Hope.

January 31st, 2009 by Leilah Feinstein

Last night, this is the email I sent my parents and Wilber:

Ok, so, I finally had a meeting with the director of Huchuy Yachaq, along with the head of construction and the directors of Máximo Nivel. I know the news has been slow in the making, but you guys need to understand that Peru is an extremely disorganized country, and Cusco is a concentrated source of confusion and run-arounds.

Here is the deal.

Huchuy Yachaq is a children’s center, and it’s main focus is education. Apparently, since this is vacation time in Cusco, the 300 kids that are there right now is hugely over the regular amount of attendees. Starting March 2, regular classes will resume, and the number of kids will drop to about 70 or 80. The other children will go back to school. That being said, the 70 or 80 remaining are the ones who can’t afford school or aschool uniform. In Peru, lack of a school uniform = non admittance. So Huchuy Yachaq becomes the primary source of their education. I had a really tough time not crying today, for the first time since I’ve been here. It’s a bit overwhelming. If you could just see their over-packed classes, lack of materials, and completely untrained “teachers,” you’d know as well as I that these kids are being set up for failure. Education is the key to overcoming poverty, and they just aren’t getting any.

Since I arrived, there has been a construction project at Huchuy Yachaq, building new classrooms. This week they ran out of money. They cannot put in windows, doors, or floors. The classrooms are scheduled to open in time for school on March 2.

I have been in heavy discussion with all those primarily involved, because I really still want to implement this shower thing. They do have 2 working toilets (and 1 broken one) and 1 working shower– trouble is, none of the kids are allowed to use them because of the sheer number of people versus facilities. There’s simply not enough water pressure to support 300 humans a day. Also, there is a lot of just… backwardness here. Marlene, the director of Huchuy, is generally very focused and I’m glad to see it. But she’s got this weird idea of knocking down the existing bathrooms to build a cement patio. It’s just so counter-intuitive; aesthetics are NOT the priority here!

To build completely new showers right now would break my budget. It would involve a lot of rock excavation (which includes renting a tractor by the hour), and we are on a $900 (S/2700) plan. The total cost is over $3,000. At first I was totally discouraged, but after several days of discussion this is what we’ve come up with for the money I’ve brought:

-Restore the current bathrooms and fix the broken toilet, on the condition that Marlene does NOT tear them down. With the regular number of students, 3 toilets & 1 shower is not ideal, but it’s not wildly unreasonable either.

-Finish funding the classrooms so the kids can start school on March 2. This new building will serve as a pre-school in the morning and a grade school in the afternoons. Because there will be multiple classrooms, it will relieve the current situations of putting like 50 kids in one completely pointless class.

In addition, I will help draft a curriculum for a health/hygiene course so that incoming volunteers can continue what I’ve started. There is no point without continuum.

What have I learned here? Poco a poco. Little by little. Get this done today, come home to the states tomorrow, raise money, keep making improvements at Huchuy Yachaq. Someday, I am sure, it will be a proper school with kids sitting in class, reading off a proper board, with real teachers in charge. These kids will have a place to wash, and the know-how to do it. With bodily awareness and respect, coupled with education, somewhere down the line I will support the creation of sex-ed classes. Armed with knowledge, there is no reason why people must continue to reproduce lost and uncounted offspring, breeding poverty. This cycle will break. I realize I can’t make it happen this instant, but I can start by making the building blocks.

This afternoon, this is the forward email I received from my Dad:

Hi Jay
Thanks for the update.
Peter and I will donate $3,000.
I will send a check in with Nicole
on monday.
I hope others help out…
All the best
Irene

As you can all imagine, my heart is spinning with joy at the knowledge that such wonderful people exist. Irene and her sister also donated $600 prior to my departure. I have never met them.

Hope.