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The complex is situated on 2.7 hectares of ground about 4.5 km outside the village of Urubamba at an altitude of 2.900 metres. It is easy to travel to the project from the village with your own transport, taxi, by bike or on foot. Heléna sold all here possessions in The Netherlands to be able to build the infrastructure of the Niños del Arco Iris. The complex and the infrastructure are owned by her. She has donated the use of them for the functioning of the project. As well as designing the layout of the complex, the buildings and their interiors, Heléna also supervised the building activity in person. She mostly used materials available locally. The result is beautiful. For Heléna, beauty is one of the essentials of life. Inner and outer beauty represent strenght. If someone ore something loses their own beaty, then they also lose their strength. Seeing strenght in someone else is also beaty. Heléna wants to show the Peruvian community and visitors the full beauty of the materials, creativity adaptability and cultural heritage of their own country. The materials are freely available in Peru, and there are nearly no extra costs in adapting them. Poverty does not have to mean that one has to lose the feeling for one's individual or collective cultureal value. In this way, the buildings are made from materials which come from the grounds: large blocks of rock as foundations, glue for the walls, cactus juice mixed with fine sand for finishing the walls, eucalyptus tree trunks for rafters, bamboo for roof covering and small stones eroded by the River as decoration for the plasterwork. We invite you to come and see and experience for yourself the natural style and atmosphere of the complex.     Heléna used her own resources to engage a large group of unemployed men from the local communities to build the infrastructure. Most of the workers are agricultural labourers. The low financial rewards from the harvests are absolutely not sufficient to support them and their families. Heléna saw to it that these men were in fact re-trained as construction workers with specific building skills. |