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Mano a mano

15 years ago and after having worked for Médecins Sans Frontières in Peru, Sylvie Dumans, touched by the living conditions in the slum community of "La Ensenada" starts "Mano a Mano" (www.manoamanoperou.org) with the main objective of providing better living conditions for its inhabitants and their children.
 
Living in Lima, Fanny and Nicolas were particularly touched and interested in the projects developed by "Mano a Mano" as their approach is based on directly involving the inhabitants of "La Ensenada" by making them not only the beneficiaries of each particular project - i.e. the inhabitants benefit of improved living conditions - but also become actors of such improvements - i.e. the inhabitants participate in performing the work involved - which enables them to earn a fair salary as well as training!  

An example of a project: "Building a garden, project initiated in 2007, the majority of workers are women/ mothers from the community. We train them in masonry, bricklaying and plumbing. This gives them the possibility of earning a small salary, distributed in goods and in money. Two meals are also provided for each days of work that they do. Another requisite for the women we train is that they conclude their primary and secondary studies."

This mindset reflects exactly our motto within Léon "give a man a fish, he will eat for a day! Teach him how to fish and he will eat forever". So we unanimously decided to support Mano a Mano in a future project.
 
And they already had a future project in mind: building a soccer field in the middle of the slum! Now you might wonder: how is a soccer field important for a slum? In Latin America a soccer field is not only important for promoting “active lifestyle” (a marketing word for sports) or keeping the youth busy and away from bad habits, but is also a fundamental tool which creates a strong sense of fraternity and social belonging as it constitutes the main area for community social activities.
 
The soccer field was terminated end of March 2012. Since then, several events were held there, such as the national gathering of "Scout of Peru" which enabled to raise National awareness for living conditions in slums. Additionally, and to celebrate the 1st of May, Mano a Mano organized a big market in the soccer field where women of the community could sell pastries and food gathering money for more projects to come.
 
Not to mention that the locals look forward for Lionel to participate in their usual “Pichanga del Domingo”, i.e. informal soccer game on Sundays!

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