Its Thursday!

Writer’s note: I apparently felt the need to emphasize things in ALL CAPS tonight.

Buenos noches friends, family, and most importantly donors,

Its been a while since I have posted (two weeks or so). That’s not to say that nothing has been going on, I have just been spending all of my spare moments (and some moments that probably should have been used for other things) to work on my applications to graduate programs in Economics. Technology is great. I can pretty much apply to grad school online in Ecuador. At the same time, this would not be possible without: my professors who agreed to write me recommendations, and, my family and friends on the ground in America carrying forms around, sending off mailings, and giving me comments on what I have written. So, if you are reading this, thank you (I’m pretty sure at least my mom does). I have made some progress, but still have plenty to do before I am done applying everywhere. It is still only late September, which makes me early to on-schedule.

Applications have taken up almost all of my spare time. I’m not going to lie; it is tedious, grating, and I’m probably in a worse mood because of it. The two other things that stand out are the two professional soccer games I have attended. My club team is now LDU Quito, (Liga Deportiva Universidad Quito), or affectionately called “Liga” here (if you speak Spanish, you see how terrible a name Liga is for your team. If you are good at guessing what words that sound like something in one language mean in another language you might be able to tell why this is an uncreative name as well). Two weekends ago on Sunday they had an 11h30 game in la Casa Blanca, their stadium, up a little north of the airport. This stadium is very much in Quito; it is also just about two hours away from our front door. Quito is a very long city. They tied Macara 1-1. It was incredibly sunny and NO ONE was there. It was great. Last weekend, Liga played South Quito at 18h30 in Estadio Atahualpa, another stadium in Quito south of the airport but on the Ecovia, not the Metrobus. The crowd was much more into it. I consider myself a good fan in general: I go early, I stay to the end, I am willing to stand the whole time and cheer, and know what is going on for the most part. In a professional soccer game here, not only do you stand the whole game you sing the WHOLE TIME. It was awesome. By the end of the game we were learning some of the lyrics. Some songs were very encouraging. Others were less so. However, I do believe everything we said was much less racially/ethnically charged than reading “How Soccer Explains the World” would have you believe soccer fans behave. Liga got pounded. They went down 3-0 in the first half and stayed there. The fans…got…rowdy (edited for content). Still, it was a great experience and I cannot wait to go to the Ecuador-Paraguay game in a couple weeks.

Programs also started last week. Mine started slow. Monday, there was plenty of attendance at kids English, but no adults showed up for Adult English. Tuesday, the first day of art, was also the first day of winter, so the weather was terrible and no kids came to art/the library. Wednesday no adults showed up for Adult English. Thursday we had three kids for children’s art (we made egg crate caterpillars). Friday is the day Haley and I go in early and then come home to cook (we have classes that exclude us from doing this every other day of the week). We made chicken jambalaya and it turned out great.

Things are better this week (if you have trouble following my timeline, in-between the last paragraph and this one soccer game two occurred). Monday we had three adults in Adult English (technically two adults and a kid). They were also much more advanced English speakers than we had planned on. Krysta and I scrambled for two hours. We started by walking to the window and learning all the vocabulary we could see but didn’t know. Then we played “I spy” in English. I won. We got the diagnostic, vocab, and game to last an hour. Then we did pronunciation; our students red aloud to us from books. We spent half an hour on pronunciation, and then Krysta and I went over four major problem areas (pronouncing “g,” words that end in “y,” words that end in “ed,” and “th”). I feel like it went pretty well, especially for having to scramble.

Tuesday was a banner (and long) day. It started with a 10am meeting with CIDE about these small business classes. That meeting definitely exceeded expectations. We walked in and said we have the money, lacked the people, but are ready to take the class. We talked about details a little bit and PICKED A DATE. Class will be October 12-16. Classes run from 8-13h00, with a coffee break at 11h00. It is a one-week, twenty five hour class that we will walk out of being certified to train instructors for the course. I personally am paying for the instructor fee (most of the course cost) at a price of $375. When I say personally I mean you, my donors, who have donated all the funds I will use to do so. It is going to make for a long week doing this in the mornings in top of all the program stuff in the afternoon, but we think its 100% worth it. I also plan on writing up a proposal to USAID with some more long-term goals to see if I can finagle some extra bones out of those tax-dollars we all pay (and because Ecuador also uses the dollar there is a small chance that it will be the physical dollar you gave to the government to pay your taxes with. Oh, what’s that? In some places the entire economy isn’t cash only? Interesting.) After our meeting, we ran some errands in San Luis and I turned $120 in twenties into $120 in dollar coins and quarters for the bus jar. We were home by 11h30. Tuesday is children’s art day; Sonia planned this one. We made mobiles of the life cycle of caterpillars! (fun and educational, which in all seriousness is something we strive for). This was a learning experience. The kids loved it, but some parts (cutting spirals, attaching hanging things with yarn) might have been a bit two advanced for some of our younger students. My favorite story from the day was when after explaining the parts of the CATEPILLAR LIFE CYCLE we were going to make, Paula told me she was going to make “a flower, a dog, a house…and…a dog house! She did. We encourage creativity.

Wednesday was Adult English again. Wednesday really started after dinner on Tuesday with lesson planning until about midnight. Erik’s Spanish teacher Diego once said “native speakers speak their language at about the intermediate level.” I figured he was probably right. I also figured my degree in English would make me more or less exempt from this statistic. WRONG. I learned this planning my review of all the verb tenses for regular verbs in English. I did not even know how many tenses there are, and definitely could not name them all. It was a humbling experience, but I do think it turned out pretty well. In class, we had three more teens, which is great, because they were about the same English level, but it did really change the dynamic (everyone was less willing to speak up). We also only got through about half of the verb tenses. This is fine, because we teach for understanding, so if we need to go slower we certainly will. The worksheets we had for class/homework were too hard. I’m still learning.

Thursday (today) was children’s art. I spent the morning prepping by helping Mike and Erik move the broken cinder block pieces off the roof (from the door we put in). To put it lightly, some of our neighbors are a bit too protective of the field they don’t own. So we only got about three-fourths off the roof (there are so many random projects do to around the house). In art, we did hot and colors and drew animals with echo lines. Props to http://oodlesofart.blogspot.com/search/label/2nd%20Grade and the appropriate links to help me plan this one. I had been wanting (did you notice I used the past perfect progressive? I did it intentionally, because I made a calendar of all the art classes this semester, split the months into categories [September is animals month] and then filled in about half the dates with projects) to do tissue paper dragons, but funding issues got in my way. We started the class with a lecture on hot and cold colors (Hot: red, yellow, orange, pink; they open up spaces and are active. Cold: blue, green, purple, gray; they make spaces seem smaller and calm or depress.) Then we had the kids draw an animal on the page, draw concentric contour lines around it, and then color in the rings in an alternating pattern of either warm or cool colors. Everyone except the two youngest really seemed to get this and ended up with good projects. We also had a lot of talking today, which I thought was great/fun. Sonia brought in music, which really enhanced the mood. I will probably have to be stricter about staying seated on Monday.

Afterwards Paula and some others spent about half an hour decorating my hair/face with construction paper scraps. I was in a pretty AWESOME mood today (lucky everyone) so I just took it in stride. The two things that stand out are the fact that 1) at one point they called me “the bull,” which is a nickname I am more than willing to keep, and, 2) they obviously want me to grow a mustache because they taped a paper one on my face. I’ll probably indulge them on that one once this small business class in done. I’ll need to fit in when I go to Argentina over Thanksgiving.

Today was also Haley’s birthday, so we went to Crepes and Waffles for dinner. It was delicious. Absolutely incredible. Tomorrow the library is closed because we are taking our first quarter retreat. We are going to a resort called Sierra Azul, in the Tena area. Its in the jungle. It should be wet and gorgeous. I really wanted to watch Anaconda tonight to get in the mood, but only Mike and Erik thought this was a good idea. I hope my camera is up to the challenge. And with all the lesson planning I have ahead of me and applications to look forward to in my spare time, it should be a good chance to get away.

Things to report in general: I did in fact have a sinus infection. Due so some technical problems in the lab, I spend the first 4 days on antibiotics that the bacteria was drug resistant to. I then spent another 8 days on real antibiotics. I think its cleared up now.

The faster I finish my applications, the faster you can get regular updates again.

Chao,

Chet

Song of the Blog: “You Belong with Me” by Taylor Swift

CIDE update and another bill story.

Buenas noches friends, family, and most importantly donors,

I wrote about paying a bill last time because I thought it was a novel experience. As I write this today, I wonder if perhaps every bill I pay here will be an experience. But in order to stick to my rigorous belief in chronological cataloguing, first I am going to tell you about team Microfinance’s meeting with CIDE Thursday morning.

I mentioned about a month ago, during that official programmatic update, that we had met with CIDE, this organization through ESPE (a local university) to run another set of small business classes. I’m pretty sure I also mentioned that they told us to call back in September, because they were about to go on vacation. Well, we waited a month and then gave them a jingle jangle on Tuesday, September 1. They set up a meeting for 10am Thursday. The night before, Bibi, Erik, and I met to discuss what we really wanted out of this meeting. We had talked about undergoing training to be certified to teach instructors. However, we had had zero (0) luck recruiting people with college degrees or people actively seeking college degrees who wanted to take 40 hours off to do a small business training course and assumed that CIDE had done zero recruiting as well. We decided to go in asking if it was still a feasible class, but still feeling comfortable ending up simply enrolling in a small business class and taking good notes to replicate in the future.

This meeting was much less about the when/where logistics of the course to be taught and much more on the “which course?” discussion than I had expected. We actually spent most of the time talking about prices. CIDE had told us at the first meeting that they were recently turned into a public institution, which meant that they couldn’t say no to anyone but also had no funding. A professor for this course charges $15 an hour. Other than that there are some modest materials costs. The capacitación de capacitadores class would be 20 hours; 4 hours a morning 5 days a week. The simple capacitación is 40 hours, 2 weeks of four hours a day. While the following may be a readily apparent fact, the capacitación de capacitadores class would cost half as much as attending the basic small business class. While they also encourage about 15 students a class, there didn’t seem to be a lower bound as long as they get paid. I am a little hazy on this point; while I understood almost all of this meeting, I was unable to ask this question in a way they understood (which was a little embarrassing; I really did have the feeling that they would think I was a lot smarter than I was if I could just keep my mouth shut). In fact, they suggested recruiting about 20 people to lower the cost of the basic small business class.

So where are we now on these classes? The honest answer is still more up in the air than I thought we would be after this second meeting. But this meeting wasn’t exactly bad news. It sounds to me like Erik and I can get certified to train instructors for $300 and some nubbins. This sounds pretty good: it is half the time and half the cost of the other option. Sure, recruiting others is almost impossible, but if we don’t really need others for the class to happen than it doesn’t matter. Things like certificates and certification are very, very important here. Our flyers for English classes say something to the effect of “we are certified gringos” (Enseóado por licenciados nativohablantes) which makes very little sense when you think about it. The money to fund these courses is a problem either way we decide, though.

But money isn’t as big a problem as it might first sound. I’m not sure if I have said this yet, but thanks to my donors, I have actually met my fundraising goal and actually raised a little beyond. So a very, very big thank you is appropriate for all of you. We actually get a little lee-way with how any money we raise over our goal is spent (but not too much lee-way, it still has to be spent in a way that makes it a legally tax-deductible donation.) and I can think of few things more appropriate for me to spend my surplus on than paying for the training to bring small business classes to the communities I work in. And when team microfinance talked about where exactly we stood walking out of our meeting, I said just that: I think $300 is a great way for the guy who came down really interested in microfinance and small business classes to be trained in useful small business class techniques (Erik can come too; and actually, anyone else we can find who is interested in this class). This sounds like a pretty reasonable game plan (estrategia). It hinges on two major factors: this being a reasonable (and legal) way to use my surplus, and CIDE saying “sure, all we really care about is your money, two is great!” I think we can win this one, but there is no telling right now. But the bottom line is I think the class that will make us more qualified in half the time for half the money is probably the better deal. Stay tuned for the next exciting segment of small business.

I returned home to the house with mixed feelings about our meeting with CIDE, but still overly optimistic. There were two surprises waiting for me when I got home: Seth was home from the Galapagos and there was a $305 water bill on the table. It was great to see Seth again, and he had only been gone a week. I have several phrases, in both English and Spanish, to describe a $300 water bill, and none of them are blog appropriate. Water is cheap here. How, on Earth, could we owe $300?

Well, as it turns out, we didn’t pay last month (worst bill transition ever, right? I know, I’m thinking the same thing. At least I know phone and electricity were, in fact, taken care of.) when we consumed out record high of 124m³ of water (up 40% from our previous high in the 80s). Tack on a late fee to a $130 bill, add 200m³ of consumption this month (whoops) and a $50 charge for wastewater and some other small taxes and you end up at around $300. You also have a bill that needs to be paid immediamente so you don’t have your water shut off (which trust me, in this house would not be nearly as traumatizing as losing internet access). After stressing out about this even though I have very little to do with it (arguably, less than 1/10 when you factor in all the old PDs and all our August guests) and even fewer tools at my disposal to fix this though ways other than paying, we talked to some of our Ecuadorian friends and came to the conclusion that this was, in fact, too high.

So this morning Bibi and I went to Triangulo (a town over, though you couldn’t really tell) to pay this bill. I left the house with $345 in cash and a knife, met up with a Bibi, and took a taxi to Triangulo. The house binder had pretty clear directions on how to find the place; incidentally it is the store in the mall closest to broken change machine number two from my last hunt for bus change. As a quick aside, the change machine was very much in working order this time and while we waited to talk to a desk worker about our bill (about 45 min), I was able to successfully turn 5 twenties into a substantial weight in my bag. When we finally got up to the desk worker, she also agreed with us that the bill was way too high. They are going to send someone out to our house sometime on Monday to examine the meter. The report should be filed by Thursday morning. I’m going to go back Friday to see what the haps is and probably pay them a substantial chunk of change (I‘ll actually pay them in 20s, change is too useful here). In any case, we have until Sept 14 before they shut our water off, so no big deal right?

As a final observation about this experience, I don’t know just how long you have been able to pay a bill without going to an independent location in America but it sure lowers transaction costs. Wow.

I also bought some plants for my room. I feel like they go a long way towards lightening up the mood. I’ve gone ahead and attached pictures now in case something happens to them. And yes, the big one is planted in a bucket. It was WAY cheaper than buying a pot. I think we are going to hike Pichincha tomorrow.

Chao,

Chet

Song of the Blog: “Not a Drop of Rain,” by Robert Earl Keen.

The rainy season should start any day now.

Life is different here...

Buenas Noches Friends, Family, and most importantly Donors,

Sometimes, other than the fact that everyone speaks Spanish, it is hard to remember that I am living in a place wildly different than where I grew up. Other days, it is painfully obvious. I have two stories about that for you now.

MPI ran a medical clinic in our community this past Friday and Saturday partnered with an organization called Healthechildren (pronounced healthy children) and Aliñambi. The five girls who compose the medical part of this year’s set of Program Directors worked their tails off to get ready for this: meetings to plan how the clinic would be run, making t-shirts, staying up illustrating Ecuadorian food pyramids and preparing charlas (read: talks) on brushing and flossing. We (being the non-medical PDs) had more to do as well, though ours wasn’t as much fun: we had more cooking and cleaning, more library time, time spent advertising the clinic on busses (Erik and I can put a flyer on the interior of a bus on average every three minutes), and fewer hands to go around for the summer camp in the mornings. Overall, with all their hard work the clinic seemed to go really well. I spent some of Friday afternoon and some of Saturday morning being around to help facilitate things and keep children entertained. Friday there were no children, so Mike and I kicked the soccer ball around and solved a 300 piece puzzle (which in Spanish is referred to as a “broken head”). Saturday morning there were a lot more kids, and I got to play 3v4 soccer with them. Two months in, and the air is still pretty thin up here at 9000 feet if you are going to try to run around. My team lost 4 to 5, but I promise you it was only because I let them win. I also got to spend a little time Saturday morning helping in the pharmacy.

This brings me to the first thing you can’t do in the states: administer prescription medication without at least being a pharmacy tech. The clinic was staffed with actual doctors. The pharmacy was stocked with actual medications, some of which were labeled “donated, not for prescription in the United States,” which I think is very nice of pharmaceutical companies to do. One thing we were short of was pharmacy technicians. I got to fill in. It is actually pretty easy. A patient brings in a prescription. You find it sitting somewhere on the floor of the room. It is probably in a box. The exciting part is when it isn’t in a box. Then you get to count out the pills on the sterile paper taped to the table, label a plastic bag with a sharpie, put the pills in, and tie it in a knot. I feel like I am pretty skilled at counting by natural numbers at this point. I even made sure to count everything twice. It was actually a lot of fun, but I don’t know if that is because I may have a backup career as a pharmacist if this whole “development” thing doesn’t pan out or because I spent the whole time thinking how I couldn’t ever do this in America. Life is different here.

The second thing is paying the bills. I understand that my bill paying experience in life is really quite limited. I pay most of my meager number of bills online, whether I’m at home, at school, in Ireland, or in Ecuador. I have paid some medical bills with my credit card by phone before. I’m not sure I’ve ever had to mail a check in to pay a bill, which makes me different than, say, my parents. But I think we all can agree that I have listed most of the standard ways to pay a bill in the states.

We play by different rules in Ecuador. I paid the internet bill yesterday, making me I believe the first PD of ’09-0’10 to pay a bill. I discovered it wedged behind our schedule board Monday morning before our 3 hour staff meeting. As Financial manager, I am not in charge of personally paying every bill (rent, electricity, water, phone, internet) but I am in charge making sure they get paid. This bill was about a week late (due the 21^st, it was the 31^st). Now, as testament to how things are run…er…differently in Ecuador, they hadn’t cut our internet off yet, which is good, because I can tell you after living in this house that the world would end as we know if the internet was out. So how does one pay a bill in Ecuador? Send the company a check? No, no checks. They only trust American Dollars. Pay by credit card then? No-what did I just say? Cash only.

So cash it is. Well, cash is legal tender for all debts public and private in both the United States and apparently Ecuador (it says so in the bill Towers’ Varsity Market and American Airlines inflight beverage service) so just grab 5 V notes (theV stands for veinte, more traditionally referred to as a $20 bill. I feel pretty smug about my Spanglish nicknames) and go pay at the counter in the office of the company I owe (in this case Novanet). No, that puts too much trust in people, who may be corrupt. The proper procedure is in fact to walk to a bank (in this case Banco Pichincha), take a deposit slip, deposit it into the Novanet account with Novanet’s name written on the deposit slip, then go home and send Novanet an email (again, good thing they didn’t cut off our internet for something as silly as not paying them) with all the deposit information so they know it was you, and not anyone else, that put that money in their account to pay a bill.

Talk about luck, it is only about a 15 minute walk with $100 in cash on me up to the nearest Banco Pichnicha. The line was the shortest I have ever seen inside there, with the line of people only extending to the end of the velvet ropes that swerve drunkenly around the first half of the lobby. It only took about half an hour to get up to the window. The only eventful thing that happened in my wait was my realization that one of the security guards had a picture of the Virgin Mary over his heart in his little clear picture-holder. It was probably for the best, because that vest looked neither bullet nor stab proof. I left an awful lot of blanks on that deposit slip (efectivo) blank, but the teller said she had everything she needed from me. And that is how you pay a bill in Ecuador. Is it a hassle? Sure, but we are pretty sure it makes it harder for someone to steal the money.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the leniency in bill pay here in Ecuador, but I know too much about the money multiplier and believe too much in credit to think this is a better system than online, phone, check by mail bill pay. But again, life is different here.

As a further quick update, the Microfinance team (read: Erik, Chet, and Bibi) will meet with CIDE Thursday to iron out the details on us becoming certified to train small business class instructors. Hopefully it will go well. The first art class will probably make egg crate caterpillars (next Tuesday).

Chao,

Chet

Song of the Blog: “Punk Rock Princess” by Something Corporate

PS: That is a picture of the monument at Mitad del Mundo (read: Equator). Its not technically on the Equator, its actually off by about 200m, but you can't blame them for giving it the old college try.