AIDENICA

So yesterday we visited another new organization, I thought it was less exciting than La Semilla but that’s just my opinion.  So AIDENICA is the name of the organization, everyone here in Peru loves really long acronyms.  What does it stand for?  Asociacion para la atencion integral de Ninos de la Calle.  In English, something like “Association for the care of street children”, it doesn’t translate well, but seriously, where do they get the acronym from?  “asociacion para la Atencion Integral DE NInos de la CAlle”?

What they do is they have a home where they take boys that have been living on the street or kicked out of their homes and give them a place to stay.  They live there from the age of 12 to the age of 18, and they attend high school and help out with chores and learn trades like cooking or fixing stuff.  They actually also run a restaurant where the boys can work and earn money and help pay for the home, it serves mostly ceviche so I didn’t try any.  But we’re going to send volunteers there!  Would you like to be first?

It was an adventure trying to get there too.  A lot of streets are one-way in Lima, and Breña, the district where AIDENICA is, is no exception.  So we were going down this one-way street and we come up to the intersection of the street we want.  Unfortunately, it is also a one-way street, and we need to go the wrong way on it.  On top of that, the streets do not intersect at a reasonable, 90-degree angle, they converge like a V, so we can’t even guess where we might have to go to get to the correct part of the street.  Let’s just say it took a while to figure out.

Interesting side-note: I just learned that “Breña” comes from a Spanish word meaning “earth between rocks populated by weeds.”  Sounds pleasant, doesn’t it?

Apparently actually the organization has a video on YouTube, which I found.  It is here, if you want to watch, but be warned that it is all in Spanish and mostly just interviews with the people that work and live there.  But you do get to see a bit of the building and the neighbourhood, and if you get about halfway through there is a lot of music.

P.S. Ana Maria’s input was that the place needed a paint job.