We are in Quito

My name is Jeff and I am one of the May tutors. Many people have asked me what I will be doing down in Quito this summer and I have joyfully ducted the questions and answered in generic response. This was mostly because before I did not know, so I could not give you any specifics. So here is what I know now that I am down here doing the work. I am working with a foundation. This foundation principally helps with children´s education. They do this by helping to pay the cost for private schooling (because the public school in Ecuador are a joke) and by tutoring children as well. They tutor, in part, to help childrepass entrance exams and get into better schools. There is a law here that if you are not in high school by the age of 16 you can never go. The Onas, the family that runs the foundation, have repeatedly reminded me that they do not adopt a child they adopt a family. This means that in order for the foundation to adopt a family they demand accountability from the parent. It is not much, clean house, shower daily, cook food, hold a steady job/look for one, and send the child to school. Sadly or justly, if the family does not hold up their end of the bargain the aid is pulled. They are usually given 5 years to change and this is confirmed by home visits.

This foundation is run quite incredibly by one women with some help from her family. It is quite an undertaking. They have close to 200 children in the program. Because of the setup of the program the families eventually graduate from it when they are financially self sufficient and responsible for themselves and their children. However this is harder for some than others because there are some parents that are analfebetos or illiterate and so the work it more tedious and with the parents as well.

Now to what I have been doing . We are doing a o prelimanary work now. We went to a school in the poorest part of quito to take information about the students to find more families to enter into the program. It is slow work. Students up until the 6th grade do not know their birthday. I had kids that were 6 tell me they were 2. The children cannot write till at least 5th grade. So we went around taking information like name parents name address (about 5% know their street name and have yet to find one that knows their full address but they can all get to their house), favorite subject, number of rooms in their house and whether they have water light or telephone. The teachers are overwhelmed with 55 or so students in each class room. It is quite a sight. So we did that each morning and each afternoon I have typed this information up on a computer.

The others have gone to the site to tutor kids after school and help them with work. Another thing the foundation does is help find housing for people displaced by the government. So they require that the families put in as much work as they receive aid which is often tough for families where both parents work 5 days a week and if they miss a day they are fired but the do try. For instance the families made all the bricks for the house and the foundation bought the roof and the family will do all the installation.

We are about two miles up so the altitude is something to contend with for sure. It is high. I am not sure what I expected commons here but this has both completely surprised me and met my expectations at the same time. It is hard to describe. At some moments the need seems overwhelming and I question what good is coming out of this and at other times I can see progress. And am very encouraged. I just know that I am continuing to build a foundation, adding one brick at a time, that others after me wilcontinuene to work on and lead to an amazing finished productct