Rules of the Summer Camp (Casa de la Ninez)
8/20/2006: This post was written (by hand) several weeks ago, but I had not had the opportunity to type it up. Some of this information is dated, but it’s still interesting.
It´s probably become apparent that my work at Casa de la Niñez is frustrating and not entirely satisfying. It´s gotten much better after the rough start since we´ve gotten 12 new local volunteers (monitores) and the workshops are organized and have enough materials for all the children to participate. However, I still question what our role is here. We are acting as camp counselors to the kids, doing the same work as the monitores. Undoubtedly it is very valuable for many of these children to receive personal attention from us in the context of playing with others, since at home many of them spend all their time doing chores, looking after younger siblings, etc. It´s frustrating to me, however, that we don´t have the opportunity to teach the workshops we volunteers had done so much preparation for.
Driven by this frustration, I spent some time on the internet last week and found an organization named ChasquiNet (www.chasquinet.org . webpage is in Spanish). They do work in bringing access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) to underserved populations. Some of their projects include setting up telecenters, helping rural communities market their products internationally through the internet, and training teachers throughout Quito how to use technology to help them teach more effectively.
I´m really impressed with ChasquiNet´s philosophy of sustainability. Telecenters all over the world have been struggling to stay afloat, for various reasons. ChasquiNet emphasizes social, political, technical, and financial sustainability when they take on the task of setting up a telecenter, and they´re thorough – taking a year from start to finish. This holistic approach to adding a telecenter to a community means they are more likely to be successful in the long run and be a useful space for the community.
Before I go any further, I should probably explain what a telecenter is. A telecenter is a community space that provides information and communication technology services. It can have everything that an internet café has (internet, fax, phone booths) but in addition provides workshops to teach people how to use these services.
ChasquiNet just got involved in setting up a telecenter in a poor neighborhood in the north of Quito, which is called Colinas del Norte. The social sustainability aspect means that ChasquiNet trains local leaders to set up and run the telecenter, instead of coming in and doing all the work, then leaving (which has happened in many other telecenters that subsequently closed because no one understood why things were set up the way they were and couldn’t manage them effectively). So Marcelo, from ChasquiNet, is giving a workshop every day this week to train the future telecenter operators. He’s starting with the broad theme of “what is a telecenter” and progressing to what specific services and workshops this telecenter will provide, based on what the community needs and wants. I’ve been attending the workshops this whole week, and it’s been really cool to see the concept of this space, the telecenter, begin to coalesce, until by Friday they were discussing the fees they would charge for services to make the telecenter financially sustainable.
The telecenter already has 5 computers that the community bought for its community center 8 years ago, and next Monday they are getting an internet connection. By Thursday the computer cluster is supposed to be fully up and running, with the first workshops on basic computer skills begin given as well. The idea is that these workshops be based around the uses of technology (e.g. a communication workshop which teaches how to set up and check email) rather than being software-driven (e.g. how to use Word). I’m going to be splitting my time between the telecenter and Casa de la Niñez starting next week. When I work at the telecenter I’m going to be helping teach people how to use computers & the internet. I’m really excited about this work, which wil give me the opportunity to both observe the creation and growth of a telecenter from the very start, and also to work directly with teaching people how to use technology.
Update (8/20/06): I’ve actually switched over from working at the telecenter in Colinas del Norte to working at the ChasquiNet office. I’m doing research online to add resources to the Resource Center of the Latin American & Caribbean Telecenter Network, and also helping translate documents from Spanish into English.
Categories: Ecuador · organizations · technology
I love riding the trolley (especially when I can get a seat). Quito’s public transportation system is excellent. It costs 25 cents for however long you want to stay on, and the trolley buses are fairly clean. They come every few minutes (sometimes they are litterally 30 seconds apart, because so many people ride the trolley).
Just about everyone rides the trolley – hip youth in torn jeans with headphones, mothers carrying infants (often breastfeeding them in public), men and women hunched over with age for whom people vacate seats, beggars, the blind, businessmen in suits, pickpockets. Everyone rides the trolley. It’s probably the only place where peopel fo every ethnicity and socioeconomic background rub sholders.
It’s impossible to get a seat usually, even though the trolley comes so frequently. During peak commute hours everyone is jammed together so that there problems with doors closing on people, and you have to watch your bags carefullly to avoid being the victim of pickpocketing.
During my commutes to and from work, I enjoy observing my fellow passengers and how they interact. It’s interesting enough even to make up for having to stand for 40 minutes and hang on to avoid being thrown to the ground by the starts and stops of the trolley.
It used to be that seeing a gaggle of young kids running around, or a little girl clutching her mother’s skirt and peeking around it timidly evoked an “aww” reaction and unadulterated pleasure. Now that I’ve been working in the shelter and walk past children begging or peddling goods on the street, that reaction is tempered with sadness at this vision of the next generation of poverty.
Most of the kids I’ve talked to have many siblings, sometimes more than 7. Not infrequently, when asked about their siblings they mention that they used to have more, but some have died.
With so many children, there isn’t enough parental attention to go around. Older siblings care for younger ones, and they all quickly learn to fend for themselves and amuse themselves. Kids here are strongly independent and unafraid to venture out on their own, which is strongly shaped by the fact that it is nearly universal among poorer families to send children out to work on their own (shining shoes, selling gum) when they’re not in school (and sometimes they are pulled out of school when the family doesn’t have enough money and needs the income from their children). All of this contributes to the difficulty we have with keeping groups together and paying attention to an activity.
Mario, an educador (educator) at Casa de la Ninez, commented that there is a culturally instilled desire to have many children, in part because of the indigenous farming culture (many of the children we work and their families are immigrants from rural Ecuador) and in part because of machismo - having many children proves the man’s virility.
Having little, kids are always on the lookout for extra things – an extra orange at snack, an extra sheet of paper when we’re drawing. There are two main tactics for getting what they want – deceit and begging. They might hide the orange and say they didn’t get one, and when you aren’t looking crayons disappear. The other method, begging, is the Ecuadorian counterpart to American children’s whining. There is a certain tone of voice they take on, which they use to beg to go to the bathroom when you’ve told them to wait, or to lend them money (which is strictly against the rules of Casa de la Ninez). It’s the same tone of voice they use to beg for money in the plazas. It’s just as grating as listening to a kid whine, but whereas whining stems from a sense of entitlement, begging comes out of a hope for getting something you don’t deserve (I’m ignoring the ethical arguments regarding wealth distribution for the moment).
Working with Ecuadorian children has been frustrating because of their nonchalance towards authority and deceitful tendencies, and the omnipresent begging. At the same time, sometimes I get to see children sharing, or an older sibling anxiously looking for a younger one after camp and then wrapping their arm aroudn them and launching into an animated, private conversation. Work is quite the mixed bag.
Life without the internet and not living in the shelter means I have a lot of time after work to spend in other ways. I´ve gone with DeAnna to Quito´s Vivarium (reptile & amphibian house), where we saw many cool snakes, iguanas, taods, and the like, many of them from the Amazon. (We read about their conservation status, breeding habits, etc. in Spanish – no small feat). We also went to the World Press Photo 2006 exhibit in Quito´s Centro Cultural, which was very powerful and thought-provoking. It is a set of photos which depict major events of the year – photojournalism. (highly recommended – Google it, the exhibit is online as well).
Since we´ve set up a rotating schedule to attend the tedious staff meetings, I have a lot of time to do something I never get a chance to do normally – sit down and read a book. As Ally said, you could pick up a whole new topic here with the amount of down time we have. That is, if you can find books on the subject and are willing to fork out the plata (literally, silver; slang for money). Books here are prohibitively expenisive – more on this topic later.
Anyway, my solution to this quandary of so much time coupled with expensive books has been to borrow two, and buy one. I´m therefore currently reading four books (I brought one as well):
As if 4 books aren’t enough, I’m thinking of buying a 5th one when we go into Mariscal (touristy district) tomorrow for our weekly VILA dinner. There’s a used bookstore there which mainly carries books in English. I like to have many options because I only want to read certain books when I’m in specific moods (Guns, Germs, and Steel is the hardest – I have to feel very studious and disciplined, like I’m in school, but I do enjoy it when I get into it).
Categories: Ecuador · tasty reading
Half of us volunteers are staying with a host family in the north of Quito for the first month while the other half stays in the shelter; then we´ll swap.
I’m staying with a host family first. It felt good to settle in once we’d made the decision of who was staying where. It´s rough living out of a bag – I don´t know how backpackers do it. You find yourself constantly weighing your desire for an object against teh effort fo digging it out and putting it back under mountains of other things (presuming you know exactly where it is and don´t have to do some hunting in addition). I´m glad I got put with a host family first. It´s nice to wake up in the morning to food on the table, and come home at night to hot food as well (in the shelter, we cook for ourselves, which wouldn´t be so bad if the shelter staff weren´t so delinquent in finding the pots and pans. they did get the microwave within the first few days, and the burner after a week, but the pots are still eluding them, apparently. I hear the volunteers at the shelter have been subsisting off guacamole and chips, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.)
My host family is very gracious and insists on helping me do everything, getting me drinks and taking away my dishes though I protest that I can do it myself. My host mom is especially bad about this. For example, I always make my bed before I leave for work in teh morning, and I come back at night to find taht it has been remade. Every day, without fail. No matter how well I made it. The closest I´ve come to benig able to help out has been the one night I was allowed to set the table. However, I hear my situation is not the most outrageous, as DeAnna´s host family won´t let her get up to get her own spoon.
My host dad, Cristián, is very animated and has a great sense of humor. He never misses an opportunity to teast his wife and kids, and I´m not exempted.
My host brother, also Cristián, is studying medicine (he´s my age- their education system is slightly different here). We´ve had a couple cool conversations about medicine (I´m very interested in biology and the field of medicine, though I don´t intend to pursue it as a vocation) and about languages and traveling. He hasn´t been aroudn much, though, becuase he´s studying for finals (year-long cumulative: ow!). Hopefully he´ll be aroudn more when he gets out for the summer.
I have two host sisters, Ana and María Belén (here, most people have 2 first names, and they can go by the first, second, both together, or different ones at differnet times, according to their preference=. Ana is 20 and majoring in fashion, and Belén is 13 and also quite interested in clothing. Belén likes to ask my opinion on various outfits and models, which puts me completely out fo my element. Maybe we´ll find other common interests to talk about.
Meals with my host family have not been so different from what you find in America. We´ve had salads, pasta, lasagna, grilled meat, and soups. There´s always a soup with every meal (more often cream-based than not), which are hearty and filling (I love soup). These are more traditional Ecuadorian recipes, and they´re always delicious. My favorite part of meals, though, is the fresh squeezed juice (lemonade, orange juice, even guanábana (soursop) once!).
Once major difference from the quintessential American meal is the omnipresence of rice (which I believe is cooked with a smidgen of butter). When my host mom mentioned that some hostees in the past had to adjust to rice being a staple, I laughed and recounted one of my freshman experiences – arriving in teh dining hall to be shocked that rice wasn´t abundantly available with every meal.
Well, I´ve rambled on and on, but the gist fo this post is that my host family is awesome and I´m glad I got put here first while I adjust to life in Quito and working at the shelter.
I got a chance to look at my last post as it is on the page, instead of in the tiny box where I type. Whoa, there are a lot of typos! Appologies for this; the computer I am typing on is a little short on RAM (computer memory) and thus tends to forget some letters I type, and hiccups in displaying what I input fairly frequently. I”ll try to minimize the typos in the future.
Categories: Uncategorized
I´ve finished my first week working at the shelter, Casa de la Ninez. We´re helping to run 2 3-week summer camps, which the shelter decided to do this year because the one the VILA volunteers put on last year was so successful.
It amazes me that I can consistently wake up at 6am. In face, I stragely surface to consciousness half an hour early every morning (which always makes me feel slightly cheated).
My days have settled into a routine – wake up at 6, get ready and eat breakfast, catching the 7:00 bus to the trolley station (I´m living with a host family for the first month – more on that later). After an 8 block walk (uphill all the way, whoo!) I get to work a little before 8. The next 6 hours are filled with hundreds of children running aroudn in various states of chaos (more on this later too). The camp is supposed to end at 12:30, more or less, but we´ve always gotten out late – around 1:30 at times. Some of the kids get picked up, and others stay for lunch. We eat lunch with the ones who stay, and then it´s time for staff meeting (which have thus far been varying degrees of frustrating unproductivity due to the lack of strong facilitation to prevent everyone from talking at the same time, all the time). Depending on the length of the meeting, which is directly proportional to the number of misshaps and degree of chaos during the day, I´ve been getting out around 5, and I get home around 7 or 8 after running some errands. After dinner and a shower, I´m in bed around 10, and the cycle begins again.
The second day of work was the worst. On teh first day we only had 70ish kids, so we divided them by age into 8 groups (6-13+) and played games, listened to stories, and had free time on the cancha (“court”; there´s a small jungle gym and a soccer field). Apparently we were supposed to be getting kids from other shelters who had signed up for this summer camp, but due to miscommunication they weren´t coming until the second day.
The second day was utter chaos. We got at least 200 more kids, whom the educadores (educators; full time shelter staff) decided to integrate with the others by again dividing by ages. However, there were many more kids of some ages than others. I had 40 10-year-olds, and Tory (another VILA volunteer) had 54 9-year-olds. Meanwhile, the 16-year-old group had no one at all; indeed, there were 4 staff members assigned to the 5 kids who were 13-17!.
Needless to say, having a 40:1 or 40:2 children:adult ratio was an absymal failure (part of hte time I had an educador helping me). There weren’t enough materials when we tried to make a banner for or patrulla (troop), nor enough chairs for everyone to sit down. Kids got bored, understandably, and took every opportunity to wander off. I couldn’t get them to do something as simple as sit down or get in line (and it wasn’t because they couldn’t understand my Spanish!). By the end of the day, I was wondernig whether I’d made a mistake in signing up for this. I felt completely ineffective.
Then, at the staff meeting, I found that everyone was frazzled. Even the educadores had barely been able tot get children to follow directions. It wasn’t a matter fo competence, bu rather of hte proper environment for managing so many children. The meeting was heated, with everyone airing their grievances and pretending not to point finger while really blaming others for not having materials ready, etc. The only productive thing we gout out of that 2 hour meeting was a redistribution of the patrullas to be of equal size, keeping together kids who were around the same age.
The next day we had 12 groups of roughly 30 kids each, which made a huge difference. I stayed wiht most o the 10-year-olds, and was amazed that the same children who were running away the day before and not lisntening to anyone were attentive and sweet this eay. I was even more surprised when teh same kids who grabbed for supplies the day before shared teh 3 painbrushes this day without a murmur when I asked them to. They even did a fairly good job of passing them without my prompting when I turned to deal with something else. It’s all a matter of context – in this situation everyone felt assured taht they would get their fair share, wheras on the previous day they felt that they had to fight to grab whatever they could.
The next day, Thursday, we finally got to teach one fo the talleres (workshops) which we VILA volunteers had written. Our first set of workshops are based around the theme of self esteem, so our first workshop included playing “two truths and a lie” and drawing group and self portraits. I had 27 kids and an educador, Fredy, who was with me nearly the whole time, so I was able to divide the group in two and take half while Fredy took the other half. The taller went beautifully. I dont’ know how much they learned about “self estee” perse, but I hope they did learn soemthing about teamwork when they worked together on teh group portraits, and they certainly enjoyed themselves.
On Friday teh whole camp got on buses and went tot eh pool, which was a welcome change from having to keep them focused and organized. Apparently we will be taking camp-wide field trips every Friday, which will be a nice way to end the week.
We moved into the shelter today. Accommodations are generous – we will be getting our own rooms, with private bathrooms. We were unsuccessful in figuring out how to work the hot water, however (in most Ecuadorian homes, you have to turn on the water heater when you want a shower), so we´re waiting til the morning.
We met a few of the children as we were moving in, who are all insatiably curious abou twho we are and what we´re going to be doing in the shelter.
Sidenote: I´m blogging from an internet cafe, which are plentiful in Quito. They are usually packed, but tunrover is quick because you pay by the quarter hour. They are frequented by foreigners and locals alike, and while most people do come to use the internet, I have also seen people word processing a paper or essay as well.
Categories: Uncategorized
These past two days I´ve completely changed the pace of my life. On the plane I was content to sleep most of the time, and spend the rest of the time gazing out the window. I tried to read and listen to music, but wasn´t up for expending the effort. Whenever I travel, I don´t feel compelled to do anything: I suppose it´s because I´m between responsibilities, in transition. That mood hasn´t lifted, though, even after I touched down. I´ve spent a little time glancing through the Ecuador guidebook, and doing some reading for pleasure, but mostly I´ve just been content to talk, eat, and watch or help people make food. It´s funny that when I slow down, I´m not bored- but if I had 15 minutes between things at home without a distraction, I would be impatient and clock watching: I suppose ít´s a different mentality- needing to be as “productive” as possible, whittling away at an almost manageable load of responsibilities, vs. waiting for my life here to start.
Orientation begins tomorrow, and I suspect that the pace of my life is going to pick up very quickly. Soon, I´ll be back in the thick of things, but for now, it´s nice to enjoy a breather.
Categories: Uncategorized
