July 2: Educadores de la Calle

Saturday we went into a district of Lima called Victoria, it’s probably the most dangerous part of the city. We went to meet with an organization called Educadores de la Calle. It’s very common for children to work in the streets with their families and this group works to help them stay in school and maintain relationships with their parents. These children contribute to the lively hood of the families, so the organization isn’t trying to make them stop working. EC is just trying to encourage them to look after their futures as well. We were paired up with someone from the organization to go out and see the market that most of these kids work in. To put this in perspective: they wouldn’t let us walk more than about 20 feet away from the locals that were leading us, but there are kids who spend most of their days working here. The EC program really is amazing and it seemed to be that they are having success with keeping children in school. After going to the market we went over to the Peace Corps office to take a look around and from there we walked to a gigantic mall called Jockey Plaza. Talk about seeing two extremes in one day. It’s basically a tourist trap, but somewhere between Starbucks and Pizza Hut we decided that we didn’t care. :-P Our combi ride home was actually a pretty fun little event. Sabrina, Kelsy, Faith and I were crammed into the front like clowns in a clown car, but the music and people watching were both excellent so we had a good time. That night we all went out into Chosica for a while. We went to a little bar and I actually met another PCV that went to UGA. She was back in Santa Eulalia visiting her host family, so we had a good time talking about Athens. After the bar we all went to a club and danced the night away……which incidentally is the name of a song that I hear roughly 4-5 times a day in Peru.