Dinner at Jenni's

This week's guest blog comes from Nicole, who reflects on a recent visit to a community member's home for dinner:

All of us here in Ecuador are quickly learning that nothing is ever going to be quite

as it seems, exactly as you plan, or as any preconceived ideas predict. Sometimes

this unpredictability turns out to be something awesome, and sometimes not

so awesome (stay tuned for an example of the former), but it’s teaching all of us

patience. And to just go with the flow.

This past Sunday we were all asked to dinner by Jenni, a lady whose family attends

classes at our Centro. Everyone was really up for going, but given the fact that it

was our day “off” and we also wanted and needed some down time, we hoped and

planned on going for 2 hours, no más. We left our house a little after 4 to meet them

in Amaguaña and take a camioñeta (new favorite form of transportation) to their

house where we met the family, dogs, ducks, and guinea pigs that may or may not

have been the ones they ate for dinner later.

The visit then really kicked off with what turned out to be a two and a half hour

walk around Amaguaña – one of the prettiest suburbs of Quito I’ve seen so far.

We spent the evening meeting even more extended family as we traipsed through

their farms and gardens, drank fresh spring water, took lots of pictures, and spoke

lots of Spanish. By the end of our impromptu tour, we were all convinced that

the Manna house should relocate to Amaguaña (still working on the logistics of

this!). My favorite part of the evening was meeting Jenni’s grandmother and 100-

year old grandfather – both very Quechua. They were so welcoming to a large

group of Gringos taking over their kitchen and spoke to us in Quechua, which I had

never heard before save for a few words and phrases that have been passed down

into modern Ecuadorian Spanish. Being able to walk around the town with local

residents and hear stories about the history of Amaguaña, who the people are, and

how things have changed, among other stories, definitely made this tour the best of

any I’ve been on so far.

We returned to the house and finally sat down to dinner at 7. In no time, our “2 hour

visit” turned into a 5-hour experience, but, despite any amount of yawns, one that

none of us would have traded for a little r&r.

Guinea pig... its what's for dinner

Corn and Tourism

Now those are two things worth celebrating. These past two weeks have been a big deal for Sangolqui and the surrounding towns in the valley as they have been holding various events to celebrate their annual festival of Maíz y Turismo. We Program Directors have had the opportunity to collaborate with the Ecuadorian Red Cross during some of these events. We are lucky enough to live right next to the Monumento de Rumiñahui, a large statue of the famous Incan warrior for which our district is named. The festival’s parade route ended right in front of the monument, and a majority of the festival’s events happened just a short walk away from the Manna house.

Last Saturday’s parade was a bigger event than any of us had expected, with roads closed off all around the monument and thousands of people crowding the streets (this made getting to the Centro a difficult task). During the event, I had the pleasure of volunteering in the Red Cross tent where I was taught how to give an IV… and then given the opportunity to practice on a fellow volunteer. Luckily for everyone involved, I was never called upon to use my newfound skill. The parade lasted hours, with a continuous flow of musicians, indigenous dancers, Sangolqui beauty queens, and small children dressed like corn. Since people from all over the district showed up for the parade, we had an awesome opportunity to mingle with community members and spread the word about Manna Project.

This weekend’s Corrida de Toros (bullfight) was another story altogether. Traditional bullfights in Spain involve trained Matadors and skilled horsemen collaborating to kill a bull. There is a lot of controversy over the sport, and in some parts of the world it is prohibited to kill the bull in front of the crowd. Sangolqui’s toros give the bulls a chance to fight back. A few days before the Corrida a makeshift ring and stands are constructed out of wood and… what appears to be socks, to hold the bull, the participants, and hundreds of spectators. Unarmed, untrained Ecuadorian men (and once in a great while women) enter the ring with the bull to try their hand as amateur bullfighters, or just for the thrill of being close to such a powerful animal. Participants antagonize the bull and then run terrified for the stands when the bull starts to chase them. Props to our very own Nicole Hamilton and our friend Evo Vaca for being the only mujeres to enter the ring this year. Although it is very entertaining to watch, people do get badly injured during the festival. Needless to say, volunteering with the Red Cross this weekend was a very different experience than helping out during the parade. Our future health care professional Emily was thrilled at the chance to help the injured toreros, and has spent the last three days helping out in the tent. I on the other hand saw enough the first day and have officially retired as a Red Cross volunteer.

Nicole and I volunteering in the Red Cross tent

Some very happy corn

View of the backside of the stands for the bulls

Los toros de Sangolqui

Grassroots Advertising, Inscriptions, and “¡Tu Lenguaje!”

The academic year is fast approaching for MPI Ecuador. I do not mean that any of the recent college graduates that make up the new team of program directors will be enrolling for classes, however. Instead, all of us will soon be assuming the role of teacher, a frightening and ironic thought to any of us who have ever been sent out of class for being disruptive but colluded with other disruptive classmates to avoid punishment from the teacher (definitely not me). Collectively, we will be doing our best to impart our gringo accents to our English students, inspire creativity in young art students, demonstrate healthy cooking techniques to adults, and motivate women from the Chillos Valley to master Zumba routines in women’s exercise classes. But before the fun can begin, a certain amount of work is required of the teachers-to-be, and this work is also the subject of this week’s blog. In the lead-up to classes, which begin on September 13^th, the new team of program directors has been walking the streets of the Chillos Valley making MPI’s presence known and advertising our fall classes. In the process we’ve had our share of laughs, shrugs, and reasons for optimism.

Even the best ideas require marketing before they catch on. At MPI Ecuador we think that the classes we offer are at least “very important” for the communities we serve— so it’s important that we find ways to advertise what we offer. However, our options are limited by the lack of widespread Internet access in the communities we serve. No matter. This week each program director has taken part in what in reality may be the best form of advertising for us: approaching strangers on the street and explaining to them about Manna Project and the classes we offer. To maximize our reach, we divvyed up all of the different municipalities that Manna Project serves in the Chillos Valley, and with flyers in hand, sent a pair of PDs to each community to advertise our English, cooking and nutrition, children’s art, and women’s exercise classes.

The PDs already take buses to our Centro in Rumiloma as well as everywhere else we go, and this proved to be a valuable platform for reaching large numbers of people. My compadre Charlie and I took turns standing at the front of the buses speaking loudly about MPI and our classes, while the other passed out flyers to the people seated.

In San Pedro, a smaller and less dense municipality in between Rumiloma and Sangolquí, we targeted families with children as we walked around, introducing ourselves as volunteers from a nonprofit organization, and briefly describing MPI’s classes and services. Often our approaches were met initially with confusion or suspicion, but we were encouraged that most people appeared piqued afterward, and almost everybody accepted our flyers. Once, after chatting with a group of people gathered around a grill on a street corner about their interest in our English classes, a woman responded that “No entendí tu lenguaje.” We recovered from her not understanding our Spanish by countering, “So now you know that we can definitely speak English.” Like the other program directors, Charlie and I talked to many people during our walk-around, and gained permission from several storeowners to leave information in windows. We ended our advertising campaign in good spirits, discussing how the people we were recruiting would probably be taking the same bus to the Centro that we do.

Making the rounds in the communities we serve is important for more reasons than simply increasing participation in our programs. By talking to people and gauging their reactions, the experience was both an exercise in communication with the very people we are trying to serve, and a reassurance to these people that our intentions are sincere. My experiences talking to strangers and being pushed out of my comfort zone this week gave me a heightened sense of purpose and enthusiasm for our work, and I believe the rest of the team shared this experience. Speaking on behalf of all the current team of program directors, I am excited that our fall class offerings will soon begin and hope to see in the Centro with us some of the same faces from the streets that we walked this week.

Games Games Games

Hey everyone, for this week’s guest blog I would like to introduce an important member of our library Daniel Ajoy, an Ecuadorian volunteer who comes to the centro regularly to play games with the niños. Daniel brings a variety of games that teach the kids valuable lessons and also give them a break from the standard choices at the library. The kids really enjoy playing with him, and always ask for him when he isn't around. Here are a few words from Daniel himself about what he does:

Hi, my name is Daniel Ajoy and I go to the Manna library at Rumiloma as often as other obligations allow. I enjoy very much playing and teaching board games to the kids there, because I remember the times when I was bored at home when I was young, as these kids are, and I didn't know how to use the game pieces I had, to play with my brother and sister.

The library has a few board games the kids are free to play with. I imagine that all of the games were donated with all of their components complete. They are in shelves accessible even to the younger kids, but through the months of use and exploration, many of them have lost pieces or have broken ones. From what I've seen, the most resilient games are the ever popular Uno, and Othello, because the board is sturdy and the pieces are identical and abundant, so if some of them get lost the game is still playable.

I usually go with a bag that contains:

· two Piecepacks, which are generic sets of pieces: numbered tiles, numbered coins, dice, and pawns.

· two bags of many nice-looking glass beads

· one bag of buttons in four colors

· a white set of Dominoes

· a deck of regular cards

With the pawns we have been able to play a few games of Candyland, changing the rules a bit so that it's not just a matter of taking a color card from the top of your stack and moving you pawn to that spot in the track through the Land of Candy, but having each kid manage a hand of three color cards, and make decisions about which card to play next. This rule change was suggested by Tom Vasel in this video.

With the glass beads we have played Breakthrough on the Chess tables, I think it is a very nice simple game to play with the kids, but the problem is that it is just for two players. I'm trying to find games for more players that use the Chess tables and we have tried Pente and Halma with the colored buttons. The kids have enjoyed both. Also with simple buttons, glass beads and pawns, we have played other multi-player games like: Veleno (which we call "Help your friend"), Poison Pot, Pandora's box and Yavalath. For those a simple printable board was needed.

We have a nice set of thick black Dominoes... but it lacks three pieces. I realized that the incomplete black set of Dominoes had enough pieces to play an adaptation of Raj, we use those pieces and a deck of regular playing cards, and each player gets all the 13 cards of a suite, so with one deck up to 4 players can participate. Playing cards are relatively cheap here, and I'm still trying to find simple, yet novel games to play with them. We have played Army Ants, Sequence, with a printable board; and Eleusis, but in its Express version. I think kids would benefit from playing more Eleusis (which I presented to them as "Nature against Scientists") but I suspect they don't appreciate my representing Nature every time, and they don't yet have a sense of what good rules are, to play as Nature themselves affectively. However, their favorite card game is Egyptian Rat Slap.

With the Piecepack tiles we have explored games like Hey, That's my Fish!, Penguin and The Secret Door. With the Piecepack dice we have played: Can't Stop and Pickomino (which they usually just call Worms). And lately we have tried more sophisticated adaptations like: Way of the Dragon, Forbidden Island, Royal Racers and Cloud 9 (which we call "7 Heaven" and we assemble with Piecepack components, a Dominoes set to indicate "cloud points", and origami dice)

The idea of using origami dice came from the desire of playing fun games with what we have at hand, paper for example. We use origami dice to play Sushizock im Gockelwok, and regular notebooks and pencils to play Dots and Boxes which in Ecuador is called "Galleta" and Sprouts. I still want to show them how to play Racetrack with more than two players, but that looks like an all-boys game, so I'll wait for the right opportunity.

It would be nice to have generic sets of Dominoes, dice, cards and color tokens at the library, so that kids can play the games rules we learn on their own.

Thank you Daniel! The PDs and the niños genuinely appreciate your help!

Daniel playing with some of the library regulars

Montañita

I Y Montañita

This past weekend we PDs had four days off for a holiday, 10 de agosto, the day on which Ecuador first declared its independence from Spain. Although actual independence wasn’t achieved until much later, the day is very important in Ecuadorian history, especially for Quito. Everyone had time off for the holiday and like almost everyone else in the city, we took advantage of the long weekend to take a trip to the coast. Although Ecuador is a very small country, it takes a long time to navigate through the sierra to get the beach. We have heard a lot of horror stories about long bus rides through the mountains, so we were all a little apprehensive about how to get there. After a lot of deliberation we opted to fly to Guayaquil, then take the three hour bus ride to Montañita, a small but lively beach town that was highly recommended to us by former PDs and locals alike. At 5am on Friday we grabbed our bags and piled into the back of a camioneta (pick up truck) for the 40-minute ride to the airport in Quito. Due to flight issues and an overcrowded bus terminal it ended up taking us a lot longer to get there than planned, but we passed the time with lots of card games and cheap food.

The town was like nothing I have ever experienced. It is full of surfers, international travelers, wandering craftsman, expats, and Ecuadorians looking to have a good time. We stayed in a really neat hostel right in the center of town, which was awesome until it was time to go to sleep. The music and celebrations finally started to wind down around 6am and which point we could finally catch a few hours of shut-eye under our mosquito nets. By the end of our trip we were scraping our change together to buy choclo con queso (grilled corn with pesto sauce, mayo, and cheese) and most of us were indebted to the bank of Emily. We are quickly learning how to make a little money go a long way. Unfortunately we didn’t see the sun once during our trip (though some of us still managed to get sunburned). We did however play in monstrous waves, dance in the streets, buy lots of jewelry, and get to know each other a lot better.

Emily and I walking to the plane

Nicole and Taylor relaxing on the beach

Surf school