San Roque

Many apologies for how long it has taken for me to finally get round to typing this - I assure you all that it is entirely the fault of Blogger.com...

Anyway, now that I've been working there over a month, I can tell you some more about CENIT. In the mornings, asI may have said, I catch a bus to CENIT itself, and find the rest of my market group - there's loads of volunteers, as CENIT is virtually run by them. There are a handful of paid teaching staff, the tiny convent of nuns that officially runs the place, and an armyof German volunteers on civil service. Anyway, I find the others from the San Roque market group, we pick up a bag full of toothbrushes and whatever the canteen has for us to take to the kids (this can be anything: bread, soup, watermelon, boiled plantain (it's like a huge banana, and when boiled smells very, very alcoholic), 80 boiled eggs, mush, gruel, fruit, fruit soup) and wander down to El Recreo. El Recreo is odd. It's a shopping centre, smack in the middle of the South of Quito (the poor(est) end) and contains every shop you'd expect to find in a shopping centre in the USA. It's wildly out of place, and both an eyesore and a refuge from the South of Quito! Once there we catch another bus to San Roque, one of the poorest areas of Quito, situated somewhat precariously on the steep hillside under Quito's focus point, a huge statue of the Virgin Mary that looks out over San Roque to the rest of the city. The market itself is mostly in a huge building owned by Coca Cola, but spills out onto the surrounding streets. CENIT rents a room in the market, so on arriving in the mornings we wander around the market picking up children whose parents work there. The kids aren't really allowed to come unless their parents will register them properly, with a birth certificate and address (allowing the social workers that access families through CENIT to help the families more directly) but we have quite a few that come every day whose parents won't talk to us, and send their kids along after we've passed. One of the reasons for this is that the majority of parents in San Roque are indiginous, and speak only very simply, highly accented Spanish as their second language after Quichua, which most of the kids speak as their first language too. We eventually get to our room, which is laid out like a classroom with a tiny kitchen at one end. The kids' ages range from 2 to 12, but all of them join in singing "Buenos dias, niños, como estan?" first, following which the younger ones all wash their hands, which they love. Principal activities vary greatly fromone day to the next, and have been anything from colouring in to making St Valentine's Day cards. They brush their teeth, receive their food, and we deposit them back with their families by12.

A social worker comes to the market with us, and works with the over 5's, helping them with their homework and teaching those that do not attend the local school (which is a free state school, but treats indiginous children appallingly, the teachers themselves reinforcing the traditional predjudice in Ecuador that the indiginous people are stupid) to read and write. Given that the social worker is a Spanish speaking 'mestiso' (of Spanish descent) too, this is a very hard task, but she has other duties in the market - Ecuador's social service system is very young, but it does exist, and where necessary families can access help with healthcare, family planning (a major issue in this country, where 7 or 8 children may be a norm) or accomodation, but very few know it, and this makes it very hard for the social workers to find out where social services are most needed. This is the reason that they work through CENIT, which it's registration system and access to families, and at the moment some very, very personal questionaires are being returned by the families to the social services through CENIT's San Roque market group. They're terrifying. It's so hard to associate the adorable children who come and play with us every day, with a family of 12 that lives in a one room with no running water on a $120/month rent, with a monthly income of $150/month. It is, however, a very encouraging sign that these families now trust us enough to let us know those kinds of details.

That's just the morning. I'll get onto the afternoons some time soon.At present I have a slight problem - I broke some ribs on the bus on the way to the beach for carnival, which is a little uncomfortable. I'll write about that too.

Ecuador, Quito, and CENIT

I´m now almost two weeks into my four and half months at CENIT, in Quito, Ecuador, so here´s some impressions...

Quito is amazing - almost three kilometres up, altitude sickness is a major issue for many Britains who come here, bus mercifully I´ve been let off fairly lightly. There is no excuse for this city - it´s a long way from the coast, there´s no big river or trading route nearby, and not an inch of natural flat ground for hundreds of miles. Quito isn´t built on a hillside, though, nor even in a valley, but at the meeting of about 32 of the Andes most dramatic volcanos, and therefore the city doesn´t so much sprawl as spill into the larger valleys, and from the air the city appears to be flowing down in a line towards the sea. The place is endearingly lawless - the roads are mayhem, but that seems to breed good drivers (not in the British sense, though) and although my horror when the bus I was riding in U-turned in the middle of a duel carriageway was somewhat vocal, I´ve grown used to it.

Ecuador is, as is possible to guess, on the equator, but in Quito you might think it was in Italy or Greece; however, if, like our group of volunteers, you venture down to the coast of a weekend, things change rather quickly. In Quito, it´s usually hot, but at Esmeraldas, on the north coast, it´s always summer and the heat is... hot. A girl who came with us fell over at the beach, and hit her head on a rock. Later that day she became very unwell ineed, hyperventillating, having several epileptic seizures, and at several point stopping breathing - I have never been more grateful for my First Aid training, and she is thankfully much better now.

CENIT is the centre that I´m working at for the next 5 months of so - it´s full title is 'el Centro de la Niña Trabajadora', or the Centre for the Working Girl. I could write a lot about it, but they have a very good website at www.cenitecuador.org, which can tell you everything you need to know about the centre. I am working in the mornings at San Roque market, where we are trying to introduce the children to a classroom environment in the hope that it will enable them to do better at school - the majority are children of indiginous families, and therefore they will not receive encouragement at school because of the prevalent predjudice in Ecuador that the indiginous population are inherently less intelligent than the 'mestisos' - those of mixed indiginous/Spanish mixed heritage. What we really do is give the children some time and space to play, to learn a little and to appreciate the social manner that will enable them to get better jobs than working in the market like their parents, who may earn as little as $40 a month (about 20 pounds).

In the afternoons I help teach English in the primary school at CENIT itself, which is a challenge, to put it lightly. The kids are lovely, all very intelligent too, but they do not want to learn to speak English, and they do not want to be taught by a 'gringo', although they are all very friendly. The classes are large, lack any normal teaching resources (only one room has a whiteboard) and frequently involve more crowd control than teaching. Nevertheless, they are great fun, and I am assured that the children might take as much from simply seeing what advantages proper education has given their teachers (no comment) as from the lesson itself.

I am out of time - more to come.