Maps and Cobblers

For my birthday yesterday, Taylor Brown (a summer volunteer, family friend and fellow Coloradan) and I decided to do a birthday project.

This birthday project involved 50+ maps from our massive supply of National Geographics...


3 canisters of Ecuador's version of rubber cement...



2 different types of accents (British and Indian, if you must know)...


some pretty clutch dance moves...

and a lot of pasting, stepping back, realizing it was horribly crooked, peeling, and re-placing countless maps.

And then laughing at ourselves.

Coming home to a peach cobbler baked by my housemates was the perfect end to a really wonderful birthday.

I love my housemates. And summer volunteers, too :)
~Holly

Snail Mail Surprise

Making the trek out to our Postal Box in Sangolqui (a 45 minute bus ride-trek each way) is always slightly depressing. Since it's such an ordeal to head out there, we usually only check it once or twice every month. Therein lies the depressing part: even after a whole MONTH of not checking it, we usually have one measly little letter from one of our Universities asking for money (how'd they FIND US?!). Every time I head out there, I find myself talking down my expectations.

"Holly, Ecuador is notoriously bad with mail. 50 percent of things sent down here probably never even made it past customs. You just told your mom not to send anything because it would probably never make it. Emails are quicker and guaranteed to arrive. Don't get upset if there's nothing there. Don't take it out on the Postal Worker if there's nothing there."

Ok, so perhaps I'm giving over to my more dramatic tendencies. There was that amazing letter I got back in November from Ashley, and the homemade Valentine complete with a sparkling Wizard of Oz shoe-decal from Kaili. And don't get me started on the packages Dunc's mom has sent him; they're incredible. Actually, alright, now that I think about it we've gotten some great things from almost all our families during the past 10 months. Thanks Moms!

On Thursday, however, I got something incredible. I didn't even go to the Post Office so it was even more of a surprise when Dunc handed me a letter. Inside I found one of the paintings Marjorie had done on one of the many afternoons in Children's Art, beautifully rendered onto a stationary card. Minette Hand (younger sister of Country Director Mark Hand) had emailed me a few months back to see if I might be able to take pictures of some of my students' artwork and email them over to her so she could make cards as a fundraising tool. I did it and then quickly forgot about it, moving on to planning for Thanksgiving and trying in vain to learn Ecuadorian long division.

Melanie Hand (Mark's mom), it turns out, hadn't forgotten. She was kind enough to send a card down to me in Ecuador. I almost teared up in the kitchen (effectively freaking Dunc and Mark out) as I opened it. Marjorie will be so excited when I show it to her on Monday. What pride she will feel when she sees her artwork on a beautiful piece of stationary!

Thank you, Minette and Melanie, so so much.
Holly

Scratching Our Heads and Stretching Our Brains

(Today's guest blog (two in a row, amazing I know) comes from Country Director Mark Hand. I think everyone's trying to de-stress me so I'll get the Seth Harlan interview up, and it's worked; it will be up tomorrow! In the meantime, enjoy Mark's insightful contemplations on educational games.)

"When we opened our library here at MPI-Ecuador, we had a handful of books, a couple of chess sets, and a second-hand Connect-Four. I've wanted to expand our educational games section for some time now, driven by the feeling that my own intellectual development had a lot to do with Mastermind and Memory.
Thanks to the McCallas, we've significantly expanded the number of games that make our heads hurt, with Blokus, Rush Hour and my personal favorite, SET. In my mind - given Ecuadorians' own acknowledgment that the educational system here discourages creative thinking - these games are one of the funnest ways for us to contribute to the development of the children at the MPI library.
If you'd like to contribute to our collection of educational games, please let us know! I've picked out a handful of games below that a) develop fine motor skills or critical thinking abilities; b) are durable and c) are either language-free or Spanish-based.

Mastermind
Othello
Apples to Apples para Niños
Memory (Dora the Explorer edition)
Memory (original)

Thanks, and really, you should all pick up Blockus next time you're at Target. It's awesome.
~Mark"

Sketching

Seth and I have been throwing around the idea of a teenage art class ever since, well, probably the first conversation we ever had back in July when I was still living in Quito and going to language school. Back then it was totally just a concept, a dream. One of those good ideas that gets thrown around at family dinner, along with 20 other good ideas and a couple of inappropriate stories. And then life in Ecuador officially kicked into gear, and the idea was pushed to the back of the closet and (almost) forgotten.

Once the teen center was up and running, however, we found ourselves returning to the idea of such a class. While we weren't quite sure how to organize it, once three teen-center teens expressed interest to Seth in an art class, we knew there was serious potential for something.

Now, every Wednesday morning from 10 to 11:30 the five of us meet at the big work table in the library. I come up with a rough idea to structure the class and provide some sort of technical instruction, Seth provides the comfortable atmosphere, and the students provide us with commentary on the never-ending supply of high school drama. We all have an hour and a half to sketch out what creativity is to us. I'm coming to love Wednesday mornings.



~Holly

Self Portraits

So here's the thing with my children's art class. While I try to incorporate some kind of artistic technique or artist study into each class, when 75% of your students are under 5 years old, it gets a little tricky. Take Jori, for example. He would rather sit under the table scraping off crayon shavings with his scissors than learn about Georgia O'Keefe's desert inspirations. Or Carlitos. He'd rather be kicking Jori, who's under the table, than trying to understand Kandinsky color palettes.

Imagine my surprise yesterday when, after discussing the composition and symmetry of the face and explaining the 'self-portrait' project for the day, each and every one of our tiny students were hunched over their papers, painstakingly drawing their "football-americano" shaped eyes half way down their oval-faces, making little heart lips, and trying to remember where their ears go (Kerley was absolutely positive that her ears are in fact above her eyebrows). Yes, Serena and I had to walk them through every step of the way, coaxing them to erase all pencil marks after going over their faces with pen (ALL of them, Jonathan), and help them cut out the difficult parts involving their drawn hair, but overall, I was incredibly proud of the finished products. They even kind of look like them :)

We're excited for Eliah's brother, Aravon, to arrive tomorrow night! We LOVE visitors!
Happy Friday,
Holly

First 5 Lessons

I've been taking photographs after every children's art class of the collected works assembled to dry, and thought that I'd post those pictures here to give everyone a better idea of what we've been up to (other than our elbows in paint) for the past 3 weeks. I am so encouraged by by the progress, in terms of originality, which has blossomed this past week.

(Drawing Neruda, personal responses to two Neruda poems)


(Tissue paper valentines)


(Who am I? Collages)


(Painter Study I: Vincent Van Gogh and Starry Night)


(Painting birds, inspired by the beautiful book Abuela, donated by Dunc and Jocelyn's fabulous grandma!)

Drawing Neruda

As I mentioned at the start of the week, Tuesday was our first day of the new Children's Art class. This class has been one of my dreams ever since I applied to Manna Project, which was about this time last year if I think about it. It's wild to think back on that time of life when Ecuador was still a far-away day dream.

After finishing up the last of their homework problems (and trying to fit a few pieces into the new puzzle Jocelyn's mom sent back with her), Dana, Eliah and I convinced them to help us push 4 big tables together into the middle of the Casa Barrial, maneuver the heavy benches around the edges, plug in my ipod and speakers, and find a seat.

As I see it, the main objectives of the Children's Art class is twofold: in the short term, I hope to provide the students with a creative outlet and to expand their artistic experiences from those of markers, stickers, and construction paper to collages, portraits, painter studies, poetry, splatter painting, and public art instillations. In the long term, I can only hope that the experiences they have in our 45 minutes together will inspire a shift in their way of thinking and approaching problems (be it homework or life related) that encourages independent thinking and a creative outlook, as opposed to the overwhelming status quo of copying and memorizing any and everything.

To that end, for our first lesson Seth loaned me his comprehensive anthology of poetry by Pablo Neruda. As we passed the two poems I had chosen (Ode to Criticism and IV from 100 Love Sonnets) around the table, everyone took a turn reading a stanza aloud. After brainstorming a list of images we found in each poem, we took the next 30 minutes to translate the words of the poem into our own crayon, colored-pencil and marker-rich images. And while there was a good deal of overlap (read: copying), there were also a few creative surprises Neruda himself would have been proud of.

Holly

(first class's finished products: see if you can find 1. Eliah's, 2. two that are exactly the same, 3. the snow bird)