Huamachuco & Marcelino Centre - Week 41

22nd June - 1st July

Our next stop was to visit a charity that our Norwegian friend, Henrietta, had told us about. The project is called Proyecto Amigo or Casa Marcelino and was set up 15 years ago by an Italian, Mario, and his Peruvian wife, Nury, as support for the children that have to work and have no time or money to go to school. These days, they have a new building with 8 classrooms and dorms where the children can stay (not quite finished). There are over 350 children that use the services, the centre fully supports the children in their lives, the children are fed and the peruvians that run the project are fully aware of the children's problems and are the nicest people in the world!! They have a library for everyone in the community to use, there is a lawyer who campaigns constantly for the people's human rights and the project is very well thought of in the community. All this has been achieved by a lot of hard work from a few local people and charitable donations. If you want to see more info or donate some cash, have a look at their website: http://www.marcelino.org/.

The daily reunion

Queueing up for free food

Huamachuco is 100 miles from Trujillo up in the sierra but as the roads are completely rubbish it is a 6 1/2 hour very bumpy train ride! We arrived at about 3.30pm 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. Katie Cry-At-Anything just about managed to hold it together in front of the kids but had a few tears in secret... 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!

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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 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.

Romario and Ernesto and their family

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. All the women and children were dressed in their traditional sunday best and all the men were absolutely rat-arsed on the local firewater that they carried round with them in buckets...!

Sunday afternoon involved more fun and games with the kids:

From Monday to Thursday, there is a school at the centre from 8am until 1pm 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 (Katie in orange in the thick of the good works!!):


While the lads 'work the fields', some of the girls cook an enormous meal for them all:


The kids bring their families to help including parents and little brothers and sisters:


After a morning of hard work down at the fields (for Katie, James not feeling well - hmmm!), we took a taxi with a couple of the tios to a nearby lake which was holding a 'Trucha de Oro' (Golden Trout) festival:

There was traditional dancing and we went out on the lake on a rowing boat which was beautiful. And the food was brilliant - 2 quid for a great big fried trout!

On Friday night James had an early night while Katie went out and 'danced it up' at the local disco with all the teachers. It was hilarious, the music was terrible, we didn't stop dancing all night and we managed to leave at 3am completely, stone-cold sober!!! We drank 7 pint bottles of beer between 11 of us. Trying to explain that at a club in England one bloke alone would drink 8 pints and a girl 5 pints was a bit tricky!

We had the morning off on Saturday and then organised games with the kids on Saturday afternoon. All the 'proper' teachers were in meetings so it was just us two for two and half hours which was completely chaotic but good fun!

On the Saturday evening we went to a concert with all the people that work at the project. The bands were pretty good but the only problem was the it was outdoors and by midnight we were all freezing. Highlight was the drummer of the second band who must have modelled himself on Rick Mayall's character in 'Bad News' (sorry if that means nothing to anyone except Suse, Dad and Mum!). It was hilarious, a lot of hair swinging and tantrums when the speakers weren't working properly. Wish we had pictures...!

On Sunday, we joined the final day of a meeting that had been running for 3 days for various workers for peace around Peru. Between 1980 and 2000, Peru went through an horrific civil war that we knew very little about before arriving at Casa Marcelino. We are writing a separate blog about the work that they are doing at the project to help educate the people of Peru so that nothing similar happens again so please see next entry for more info.

On 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 (again). 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, bloody hell, 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!!