KATIE OG JAMES FRA ENGLAND
10. oktober 2008
James and I arrived in Huamachuco after a 6 1/2 hour very bumpy bus ride from Trujillo! We arrived at about 3.30 pm and were met by Carmen, the librarian. We dumped our bags in our room (we were staying at the centre) and met Rocio, the stand-in director for the week. All the teachers and support workers are called Tio (Uncle) or Tia (Aunty) by the children and so we started our week ahead as Tia Katarin and Tio Jaime! None of the people working at the centre speak any English so we knew we had a pretty tricky couple of weeks ahead speaking only Spanish!
The first couple of days were pretty shocking. A lot of the kids coming to the project are very, very poor and it is very sad to see. They are all lovely friendly kids and massively interested in where we are from and learning English (favourite question: Are there just gringos in England, Tia?). On our first full day, Saturday, we met all the support workers (tia/os) in the morning to find out what they all do and then the children arrived in the afternoon. The first part of the afternoon at the weekends is to support the children with homework. I think it was a bit more educative for us than the kids, trying to understand ‘The boy who cried wolf’ in Spanish and brushing up on the words for sheep, wolf, shephard, liar etc. After the lesson we had a couple of hours of games which was great, we felt like we were back in our school playing fields, teaching them all our old favourites!
On Sunday morning we went with Tias Joba and Rocio to visit two brothers, Romario and Ernesto, that come to the centre. The teachers make time to visit all of the kids in their classes at home to see how they are living and understand more about their problems and what can be done to help. The families usually have very little but always invite you in and make tea, if not a whole meal. Romario and Ernesto live 1 1/2 hour walk away from school. We were exhausted by the time we got there – what a journey to make to and from school every day. Proyecto Amigo are hoping to have the money soon to start using the dormitories so that children like this can stay at the centre for a couple of nights a week and don’t have to walk for hours in the morning before school.
Their mum cooked up soup and fried meat and then had a long conversation with us about their lives. They scrape a living in the country, growing crops but cannot afford to send the boys to school as the uniform alone would cost too much, let alone the books and equipment they have to have to get through the doors. The whole family were really friendly and kind and insisted that we walk down to the village (a square of about 8 adobe huts and a little adobe church) with them as they were having a fiesta.
From Monday to Thursday, there is a school at the centre from 8 am until 1 pm for children that cannot afford the uniform and all the equipment they need for state secondary schools. We moved round all the different age groups, helping out. Highlights being James describing a lesson in momentum in spanish, Katie giving an explanation of triangles and their angles in Spanish and James giving a group of 25 twelve year olds (and their teacher) a 1/2 hour English lesson!
The centre has also just started to rent a plot of land in order to teach lessons in farming methods and productivity. We went for a couple of lessons to help out and learnt a lot about farming!
On Fridays, a group of the kids have also set up a cooperative and they work really hard planting and cultivating in order to sell the produce at the market.
On our last Sunday night, the teachers had all prepared a little party for us which was lovely. We ate cake and icecream and fruit salad and Katie cried. After we had eaten, the evening took a very strange corner and turned into a sort of talent show. Tia Rocio nominated people to ‘perform’ and they duly did. We had dancing, singing, jokes, poetry recitals – it was very funny. James and I could see what was coming, our turn (horror!), so James found a Jive Bunny cd in a dodgy collection of one of the teachers and we got up and jived – us, JIVING, you should’ve seen it!!! We bought a wheelbarrow and some supplies for the school as a donation and promised to pass on the word of all the help needed to the UK.
It was really sad to leave all the kids and just before we left for the bus on Monday morning, they all got in a line and gave us a kiss and wished us on our way! We really hope to go back one day and seem to have promised all the women there that we would return with kids of our own in the not too distant future!!
James and Katie
EN FRIVILLIG ORGANISASJON SOM HJELPER ARBEIDENDE BARN OG UNGDOM I PERU MED SKOLEGANG