Plan Peru

One of the absolute highlights of my round the world trip was visiting Luis, a boy who lives it a tiny isolated village, a days drive from Cusco, high up in the Andes in Peru. We have been sponsoring him through the charity Plan for the last 5 years (my eldest son and he have been regular pen pals over that time). To meet him and his family was wonderful and truly humbling.

The standard one-day child visit, through the charity Plan, turned into a three day adventure as Luis unfortunately was due to come to Cusco, where we were based, to be in an athletics competition just as we were due to go up to his village. As Plan Peru had already arrange for us to go to the community, we decided to go to the village and see Luis when we got back in a couple of days.

We set off very early in the morning from Cusco and drove on dirt roads for 8 hours to the main town near Luis' village. There we met some proud, eager students who are being taught by the local Plan team to become community ambassadors. They are learning about their rights to: education, freedom from violence and nutrition (which are sadly lacking in these poor rural communities) and spreading the word to other families and children, especially girls, through radio and poster campaigns.

We stayed overnight in the only hotel in town and the next morning we drove to Luis' village. We were met by a group of children from his school all wearing their beautiful traditional dress, they walked us, hand-in-hand to their school – which Plan helped pay for and build. They put on a fiesta for us with poems and songs. We visited classrooms and saw more of the work Plan is doing with the children. Baxter, my eldest son, played football with the girls and lost.

We were then taken to Luis' house a mile or so down the road and met his parents. They were very warm and friendly and gave us delicious local potatoes to eat. Their house is small and made of mud with no glass in the windows and is a tiny refuge after a very hard days work on the land. Life is harsh for everyone, every day before school the children spend 2 hours taking the animals 1000m up to the pasture and have to bring them home again after school. We said goodbye to Luis' family and made the long bumpy journey back to Cusco.

The next day we were invited to the regional heats at the athletics stadium in Cusco and met Luis there with the rest of his relay team. Luis’ team were distinctive as they run barefoot as they can't afford running shoes. The harsh life these children live at extreme altitude (4000m) means they are very athletic and excellent runners. The first three teams in the heats would go on to the national final in Lima. Sadly Luis' team came 4th, and although they were very disappointed they soon cheered up. Before long they were all playing with our boys balancing on the steeplechase hurdles and really connecting even though they don't share a language.

It was an amazing few days that I was very lucky to experience and photograph.