It should be stressed that this is not our normal “business” but we received some generous donations which enabled us to consider this action in the first place, in Huarmey, 200 miles or so from our refuge.
At short notice and in response to the state of emergency, everyone in our Project Peru refuge contributed; the children helped to load up a car with food, water, toys for the children and more which some of the staff took to Huarmey in the Ancash region north of Lima, which was badly affected, as were so many other areas, and which had had very little help.
The photos show our children closely involved in helping load up the vehicle at the refuge, the situation our staff found on arrival, and their distribution of goods in Huarmey. Using our local social work contacts, we were able to donate bottled water, basic dried food, clothing, blankets and toys to some of those still most in need. We also made plans to build two small houses for some elderly ladies who had been identified as particularly vulnerable and devastated by losing their homes; it didn’t aim to solve the whole problem but every little helps. Meanwhile we also needed to keep our refuge “afloat”, though fortunately we did not have any direct flood damage ourselves.
Then, thanks to additional, generous donations, Project Peru was able to make a second trip to the north of where we are situated, to two isolated communities – one near Supe and the other near Paramonga; one was like a ghost community as the landslides had flattened everything and there were just a few people left, with nowhere to go. In the other place the roads were all dried mud and the houses of adobe and reed matting (esteras) had been crushed.
Then in May and June 2017, Project Peru was able to go twice more to Paramonga. With two teams of staff, volunteers, family members and with local people, we were able to complete two simple new houses for people who had lost everything. This sort of community work is only possible for us after generous donations. We were particularly grateful for donations to help with all this relief work from a Peruvian restaurant in Berlin (Chicha Berlin )
