Update from MAD HQ: Casa del Corazon

Casa del Corazon is a home and school for country children, who mainly come from a small rural village about 45 minutes from Cusco city. Due to the lack of facilities in rural communities, and transport problems, many children receive a poor education, if they attend school at all. Most children by the age of ten are put to work in the fields. Many families want their children to continue to study, but this option is not available to them. From a young age, children have educational problems arising from teachers being unable to teach that day due to transport problems, from lack of school resources, from lack of good teachers, from language difficulties as the rural communities speak Quechua.

To combat these difficulties, if a family wants their children to study past the age of ten, they are often sent to Cusco to live with a relative and study at a better school.For the children, being sent to the city to study gives rise to another set of problems. The children, to pay their way in the relative's home, have to work in shops, restaurants, or on the streets, and as a result have little time or energy to dedicate to their studies. They are often subject to verbal or physical abuse for being unable to speak Spanish and being darker in skin colour than mestizos (those of more Spanish descent). Many abandon their studies disillusioned, and retreat into themselves and return to work in the fields for the rest of their lives, with a fear and hatred for the outside world.

Casa del Corazon is a well-run establishment, but lacks funds to provide every opportunity for these children that it wishes to. We helped construct a carpentry workshop and kit it out, so that the children can learn valuable practical skills on-site. We also want to rebuilt the greenhouse which provides essential fresh food for the children and helps the home be more self-sustaining and reduce its running costs. We also renovated the home and its grounds, and built a shed intended for guinea pig rearing to provide a self sustaining meat source for the home.

We also improved and upgraded the existing structure of Casa de Corazon's greenhouse. The greenhouse is an important feature in many rural schools and homes as it provides free food, with the option of selling any surplus and thus investing funds in buying school materials, paying the bills or funding extra-curricular activities. The children also participated in looking after the plants that are grown, thus developing skills that they can take back and put to use in their own communities when they leave the home and need to support themselves - in this way, despite being educated in an urban setting, they are not completely cut off from their rural roots and identity.