old news in the united states, but a striking thought here: The cyber café as the new playground.
I turn a street corner in a middle-class neighborhood in Cusco, Peru, and all I hear is boys laughing and yelling. It is Saturday afternoon and it sounds like they`re playing soccer. But this is a busy street and I already passed the soccer field and playground.
Approach, and to my right a tiny room with 24 shiny black computers, a man with glasses and a button-up shirt looking up every few minutes, and barely a space to move. So many boys! All of them, boys! All of them between oh I don´t know 8 and 15, all of them playing or watching somebody play a game called War Craft and another called Star Craft. They are all playing in the same world, yelling into black headsets, looking over a few screens and yelling at each other's faces, and the man with the button-up shirt tells me to wait! 10 minutes! then it can be your turn.
Outside again. This place is packed and I don´t know if I can handle such a noisy little room. But the café down the block looks the same! and I am using so many exclamation points all of the sudden but where did all these children come from and why are they all boys and why was nobody at the park I passed earlier on my way to here.
Peru is special, and Cusco is no exception. Internet penetration here is tremendous due mainly because of places like this, which began booming in popularity in the mid-1990s because they´re relatively cheap and accessible and novel.
There´s more though, at least here in Cusco. Yesterday I tried to find out why more children weren´t playing outside, and this is what I discovered:
The city has grown and not enough green spaces have been created to handle the new population, (from 1993 to 2005, it grew by some 11 percent, according to the nation´s census.) More people also means more cars, which means less road space for street soccer.
And about 5 years ago, the city began fencing in parks and sport fields to protect against vandalism. That´s what Cusco`s environmental director (who is in charge of parks and gardens) told me yesterday. Neighborhood groups that directly manage local parks decided to start charging admission, too, in order to pay for upkeep and security.
¨And it´s one thing to pay the park admission, it`s another thing to rent a soccer field. There´s no guarantee you´ll even be able to play soccer if you pay to get in,¨ one 15-year-old boy (on his way to the cyber) told me. ¨On the other hand, there is more security that you´ll be able to play at the cyber.¨
Capitalism respects his money.
So discussing this with the family I´m visiting here, we start thinking: poor kids who can´t afford to pay to get into a park (less than a quarter U.S.) and can´t necessarily play in the streets because of the cars are kind of out of luck. Cybers are about as out of the question as pay-to-play parks.
The parks director said the city hasn´t conducted any studies on park usage, but that it´s safe to assume the same number of children are playing outside as before -- you just have to remember there´s the same number of parks for a lot more people. Her worries aren´t like so many in the States about children leading sedentary lifestyles (obesity, diabetes, etc.) Because the altitude here forces bodies to work harder to stay warm and the diet is pretty natural, you don´t see many fat kids running around.
¨But if they´re living in virtual worlds, spending hours and hours every day in front of a computer and not interacting with other children or their environment, I worry about what kind of adults they´ll become.¨
I wonder whether they´ll be that different than kids in the States.


Managuan barrio. (He was at one of the bean sales by Enabas that I'd written about yesterday, throwing out free 5-pound bags of beans to very excited supporters afterward.)

