Hearts Cafe Ollantaytambo
UK and Peru registered NGO Living Heart is associated with social enterprise Hearts Café Ollantaytambo on the main square of Ollantaytambo in the Sacred Valley.
Quality Food at Hearts Cafe Ollantaytambo
Meals at the café are not gourmet, rather they constitute great quality comfort food. All of the food is very delicious and made from good quality ingredients, most of which grown locally. There are a whole array of interesting options, some of which are not always available in Peru.
Creating local employment
All of the staff in the café are people who previously suffered from domestic abuse, and who are now offered work and shelter by the NGO. All of the profits go towards the projects that the NGO is involved with.
As well as highly encouraging travellers to stop by the cafe, it is possible for our guests to arrange a visit with Sonia Newhouse to discuss the work of Living Heart in full. Please contact us for more details.
Supporting Andean Communities
The NGO Living Heart works with five highland communities in the Sacred Valley, offering a wide variety of vital support. The founder of the NGO is Sonia Newhouse, an English woman in her early 80s, who has dedicated the last decade of her life to helping local communities.
Amongst other support, Living Heart provides educational supplies and learning materials to children; they organise volunteer art teachers and theatre classes for children; they provide nutritional diets to younger children and abandoned elderly people; they offer family planning advice and contraception; and they work with small scale water purification and elimination of risk from water borne parasites.
Although Living Heart does not disclose which communities they work with in order that they can remain protected and undisturbed by outside visitors, travellers can visit Heart’s Café to learn all about the projects and find out how to donate.
How to help:
- To provide one child with 2 hot meals daily costs Living Heart $106, or £66 per school year. Multiply that by 370 children and the nutrition project needs almost $40,000 a year to keep supporting these malnourished children.
- There are over 200 malnourished children waiting for help. As always funds are limited it is useful to know that the cost per head of breakfast, lunch and distribution is around 30 cents USD per child per day. The project is currently feeding 405 children.
- Warm clothing for the babies, children and elderly of the communities. These parcels may be left at Hearts Cafe.
- Paracetamol and Cough mixture, as Living Heart now has ‘boticas’ in the schools which the Director is trained to administer by one of the project’s nurses.
- Books in Spanish for the 8 to 14 year olds. A4 sized notebooks with squares. Thick wax crayons, rubbers, coloured paper to ‘cut out’, paste, cellotape.
UPDATE 29/02/2012: For a full list of up to date facts and figures please visit Living Heart: Facts and Figures and to see what support the NGO currently is most urgently in need of please visit the Living Heart Wish List.
Responsible Travel Peru
You can visit the project’s websites here: Living Heart and Heart’s Cafe or learn more about Aracari’s own responsible travel Peru initiatives.