Fe y Alegria
Jicamarca, Peru
“Imagine every morning looking out from your bedroom window into emptiness, dirt, dust and desperate poverty. Where there is no electricity, running water or sanitation. Where disease lies in every corner. Where the only thing to catch are fleas. Where being hungry for most people forms part of daily living. Where home is a shack. Now, imagine you choose to live in this place”.
“Fe y Alegria” stands for Faith and Happiness. Fe y Alegria is a movement for comprehensive popular education and social development whose activities are directed at the most impoverished and excluded sectors of the population to empower them in their personal development and their participation in society. (These are schools founded by the Jesuits and staffed by other religious and laypeople. Fe y Alegria is active in 13 Latin American countries, educating more than 500,000 students each year).
Fe y Alegria in Jicamarca
Jicamarca is inhabited by 25,600 indigenous people and immigrants in 5,800 families. 68% of the population is under 20 years old. The inhabitants of Jicamarca live in total poverty with 49% below subsistence level. These young people have an extremely high level of malnutrition and tuberculosis is endemic.
The lack of social and housing policies together with the terrorist phenomenon has caused the migration towards the capital. Due to the great need of these people to obtain better conditions of life, they have settled in the surrounding areas of Lima. These places are in rocky, mountainous, uninhabited zones in which people live without the basic necessities. The slum dwellers are constantly threatened by legal problems of earth possession and eviction orders from immoral land dealers.
In order to improve the quality of life for the people in these slums, Catholic organisations and individuals have embarked on projects such as forestation programs, other projects are also focussed on giving to the population a better place to live and trying to contain the growth of these inhumane living condition.
One such project is the Fe y Alegria communal school, one kilometre outside Lima, run by Sister Patricia McLaughlin, a Loreto Nun. Her mission is to give the children in the slums a chance in life and future. She strongly believes that, “these children will become teachers, carpenters, electricians, lawyers and doctors. … They are as bright as any other children anywhere in the world”.
She further states that, “The important thing is not to just give them everything. They have to have dignity. And so when they come to school they are provided with certain things but their uniforms are paid for by their parents. … The parents also help out in the school on a regular basis and participate in the activities. They helped us to set it up”.
The Fe y Alegria School caters for 140 children (40 in each class0 but will eventually cater for 1000. At the moment it is just a Primary School but there are plans to start a Secondary School soon (next year). The school has a football team, a choir and a library.
The Fe y Alegria School has also a nursery section where many of the children get fed. Sister Patricia says that, “For many of these children this is the only bit of food they get in the entire day because there is none at home. Many are constantly hungry and they tell me and we cope as best we can. Their mothers are very young and they go out to work to maintain their families. Many of them are single mothers who just work to buy food for their children”.