Harry Akehurst - CENIT 01/07 - 05/07

CENIT, 5 months later

2007-05-23T15:19:00.000-07:00

I'm almost out of time here, so (please, draw no comparisons, please) I guess it's time to start thinking about my legacy at CENIT...

San Roque was a very young project when I started working there in January, and has changed dramatically since then. It's a volatile workplace - the roof leaks, the plumbing has its less stable moments, and various times we've arrived to find the room up to 6 inches deep in water. The room is not really rented - we don't pay for it, and therefore its real owner doesn't feel terribly many qualms about hosting meetings there during our time, kicking us out with no notice. We've had drunkards try to break in, family feuds and I personally cut off water to the entire market by mistake when the plumbing broke (quite innocent of any notion that I was doing it - I turned a lever, and the water stopped coming. I thought I'd done pretty well). And that's without taking the people into account. Mariana, our Ecuadorian coordinator in San Roque, announced one day that we would almost double our time at the market in the morning. Working with the youngest group, this shook things up for me and the other volunteer who planned every day for them - we couldn't well drag our present plans out when the longest attention span in our group was about 12 seconds. It fell, somehow, to me to rework the plan for the youngest group, which wouldn't have been too much of a task, if it wasn't for the tassles on the edge of the task. We needed a plan that would allow new volunteers to carry on their work from where we left off, without having to learn the same lessons the hard way we did. We also had a LOT of time to fill, and with three other programmes running in the same room at once to distract them, the children needed to be quite transfixed by our activities - tricky with no attention span at all.

In fact, the changes I made to the routine have reshaped the programme completely - every day is different, but every day has the same core elements with the aim of achieving the same long term objectives. Every moment is full, no more than 15 minutes is spend on anything, and everything progresses day after day, but the volunteers need only plan once a week, for about two hours, for almost 10 hours of contact time. It works, and children have learnt to speak who couldn't speak before, to draw, to use "please" and "thank you", to converse, ask questions; in some cases children have learnt, for the first time, what the answer to "what is your name" or "how old are you", all under this new programme. Not that I get to see it happening: I no longer work with that group.

When another volunteer finished her term here I moved from the youngest to the oldest group - homework help, and setting activities to help at school, and for those who don't go to school, giving them a replacement for it. This is harder - they work fast, they all do different things, and I'm the only volunteers working with them. This means planning lots - the work I'm giving them at the moment is trying to concentrate on using the imagination, but it's tough going. Most of them will take 5 minutes to name a fictional fish I've drawn and demanded that they name, and none of them could make up a story. Starting by giving them pictures with the focus missing (one person obviously giving something to another, with the 'thing' itself missing) and trying to make them think of something to put in and moving on to answering questions about the life a fish, a bear, or a duck that only exists on paper, I'm trying to work towards a simple story before I leave. It's hard - they will always try to copy their pictures from something they can see, and name the fish after the person sitting next to them, but progress is coming.

More to come on Clases de Ingles.

The Difference Between Yesterday and Today in Ecuador

2007-04-16T09:43:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a rather important day here, but the explanation should probably begin in January. Very, very shortly before we arrived here a presidential election (I don't know exactly what they call it here) took place, in which, amongst an absolute pack of candidates, one Rafael Correa won, by apparently a surprising margin. He was the most left-wing candidate who wasn't completely loco, and very shortly after we arrived held a meeting with a number of well-known national leaders, pointedly leaving Mr Blair and President Bush, amongst other rather prominent and, afterwards, somewhat disgruntled high-profile politicians off his guest list. Of those who attended were representatives from China, Cuba, and a number of smaller Latin American countries, making a very Bolivarian statement. Since then he has been making loud complaints about the political system and highly developed, intricate, networked layers of bureaucracy that he has inherited.

This President, although Mestizo (dual Spanish and Indiginous heritage, and natively Spanish-speaking) spent a year doing volunteer work in a tiny indiginous village in the Páramo in Ecuador, learning Quechua while he did it. This background of concern into what is by far the poorest sector of Ecuadorian culture was a major part of his election campaign, and he has carried on emphasising his commitment to the Quechua people through the past 4 months. This is all fairly normal from an Ecuadorian President (except actually speaking Quechua), and their history of corrupt Presidents can testify to that.

The usual course of action is to complain that a corrupt system has been in place, and that the new government should be left alone and trusted to put past damage to right. By and by declarations of horror at the past government's incompetence/corruption/inherent evil will become less and less frequent, and the new government's innovations will become less and less frequent, and nothing will change.

Correa, however, recently announced that the present congress was corrupt to its roots, and that it needed to go, and that the old Constitution of Ecuador was rubbish and needed to go too. He proposed a national referrendum to abolish the congress, institute a National Assembly, and promised to resign if the country voted against it. The vote took place yesterday, a compulsary vote which followed three days of a nation-wide ban on the sale and consumption of alcohol, and in which every citizen above voting age had to return to their home town. Yesterday was not a day to be travelling.

The vote turned out with 78% voting for Correa's proposal. Congress will shortly be disbanded, the Constitution rewritten, and a 'Peoples' Assembly' instituted.

Chavez, Venuezuelen President, who also attended Correa's meeting in January, has already welcomed the outcome: "That is how Latin America is moving forward, from victory to victory, from triumph to triumph". Correa also announced, welcoming the result, that the country has paid its final debt to the IMF, saying "we don't want to hear anything more from that international bureaucracy" and threatening to expell the World Bank's representative from Ecuador if his government felt "pressured" by the organisation.

Many people have claimed that the entire thing is an attempt to give Correa himself more power, and that the Assembly will be either selected or ignored, and that the new Constitution will be nothing but a power cheque to the President. Signs of a tragic tendency towards those time-honoured Latin American political traditions (objectors thrown out of office, riot police being used to subdue demonstrations etc) have been shown, but in bid to quell the incredulous Correa has declared a second referendum to take place in 6 months' time to approve of the new Constitution, and the Assembly will be selected by popular vote again.

What seems definate is that IMF, World Bank and the Tratada de Libre Comercio (USA backed/pushed Free Trade Treaty, or TLC, as it's graffiti'd all over the walls in Quito, always as "NO TLC") influence has been firmly expelled, to the general understanding that a massive load of international corruption has been lifted from Ecuador. Whether this is to be replaced with national corruption in the form of a dictatorship is yet to be seen, but popular opinion seems to be that the greater evil has been cast off with the international influences.

What precisely awaits Ecuador is uncertain, but it is likely that much will unfold in the next 7 weeks while I'm still here, and it promises to be and exciting time.

Clases de Inglés

2007-03-26T14:53:00.000-07:00

Aside from San Roque, my main job at CENIT is organising, planning and, somehow, teaching English at CENIT's Primary School. Estar, the Primary School at the CENIT centre, has only 3 classes in it. Because it has to take children much older than they should be (market children who were not sent to school at the normal age often are refused entry into other schools, so go to Estar where they can begin at any age), it condenses 6 years into three, resulting in three classes of children aged between 7 and 16, and total chaos. When you tell someone in CENIT that you work English Classes, they give you a dry smile and wish you luck. There are 6 classes every week - 3rd Level have 2, 2nd Level have 3, and 1st Level have one double length class. There are either two or three volunteers in each class, and we run the classes alone. At present I plan the whole of 3rd and 1st Level, and together with another volunteer plan the 2nd Level. Improvement is slow, lessons in which no headway whatsoever is made are frequent, and the potential for disheartenment is very, very high. These children have energy that flares off constantly; they fight, they shout, they sulk - they have teenager problems, and they have very, very serious other problems. In the most terrifyingly offhand manner one Ecuadorian teacher informed me one day when all attempts at control and discipline had been abandoned, and the class had descended to something resembling a Medievil battlefield, that every child in the class was the subject of physical abuse at home, and that 60% were the victims of sexual abuse as well. Into this background step three gringos, trying to teach a language they don't want to learn...

Our principal challenges are preventing fighting, encouraging sitting down and actually doing some work, and creating work that will actually get done. Some are very, very clever; some are very, very sweet - most are very, very quick tempered, and the majority are just hitting those charming teenge years, which compounded with Latin Americans' love of dramatic and clichêd romantic gestures, means that they flirt, terribly, all the time. They kick, punch, throw furniture, pull hair, shout, scream, try to beat each other to death with broomsticks, and so on. They do not do the slightest bit of work without their teachers putting in 50 times more. We plan, very, very hard, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. On a good day they will work every example perfectly, and make the bounds of initiative that in children can so often lead to perfect understanding of something we hadn't even meant to teach, but the most clear explanation will escape everyone if one child is having a bad day, so there is not opportunity for their teachers to have bad days. I have been trying to steer the focus of these classes away from straightforward vocabulary to an understanding of how to form their own sentences by subversively teaching basic grammer rules. This means hiding the rule behind some kind of arbitrary process, and eventually demonstrating the extent of their learning by making them use their initiative on an unfamiliar example.

This approach, 'grammer without the grammer', means first using sentence templates and providing a very limited vocabulary list to try to force them to make their own sentences with a single subject type of a single verb, and slowly using the same type of template with other subject types and object types, always creating some kind of interesting theme to base them on (last week: insults with 'you are') and eventually springing a test on them which makes them realise that they can actually use the language that they know. It is a slow process, but every time they realise that they can do something, their sense of pride and achievement is amazing. I believe it will transpire in the coming weeks that their total lack of interest in the language is the result of having focussed for so long on learning massive vocabulary lists, and never feeling like their could actually say anything.

We have been concentrating on individual work - I make worksheets for them, try to make them look interesting and teach new rules clearly and subtly, and photocopy them for the classes - because this means we can mark their work and give it back witha grade, and allows us to identify in what areas each child needs help. The greatest thing this approach has achieved, however, is to develop some pride in their own work - a low grade, obviously considered and recorded, is an incentive to work harder, whereas a high grade makes them proud, giving them the self-confidence they need to use their initiative to learn harder rules. Successful use of their initiative gives them a sense of success, which in turn nurtures a desire to learn.

Ecuador

2007-03-15T14:21:00.000-07:00

I'm not principally in this country to travel or explore, but after a week of Quito's buses spurting suffocating black smoke at you and people stalking up to you at all hours to sell you something or steal everything you have, the country outside the capital city is more than a little bit tempting. So at the weekends, we go places.

Leaving Quito in any direction is always an experience - the city draws your eyes into it, and there is seldom time to stare up at the horizon, but we really are surrounded by mountains, and as we drive out of the city the Andes yawn open, the valleys drop away below and the peaks sore up into the sky. Not far from Quito, up the enormous valley known as the Volcano Avenue, is the hostel we stayed at when we went to climb Corazon, Illinizes and, finally, Cotopaxi. It's a converted farm, and it's lovely, but the main attraction is the views. From the front gates the entire width of the Avenue gapes up at you, with Quito swimming in smog, dammed up against the Pichincha volcanoes before the Avenue begins its 2800m descent to the sea. At the other end, the valley snakes up into the Central Highlands (they have them here too!) where it is flanked by Cotopaxi, Antisana and, eventuall, Cayambe. On the opposite side of the Avenue to the hostel is a huge three-peaked ridge, part of the edge of the crater of a long extinct volcano, and, rising shear up to over 4000m, it cuts into the sky as if a section of the sky has been torn off the scene. It makes for some pretty impressive sunsets.

The Teleferico, a cable car, rises straight out of Quito to 4200m, and from this point it is possible (we discovered) to make the ascent of the Volcano Rucu Pichincha (dangerous - 3 people have died on it since we climbed it, all as a result of not taking a guide...neither did we) in a day. As the cable car ascends almost vertically out of the city, and the eyes drift from the streets and blocks below to the mountains on the other side of the city, the Andes really hit home. Quito, so demanding, so imposingly dangerous, is dwarfed and then swallowed as you reach the end of the cable car, leaving only the climbing peaks and a vast abyss to show where the city nestles below. At the top, a bowl-like plateau prevents us from looking down, forcing the eyes up at the peaks, but a short (but very, very hard) walk takes us to the ridge, where the Andes stretch out and the belief that a capital city could possibly be so close is tested to its limit.

But the Andes aren't all this lifeless majesty, and lower where the altitude permits life a different kind of scene awaited us. Driving down to the coast on the way to the beach we reached the cloud forest at dusk. Cloud forest is basically rainforest, but higher up, on mountains, and very, very cloudy. At dusk, it was amazing. From the road, clinging to the side of one of the precariously steep mountains, the view up the hillside was straight into a cloud, from which the twisted branches of rainforest trees and vines give a ghostly definition to the hill, implying a vast depth to the turmoil of grey-green the masked the ground itself. Out the other window of the bus the valley plunged down out of sight, so steeply that the other wise of the valley was only a hundren yards or so away, but the drop was immense. Of the other side, only the faintest definition of the hillside could be seen, but much higher up the clouds admit a glimpse of more tangled limbs reaching out through the murk. Again, higher, another sliver of floating forest, and higher up, another, each one further up and further away, leaving neither doubt nor actual proof of the mountain's incredible size. Higher, just above the highest greyscaled knitting of far off branches, the sun, glowing huge and red through the cloud, is setting behind the peak, defining it perfectly for a moment and shooting off blood red beams into the clouds before setting completely, and leaving us to the tangle of undergrowth at the sides of the road, seeming to get nearer and nearer as the light fades.

The coast itself, when we finally got there, is like a different world. Palm trees, or vast stretches of desert-like wilderness, and the world eventually severed by the beach. The Pacific Ocean, too vast to comprehend, cuts half the concern out of life - while the world goes on on one side of this terrible border, the other world, the other half of everything that you perceive, everything you sense and acknowledge is this eternal rhythm of the sea. It's not like the Atlantic, which one can imagine sailing over to America, nothing like the Channel or the North Sea, spotted with ships and oil rigs - with the Pacific, the horizon is where the Earth curves out of sight.

There is more left to see - the erupting volcano at Baños, where every night from a viewpoint searing orange and red lava floes can be seen worming down the mountainside, the Amazon basin where it steps out from behind the shoulder of the Andean Cordilleras, and the Andes themselves where they meet Peru, and the mountains turn dark as they slope Southward to Machu Pichu and Chile, far, far beyond...

With any luck...

Cotopaxi

2007-03-08T12:04:00.000-08:00

A few weeks back, and following several weekends of fairly intensive training, we climbed Cotopaxi, the world's highest active volcano (5850m). It was really quite something:

We wandered up to the refuge at 4800m around lunchtime on Saturday, with all our equipment, which, although the walk is only about 800m, took 40 minutes because there was a lot of equipment. We then relaxed in the refuge for a few hours, and went to bed there at about 7 in the evening. I couldn't sleep - the altitude, which had other people throwing up and passing out, didn't affect me at all except when I tried to sleep, when I got wildly out of breath.

At midnight we got up, pulled on enough clothing to make me roughly the shape of a rugby ball with a wooly hat on, and had breakfast. Then, at about half 1 in the morning, we set off. We reached the base of the glacier just after 2 and, after strapping on crampons, me and Nicola (another English volunteer) attached ourselves to a guide called Lobo (it means 'Wolf' in Spanish; he had a gun, in case of puma attacks apparently...) and set off. We walked very slowly, which was fine at first. It was pitch dark, but it was a fairly clear night, and other climbers on the mountain made a trail of lights into the sky in front of us. Soon, however, we were on the glacier proper, and it was getting very cold. Eyes were adjusting, so I'd turned off the torch, but it was clouding over, and the mountains around us, and the ground below, were invisible - it was just ice, darkness and the moon, blurred by the clouds. We were still walking very slowly (you have to at that altitude - the lack of air is really rather noticable) but I was getting very, very cold.

Eventually we tied Nicola to another guide who was walking slowly, and Lobo and myself sprinted up the glacier to get some warmth back. Under a huge wall of ice that provided a little shelter we came across the only people from the group who were further up, Theo(dora) and Megan, with their guide Eran, where Theo was in tears saying she couldn't possibly go on. There was some arguing, and Lobo took Theo to go down, and I got roped on to Eran and Megan. Now it was getting cold in earnest, and it was about 4 in the morning - the clouds were getting very thick, but we were on out way out of the top of them. Now the moon was clear, and the ice glinted as we climbed through the dark, out of the clouds into the sky - that was all there was to see. Just ice, the crunch-clink-crunch-clink of crampons and ice axes, and the only ground we could see was the ice we were standing on.

Then we rounded a lump of glacier the size of a house, and the wind hit. No we were out of the clouds, and climbing into the sky. I have never been so cold. The last hour and a half of climbing was full on, hands and feet and ice axe ice climbing, no shelter or stops, and was too cold to go slow but too high to go fast. Suddenly day broke, but sadly and with barely more light than we had from the moon, and the cloud pulled back over the sky. We reached the summit in clouds and it could have been a meteor flying through some interstellar dust cloud, the place looked so totally unlike anywhere on earth. All there was to see was about 20 yards of scoured ice, twisted by the wind into somewhat terrifing statues, and clouds swirling past with the wind. I was 6.30 in the morning, 5850m up, and it was -20 degrees. We didn't stay long.

We were back at the refuge by 9am - only the two of us and Eran actually made it to the summit.

San Roque

2007-02-21T10:34:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-01T13:10:00.000-08:00

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.