I am in Peru. What opened my eyes wide in Paraguay has become much clearer as I pass my days in Lima.

Lima is a beast of a city. It takes forever to get from place to place, but that´s cool. I like to see the city. The city sits in a valley, or at least a place without hills that surrounded by them. The hills (or cerros) are dangerous because they´re all dirt and rock that has a thing for sliding down from time to time. They are also the poor districts.

I had the fantastic oppurtunity to see these firsthand as I took a trip up one cerro with a team of psychiatrists who work in a small mental health hospital for the area. The houses are built in precarious locations where the slightes push on a rock could bring down first a house, and then a whole neighborhood. These are the little wooden houses too..no brick and cement here.

The reality of the thing stunned me. They can´t inhabit land within the city because that costs money they don´t have, so they´re pushed up into the danger of the cerros. The cerro I mounted was one chiefly composed of victims of terrorism in the region not to many years back. The mental health issue is a big deal, but we encountered a lot of resistance (people not wanting to talk to us, not coming down from their houses).

This is all such a big deal. I never could´ve understood any of this back home, seeing pictures, watching documentaries, any of it. You have to stare a man in the eyes to understand this reality. And in those eyes--they´re not empty, but they´re not full of joy. You see his distress with his condition, and that he knows that despite his hardest efforts, his daughter who he loves so much is never going to get out of this place. This mountain of dust and rocks that yearn to see him fail.

Evo Morales is now the president elect of Bolivia. He´s allied himself with Chavez (and Humala--wtf?). We might see some change ahead, but as I´ve said and continue to do, change needs to be something radically new. Peruvians don´t like to be fucked around from outside, but man, they need to pick up their own.

I have work to do. Come Join me.