South america 2007

Oops, it's been a while! I meant to write some explanation to the photos below then put some more up. I went to south America for 6 weeks in August/Sept last year. It was initially a 2 week 'Taste of Mission' trip with an organisation called Oak Hall, which is based in Kent, UK. We teamed up with Scripture Union in Peru to help with whatever we could for their centres for street boys. We flew into the Lima Centre, stayed overnight and then headed to the Eastern side of the Andes to a campsite they have named 'Kimo' which means 'happiness'. It is near a town called La Merced.
My friend Claire and I arrived in Lima before the rest of the team and headed to the 'Girasoles' (Sunflowers) centre in central Lima. About an hour after we got there we felt the whole building start to sway. It went on for a few minutes and just as we were wondering if we should evacuate, it stopped. We could hear a lot of commotion from the street outside and after a while the staff and boys living there decided to get a tv set up to see what the news was saying. It turned out to be a severe earthquake, with the epicentre well South of Lima. The rest of the team turned up well after we had gone to bed, and by the next morning we had 20 other people to get to know (including 3 others from our own church in London).
The earthquake had damaged the road that we were to take through the Andes that day, so we drove instead to another SU property in Eastern Lima, in an area called 'Chosica'. It was a property that had been pledged to SU, so they were using it to make some income, as a resort location for public/families etc. It was fractionally warmer here (Lima was freezing!), but still no hot water, a theme we were to get very accustomed to for the next 2 weeks! We spent the day and night there, doing what we could to help which mainly involved weeding and painting some of the buildings. The next day we were meant to get the bus at about 10am, so we set off at 11 ('Peruvian time'), to hit the road over the mountains. At about 12 we caught up with the other traffic that was a pretty much a standstill as we waited for more landslides to be cleared from the road! What was meant to take about 5 hours ended up taking about 10, and we eventually got to La Merced to catch the 'cable cart' over a rushing river to our campsite. It was dark and raining, and we were not able to appreicate out surroundings till the next day.
Kimo was an idyllic site - thatched rooved cottages set next to a small lake, in the Andean cloud forest. We were warned of snakes, spiders, toxic caterpillars and even a resident jaguar that had been heard around the site at night! We were all exhausted and hit our beds gratefully. The next couple of days we split into teams to help fold palm leaves for thatching, painting some buildings and also clear an area on a nearby hill around what is going to be the accomodation for more street boys. This was hard work and it was hot and humid in the rainforest, but we were happy with the results by the end of three days of macheteing!
We spent a day in La Merced, attended church, went to a local coffee producer, to a huge waterfall high in the mountains and visited a 'traditional' Andean tribe (who mosty exist thanks to tourism!). Kimo is to be used to make some income as well as house the boys, and they had an area where they had some animals - tortioses, birds, monkeys and a specatbled bear who my friend Nai affectionately named 'Brian' (Bri for short). I was concerned about him initially, as he didn't seem a very happy bear, and had some strange behaviours, but I was told that he had been saved from Poachers and had some head trauma before he was taken to the campsite. His enclosure was pretty basic, and he could have done with a lot more environmental enrichment, but apparently he dances with one of the director's sons when he has the chance and is fed of scraps from the kitchen, which are probably quite nutritious seeing what was left after our meals!
we headed back over the Andes, passing over an altitude of more than 5000m above sea level in the bus. Noone got altitude sickness but I felt a kind of pressure on my chest and a little light headed as we ascended. We stopped at a restaurant on the way and samples guinea pig and fried bull's testicles - both of which I'm happily not eat again :) then it was onto Kawai, another centre by the sea south of Lima, in an area that was more affected by the earthquake.
Kimo was an amazing place - it had been taken over several times by the 'Shining Path' Terrorist group when they were active, and its director had become a Christian there, turning from gang warfare to deciding to commit him life to working with kids in camps. He was an inspiring man, a true larrakin, and he and his family and staff from the camp were so lovely, tolerating our pathetic spanish and feeding us so well!