Board member J. Calvitt Clarke, III has kindly shared with us another story from his trip to Peru:
"Last November, while on a
trip to Peru, my fourteen-year-old
daughter and I visited two projects in Lima, where Children, Incorporated sponsors children. On my blog post of January 7, I described our visit to Puente Piedra Girl's Home on Sunday, November 18.
The next morning, my
daughter and I awoke to the noisy, early-morning rush hour and the pungent
smell of pollution from automobiles and trucks reaching to our ninth-floor room. We braved this traffic to visit the Fe y
Alegria (Faith and Joy) School.
The school educates 1,800
students split between morning and afternoon sessions. Our sponsors help care for twenty in the
morning and thirty in the afternoon. Fe
y Alegria is a technical school, and only a few of its students enter
college. The prospect of good pay with a
technical degree is too enticing for the impoverished male students to pass
up. Almost no girls get a technical
degree and, consequently, have fewer chances for well-paying and edifying work.
We met many of the morning
students who have Children, Incorporated sponsors. Like all the students, they were engaging,
well-dressed in their uniforms, and joyful—quite belying the poverty of their
homes and neighborhoods. My daughter and
I then shared lunch of pasta and sweet potatoes in tomato sauce plus a thin
chocolate tea. This is the best meal of
the day for almost all the students.
After lunch, the afternoon
students arrived, and the school’s principal introduced us at the ceremony that
begins their school day and asked us to speak. A little embarrassing—my daughter says “a little” does not do the
embarrassment justice.
We tried to visit some of
the sponsored children in their homes. Several of the houses
were locked with the children at school and the
mothers at work. We did visit two. The first looked nice enough from the
outside, but inside, four families had split the building into quarters. This clearly stretches the facilities in the
house. At the second home, we met a
sponsored child and his
mother. She
proudly showed us her home, so substandard by our standards that it is
difficult to express.
At another home, the mother
and child were out, so we could not enter. It consisted of discarded building materials stacked to build two walls,
with the other two walls formed by the outside walls of existing
buildings. A tin roof only partially
covered the enclosure.
We saw many homes like this. For the slightly more prosperous, half-built
homes mark
Lima’s slums. Families build
as finances allow and most will never finish them. Thin and wary stray dogs everywhere patrol piles
of building materials and trash that form obstacles in the rutted, dirt
roads. A dusty pall shrouds everything.
The Fe y Alegria School and
the good sponsors of Children Incorporated can and do help these children break
free of the enslaving chains poverty would impose on them."
Many of the Appalachian communities in which we maintain projects have received massive amounts of snow this winter. Some of our children have missed as many as nineteen days of school since the beginning of 2008. Consequently, many of our Appalachian volunteers have had no opportunity to help their children compose and mail letters. 
