REMEMBER!

WANTING TO VOLUNTEER?

HOST FAMILY

Cusco is one of South-Americas largest tourist centers, so it isn't strange that relatively a lot of social help is concentrated in this city. In the last years we got to know some 30 social projects, some useful, some useless.

As a Peruvian company we see it as our social duty to help the poor population of the country and we started thinking about a donation program as soon as we had the plan to start Mundo Antiguo Tours. Our first plan was to select the best social projects we know in order to help them financially.

But analyzing all the social projects we knew, we became frustrated. Although we are impressed by the efforts of some, we became more and more suspicious about the usefulness and the intentions of many of those projects.
There is always something missing. In our opinion it’s regretful that most of the social projects in the department of Cusco are based in the city itself, as the poverty in the remote communities is by far worse. Although we understand that it’s more practical to work in the city with its infrastructure, social projects should focus on the most urgent problems.

Our other objection is that most of the projects work with a relatively small group of lucky persons, mostly children, who receive for example food, some basic education and a shelter from every day reality. We don’t want to trivialize this kind of help at all – that’s why we support a number of those projects by sending volunteers. But we still think its unsatisfactory that help reaches only the lucky few – who most of the time only receive this help for some time after which they have to survive on their own, ready or not. In short: we are not sure that these projects offer substantial help to significant improve the life situation in the region.

Our conclusion was that we weren’t satisfied with our plan. Also, we were afraid that we could never guarantee completely what would happen with the donated money. We just lack the manpower to strictly control every social project in everything they buy or do.

Water for everyone

Reading an article in a regional newspaper we found a possible destiny for our donation program about which we never thought before. We were shocked to read the newspapers claim that in the department of Cusco only 45 % of the people has access to clean water. Investigating further, we found the official numbers: according to the Peruvian division of the United Nations 40% of the inhabitants of the department of Cusco lacks clean water, in the department of Puno for example, it’s nearly 61%. The decision to raise money for the construction of water networks was made.
We invest 10% of the total price of our own operated tours and programs directly in our water project. Please write us to see what we did so far and to find out how you can help even more!

More information about Peru’s water problem:
www.onu.org.pe/Publico/odm/odm.aspx (go to objective 7, only in Spanish).

SURVIVAL SPANISH

MORE COURSES