So this
week’s blog is more of a week in pictures, although even the pictures don’t sum
up how much we’ve done. We’ve finally booked our flights out of Iquitos, on
Friday 13th July which gives us 2 more weekends here and pretty much
no time with our babies. I can’t believe that I'm already at this point of going
home, getting ready and having to say all my good byes so soon. But we’re both
really really determined to make these last few weeks full of stuff and time
with the kids and are throwing ourselves into it 150 %.
One of the
girls who’s been with us since the start left this week for adoption to Italy,
they arrived on Monday and she had a week of seeing them during the day,
sleeping in the Aldea and getting to
used to them before they finally got to take her back to their hotel on Friday.
Maria’s 6 she can’t read and barely knows her letters so this whole time we’ve
been waiting for her parents to arrive as been so hopeful because I know that
at least one of the kids here will finally be given the opportunities and
education that they need. On the second day they had already bought her an Italian
alphabet book! So that was pretty awesome, seeing how quickly she adapted to
them and was so so happy.
We’ve had a
few new addictions this week to Aldea life, more older girls which is a relief
because I was starting to feel a bit baby claustrophobic! All this week the
kids at school have been going on trips and celebrating in school the festival
of San Juan.
San Juan is
the area of Iquitos where the Aldea is situated and for some reason, no idea why but 24th June
is the day they celebrate their queen who apparently ordered a traitor of their
jungle village to be caught and ordered her men to chop off his head. The
biggest part of this festival is where everyone gets together to eat Juanes,
which is basically just rice and chicken (standard Peruvian diet) but wrapped
and cooked in banana leaves because when it’s finished it sort of looks like
the shape of a head…if you squint at it! So yesterday me and Alex got invited
by one of the Tia's to help her sister make up the Juanes for her family. We turned
up with our contribution of 24 eggs and she pretty much put us straight to
work. It was awesome I had such a great time, we wrote it all down as well so
we can attempt it again back home. I had no idea how much went into it, even
just the rice had loads of spices and bits and bobs we had to fry, chop, sizzle
it was crazy. Sylvia taught us all these
funky knots and how to keep everything together once it’s been put into the
leaves so that nothing falls out when you are boiling them. Took us nearly 5
hours but we did it. Alex and I actually made our own Juanes-probably around 40
of them and got to take some back for our own aldea Juane celebration today. So be prepared for Aneesha’s Juane making
craze once I get home I’ll be impressing you all!
Tambien on
Friday tia Magdalena took us down the road to see another Aldea which work with
our aldea sometimes, the only difference being that ArcoIris is privately owned
and ours is funded by the government. It was amazing seeing this whole other
place and means of working/living for the kids of Iquitos. It was smaller, they
only receive around 30 kids and all are between 5 and 12 years old, they
categorically don’t receive babies. Apart from that, the difference and seeing
the support available for the kids there was absolutely mind boggling. I know that it’s obviously a hundred times
easier when you have all the money available to you but some of the differences
between our aldea and Arco Iris showed the gaping holes in the system of our
Aldea. Simple things like all the beds had mosquito nets, even when malaria and
dengue aren’t problems within ArcoIris,
and the fact that numerous children in
our aldea over the years have been in hospital for Dengue doesn’t seem to
change the fact that there is still
not enough money to replace all the holey mosquito's nets that are sporadically
placed throughout the modulos. They had teachers who worked in partnerships
with ArcoIris and a local school who came over every afternoon for 2 hours to do extra tarea with the kids who
need it. There were set hours for the children over the weekends to work in the
vegetable gardens with the gardeners and any produce that they made they were
allowed to sell in the local farmers markets every weekend. It was crazy, I mean not only does that feed
back into the Aldea more money, but it gives the kids who don’t go to school
something to work towards. It made me really annoyed that our kids don’t and
can’t have these kind of opportunities because there simply ‘isn’t the money
from the government funds’ to provide them. It makes me so angry that my kids have to
suffer, that they will go through life without ever learning to read because they
didn’t go to school and there is nobody to pay for an extra teacher in the
Aldea or that they will never learn another task as a way of earning a living
when they leave the Aldea so will probably end up cleaning the streets.
I don’t
want this to sound like an angry ramble but I just want to make everyone aware
that there are still so many things lacking here for the kids. Even if they do have
the safeness of the Aldea, clean clothes, food and water every day, other
children to interact with there are still a million and one things that they
lack. And you know what, it just makes
me a hundred percent more determined to continue with my fund raising when I get
home to ensure that these kids, my babies will be able to get all the things
and education that they deserve!
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