Foto Story: A day in Belén

To give you a bit more of a visual understaning of my life and work in Iquitos, I’ve put together the following story of pictures from an afternoon workshop in Belen. Though I spend most of my time at La Restinga, I go here twice a week in the afternoons to do workshops with the kids, mostly around issues of child abuse and exploitation. As I hope I’m able to portray through the pictures, Belen is an area of great poverty, but it’s also so much more than that. Working this kids gives me so much hope and joy, and I wish you could all get to know them. But for now, the pictures will have to do... By the way, you should be able to see most of the pictures in larger size by clicking on them. This is also true for all the other pictures on this blog.

Above: Arriving in Belén in the afternoons, we are always met by a drastically different sight than what we see downtown Iquitos. Belén is both its own city as well as part of the larger Iquitos. The whole area lies much lower than the rest of the city, so the houses are built on stilts. When the river rises, which it will in a few months, the streets are filled with water and the only way of getting around is in caoes and boats. Here's a boat in construction.

As we walk through the neighboorhood, on the way to the community house where we work, we usually see lots of the kids on our way. Here is one of the educators, an Italian volunteer, Alessandro, greeted by Wellixer, Justin, and Franklin - three of our most rambunctious but wonderful boys.




Some of the kids, and Carmen (another educator) and I laying down to pose for the camera.


Katty (12) flashing her beautiful smile.










Carmen and Wellixer goofing around..

Victoria taking a break and smiling to the camera. This day's lesson was about stragtegies for coping with sexual abuse, and here the kids are drawing their ideas for how to respond to different types of abuse.

As I've described before, several of the houses in Belén don't have a fourth wall. This is the house accross from where we work.

On this particular day, we decided to go visit Giler, one of the participants in a young leaders program in Belén. He lives right down the street from the house where we work to the kids, and this is us sitting outside, getting to know his family and some of his neighboors while we waited.

Giler´s little sister looking curiously at us...

Carmen doesn't know how to swim, so she was smiling with fear and joy as we set out.




Turns out Carmen had reason to be scared. There were so many times we thought the boat was about to tip over, including in the moment when this picture was taken (not incidentally while I was trying to steer...).





The sun setting down as Giler steered us (including his two younger sisters in the picture above) safely back to the shore.


As we headed home our day was made, if possible, even better by the sight of a beautiful rainbow rising out of the dirt roads.