Centro Lola
In 2008 Lola’s family and friends organised a celebration of her life, which raised several thousand pounds. This was used, in partnership with Save the Children, to construct the Lola Almudevar Women’s Centre, known locally as Centro Lola, in the village of Choritotora on the Altiplano, close to where she died. Her mother Monica Stoppleman, her sister Rebecca and a group of women from Nottingham went to Bolivia to the inauguration of the centre. Many valuable contacts were made both with the Aymaran people who live on the Altiplano, with local and locally based international NGOs, and with the Bolivian authorities.
Centro Lola (Centro de Mujeres ‘Lola’) opened in February 2010. It is at present a basic four-walls-and-a-roof building with very limited facilities. It is the only meeting place for women, children and men in the wide area surrounding the small settlement of Choritotora.
The Centre is a public facility owned by the Municipality of Calamarca (the local government) and is used by some 1600 families who travel from a wide area of the Altiplano up to four hours on foot to use the facility. If fundraising efforts allow, we aspire to extend the geographical scope of our support to a wider area of the Altiplano region.
The grants we give will help to provide:
- furniture, educational materials, toys and other useful material for Centro Lola;
- educational activities, in particular education about sexual and reproductive health, since the area has a high level of perinatal mortality;
- training opportunities in relation to becoming economically self-supporting;
The Fund will not provide these things directly, we will do so by making grants to the Municipality (which has a local group which takes care of the Centre) and to NGOs who operate programmes aligned with our aims. These include Save the Children, Pro Mujer and PLAN International among others.
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