Villa Tunari

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It´s Wednesday night. I´ve been working at the foundation for 3 days. The first day was ¨tranquillo¨ since there were only about 12 kids. There was some confusion about the starting date. The second day was a bit crazy since we´re lacking one teacher. I suddenly found myself in charge of 11 3-year olds. With my limitted Spanish and without knowing how things were supposed to be running, I was quite overwhelmed but managed somehow. Today was fun. We´ve been up to about 80 children (the limit for this year, usually there are about 130, more about that later). We worked in the kitchen, then I helped out with the 2-year olds. One of them was so little and shy, he cried a lot but once he got used to me, he followed me everywhere. There´s always so much work to do. Next to helping in the kitchen and in the classrooms, we make sure lunch goes smoothly, accompy the children on the bus to the foundation and back home and clean the facilities. It´s busy. Next to that we have Spanish lessons for 2 hours a day, do our laundry (by hand of course) and right now we´ve also been thinking about how to help the foundation out of the crisis they´re finding themselves in. The US founder has been accused of molesting children of the surrounding villages. He´s thereafter been removed from the foundation, is currently under police surveillance and awaiting trail. The problem is that the US funding, organized through him, stopped as well. Currently there´s no money coming in. Under these conditions they´d have to close the foundation within months. The staff, 13 of them, are currently working without salary. The staff is thinking about raising money by baking and selling bread and raising chicken and selling the meat. It´s great how involved they are but bringing up the roughly $8,000 a month needed to run the foundation this way is hopeless. They´ve also worked out a emergency budget, they´re cutting back on spending wherever they can. They´re only admitting 80 children this year, are cutting back on meat; the medical clinic is closed to the public and is only treating the children and so forth. This is our short term problem: Money is needed fast in order to keep the work going. The long run problem is to start a new legal organization (which is under way) and find new long term funding sources. We´re doing the best we can. We´ll try to mobilize people and organizations, get some publicity if possible, spread the word. It would be such a pitty if they´d have to close down after all the work that has been done. Our next few weekends will be very busy. That´s it for now. I´m chosen to accompany the driver in the bus tomorrow morning at 6am. Good night!

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