Urban poverty in Ventanilla

On Friday, while still in Lima, I had the chance to visit two nursery schools in Ventanilla slum, a good one-and-a-half-hour bus ride away from the city centre. After spending a couple of days in the prosperous districts of Lima, it was an eye-opening experience to see the extent of the poverty in Ventanilla. I got to see for myself what I had read so many books about.

A bustling metropolis, Lima is currently home to some eight million people and keeps growing at an uncontrollable rate. Migrants from all over Peru flood its outskirts in search of a better life. However, the grass is not always greener on the other side. Many end up working in the informal sector, taking odd jobs to earn a meagre living.

The slums literally mushroom overnight; they are created “spontaneously”. Homeless migrants organise, choose an empty, barren wasteland, sneak in at night, mark out the plots and raise some sort of a roof on what is to be their house. Little by little, they upgrade the house. The ultimate sign of success is a two-storey home. Authorities tolerate the illegal settlements, because there is no other solution to the acute shortage of housing in Lima.




Ventanilla is located on a hillside in the middle of the desert. Infrastructure lags far behind the housing: The houses do not have running water yet, and cuts in electricity are the order of the day. Paradoxically enough, slum dwellers pay many times more for their precarious electricity than other Limeans do, because it is very expensive to provide basic infrastructure to such far-away communities.




The nursery schools I visited with Cristina were for 2- to 5-year-olds. Warmayllu works with the teachers there, helping them to improve their teaching methods. On Friday, Cristina and I videotaped and photographed the Mothers’ Day celebrations at María Pía nursery school. Together with their teacher, the children had prepared and decorated a piñata (cardboard doll) and filled it with Mothers’ Day cards, candy, and colourful bits of paper. The climax of the festivities was breaking the piñata. All mothers danced around it and took turns at hitting it with a stick. Once it broke, everyone went out for the candies and cards. Then we all had a delicious lunch: maracuya juice, camote, potato, rice and chicken.








In spite the earth floors, outhouses and lack of just about everything, the mood was cheerful. The children seemed happy, and the teachers, caring and motivated. No sign of the stress that characterises many Finnish day-care centres! After all, I guess lots of things we Finns take for granted and consider essential (warm showers, flushable toilets, refrigerators, electric light, etc.) are not really that important.

Unfortunately, not all is happiness and joy in Ventanilla. A conversation I had with two three-year-old girls pulled me up short. They started off by asking me: “When you are grown up, are you going to have a boyfriend?” Amused and somewhat flattered by the fact that they didn’t consider me grown up yet, I answered: “Why yes, of course. Won’t you?” “No, never.” “But why is that?” I was left speechless by their answer: “Because boyfriends are always beating you up.”