Adult Nutrition and Cooking (recipe included!)

As many of you know Adult Nutrition and Cooking is held every Saturday afternoon after English classes. The class focuses on introducing new recipes as well as providing healthy alternatives to classic Ecuadorian dishes. This year the course is being taught by the lovely Virginia and Claudia who started the class off by introducing typical dishes from their homes, including fish tacos (for Claudia's hometown of San Diego) and shrimp and grits (to represent Virginia's southern roots).

Virginia showing the class how to layer the pie

Tomato Pie

Last Saturday I had the pleasure of joining their class, to help cook, meet the wonderful participants, and eat some delicious food. The theme of the week was 'Alternatives to Wheat Flour' and Virginia introduced a tomato pie recipe with a bean flour crust (recipe below). After the food prep was finished, Claudia led a short charla about different types of flour including quinoa flour, coco flour and yuca flour, and their best uses. The pie was delicious and it was great to chat with different community members as we cooked and ate!

Enjoying the final product!

Chefs/Profes Claudia and Virginia

Pie de Tomate Receta

Relleno:

4 tomates (rebanado)

1 cebolla blanco (grande y picada)

1 taza albahaca

2 tazas de queso cheddar (rallado)

½ taza mayonesa

Preparación:

Primero, cocer la corteza vacía en el horno a 350 grados por 30 minutos o hasta la corteza esta doradas.  Segundo, cortar los tomates y la cebolla.  Saltear la cebolla.  En la corteza al horno, hacer capas del tomate, la cebolla, albahaca y queso rallado.  En cima del pie, poner la mayonesa y un poquito del queso rallado.  Cocer al horno el pie por 20 minutos mas o hasta el queso se derrita.

La Corteza:

2 tazas de harina

1 taza de mantequilla

1 cucharadita de sal

7 cucharaditas de agua

Corta la mantequilla en cubos.  Mezclar la mantequilla con la harina y sal.  Poco a poco, agregar el agua.  Amasar la masa hasta todo esta mezclado.  Rodar el plano de masa y ponerla en un molde de tarta.

New Children's Nutrition Site in Fajardo

We are excited to announce the expansion the our Children's Nutrition Program! In past year we have worked extensively with an elementary school in Chaupitena, however with recent changes to the school system here in Ecuador, Chaupitena has experienced a drastic increase in students and is currently struggling with disorganized and crowded classrooms. The lead PDs working in Children's Nutrition plan on continuing their work at Chaupitena once the school has become more organized. In the mean time the program has expanded to include a new class called "Nutrition and Wellbeing" which is now taught at a nearby high school in the Fajardo neighborhood. The course will focus on promoting an interest in and improving the knowledge of personal wellbeing with an emphasis on nutrition, preventative health and healthy lifestyles. The nutrition portion of the curriculum is modeled after the Harvard Health Eating Plate guidelines. Throughout the course students will learn about topics ranging from healthy grains to diabetes prevention to reproduction health rights. The high school also has a community garden, which will provide the prefect setting for our lessons on food production and resulting environmental impacts.

On the first day the students were given a diagnostic test on basic nutrition. The results indicated a great need for this type of education as only 2 of the 43 students present could name all 6 components of a healthy plate (many included yogurt and shrimp as two of the daily requirements) and only 12 out of 43 knew that eating fruit had different nutritional value than consuming fruit juice. When asked why, one student's response was, "because orange juice is not in an orange." Another slightly comical response from the day included a student saying that the healthiest milk is "milk from a carton." Interestingly enough many students stated that they prefer to eat home over eating at a restaurant because they know how the food was prepared and exactly what they will be eating. We will address these
misconceptions as well as many others throughout the upcoming semester.

Currently MPI is only working with the students at Fajardo every other Wednesday however given the results of the diagnostic test and the attentive nature of the students we hope to increase our presence in the classroom. We are very excited to be working with this new curriculum and group of students!

Clau in the Clouds

A blog post by our own Claudia Zaugg about her experience teaching English to the Ecuadorean Military:

A Day with the Military
Wednesday started at 5:30 AM with a 1.5-hour car-ride in a military-owned vehicle to a military base just north of Quito. Upon arrival, we were greeted with a camp-style breakfast and men dressed in uniform. Not to mention the soundtrack of gun-shots, airplanes, and Arabic prayers playing over the loud-speaker on repeat. For 7AM, we were all a little confused as I am sure whoever reading this is at this point. Let me backtrack a bit. El Valle de Los Chillos has a strong military presence since there is an Ecuadorean base nearby. Therefore, many of our students are active in the military or have family in the military. One of our English students came to us the other day asking for a favor –to help with the final English examination of the UN Peacekeepers. We weren’t exactly sure what this entailed, but myself, Cate, Heather, and Taylor agreed to the challenge. After our delicious breakfast, we were each given a piece of paper explaining the “situation” and our roles as workers for different NGOs. Our roles: mine to act as an official from the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), Cate from UNESCO, Heather from the UN World Food Program, and Taylor from Doctors without Borders. The situation: a rebel up rise and civil unrest somewhere in Africa causing many people to flee their homes and settle in refugee camps. In my case in particular, the UNHCR had supplies to deliver to the refugee camps but could not successfully deliver them without the security of UN soldiers. One-by-one, the UN Peacekeepers in training would approach my table and have 10 minutes to figure out what I needed from them and how they could fix the issue (all in English). Perhaps the hardest part of this whole role-playing situation was the fact that I was supposed to act mean in some situations, and over-friendly in others. In the words of the soldiers evaluating the UN Peacekeepers, “try to make the one girl cry and maybe flirt with some of the guys.” After the first few rounds, the evaluator at my table started laughing at my inability to act mean. After 2 hours of role-playing, it was time to watch how our 4 different stories would come together. We were taken to another building in the compound where a tall Canadian soldier greeted the 13 UN Peacekeepers. The Canadian started to grill them about what they learned about the situation and was not afraid to call bullshit on their stories. The 4 of us sat there, feeling bad for some of the Peacekeepers whose English was not up to par, and realizing how much information we had to make up to answer many of the questions they asked us (for example, some guy asked me for my radio station number, and I didn’t even know I had a radio, so I just said I didn’t have one. My evaluator cracked up at this one). Overall, the day was extremely eye opening and interesting. Although the situation was hypothetical, we felt pretty cool having such a responsibility in a largely official and important task. All the soldiers we met were overly nice, and have even offered us houses to stay in during our future travels in Ecuador.

Children's English Program

The third week of English continues to go smoothly as all classes finish up review and diving into new material! Here are some photos from Children's English this past week:

Students taking a quiz

Profe Nico teaching intermediate children's english

The students in intermediate learn the body parts in English, an excellent reason to sing "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes"

Students work on homework in the library

Profe Taylor and her attentive students in advanced english

And So It Begins

In a poorly lit dining room in a big orange house in a middle class suburb of Sangolqui, Ecuador, seven American twenty-somethings sit in silence typing away frantically at seven illuminated Mac Book keyboards.  This can only mean one thing—classes at the Manna Project International Bibiloteca have finally commenced.  Surrounded by stacks and stacks of binders, books and teaching aids—the legacies passed down from our predecessors, the residents of the Manna house studiously press on through the misty jungle of lesson planning, a first for nearly everyone, as we prepare for our second week of classes.

Saturday evening was met with a sigh of relief after the first week of classes concluded, seemingly hitch-less.  Art class, all English level classes for both children and adults, as well as cooking and adult nutrition have now joined the ranks with our exercise classes as well as our small business development and preventative health programs which are already in full-swing.

In a diagnostic test given in Profe Abby’s class, an adult English student responded to the question “Where do you live?” with “I am play soccer.”  While probably true, a decidedly incorrect response. 

 All students have been very eager and willing to learn, though.  Having been inundated with inscriptions for English classes, and having three more PDs than last year, we found ourselves in a perfect storm of opportunity and were able to add another basic level adult English class, accommodating twenty more students who otherwise would have been wait-listed.

Our focus, however, has not strayed from our many other obligations here in Ecuador.  The small business development team is making inroads into involving our loan recipients in Jatampungo with our friends from De la Mata a la Olla as a possible new market for their organic produce.  The Preventative Health team soldiers on with their weekly diabetes club, continuing to find new and creative ways of teaching about living a healthy lifestyle with diabetes.  The PDs in charge of children’s nutrition are also finding new honey pots in which to stick their pedagogical hands into, starting up classes again in Chaupitena soon and hopefully as well at a new location in Fajardo. In other exciting news, Abby and Tari will kick off our group’s first live radio show this Friday. The topic will be Manna’s sponsorship of the acoustic concert Abby and Tari are organizing for Playing for Change, a global event where musicians broadcast their performances in the name of social change.