An American in Lima

My eyes popped when I saw this image on Boing Boing, taken from Zeraga’s Flickr pool via Street Use:

 In Perú from Huánuco to Tingo Maria, where the road from the Pacific coast across the Andes finds its way towards the Amazon lowlands. This is near the top of the last mountain pass. From there, a soapbox rider can enjoy a vertical 1000 meters of gravity assisted ride.

As these kids help stranded truck drivers along the road, they’re called bomberos (firemen). They transport drinks, food and spare parts to broken trucks.

A Peruvian (ZU) who  travels that part of northern Peru adds:

“I usually use that highway go to work. I saw a lot of those cases of children with their skateboard or a board with wheels (artesanal) (those wheels are metallic and they tolerate the speed) they have had many fatal accidents and some times they do it for work like “fireman”, I work for this highway 4 years, most of them are poor children that don’t have money neither for the bus ticket, to move from a place to another in long distances and some for “enjoy”.”

I haven’t been to northern Peru, near the jungle, where this remarkable photo was taken, so I haven’t seen the bomberos for myself. But I recognize elements that make this scene typical of contemporary Peru: desperately poor kids/entrepreneurs trying to earn a buck any way they can, the improvised transport (homemade cart coupled to truck), the inexplicable way that authorities allow acts of recklessness to occur on the roads.

Every day in Lima I see poor kids and teenagers performing acrobatics at intersections, hoping for a few soles thrown from drivers’ windows. I’ve seen three-year-olds standing on their heads in the middle of the street. The police sometimes chase them away, but the children are always back the next day. They’re often “owned” by mafias who make them work the streets and deliver their earnings to adult leaders. 

After a while, the kids become numbed to the dangers of traffic. And when they are hit by a car, there’s hardly ever a reporter around to write the story up. I suspect that most of the childrens’ deaths go unreported.

Kids become bomberos in the provinces because there aren’t many other ways to earn a living there. Their safety and their lives are expendable, as evidences by authorities’ unwillingness to prohibit the activity. 

This photo intrigues me because while it’s visually exciting, the details in it hint at the dark social problems underpinning the scene. Look at the face of the boy on the back: He isn’t thrilled; he’s nonplussed.

This is work for him, not an “extreme sport.”

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