Minga de Limpieza Comunitaria

This past Saturday marked our first Minga of the year.  (Minga |meen-gah|noun: an Ecuadorian word for people coming together to do a community service project)  

Nine PDs awoke at 6:45 a.m. to the smell of brewing coffee and a scramble to collect brooms, gloves, and as many trash bags as we could find.  Though we sleepily commuted into Rumiloma, we perked right up as we stepped off of the bus to find a dozen kids and parents already gathered in front of the library, ready to clean up their community.  As we split into groups to tackle the various neighborhood streets and sidewalks, we found many residents cleaning streets and sidewalks by their homes as well, asking us to borrow supplies.

Our neighbors, brushing up garbage from the drain pipes 

We spent the better part of 3 hours cleaning up around Rumiloma; my main job was to run around making sure everyone had enough trash bags, haul full bags back to the library, label them with kids' names and then weigh them to keep track of which kid collected the most, by volume.  By 11a.m. we had run out of bags (something I never thought would happen given the amount we stole from the house and wiped out of the library stash) and rounded up all of the kids in the library to tally the weight results, which are the following:

Total Combined Kids' Weight: 376.5 lbs 

Total Combined Profe's Weight: 70 lbs (plus Sarah's 2 tires)

------------------------------

Total Weight: 446.5 lbs 

Team Iori proudly showing off their loot 

A few notes about the weights: the profes had significantly less weight because we mostly helped the kids (we're not lazy, don't worry) and there was an estimate of 60-70 lbs not weighed that were left on street corners, where other residents were instructed to put their trash for pick up.  Though there were only 4 kids who got our grande sopresa, we dolled out lollipops to the other kids who answered our environmental quiz questions correctly and provided other refreshments for the families.  

Mike and Dana haul kids (and trash) from the plaza to the library

Lucia, Shawn, Erik and Bibi weighing the trash

The whole group in front of 450lbs. of collected trash!

Everyone helps throw trash bags into the truck

Some people question the sustainability of such an event, wondering if the streets will simply become riddled with garbage again a week later.  While that reality is more likely than not, clean-ups are a powerful tool for a number of reasons: they bring people together, engage them in a service dedicated to the area where they live, and quite frankly, after participating in something like picking up trash for house, you tend to think twice about dropping a candy wrapper onto the street.  

The event also opens the door for bigger projects.  There are two major trash issues in Rumiloma: burning household trash, mostly out of habit since there are reliable waste haulers now, and water contamination as a result of excessive litter and agricultural/livestock practices.  It is a priority of our environmental program here in Ecuador to tackle both issues in collaboration with USAID, FONAG (El Fondo de protección del agua), and most importantly, local leaders and organizations.   But I'm getting ahead of myself.. you'll have to wait to hear more about that in future posts!

Litter-less and feeling free (not really because quarterly reports are due next week!), 

Jackie

Advertising Antics

When you're starting up a handful of new programs, excessive advertising comes with the territory.  Planning for classes, charlas, mingas, and health clinics takes a ton of time and we certainly want to make sure we have successful event turn outs.  In order to make this happen, we are on our way to mastering various types of advertising strategies.  Some are pretty straightforward: making posters, handing out flyers to community members and library kids, and attending as many community-based meetings as possible (churches, town councils, futbol leagues etc.).  

There are also some more non-traditional methods.  One of them involves hopping on buses and having one person give a presentation while the other puts up flyers at the front of the bus; so far Erik and Mike have mastered the art of bus advertising while the rest of us stick to less intimidating methods.  However, starting next week I will be participating in three days of advertising via riding around on a Camioneta shouting into a megaphone about the details of our very first Minga, set for the third of October.  

Erik and I have collaborated to co-lead a community clean up in Rumiloma.  It's a perfect combination as he is in charge of organizing Mingas (an Ecuadorian word for people coming together to do community service projects) and I am running the environmental programs.  Litter is a huge problem in our community as people are accustomed to simply throwing trash, from water bottles to candy wrappers, all over the streets.  Many community members approached us both in the library and at one of the town meetings last week about this issue and wanting public trash cans.  We've also created a friendly competition between library kids to give them incentives to come to the clean up.  Hopefully we'll be able to use this time to talk with interested people about improving waste management and mitigation for our community. 

I'll keep you updated about how the telefoneo incident goes (and of course about the clean up itself);  I think I'll be spending the next week taking notes on the Camionetas drive down our streets yelling things like "el gas el gas el gas" and "escobas escobas... escobas."  

- Jackie 

Fundraisers, Infomercials and Futbol

It might sound like these three topics don't mesh well together, but that, in chronological order, is exactly how we spent our weekend.  Mid-afternoon on Saturday we headed to a fundraiser for the church of Rumiloma.  The building had been knocked down sometime last year and the community has been slowly renovating it, but unable to get very far due to lack of funds.  As we walked into the courtyard and found a half dozen tents, a full band on a covered stage, and some of our favorite library kids running up to greet us.  We wandered through the crowd, some of us ordering Cuy while others watched a clown sporting over-sized plastic American flag shoes sing to a woman for her 100th birthday  (and shamelessly point out the ten gringos lingering in the background). 

Being greeted by some kids in the community

Watching the impressive (and well dressed!) band

Mike and Chet enjoy their cuy (a.k.a. guinea pig, an Ecuadorian delicacy) 

After stuffing ourselves with cuy and chochos we caught a bus into Quito to scalp some futbol tickets.  Although we're accustomed to people hopping on buses and sell everything from Bon Ice to historical dvds (guilty of buying both), the man that hopped on our bus had a talent that most lack.  I'm not sure if it was his thought-provoking riddles or straight up charm, but he somehow convinced at least half of the people on our bus, including Krysta, to buy a family indestructible tiny Snoopy keychains.  How do we know they were destructible, you might ask?  The salesman threw it on the bus floor (lick any of those lately to avoid going to Jersey, Seth?) and stomped all over it to demonstrate.  

A clan of snoopies... enough said.

The rest of us were happy to spend our allowance on futbol tickets, avoiding the ploys of a Billy Mays in the making.  La Liga Deportiva, the club team we've become partial to, played against el Deportivo de Quito.  Though our team lost 3-0, we thoroughly enjoyed waving around Liga flags and jumping around with the rest of the fans and chanting "esta noche tenemos que ganar!" (at least that's the only part of the cheer I remember). 

Liga fans loyally chanting for their team 

The girls attempt to chime in with the fight songs

Until next time, 

Jackie 

A Final Farewell

13 months later, and it's time. Time to pass on the cameras, give up administrator status in the google group, and hand over the Daily Life Blog to my two replacements, Sarah Scott and Jackie Weidman.

Thank you all for tuning in this past year; it has been an awfully great privilege to be the online voice of the Manna Ecuador site. After 180 posts, it sure has been a prolific journey. I've loved your comments (yes, even yours Aravon), your emails, your encouragements and your suggestions. Thank you for checking up with us every once in a while and for playing a part in what MPIE has become.

There is more to say about what we've learned this year, but I'll save all of that for the monthly (or more aptly tri-monthly at this point) update sent sometime later this week. All I can really say is an exhaustive thank you. I'll be sure to pop in every now and then as a guest blogger, too :)

Signing out,
Holly

Upon his return

(Eliah and Dunc have been gone for about a week, so imagine my surprise when I opened my email to find something from Eliah titled "Last Guest Blog". Turns out he just can't seem to get enough :) So here it is, Eliah's last hurrah.)

"Here I am in my first week back after thirteen months with Manna and it's clear things have changed.
Take my brother's yappy beagle, with whom I cohabit when in the States. While I've been gone, she has matured, like a fine wine, into a less-annoyingly yappy state of being. Unlike this time last year, I now have an irresistible urge to put used toilet paper in bathroom trash cans. Of course there was never anything abnormal about spending the afternoon hunting for mushrooms in the woods, but when I got home today I cooked them. That wouldn't have happened a year ago. Meanwhile, no one anywhere in the house has screamed in the last hour. Strange.
But that's not all. Things in my own head, too, are not the same as before. Maybe I can't get past the fact that I just spent a year volunteering in a country with a higher rate of nose jobs than southern California. Or that I paid about as much to work for that year as Ecuadorians earn in the same amount of time ($7150 vs. $7500 according to the CIA World Factbook). Then again, maybe it's something else. Something about a unique time and a way of living gained and then lost. People, places, and experiences I know I won't forget. Something that can't be captured in a single blog entry. Or maybe that's just the parasites talking.
Whatever it is, after a year with Manna things have changed, and in a way I can't—and wouldn't—undo. Still, it's comforting to know that some things are exactly as I left them thirteen months ago.

I need a job.

-Eliah"