La Mansion

One of the projects that CIESCU is involved in is in a part of Arequipa called 'La Mansion'. La Mansion is a pueblo joven that, if the gateway welcoming people to the district is to be belived, was founded in 1996.

Like many pueblo jovens it looks very much like a building site with half constructed houses and building materials along the side of the road. Many of the people construct additions to their houses as and when they have the money so it is very common to see shafts of metal sticking up out of walls for when the home gets the next level of investment. Only a handful of homes that I saw had a completed second floor.

Many pueblo jovens and rural area's have high levels of malnutrition and paracites and anemia is common. CIESCU's project in La Masion is centred around bringing nutritional meals to school children of primary/elementary age. The idea is to use local grown ingrediants as far as possible and to have volunteers from the children's parents and families help prepare the meals under the guidence of a qualified nutritionist.

The project hasn't quite got off the ground yet however. The director of the school apparently doesn't think it's his responsability to be concerned with the childrens nutrition, only their education and has refused to allow the project to take place on the site of the school.

On Sunday I went with Jose to try and find another place where we could provide school dinners. A few of the houses had garages or large yards and we had a look at but I wasn't convinced they would be large enough to fit 100 studentshave space to cook the food.

We kept asking around and finally ended up knocking on the door of a lady who took us to a newly build house just around the corner. no one had moved in yet and there were no appliences in the kitchen, but the space was large and looked promising.

I'll be returning to La Mansion some time in the next week and hope to have more details then. But so far it's looking promising.