For those who have no voices

Today at the Casa Josefina children’s home I was looking after two babies, three 2 year olds and Beltrán (who is 6 but with varied special needs). This is quite normal but usually one of the house mums is there too. Today however the cook hadn’t come which meant the house mum was cooking and I had all the kids on my own. Katerine and Alex (the babies) are actually very good, and Beltrán is not difficult to look after either, but the three 2 year old boys can be rather a handful! Anyway, while I was there I witnessed one of the saddest things I’ve seen since being here – a mum came with the social worker to leave her little girl at the home. The little girl has Downs Syndrome and the mum lives in a remote village with four other children. She had decided she couldn’t look after this little 2 year old properly but was obviously very distraught at having to leave her baby. She left with tears in her eyes and asked me to make sure the baby was well-cared for. It is hoped she will be able to take her back at some stage, once her other children are a bit older, but for the foreseeable future she will just visit once or twice per month.


Yesterday I also went with Robyn to visit Alina, who was in the Casa Josefina home until recently. She has been moved to the Mother Teresa home which is better able to cater for children with such severe special needs. She seems to have settled in well and smiled when Robyn mentioned Lucy’s name. She laughed like always when I sang some of the songs we used to do with her at Casa J. However, it makes me sad to see these children in such an institutionalised place – they care for the kids quite well but there are really not enough staff and it’s nothing like being in a family home. There are three rooms full of big cots, a place for meals and a play/therapy room, but it is rather like a bare hospital. And probably so many of these kids are like the little girl who was left today – loved but with needs that poor families in remote communities feel they cannot handle. When I think of the help these kids and their families would receive in Britain it makes me so sad. Many of the children of Peru are in desperate situations, a large proportion of them completely hidden and forgotten by the outside world in remote communities. We only see the tip of the iceberg in children like Alina. When I have read previously in various leaflets and websites of aid organisations about ‘Juan (or whoever), a poor farmer who struggles to provide for his families’ needs such as food, healthcare and education’, the reality had never quite struck me as much as today when I saw ‘Juan’s’ poor wife leave behind their little girl.

I wonder if you have ever sung the song below? I haven’t sung it for a number of years but it came back to me as I thought about the little kids and the youngsters with special needs – the ones that literally have ‘no voice’ and cannot even verbalise how they feel or what they want.

I will speak out

by Bankhead, Rinaldi, Goudie & Bassett

I WILL SPEAK OUT
for those who have no voices,
I will stand up for the rights of all the oppressed.
I will speak truth and justice,
I'll defend the poor and needy,
I will lift up the weak in Jesus' Name.

I will speak out for those who have no choices
I will cry out for those who live without love.
I will show God's compassion
To the crushed and broken in spirit.
I will lift up the weak in Jesus' Name.

Copyright © 1990 Springtime/Word Music

When I was looking for the lyrics of the above song, I also spotted these lyrics which were popular around the same time:

I the Lord of Sea and Sky (Here I am, Lord)

by Daniel Schutte

I, THE LORD OF SEA AND SKY,
I have heard my people cry.
All who dwell in dark and sin
My hand will save.
I who made the stars of night.
I will make the darkness bright.
Who will bear my light to them?
Whom shall I send?

Here I am, Lord. Is it I, Lord?
I have heard You calling in the night.
I will go, Lord, if you lead me.
I will hold your people in my heart.

Copyright © 1981 New Dawn Music

I think I heard, and I went, and now I’m here, and I do hold a number of children in my heart, but there are rather a lot more, and there is rather a lot more help needed, to put it mildly. The question for me now is whether to concentrate on helping a few children, or whether there is something bigger that can be done. In practice, what does it mean to ‘speak out’? It may sound as though I am a little overwhelmed by the needs of the kids here, and there are moments when maybe I am, but this is why I am here, and with the children we help at Casa Josefina, the Mountain Project and the hospital, we can show God’s compassion to at least some of the voiceless, the poor, the needy and the weak. Thank you again to everyone who supports us and enables us to help these children!

Some strange events of daily life

Yesterday I was rather surprised to find a metal post suddenly appear through the lounge wall a few inches behind the TV. The workmen next door had obviously not thought very carefully about the thickness of the wall and had come straight through! A little surprising seeing as we are in a very old mud brick house with extremely thick walls. Anyway, after the man in the shop below trying to help (he wasn’t much help as he had been drinking), the landlady arriving and the workmen going in and out a few times, they managed to knock the post back through. There is a still a hole in the wall though. What made it more complicated was that I was looking after our friends Ian and Juliana’s two boys as well as our two at the time, and after the first post appeared it sounded as though another one was on its way so there was a lot of frantic running backwards and forwards to tell the workmen to stop! Fortunately Pip, who has just moved in with us for a few weeks, was around and could help watch the kids.

Today as I was coming back from the children’s home I was fortunate (I thought!) to find a taxi who could take me down to the main road. This is not a very common occurrence as the home is up a rough track where there aren’t many taxis. However, as this one tried to turn round, it became obvious that it wasn’t going to start. It seemed as though if we could push it to face the right direction then we could at least roll down, as the track is on a slight slope. So the taxi driver and I got out and just about managed to push it round. We then rolled some of the way down until we came to another flat part where we came to a halt. A guy working in a nearby field helped push and we got a little further. Then we stopped again. This time another taxi driver came to the rescue. He got in the car while my driver pushed. He managed to start the car, so drove a little way down the track. Meanwhile my diver caught up, jumped in and off we went! The other driver ran back up the road to retrieve his car and passengers! And after all the pushing I still paid the guy as I felt sorry for him! The road up to the children’s home is proving quite eventful as a few weeks ago on the same road, Lucy and I had to dodge rally cars on some sort of cross-Peru race. They had raced as far as the village near the main road, then came slowly through to a check point just under a mile from the home. From there they were set off at 2 minute intervals. There were a few policemen blowing whistles, but really you needed to either walk through the fields by the side of the track, or run for about 90 seconds down the track and jump into the ditch when you heard the next engine! It was the most dangerous event I had ever seen!

Sammy and Benjamin's school annual show. The main theme was 'protecting our environment'. The end of the video includes a 'practice session' at home!

Some Cusco Children

Even after living here for over 2 years, there are occasions here when I am very moved – it might be meeting someone, visiting somewhere, or just an occurrence in the course of everyday life. This week I have had several of these moments so I thought I’d try and express them on the blog.

Sonia

Last week Lucy (Strider) and I went to visit Sonia's mum who was sick. Sonia is a 12 year old we know well from the mountain project and perhaps because she is a bright girl with leadership skills we had not realised how poor her family is. Her mum is a widow of Quechua background who does not speak much Spanish and the family, with three children, live in the tiniest, darkest little mud house I have ever seen. They have one room containing three 'beds' (more like benches with blankets), a table and some shelves. The house has no windows, a mud floor and a few guinea pigs running around. They have a little side room containing something that resembles a gas camping stove, and a small mud-walled courtyard. I cannot imagine how they manage to live there. I have questions such as: How does Sonia manage to have clean clothes? Where does she do her homework? What do they do when it rains and they can’t use the courtyard? What hope do they have of ever getting a better place to live? How can we help this family?

Sonia, left, with friends and Emma, a volunteer from China.

Flor

At the weekend Lucy, Robyn and I (together with Matthew and Carolina (Robyn’s children), and Sammy) went to visit baby Flor’s grave, as at her burial we did not have a little cross to mark the site. It was Sunday afternoon and the atmosphere at the hillside cemetery was a strange mixture. Some families, presumably those who relatives had died a long time ago, seemed to be on an afternoon out with kids running about flying kites. Others were in the midst of grief as they visited a very recent grave or were actually burying someone that day. A young couple had brought flowers and silently lit a candle over a very new baby grave near to Flor’s. There was actually just a patch of earth where Flor’s grave was as people had used the stones we had put there for other graves and the flowers had died since it is the dry season. Anyway, we pretty much had expected this and Lucy had brought new plants to put in. Matthew and Sammy carried the little wooden cross up the hill and one of the teenage grave diggers helped to fix the cross into the ground. As we were there, just below another family were burying a little white coffin. It didn’t take long and after a very brief prayer they left. But then, two of their grave diggers, boys who looked to be about 12 years old, took off their caps, stood beside the grave and very solemnly and clearly began to recite prayers and sing a hymn. It was very moving to see how seriously they committed the little girl to God.

Sammy and Matthew at the cemetery.

Nilda and Katherín

Part of Lucy’s work here is visiting a children’s home once a week and I have been going along too. I wasn’t sure at first if I had the time to go every week but I’ve quickly grown attached to the kids so I have been going regularly. (It has taken the place of the little baby and toddler group I used to do with Ben last year, which we don’t do now he is at pre-school.) It is a new home started by another mission agency and most of the kids are very young – it is so sad to see such little children without parents, despite the good care they do receive in the home. I have become particularly attached to two little sisters, Nilda (4) and Katherín (6 months). Nilda used to live with her mum (often on the streets), who is ill, and I think they were picked up by the police when Katherín was born. Their mum is not able to look after them so they are permanently in the children’s home I think. Not much is known about their dads and they have had to estimate Nilda’s birthday. Other children have similar terrible stories. Beltran, who is about 6, is smaller than our Ben and has multiple disabilities. His mother died, I think due to alcohol problems, and he was found in a field beside her. It is amazing how he has improved since being in the home. He has learned to sit up, talk and sing and is such a happy little boy. Alina is the oldest girl in the home and we thought she would always be in a wheelchair. However, this week a visiting group from the USA had brought her a walking frame and with Lucy’s help it was amazing to see her begin to try to take steps with it. Again, she is a child who is going to improve so much now that she is being given better care.

Baby Katherín

Vanessa

Church last weekend was one of our special invitation services for families and a group of our older girls from the mountain project performed a dance. They have been practicing with Lucy for a number of weeks and it was lovely to see them finally perform. Afterwards, Vanessa asked if they had done OK because she said ‘ it was the first time I’ve done something like that and it made me really nervous’. She is 12 and really quite talented in art and dance – how special it was for her to perform in front of a church full of people! Later in the service everyone got into groups to talk about the Bible story and do activities and it was great to see 6 groups (3 kids groups, plus men, ladies and young people) all sitting round discussing – such a change from the tiny services we used to be part of a year and a half ago! Equally encouraging is that the church people themselves organise most of these outreach events now.

August Family Service.

Mountain Project Film

This film was made recently as an introduction to the mountain project for a couple of classes in two schools in the UK.

Flowers of Hope

Please watch this 3 minunte presentation.
To make a donation please visit: www.justgiving.com/vision3300

I was thinking of waiting a little while before visiting the hospital again. I’m trying to do things one at a time and my first project is sorting out the work at the mountain. However, an abandoned baby girl drew me back to the paediatric ward a little sooner. Here is the story of little baby Flor. Please be warned that it is rather sad.

Lucy, who is here with us for 8 months from Latin Link, has started going to the hospital once a week with my Australian friend, Robyn. It’s great as with Robyn’s Occupational Therapy background and Lucy’s Paediatric Nurse training they can do a lot to help the kids. Robyn particularly helps in the burns unit where there are not enough staff to help the children with the exercises they need to do. She also helps the poorest families with the special cream they need to buy but can’t afford (it can be something like £10 every couple of weeks which is totally impossible for most families in the state hospital). Robyn and Lucy also spend time with children who are alone either because they are from children’s homes or they have parents living far away that can’t visit much, or they have actually been abandoned at the hospital.

Three weeks ago they met Flor, a tiny little baby who had been brought from a town some hours away and left at the hospital. The nurses were told that her parents couldn’t keep her and she had been brought to the hospital because she wasn’t breathing properly. I went with Lucy one Sunday morning to help her change her clothes and nappy and be with her for a little while. Someone visiting from the States had kindly brought her some premature baby clothes – she wasn’t actually premature but was absolutely tiny. At first there didn’t look as though there was much else wrong but as Lucy changed her I could see she didn’t have all her fingers on one hand. A trainee doctor told us that neither her heart nor lungs had developed properly. She was on oxygen and was being tube-fed. Lucy, with her nursing training, was rather concerned that she wasn’t being cared for very well at the hospital.

Lucy continued to visit Flor the following week but the Monday after Easter she and Robyn went with more nappies for her and were told that she had died over the weekend. It was so sad to think of her having spent most of her month of life alone in a big cot in the hospital belonging to no one. Lucy and Robyn had been wonderful to her but to them of course what they had been able to do seemed woefully inadequate.

The next question was Flor’s funeral. With no relatives and nobody responsible it seems that nothing would have happened. Her body would just have been put into a common grave. To us who knew her that seemed awful, so Robyn, who knows the hospital well, set about trying to organise something. After several days of getting nowhere, due to the death certificate not having been signed, she eventually obtained permission to take Flor’s body. The very basic state insurance would provide a little coffin and there was a place reserved in the ‘poor people’s cemetery’ for people in Flor’s situation. We would have to do everything ourselves though. This meant going to the morgue to collect her body (to our relief the staff there put her into the coffin for us). We then had to take the tiny white coffin in Robyn’s car to the cemetery. There was a grave prepared for the coffin there, and it was actually a very beautiful location on the side of a hill on the edge of town. Lucy, her husband Tim, Joel (who is the pastor of our San Blas English-speaking church here) and myself accompanied Robyn. As we watched, two cemetery staff buried the coffin at the top end of a huge section of little child graves. We then planted flowers that Lucy had brought and Joel helped us with a short time of thanksgiving for her life. I thought it was actually the most beautiful little funeral I had ever been to, and it was very special, even though it was so sad.

It is hard to put into words how this experience has been for us. We have many unanswerable questions. Sitting on the hillside beside Flor’s grave I think we all hoped that we will never have to do the same thing again. Realistically, it is likely that we will. The child mortality statistics of developing countries have suddenly become personal to us. The rows of little graves we saw are the result of poor health care and poverty, and are only representative of the other little children who die in the countryside miles from proper medical care. All this can be a little overwhelming. The needs are so great here and what we can do seems so small.

However, Flor’s life has inspired us. We know that there is more we can do for the kids in the hospital and whatever we do, however small, is always valuable.

But now in a single victorious stroke of Life, all three—sin, guilt, death—are gone, the gift of our Master, Jesus Christ. Thank God! With all this going for us, my dear, dear friends, stand your ground. And don't hold back. Throw yourselves into the work of the Master, confident that nothing you do for him is a waste of time or effort. (1 Corinthians 15:57-58, The Message, part of what I read at Flor’s burial)

Holiday House in Eastbourne

While we are in Peru, our house in Eastbourne is available for summer lets for family, friends, or friends of friends! Below are some details if you or anyone you know are interested.

The Blue House

Large house (sleeps up to 10) with patio and sizeable garden situated close to seafront.

Bedrooms: 2 double, 2 twin, 1 large and 1 small single. 2 bathrooms, kitchen, dining and living rooms. Suitable for large family, two families holidaying together or a group of friends.

TV, washing machine.

Duvets, pillows and a cot can be borrowed on request.

No smoking. No pets.

Weekly rates:

£350 -£500 depending on number of people.

£50 deposit with booking. Full payment 8 weeks before arrival.

Availability:

July, August and first two weeks of September.

To book or for further information please E mail: dave-brown6@tiscali.co.uk

Attractions nearby include:

Half to 1 mile away:

Clean beach with sand and shallow water at low tide.

Promenade and pier.

Numerous cafes, pubs, takeaways and restaurants.

Town centre, including indoor Arndale Centre, museums, bus and railway stations.

Treasure Island, including paddling pool, adventure playground, indoor soft play, pirate crazy golf.

Princes Park, including putting, playgrounds, bowling green and lake.

1 to 3 miles away:

The Downs, including Beachy Head.

The South Downs Way and many walks.

Sovereign Harbour – boat trips, cinema, shopping, cafes and restaurants.

Fort Fun Leisure Park, with Go Karts, soft play, fair ground rides, adventure golf.

Spray Water Sports – sailing, windsurfing, kayaking.

Miniature Steam Railway.

Ten Pin Bowling and Laser Quest.

Sovereign Centre – swimming pools, gym and sports hall.

Trax Indoor Karting Centre.

Cuckoo Trail cycle path.

Theatres.

Golf courses.

News from Project CORASON (the mountain project) – April 2009

I returned from England in March and was pleased to find the afternoon children’s club had been running for the whole 3 months that I had been away, thanks to a good number of volunteers from the language schools.

Easter activities: A film and card making

Some new developments at the club this month:

1. We have now divided the afternoon club into 3 sections to cater for the different age groups we have: Pre-school (up to 6 year olds), Juniors (7-10s), and Seniors (11+)
2. We have also made the roles and responsibilities of volunteers clearer. We aim to have the following staff each week:

Supervisor

Pre-school coordinator and assistant(s)

Junior coordinator and assistant (s)

Senior leaders for both girls and boys

3. We are very encouraged to have received some funding from the UK which will enable us to employ a part time Peruvian project worker for 2 years. So in addition to the support that Mary (the Pastor’s wife who lives at the project) and myself are able to give, we will have someone working with the volunteers and kids everyday and doing some of the administration.
4. We have some new games and toys at the club room and work on a sports pitch above the house is progressing well. We are continuing to offer art and craft activities to support our English programme and are looking at ways to provide more structured sports activities and craft workshops for our older kids.

A work team helping with the sports area

A note for language school coordinators and prospective volunteers:

We are very grateful for the various gifts volunteers bring for the children. However, we are asking that people don’t bring sweets up to the project. The kids are very happy to receive fruit, if volunteers want to give them a snack. Otherwise, particularly useful items for the project include items of stationary (pencils, paints, paper, glue, etc.), wool and material scraps for art and craft projects, balloons, books (either in Spanish or very simple English), toothpaste and toothbrushes, and sports equipment.

Finally, I have a volunteer, Robyn, who helps regularly at the club on Friday afternoons who also does some hospital visiting. If coordinators at language schools have any longer term volunteers for Club CORASON (a month or more) who would also like to visit the children in one of the hospitals one or two mornings per week, they could go with Robyn.