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 of 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.

Program Updates

Pre-game in the Rain for the Super Bowl

I'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.