The road my mother's village doesn't have yet

My mother was born in a small community in the Puno region, high on the altiplano, in a place that to this day is reached by a dirt track that becomes impassable in the wet season. I was born in Lima, in Miraflores, in a hospital with three hundred beds. The distance between those two births is what I write about. I work in hospital administration, which involves an enormous amount of logistics and a particular exposure to what healthcare does and doesn't reach. I know the census data. I know the mortality rates. What I'm writing is not about the data. It's about my grandmother describing her journey to the coast for the first time in 1979, the specific detail of the food she packed, what she expected Lima to look like and what it was. These are stories I recorded on my phone and transcribed and am now trying to shape into something that can outlast the people who remember them. My mother is 74 and she still has family in Puno. I visited the community for the first time in 2017, as an adult, and the visit changed what I understood about what my family had moved through. The memoir I'm writing is for her, and for my daughters, and for the people in the community who were never going to be in a history book.