Night and Day

This has been such a full week, I wanted to update you all with some of my new experiences. On Tuesday, I got to visit the FH office along with all the other Hunger Corps to meet with the FH International President, Greg Vestri. It was a great time of learning more about FHI and about FH Peru and the projects going on in the communities where FH works here in Lima. After a morning of presentations and a fabulous lunch of Chifa (this is what Peruanos call Chinese food) we then had the opportunity to visit some of the FH communities in los pueblos jovenes (the "young towns" on the outskirts of the city).

After seeing my pictures of where I am living now (from my last post)- the beautiful mall, beach, and even a Starbucks, some of you might be wondering...."I thought Lauren was going to Lima to serve the poor - where are they?" So let me show you another side of Lima, and a difference of night and day.


One of the hundreds of communities in los pueblos jovenes de Lima ("the young towns")



Greg Vestri, with a women and her children we visited with an FH case worker. Two of the children are apart of the child sponsorship program through FH, but during our visit, the case worker made sure to ask about the health and welfare of everyone in the family including the parents.



One of many steep steps going up to the homes in the communities. While these stairs look difficult to climb (and they are) they are a great improvement to having just a steep hill to climb. You can also see many 55 gal. garbage cans in this picture. In this community there is no water, so every day a truck comes by with water to fill the "water tanks." Imagine having only 55 gal of water a day to do all your wash, cooking, cleaning for a family of 5 or 6 - very difficult.

You can also see in this picture the retaining walls built to hold back the dirt and make a level place on this hill for building a house. As we walked around the community, Rousaura, the country director, kept nudging me to look at these huge stones fit together with no cement or reinforcement. Imagine, she said, what would happen if there was a big earthquake....I don't want to, I replied - this is just a little evidence of the great need there is for disaster prevention and mitigation work here in these communities.



Singing at a FH Kids Club (after school program for sponsored children in the community - although all are invited - where they do crafts, sing, play games, and learn about the word of God and how much God loves them).



Me and Anabel, a little girl who clung to my arm the entire time were visiting Kids Club.

While there is great wealth in this city, there is great poverty as well. But there is hope in these poor communities as well. One of the most powerful projects we got to visit was a meeting and training for women who have experienced violence in there homes. Organized by FH, the women and their husbands (during a different training) are receiving guidance on how to build a stable, loving, violence free home. Several women expressed how much they and their husbands have learned form the biblical teachings, and how much it has change their attitudes and behavior in the home. As one women expressed - she is not going to pass on this violence to her children.

I can not say how great it was to see lives in the process of transformation, and how much this experience has both challenged me and given me excitement to begin my work here.....but first a month of language school, which I started today :)

Caio!

Lauren