Trujillo introduced me with the Peru of contradictions, the Sierra and the Coast, those 500 years of new history on top of what was thought to be old but is now, it always was, everywhere and present.

The Central Market dispaying lucuma, an ancient fruit unique to Peruvian soil, names like Rupa-Rupa reminding everyone quechua is still a living language and stories about playful gnomos who tie horses’ hair into knots that nobody can untide but go away on their own after some years, are just some of the myriad of reminders of the strong grasp of their past.

It is especially here in El Porvenir, the neighbourhood where SKIP works, that I stop myself to think more and more about these and other contradictions, on how it can be that parents have to pay for public schools, that we have been trying to go teach English for the last week to a school but most of the times we have just encountered an empty classroom( “the teacher did not come today”) or a closed School’s entrance door ( “Huelga de Hambre” and other manifestations).

I believe that most unjustices are inherited from the past. No memory for indigenous people, no second thought for the poor. But it is in today that things show all of their absurdity. “A laptop for every child”, that is what the Peruvian government is thinking of introducing as a national public policy this year. But where is the money that should be going to these public schools and that would allow the rest of the kids in El Porvenir that SKIP cannot help (around 2000) to go to school?

I just wonder. And think more and more about these and other contradictions.