Wednesday, January 5, 2011

HUNDREDS OF SHOES!






By Helen Osborn, Mysmallhelp Peru volunteer, 20th December 2010

Two months ago I was saying see you soon to Leander, as I left to volunteer in Trujillo. Now that two months is up. Here I am again back in the beautiful town of Ollantaytambo. My original reason for coming here was to help Leander with the Christmas Chocolatadas she had planned to organize for over 3000 people, in the villages near (and far) from Ollantaytambo. However, when I arrived the week before the start of the Chocolatadas we had another pretty huge project to complete. Mysmallhelp had received a donation of 72 boxes of shoes from America by Desana inc. on behalf of Buckner international. A big thank you goes out to everyone involved especially to Sonia and
all of the volunteers at Living Heart that helped by receiving the delivery of the shoes and the movement of them from the Living Heart store room in Ollantaytambo to the Paskay volunteer house on Patacalle.


Mysmallhelp had a list of approximately 350 people due to receive the main portion of the shoes donated by Desana Giving and Buckner. In addition, Mysmallhelp received funding from Australian friends Victoria and David to purchase an additional 80 pairs of traditional sandals to be donated to members of the more remote communities
(Tastayoc and Patacancha) that had also been measured for shoes during the August health campaign. Matt and Leander had already travelled to Cusco and purchased the traditional ojota shoes and delivered them back to Ollanta. David, is the podiatrist that examined, treated and measured the feet of patients in villages surrounding Ollantaytambo. David and Victoria raised funds to purchase the traditional shoes for the remote communities as they agreed with the belief of Mysmallhelp that it wasn´t appropriate to donate Western shoes to these traditional communities. The shoes were donated as a Christmas present and way of saying thank you to the people that came to the health mission in August 2010.



Approximately 800 pairs of shoes were donated to Mysmallhelp! So yes we had A LOT of shoes to sort... Matt another volunteer who arrived here before me had already devised a system of allocating the correct sixed shoe to the right person, the system was brilliantly organized and with the help of Liliana (a member of the NGO Paskay) and Nelly (a volunteer from Desana Giving) we sorted the shoes reasonably quickly labelling each shoe with the name of the owner and separating piles of shoes to be distributed in each village. The shoes were distributed at five different village schools. The first was Phyri. We arrived at the school and organized the shoes into order; we then
called out the list and distributed the shoes numerically. It sounds like it should be a perfect system, however we all agreed Phyri was the most frustrating of all the schools. We repeatedly told the children to not touch the shoes as they had been laid out in order; however it is hard to control the children when their parents refuse to listen as well. The lack of education and discipline of the parents is unfortunately a reoccurring theme in the poorer areas of Peru. This then generally means that the discipline of the children suffers as well. To make things just a little trickier, unfortunately some of the people wanting shoes in Phyri were on the list for shoes from the next location Caticancha. It would have been a nightmare to unpack all the shoes for Caticacha in Phyri so we decided to take the people from


Pbyri due to receive shoes in Caticancha in our little mini bus... Needless to say the bus was pretty full! In Caticacha things were much more organized, the Director of the school took charge of our list and divided those who were on the list from those who were not, and this made distributing the shoes a great deal easier. When we arrived at the Pachar school there were no children to be seen as it was a fiesta so we had to resign to return another day...

The next day, on arrival up in the remote community of Patacancha the school was closed, however as always there were a

few children hanging around; one of them happened to have the keys to the school. Most of the children only spoke quechua, but luckily we had Ruben our trusty driver on hand to translate! Patacancha appeared to be an extremely traditional yet unfortunately poor town. The children were wearing clothes that were in some cases pieced together. The people of this village had requested traditional sandals, as the Director of the school was not around we went on a hunt for the next responsible adult to leave in charge of the shoes. We very luckily stumbled across the President of the community. He very happily took over our list and the shoes for those who were not at school that day. The President had been at the Dentist project and knew all about why we were giving the shoes so we all felt highly confident leaving distributing the rest in his hands. The remainder of the shoes were distributed to the allocated people at the schools in Pachar, Rumira and Tastayoc.



However, we still found ourselves with a large amount of shoes that needed distributing so we decided to make a donation to two other local projects in need of shoes for their communities. The first partner project was Awamaki, who are working to help the flood victims of the Huayroncoyocpampa community where many people lost their homes
in the January floods. We also made a donation to The Sacred Valley project which helps provide secondary education to young girls from families in the surrounding mountain villages.

Mysmallhelp distributed the remainder of the shoes directly from the Paskay volunteer house. The word spread quickly that we had shoes for distributing as we had given away a few pairs to our next door neighbours Chuchi and Libertad and their alcoholic mother. It didn’t take long for an extremely unordererd queue to form at our front door. The shoes went exceeding quickly, which is fantastic as they went to people who really need them.

Many thanks once again to everyone involved especially to George and Kathy at Desana Giving and their Buckner friends!

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