Misiones

We have all come home happy and dirty and very satisfied that we helped the people of the Peruti village in Misiones District have a wonderful weekend. We drove off the motorway into the jungle and were given welcoming waves as we made our way down the dirt track.

We gathered rubbish, brought up water from the well, distributed the clothing we had brought with us, offered milk and cookies and breakfast, brought nice new toys and went swimming in the nearby river with the happy youngsters. Old clothes were recycled to become new clothes to these people and proud young girls showed off, for them, the latest trends. Sebastian and Eduardo made dough for three hundred while the girls became hairdressers for the day.

Our toilet facilities were a wooden hut with a dirty torn curtain over the doorway and chickens running underneath your pee stream if you look down into the hole below (It might have been better to use a field toilet but you had to respect the village effort). Everyone mucked in and the villagers appreciated it. I do not know who had the most fun the children or the helpers! We washed their hair to clean out the lice which nestled there and then frantically washed our hair back at our hostel called, appropriately enough Peter Pan hostel, just in case we caught some lice. Our new T shirts, which we had only just bought to show we were from L.I.F.E. the volunteer organisation, were a wonderful dirty red earth colour and that does not wash out, believe me, I have tried! It is now a sign of our hard work. Faces were washed, hands were cleaned, the kids had fun being washed and washing themselves in the soapy water. Little angels with dirty faces became little angels with clean faces and the reward was fantastic big beefburgers which the youngsters relished as did the helpers!! Hopefully they will have learnt something of hygiene from the visit. Kites flew even though there was no wind just sheer determination. Dogs hovered around looking for scraps and scaring the helpers who wanted nothing to do with the mangy half starved curs.

Little girls or boys looked after their even younger sisters or brothers. We got hugs and cuddles everywhere and gave as good as we got.Clothes were desperately sought and we knew we were very short on children’s clothes as the families were very large (up to ten children) as there is no family planning and very little to do in the village. We were told that on L.I.F.E.’s early visits to the village that the villagers did not know how babies were made (as sex did not always make you pregnant) and that even the explanation of the menstrual cycle and safe times to have sex has reduced the number of pregnancies. We take so much for granted.