Travelers galore...

After being together for a month, three of the PDs decided to travel to the beach this long weekend (Friday being a holiday because of dia de independencia). The three of them (Zoe, Luke and Becky) left on Thursday night and will not be back with us until Monday morning. It was strange cooking for only six people but the weekend was wonderfully relaxing (and surprisingly quiet). Jackie and Shawn have rejoined us from their travels and Bibi's family will be stopping by for dinner tonight, so once again we're cooking for a full house (12 or so).

I stayed behind this weekend because Ashley, Sam and I had a teen workshop at the Centro on Friday night. There is a big teen's rights movement happening in Ecuador and we are trying to get the young teens from our Centro to get involved and have a say in this movement. It is incredible the work they are doing and rewarding to hang out exclusively with the teenagers from the area even though they try to trick us into watching super inappropriate movies after the workshops.

Angela working with the teens in the Centro.

Fulfilling embarrassing punishments because I lost a game.

We are all eagerly awaiting Bibi's family for dinner. It is exciting to have guests here and many of us have presents that her family has generously agreed to carry with them in their suitcases. (I'm getting my Kindle tonight - finally!). After we all spend some time together tonight Bibi will depart for the jungle with her family and we will have another visitor for the week. Brooke Kingsland will be joining us from Duke University and we cannot wait to work with her. More updates to come soon!

Until Friday...

BesosCiaoCiao

Happy 22nd, Zoë!

This week we had our first birthday of the year! Zoë, the baby of the house, turned 22 on August 9th. Our celebration at La Guardía del Coyote, a Mexican restaurant in San José, featured circular, extremely cheesy enchiladas, foot-long burritos, and a delicious fruit crepe for the birthday girl on the house - for which we were required to provide photo ID verification of her birthday. So much for the surprise aspect. But it was delicious.

Happy birthday, Zoë!

My First Post (part 2)!

¡Saludos a todos! I am terribly excited to be joining Hannah as a new blogger for MPI Ecuador 2010-2011. The only thing that makes our beginnings here bittersweet is saying goodbye to the 2009-2010 PDs. That extraordinary group taught us a great deal during our brief coexistence at MPI Ecuador. I only hope we can make them proud as we take up the mantle of Manna and bid them good luck back in the States with school, new jobs, and loss of access to fresh fruit in Ecuador.

To quickly give interested parties an idea about me, my name is Noel León, I’m from Little Rock, AR, and I graduated in 2009 from Yale University with a degree in psychology. Seeing as Yale does not (yet) have a Manna chapter, I found out about MPI at a global volunteering fair in New York City in February, applied, and thankfully was offered the opportunity to join this fantastic organization down in Ecuador for the coming year. Now that we’ve been here nearly a month (wait, how did that happen?), have all moved into our rooms in the house, and are starting to pick up programs, the Valley outside Quito is really starting to feel like home.

Last week we started our three-week morning curso de vacaciones (summer camp) in conjunction with Fundación Añamisi, hosted at the Manna Library in Rumiloma. We help Christian and Laura from Añamisi as they run the camp three days a week, and we take over for the remaining two. To supplement Christian’s and Laura’s focus on environmental education, English practice, and games, we play more games with the kids and lead group creative arts projects like crafts music, or drama exercises. Friday, 5 PDs and Bibi took our kids on a paseo, or field trip, to the Indigenous Museum in Quito. The task of keeping track of 20 kids ranging in age from 3-14 on buses and the streets of Quito was initially daunting, but a couple of lovely moms accompanied us, and the many older siblings and cousins were a wonderful help in looking after their younger kin.

Organizationally, the great thing about camp is that it gives us an opportunity to introduce ourselves to our community. We are already fully staffing the library each afternoon and meet kids and their parents there, but camp allows us to more proactively engage with community members in anticipation of resuming most of our programs in September. We can show our commitment to this community on the heels of the old PDs’ departure and simultaneously better understand the needs and expectations of those community members who are thus far most involved in and dedicated to Manna’s activities. Judging by our first two weeks in the Valley, I have a great feeling about the year to come.

In sum, the 2010-2011 PDs are officially off the ground and running! Hannah and I will be coming to you with more information each week about goings-on in Ecuador, in addition to a guest blog from one of our seven other new colleagues and friends. If there’s anything you’d like to hear more about, please feel free to contact either one of us via this blog, or email Hannah or me.

Until then, ¡chao!

My First Post!

Hello readers! My name is Hannah Palin and I am one of the people who will be taking over the Manna Project blog this year. (Noel, the other blogger, will introduce herself in the next post.) I just graduated from Vanderbilt University this May with a double major in Spanish & Psychology. I participated in MPI through Vanderbilt’s campus chapter and decided that I would love to take a year off after college and to see another part of the world (especially before applying to grad school, or as I like to call it, big kid school). As of right now the new Program Directors (9 of us in all) are just getting settled into the Manna House and still learning about the organizational and programmatic roles we will be taking on this year. So far we have said goodbye to a few of the “veteran PDs” (NOT old PDs, they don’t like that phrase – just as I am sure I will not at this time next year) while some of them are still co-habitating with us. It has been a good transition, I know many of us were very ready to move into Conocoto after two weeks in Quito.

The first two weeks of our time here in Ecuador were spent in home stays with lovely families chosen for us by Luis, the owner/operator of the Guayasamin Spanish language school. If there is anything that will make you lose faith in your Spanish speaking abilities it is Spanish language school. I am pretty sure my Spanish is regressing as I pass the time attempting to remember whether or not I should use the pluscamperfecto or imperfecto subjuntivo. Is it conocer or saber that I am supposed to use when I am saying that I know something? Thankfully my profesora loved to play Scrabble and we passed the last hour picking Spanish letters out of a green bag. There is a large chance that she made up some vocabulary while we played because I usually had no idea what half the words meant.

Every day after class the 9 of us met with Bibi, our country director, and some of the veteran PDs (almost wrote old PDs). We learned a lot about the programs that we would be taking over and also found that there is a plethora of diverse food in Quito. Every day the PDs would bring in some other exotic food for us to drool over – sushi, burritos, empanadas, salads, etc. In the evenings and on the weekends, we were left to our own devices and managed to find some fun things to do. A few days we went out to lunch/dinner but, the highlight of our time in Quito was a trip to a Liga versus Barcelona game (the two biggest soccer teams in Ecuador). We bartered for our tickets, bought jerseys in bulk and Brock and I were even highlighted in the Quito newspaper (see picture above in Jackie’s post). All in all, a great experience.

This week has been a little more program focused and I am sure that soon I will have amazing updates, especially because we have some more in depth talks with Bibi coming up in the next week. That, and we have summer camp that started this past Monday! Can’t wait to keep you all updated on our adventures. Thanks for reading.

BesosCiaoCiao (As Chet would say)…

Hannah

the beginning after the end

Everyone keeps asking what I'm going to miss most when I go home. After a number of things come into my head - the Andes, public transportation, Magnum bars - nothing strikes me as much as how much I'm going to miss the people I've grown close to. Manna's anthem is 'communities helping communities,' the latter referring to the six communities we work in and the former, and most important to me, the community we worked hard to form amongst the ten of us.

Working in Rumiloma has shaped me in more ways than I can count: I learned how to upkeep an organic garden, how to teach someone to read in a foreign language, what it means to understand and value a culture completely different than my own. Even though I have the utmost confidence for our PD successors, it is indescribably difficult to say goodbye to MPI. What's been equally difficult is watching all of my housemates leave for the states, one by one. And so, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank them individually.

To Mike for his open-mindedness; to Erik for his daily bear hugs; to Haley for her compassion; to Sonia for her contagious humor; to Chet for his quick-wit; to Shawn for her adventurousness; to Sarah for her organizational leadership; to Krysta for her spirit, and last but absolutely not least, to Bibi for her patience, guidance, and unfailing, diplomatic leadership. Thank all of you for helping me feel comfortable in a foreign country, accomplish my personal and professional goals this year, and for helping me grow into who I am leaving Manna and moving into the future.

I also would like to thank all of you you so much for your dedication this year. Without your support, none of what we do would be possible. Since visuals do a much better job at summing up this past year than I ever could, please enjoy my version of 'the year in pictures' followed by the Despedida/Bienvenida slideshow we screened last week to say goodbye to our beloved community members.

A twilight view of our beautiful home city of Quito

All decked out for summer camp field trips

Water balloon toss at our January Celebration


Paola shows off her work during Art class

Bibi reads to Samantha and Ronny


Chester Polson, ladies man through and through

The graduates of the Alimentate Ecuador Nutrition Class


There is nothing I will miss more than family dinners...


Two of our favorite teens, Joseph and Carlos, atop Ilalo

Los Profes de MPI 2009-2010


Trying to keep it together as Bibi speaks at the Despedida


Forever in our hearts, Ecuador

Qué vive los años siguientes (to the years to come),
Jackie