Our First Week of Volunteering, or: Where is Charles Dickens When You Need Him?

Since we arrived in South America, we have been amazed at the ages of the children selling goods in the street. There seems to be no limit to how young they must be to push candy and trinkets to strangers; as long as the child can walk and hold objects in their hands, he or she is deemed fit as a vendor. Magge likes to tell me that I am a cold, emotionless person, but I have a hard time seeing an emaciated five year old with tattered clothes and hands nearly black with grime begging passersbys to buy suckers and gum.

Education is constitutionally compulsory and free in Peru, but many children, especially those from the barrios (poor neighborhoods that typically rim major cities), never make it into schools. Supposedly, the matriculation rate at the primary levels is 97%, but I rarely ever believe data released from the U.S., so I'm not inclined to believe any statistics sourced from the Peruvian government. A number of children are born in their families' shanties without birth certificates or other records, so I don't think the government even knows how many children they are supposed to have in their schools.
Children that do not start off in the school system have little hope of entering at a later time. Potential students must pass entrance exams, and if you haven't been in school, how are you supposed to do that without outside help? The purpose of Bruce Peru, the organization with which Magge and I are currently volunteering, is to reach out to children who are either not in school or would otherwise not to go to school and educate them in order to place them into the public school system. Its employees and volunteers literally go door to door in the barrios, convincing parents to send their children to a Bruce Peru school so that they can eventually attend public school. It's a daunting task given the sheer number of children and the often-uncooperative attitude of parents, but the organization has had several thousand students since opening their first school in 2001, so they are making progress.

Magge and I arrived in Trujillo the Saturday after Thanksgiving and began working on Monday. I volunteer at a school in a barrio called Alto Trujillo, which is about a fifty minute bus ride from our apartment in the city center. Unlike most of the other schools that Bruce Peru operates, class here is held in a school building instead of a local person's house. However, like most buildings in the barrios, it does not have electricity or running water and is patrolled by stray dogs. There are about twenty-five students ranging in age from four to thirteen, with the bulk of them being around six years old, and they are all crammed into one room.

I function as a teacher's assistant in the classroom. Since the ages and abilities vary so much, it's impossible to give the standard classroom lessons that Americans are used to. Instead, lessons are targeted at smaller groups of children, while the other children are supposed to be doing exercises on their own, but are actually playing with what look to be Peruvian pogs (pogs were a fad for about three weeks in North America in the early 90s, but are apparently still popular down here - or maybe the three week fad period just finally worked its way into Peru and will be over soon). I try my best to work with the kids that are not working directly with the teacher, helping them with counting, addition, subtraction and basic reading and writing. I also bring bread and fruit to school everyday, for what I am told is the only meal of the day for a number of the kids.

Some of the kids have such little understanding of what they are doing, that at times it seems fruitless and hopeless to work with them. I have to tell myself that it takes time to get these kids up to speed, and they are in a much better position now than they were previously.

I'm probably not supposed to have favorites, but any volunteer or teacher who does not is a better person than I am. There are two brothers, Jair and Alessandro, that stood out to me on the first day. Jair is six years old and probably the sharpest kid with which I've worked; he is one of the few students that actually understands the concepts instead of just memorizing them and can extrapolate what he's already learned. I am going to talk to the people at Bruce Peru to see if there's anything I can do to make sure he gets the education he needs once he's done with the program. His brother Alessandro is four years old, which is younger than the age requirement for the school, and constantly cracks me up, even though I only understand a quarter of what he's saying.

We will be in the schools for another week and a half, and then the kids break for Christmas and summer vacations. We will then help the organization recruit children for next school year by going door to door in the barrios, which will be very interesting because the barrios here are unlike anything we have in the U.S. (although I haven't been to Detroit in a while so I cannot comment there). They are built on dirt fields and hills, with little to no vegetation to break up the brown monotony of the landscape. The buildings are four concrete slabs thrown together, may or may not have roofs and the floors most likely are not any fancier than the dirt that is omnipresent outside. I said previously, most have neither running water nor electricity. I have not taken a camera to the school with me, so I have not taken any pictures of Alto Trujillo yet but will try to post some soon.