News
UVa in Huachipa
July 3, 2009 by Valentina Martufi
Due to SOLAC’s determination to keep on giving support to the primary school Colegio Alto Perú - in Huachipa, District of Chosica-Lurigancho, Lima – for the second year running we managed to organize a weekend project to bring some improvements to the school thanks to the participation of the University of Virginia students on interchange at the Universidad Antonio Ruiz de Montoya of Lima.
1) A general cleanup of all indoor and outdoor spaces;
2) Fixing the playground units that were broken;
3) Planting some trees.
The volunteers did an amazing job, and at the end of the weekend we were all very satisfied at the visible difference that had been made.
On Saturday we started off with the cleaning, better get the nasty part out of the way!
Half of the volunteers went around the school yard picking up all the garbage that had long been accumulating in every last corner of the school. Garbage recollection is practically inexistent in Huachipa, so unfortunately the kids do not seem to see the difference between having a pile of garbage-filled bin bags just outside the yard, or garbage randomly scattered around the yard…We are hoping to start changing this mind-frame with small activities of environmental awareness. Cleaning up the present garbage is only the beginning.
The other half of the volunteers cleaned the classrooms.
Here’s one of the volunteers’ tale.
“At the school, where the only government funding is for the very meager salaries of the teachers, we cleaned the oodles of dust out of all the classrooms by sweeping, and then sweeping again, and then sweeping again… then mopping, which trapped the dirt more than cleaning it. The only sidewalks there are right on the edges of the buildings, so everything gets a pretty good coat of dust.”
“were in pretty bad shape but actually a lot of fun to clean (got to play with buckets AND water, and stand on chairs while we were doing it!) if you didn’t think too hard about what it was you were cleaning (I think I may have a slightly different opinion about this than some people, haha). Thank goodness for the giant, thick rubber gloves we had.”
Impressions after the first day…
“It was a really strange experience to walk back into the home I’m staying in. The entrance here is a long staircase with white walls on either side, and the brilliance of the walls made them seem almost like they were lit up! It was astounding, even though we had only been in Huachipa for one day, which doesn’t seem like it would change your mindset that much. It makes me appreciate how meticulously clean most things I am in contact with in my everyday life are: the walls (and everything else) at the school are all dirty, though they were once white, and “clean” for those walls means there is no loose dirt, though there may be scuff marks, smudged handprints, etc. all over them”
And then back again the next day…
“We returned Sunday, to plant eight young yam trees, weed the school’s garden, fix/rehang the swingset and the seesaw and put nets on the basketball hoops and football (soccer) goals”
-Christa Doerwaldt
Again we would like to thank all the volunteers that made it possible to bring this little extra help to the kids of Colegio Alto Perú: Christa Doerwaldt, Lisa Newill-Smith, Ann-Marie McKenzie, Darby Ford, Matthew Hanlon, Scott Trumball, Caitlin Ham, and Rami Cosulich.
