9 million. It is a massive city with a beautiful centre with shopping malls, beautiful parks, amazing historical buildings BUT totally mad drivers!!
The sandstone hills surrounding the city are an extremely dusty, un-serviced environment, and home to Lima’s poor.
For many years people have migrated from the countryside into Lima with the hope of improving their living and, as a result, their lifestyle. Sadly, on arrival, they find they cannot get work and so settle in these sandstone hills and begin building a home out of whatever materials they can obtain!!
They are squatting BUT the normal pattern is that the Government, after approximately 8 years, begin putting in services. Until then they have managed without water, electricity or sewerage. Unfortunately as the first children reach mid-teens gangs move in and with them crime, drugs and alcohol.
On top of problems at home created by the environment, together with no work, alcohol, drugs and abuse of all kinds, these areas produce many street living and street working children. Toybox supports Red Alert Lima, who are linked with Viva Latin America, which supports many projects in these areas and is working closely with the Government to help them replicate a good working strategy.
The Government has opened feeding centres in these poor areas but that is all these centres do. Red Alert has agreed with the Government that they can provide education for adults and children, spiritual support, and psychological support. The centres are a great place to do this because people are already going there and the people welcome this help. The Government is viewing this positively and is keen to replicate this model in other feeding Centres. This is a low cost way of providing preventative work where it is needed and with the Government now viewing the 3 pilot schemes positively we have high hopes of this being replicated. The Government is now funding educators for these centres.
 |
| Jorge and Maria work extremely hard providing educational support as well as food |
We visited 2 of these centres where we chatted with families who were extremely poor. We joined a class of adults who were being taught how to show love to their children. Many of these were uneducated so this environment was very new to them and what they were learning appeared a surprise!!
We visited 2 projects in a market stall area. These projects took care of the children whilst parents were working, encouraged the children to attend school and gave them support with their homework.
They also meet with the parents (usually mothers as fathers are absent) to give them education and support similar to the feeding centres. One of the parental groups we joined had 20 mothers and 1 father attending, where that day, they where being encouraged to sit with their children while they read in the hope that this would help both the child and the parent with their reading classes.
Vaso de Leche (glass of milk) is a project Alastair visited almost 4 years ago. This project was reaching approximately 20 children then and now reaches 120 children providing them with food, education, spiritual and psychological support.
This is an amazing project, which has benefited from training workshops and grants. It is so good to go back after almost 4 years and see the impact of the support from Red Alert so positively influencing the community with many parents involved with helping as well.
Becky describes in her blog taking every mode of transport available in Lima one day … buses, Tok Tok, taxi….. with crazy drivers this was quite an experience with more near misses than we would have in a year at home! Beck’s blog has loads of photos so please have a look.
Happy Faces project is almost at the top of some sandstone hills …. a very poor area with a very edgy feel to it.
Here we found a Lady who was so committed to young children who live in this so so poor area. She along with three helpers works with approximately 40 children providing education, food and support to them in an amazing way.
We visited Caritas Felices, a project that is part of a small Church in the hills where a couple called Casio and Ofelia work with 50 children.
These children are from extremely painful backgrounds or street living children. Casio, Ofelia and their family are so committed and are benefiting from grants and training as they grow this project and gaining further help from the local community.
They told us of a story of a child of 5 who they found laying down outside the project whimpering. As they looked they could see he had received a severe beating and was very bruised and bleeding. He lives with his mother who has 13 children and his drunk father. Sadly his mother is also drunk most of the time and drugs are also involved. This is such a sad sad situation as being right in the heart of a very poor community they have to manage very carefully how this child can be removed from this life-threatening situation. Obviously they want to help the family but the immediate risk is the child’s life. The parents will not allow the little boy to leave them because he is viewed as an asset and until there is “sufficient evidence of abuse from the parents” the government officials will not intervene believing it is best for the child to stay in the family unit at almost any cost!! It comes down to lack of resources especially if that child has not been registered at birth and therefore does not exist in the eyes of the Government. This was just a dreadful situation to walk away from but we did so knowing Casio and Ofelia were doing all they could with the support of Red Alert.
Lima has a massive problem where 80% of children are quoted to suffer from abuse of one sort or another. We were so glad to have been with the Red Alert team who Toybox supports to see the on-going work in Lima … walking away is very, very hard, we do so confidently, knowing there are good people in Lima supporting the children, however the pain in us goes so very deep! We know God has good plans and we are sure street children are not one of these. Street children, we believe, are sadly a result of man’s greed, and are NOT God’s plans.
Please have a look at Becky’s You Tube channel where she has edited a video of some of what we have seen.
We will end now as we continue to reflect on this trip, which has been hugely challenging and will post a final blog with our thoughts at some stage. In the meantime please consider praying for these children and supporting Toybox in some way. Sponsoring a child, being a “Best Friend”, sending a donation or doing something crazy by joining the Toybox ‘iDo’ campaign. THANK YOU for reading this blog.
Love Alastair & Debbie
No comments:
Post a Comment