finally!

I uploaded photos to my flickr page!  you can go see them!  there are pictures of our house, some food, and the beach.  por ejemplo, this is our porch. 

and this is the beach

wooo ecuador!

ayudame!

seriously.  I work at an after school program for kids and once or twice a week I have to come up with an educational and fun activity.  all by myself.  all the activities I come up with are fun, but hardly educational.  mostly they are art projects. 

so, if you can think of any games or activities that can be done in spanish with kids 10-14 years old, I´d appreciate it.

¡una vez mas!

this is my (and my community members´) current favorite song.  we´ve got the words posted up on the wall in our dining area and are actively learning all the words (and the meaning).  we listen to it at least once a day and sing along loudly and dance.  I wonder at times what our neighbors think, considering you can hear everything we do in our house outside in the street, and our guards have commented in the past about our musical choices (in favor of, not complaining about).

anyway, we find it uplifting!  and peppy!  with a great rock out! the song is Color Esperanza, by Diego Torres.  someday, we plan on buying the cd.  my neighbor tells me that he sings many songs que son muy bien.

music education

I took the retreat group last week to hang out with neighbors in Arbolito one day.  we went to this woman´s house who has three sons, oldest aged 14, and the youngest in 4th grade.  they all go to nuevo mundo, a good foundation school rostro partners with. 

turns out, in ecuador kids learn to play the recorder!  who knew such things crossed cultures!  they learn it in 4th grade, so the youngest son played us twinkle twinkle little star and we clapped like mad.  yay that´s over with!  no more recorder concert!  nope.  turns out the other two kids learned to play the recorder as well.  AND the family happens to own two of them.  the boys busted them out.  the middle child started a song.  it sounded like something I should recognise…but I couldn´t quite get it.  until the oldest took over at the chorus.  celine dion. 

you don´t know surreal until you´re sitting on a concrete floor in the middle of an invasion community listening to a kid play my heart will go on on the recorder.

como se dice…

ok so Rostro de Cristo runs three different after school programs (asp), in three different neighborhoods.  I may have mentioned this before.  it´s the only program that rostro runs itself, all others are foundations or organizations that we partner with.  but we saw this need for asps in our neighborhoods so we run these programs. 

this week, and whenever there is not a retreat group in town, I was at Valdivia, the asp in my neighborhood.  it was actually really fun.  we do PAI activities, which are supposed to help the kids build skills they´re not learning in the broken ecuadorian education system.  we do fun/educational activities.  there´s recess.  then we have a chat and give out bread bananas and water.  good times.  this week I ran an activity on wednesday, where we played scattegories (I made up categories and they wrote their answers on scrap paper, it´s a game you don´t need a lot of materials for).  it was fun, though I had to trust that when they wrote down famous people or places that they were real people or places.  we also have homework help, so kids come with their homework and we have a volunteer in there that does tutoring and the like.  it´s a safe structured place for kids to hang out in the afternoon.  yay.  I like getting to know the kids, we do a lot of coloring and games, so it´s fun.  plus it helps me practice my growing spanish skills (though I still do a lot of pointing and looking confused).