Our Social Projects

Community Social Projects

Peru by Locals is based in Cusco, which was established by an ex porter and a current tour guide (me) along the Inca trail to Machu Picchu, Jose L. Condor, born in Huayllaccocha, a village between Cusco and Machu Picchu at over 3,900 m / 12,800 ft, where life was hard for me growing up. After I finished high school near my home town, I moved to Cusco to study tourism program and hospitality. I decided to create Peru by Locals inspired by the local Quechua people to give back to the communities, especially those in need. Since I opened Peru by Locals, we do social works supporting schools in mountain villages. We practice sustainable tourism. We focus our projects on the education of children, providing them school supplies, hygiene supplies, books and other educational needs. We focus our projects in the village called Chaqepay near my home village – the school has children from kindergarden to elementary school, aged from 5 to 11 years.

When you book with us any trek or tour, you are a part of our projects because your thrust in us is making possible to keep creating better education for the ones that need it the most – without your help this would be impossible. Apart from providing you a great service and giving you a lifetime experiences, we use part of your money you pay us for the tours for giving back to the communities.

School Supplies

On the 4th August 2015 we partnered up with this beautiful hearted clients from Canada, Katie, Perth and Pong to bring school supplies for the children at the Chaqepay school, the village which is home to many of our Inka Trail porters. Early in the morning we left Cusco first to purchase all the supplies we could, we arrived to the community by noon. All the kids were already so excited to see what we got for them! We started playing soccer, they couldn’t wait. After a while we had time to introduce ourselves and finally gave them all we got – pencils, books, markers for the teachers, soccer balls, valleyballs, and others. After a week everybody got also a sun hats, which was amazing because the sun in the mountains is very strong so now the children are protected from it.

This was our 3rd visit to this village, the first 2 years it was mainly to spend some time with the kids for Christmas – we made hot chocolate, gave them fruit bread and lots of toys for each of them. They were very excited and we want this to become a tradition for every year.

Peru By Locals is very proud to be able to give back to the communities and help to improve education in the Andes, and this is only possible because of all of you, our clients.

Peru By Locals is dedicated to provide a world class tours and treks, but we are also dedicated to helping our communities to have better education because we believe the education is the gate for the future of the children. Our dream is to support other schools as well. We believe they are our partners, we are one of them and we don’t want to leave them behind, we want to grow together.

The children we support are mostly the kids of our Quechuas or porters, who carry all our equipment on the Inca trail, making possible the dream of every tourist that want to accomplish the dream of getting to Machu Picchu by Inca Trail.

In our projects we include:

• giving them small courses about identification – when we help the children with the education in the communities, it is very important for us to encourage them to keep practicing their traditions and keep speaking Quechua as their mother language, which was even spoken by their ancestors, the Incas
• encouraging them to learn English, because Cusco’s economy is based on tourism – we would like many of those kids to be part of our team one day, we would like to have them as tour guides when they will grow up, because the best tour guides are LOCALS – they know how transmit the history, their traditions etc.

How can you help?

When you book with us, you are already involving yourselves in Our Social Projects, since part of our incomes go to buy supplies for these schools that need all the tools to learn, but we buy them also toothbrushes, warm fleeces and similar stuff.

We invite you to be a part of these projects – we also created little program basically to take you to the school to spend some time with the kids playing, teaching them your games or any skill you have to share with them – they will love it and be very grateful for everything they learn!