By Dom Williams | Founder and Director
I hope all is well. It has been a great couple of months on the projects.
The scholarship students have been involved in our annual reforestation programme planting hundreds of trees which helps offset Phoenix’s carbon footprint in all our countries. This includes daily transport our teachers take as well as flights taken for our charity challenges and the annual Impington school trip to Peru. Several more planting days will be undertaken as we aim to plant over two thousand trees each year.
All the children and families we support from different communities around the lake live in extreme poverty. They are unable to purchase even the simplest classroom materials, never mind the monthly costs of further education. Weeks are spent visiting different communities to identify the families in most need to make sure all our scholarships are awarded to the students who really need them. We currently help three hundred and fifty primary school students and one hundred secondary and college students.
We have been implementing a Plan Cuy sustainable plan thanks to the donations raised from this month’s 20th Anniversary Charity Challenge. We purchased all the materials to build a large Cuy House where guinea pigs will be reared and sold with the income raised going towards some of the monthly costs of the school. Members of the community got together for a couple of mingas to help with the ground preparation and construction which will be finished during the community day as part of the Challenge.
The school vegetable garden we introduced in January is beginning to show results with cabbage, beetroot and carrots being able to be grown at high altitude. These will be essential for the children’s daily food programme. Harvests are underway with our large-scale Plan Huertos we introduced in 2024 which help cover some costs of our sustainable plan management whilst helping local families.
As is tradition, Fanesca was prepared in the school with extras taken home to be shared with the families. This is a soup made during Semana Santa (Easter) and made from a variety of ingredients including beans, grains, fish, eggs and many others. Pawkar Raymi and Muchuk Nina were celebrated giving thanks to Pachamama (Mother Earth) for the flowering of crops and the upcoming harvests of grains.
Mother’s Day was celebrated in the school in Peru with plenty of traditional dance. We pay for a teacher to come in and show the children the different dances and rent the clothes for them. The mothers received presents and as ever, a good lunch!
Whilst the school was on holiday over Christmas we planted potatoes in the school vegetable garden which are due to be harvested in the coming weeks. This will provide an excellent addition to the daily food we provide the children along with the daily fruit. A variety of vegetables will be planted once the harvest has concluded.
Thank you so much for your fantastic support for the projects, it really does mean so much for the families in the communities. We’ll update you more in a couple of months.
Cheers
By Dom Williams | Founder and Director
By Dom Williams | Founder and Director
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