MEET THE MENTOR: PETIT MIRIBEL
HIGH IN THE ANDES MOUNTAINS OF PERU LIES THE SACRED VALLEY, A LAND OF ANCIENT RUINS, HIGH ALTITUDE VILLAGES AND THE HOME OF PETIT MIRIBEL, FOUNDER OF THE SOL Y LUNA FOUNDATION, A CHARITY PROVIDING EDUCATION AND CARE FOR OVER 200 CHILDREN, SUPPORTED BY THE BEAUTIFUL, SUSTAINABLE SOL Y LUNA HOTEL.
Having settled in Peru from her native France, Petit Miribel has dedicated her life to supporting and educating underprivileged children in Peru’s Sacred Valley. Today, the Sol y Luna Foundation educates, houses and supports over 200 children, taking care of all their needs, from medical care to psychological and physiological support. In 2000, Petit and her husband Franz opened the Sol y Luna Hotel as a means to fund the ever-growing and expanding foundation. We are delighted to welcome Petit on board as a mentor for members of The Conscious Travel Foundation, and spoke to her about her passion, drive and the challenges they’ve faced as a result of the global pandemic.
The Sol y Luna Timeline:
1990: Petit was working as a commodity trader in mining in Lima, Peru
1996: The idea of creating the Sol y Luna Foundation was born after the local school Petit’s children were attending closed down
1998: The initial works began for the creation of the school, this is what would later become the Sol y Luna Foundation
2000: Hotel Sol y Luna opened with 14 casitas
2003: The Sol y Luna Foundation works to support local public schools
2009: The Sol y Luna School opens its doors offering education for kindergarten, and the first few years of primary school
2010: Hotel Sol y Luna expands, opening Deluxe and Premium casitas
2010: Sol y Luna School now offers full primary education
2016: Hotel Sol y Luna expands with a new heated swimming pool, jacuzzi, sauna and gym
2017: The first Sol y Luna students graduate from the school
2019: The Sol y Luna Home opens its doors, providing a safe foster home for the students who most need it
2020: Petit and Franz’s eldest child, Thomas, graduates from the Sol y Luna School at the age of 17
What inspired you to create the Sol y Luna Foundation?
I always wanted to be useful to other people, even as an adolescent I had that need. I was brought up in a very traditional family in France, but I remember reading books and saying to my parents I have to go and help people. I went on to study, and came to Peru about 33 years ago. I was working in the mining industry in Lima and that’s when I decided to move to the Sacred Valley. My husband and I started to get involved with the local community, and we thought finally we can be useful. We used to go to the local school every day, trying to be useful but we realised that we couldn’t make any real impact without creating our own foundation and investing in it. It’s one thing to do a few campaigns a year but it’s not enough, so we need something more sustainable and so we came up with the hotel as a tool for making money for the foundation. And that’s when we founded the hotel. It took time, but when the hotel started to make some money, we started to help local schools with whatever they needed.
Twelve years ago, we decided that the only way to make a real difference would be to start our own school. The idea was not to have a school for “poor children” but to open it to everyone. Melanie, my daughter, still goes to Sol y Luna School. We then started to realise that many children were unable to go to school at all, so we founded Paqari, the faculty for disabled children. Then we decided to create the shelter which is now on its second year, during the pandemic the shelter has also had to become a virtual school.
What drives you to continue supporting the community?
The best feeling is when you help other people, but I am very anxious about not letting them down. Yesterday I went to visit many of our children, and one was so excited I could hear him shouting as I arrived at his house!
Fun with circus skills at the Sol y Luna School
Why is the idea of conscious or sustainable travel so important to you?
Of course I am worried about the future of the hotel, but I think maybe we needed to stop and restart in a different way. Machu Picchu doesn’t need 10,000 people a day, people don’t need to become billionaires working in tourism, there should be more respect for the local people. Today in the Sacred Valley, nothing is left without tourism. I don’t think being ‘conscious’ should be now because something terrible happened, it should be every day in your life.
What have been the biggest challenges you’ve faced in light of COVID-19?
When everything started my first feeling was that we have to protect our children. The hotel is also complicated, I have 120 staff, and we have just 16 working at the moment, so I am worried about them. But my first thought was to save the children, so we launched the campaign to save the Sol y Luna Home and thank goodness we are okay for one year thanks to the campaign. Then we have the issue with the school, we have had to be very creative and take the computers from the hotel and give them to the children to connect them, so that as many as possible can do distance learning. It is not easy, not only do we need computers but also money to provide internet, as most of our families have no computer or internet. Then the next challenge was Paqari, now that we are no longer in quarantine, we are able to launch this programme where we can visit the disabled children at home.
What is it like for the school children when hotel visitors spend time at the school?
I have to say the first years of the school, we did not open our doors. We were very protective of what we were doing and we did not want to be associated with many projects that are only there for marketing purposes, so I said I preferred that nobody knew about the foundation. But then the children started to grow, as did the school, and I needed help - the money of the hotel was not enough - so I started to talk about it and opened the doors of the hotel. Nobody is going to help if they have not seen what we are doing. We do this in a very respectful and wonderful way, and the children love it - they are children so they love their class to be interrupted!! They run to the visitors and hug them; they are so happy to see people come and visit them from afar. (To learn more about visiting the school, take a look here)
Could you give us an example of the challenges you face with the local families in trying to educate their children?
When the children start to grow in a different way from what they are used to. I will give you an example, all the children from one family were studying and one day the father called and said he was taking one of his sons out as another son was doing better academically. These families need their children to do manual labour, so we have to sit down and talk with them and explain that even if not everyone is as gifted academically but it’s so valuable for them. It’s a sacrifice for these families to let their children be educated, they also miss them. Children have their role in the family, and educating is not a traditional part of that.
What led to the decision to open the Sol y Luna home?
This was when we realised that many of our children were being abused, and unfortunately many times it is sexual abuse. We decided we needed to open the shelter. I think in life you connect with the right people at the right time - a great friend of mine had a shelter in the Sacred Valley, she was 70 and finally wanted to return to Italy. She had the need to go back home, so she left and I took over the shelter.
Do you ever see your visitors being positively affected by visit to Sol y Luna?
Last year a young girl of 14 spent half the day at the foundation with us, a few months later she got back in touch and she had launched her own campaign selling T-shirts for our children. Her best memory was not Machu Picchu or the famous Peruvian food, but the children who touched her heart.
What’s next for the Sol y Luna Hotel and Foundation?
We have a plan for changing our communication, I have had enough of talking about bathrooms, bedrooms and restaurants for 20 years at trade shows! Of course, these parts are great, but the project we had in mind was to start talking about people, we wanted to celebrate this year as we will be 20 years doing this. Now we don’t want to show pictures of dishes but the people behind it. The chef in this instance!
On August 10th, we launched a new initiative called ‘Paqari at Home’, where our teachers and support structure will be able visit the homes of our 16 disabled students as they cannot do virtual learning. It was a past guest who wanted to be involved with the foundation, he had a very emotional moment at the school and afterwards he asked if there was anything he could do. He presented our plans for Paqari at Home to a local charity, which is supporting our actions for a year.
Are there any messages you want to get out there? Or any ways people can help?
We need help more than ever! We have no hotel at the moment, and no vision of how the economy will recover. When we reopen it’s not that the hotel will make money to help straight away, it’s a very complicated hotel to maintain, we are losing a lot of money each month at the moment, so now more than ever we need to operate the foundation independently from the hotel.
Foundations are being more empowered nowadays, it’s great to do campaigns but they are not sustainable, I need to find a sustainable way to sustain the foundation. The foundation can’t just be me; we need to change the structure so that it doesn’t depend wholly on me. It doesn’t mean the hotel should stop helping, but we can’t 100% rely on it.
As donations began to dry up at the beginning of the pandemic, the Sol y Luna home and the 200 vulnerable children it housed were at risk, so Petit and her team set up a Go Fund Me Help to raise money to keep the foundation going. So far, they have raised £43,062. If you’d like to support the foundation and its children, please visit their Go Fund Me page - donations are very welcome.
We are so honoured to have Petit on board as a supporter and mentor of The Conscious Travel Foundation.
