Los Amigos is a faith-based organization dedicated to supporting programs that improve and transform the lives of the poor of Chimbote, Peru.

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Read a Story: Sr. Peggy Byrne’s Introduction to Chimbote in the 1980s

The following story, adapted from a book about Sr. Peggy Byrne’s life as a missionary,  is about Sr. Peggy’s initial experiences in Chimbote in the 1980s.

For most people, Peru, a country on the Western edge of South America, brought to mind images of Machu Picchu, the majestic Andes mountains, or the Amazon rainforest.

For Sr. Peggy, arriving for a three-month visit to Chimbote in 1981, the city seemed to have nothing in common with these images.

The contrast began on the road into Chimbote - an asphalt road with a mountain of sand on the right and sandy dropoff to the ocean on the left. Then, quite suddenly, a few miles after the road sign marking Chimbote, just past the shops, cars, and cement houses that fill a typical South American town, the asphalt road ended. Now, the road carrying Sr. Peggy was made of sand. The barrios – neighborhoods containing rows upon rows of poor people’s homes – had begun.

To the Western eye, the structures were barely recognizable as homes. They looked more like long, low row-houses where chickens or turkeys might be kept. Walls were made from a flimsy, woven straw that sometimes buckled or leaned. Ceilings were made from the same straw or, sometimes, cardboard. There were no windows.

Out the window of the bus, Sr. Peggy could see animal feces and mountainous piles of garbage dotting the packed-sand streets. Fathers, mothers and children walked this way and that, on the way to schools, markets, or jobs. Many of the families didn’t have shoes. Their clothes were ragged.

At the compound where the priests lived, Sr. Peggy found her friend Fr. Jack. He looked the same as he had when he’d visited a few years earlier for Christmas. At the time, the parishioners who picked him up from the airport had cried in shock at his appearance. “I had lost so much weight, I just looked terrible,” Fr. Jack says. “(It was) stress and strain of culture shock.”

A three-month visit, Sr. Peggy figured, gave her enough time to learn some Spanish so she could better help the priests and sisters stationed in Chimbote.

In a day care run by the parish, she found many willing instructors. “I would sit with the kids in the afternoons and I would say something in English and they would say it to me in Spanish. They would teach me,” she says. “I’d study at night.”  
The children adored the opportunity to teach something to the slight nun with the happy laugh and funny accent

Living conditions for Fr. Jack and the other nuns and priests of the area were better than conditions faced by locals, but still rustic. Although most homes lacked running water, the missionaries had water piped in from the city. The pipes were opened for about an hour every morning. “We would fill up a barrel in the morning,” says Sr. Peggy, “and that was the water supply for the day. There wasn’t a shower – you just would take a bucket and throw it over your head.”

Wherever she went, Sr. Peggy had to watch her step –the manhole covers in the street usually were missing because the metal could be sold or used for other purposes. And even in the parish where Sr. Peggy was staying, electricity was sporadic and she often found herself in the dark.

Everyone Sr. Peggy met was affected in some way by the wrenching poverty. Nearly every day, Fr. Jack performed an emergency baptism because of the weakened states of the babies whose mothers had been malnourished during pregnancy. What appeared to be the elderly were men and women in their forties – Sr. Peggy’s age – whose arduous lives had etched wrinkles in their faces and notches in their backs.

Yet, despite their desperate living conditions, the residents smiled and laughed with her as much or more than her longtime friends in the U.S. Every chance they had, the children rushed up to give her hugs.

Learning Spanish turned out to be quite a challenge. By this time, Sr. Peggy was in her forties and she had never learned another language. Sometimes she just couldn’t wrap her tongue around the words. “I really appreciated the people then,” Sr. Peggy says. “They never laughed at you. But if you laughed at yourself, they’d laugh with you.”

Before she knew it, her three-month visit was up. It was time to go home.

During her visit to Chimbote, Sr. Peggy kept remembering a song she’d heard at a religious retreat—a song about following where Jesus led, no matter where that may be. The song helped her make her decision: she wanted to return to Chimbote and help Fr. Jack with the mission. Within a year, she returned. Her education about Chimbote and its people had just begun.

In the day-to-day life of Chimbote in the 1980s, Sr. Peggy often found herself troubled with questions. How did Chimbote become a city of such contrasts, with just a few city-blocks of modernity and sprawling blocks of poverty? Why didn’t the homes have windows? Without windows or electricity – and without other safe, well-lit, free gathering places like the libraries in American cities – how did children study? How did families cook, read, play, or work after the sun went down? And why was the smell of the city – a fish and fuel smell that stung the eyes and clogged the lungs – so overwhelming?

Fr. Jack and the other priests and sisters were stalwart guides in the process of learning. They told Sr. Peggy about how Chimbote grew from a small fishing village to a city of hundreds of thousands when terrorism and political violence in the 1960s and 1970s threatened the residents of nearby villages in the Andes mountain range. Over the years, thousands of Peruvians left their homes in the mountains, often on short notice, leaving everything behind. They arrived in the city with nothing but the clothes on their backs. They wove estera reed into walls and attached the walls onto one of the long lines of huts that had begun forming in the 1950s. If they were lucky they had enough estera reed for ceilings. If they were really lucky they got jobs in one of the 20-plus fish-processing factories that popped up in Chimbote when word spread about the cheap labor available there.

The fish processing factories were the source of the smell that roiled forth from the smokestacks and sped through town as fast as a locomotive. If the smell was present, the factories were open.

If the smell was absent, it meant the fishing boats had been unsuccessful. Overfishing had compromised their efforts. The factories were closed and the town was full of fathers and mothers wandering the streets in search of another way to make money to feed their families.

With money in short supply, families were vulnerable to theft. Windows were an invitation to robbery so no one in the barrios had them. At night, families went to bed or used candles for light. Few parents had finished enough schooling to read as a pastime so they didn’t long for light to read by. Children struggled to study by candlelight or didn’t study at all.

In the lush Andes, many of the families had grown crops to feed themselves. But Chimbote was desert land. No one had enough money for the irrigation that would allow crops to grow. Most families kept a few animals in their huts, like chickens or turkeys, but just the eggs were used. Animals were only slaughtered if absolutely necessary.

For food, families usually bought rice or fruit or vegetables and cooked it in their huts over fires. Because the dry, reed houses shared walls, one out-of-control spark could level a whole street in a matter of minutes, killing the people inside and turning the houses into long rectangles of ash. If there were survivors, they almost never had the money for treatment of their burns.
In her first years in Chimbote, Sr. Peggy’s official role was as a pastoral agent, which meant assisting the priests with catechism and liturgy. But job titles for all the missionaries were moving targets. Projects varied depending on where and what the need was. Sr. Peggy was constantly shocked by the poverty.  “I expected them (the Peruvians) to be poor,” Sr. Peggy says. “But not as poor as they were. I couldn’t believe that kids didn’t have a pencil. Or that it was difficult to buy a notebook.”

Charlie Skemp, a volunteer during the 1980s when Sr. Peggy was beginning her ministry in Chimbote, also recalls being floored by what the Peruvians did without. The impression even held true with a group considered to be privileged – students from a college in Chimbote. “We’d stayed with some university students,” Charlie recalls, “and I was amazed at how this could be a public university. It was completely dilapidated. The toilets were all clogged. There was no running water. We slept in the dorm and a student gave up a blanket so we’d have one.”

Gradually the poverty and the people began to separate in Peggy’s mind. “After awhile, a lot of that (the shock of poverty) faded into the background. I began to see the people – make friends,” she says. “I could have walked into any house and, no matter what they had, they would have invited me to sit down and share it with them. If you came when they were eating, they would take food off their own plates to make a plate for you.”