Jambi Huasi

Just a short update about what I'm doing here at Jambi Huasi! So far, it has been pretty random. In my last blog post I mentioned the appointments, TB questioning and excel work. About a week ago I went with the director and administrator to visit a couple of more rural schools to ask them if we can come back later to teach about various health topics. Those may include sexual health, doctor's visits and nutrition. Observing the nutrition part will hopefully be really helpful for my final paper!

Part of the first school, Unidad Educativa Provincia de Pichincha

Kids playing with the water running down the street at the second school, Escuela Dolores Cacuango Cutambi

"Kids have the right to: receive care, love and be loved, a good education, play, respect for their cultural identity, have a happy family, care and life"

Reeeeally curvy, bumpy roads on our way to this school! It's crazy how much longer car trips take when you have to weave your way up and down every hill and mountain.

I have also gone with the administrator a couple of times to distribute little slips of paper that list our services and phone number. Honestly, my favorite part of this project was cutting out the thousands of papers. I got a little tired of saying "Buenos días, quiere alguna información sobre Jambi Huasi, el centro de salud alternativa?" to every single person I passed. Over two mornings we tackled three main markets here. The second day, I went with (and met) a volunteer from Germany named Ana who is teaching English here for a year, and comes to Jambi Huasi to work on Fridays. She's more comfortable with English than Spanish, so we speak English, and it was really strange to speak it face-to-face with someone for the first time in a few weeks! Surprisingly, it's actually kind of uncomfortable to speak English here... I must have really associated Otavalo with Spanish because now I feel like English is the language I struggle with here. I really only speak it now through the internet, except for the occasional time when one of my host sister's friends wants to practice.

The most fun project I have done was to put together a little poster about nutrition for kids to hang on the board in Jambi Huasi. Hopefully it will be helpful... but a lot of the indigenous adults who come here can't read, so I guess it will really only help some. Maybe in those cases they'll see the sheer amount of fruit and vegetable pictures on the poster and realize that everyone here needs more of those in their diets! Something else I was reminded of while doing this project - advertising, in whatever country, is really white. I tried to pick pictures of kids for this that looked remotely Ecuadorian, but I didn't find anything close to looking Indigenous. It reminded me of some "congrats" baby cards I saw in many stores in Rwanda... they all had pictures of really white babies one them, even though there are probably zero white babies there! It's sad that the media is so white-dominated that countries with darker-skinned populations can't find pictures of their own people on their products.

My poster!

The most recent thing I have done is help paint the main office! A lot of the paint was sort-of bubbling out from the wall because of moisture, so I got to scrape that off and fill in the holes. We also stained the wood rafters on the ceiling, during which I felt like I was going to die from the fumes - it burned!

Just starting... so far the blue paint is just over all the parts I scraped.

Almost done!

Today one of the administrators of CIMAS visited me here to assess how things were going and talk about my final paper. While I've been doing a little bit of research, it has finally hit me that I have a 20-30 page paper to research for and write, so I better get working! This will be the longest and most academic paper I have ever written... I thought studying abroad was usually easier?