Huaycán (Peru)

Huaycán is an extremely poor slum in the district of Ate, east of Lima, Peru with 160.000 inhabitants who moved there from different parts of Peru. Their primary reasons were the hope to find a job and a better life. Yet, the vast majority of the people still live in tiny clay huts or small wooden cottages and it literally never rains.

Jayma Kunan is / was building two educational centers in the town.

Camino al Cielo (2012 – 2015)

After visiting multiple projects in the Lima-area in December 2012 that neither supported by the government nor by any other charity organization, we arrived at the afternoon school “Camino al Cielo”, where we met Martinia Olivares Bautista, who was the heart and the soul of the center. We helped them with their most urgent needs: we finished the second floor of the building, we ensured that every child receives one proper meal every day, we provided text books and teaching materials for all age groups and also financed additional teachers among others. It was great to see that the size of the school was growing from slightly above 40 kids at the beginning to almost 100 around Christmas 2013. We provided the daily lunch for kids at the center for the entire period we were active there (up to almost 8000 a year) and then handed it over to an Irish congregation in order to leave a more sustainable footprint. In 2015 we were then trying to get more involved into projects which are beneficiary for the entire community of Huaycan. This is why we started concentrating our resources on the construction of a sports and playground which is now be available to all children in the entire neighborhood.

Zona Alta (2018 – today)

By the year 2017 Martinia (see above) had left the congregation and started her own little educational center for children of the Zona Alta of Huaycan.

Unfortunately, it was very hard to raise the required funds locally so Martinia approached us and asked us for help to rebuild her center from the ground up which we did. We always had an excellent relationship with her which is why it was basically a no brainer to work together again. We started to build the rooms and acquire the furniture for the classrooms in 2018.

In 2019 the center grew to almost 50 kids and Martinia and Jayma Kunan worked hard to increase the offer of the center. With Covid 19, the center unfortunately had to close and we converted it to a kitchen with two chefs that was offering a free daily lunch to the kids and their families since March 2020.