PERU PART I

Oh Peru....

The last time I was here I was 19, and coming back felt a little like walking through a memory that still exists somewhere, but doesn’t quite belong to me anymore. There’s something strange about returning to a place where a younger version of you once stood, especially when you’re not that person anymore.

But that’s not really what this is about.

I arrived in Cusco, at 3,500 meters above sea level, and the altitude makes itself known in those small interruptions, walking a little too fast, laughing and suddenly needing air, your body gently reminding you that you’re not used to this.

10 years, and still, the city felt familiar. That same mix of fresh mountain air and something heavier lingering in it, maybe smog, maybe just the density of life. The streets are narrow enough that you constantly find yourself stepping aside, pressing against cold stone walls to let cars pass, and the sun has this deceptive warmth during the day that makes you forget where you are, until it disappears and the cold settles in immediately.

I spent a lot of time in the local markets, and I think I always will. There’s something about them that feels more honest than anywhere else, maybe because nothing is curated. Between juice stands, fabrics, plastic buckets, fruit piled on top of each other, you meet everyone, locals, travelers, people who are just there without any clear intention of leaving anytime soon.

On the 8th of March I went there with my camera and started asking people some simple questions like what does it mean to be a woman? And I think I expected something clearer, maybe even something universal, but instead what I got were fragments. Different answers shaped by different lives, different realities, different weights behind the same word. You can watch the video on my Youtube or Instagram.

The next day I met a pregnant woman. Her first child was two years old, and now she was pregnant again, and once more this gap appeared that I keep encountering in different places, the gap between city and countryside, between what is accessible and what is not, between systems that exist on paper and realities that people actually live in.

In Peru, home births are not exactly illegal, but what happens afterwards makes it feel as though they are. If a woman gives birth at home, registering her baby can become complicated, sometimes even difficult. Midwives or here, obstetras, are only allowed to issue birth certificates if they are working within the official system, and if they are not, some clinics simply refuse to provide any documentation at all. It’s not openly stated as punishment, but it feels like one.

And I keep noticing this pattern, not just here in Peru but in many places. This quiet structure of power around birth, shaping things in subtle ways. It starts with small questions, who is allowed to confirm a pregnancy, who decides whether a woman should rest, who signs the paper that allows her to step out of work, and it extends all the way to something as fundamental as who is allowed to confirm that a baby was born alive.

If you ask me, anyone who is trusted to care for a woman medically during pregnancy and birth should be trusted with all of it. Whether that person is a doctor, a midwife, an obstetra, or a traditional birth attendant, the responsibility in that moment is the same.

And yet, instead of working alongside each other, there is this tension between different parts of the system, especially between midwives and doctors, as if they were working towards different goals. But they aren’t. Midwives are trained to protect and support physiology, while doctors are trained to identify and treat pathology, and both perspectives are necessary and so important. Still, somewhere along the way, this difference has turned into something that feels less like collaboration and more like a struggle over control.

Maybe I’m simplifying it. Maybe I’m not. I’m still trying to understand it myself.

After Cusco I rented a car and drove into the Sacred Valley. Driving alone in another country has this strange effect, it makes you feel slightly out of place and completely present at the same time. The roads were uneven and unpredictable, traffic appearing where you didn’t expect it, and people standing at the side of the road, hitchhiking because there aren’t many other options to get from one place to another.

And then the landscape opens up. Mountains on both sides, wide and quiet in a way that makes everything feel smaller. At some point I stopped trying to take pictures, this is one of those places that doesn’t translate well into images. You can capture it, but you don’t really capture it.

And I understood why it’s called the Sacred Valley, not because someone decided to name it that way, but because it genuinely feels like it.

I met two midwives, two doulas, and another pregnant woman there, and those conversations made my heart all wobbly in all the right ways. You know those moments where you walk away and something inside you is moving, a quiet sense that something you saw or heard is going to stay with you.

I started learning more about Andean traditions around birth. The color black plays a significant role, associated with protection, grounding, and medicine, and women often give birth on black sheep fur. The placenta is meaningful, but not in the same way I had seen in Indonesia. Here, it seems to be more about belonging, where it is buried, often decided by the grandmother, can reflect whether a child is fully welcomed into the family and community. And then there are the stories.

One midwife told me about a birth where she had to physically remove the husband from the room because he was being abusive and didn’t want the baby to be born, simply because it was another girl. Years later, she attended the birth of that same girl, now grown, and the father was there as well, quiet, present, even proud.

I don’t know exactly why that stayed with me, maybe because it shows how contradictory things can be. Care and violence, change and continuity, all existing at the same time.

Because the reality is that violence, abuse, and inequality are still very present here. And yet, birth is not something isolated. It doesn’t happen behind closed doors with only one person involved. It is shared, witnessed, held by family and community in a way that feels very different from what I am used to.

There’s another thought that kept coming back to me while I was there, something less visible but just as present.

I think that whatever we choose to do with our lives, there is something that feels true, something that pulls us in a certain direction. But not everything that pulls us is meant to be followed. Money pulls as well, especially in a world that constantly tells us what success should look like, and I’m not saying money doesn’t matter because it does. But when it becomes the main reason for doing something, you can feel the shift.

I met a midwife where it felt like that shift had happened, where something didn’t fully align anymore. It felt less like care and more like performance, less like being present and more like fulfilling a role that works financially. And it made me think about how easily that can happen, how easily intention can get lost along the way.

And then there is something I can’t wrap my head around.

In some hospitals here, vertical birth is now “allowed” in Peru ..... Allowed.

As if it was ever something that could be taken away in the first place. As if standing, squatting, moving during birth wasn’t always part of it. And now it is being reintroduced in small steps, framed as progress, as something newly granted.

And people accept it and call it autonomy.

But sometimes it feels like the system creates the limitation first, only to later present itself as the one offering the solution.

I feel like I’m still in the middle of understanding all of this, and maybe that’s why it’s difficult to end this in a clean way.

So I won’t.

Not because there’s nothing more to say, but because I’m not done thinking yet.