Day 4 and 5

May 10th

Gotta love the communication issues of Peru. The group is up and ready to go at 8, but Dora is no where to be seen. At 8:15 I check my e-mail and realize Dora had sent me an e-mail in her broken english saying we were going to ifejant for a meeting at 9:15. So we wait around for her to come over. 9:30, she's not here. So she calls the hostel saying we're suppose to be meeting her there, but we have no way of getting there on our own. So naturally Ronal, superhero that he is, takes us there and attends the meeting with us for a while.

At the meeting, there was a translator who helped us to understand the philosophy behind ifejant and what they are trying to accomplish.

A few things I learned at the meeting
- ifejant works to provide rights to working children, rights that include treating them as equally as adults and providing the opportunity for them to work and provide for their families
- children in other rual areas of peru work because it is a part of their lifestyle and it is what they are brough up with, but kids in the city work beccause their families live in poverty and have no other option
- ifejant works with about 5 schools around Peru to create these opportunities for kids
- they want to break away from the western ways of thinking that kids should only attend school to obtain an education
- through working they are able to further their knowledge, but ifejant does value education, and creates programs with schools so that kids can both work and attend school

A pretty interesting philospohy if you ask me.

We also learned that Lima is one of the fastest growing cities in the world, with 90 percent of the population living below the poverty line. We learned about some of the issues and needs of the population. One of the resons there is so much poverty here, is that many people move from the andes region of Peru, but they come to Lima and cannot find much work and end up living in the slums.

After the meeting, we went to Villa Maria for another half a day of work. Savannah and I painted a classroom, and the others worked on similar projects from the day before. After about 3 hours we went a played soccer with the kids. 

Meanwhile, Dora and the principle of the school had gone into town to get supplies for the school. We were suppose to leave at 5, but at 5:20 she still was not back. After waiting around for about an hour, she shows up saying their combie had a flat tire. She arrived in a truck full of supplies that we then had to unload.

Once that was done we were allowed to head home. But its much harder to get a combie to Miraflores for 9 people at night, so one half of the group took a mototaxi to the bottem of the hill, and the other half took a combie that was aleady full. So we had about 20 people in a small bus that seats roughly 13 people.

So then we had to take another combie from the bottem of the hill of Villa Maria to Miraflores and its well past 7 by now. Things started to look up when the combie that Dora found was the same one our group took last year! Getting into the combie the driver recognized me right away and was stoked to have our group. We arranged to have him drive us each day.

Once we got home Ronal was waiting for us and he helped us order Chifa (Peruvian Chinese food). It was a pretty big hit and unlike last year, we didn't have any leftovers. 


May 11th

We get into the combie pretty much on time today, to find a translator sitting on the bus!! Dora managed to work her magic and got her neighbour to come to work with us today. His name is Milo and he is awesome. He brought a suitcase full of stuff to help us out at the work sight and he even brought power tools.

We started building today. First we had to move everything that we had moved the day before to the top of the hill. The only people who fell were Savannah and I...go figure. Next, the boys stated making walls for the stucture, because Milo insisted that was a man job. So the girls did a lot of sitting around today. But, we did move some old doors, and walls from a previous building up to the top of the hill where we were working, and once they were there we had to take the nails out of them and pull the pieces apart so that we could cut them up small enough to make a fence out of the material.

We finished work around 3 today, and there were no kids around to hang out with so we got to leave early, and come home to our showers. It was my shower day today, but the water kept shutting off and going from hot to cold... not cool. 

After first showers the boys and I went grocery shopping for dinner and lunch food. When we realized how many bags we had we realized we couldn't easily carry everything home so we (mostly Ryan) decided we would take the grocery cart home with us. No one seemed to mind. Matt and Ryan pushed it along and I walked behind with Suud and Rory naturally scared we would get in trouble.

We made a huge pasta dinner, and it was awesome. We didn't even have Ronal to help us this time!