Grandmommy & Baby

There is a difference between hearing crazy stories about rural Peruvians – choosing your life partner based on a stone throw to their forehead, leaving babies in mud pens to be accidentally eaten by wild dogs – and hearing less-than-crazy but much more real stories from rural Peruvians themselves. Today was day three of infant assessments – we’re spending the next week and a half visiting individual families in their homes in five different locations in and around Huancayo.

I was surprised to meet a mother hitting almost 50 years in age with an 8-month old baby. As we worked through the questionnaire, her love for her infant was evident. It was hard not to fall in love with the beautiful baby girl, her curious eyes and full head of curls peeking out of the manta (the cloth Peruvians use to carry their babies on their back). She was attentive to her baby, was thoroughly knowledgeable of her baby’s capabilities but also subtle deficits, and was eager to honestly disclose what she knew about her baby so that we could also best share our knowledge on how she could promote the infant’s physical, mental, and socio-emotional health.

As the assessment came to a close, she expressed concern for her baby’s delay in gross motor development – the baby wasn’t able to hold herself up in a sitting position and her legs were too weak to support herself standing even when holding on to a railing or someone else’s hands. From there, her story unfolded. She is actually the grandmother and not the mother of baby, she confessed. She has three children – the youngest daughter was spoiled and wild, accidentally found herself pregnant, then tried to abort the baby on multiple occasions during the pregnancy, taking “special herbs” from the rainforest. The baby was born anyway, but who knows how these abortion attempts may have affected her prenatal development. The grandmother was unhappy with her daughter’s decisions, but didn’t intervene until her daughter accidentally dropped the baby from her manta one day – the baby fell to the ground and rolled a certain distance away, traumatized.

It was the last straw. The grandmother took the baby and the baby’s older sister into her own care, forcing her daughter to work. The daughter now sends money home monthly and when she visits, the baby cries as if her own real mother is a stranger. And such is the life of many of these families it seems.