We sent over some questions for the children, hoping to find out a little more about them. As the children don’t all turn up every week, it took quite some time to collect and collate answers. We asked:
Q1:Name
Q2:Age
Q3:Favourite Colour
Q4:Favourite Sport
Q5:What do you want to do when you grow up?
Q6:If you were president for the day, what one thing would you do?
There were some insightful answers, especially for the last two questions, such as
A5:
Doctor, Lawyer, Teacher, Mechanical engineer, Architect
A6:
I’d make the schools better and provide a good school breakfast
Close all the bars (her father’s a serious alcoholic) and help the poor with grants
Make schools bigger
Give children pencils and paper to learn better
Clean up the towns
They may be on the other side of the world, they may be minors, and they may be poor, but they are not without ambition or awareness of their surroundings. I learnt quite recently that two of the adult helpers involved with inti were local children and used to be in the same position as the children they now help, who have somehow beaten the odds to get themselves to university and get an education to be proud of.
I have had some news from the Embassy, there is no forward movement as yet because the Ministry of Culture as I’ve mentioned already, have to approve of their involvement. This project involves children and they need to “to authenticate the children’s identity and confirm whether they have consented that their work and portraits be on display”
I hadn’t envisaged this as being the stumbling block, but in hindsight it makes sense. The one thing about it that I can’t figure out is why they have not requested contact info from us to speed things up? So I have replied and offered to put them in touch with both “inti” and “biblioworks” in the hope of doing so.
