Hi all.
Hope you are all doing well. A lot has been going on here and have been slowly writing this up for a while so am sorry for the delay.
So much has been going on out here it is hard to summarise. So I’m not going to summarise. I’m going to write a lot. Just thought I would let you know that now.
I have been having a really good time working with Viva; seeing the impact and influence they have been and currently are having on street child projects across Central and South America. Just to remind you, Viva works with projects through Christian networks helping to develop their quality, unity and impact, bringing them together to offer the best possible care to street children (www.viva.org).
Over the last month I have been visiting projects as part of the Quality Improvement Systems Verification team. This is a process which involves having a set of standards and going through them with members of staff, analysing which standards are being met, which are not, and most importantly, identifying in which areas improvements can be made. There are 6 units which cover a vast range of activities a project partakes in; People Care, Governance, Child Protection, Child Well-being, Project Planning and Design and Financial Accountability. I went through two units with each of the three projects I visited - People Care and Financial Accountability. Each project I visited was incredibly different in size which proved interesting and gave me a great insight. The first was a well-established day-care centre. The second and third were both very small Church-based projects operating on little resources in poor communities. One of which was a ‘comedor’, providing meals and entertaining children each weekend with games and activities as well as teaching them a message from the Bible. It was great to learn about these projects and see how they work with what they receive and in response to the needs around them. The people working at them were so passionate and humble. They go about their business and are happy to do it with little or no return or recognition. Many of us in England carrying out similar work may get the chance to speak at a conference or up at the front in Church, however these people just get on with it. I guess that’s a challenge for us, to consistently ask ourselves with what motives we are living by and serving people with.
I have also been helping out at a foster care project called Casa Viva two days a week. They challenge Churches to care for children by encouraging families to receive children at high-risk with the goal of honouring and ultimately restoring them back to healthy biological family environments. While a child is being fostered the biological family is being educated on how to run a family and how relationships between family members should function. I have had a great time working with Casa Viva with the majority of my time being spent on helping them prepare for workshops with potential Casa Viva parents. These workshops have involved going through with the parents the process of taking a child at high-risk into foster care. The emphasis was on helping the families to understand from the child’s perspective what they would be going through having to leave their biological home and to move in with a family of strangers. The idea of Casa Viva is to provide an alternative to orphanages. The best possible place for a child to be brought up in is in a family. This is what Casa Viva is trying to do. While orphanages provide children with a better living situation than what they would be in, it is still not a viable long-term solution providing what could be the best outcomes. I have read stories of orphanages being started up and taking in 20-30 children and with years gone by this number has grown and grown. Many of those children have grown up and left orphanages, uneducated and with no real knowledge of how to survive in the world, and then their children have been neglected and ended up at the same orphanages. Therefore in effect, some orphanages could be to some extent creating their own business, although this is all dependable on a number of factors. It is therefore vital that where possible, children are brought up in loving, family surroundings and it is key that they are taught and well-educated so that when they grow up they are not starting up another generation of children in need. Having visited some orphanages and met some of the children living with Casa Viva parents a clear personality difference seems to stand out to me. I remember visiting an orphanage once and within five minutes I must have had at least five or six children climbing all over me, all with their arms outstretched wanting more and more attention. It seemed that no trust needed to be built between me and these children. They simply wanted a rare bit of attention. With the children I have met being fostered there is always that element of caution in their eye when you first meet them. They look at you and wonder who you are, often hiding behind their parents wanting reassurance whether this person is good. That trust needs to be built and that is something that needs to be learned in relationships from an early age.
Away from work further fun has been had. Had a ‘little venture’ (*massive understatement: this involved a total of 19 hours bus riding of which 5 hours was queuing at the border to get a pretty stamp on my passport* it is really pretty though*) to Nicaragua a couple of weeks ago. I went with a friend and we stayed with some friends of his in the capital, Managua. Nicaragua is a really beautiful country – very mountainous and volcanic and very hot. One highlight included enjoying a bit of cows tongue – highly recommended. It’s a bit squishy and the texture is a little off-putting but it tastes great. Try putting that one on the menu for Christmas next year Mum. We also visited a volcano, an active one. It’s had its odd eruption over the last few years so precautions had to be taken, one being having a very strict reverse parking policy so it is possible to escape quickly if an eruption did occur.
At the moment everyone is now on their Christmas break. Basically for two weeks over Christmas and New Year the whole of Costa Rica shuts down and everyone has a good time, this for many being two of the three weeks holiday they get for the year. They obviously like to save it up until the seasonal time of the year (although they do seem to have a million excuses to have a bank holiday. There must have been at least five since I have been here, the latest being ‘National Culture Day’. Why can’t we have one of them?). The last week of work involved party upon party. Now I am making up for it by sleeping a lot. 6am starts on the trot each day since the 23rd September is something I envisaged would be humanely impossible for me. Fellow Liverpool housemates and my mother will surely level with me on that one.
I have been staying with a great couple called Jorge and Maria. They have been really good to me and have adopted me and treated me like a prince. I’m not allowed to lay a hand on the kitchen sink. I really hope I haven’t lost all my cooking expertise that I worked really hard on throughout my four years at University. I will be spending Christmas with them and their family. Four of their six children will be coming round along with grandchildren so it’s not looking like it’s going to be a quiet one. Home is being missed big time, more than I thought it would be, but I’m thankful for Christmases had and a great family. I’m gutted to be missing out on all the snow you lot are getting, but I’ll settle with 25 degrees of sunshine. Commiserations to Simon Cowell for not getting what he wanted in the Christmas charts this year and sorry to those who missed out on buying the infamous ginger Christmas card from Tescos (see - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/north_yorkshire/8411894.stm). Hope you’re not too offended Mum. And here’s hoping for a Boxing Day win for the Reds. They need it.
Next destination is Cochabamba, Bolivia. Flying on New Year’s Day, so I’ll write to you all next from there. Please love me and send me emails wishing me a Happy Christmas. I love to hear from everyone.
I’ll leave you with what seems to be our version of ‘We Wish you a Merry Christmas’ that has been ringing in the streets for the last two months - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihW56Xa3XGQ (You really don’t have to listen to all of it, you pretty much get the drift after the first 30-40 seconds).
Feliz Navidad.
