The Village of Los Bances

The village of Los Bances, located in the northwest portion of the Tùcume district would be indistinguishable from surrounding villages were it not for three modern concrete buildings in the center of the village. One of the buildings is a secondary (high) school with 200 students. A second is the primary (grade) school with 180 enrolled. Both are reasonably well equipped, including three-burner gas stoves supplied by the government to cook the free food distributed to poor communities. Between the two schools there are 19 classrooms, each well-furnished lacking only whiteboards, though the plaster chalkboards are in excellent condition. Johanna is the director of both schools. She has 17 teachers reporting to her. The third building is a kinder. It too is well furnished and maintained.

The schools are in Los Bances only because the village is centrally located to about a dozen other villages, so the vast majority of the students do not live in Los Bances. When the schools were built five years ago there was adequate room for all eligible students from the area. Now things have changed.

The original kinder was designed to accommodate forty students. There are fifty students in the classroom. Recently a modular classroom was constructed to hold thirty more students. Now it is full. There are at least another twenty students eligible to attend kinder and no room for them.

To deal with the situation the parents association last March acquired temporary use of an old building close to the kinder. Tables and chairs were borrowed from the primary school. Martha, a retired teacher was persuaded to take control. The pronoei they created is simply called Los Bances.

The room is small and is at capacity with the present fourteen students. The remaining six eligible students are either scattered among overcrowded pronoeis in other villages or are not being schooled.

Martha phoned Promesa Peru last June asking for help but somehow her request got lost and we dropped the ball. She desperately needs teaching aids…tangrams, abacus, puzzles, books, crayons, pencils and paper. We want to supply those things to her along with a whiteboard and storage shelves. It wouldn’t take more than $200 to do that.

$50 will buy a whiteboard or two storage shelves. $5 will buy 5 story books. $10 will provide 5 puzzles. $15 purchases 5 packs of crayons, 5 coloring books and 3 notebooks. Won’t you please help us to help Martha and those kids? If you have a few dollars to spare please visit the Promesa Peru webpage to donate. Thank you.