(A-92) Status: Sponsored as of Dec 16, 2012!
Needs: food, diapers, pain meds, water filter, double mattress
To provide Pedro with any of these needs, click here.
For more stories and photos of the ancianos in the Feeding Program, please consider purchasing a book compiled of our participants. All profits go to the Elderly. You can preview the book here.
We duck into the small adobe room, where Pedro sits on the bed that takes up most of the space.
He lives in it alone, in a corner of a derelict courtyard across from a store selling expensive chips and soda.
He used to work in one of these stores, long time ago, he says. These days Pedro can't walk alone.
The pila-- the large concrete wash basin--is in the middle bordered in rooms occupied by other tenants of the compound.
His two daughters care for him, says one, while his three sons are drunks.
Twelve years ago his wife died of cancer.
He sleeps on a straw mat on the bed, and relies on diapers so his daughters won't have to clean up after him all the time.
His bladder's been bad for months. If he gets up he can't hold it in, not even to make it to the letrine-- the communal concrete toilet bowl over a hole in the ground.
Both live with their families down the mountain. Neither works; the one I talk to has five kids of her own.
There's no room for him to cook, so the only food he gets is delivered from the Program. He has no clean water to drink, no place to wash aside from the sink that is like a stage in the middle of its audience of apartments.
His daughter holds up one of his diapers-- this is the only one we've got left, she says. We'll have to start finding another solution if we can't find the money for more.
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