Trujillo

Now we are living in the desert - though Trujillo is advertised as the city of eternal spring. It never rains, except when the El Niño arrives. Therefore the landscape is quite a bit eerie; basically your eyes are deprived of green except for some palms on the main square. The good thing is that the temperature is very mild - around 18 degrees Celsius, though at the moment a bit chilly at nights.We have arrived on Saturday morning to our new, more long term destination. After our arrival we were taken to our apartment right in the centre of Trujillo, a pretty, colonial city of circa half a million inhabitants - most of which live in the slams around the city. The apartment is a huge five bedroom flat and at the time we moved in the whole place was for two of us only. After a couple of days two more flatmates moved in from the US. In the light of our plan to spend the coming minimum 3 months in Trujillo we have taken the weekend very easy, leaving plenty of time to discover the beauties of the neighbourhood. We looked around the centre and waited for our first ¨working week¨ at the organization we have chosen to volunteer with. Despite of the universal rule according to which Tomek is always right, he gave up finding our way in Trujillo on the first day. And despite of the other quite universal rule according to which women have sense for directions comparable to a parrot, Rita is quite able to navigate throughout the chess table streets of the centre. We have also learned the meaning of a new sign - most buildings have a green sign, one like the one on the right. Though I am still not sure that in case of an earthquake I would not rather want to run out of the building.The week started slowly. BrucePeru is a Peruvian Non Governmental Organization (NGO) with the mission to help children participate in the National Education. They approach parents, usually single mothers living in poor conditions and try convincing them to let their kids come to a one year school, instead of or besides making the kids work or beg. In the schools BrucePeru teaches them basic literacy and maths and supports them socially and emotionally to be able to succeed in the National Schools. As an induction we were to see various activities of the organization; the first day we spent at the celebrations of completion of first year of microfinance project that the organization is running in order to support women to develop enterprises to be able to finance their children’s schooling. We have not learned much there but it made us curious what is behind it. The next day more than compensated for the first one. In the morning we were taken to the local slums to the schools (each of us to a different one). First of all the slums are quite shocking as such. They are in the middle of a grey sand desert and you cannot see the end of them. There are no trees, no running water and we learned that we go there only in the mornings since later on it becomes dangerous to hang around there. The kids are also not the easiest to get their attention. Both of us in different schools got the ones that pose the most problems and it was quite a challenge even without the obvious language barrier we have. Tomek was told by his pupil that he is a bad professor due to the fact that his Spanish is almost non-existent, and asked whether he is a niño or a senior :) He figured that for now the only way to get closer to kids was to go play football with them...Rita got a mentally disabled girl in a wheelchair with 3 other little boys with behavioural challenges, one of which beat her with his little notebook whenever he got upset. By the end of the day both of us were quite stunned by what we experienced. The next day we went to different schools where Rita had her first admirer drawing hearts with arrows for her and easier kids to deal with...The thing that the schools have usually no floors and something that resembles a roof did not shock us on the second day...
On the fourth day we ´strolled´ around one of the slums with two Peruvian employees from our organization responsible for microfinance project, visiting the homes of the projects participants. We saw their new small businesses, houses, market and in general the local life that takes place there. Nobody there spoke English so Rita really had to do her best in Spanish, but amazingly she was able to make herself understood and translate most of the things. Some of the women set up little shops in the centre selling grocery, some make shoes, others silver jewellery or herbal products. It was great to see that some of the businesses where doing very well. Though the general atmosphere of the barrio was far from uplifting... quite an experience that you do not get as a tourist to Peru just like that...All in all the organization is doing a great job - we had our doubts before coming here and were quite sceptical but both the founders and the local staff are just great. It is quite remarkable how much effort they are putting into helping people and kids avoid a pretty sad future.

By the way thanks to Petra there are two new photos of us in the London set on Flickr (photo1 & photo2). This is how many things one needs for one year of travelling - each of us carrying around 15kg´s on our backs :))