Raising money for San Nicolas

I volunteered at San Nicolas in 2008 and when I saw the recent devastation wanted to help raise some money for the centre. In the UK a quick way to raise money is by doing a 'car boot sale' where you sell unwanted items from the 'boot' of your car. In November my friends and I did this in Edinburgh, Scotland. Friends donated unwanted items and also helped me on the 2 'sale' days. We were happy to able to send San Nicolas $470 and I am posting this blog so that the people who bought from us can see that Luisa has now received the money and can watch the progress of the renovations.

I promised in 2008 that the children at San Nicolas would always be in my heart and they always will be. The kindness, hard work and love evident at San Nicolas is inspiring to us all!

- Gill from Scotland

Participate in San Nicolas Urraca new projet from home!

With a lot of motivation, the moms from San Nicolas have started a new project "San Nicolas Urraca Tejidos" in order to gather some money and to rebuild the local! You can help them out even from home!!


Indeed, Luisa, Ana and all the others are knitting scarves and chalinas made out of 100% Alpaca (see the pictures)! If you are interested in buying one or several for yourself or for a gift (Christmas is just around the corner!) or if you have any contacts that could commercialize them outside of Cusco or even Peru, do not hesitate to get in contact with Luisa (sannico44@hotmail.com) or with the blog crew for English speakers (sannicolasurraca@gmail.com).

If you wish, you can even make a special request (in terms of colors, model etc...) and Luisa will try to accomodate it as best as she can!

Many thanks in advance from Luisa, the kids and everyone involved to support this project and the association!

San Nicolas' new challenge

As mentionned by Susann in the previous post, San Nicolas is facing a new unexpected challenge as part of the local has unfortunately collapsed due to near-by construction... As a result, Luisa and the kids are left without a the storage room and the bathrooms that had been constructed thanks to a fundraising organized by volunteers back home. The back, the only place where kids could play outside, with games bought by past volunteers have also been partly destroyed and are unaccessible since it is too dangerous.

Even in such a hard time, San Nicolas doesn't give up and is ready to overcome this new challenge. Luisa, Ana and the mothers of the kids have thus decided to start a new project in order to find funds for reconstruction! Since August, they are knitting scarves that they are selling in order to collect some money for future works.

Here are some pictures of the situation, and if you want to help out, read the article "Participate in San Nicolas Urraca new projet from home!".

Times changed

I came back from Cusco the last weeks ago and I had a really great experience at San Nicolas Urraca. But I'm really sad to tell, that something terrible had happen. The new bathrooms that you can see working on the other volunteers chrashed down. There was a building site behind the project and one night the ground slided down including the bathrooms, the half of the teaching room and 3 other houses from the neibourhood. The building company left, left the chaos and the costs for the other people.




Luisa and the other women feel really sorry and miserable about the situation and it's hard because they can't show her sadness to the children. They are really strong and the project has to go on. So we need help, because they don't have the money to rebuild everything.




The women are weaving a special kind of scarfs and when I saw it I had an idea and I helped them to find a person with a shop who can pay the wool, buy the scarfs and sell it in there own shop. I hope this business is running soon and they have a little but stabil source of income soon.

The children are still as adorable and awesome as they are descriped in the other posts, but they still need help and at the moment there are not a lot of volunteers. I'm looking forward to come back one day. - Susann from Germany