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Lima - Skyscrapers, shanty towns and anagrams!
October 20th, 2011
by
Ben Nolan
We have arrived in Lima! It is completely different from anything we have seen so far. Firstly, it is huge! It is around 60km by 40km and is home to nearly 9 million people. Downtown Lima is overcast and a bit foggy, but when you head up to the shanty towns it’s really sunny, and incredibly dusty. It is also probably the wealthiest place we have been to. In the centre of Lima there are skyscrapers belonging to various household brands such as Samsung, HSBC and KPMG.
The traffic is also something that has to be seen to be believed. Here are the rules of the road:
- At junctions pick the lane with the shortest queue – you can just cut across people afterwards to get where you need to go
- When at junctions watch out for police officers with whistles. They will often arbitrarily decide to overrule traffic lights
- Either keep your indicators on all the time, or never use them – the horn will do just fine.
But once you make it out of this modern metropolis of a death trap you get to a very different Lima. There are shanty towns here that stretch as far as you can see up the mountains. These have been built by immigrants from the countryside – hoping for a better life in the city. There’s no electricity, no running water, no roads other than dirt tracks. Eventually – when enough people have moved to an area the government comes along and installs water and electricity. The area quickly fills up and then the same thing happens further out. It’s not a poverty I could ever imagine – people don’t look poor, they are wearing the latest (fake) Hollister t shirt and Puma trainers, but they live in wooden shacks smaller than my bedroom – houses that whole families share. Parents leave for work in the city centre at 7am and often don’t get back until 7pm. School only lasts until lunchtime – leaving children on their own, working, or playing on the streets.
Dennis, who heads up our work in Lima, explained the cruel way that children often end up dropping out of school and into life on the streets. Many mothers work selling sweets on buses and at traffic lights – it is reckoned that an adult can sell one full bag of these and make about $4 a day. However, a child is generally believed to be able to sell three times this amount. The reason they do better is because people want to help these kids, so they buy from them as an act of charity. Because they can earn more, the child comes under pressure to be out selling sweets, rather than doing their homework or attending school. Very quickly they can end up dropping out. With this cruel irony heavy on our hearts, we went to visit a project in a shanty town called “the Hand of God”, (which used to be called the Devil’s Mouth until the residents complained) to see what they were trying to do to tackle this.
This project was simply fantastic. Many years ago it had started as a government initiative called “a glass of milk.” It was a fairly self-explanatory programme – the project gave out glasses of milk to children before school. But Irma, the project director, had taken it way beyond that. She asked, “What does a glass of milk really change? These children would still be out on the street for the rest of the day because their parents don’t look after them. A glass of milk doesn’t do anything about that.” Now, she still gives out milk in the morning but in the afternoon around 40 children aged from 7 to 12 come here after school, and stay until their parents get home.
I snuck away from the grown-ups to muck around with the kids. However, I was quickly sat down by one of the project leaders and instructed to help 8-year-old Jose with his English homework, and specifically with one of the problems he couldn’t do.
It was an anagram. I am awful at anagrams. I stared at the page for several minutes and couldn’t see anything. Several of the children who had been crowding around me got bored and wandered off – was this man so hopeless he didn’t even know his own language?? Eventually I scribbled down an answer – it was clearly wrong. Then, as I was really starting to sweat, I looked at the previous page and found the answer written down. With a huge sigh of relief I rubbed out “gardenim” (sic) and replaced it with… I’m going to leave you to work it out. First person to put their answer in the comments section wins a mystery prize from Peru. “I ilke rgcecdaoimins.”
My hopelessness spurred Jose on – and for the next 15 minutes he worked furiously to show he could do it better than me – catching up with the homework that I could see from his textbook he was getting in quite a bit of trouble at school for not doing.
We also got speaking to 16 year-old Ana. She was helping some girls with their homework with rather less fuss than me and she told us a bit about herself. She is here for 4 hours after school, helping Irma to run everything. She walks the 30 minutes here every day, and apologised for only coming to the project 5 days a week (she takes Saturday and Sunday off). She hopes to carry on studying, and maybe one day go to university. She was clearly very popular with the kids who crowded around her to have a photo taken. Ana was such a quietly inspiring teenager – with so much maturity and dedication for any person – let-alone someone her age. It was impossible not to be moved. We later found out that our partners had done quite a lot in the early days to encourage and support her in this role. She clearly needed no more encouragement now.
Many of these children will still have to work on the streets some days a week. That is simply the economic reality they are faced with. But while they are enjoying school and keeping up with their work – they do have a chance at a better life. They’re also somewhere that is safe and secure, and where they are loved and looked after by inspirational volunteers such as Ana.
Please pray for Ana, that she can fulfil all of her dreams. We found her inspiring; and I hope she can be inspiring for other teenager – wherever they live.
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