Hygiene

Each day 2 or 3 people are scheduled to hygiene between morning tea and lunch.
This necessary activity is to help the children learn to wash their hands and clean their teeth. The teachers let the children out a grade at a time, they really are cute. One volunteer supervises the washing of hands and makes sure everyone has shampoo (soap) while someone else dispenses the crema (moisturiser) for face and hands. Then they are given a piece of fruit before they go to collect their lunch from the school kitchen where the village mothers are rostered on to cook each day. This will often be the only meal some of the children will have for the day.

Apparently the water in the village and at the school is approximately 200 times the acceptable drinking water level, even though the water is coming straight from the mountain. We think this is due to bad farming practices - they let their animals drink from the same reservoir. World Vision is trying to help with this.

The weather conditions up here on the mountain are so harsh that their little faces are always dry and cracked. You have to encourage them to put the moisturiser on their cheeks, but they try to resist. Pip told me that their cracked cheeks are infested with little mites and it probably hurts.

This all sounds pretty horendous but it is a lovely time for us. The children are always pleased to see you and they greet you with "hola amigo Jenny" because they remember you from class. And they are surprisingly polite, they wouldn´t dream of taking a piece of fruit from the box without having it handed to them, even when there is a bit of a rush on.

Peru´s Challenge has installed flushing toilets at the school and this is something else the children have to learn to use. They are not used to toilets at all. At home apparently they just go in the fields.