Máximo Ramírez and his wife, Vaicha, live on the side of an Andean mountain in San Nicolás, Peru. They’re old, but every day they roll up their sleeping mats on the dirt floor of their adobe hut—perched nearly 10,000 feet above sea level—and go out to farm their land. They grow potatoes and other crops, working with rudimentary tools.
Vaicha was tending to a row of plants outside her hut last week when we arrived on foot, out of breath from the steep hike. Máximo was working farther up the mountain. They know my daughter, Brooke, who lives with their son and daughter-in-law in San Nicolás while doing a two-year stint in the Peace Corps. Vaicha, dressed in traditional rural mountain garb—a skirt with tights, a sweater and a tall, brimmed hat—left her work to greet us.
She gently clasped our hands in her own mud-caked hands and kissed them. She apologized for not having any soup to offer us.
