Slideshow of some of the areas in which we work.

The Knitting Project - updated (see link to photos)

The Knitting Project

Last year, during the very cold weather in July and August, I mentioned to my mum that the children living in poor communities in the mountains above Cusco were at risk of illness and even death and that there were clothing collections to provide them with warm clothes. In some areas it is not necessarily much colder than Britain in winter but the issue is that no one here has central heating and the poorer houses don’t have proper windows, so basically it can be as cold indoors as outside. Of course, in the really high areas it is well below zero at night.

My mum had the idea of asking people she knew in the UK to knit jumpers to send ready for the cold weather this year. The project started small, but has grown to the extent that we already have over 300 jumpers with more promised! Many thanks to all the knitters, the people who collected children's jumpers from various sources, and also to our 'couriers' who have carried jumpers in their luggage to save on postage costs!

Some jumpers have already gone to the region of Peru hit by last year’s earthquake, where a couple of short term teams from Latin Link are working at the moment. Most of the rest we are planning to distribute in May. Some will go to the two mountain communities, one of which is where our pastors have their house and where we are working with the children. There is also a third community even higher up which we hope to visit. Some will go to children in the hospital, many of whom come from outlying areas. Already I have given away three knitted teddies to children in the burns unit. The mum of one of Sammy’s friends runs a big travel company here and helps out some of the communities from which her workers come, so we hope to go with her to one of these to distribute jumpers. We have a number of other contacts as well, so with the large number of jumpers we have, and that are still to come, I would imagine we might follow these up as well.

Update: We have just been to distribute some jumpers in the mountains. For photos please click here

If you are one of the knitters reading this, thank you so much for your support of this project. We realise that some of you knitted the jumpers a long time ago now and must be wondering if the children have received them. Apologies for the delay – it has taken a bit of organisation to get them all here. Now we have a large number of them we will be able to sort them out and see how many we need for each location. There are still more to come so if anyone reading this knows someone coming to Peru who could bring some, please contact my mum!

More news and photos will follow next month, so please come back to the blog at the end of May!

The New Running Track

We have been interested to watch the building of the new running track in Cusco over the last couple of months. We knew it needed to be ready for this week as they had an international competition planned. As always in Peru, it was very last minute and they were still painting the lines a few hours before the event started! Actually, today, day 3 of the competition, they were re-painting some they had done incorrectly in between races!

The event is a competition between junior (under 20) athletes from the high altitude regions of Peru, Ecuador, Chile and Argentina. We are unsure of the sense in racing anything over 200m at this altitude though, judging by the number of athletes needing oxygen after their races! For anyone reading this with athletics interest, the 800m winning times were about 2m 20 for the girls and just under 2min for the guys, which we think is pretty good at this altitude. Anyway, we hope to be able to resume our Saturday morning trips to the track soon. Sammy is very keen to run on the new track and dig in the new long jump pit (if we can still get away with that!) We are optimistic that we might be able to run a bit faster with a synthetic surface, but will have less excuse for our terrible times – still, the 3,400m altitude is good enough!