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Published: October 8th 2010
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Howdy.
As I mentioned last time, Carpio is the name of the town we work in. It is the rubbish dump for the city of San Jose and also has 35,000 people living there. It apparently started with several thousand Nicaraguan refugees from various conflicts across the border and has grown from there. It is a huge settlement of row after row of corrugated iron shacks that there is no way to get an idea of the scale of without walking round it, which is not-advisable given that we need an escort from the bus stop through to the centre and back again simply because it isn't safe for us to be there alone. Our escort is the Pastor who runs the centre that we are based at. One thing that is striking about all of San Jose but La Carpio in particular, is the respect there is for religion here. Despite how poor and desperate many of the people are, the fact that the Pastor is with us seemingly means we are safe and no one will touch us. Incredible to see for someone who is not only not religious but who comes from a country where men of
the cloth are largely either ignored or ridiculed.
As for what we actually do there, well it varies wildly from day to day. Some days there are ten children, some days there are thirty plus. In general, our aim is to play with them, give them some attention and human contact that they might otherwise not get, and if possible, teach them some English as we go. Some days we might get half an hour of English in, some days ten minutes, and others none at all. As far as we're concerned if they're laughing and having fun then its going alright and we're doing our job. They like a good piggy back and three and a half weeks in my knees feel like they belong to Alf-Inge Haaland, but you can't really say no to them, so you just suck it up and deal with it. Depending on who shows up on any given day (some of the children go to school for some of the days) you can end up colouring in, drawing on the blackboard, playing head tennis in the street, piggy backs, spinning the kids round until they feel sick or I fall over, playing
bingo (which I never seem to win), playing card games (which I don't even know the rules too), skipping, running races and countless other things that hopefully will be documented in picture form at some point.
Obviously we try and get as much English in as we can, which is quite easy when you're playing some kind of board game, but more of a challenge with skipping or football - but we try and encourage them to count in English during those activities - but it is far from being the priority of the exercise.
The heartbreaking thing is knowing that, as much fun as you can have with them, and they can have with you, we could be there for twelve hours a day for the next five years and it probably wouldn't make a difference to the way some of their lives will go. Most of the pictures that are posted here were taken by a boy of about 6 called Manuel. Last week I gave him my camera for about an hour and he immediately set to work organising people into groups, taking arty close ups of things in the street and generally going all
David Bailey on everybody's ass (to coin a phrase). By the end he could work the camera better than me. As I say, it is heartbreaking to see a boy with that kind of passion and talent who you know will probably never get the chance to use it - short of me starting some kind of City Of God-esque turf war that he can then document, but that probably has it's downsides too to be honest. The same goes for some of the drawings they have been doing for us. They are really good but you know that there are tens of thousands of people all over the world who have a tenth of the talent who will get opportunities that these children can't even dream of. Such is life I suppose.
One of the things we are aiming to do for some of the older kids (10 - 15 year olds approx) is to involve them more on our side of the fence. There are, as you would imagine, problems with gangs and violence in La Carpio and the hope is that if we can get them interested in helping us to help the younger ones they
might grow up to see an alternative future for themselves. Although we accept that the temptation to meet Ross Kemp doing his 'La Carpio Special' in five years time must overwhelming. There are already signs of this happening with a couple of the boys and so it is really just up to us to encourage them to carry on and hopefully, in the future, they will be able to continue the work that the Pastor and the centre have started.
Once a week, usually on a Wednesday, we do a soup kitchen down by the river in La Carpio. This is largely as it sounds and for us, it is probably the most satisfying part of the week because you get to see whole families there and you can see how much of a positive effect the centre has on everybody in the settlement. It is also the only time that we get to see a different part of Carpio whilst still being in the relative safety of the group. It becomes quite a humbling experience when you see the excitement and gratitude on the faces of the Mums and the children when all we've given them is a
bowl of rice and chicken. Last week a couple of us were taken by two of the children, down to the bank of the river (where apparently crocodiles sometimes make an appearance) and onto a bridge that took us up and over the water onto quite a large hill on the other side which gives an incredible view of part of La Carpio. As much as I'd like to pretend I was being all Billy Big Bollocks about the whole thing, I was pretty nervous due to the ragged looking nature of the bridge (think of the ones Wiley Coyote used to fall off in the Roadrunner cartoons and you won't be far off) and the height we were above the water. I am very pleased that I did it though, for the experience if nothing else. The way back was just as scary but I think I kept a grimaced smile on my face for most of the way. The two kids who took us over were loving it though, while I was trying not to look scared they were jumping and running up and down the bridge while it creaked underneath them. Can't see me doing that no matter how times I go there - not with my knees.
Pura Vida
Dave
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Adam
non-member comment
I want....
...a go on that bridge!