Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Spring Break!
The weeks of March 7th-21st marked the arrival of our spring break volunteers. Brock and I were extremely excited for our group from the University of Georgia to arrive. Throughout the week we acted as tour guides, chaperones, project leaders, and friends. Because I want you to see the week through the eyes of our spring breakers, and because I am feeling lazy due to the daunting task of writing a grant this week, I am going to post the link to their blog, instead of writing my own. It recaps the week they spent with us in Ecuador. Enjoy! http://mpiuga.blogspot.com/
Friday, February 18, 2011
Children's Art
I was the designated guest blogger for our Manna Project blog this week, where I wrote about our children's art program. Yes, I'm being lazy and I'm posting it on my personal blog as well. I also encourage all of you to check out our Manna Ecuador blog @ http://openhandsdirtyfeet.blogspot.com/. Our children’s art program attendance has nearly tripled since Zoë, Sam, and I took over art class in late August. This is largely due in part by our push to advertise our art program within the library space. The biggest promoter has come in the form of our monthly library parties, where we host a craft hour within the library open to all children who are interested in participating.
Our children’s art program serves as a creative outlet for the children that frequent our library, and has quickly become one of my favorite courses that we run here in Ecuador. As the Ecuadorian school system seems to lack the fundamental teachings o
f creative thinking, I deem this program extremely important. And let’s be honest, it’s fun to spark the artistic bug in children which often times results in them getting paint and glue all over themselves.
As well as increasing creative thinking, another goal of our art program is to increase cultural awareness through focusing on art projects from around the world. Each art class is preceded by a brief charla on the cultural region, art, or ethnic group that we have chosen to focus on. Thus far we have focused on Native American art, where we did numerous projects including the constructing of tipis, Asian art where we made origami frogs, they could actually hop, Middle Eastern art where we made pyramids out of caramel, which later melted in the sun, bummer, and our current focus of South American art, where we are emulating art projects from famous South American artists.
Our children’s art program serves as a learning tool, a vehicle which inspires creativity, and a fun class that creates a light atmosphere for children from different barrios (neighborhoods, which has a much different connotation here than in the states)to interact and enjoy each others company.
Our children’s art program serves as a creative outlet for the children that frequent our library, and has quickly become one of my favorite courses that we run here in Ecuador. As the Ecuadorian school system seems to lack the fundamental teachings o
f creative thinking, I deem this program extremely important. And let’s be honest, it’s fun to spark the artistic bug in children which often times results in them getting paint and glue all over themselves.As well as increasing creative thinking, another goal of our art program is to increase cultural awareness through focusing on art projects from around the world. Each art class is preceded by a brief charla on the cultural region, art, or ethnic group that we have chosen to focus on. Thus far we have focused on Native American art, where we did numerous projects including the constructing of tipis, Asian art where we made origami frogs, they could actually hop, Middle Eastern art where we made pyramids out of caramel, which later melted in the sun, bummer, and our current focus of South American art, where we are emulating art projects from famous South American artists.
Our children’s art program serves as a learning tool, a vehicle which inspires creativity, and a fun class that creates a light atmosphere for children from different barrios (neighborhoods, which has a much different connotation here than in the states)to interact and enjoy each others company.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Program Updates
Pre-game in the Rain for the Super BowlI'm going to start off my saying GO PACK GO! The MPI crew all headed into Quito, where we watched the Super Bowl at an Irish pub. Couldn't ask for a better outcome, and yes I will be ranting about my team for the year to come. It has also inspired me to (when I start receiving some money for my diligant work) allocate money towards a Super Bowl fund, as I forsee us going again in the near future.
On another note I Hope all is well in the states, but I must say I'm excited to not be suffering the bite of Jack Frost. However, I do hope you all stay safe and warm. And hey, look at the bright side, you get to go sledding...and all I get to do is go to the beach for Carnaval in a few weeks :).
Alright, so program updates. As I believe I have mentioned, we have changed our work week to Tuesday-Saturday, instead of the typical Monday-Friday. The idea was to improve attendance for our English classes, as more people have Saturday mornings available. With the Saturday switch Hannah and I also decided to change our Cooking Class from Fridays to Saturdays in hopes of similar results. It worked, awesome!
Cooking Class
Cooking class has a tremendous amount of promise. The idea is to introduce affordable, nutritious meals with readily available ingredients (the diversity of produce in Ecuador is astounding but many families don't take advantage of this) to the Ecuadorian diet. There meals tend to be universal in composition, lacking diversity, and are rice heavy with few vegetables and a small portion of meat. To put things into prospective, 45% of Ecuadorian children are classified as malnurished. This is due to a lack of monetary means, the lack of access to food in rural areas, and the lack of knowledge. We aim to improve the latter of the three.
Before the switch to a Saturday class, it was difficult for community members to attend our cooking class. We now have a steadily following of women, and a few of their daughters, not to mention my favorite six year old (besides my niece),Wendy, who follows me up to the kitchen area every Saturday to participate.
Because of the Saturday switch our class has improved 10 fold, and we are very excited to see what the future brings, and hope that our class participants share the recipes we use throughout the community.
Agriculture
Brock and I are the Program Directors of our agriculture program. We work closely with a small educational and organic farming organization, Anamisi. Because of Anamisis's organic component, they take on an increasingly important role in the agriculture sector of Ecuador. Many Ecuadorian household and farmers use pesticides in their gardens. Unlike the U.S., Ecuador has no regulations pesticides. This has transformed much of Ecuador's inherently nutrient rich, fertile soil into soil that is unsuitable to maintain a farm or garden.
We help Anamisi by promoting their business and by working with them in their garden every Friday morning. Due to their lack of manpower (they only have two employees) the help of Brock and I is much appreciated and frees up a substantial amount of time for them to pursue other tasks.
We also work with a school/orphange in Rumiloma, the town in which our centro is located. We have a collaborative nutrition/agriculture program with the sixth grade class. This was a program that was implemented last year, but has grown immensly since our arrival.
Brock and I were giving a generous plot of land next to the school's classrooms to start a garden. We have since built 6 garden beds and a fence and gate to surround the garden. This was implemented to keep the children out because of their tendancy to walk on and destroy anything and everything we planted in the garden.
We currently have onions, tomate de arbol trees, both hot pepper and green pepper plants, corn, carrots, lettuce, and radishes. We work in the garden with the kids every Friday, which is accompanied by a brief charla (talk) which teaches them the importance of an organic garden and numerous gardening techniques. This week we introduced the process of photosynthesis, which turned out to be beneficial for me as well!
And as far as how I am down here, things are going extremely well. I gave up a few important things in my life by taking this opportunity, but in no way, shape, or form do I regret it. I'm still enjoying my time down here and the work that I am doing. I couldn't ask for a better opportunity and couldn't be more grateful for doing something that I love, for having the opportunity to experience another culture and another part of the world, and being able to share it with 8 newly found friends and co-workers.
On another note I Hope all is well in the states, but I must say I'm excited to not be suffering the bite of Jack Frost. However, I do hope you all stay safe and warm. And hey, look at the bright side, you get to go sledding...and all I get to do is go to the beach for Carnaval in a few weeks :).
Alright, so program updates. As I believe I have mentioned, we have changed our work week to Tuesday-Saturday, instead of the typical Monday-Friday. The idea was to improve attendance for our English classes, as more people have Saturday mornings available. With the Saturday switch Hannah and I also decided to change our Cooking Class from Fridays to Saturdays in hopes of similar results. It worked, awesome!
Cooking Class
Cooking class has a tremendous amount of promise. The idea is to introduce affordable, nutritious meals with readily available ingredients (the diversity of produce in Ecuador is astounding but many families don't take advantage of this) to the Ecuadorian diet. There meals tend to be universal in composition, lacking diversity, and are rice heavy with few vegetables and a small portion of meat. To put things into prospective, 45% of Ecuadorian children are classified as malnurished. This is due to a lack of monetary means, the lack of access to food in rural areas, and the lack of knowledge. We aim to improve the latter of the three.
Before the switch to a Saturday class, it was difficult for community members to attend our cooking class. We now have a steadily following of women, and a few of their daughters, not to mention my favorite six year old (besides my niece),Wendy, who follows me up to the kitchen area every Saturday to participate.
Because of the Saturday switch our class has improved 10 fold, and we are very excited to see what the future brings, and hope that our class participants share the recipes we use throughout the community.
Agriculture
Brock and I are the Program Directors of our agriculture program. We work closely with a small educational and organic farming organization, Anamisi. Because of Anamisis's organic component, they take on an increasingly important role in the agriculture sector of Ecuador. Many Ecuadorian household and farmers use pesticides in their gardens. Unlike the U.S., Ecuador has no regulations pesticides. This has transformed much of Ecuador's inherently nutrient rich, fertile soil into soil that is unsuitable to maintain a farm or garden.
We help Anamisi by promoting their business and by working with them in their garden every Friday morning. Due to their lack of manpower (they only have two employees) the help of Brock and I is much appreciated and frees up a substantial amount of time for them to pursue other tasks.
We also work with a school/orphange in Rumiloma, the town in which our centro is located. We have a collaborative nutrition/agriculture program with the sixth grade class. This was a program that was implemented last year, but has grown immensly since our arrival.
Brock and I were giving a generous plot of land next to the school's classrooms to start a garden. We have since built 6 garden beds and a fence and gate to surround the garden. This was implemented to keep the children out because of their tendancy to walk on and destroy anything and everything we planted in the garden.
We currently have onions, tomate de arbol trees, both hot pepper and green pepper plants, corn, carrots, lettuce, and radishes. We work in the garden with the kids every Friday, which is accompanied by a brief charla (talk) which teaches them the importance of an organic garden and numerous gardening techniques. This week we introduced the process of photosynthesis, which turned out to be beneficial for me as well!
And as far as how I am down here, things are going extremely well. I gave up a few important things in my life by taking this opportunity, but in no way, shape, or form do I regret it. I'm still enjoying my time down here and the work that I am doing. I couldn't ask for a better opportunity and couldn't be more grateful for doing something that I love, for having the opportunity to experience another culture and another part of the world, and being able to share it with 8 newly found friends and co-workers.
Friday, January 28, 2011
Saturday (Jan 22nd) marked the day of our community celebration in the plaza de Rumiloma just a few blocks from our centro. This is a tradition started by last year's PD's in order to promote our library space and programs after a three weeks hiatus in which most us went back to the states for Christmas.
Through the hard work of Jack Butler (he organized the event) and the rest of us who diligently promoted throughout Rumiloma, we had anywhere between 150-200 people stop by, most of which children. We organized games such as tug-o-war, a water balloon toss (that yours truly put together), and a three legged race. We also had a face painting station and a blow up bouncy house, both were huge hits with the children. As you can see from pictures that accompany this blog post, I opted to get my face painted. What I thought was going to be a tiger turned into the hybrid of a tiger with an off centered mouth, a lion, and a butterfly. Oh, did I mention the DJ who played reggae tone to which I tried to learn how to salsa. Unfortunately it was to no avail.
On another note, all three Manna Project sites decided to participate in a 30 hour fast in order to raise awareness of world hunger. It is also proving ot be a valuable tool for me to reflect upon the sturggles of the 1 billion people affected by this. It began yesterday (Jan 27th) at 1, and thusfar has been a mental battle. Yes, I'm grumpy, tired, light headed, and hungry. I could not imagine my life soley based on the effort to find food, or to have had my physical or mental capacity be affected by malnutrition. I have been very blessed, this I know. Here are some links to articles and videos that we all looked at before partaking in the fast. I highly recommend checking them out.
Through the hard work of Jack Butler (he organized the event) and the rest of us who diligently promoted throughout Rumiloma, we had anywhere between 150-200 people stop by, most of which children. We organized games such as tug-o-war, a water balloon toss (that yours truly put together), and a three legged race. We also had a face painting station and a blow up bouncy house, both were huge hits with the children. As you can see from pictures that accompany this blog post, I opted to get my face painted. What I thought was going to be a tiger turned into the hybrid of a tiger with an off centered mouth, a lion, and a butterfly. Oh, did I mention the DJ who played reggae tone to which I tried to learn how to salsa. Unfortunately it was to no avail.
On another note, all three Manna Project sites decided to participate in a 30 hour fast in order to raise awareness of world hunger. It is also proving ot be a valuable tool for me to reflect upon the sturggles of the 1 billion people affected by this. It began yesterday (Jan 27th) at 1, and thusfar has been a mental battle. Yes, I'm grumpy, tired, light headed, and hungry. I could not imagine my life soley based on the effort to find food, or to have had my physical or mental capacity be affected by malnutrition. I have been very blessed, this I know. Here are some links to articles and videos that we all looked at before partaking in the fast. I highly recommend checking them out.
http: //www.30hourfamine.org/images/stories/PDFs/FamineTrivia.pdf
My water balloon toss partner
Jack interviewing tug-o-war participants
Crazy game of duck, duck goose
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Feliz Ano! I hope everyone had a great holiday season. Here in Ecuador we had a 3 week break where all but one of us went back to the states to spend some time with our family and friends over the holidays. I will undoubtedly miss being home to hang out with my 6 year old niece, my brothers, my friends, and yes, even my parents. However, I am excited for my next 7 months in the beautiful country (and warm might I add, I believe it is 8 degrees at home right now as opposed to 80 here) of Ecuador that I now call home.
I was unsure of how I would adjust after such a long time in the states. I was actually a bit nervous. I stepped off of the plane and realized my elevation of 9,300 feet due to my shortness of breath, haggled for a price of a cab (I won), opened the door to my house where I was greeted by my fellow co-workers (whom have now become close friends), and felt at home.
I am now officially back into the swing of things. During our 3 work days of last week we pr
omoted the start of our new classes and the reopening of our library. Tuesday marked the first day of our library being open since we left for the states on December 15th. I must say I was excited to see the kids and play uncopious amounts of Uno, which is really saying something. We also were benefactors of a game drive conducted by Zoe’s uncle. We were in dire need of some new games for our library. For this generous donation, we are all extremely grateful.
Well that’s it for now. Hope all is well. Chow.
Luke
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Program Update
I realize that once again I have had a vast lag time between my posts, and once again I truly apologize. I have come to the fruition that I have neglected to talk about the strides we have made in my current programs. Here is an update on two of my current programs, micro finance and children’s art.
MICRO FINANCE
We have had several goals for the past two quarters. The first was to legitimize the micro finance program. I say legitimize because it wasn’t a program that necessarily met every week due to the fact that it is autonomous by nature and the program didn’t have the weekly obligation of planning for classes. The second was to build a relationship with our partner organization Esperanza y Progreso del Valle, better known by the PD’s as EPV (a small micro lending organization). And third, to build off of last year’s PD’s work in hopes of developing a small business class.
Brock, Jack, and I have worked diligently in order to realize the goals we had set before us. We now meet every Tuesday mooring at 9am to plan our business class, yes we have gotten this off of the ground as well, and to look for ways to improve our partner organization, EPV. With the help of last year’s PD’s we have developed a 6 week micro emprezas class (small business class) in cooperation with EPV. The guiding principal behind this class is to expose current and aspiring business owners to basic business practices. EPV’s responsibility for the class is to talk about their lending processes in order to educate individuals on the benefits and protocol of taking out loans. By default, this class has strengthened our relationship with EPV. Brock, Jack, and I have each shadowed their organization in hopes of better understanding day to day operations. Jack, the only Spanish speaker out of the micro finance group, sits in on board meetings in order to add outside input. Although this program got off to a slow start, we have now been progressively moving towards establishing this as one of our strongest programs.
CHILDREN'S ART
You may ask yourself what am I even doing teaching this class? My artistic abilities are subpar, or to be more accurate, nonexistent. Well, because I wanted to. I’m happy that I did, it is my only program in which I interact with the children of the communities we serve (except for our public lending library in which I work 2 days a week, but it is not technically my program).
Sam, Zoe, and I work on this program together. I’m the constant “profe” attending class every Friday at 4pm, while Sam and Zoe alternate weeks. In all honesty, it has given me a great appreciation for art and has been an extremely enjoyable experience thus far. Creative thinking seems to be lacking in the Ecuadorian school system. Because of this I find it very important to provide an art class for the communities that we serve. When giving the opportunity and encouragement their creative imaginations are unleashed.
We decided to structure the class to incorporate art from around the world. We started off with the United States, where we built Native American tipis and made corn out of toilet paper rolls and gum balls. We are currently focusing on Asian art. Thus far we have made Chinese lanterns and constructed a Japanese garden using construction paper and egg cartons. Accompanied by each art project is a brief lesson describing their culture importance and relevance. This makes the class fun, creative, and educational. It's a triple threat :)
Happy Holidays everyone!
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Culture SHOCK!
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I´ll start off by saying I know the pictures of the new house and Sanquolqui market are unrelated, I just wanted to share them with you all.
What seemed to be a seemingly normal, well to do week, ended as one of the craziest weeks in my 20+ year existence. As I’m sure many of you know we were in the midst of a governmental overthrow. Quite the shock, it’s something you don’t experience within the U.S., and on top of this our fearless leader (our boss and go to persona within Ecuador) was in Nashville, TN attending a conference.
We were first caught wind of this early Thursday morning when one of our partner organizations got in contact with us via my phone (which Sam answered) telling us not to leave the confines of our house. Confused by this, we sought more information. The initial report is that the police were on strike i.e. no police force in Quito and the surrounding valley (where we live). Because of this and being inhertinley Gringo (i.e. targeted because the belief is we have more money), it was presumably unsafe
for us to leave our house. This proved true when we found out that both of the local grocery stores (just down the road from us) were looted and 3 banks in Quito were robbed before noon.
Later that evening we contacted some friends who informed us of the complexity of the situation partaking around us. I’ll explain the situation as best I can, although I undoubtedly cannot truly understand or portray the intricacy and governmental turmoil this country has struggled with for years. It in fact was not just a police strike but a political move inspired by the opposing political party. This political party misinformed the police on a new policy regarding the benefits and compensation of the police force. They convinced the police department that they were receiving pay cuts and their benefits were being eliminated. However this was not the case, as t
he president, Rafael Correa, tried to explain in a speech to the police. The police berated the president with words, bottles, and tear gas. Due to the injuries received during his speech, the president was forced to receive medical care at a hospital in Quito. It was here that the police kidnapped the Ecuadorian president in hopes of forcing him to sign a new agreement with the police. His savoir came in the form of the military. The military was forced into a shootout with the police, which resulted in two dead officers and the freeing of the president.
I wasn’t quite sure how to feel while all of this was taking place. I’ve never been in such a precarious, unsettling situation, especially one in which I truly did not understand. Was the overthrow going to succeed? Were we going to have to be evacuated? Were looters going to try and rob our house because the police force were on strike? (although Brock and I had adrenaline pumping through our veins, a sledgehammer, and a large pick axe, all in all a pretty good combination to deter intruders).
By the next day, Friday, many things seemed to be back to normal. Some of the police force had returned to work, the city seem
ed to be unscathed and unaware of the previous day’s events, and we were allowed to walk outside of our doors again. However, we were required to stay in the surrounding Sanquolqui area (the town in which we live).
I guess the
good news was that we inherited a 4 day weekend and I acquired an authentic 
Ecuadorian soccer jersey and a cross necklace by two random people at a bar in Sanquolqui. Apparently they aren’t used to seeing Gringos in the area, for most Gringos are tourists and frequent the Mariscal (gringolandia) in Quito. Oh, and work is going well. Talks of work just happened to be trumped by the events of the week. If you would like more information about the police riot in Ecuador check out this article:
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/09/30/ecuador.violence.archive/index.html?iref=allsearch
Until next time,
Luke
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