Volunteering

I leave Peru tonight, and while I have a lot of feelings about that, I'm not going to address that right now. That's a post for tomorrow, and my 14-hour layover in New York.

Today, I wanted to spend a little time reflecting on my time spent volunteering with Cedro and Habla Battería.

Centro de Información y Educación para la Prevención del Abuso de Drogas (CEDRO), or in english, Center for Information and Education for the Prevention of Drug Abuse, is an organization in Lima that  helps, as the name implies, prevent drug abuse. Habla Batería is a program they have that specifically works with kids. I spent my time with Habla Batería volunteering with Kike and Paola, two of the people who run the program, in Rimac. Rimac is one of the poorest districts of Lima. Paola told us one of our first days about how she's been robbed at knifepoint there, so we should never keep anything valuable on us. While it is a dangerous neighborhood, I never had any problems, and passed blissfully through without seeing any of that danger. I did, however, leave all valuables at home. Thus, unfortunately, I don't really have any photos to show of my time volunteering. I didn't want to take the chance of having my camera stolen.

Volunteering in Peru was singlehandedly the most frustrating and rewarding experience of the trip. I frequently felt frustrated at how little we could do, and at how badly organized everything was. I also felt quite useless on more than one occasion. It often seemed as though we weren't needed. I felt that there was so much more we could be doing, but didn't know how to go about doing it.

Cedro’s stated mission is to help prevent drug abuse, but I did not see an explicit attempt to do that on the part of Habla Batería. It appeared to me that the mission of Habla Batería was more about youth leadership, and potentially preventative measures, although I never heard any explicitly stated. It seems to me that the people at Habla Batería do a good job at these. The head of the organization, Kike, has a good presence in schools, and many kids seem to look up to him a lot. He, and this organization, seem to be a positive influence in their lives. I could see this in action when I volunteered on a couple of Saturdays at Flor de Amancaes. Kike was able to get 20 or so high school students to come volunteers on their day off, students who come from bad homes, who work, or who fit other criteria for Habla Batería to feel they are at risk.

   

I was often unsure about how much we were actually helping Kike and Paola. There were many times when we would just follow them around to schools and talk to kids, or when Kike and Paola wouldn’t come, so we would just hang out at the casa de hogar. At those points, I felt like I was not being helpful at all, that I was not a necessary part of the project. There were many times when I felt very frustrated with the lack of structure and actual work in our project. The English classes are definitely where I feel I helped the most, as well as the extra Saturday volunteering in Flor de Amancaes. The English classes were frustrating in their own right however, simply because they were very challenging. I felt , that we could have accomplished more if we could have just taken over the class, but we didn’t want to undermine the authority of the teacher. I hope that we made some kind of impact there, that we helped some kid in some way, but it’s really hard to know for sure. The teacher didn't speak great English, and so obviously neither did the kids. There was little to no discipline in the classroom, and the kids were very disrespectful to the teacher. There was constant back talk and side talking, and it was hard to make them do anything at all. I could go on and on about the problems in these classrooms, but I'll just get frustrated and angry if I do that, so I'm going to move on.

   

While I didn’t form super close bonds with a lot of Peruvians through this volunteer experience, because the nature of the work we were doing didn’t really allow it, I did get pretty close to Kike and Paola. They're both great people, and it was a pleasure to work with them. I also feel I got a unique view into Peruvian culture from many of the other students on the program because I was able to go some schools. It was a really interesting insight into Peruvian culture being able to see those. School is such an important influence on people’s lives, it was cool to see the differences. I also loved being able to go up into Flor de Amancaes and see how people lived there. I met a lot of great high school kids who were willing to give up their Saturday to volunteer, and a lot of cute little children as well. I definitely met a lot of new people, and learned a lot.