Love, a Shantytown Anecdote

Rosa is a woman in her early thirties with two preschool-age children. She and her husband fled their native town of Ica after the massive earthquake of 2007 and moved into Villa del Sur, an extreme poverty section in San Juan de Miraflores. She has been an enthusiastic supporter of the UNO/OLLAS Service Learning program in Lima. She told me laughing, “I have to support it; where would my children go otherwise?” We have become familiar seeing her walking up and down the dirt yard organizing mothers, supporting teachers and advising children while the UNO students worked.

The community parents had committed themselves to build a new bathroom. The old one is too far away from the classrooms and mothers were afraid that something bad could happen to the children while they were not under supervision of the teachers. Villa del Sur, after all, is a rough neighborhood. Supported by Arturo, they began building the new bathroom on Saturday while our students were painting the module. Sunday they ran out of bricks but felt embarrassed to call Arturo asking for money again. Rosa and the teachers calculated that if each parent would donate one brick they could finish the bathroom. They called the parents and asked them that each of them would bring a brick next day. To their dismay, only a few parents fulfilled the promise and the masons were soon short of bricks again…

So, Rosa picked the mason’s wheel barrow and went around the neighborhood knocking at doors, “I think you own me a brick,” she would say, smiling. At the end of the day, she had collected all the bricks needed to complete the bathroom.

Tomorrow we will celebrate the children’s new module and a bathroom built by their fathers’ hands and, of course, Rosa’s perseverance.

Dr. Celle