Finishing up Humanitarian Projects, and Lima Churches, Monasteries and Convents

18 February 2018

We manage humanitarian projects all around Peru to reduce suffering and improve life for the poorest of the poor. Each project eventually comes to an end and requires closure. These past few weeks we have been busy closing a number of these projects, which involves assessing how effective they were. We have also been gathering impact reports from our partners that tell us how the projects have worked out.

Finishing Humanitarian Projects

Here are a few of the projects we have closed recently, along with photos sent to us by our partner organizations that benefited from the help.

Pucallpa - Vision Project

Issue: Poor children often go without eyeglasses and perform poorly in school leading to high dropout rates.

Goal: Improve vision for children of families with very limited resources.

Project details:

• Partnered with regional health authority who coordinated the initial screening of over 10,000 children in 41 schools in Pucallpa.
• From those screened, provided eye exams for 1,056 of those children
• Donated total of 956 eyeglasses

Arequipa - Soup Kitchen (Comedores Populares) Project

Issue: Many poor people suffer from malnutrition in remote regions of Peru.

Goal: Improve nutrition levels for the poorest of the poor in the Arequipa Region.

Project details:

• Partnered with regional government to improve conditions at 225 soup kitchens that provide one meal a day to the poor
• Project was held in conjunction with training of soup kitchen operators to improve nutritional content of the meals
• Donation included 900 large cooking pots, 450 dozen plates and utensil sets, 225 blenders, etc. 

Cayma - Maternal/Newborn Health Project

Issue: Mothers and babies in this poor region were dying due to lack of early identification of problem pregnancies.

Goal: Reduce maternal & infant mortality in this poor region near Arequipa.

Project Details:

• Partnered with local government health authority to provide needed diagnostic equipment for poor pregnant women.
• Our donations of equipment were placed in two health facilities that provide care to the poor.
• Donations included fetal monitors, ultrasound devices, blood monitor, and laboratory microscope.

Catacaos - School Project

Issue: Floods last year destroyed school desks in 13 schools up north in Catacaos near Piura.

Goal: Restore schools to working condition in a region wiped out by floods last year.

Project details:

• Partnered with local school district to identify schools most-severely affected by the floods
• Donated 900 student desks and 27 teacher desks
• Donations restored 13 schools to functional state
• Coordinated school cleanup project with 90 local church members

Cerro de Pasco - Maternal/Newborn Health Project

Issue: Mothers and babies in this poor region were dying due to lack of early identification of problem pregnancies.

Goal: Reduce maternal & infant mortality in this poor and isolated mountain region.

Project details:

• Partnered with local government health authority to provide needed diagnostic equipment for poor pregnant women.
• Our donations of equipment were placed in six remote health facilities that provide care to the poor.
• Donations included fetal monitors, ultrasound devices, blood monitors, and other laboratory equipment.

There is a sense of satisfaction in completing these projects. Our goal is to finish the majority of the humanitarian projects we have worked on by the time our replacements arrive in 5 months. That will give them a chance to start fresh.

Lima Churches, Monasteries, and Convents

Central Lima is filled with an amazing collection of Catholic churches, monasteries, and convents built over the past five centuries. On our day off this week, we roamed the downtown visiting a number of the most interesting of these buildings.

All of these churches were within just a few blocks of each other.

View into central Lima and the main cathedral at the Plaza de Armas. Central Lima is filled with many Catholic churches, convents, and monasteries that resemble similar buildings throughout Spain.

Ornate stone carvings fill the facade of the Church of Saint Augustine. It is amazing what skilled Spanish craftsmen did with hammer and chisel.

Church of Saint Augustine. Stone masons and sculptors worked for decades on many of these churches.

Just down the street is the Convent of Santo Domingo. Built in the 1500s, this convent is still the home to nuns, although most of this convent has been converted into a museum.

Cloister of the Santo Domingo Convent. The second floor is still inhabited by nuns.

Side chapel at the Santo Domingo Convent.

We arrived at the convent just in time to join a group ascending to the top of the convent bell tower. It was an incredible hike to the top, past massive bells, with great views from the top.

Santo Domingo Bell Tower overlooking Lima.

Inside the Santo Domingo Bell Tower

Santo Domingo Bell Tower

The convent library at Santo Domingo is filled with thousands of books dating back to the 1500s. You can smell the decaying pages of the books that are centuries old.

Library at Santo Domingo Convent. Note the mannequins that they had set up to recreate what it was like in the library in by-gone days.

Main chapel at Santo Domingo

A few blocks away is the San Francisco Monastery. This monastery, built in the 1500s, has been the home for thousands of monks over the past centuries. A highlight of this church is its crypt.

San Francisco Monastery

The bones of the monks and other parishioners have been buried in the crypt beneath the church for centuries. They estimate that the bones of around 25,000 people are in the crypt.

Neatly arranged skulls and femurs in the crypt beneath the San Francisco Monastery.

Burials in crypts beneath churches was standard until modern cemeteries were established. These bones have been carefully arranged and maintained since the first burials in the 1500s. The last burials beneath the church were in the early 1800s.

A huge painting in the church (which some call a 'monsterpiece' due to its floor-to-ceiling size) is a painting of the last supper, complete with what some say is a guinea pig (or cuy) as the main course. If you look to the right of Jesus, you can see a red-headed devil whispering to Judas to betray Jesus.

Gigantic 'monsterpiece' painting of the last supper. It looks like all the apostles were served from golden chalices while reclining on their divans with alter boys serving them. Even the devil is present in the painting.

And so we ended our journey to a few of the churches, monasteries, and convents in central Lima. Honestly, we have only hit a fraction of the Catholic churches in central Lima (although these are among the largest). This is a very interesting city filled with more surprises than you could cover in a lifetime.

And so we return to our humanitarian work which this week will include a wheelchair training course here in Lima and later, a donation of 110 wheelchairs through our partners next Saturday in the jungle city of Iquitos.