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7TH OCT 2008
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 Student Travel: It is hard to describe what you feel as you stand on a hill overlooking Villa Maria, one of the largest shanty towns in the world and home to some 60,000 people in the outskirts of Lima.
The cardboard shacks continue as far as the eye can see, covering the enormous sand dunes of the Atacama desert.
I had been presented with the daunting task of helping to organize a month-long project to re-home some of Villa Maria’s residents. The problem was quite simple. Currently in the throes of the coldest winter in decades children are dying each night due to the freezing cold temperatures.
 It’s cold enough for a westerner in a thermal sleeping bag to feel, let alone a malnourished child sharing a bed with four others under a pile of hole-filled cardboard and tin. The solution was also simple- To build wooden houses for these families. Each house was to be built from scratch at a relatively low cost.
The extent of my carpentry experience prior to this trip was a slightly wonky mirror frame. By the end of this month I was confidently calculating the angle for a sloping back wall and constructing a hinged door frame.
The sense of achievement was incredible. It took four to five days of hard physical work, a lot of determination and a lot of teamwork to build each house transport it wall by wall up the hillside and reconstruct it in its place. It is immensely rewarding to stand back at the end and see something physical, the results of all your effort. For me however, it was not standing back and looking at the new wooden walls and corrugated iron roof of a much stronger, warmer house that really chocked me up. What left me speechless were the tears of gratitude from the children’s mothers, the way they wanted to tell us how warm they’d been that first night in their new home, the incredulous head shakes of the Fathers who had laughed at the notion of a group of Gringos building houses.
 We would mark the end of each week with a show for the children, who would look on in bemusement as we pranced around doing our best spice girls impression but resembling a group of men in drag or frantically tried to stop our home-made skirts falling apart as we tried to teach them the Macarena.
We would also, in the pauses between one house and the next lose miserably to the shanty town boys at football or be invited to dance salsa or eat Ceviche with the locals.
Their unquestioning acceptance of us was wonderful and no-doubt down to Alejandro, a local who has dedicated the last 15 years of his life to working with the children of Villa Maria to encourage them to participate in sport and recreational activities as opposed to crime and drugs. His work is helped ironically by the facilities at Villa Maria, built and abandoned by the government are two Olympic sized swimming pools and numerous sports pitches. It is the swimming pool changing rooms that provide accommodation for volunteers during the summer months.
We slept in the upstairs classrooms of a tiny school. We shared this space with Alejandro and two other Peruvians who worked with us. We ate together, sawed wood together, danced together and chased kids together. For that month we really were a part of Villa Maria.
I would like to urge anyone, even if you haven’t even managed a wonky mirror frame before and like me a terrible footballer/dancer with two left feet, to consider helping out.
Individuals can contact Alejandro at: info@villamariaperu.org
Quest Overseas also organize group volunteer projects see www.questoverseas.com
Article written by Sarah Benson
In her final year at Leeds University studying Spanish and Portuguese
Provided by The Student Zone (United Kingdom) |
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