Finding Home and Raising Kids in a Life Abroad - Puno, Peru -Chapter 1/Part 1
- Deborah Llewellyn
- 13 minutes ago
- 7 min read
Chapter 1 Puno, Peru (Part 1)
And so begins my story of raising kids and finding home in a life abroad. Puno was our first overseas post. My husband, Charles, was hired by Westinghouse Health Systems as part of a USAID contract to oversee health activities in several remote regions of Peru. Charles was assigned to cover Puno, on Lake Titicaca, Cusco, Apurimac, and a jungle region of Madre Dios. My task was to survive and thrive on a bumpy road with a three-year-old daughter. The year was 1984. Chapter 1 describes our life in Puno, published in four parts.
Part 1
Barren since the days of the Incas, the raised fields, cascading down the side of the mountain, were now sprouting native tree seedlings that would be planted on these high plains averaging 13-15,000 feet. Down below, I caught the setting sun cutting prisms across Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world, and shivered, anticipating the frigid air that would soon engulf us like a shadow. I looked back at the children when I heard our daughter, Bronwyn, squeal with delight. She was running toward us, clutching what I guessed to be an Inca pottery shard for her shoebox collection.
It was 1984 and my husband had landed his first job in international public health with Westinghouse Health Systems. In the beggars-can’t-be-choosers stage of job-hunting, he jumped at the chance to cover a region of Peru that included Puno, Cusco, and a swath of jungle called Madre de Dios, thus the highest elevation, the lowest elevation, and most historic setting in the country. We soon found out that what sounded to us like an adventure was viewed suspiciously by expats living in Lima, the capital city.
When my husband arrived in Lima, in the middle of the night, he was surprised to be greeted at the airport by John Gillespie, project manager. When Charles expressed his surprise, his new boss said, “Let’s put it this way: my boss said that if I didn’t find someone for this position then they would send me to Puno.” In the days that followed, Americans working in the Embassy and at USAID, as well as Peruvians working for the Ministry of Health, asked Charles what he had done wrong. A post in Puno was like being sent to Siberia. “You will starve,” they said. “Nothing grows except 1,000 varieties of potatoes and there is absolutely nothing to do for entertainment. My friend,” they said, with sympathetic expressions, “You are headed for the worst possible place to live in Peru.”
Back in Durham, I gathered Bronwyn’s clutch of best friends for her third birthday party and farewells. She loved her life in our tree-lined neighborhood and nearby Oval Drive Park where parents and kids met in the afternoons- an impromptu sacrament. One could imagine a banner over the park announcing: “Isn’t life grand?” That’s why Bronwyn was wary when we told her we were moving to another county. We assured her that we would return home every summer so she could see her friends and relatives. We told her she could bring her favorite toys and her imaginary dog, Spot. Big eyes pointed upward like daggers, she announced that it was a bad idea.
So began our daughter’s first experience shedding buckets of tears while she clung to grandparents, friends and cousins one last time. If we were to work and live internationally, then these transitions were going to require some advanced parenting insights and actions. In later years I became familiar with the term global nomads, referring to the children whose parents work abroad and relocate from one country to the next on a regular basis. Experts describe these children as being in a state of perpetual mourning. They settle into a new country, adapt to a new home and school, make friends, adopt adults in their parents’ circle to be their surrogate aunties and uncles, and in a flash give it all up and start again in a new country. I always believed in the roots and wings concept of parenting. The wings were inherent in this lifestyle; I’d have to carry a shovel for digging roots.
Westinghouse provided us with a furnished house and allowed 900 pounds of personal items to be shipped from Durham to Puno. What would we need? They told us that it will be very cold year-round and many familiar food items would be non-existent. Finally, I consolidated what I thought we would need for the two-year post. The international mover came to pack it up. He asked me where we were going. He then put his foot up on one of the boxes, the stance of a storyteller, and said this. “We recently had this client who hired our company to pick up her things at the port in Wilmington. She had lived all over the world. Now retired, she was bringing home all her treasures. The crane lifting her container from the ship, dropped it in the sea. She lost everything.” Gulp.
The complicated negotiations for leasing a car were completed by the time Bronwyn and I arrived in Lima. Charles’s employer, Westinghouse Health Systems, was required to lease an American car from Hertz, since the work was under a U.S. government contract. There were no American cars, dealerships, or mechanics in the three areas Charles was assigned to work. The most commonly driven vehicle in the high plains was a Lado, a small bare-bones Russian jeep. Although it was only slightly more comfortable than a cart and horse, the Andean mechanics had parts and acumen to fix it.
But Hertz refused to rent a Lada to Westinghouse to be driven in Puno, but leased a Volkswagen Beetle, the only car value-less enough they would send to that terrain. Charles had this great idea that we should drive this VW Beetle 818 miles along the coast and up over 18,000 feet passes to arrive in Puno. “Just think,” he said, “We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the country-side and visit the historic city of Arequipa which, by the way, has a hotel with a swimming pool.” Thus mentioned to get Bronwyn aligned with his idea.
The slightly more sensible alternative was to fly to Juliaca and from there take a taxi to Puno, sending our car with a driver to Puno. There was no radio tower in Juliaca so the daredevil pilots dived down from the clouds to clear the llamas from the barren dirt runway and assess landing safety, circled back up, and then landed with remarkably few crashes. I began to see the appeal of Charles’s grand scheme to make our way by car. However, from the beginning, there were several problems.
In 1985, safe bottled water was not available to purchase. So we carried a large thermos and filled it with boiled water to drink along the way, supplementing it with Fanta, Bronwyn’s first sugared drink, and the incremental downfall in my strict no-sugar policy for our daughter.
Bronwyn had a wound on her hand, equivalent to a third degree burn, achieved in a wagon race with cousins a few days before U.S. departure. Her pediatrician counseled us to keep it free of germs, wash it daily with clean soapy water (which was non-existent) and then blow dry. Besides the frigid air, the Arequipa swimming pool with floating mold was definitely out.
Another obstacle was forcing the dealership to install a seatbelt for her car seat. We cleared space beside her booster seat for her imaginary dog but she told us that Spot was still in Durham.
In addition, there was lack of food and accommodations along the washboard road. On the first day, it was mid-afternoon before we found a seaside truckers stop that advertised Fruti Pescado, fried fish. Waiting for lunch, our hungry child grabbed what she thought was a sliced tomato but was a sliced hot chili pepper, a condiment served along with salt and pepper in Peru. We retrieved it from her hand just before it reached her mouth. A few minutes later she started screaming as if stung by several hornets. Across the dining room, a Peruvian watched us while he ate his meal. When Bronwyn started screaming, he called out to Charles. “Senor, it’s the chili. Necessita lavar with Aqua!” We thanked him and ran outside to the handwashing sink, splashed water in her eyes and scrubbed her hands with soap. There went the only use boiled water for Bronwyn commitment.
Finally, something happens to carburetors on 18,000 feet mountain passes. Something happens to people at 18,000 feet. When we arrived at the hotel in Puno, 12,500 feet above sea level, Bronwyn and I collapsed on the bed and didn’t move for days, convinced it wasn’t that thing called altitude sickness, but in fact, we were dying.
On our arrival night, Charles requested the hotel staff to wash our mud encased car. They resisted, but Charles insisted. The next morning, he found the dirty car covered with a layer of brown ice. The buckets of water they tossed on the car froze before washing off the dirt. We had a lot to learn and the first rule was to listen-up when a native advises you not to do something you are hell-bent to do. We were beginning to realize that the term - Lost in Translation - means more about culture than language.
Written by Deborah Llewellyn
July 2026
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