The idea of making a video about SKIP came up before actually joining the crew. Together with my friend Patrick, who is a professional cameramen, we had been thinking about making a documentary for a while. When I decided to work as a volunteer for a few months, we thought that this could be an opportunity to realise a little project. Fortunately, the people at SKIP liked the idea, so Patrick booked a flight to Peru too and arrived middle of July.

By then I had been working for SKIP for a month and a half, which gave me the chance to get to know the organisation and work out a script, together with my new colleagues. We started to film immediately after Patrick got here, as we wanted to get all the footage within two weeks, before the school vacations.

We almost made it... due to the swine flue and the decision of the government to close all schools a week earlier than the vacations, we didn't manage to film at the schools. Apart from that, everything went fine and more or less according to plan. The most interesting part for us was, doubtlessly, visiting families from the program. Special thanks go out to Marisol and her husband William, who let us film them and even follow them around at work!

We used the official school vacations to go travelling up north, but we had our laptop with us and started to edit the movie. We had close to nine hours of film, and just screening and labelling everything took quite a while... we managed to get about half of it done by the time school holidays were over.

After the vacations, 14 years old Ada did a great job at speaking the introduction text and also showing us around her school. Now we had all we needed to finish it off – except that the time was running out. Patrick had to leave again, so we worked through a few night shifts to actually get it done before he left Peru... thanks a lot to him as well for spending all his holiday time on this project!

Luca

Watch the movie!