Pisco Sin Fronteras

I’ve been here 5 weeks now, and as me and the boss were saying just the other morning, it feels like I only arrived yesterday. 

Pisco...I’ve been here for three weeks and if I could I would stay for three months.

I was traveling around Peru a few weeks ago, finding myself being tired of continuously living out of a backpack. I wanted to spend my last weeks of this long trip differently, doing something useful. I wanted to find a project to get involved in and though I had volunteered before in Cusco working in a youth prison, I wanted to work with my hands now. I had heard about a devastating earthquake one year and a half ago in Pisco, a city south of Lima, shaking and flooding it’s streets and houses, destroying 80 % of the buildings and leaving 600 dead.

These are the projects we have been working on for the last few weeks.

We have been doing sites assesments in a very poor neighbourhood of Pisco called La Alameda (one of the areas most affected by the earthquake), and whilst we were there we met people from the local community, who told us how they had formed a community association of 49 families and needed our help. Immediately after the earthquake an aid agency built a toilet block but this has now been reclaimed as private land and so they have no proper sanitation.

Well, what a week!  First off, let me start by saying that everyone at PSF is really sound.  I was so glad to feel immediately welcome and everyone is of similar minds - there is always someone who you can have a chat, laugh, drink with and everyone works bloody hard.  Harold and his family are running the show swimmingly and the work that they and the volunteers put in for the community of Pisco is amazing and really admirable!

The weeks leading up the Christmas posed a problem for PSF volunteers. As a group we wanted to organise a Christmas outreach event that would make an impact in the most substantial way on the people of Pisco and its surrounding neighbourhoods. We toyed with the idea of a Christmas street party for the children who lived nearby. But unfortunately after some number-crunching and many group discussions it seemed we would not be able to raise the necessary funds to organise such an event.

This is the blog of Therese O'Reilly from Ireland who worked with Pisco Sin Fronteras for 2 1/2 weeks.

Today we helped pour a cement roof. By the end of it I was by far the dirtiest I have ever been in my life, with cement coating my back, head, arms, legs… We were all so stunning looking at the end of the day!