Celebrating Vinicio's birthday at the Manna House
Birthday boy and his brother enjoying the cake
Happy Birthday Vinicio!
Stepping it up in Women’s Exercise
All five of us female PD’s came into this year excited about the Women’s Exercise program. We all came from a background in various types of group exercise and athletics, and were eager to put our personal touches on the classes that Manna offers. It was a little disappointing at first to see the low levels of attendance in our first classes, but it motivated us to get advertising, fine-tune our classes, and start talking to the women in the community to find out what they wanted from a work-out class. We learned quickly that the women want to dance, and they are concerned about their abs, so we have been creatively incorporating both into all of our classes.
A heartwarming moment for me was when Dayana, a 10 year old who attended our summer camp and frequents the library, asked if she could come to women’s exercise because yoga helps her relieve stress. I personally started taking aerobic kickboxing classes with my mom and sister when I was her age, and by far the youngest woman in the class. It was awesome to see her proudly take her place in the front of the room as she bravely tested out each of the classes that her busy schedule allows.
The newest and biggest change we will be implementing this year is a step aerobic class, to be taught by Emily on Friday mornings. The women were very excited about the idea, so all we needed were the steps. After walking to the gym down the street to check out models, watching various Youtube videos on how to make steps, and pricing wood at a nearby hardware store, we were ready to get started. The process didn’t turn out to be all that hard, and we managed to make the first 6 steps for free! We used wood and nails we found around the house, got the wood cut for free by some nice gentleman down the street, and had the steps transported to the Centro by our favorite vecino, Ceasar.
The next step for the program, and something we are all anxious for, will be mounting mirrors on the wall of the exercise room. The room occupies a large open space on the top floor of our Centro, with racks of exercise balls and floor mats, and windows overlooking the mountains. It is a fantastic space and perfect for giving classes, but it lacks mirrors, which are fundamental for checking form and accurately following routines. We are currently working hard contacting gyms and athletic stores in the U.S. trying to get money donated so we can have mirrors installed. In the meantime we’ll continue working to improve our workout classes and get more community members interested in their personal health and fitness.
Building steps
The finished product
Testing it out
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 13th, 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.