Ecuador - Current Projects - Espoir sans Frontières


	Amaluza, Southern Ecuador, Year 2000 A mountain village perched at 3000 m Thanks to the link that we have had for years with the Father Segundo Pardo Rojas, a member of Espoir sans Frontièere passed on a request for a financial and logistical support to build a school canteen in Amaluza, a little village in the Ecuadorian mountains.
	In these isolated places,the Luis Alfonso Crespo secondary school receive every day 620 pupils from little farmers' families. They are so poor that they often can't give breakfast to the children before they cover the long distance which separates them from school. It is not uncommon to see, during the morning, some pupils fainting because of anaemia. The little meal they bring from home for the lunch is not sufficient to inflect the illness, which often results in a lack of concentration at school, or an important absenteeism. Thus, this population perpetuates the incapacity to change its lifestyle.
	To improve this situation, we thought, with parents, teachers, the care center, and the authorities, to build a canteen with a studied food balance. Thanks to the concrete financial and technical help of its different partners, it only remains to Espoir sans Frontières to bring complementary funds and to technically accompany the construction by the voluntary involvment of a young member available to adapt to the various local needs. On december 1999, the foundation stone was laid. On april 2000, the canteen was opened and daily supplied with fresh vegetables, fishes, meats and fruits by means of their own production.
	Indeed, within the same secondary school, farm trainings leading to qualification were putting in place. There were usable for the ends of the studies but also punctually productive, thus favouring the pupils' feeding. The "Bar des Lutins, (the Goblins' Bar)", is a strange name for a school canteen! Our Ecuadorian friends wanted to make durable the initiative of some voluntaries of Espoir sans Frontières who, for weeks and weeks, made these goblins from egg boxes later sold on the Christmas Market of their regions until they reached the sum needed!