March 17th 2005

Today we took possession of our new Centre in Miraflores, Lima. Some of our international volunteers will live here, and venture out in the mornings to satellite centres in the barrios to serve Lima's poorest children. The language courses will be held from here as well.

April 2nd 2005
Miraflores, central location :
Last week in Lima we progressed on a number of fronts, and still have a few small challenges which our Lima volunteers report are at last coming good - i.e. the telephone will finally be connected tomorrow morning. Getting a license from Miraflores to run a language academy will take some more attention - we steadfastly refuse to make "gifts" to officials for doing their job. This sometimes slows things a bit, but we normally get what we need for the work.

On Thursday we held our reception to dedicate and consecrate the Lima Project and property.

First children centre in Villa Maria:
Friday April 1 st we dedicated the Satellite Children's Centre in Villa Maria - today was the first day of class, and it went well. We started with 11 children, and expect this to grow to 20 - 25 in a short time.

Next steps
We made good progress toward opening two more satellite Children's Centres.

April 15 th 2005
The mothers painted the first satellite centre last week, on their own initiative.

We have brought a social worker with us who is going to visit family’s of the street kids. In Villa Maria there should be 20+ children enrolled and studying by now, and there are only 10. But with this social worker there this will start to rise quickly.

About next satellite areas we have several prospective centres which have been in the preparation stage since last report. This is in addition to the newly to be developed centres ‘ La Victoria’ and ’San Juan de Lorigancho’. We will open in the communities who show the most support and cooperation for our programme.

We have been trying to get donations of used furniture in quantity for our satellite centres, but the man responsible at first thought we were foreigners come to tell Peruvians how to look after their children. His polite but sceptical communication opened the door to my explaining in detail how our satellite children's centre system works, and why it is needed and appropriate. He seems to have been convinced, and our Lima director is now meeting with the director for the Lima area to find out what our needs are and what furniture they are willing to give us.

May 18th 2005


The centre in Villa Maria has grown from 15 to 20 children within less than 3 weeks

The centre in San Juan de Miraflores (the large room with pool tables), has already passed 20 children, but today, sadly, we had to send three of them away - they were found to be addicted to glue sniffing, and their behavior made it difficult to teach the others. It was sad for the staff, because they had grown attached to the boys; but when one stoled Meg's cell phone, and the local policeman confirmed that the three are known local drug addicts and thieves, there was nothing to do but say goodbye to them. Meg got her phone back. We now sniff the faces of all the new children.

The centre at Pamplona (near to the San Jose centre), has been moved into a larger building with four class rooms, because it now has too many children for the original place.

The Centre at Ventanilla (which takes 1.5 hours to travel to and from) is our largest; and we just completed construction of an extension on the back of it.

In the past ten days we have delivered two truck loads of furniture to the new Pamplona centre and to the Ventanilla centre.

22nd July 2005
We just sent our principal Psychologist to Lima for two weeks to deal with the children (and their families) in all our centres there. His initial report is that they tend to suffer from the same lack of care from their mothers (most do not have fathers living with them), abandonment and abuse as do most of our children elsewhere in Peru - but perhaps more aggravated cases. He says the peer pressure to be good to ones children does not exist in the Lima barrios as much as in the smaller cities - perhaps partly because of the isolation which is typical of big cities where people are all struggling for themselves and not as a community; also the much higher cost of living in Lima: which drives parents to make their children work instead of study, even more than elsewhere in Peru.

He is very impressed with our two Lima social workers, and with the dedication and work of our international volunteers.

At the moment our volunteer house is full, but this will begin to drop off as the northern hemisphere summer holiday ends, and we go into the Sept-Dec slump.

It appears - after many promises and false obstacles - that we finally have the legal right to hold our Language academy at the Miraflores centre. For this reason we have sent our best marketing staff to Lima to flood the shops, schools, local radio and publications with publicity for the August registration. This is our only real way of making the expensive  Lima project come close to being self sustaining.

29th July 2005
The Lima schools have 103 children registered, but sadly the attendance is not very regular. We are encountering conditions in Lima which do not exist in any of our other centres in Peru. Our Psychologist conjectures it is because of the high cost of living in Lima: the poor people there are more inclined to make their children work because it is so difficult to afford the cost of living in Lima. That is why they frequently take their children out of our schools, then put them back in later on. It is a hard challenge for us to overcome.

31st August 2005
We have employed more Peruvian staff in Lima and are already managing the existing schools on an autonomous basis: that is we send money to the local school directors and they buy food for the children. Our augmented team of social workers are replacing the international volunteers in visiting the schools on a daily basis and working with the children, families, teachers and school directors: they also pay the local staff in each school on a weekly basis. Three of the schools worked the last half of last week on this new basis and it proved satisfactory - enrollment was actually up over the previous week.

26th September 2005
We finally got our license to operate an academy. Attached is a photo of the new sign (which lights up at night). We currently have a full complement of volunteers, and receive a professional marketing/communications person next week.

Information from 1st of October 2005 onwards
Comparing to our goals we can conclude that we have more than 100 children who are already out of their streetlives. A basis has been established with highly motivated people and a language license so needed for financially independency. From  now on we can only grow in number of kids to give them hope on a better and more secure life.

The Bruce Peru organisation will continue to work as hard as always … day after day.

Via their website you can follow the progress of this project from now on: http://bruceperu.org/0lima/

Thanks to Bruce Peru and the volunteers
The KinderZon Foundation wants to express their great respect and thanks for the cooperation with Bruce and Ana. This great couple showed an enormous commitment and integrity in this project.

We also have seen (mostly young) local and international volunteers working so hard, not complaining about problems, to make this project a success.

It was a privilege to work together!

Photo album