Cooking up a future
02.06.2010
The spirit of entrepreneurship is alive and kicking in Peru.
Nine years ago, in an inner city parish of Lima where I was stationed, we launched an “Association of People with Special Abilities” (ASPHAD). With the Lord’s help and generous support from friends in several countries, we acquired an old family home and gradually added a couple of storeys. By setting up a variety of small workshops and a large exercise room, we now have a friendly Centre attracting about 40 families with one or more members who have serious learning or physical difficulties. The special people’s ages run from about 15 to 50, and they are welcome to continue in the Centre indefinitely.
This year we have been equipping the extra space for training and production workshops. These include a kitchen, computer room, rooms for sewing by hand and machine, leather work, physical therapy and stimulating games, handcrafts, traditional music and dancing. On the flat roof, more than 50 breeding cuyes (guinea pigs), are producing two or three cuyes every three months or so. We are pleased to see how dealing with the cuyes helps our special people to have more stimulation, friendships and happiness in life.
Over the past three months we have had two sales of cooked cuyes. Publicity for fundraising events offering “exquisite food, drinks, and dance music” is common in Lima so it set a high standard for the women doing the cooking in our kitchen. They excelled themselves in preparing truly “exquisite” plates of a cuy surrounded by rice and potatoes, enriched by delicious sauces. Around 35 cuyes were served on each occasion and brought in nearly AUS$400. Such returns bring back some of the money invested, and later on there should be some profit to help cover other running costs of the Centre as well.
Encouraged by the success of selling cuyes, the cooks decided that they could also prepare and sell a large variety of bread and pastry items. With their shared talents and special abilities, all they needed was a much larger oven and mixing bowl. One of the mothers, Ayda, whose son has a serious physical and speaking handicap, is very good at all kinds of baking. She has become our main cooking and baking teacher for the other mothers and our special students.
We hope to have the baking section up and running soon. It will still emphasise the training of those with handicaps, they can help with the mixing and shaping of whatever is being baked. They will also get some of it to eat, as we finish around 5:30pm each day with some kind of a sandwich/cake and hot drink on these winter days.
Our hope is to have enough products left over to keep selling them to hungry neighbours, who happen to be without any pastry shop in our area.
Hopes are high that next time our cooks and helpers prepare tasty plates of cuy; they will also be able to offer the customers an additional assortment of cakes and pastries to top off their meal. The long term goal is that our special people will also be able and willing to share in preparing and serving meals in their own homes.
Some at least will also be able to prepare food for sale on the streets.
Fr Chris Baker first went to Peru in 1977.
