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.