AFE

For the past three weeks we have been working at a school called AFE...this stands for Amor, Fe, Esperanza. The school is located right beside the city dump and was started 9 years ago by a gentleman named Joeny. Many people live at the city dump and they spend all day digging through the trash and garbage looking for paper, cardboard and plastic bottles to trade for money. They earn about 5 cents per pound of paper and earn about 1 - 3 dollars per day. They also dig through the garbage looking for clothing to wear and for food to eat. They eat what they find. We had the opportunity to visit the dump and see all of the people digging through the garbage. We took water along to give to the workers and as soon as we stepped out of the car with the water we were almost mugged because people were so desperate to get water. In fact, Leo had to drop the bag of water he was holding because he was getting surrounded on all sides and getting pushed around. As the trucks with garbage arrived at the dump herds of people would jump up on top of the trucks to be the first to dig through the garbage.

The children that attend the school at AFE are from families who live and work in the dump. In fact most of these children attend school in the morning and go to work in the dump all afternoon. Most of the children do not shower, they are dirty and smell bad. They wear the same clothes day after day because they do not have anything else. The school was started in an attempt to get these kids out of the dump and give them a chance to do something different with their life.

Jenny and I taught four first graders (Maria, Dania, Paola and Carlos) who ranged in age from 7 - 11 years old (many of the children do not know their birthdate or age). At first we were told that these four students were learning small words. But Jenny and I quickly realized that they did not even know the alphabet. So for the past three weeks Jenny and I have been teaching them the alphabet...and we are excited to report that three of them know pretty much the entire alphabet!

The four of us (Shaun, Jenny, Gina, Leo) also taught a gym class together. Each day we would take a different age group and we would have one hour of gym class. We played a bunch of different games with the kids and they absolutely loved it.

All in all our time at the garbage dump and school was very eye-opening and something that we will not soon forget.

Some of our 3 grade gym class buddies

Shaun playing "Pato, pato, ganzo" (duck, duck, goose) with the first graders

Jenny and.......Jenny. This cute little girl was in our 2nd grade gym class and believe it or not her name was Jenny too!

Shaun and Gina playing "freeze tag" with the sixth graders. In this picture Shaun in the one on the ground "unfreezing" one of the girls!

This is a picture from up at the garbage dump and you can see all of the people gathered digging through the garbage. Also you can see hundreds of vulture looking birds circling above.