A Season's Change

There are only two seasons in Ecuador: winter and summer. The former is characterized by torrential downpours of rain every afternoon. The latter is the exact opposite, no rain whatsoever. Fall and spring are completely ostracized here on the equator leaving little room for transition from one climate to the next. Because of this, when one season will end and the next begins is a guessing game. But now, more than ever, we have much reason to assume that summer is comin round the bend. As the kids pile through the 2-ton metal door frame into are makeshift school, we notice that not a single one is wearing his or her galoshes that they have worn since day one. For three days in row now, we have been without a single drop of rain and temperatures have been a balmy 80 degrees. And early, every morning for the past week, I have seen the white, snow capped peak of Cotopaxi 100 miles south looming over Pasachoa and the Los Chillos Valley in which we live.

But the seasons of change not only apply to the climate of the Andes Cordillera; we too are coming out of winter and opening the door to a warmer and brighter season. We just finished our first Spring Break Volunteer session that included 45 Med-school and undergrad students who worked in and around our community, San Francisco, over the past month. Each of the 4 groups played a major role in propelling us forward into a more mature site. The groups aided in donating school supplies and new reading material for improving literacy. They worked with us to fund and repair the playground next to our school with new equipment, fresh paint, and a better soccer field. They have helped improve the health of the community by stocking the health centers with $5000 worth of donated medical supplies. They have raised half the funds to pay a social worker for 1-year who will provide psychological care for the abused children in our programs. But most importantly, they helped us get the ball rolling on transitioning from providing after-school programs with the kids to providing vital services to the whole community via our community assessment program.

Our community assessment program is unlike the traditional community needs-based assessment, which takes a look at a community to see what they lack and where they are weak, and then caters to that information. But the route we are taking assesses what the community has and where they are strong, and then helps to use those strengths to build up the community. Jim Collins, in his book Good to Great, calls this the Hedgehog approach. He applies it to businesses, but the principle is sound across the board for any organization. It is when an organization takes what they have, what they know, and what they are good at and builds the organization upon those strengths. The same can be applied for community development and it is what we hope to do here in our community.

We are joined by another organization and together we plan to assess the strengths of 5 communities in the same area, one of those communities being San Francisco, by way of surveying 1000 to 1200 families. It is a lot like a census in many ways but from the data we will extrapolate what services are provided and how well it is doing. And for us, we will be looking at the data to guide us to where our assistance can best be used in the 3 long, muddy streets that make up San Francisco.

So, as the day slowly ages and the sun stretches high above the Valley with the clouds still at bay, we as an organization have a lot to look forward to in the coming months. And before we know it, summer volunteers will be arriving just as we begin to pine for more rain, to again propel us forward and remind us just how pleasant the weather really is.

http://mannaproject.org/DonateNow.asp

Watering the Plants

I am lying in one of the hammocks in the atrium and noticing that our two hanging plants are becoming wilted and dying. With 7 people living in the house I’m sure we have all thought that someone else is probably taking care of them. So, I am going to stop playing a part in this distributive responsibility mentality and do something about it. I am going to single-handedly save the lives of these plants. I get up, fill a pitcher with water, and nourish the moribund shrubs with a sense of self-righteousness. I am doing something good. I lie back down in the hammock to gaze upon my good deed. But, my feeling of self-righteousness quickly retreats with the lack of immediate satisfaction. I am still looking at two wilted, dying plants.

She is saying something to me, but I cannot understand her. I’m hearing the words but they are not making sense to me when I mentally reconstruct her sentence in English. This is the third person that I have had trouble understanding. What’s wrong with my Spanish today? I felt so good about it just three days earlier and was encouraged by my progress so far. Slowly, I am coming to the realization that this is not something that just clicks one day, like algebra, and I can now move on to calculus. No, it is a lifetime of slow progress. Little by little learning something new everyday. Language is like Math itself, not the subjects within it. It takes a PhD in Mathematical theory before the student can look back and say he understands how numbers work. Every day before, he was building his knowledge. Building and building.

Pamela is not concentrating. She keeps telling me that 9 minus 3 is 5. We have spent 5 minutes on this one problem and I am working hard to keep the muscles in my face from displaying bewilderment. I don’t want to make her feel stupid with my reaction. But, she is one of the smartest kids in our program. Being only 9, she can learn any new material quicker than most of the kids who are older than her. In addition, I work with her everyday on math and I know that she can do better than this. I have seen her breeze through 4 digit multiplication problems. She has risen from being one of the shyest kids in the program, lacking self-confidence, to one of the best and brightest. She may be the best example we have of what service can do for kids who are capable and just need a little extra attention. But today, we’re hung up on single digit subtraction. And Today, my patience is waning. With a look of indignation, I tell her she has 10 minutes to finish her 20 math problems. She gets wide-eyed, puts her head down, and plows through to end without making a single mistake, and she did it in just 7 minutes. That’s more like it.

Day after day, I continue to water the plants.