a little of this, a little of that

The social work team, Erin and I, have been very busy during our month in Quito. We have been multitaskers extraordinaire, juggling our time between several different projects. Our primary project has been to furnish and buy a full supply of books for a library at the local primary school in San Martín and also to buy books for the Fundación San Martín tutoring site. While these sound like fairly straightforward tasks, they were actually quite challenging. Our bookshelves, tables, and benches had to be commissioned from a local carpenter. Gaining an assessment of what types of books are needed and then locating those books in Quito was time consuming, especially because the need for books is so great, and locating appropriate, educational, and affordable books in the city is not easy. However, we are happy to report that the library and foundation together will receive over 300 brand new books. These include fairy tales and fables (favorites of the children), encyclopedias, dictionaries, and countless stories and children´s literature books. At the school this year, all of the children will have a 1-hour period of library time every day, which they have never had before, and this time will be devoted to class literacy instruction and pleasure reading. We are very excited to make our official delivery of the books on Monday, and we will post pictures of the finished product! Special thanks to the July tutors, who were very helpful during several whole nights of coding, stamping, and covering all of these books!

Our second major project has been working with the public health students and then with Adriana after their departure to implement nutrition classes for mothers from the community of San Martín. We hold class every Thursday and Friday afternoon from 2:00-3:30pm. To prepare for class each week, we pick a theme (so far each day has featured a different nutritious vegetable), research nutritional benefits of this food, go grocery shopping for ingredients, and prepare several tasty recipes featuring this food. In class, we review the nutritional benefits, facilitate a discussion with the women on how they already use this food, and then present our new recipe ideas. The overarching goal for these classes is to form a cohesive group of women who are invested in the idea of bringing more accessible, nutritious food to their community. We hope that this group will form the basis for a produce market, to begin next summer. After only 3 weeks, I am already seeing seeds of community-building growing in our group of women. Where at first they were shy and hesitant to talk, now they have open discussions about what their children (and husbands!) will and will not eat, where to find the cheapest and best ingredients, and how to make a small budget stretch its furthest. They laugh and joke, and we are seeing them build cohesion. With our project budget, we have been able to purchase the appliances, tools, and ingredients Adriana will use to continue these classes every week throughout the next year.

Finally, Erin and I have been putting our social work training to work by taking ¨referrals¨ from both the clinic and the tutoring site. The students and doctors at the clinic had several patients report psychological or psychosomatic complaints, and we have been able to schedule meetings to initiate a therapeutic relationship with these patients. Their struggles range from grief, to depression, to children´s behavioral problems, to spousal conflicts, and beyond. We have met several times with the clients, gathered background and intake information, and told them about the help that the Foundation can offer. When we leave, Adriana will continue weekly meetings with these clients. It is obvious that mental health care is an extreme need here, and there are no resources for obtaining it here, so we are glad to have been able to offer our time while we are here. Similarly, there are some children at the tutoring site who benefit from one-on-one work time for one reason or another. We have spent most of our mornings working individually with these children, learning how to follow the rules, talking about problems happening at home, or working on a school subject that is particularly difficult for them. Working with clients and in one-on-ones with the kids has been incredibly rewarding, especially when we have seen improvements literally happening before our eyes.

So that, in a nutshell, has been the work of the social work team this month. We have been very busy, but we have enjoyed each of our projects. Look for library pictures to be posted soon!

Quito Film Communiqué

Hello all,

Some of you may have been wondering what that greasy haired clutch of miscreants with the camera has been up to. Following a strict stormchasing regime through Ecuador, we’ve been working tirelessly to collect footage from Quito, Loja, Peguche, Otavalo, Juncal, San Martin, and Illuman.


The film, more than anything, is a rigorous collection of qualitative data on the health and healing options in and around Quito. Although by no means a comprehensive ethnography, the focus is on the personal narrative of navigating, hybridizing, and understanding the quest for keeping oneself healthy in Ecuador.

We’ve filmed in local markets, clinics, Afro-Ecuadorian barrios, indigenous villages, retirement communities, streets, homes, and dancehalls.

Last week, we traveled to Peguche, Ilumàn (a town known for its many healers), Juncal (known for its many football players) and Otavalo, a few hours northwest of Quito. These pueblos are home to fire-breathing Shamans, who conduct ritual cleansing through herbs, burning embers, pure sugarcane alcohol, and yes, flame. Huddled in a dark cinder block room, we witnessed a strange and mysterious ceremony that only a handful of gringos have ever had the opportunity to encounter.


The other night, we attended a religious festival to San Pedro in the Church plaza in Peguche. Here, indigenous people mixed with mestizos, as they kicked around soccer balls soaked in gasoline and lit on fire while a gigantic homemade castle exploded in tiers of fireworks and torches. Meanwhile, vaca loca or "crazy cow" - men with wooden structures configured with fruits and fireworks - charged at crowds (and at the camera).

In the days previous, we visited Jambi Huasi, a unique clinic in Otavalo. Jambi Huasi (House of Healing) serves the underrepresented indigenous community, charging less and providing patients with the option of western and/or traditional (Shaman) medicine. There, we witnessed a curandero (healer) rubbing and slapping someone with a live guinea pig as a diagnostic process. She then killed the poor creature, skinned it, and turned it inside out to reveal the black organs which represented the patient’s ailments and absorption of negative energy. We also filmed a healer perform spiritual healing with a mixture of potions, stones, and smoke, while next door, a dentist cleaned teeth and a pharmacist wrote prescriptions for biomedical drugs.

With given permission, we worked with one Limberg Valencia, an Afro-Ecuadorian marimba musician, social activist, anthropologist, and cultural revivalist. Mr. Valencia has introduced us to the unique and overlooked world of African medical traditions, which are unlike any other contemporaneous practices. Here, the "Afro" community relies on a fascinating blend of spiritual healing, communal health dances, and music to revive and empower African culture.



Orfa Renosa is another contact we made through the Afro-Ecuadorian community. She works for an expansive national NGO, specializing in alternative medicine, traditional curing, health education and community organizing.



With her, we filmed a streetside ¨check-in¨ between an Afro-Ecuadorian nun and the poverty-stricken families on the periphery of Quito proper. There, we met and interviewed a number of “curbside” healers.

We have also been interviewing and following around Jaime Guevara. He is a very popular political folk singer who, unbeknownst to the majority of his fans, suffers from severe epilepsy. We filmed a conversation between him and indigenous friend about health and Quito, the ¨schizophrenic¨ city. We also had the opportunity to film and attend one of his concerts, commemorating the death of an Ecuadorian leftist killed by state terrorism.

There´s a lot more to be said; our session with Limberg and his dancers, our experience in the clinic in San Martin, our exploration of religious healing practices, our run-in with the brujas (witches). It´s all on film, and we can´t wait to share it with you once we have the chance.

We have more than 50 hours of footage to work with, and possible another year until we edit everything together, Keep in touch with us at: quitofilm@umich.edu.

Best,

Yoni
The Quito Film Collective

habas, yuca, y aji - oh my!

Well, it’s already been a week since we (Erika and I – the public health portion of the Quito Project) have returned to the United States from a whirlwind of a trip in Ecuador and we’ve been swamped since! Erika is fortunately able to work again and has been since Wednesday morning and I am still recovering from Ecuador withdrawal, but I am still glad to be back ☺ So to recap all that happened for the time we were in Ecuador, I’ll have to start from the very beginning since we had no time to blog while there in Quito (I have been spoiled by cable-speed internet and 56K modem does not bode well with me).

Even when I was unable to be there for part of the time, we spent the beginning of the week of 7/3 meeting and discussing with our foundation’s director, Adriana. From our gathering, later in the week we then went out into the community of San Martín and conducted a needs assessment of the neighborhood. We learned quickly that the plans and ideas we had construed in America way ahead of time (i.e. possibly opening some sort of market) would be drastically changed and we had to adapt and be flexible to the plans and ideas that needed to implemented right away. And so, with questionnaires in hand, we started conversations with “What do you like to cook?’ and “What do your kids not like to eat?” [to provide just a few examples] so that we (public health and social work students/graduates) were able to gain a greater understanding and fuller comprehension of the health status of the people. Walking from morning until late afternoon going house to house, we gained a deeper and more complete picture of the community looking at the houses and their animals, listening to mothers’ concerns while hearing kids and the TV in the background, taking notes at a tienda and observing the produce and junk food they have to offer. Our next step: mission – to start nutrition classes in order to initiate a grassroots enthusiasm for health awareness and nutritious living.

The following second week, we prepared, discussed, advertised, planned, and prepared some more for our nutrition classes that we held on Thursday, 7/13 and Friday, 7/14. Before those dates, all four of us public health/social work students again trekked house to house now following up our questions and inquiries with a tangible means to serve the community – providing an avenue for education and collective concern and discussion as a community. As a lure as well as a exemplary model, we slaved in the kitchen each day before our class to prepare veggie burgers for the Thursday class and soybean burgers for the Friday class so that the women can sample and guess the recipe. Overall, we all agree that the classes were a success!! Hooray! 35 attendees on the first day and 15 the next, but most important of all we believe that we accomplished the goal of finding people who are possibly and hopefully invested in seeing the improvement of health and nutrition of their own community. Although Erika and I had to leave before the next set of nutrition classes for the month of July, we know and trust that not only are the social work students carrying along the final set of classes, but that Adriana will be the one sustaining and continuing this vision for nutrition classes all through the upcoming months when all of us Quito Project volunteers are not there. I am happy to declare: mission accomplished!

A post worth 12,000 words

We've taken more than 3,000 photos so far this summer. Here, in no particular order, are just 12 to give you a glimpse into what we've been up to.

A line of patients waiting for our arrival at the clinic.

Dr. Serlin with some patients in the exam room.

We made a house call to an elderly man with a gangrenous foot.

The 6 med students in front of our clinic.

Kamala's bridge jump in Baños.

Kamala with two patients.

Testing out the exam table after we gave the room a fresh coat of maize and blue paint.

Jenny with some young patients in the waiting room.

Emergency? Has him the lever!

The park across from our house. We play nightime fútbol here frequently.

Our future doctor.

The first installment of our nutrition class series, which will continue through the year.

Each day, the kids in our tutoring project wash their hands and faces, brush their teeth, take a vitamin, and drink a hot, nutritious colada.

Hi, I´m Jenny and I´m a July tutor. It´s already been more than 2 weeks since we´ve been working with the kids here and the days fly by faster and faster. As for the type of tutoring we do with the kids, it´s pretty relaxed since it´s summer vacation for them, too. We´re mixing a bit of studying time with playing time everyday before they drink their coladas, brush their teeth, take a vitamin and put on some aloe vera for their skin. We´ve divided the kids into grade levels and one or two tutors are in charge of each group. Adriana, the host´s daughter and director of the tutoring program, gives us specific work for each of the groups. For example, the past week the older children (the groups ositos, mariposas, conejos and estrellas) did ¨dictado,¨which is writing what they hear, the 3rd level kids (los gatitos) learned the abc´s, and the 1st and 2nd level kids (los elefantes, los tiburones) learned the color red and number one. The past week we´ve been working on reading comprehension and next week we´ll be starting on mathematics. The children are taking an exam at the end of the summer that they need to pass in order to advance to the next grade, so Adriana wants to make sure they learn and review all that they need to do that. If the kids don´t pass, they have to repeat the grade. Adriana has told us that the parents won´t pay for their children´s education if they have to repeat the grade so that would be the end of schooling for the kids.
The kids are adorable and loving. Some become very attached to us, and we can tell that all they want is some attention. When we move from the project area where we study to the soccer field where we play, they always want to hold our hands. They love it when we carry them, make them ¨fly¨(the Chango boys always shout ¨haceme volar!¨), and play hand slapping games with them. They´re very cute but sometimes it´s hard to keep them all focused for a stretch of time (for example, when we read them the stories for reading comp) and they can get out of hand when they´re in line to get their coladas. I think we´ve been getting better at keeping them in order though :)
Some of the kids that were shy have been opening up to us more recently, and it´s kind of sad that we´ll be leaving in less than two weeks. I just hope that we can make the most of it during the rest of the month and that the transition to the August tutors will be smooth. It´s been an amazing experience so far...I´d love to come back next summer and see how the kids have grown!

¡hola hola coca cola!

Hellooooo,
My name is Chelsey and I am the July Education Director.

For starters the month of July is vacation time for the kids here in Quito, so we have been working with them in the mornings from 9am-12:30pm. They are divided into groups by grade with some stragglers in between. Each group is then called by an animal name, myself and Jenny lead "los gatitos" (the cats/kitties) which are predominately 6-8 year old third graders. The other clans are: los tiburones (sharks), las estrellas (stars), los conejos (rabbits), los ositos (bears), and las mariposas (butterflies). We have laminated, or rather contact papered, cartoon style name tags of the animals for each student to wear thus identifying him/her apart of a group. Since we range from 60-80 kids a day this has been the best system of organizing them and giving them a sense of unity within each group. Many a times there are world cup eligible games of fútbol (soccer) where los conejos verse los gatitos. ; )

The children have been great; friendly, easy to love, and eager to learn we have each fallen in love with them. I believe their most admirable quality is their unyielding ability to care for one another. Literally 6 year olds are watching over 4 year olds, holding their hands and guiding them through the day with patience and tenderness. A favorite clan of ours is the Changos/Calapiñas who live next door to the school. There is Erica, Henry, Brayon, Marco, Diego, and little Angelito. Full of energy and always wanting one more photo they run to greet us and give tons of hugs to anyone willing to receive one. They remind me of the simple things in life, of wanting to care for another person above one´s self. Diego, only 4 years old, is Angelo´s (2 years old) constant partner in crime and caretaker, making sure his little brother is in line for colada (a daily nutritional drink) or brushing his teeth well. Of course not all is perfect here, there are some family feuds and brotherly brawls but overall all of the children get along very well and truly help each other out with a very mature sense of comradery.

So far each group has been working on different skills concerning the group´s particular needs. Los gatitos have mastered their abc´s and are now working on comprehending stories once they have been read. The director has told us that all of the children are able to read and write with no major probelms, but they lack the ability to fully understand what they have just read or written. For example los gatitos follow our stories to their best of their attention spans (which is not very long for rambunctious children on vacation :) answering questions about details with flying colors. However, when we ask what was the overall moral or theme of the story they guess and kind of miss the point. Hopefully after a month of the phenomenal July tutors this obstacle will be cleared!

In the afternoons we help out at the clinic by taking care of any antsy kids waiting for their turn or some simply come to visit us. Thursdays and Fridays a nutrition class is being offered by the social workers and public health students so the tutors also lend a hand with the children during these sessions. I seem to be making many grocery runs for colada supplies and snacks for those other children (us) or we all go exploring the local areas. On the weekends we have been making amazing trips to Baños, Otovalo, Cotocachi, Pichincha, and this weekend we head to the jungle!

It has been an amazing experience and I cannot believe three weeks have already flown by. I know just spending time with the children helps them grow but I hope we can also leave something else behind for them. Perhaps hopes for a better future, some dreams that we have shared with them, or simply the experience of meeting a group of crazy Gringos willing to be their friends will be lasting memories to cherish. I know I will never forget them with their sunburnt cheeks and beautiful smiles.

Hope you enjoyed the mini-novel,
Chels =)

¡Hola! Thanks for reading our blog. My name is Doug and I´ve been here in Ecuador helping the tutors with the kids for July. This is my first time out of North America and it has been an amazing experience so far.

July has been an interesting month so far. The children are mostly out of school for the summer now, so they don´t have any homework. We´ve been playing lots of games to reinforce their learning and keep them busy and happy. We also make sure they all wash their hands and face, brush their teeth, drink a healthy colada and take some flintstones vitamins daily. The children are quite amazing and absolutely adorable. Hopefully, our help tutoring and health education will have a lasting impact long after we have to leave.

If anyone has any great games, songs, suggestions or questions feel free to contact us through TheQuitoProject.org website.

"Disculpe, Doctorita"

I’m not going to lie… hearing patients call me ¨little doctor¨ is kind of a sweet feeling. We have officially finished our second day of the San Martin Clinic and it has been Fourth of July, Christmas, and chocolate balls of goodness all rolled into one. What really blows my mind is that the blue scrubs and the stethoscope are enough to make people put their utmost faith in my ability to help them—and I suppose that someone else believing in me makes me…believe in me, too. I guess in the back of every medical student’s mind is that nasty little beady-eyed man saying ¨YOU WILL NEVER CUT IT AS A DOCTOR, BWAHHHHH¨… well maybe not in the back of EVERY medical student´s mind… but definitely sometimes in mine.
Anyway, back to the clinic… all of the people are delightful and so gracious that even when we are all tired as a you-know-what in a you-know-where, we are all smiling and laughing and hugging the eleventy million children that are constantly hanging around asking for some more Flintstone´s vitamins. It’s a simultaneously thrilling and frightening experience because, I suppose, we will be REAL doctors in only a matter of years. We won’t get to fall back on the talents of the doctors that we have with us now.

Another crazy aspect of all this is that while I’m already 23 years old, I still feel like a little kid running around playing doctor. Women who are a good three, four, five years younger than I am come in seeking help and they already have entire families and I can only think while I’m trying to do my best to help them that they know so much more about life than I do and I still can’t definitively say that I ever will know everything that they know. I also performed four pregnancy tests today…and I am not going to lie…I was just as nervous as the women for whom I was performing them.

Anyway—so far a list of the things that I have learned from working at the clinic: 1) chewable vitamins can get you very far with 4 and 5 year-olds 2) sometimes the only medicine someone needs is a little bit of attention… and maybe an otoscope (med students will get that) and 3) a little trust can go a long way… be it between a doctor and a patient, two spouses, parents and children, and also between friends.

High Fives all around,
The Kejner-ator

Back in the U.S.

Sorry for the lack of blog posts during the month of June... the internet is poopy and never let me online.

This past month was most definitly an amazing experience, and i truly hope I can do it again. I, along with the rest of the June tutors just returned to the states these last few days, and while it is nice to be home, it was also very hard to leave Ecuador. The Onas are a fabulous family, and they made my stay in Ecuador an extremely postive experience. It was hard to say good bye to them. I know that a lot of what i learned about myself and life in general, I learned from them.

Tutoring was also a fabulous experience. the kids are so eager to learn and to be loved, and while we were teaching them, they in turn taught me a lot. I know that the July in August tutors will also do an excellent job. One of the most important things i learned was that it doesn't matter how much we actually teach them - we are changing thier lives just as much by just being there for them and being their friends and expressing love for them. I feel like us June tutors tried our hardest to do that, and i know that the next groups will do the same thing.

Good luck to everyone in Quito, and everyone who is going to Quito next month. I know you will make a huge impact in the lives of the people who live in Ecuador. Thank you again for a wonderful experience, one which i hope to have again.

-Brandi