The families of some of the Peruvian migrant workers killed in a horrific crash in Hampstead, Ontario, remember their loved ones at their homes in Lima, Peru.
Selling old cars and motorbikes wasn't cutting it, and the living conditions in his house, a concrete box about 15 square metres in size, were becoming unbearable, especially with a small child. The family live in Comas, a crowded, dusty Lima neighbourhood of about 500,000 people where unemployment hovers close to 50 per cent.
Situated at the base of the Andean foothills, Comas is a crowded and chaotic place characterized by bleak, square buildings thrown together with cinder blocks and concrete, often without roofs.
Rebar sticks out of the top of the walls of most homes. The buildings are closer and closer together as the slopes of the hillsides become steeper. Only a few roads are paved. Plants and trees are scarce. The dust gets in your nose and clothes. Many of the homes, particularly higher up on the slopes, don't have running water or electricity. Stray dogs hunt through the garbage that lines the street corners. Crime is commonplace.
The downtown core of Lima, a 20-minute drive south, seems worlds away.
Valdiviezo, 24, was looking for a way out.
Then came an unexpected opportunity. How would he like to work as a poultry vaccinator in southern Ontario, where his father, José Valdiviezo, 45, had worked for several years to support his family back home? A spot on the crew had opened up at the last minute — a two-year stint away from home — so Fernando would have to be fast. This was on Friday. He was on a flight to Toronto that night.
“We were going to have a goodbye party for him, but we didn't have time, so he said we could have one when he got back,” wife Velasco told the Star while seated on a red couch in her living room.
But it was not to be. Valdiviezo died Monday — just two days after arriving in in Canada — on his first day on the job, one of 10 Latin American migrant workers killed in a horrific van crash in Hampstead, Ont. His father was also killed in the crash.
“He went for us, most of all for our daughter,” Velasco said, wiping back tears, holding photos of both dead men. “He wasn't earning well here and this was going to be a new experience for him. I don't know what we're going to do now.”
All of the workers who died in Monday's crash were from Comas, and were well-known in the community, perhaps none more than Enrique Arturo Arenaza.
A former professional soccer player in the mid-1980s for Alianza Lima, Peru's most popular team, Arenaza, 48, had fallen on hard times since his soccer career ended. He became a taxi driver to support his wife and four children, all of whom live just up the street from the Valdiviezo family in a fading orange concrete house. The job brought in about $15 a day.
Occasionally, local teams would pay Arenaza a small fee to make a celebrity appearance at games. His wife, Patricia Aguilar Carlin, 45, said potential employers wouldn't hire her husband because he was black.
Two years ago, Arenaza left his family for Kitchener, where he worked for MARC Poultry Vaccination Service. He hadn't been home since. The last time Carlin spoke to her husband was Sunday night via Skype.
“Life was getting better,” Aguilar Carlin said. “He wanted me to join him in Canada and we were going to see about it this year. I didn't want to go illegally so we were going to do it through the proper channels. My husband was a very straightforward man.”
Leaving to seek employment elsewhere is a trend in Peru, a country where the national unemployment rate is 26 per cent, at least officially. Between 2006 and 2010, just over a million Peruvians left the country, according to a recent Universidad del Pacifico study.
The Peruvian government claims that its economic strategies have reduced poverty by 13 percentage points to 31.3 per cent in 2010, down from 44.5 per cent in 2006. But the Universidad del Pacifico study found that of the million or so Peruvians who left the country over that five-year period, 700,000 of them were poor, meaning the government's numbers look a lot better than they actually are.
For those who cannot leave, like the wives and children of the 10 dead migrant workers, there is little hope for a better life. Girls like Fernando Valdiviezo's three-year-old daughter Vannia, will have few opportunities, said Rita Chong-Siu, a worker with Unicef in Lima.
“She may end up finishing primary school, which is state-funded, but she is unlikely to finish secondary school because she will have to go and work,” Chong-Siu said. “She will probably end up working as a maid.”
Comas was once Lima's most verdant farmland — a source of lemons, grapes, cotton and alfalfa — until population pressures in the mid-20th century saw squatters begin to stake out plots. Over time, despite police efforts to move people off the land, small communities were built up, and the neighbourhood became an official district of Lima in 1961.
Yet those living in Comas, as poor as it is, often have more opportunities for work than others living at the edges of cities, on the cusp of the urban-rural divide.
In Carabayllo, the district north of Comas, the city is encroaching into farmland, yet many areas still don't have running water or electricity.
“Many farmers here talk about leaving, and many of their children are already abroad, in places like Spain and Italy, to earn money which they send back,” said Helouise Leloup, a researcher based in Lima with the Institute of Research for Development, a French public research agency.
“There's a big lack of state support, streets aren't properly made, there are no services, and yet these people live just one hour from the centre of Lima. It's quite strange because they're quite close to modernity but entirely removed.”
Leloup said farming is dying out due to lack of proper irrigation systems, so naturally, people are looking for other means to make a living.
“Those who stay often become construction workers or trash collectors,” she said. “Or, like many, they look overseas.”
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MIGRANT WORKERS' TRAGIC ACCIDENT IN ONTARIO: Workers fled poverty
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