Inside Out: Week 1

  

Trying to organize 90 kids for snack and entering the museum.





I am now Miss Liz from 9am - 12pm and Coach Liz after lunch until 4pm. I survived the first week of Inside Out summer camp at Alliance Academy. We have 90 kids, and may have more next week! Right now I'm teaching a class of 6 first graders - who have surprised me with how much English they know! They are so cute, and for the most part, very well behaved. We have class in the mornings, and then sports and recreation in the afternoon. This first week we were playing basketball - I attempted to teach lay-ups and referee a scrimage on the last day. On Wednesday we had a field trip in the morning instead of class: we went to el Museo del Agua (the water museum). I quickly learned that field trips are more work than teaching. We had to get all the kids on buses, then try and have them eat snack and stay in line to go into the museum. They seemed to have a lot of fun learning about water melting from the glaciers in the mountains, how to filter water, ocean currents, storms, and really anything else related to water. All my students told me the next day that their favorite part was the bubble room. Then Thursday we had a trip to go swimming in the afternoon. So after lunch we all got on buses and drove to one of the kid's houses outside of Quito. It was a big house, with a clay tennis court, volleyball court and the pool - but we had to take turns swimming. It was another rather chaotic afternoon, but no one drowned, so...After yesterday I was exhausted. Two more weeks to go!

Bubbles!



One of my students playing in the bubble room.

Learning about clean and polluted water.

La Ciudad Antigua

Walking through the old city.

 Last Saturday I did some touring around Quito, which I really haven't done much of. Angel, Holger and I went to la ciudad antigua, or the old city area. It looks very different from the rest of Quito, as the government is very strict about maintaining the original appearance and color of the buildings. The architecture is very european - and I really liked it! We visited a church and had a tour, which made me feel like I was back in my art class in Spain touring cathedrals. Even though this church was baroque style, which we didn't really study our tour guide used a lot of vocabulary I'd learned in class. We also went to the Palacio de Carondelet - where the president lives! So, its kind of like going to the White House, only it was free to go in and have a tour! We just needed to leave identification with a guard. And they took our picture when we first entered and gave us a printed copy at the end! It wasn't huge, but it was very nice and well-decorated. They were also a ton of gifts from various countries on display - china and dishes from all over the world and other random things. Kind of like the president's souvineer display. While we were on the tour I met two Americans, a father and son. And the father grew up in Orchard Park (the town right next to mine) - small world! The old city is probably my favorite part of Quito!

A plaza marking some historical events.

The church La Compania de Jesus.

Inside el Palacio de Carondelet.

The photo of Angel, me, and Holger in the palacio.

The Amazon

Driving through a cloud.

Tena, Napo, Ecuador

So we got back from the coast Sunday night and I left with Maggy and Giovanni Monday afternoon for the Amazon or the "oriente" as they sometimes call it. Maggy told me we'd leave at 1pm, so that's when I got to the MAP office. We left at 3pm and then had to stop for lunch...at this point I know things won't ever happen at the time I'm told, but it can still be a little frustrating, especially when I still try to be on time. We drove through more curvy roads, ascending and descending mountains. I really hate the roads here - I never get car sick, but on these roads I don't know how people don't. Plus, you can never sleep because the car is constantly changing directions and you  

This sign is entirely too accurate.

get rocked back and forth. We finally arrived in Tena, the capital of the province of Napo (Ecuador has 23 provinces) around 8pm. I had a full day Tuesday and I never knew what was coming next. Maggy and Giovanni had some workshops to give in the community Ongota, but I went as a tourist. So they asked Dorian, one of the health promoter's husbands, to be my guide for the day. He took me for a short walk to see some little waterfalls - we had maybe a 5 minute walk in the "jungle" right near the community. We had to cross a river by taking a canoe since the bridge that had once been there washed away in a flood. After that he asked me what I wanted to do and mentioned that we could go see monkeys. It turned out that to get there we needed to go on a 45 minute motorcycle ride! Definitely a cool way to see the Amazon, but I'm glad that I'd ridden once before with my dad... We arrived and there were monkeys all over the shore of this river, which I think feeds into the Amazon. They were running around like squirrels and there was a group of ecuadorian kids trying to feed them onions - I learned that monkeys do not eat onions. They would also play with the stray dogs that were around. After, we went back toward the town and stopped at the plaza where there were a bunch of guys walking around with giant 

I love these tails!

boas and anacondas. For a dollar put it around your shoulders so you could take pictures. Then the next part of our adventure was really exciting. We went to a cave! Now this was nothing like the experience I've had visiting Kartchner Caverns State Park in Arizona. There the cave is super protected and regulated: you can't touch anything, you walk through several doors to enter so the cave's temperature and moisture remain the same, etc. This was exactly the opposite. First, there was basically a river running through the cave - no one told me to bring any type of clothing for activities involving water, so I went in wearing jeans and we practically had to swim through one part. We also had to wear head lamps becuase it was completely dark. We touched everything to keep our balance as we really splunked through this thing - there were a couple of narrow passages. And instead of going back out the same way we came in, which I was really glad we didn't, we exited out the top of the cave! We had a guide, but the whole thing was pretty sketchy...but I made it out! It was a long day of adventures. We left the next morning to return to Quito - which meant another lovely car ride. 

It just seemed like one of those things you had to do.

Dorian and I splunking with our head lamps.





Vamos a la playa (in Ecuador)

 

La playa!



Our sand "castle"/mountain.

Same, Esmeraldas, Ecuador
(that's Sah-may, not pronounced "same")
We were invited last weekend to go with the MAP staff to their 6th annual national conference for health promoters. When we were told it was at the beach, nothing more needed to be said! We constantly sang Meg's favorite song, "vamos a la playa" for the days leading up to our trip. Meg, Amanda, Emily and I drove with Giovanni and Holger in the van. They decided it would be best if we left Quito and drove through the night - so we left Thursday at 2:30am! I had slept from about 10pm - 2am and then was up with Giovanni while he drove us through the super twisty roads to the coast. We arrived to Esmeraldas around 10am and napped on the beach while we waited for other promoters to arrive. The conference started that evening, so we attended the sessions and played some ice-breaker games. The next day we spent a lot more time on the beach - skipping some of the conference and then going back during the alotted free time. We swam, sunned, built a sand castle, and had a very brief mud fight. It was so fun and relaxing! We also had an intercultural exchange that night - so the promoters from different areas either showed off a dance, sang a song, or did some other kind of presentation and we sang some worship songs with Meg playing guitar. We attempted to go to a local church and perform in order to gather more of an audiance for the event. We arrived, everyone was dressed and ready to go and a crowd was gathering, but then it started pouring rain! They hadn't had rain in months! So we all ran back to the bus we had ridden over, getting soaked in the process. We sat waiting on the bus for further instruction about what we were going to do. I just remember thinking, as some of the people started singing songs: never would I have imagine getting to this place; stranded soaking wet, on a bus full of ecuadorians, in who-knows-where Ecuador. We ended up just having the event back at the retreat center/camp where we were staying. Sunday we traveled all day to get back to Quito - leaving about 2:30pm (just the opposite of driving there) we got back to the city around 10pm.

One of two pictures that Marcelo actually took of us - he stood there with the camera for about 5 minutes.



Cotopaxi

Futbol.

We spent the day in Cotopaxi on Saturday. This was the second week of the program that MAP and ChildFund are starting in the community.  The program will last 3 years, with monthly meetings on Saturdays. We thankfully took a van, since there were 8 of us going, instead of the car we usually take. When we arrived, the school we were supposed to use was locked, so we went through town to another field to play futbol and voley with the kids first. Then we played a name game and got the program started. They presented the results of questions they'd answered during the session last week. Then we did an activity know as the "10 Seed." This is a strategy MAP uses to identify the kids' perceptions of problems in the community, resources they have available, and their uncertainties/fears. The kids brainstorm and then choose the most important/biggest issues. Then they work through as a group deciding who has the most influence over the issue. It was really interesting to hear their opinions and thought process.

Holger and Emily facilitating the 10 Seed activity.

The completed chart.

Pizza Party

$8 peanut butter.

 When we returned from Santo Domingo we made pizza for Maggy and Giovanni for dinner and Amanda wanted to make fudge for dessert (they had never heard of fudge; people don't really bake here). We first had to go grocery shopping for some ingreedients - both Meg and Amanda were experiencing some culture shock. We couldn't find anything to make pizza dough, only pre-made crusts, and Amanda couldn't find a few ingreedient for fudge - like chocolate chips. I was shocked when I walked down an aisle and found Jif peanut butter, and even more shocked when I saw that it was $8 a jar! Peanut butter isn't very popular in other countries, and is usually imported so its expensive. We spent a long time finding everything we needed and while I was waiting with the cart an ecuadorian boy approached me and asked me if I was German. He told me that I'd caught his attention - I guess that's what I get for being blonde. We finally found everything, or at least substitutes for what we needed and then went to Maggy's house to cook. It was a pretty small kitchen and an even smaller oven, but we managed. The pizza was well worth it - and well documented, Givoanni was taking video of the whole process. Unfortunately Amanda's fudge did not turn out so well - it never became solid. It was really fun coaching Maggy and Giovanni on how to pronounce "fudge." They had a hard time saying the "dge" sound, so we suggested that they say "fu-Giovanni" since his name starts with the same sound. So that's what they called it. We stayed at Maggy's practicing salsa moves and showing "American" dances like the electric slide until almost 2am! 


Making pizza.



The final product!

  

"Making" chocolate chips.



Emily and Holger eating "fugiovanni."

Santo Domingo



The unfinished cathedral in Santo Domingo.

Meg, Amanda and I went on an overnight trip with Maggy and Giovanni (MAP staff) to Santo Domingo, northwest of Quito. It was a good drive through very windy roads to get through the mountains - we drove through a cloud forest on our way! This trip was like most of our trips with MAP - the "schedule" was not exactly what happened. We were going to observe students that MAP had trained to lead workshops in their schools. We arrived and went to a school, but the time had been changed for the workshop we were supposed to observe. So we went to lunch and then had a meeting in Maggy's mom's house about a project that MAP is helping with in Valle del Toachi (I'm working on translating a document about this project, so I was excited to hear more about it). They are going to build a health center in the community, but not with your typical building materials. The building is going to be constructed using plastic bottles! They fill the bottles with sand, creating these plastic bricks. The whole community comes together to fill the bottles. MAP is trying to get the schools in Santo Domingo involved in collecting bottles for the project.
We also visited an all girls school and observed and participated in workshop they were giving about sexuality. They started with a game of telephone to show how information is passed from person to person and in the end isn't correct. I held up the game trying to understand what the message was.

Playing telephone, en espanol.

It took us a really long time to leave the school because girls kept asking to get their pictures taken with us - everywhere we go, its like we're celebrities. Everyone wants a picture with a gringa...


Students leading the workshop.



Introducing oursevles to the group.