NGO in Montevideo

Whilst in Montevideo, Martine and I visited an NGO which is partly funded by a Catholic organisation in Luxembourg. So being good Catholics (stop laughing) we visted a Community Centre/Soup Kitchen/After School Club/Health Centre/Family Advice...in an area made up of a mixture of metal shacks and concrete houses. The main source of employment is from refuge collection/recycling. Basically, the fathers and sons go around the the city on horse and cart collecting rubbish, take it home, separate it and sell it to the recycling plant. The families are often quite large and usually share one to two rooms with no heating, insulation, hot water etc. However, when we visted some of the families at home we were always given a warm welcome and the people didn´t seem to mind us looking at them with our jaws and eyes wide open at all. I really thought I had seen it all after visiting some of the worst council houses in the Stirling area, but this blew me away. Indeed, things are so bad there, the swimming pool blew away 2 years ago which the Centre took the children to 3 times a week (with no hot water and freezing houses the desire to wash every day is understandably low in some families). It has not been replaced and the people at the Centre miss it dearly...

So to give you more of an idea of what the Centre do, they: give health advice to expecting mothers (we met one aged 14, but most start far later - 15 to 18); give the children some informal education in computing, cooking, knitting, dancing and soon carpentry; provide free breakfast, lunch and dinner for those attending and on Fridays they provide food for all the families who want it (500 people a day during the recession). Some children arrive with a 5 litre plastic paint pot and use the Centre´s take-away service, while other families eat-in. As you can imagine it is all a bit tragic when you see all this, but I couldn´t help chuckle when a mother (aged 27) asked for 8 bowls of soup - one each for her and and the 7 kids. Although, this wasn´t quite as funny as when I asked one child of 15 what he wanted to be when he left school and he said "Narcotics trafficker". I asked if there was anything else legal he would like to do and he replied "Pilot". I guess he´s more likely to be the first, but you never know, if he does well he could combine the two...

Finally though, we met some great folk and have never been embraced by so many different people in such a short space of time. We certainly learned a lot and took away far more than we gave back.