Share our dreams to make their dreams come true.

Kusi Uya

“A Food Assistance Program for Poor Children”

The Project

Poverty is not an easy thing to describe. It can be described on the basis of material need, economic disparity, and social interactions. Poverty is caused by the interplay of different factors and each is not mutually exclusive from the other. Factors such as economic inequity, educational differences, and corrupt governments can be assumed as the logical cause; geography, violence, and discrimination based on age, gender, and race play an equally important, but subtle role. The complexity that entails a finite description of what poverty is can be used to explore another intriguing question: what does is it mean to be poor?

The act of dreaming, in the same manner, comprises a range of helpful descriptive words and phrases, but it’s equally intricate to find an accurate definition. Dreams, by general consensus, are impossible and unlikely under a “real” conception of the world, involve an emotional attachment, and can be used as a way to escape and perceive a different reality.

What does poverty and dreaming have to do with Kusi Uya? From the beginning, we have fostered the idea of an strategic intervention in helping underserved, underprivileged, and poor school-aged children by creating, in the long-run, a self-sustained community kitchen to meet a basic need of these children. We feel that poverty and dreaming can sometimes complement each other in order to modify, by forcefully ignoring, unpleasant aspects of daily reality. In its extreme form, dreaming can be the starting point to a radical social change such as ending poverty and ending hunger.

Kusi Uya will expand on this idea and, for its second event in the month of July in 2006, will try to raise awareness with a project entitled, “Dreams of Poverty,” that children living in poverty have dreams as any child anywhere else in the world does. But, to them, what does is it mean to be poor? And, at the same time, what sort of things do they dream of? Kusi Uya will explore some answers by hosting a carefully chosen local public elementary school in Abancay, Apurímac, Perú, for a special day in July where a meal will be served, a children’s show performed, and, most importantly, a reassurance to them that we still care for their wellbeing and that dreams do come true.

In choosing the school we will host for the event in July, Kusi Uya will employ a selection process based upon two criteria: economic and social. The economic aspect of the filtering process involves in determining the poverty level of the student-body of the potential school we will host. In essence, we will find out if the children attending the chosen school are deprived and in need of the basic necessities. The social criteria will adhere to the original purpose in having the event in the first place and will involve an essay contest where the students from the potential schools will explain what they think poverty is to them and if they have dreams for the future, what do they dream of.

We dream for a better world for her and children like her.

Dreams of Poverty – July, 2006