CHILDREN OF ECUADOR AND PERU: PHOTOS

There are four new pictures in the Pictures section of the blog. They were taken about 40 years ago in Ecuador and Peru. The little girl with the bare tummy lived with her family in a village of the Las Indios de Colorados in the eastern Ecuadorian Amazon basin. That group was still practicing slash-and-burn agriculture when we visited, but "civilization" was rapidly encroaching. Even though they lived in dirt floor huts, I saw high heeled shoes on the shelves in one of the huts. The men wore some kind of dye in their hair that made it look like they were wearing bright red helmets. The women were bare-breasted.

The other little girl lived in the countryside in Peru. She wore a child's size outfit that was the same as that of the older women in her area. Women from each area wore distinctive hats and garments that marked them as members of the same local group, so it was easy to know which group they belonged to just by looking if you knew the traditional outfits of each group.

It is easy to imagine that those young girls, now in their 40's if they are still alive, still live hard lives and are probably rapidly approaching the end of their life expectancies. The high altitudes of the villages in Peru, in particular, expose skin to colder, drier and more sun-drenched conditions. Each of them have probably already been mothers and grandmothers.