Throughout our first week in Peru, we met a lot of people and saw a lot of sights (and tried Picarones for the first time! A fried sweet potato delicacy). In the first few days, we got familiar with the area and met with two possible project sites: Huntapasqa and Casa de Panchita.
Casa de Panchita is an organization with a well-established structure in the district of Lince in the city of Lima. This organization does a lot of things that involve teaching children. This includes English classes and a variety of different workshops that go over important topics that aren’t necessarily taught in their schools. Things like proper diet, cleaning, and sexual education. This week we helped them transition into a new office space and organize donations into gift bags for kids. We hope to have a design thinking workshop put together for them, but first, we will help them prepare and celebrate their 3oth anniversary on Sunday, July 15th!
HUNTAPASQA
Huntapasqa is an NGO in the lower-income area of Pamplona (Pamplona Alta). This organization has built a safe area for the local children to come to after school to get help on their homework. They also try to incorporate educational activities that are fun for the kids. A lot of the children in the area don’t have ideal home lives and live with single mothers. Huntapasqa brings the children together and creates a community where they can always reach out to for help. So far, we have had several meetings with the leaders of Huntapasqa to see what their organization is about and how we can benefit them the most. The first concern they already knew they needed help with is designing a website where people can reach out to them to sign up their kids in the program, options for volunteering, and a way to accept donations online. Over this next week, we will be hosting a design thinking workshop with the Huntapasqa leaders and other adults in the community to dig deeper and learn the best ways we can help them and make this a site for Pavlis projects for years to come. In the following pictures, you can see (from left to right) Nic and I were in Eveli’s house with our site coordinator, Carlos Amador, and the three women that started Huntapasqa, Nataly, Rocio, and Eveli. The next two pictures show the outside of their site in Pamplona Alta (in San Juan of Miraflores) and the last picture is of all the kids that participate in the afterschool session.
