Ecuador Newsletter - February 2018
Cuenca at Christmas, read on to find out more...
Welcome to our fourth newsletter coming to you from a rather wet and, relatively, chilly San Pablo de Chila. It seems an age since our last letter in October, we had an excellent end to 2017 and an even better start to 2018 so I won't waste time with waffle and we'll dive right in....
The last couple of months of 2017 were spent practicing paper making, which Lydia now has down to an absolute art, and looking for people who would make up our first group of trainees. In December we met with Fabian and Michelle from the government agency that works with people with disabilities, CONAIDS. They were really interested in the idea of the project and with over 2,500 people registered as disabled in Santo Domingo we were sure it would just be a matter of days before we found the right people.
This, however, is Ecuador and things do not always run as smoothly as one might hope! Fabian and Michelle warned us that, although the project is a great idea, people might not buy into the the prospect of having to do 3-4 months training before they can earn money. This is just one of the countless examples where working in a different culture can really throw you at times. It is fair to say that culturally, Ecuadorians don't really plan ahead much and so the idea of signing up to training for 3-4 months was proving a hard sell, people want something that will help them tomorrow, not in 4 months time.
We knew of a deaf lady in Church called Fatima so Pastor William took us to visit her and her family in their home to talk about the project. Her sister Annabel and mother both speak sign language so through them we communicated the idea of the project and happily she said she was interested. She is part of a deaf community in Santo Domingo and took some letters explaining the project to see if any of her friends were interested. We were so happy to have one person who was interested and hoped that some of her friends would want to join in as well.
The last couple of months of 2017 were spent practicing paper making, which Lydia now has down to an absolute art, and looking for people who would make up our first group of trainees. In December we met with Fabian and Michelle from the government agency that works with people with disabilities, CONAIDS. They were really interested in the idea of the project and with over 2,500 people registered as disabled in Santo Domingo we were sure it would just be a matter of days before we found the right people.
This, however, is Ecuador and things do not always run as smoothly as one might hope! Fabian and Michelle warned us that, although the project is a great idea, people might not buy into the the prospect of having to do 3-4 months training before they can earn money. This is just one of the countless examples where working in a different culture can really throw you at times. It is fair to say that culturally, Ecuadorians don't really plan ahead much and so the idea of signing up to training for 3-4 months was proving a hard sell, people want something that will help them tomorrow, not in 4 months time.
We knew of a deaf lady in Church called Fatima so Pastor William took us to visit her and her family in their home to talk about the project. Her sister Annabel and mother both speak sign language so through them we communicated the idea of the project and happily she said she was interested. She is part of a deaf community in Santo Domingo and took some letters explaining the project to see if any of her friends were interested. We were so happy to have one person who was interested and hoped that some of her friends would want to join in as well.
Just some of the weird and exotic animals that have visited us in our house, the scorpion was probably the least welcome guest!
Before we could get any further with finding participants we were midway into December, a time when people tend to take their holidays, if they have any. We decided to work on paper making and card designs for the couple of weeks before Christmas and pick up the hunt for participants again in the new year.
Traditionally the main Christmas meal in Ecuador is eaten late on the night of the 24th with the 25th really just a day for rest from all the partying. A wonderful lady from church called Petita invited us to her house to share the meal on the evening of the 24th along with her three sons, a life long family friend from Spain and Sharon, who is very good friends with Petita and is the other CMS missionary in Ecuador. It was a really wonderful evening, Petita and her boys welcomed us so warmly and we felt part of the family immediately. We really had to put our Spanish to the test as, before we ate, we had to talk about our 2017 and what we were looking forward to in 2018. It was great to talk and reflect on all that had gone on in 2017 and to hear everybody's different hopes for 2018.
On the day of the 25th we had been invited to Claire and Edwin's to have English Christmas lunch. Claire first came to Ecuador around 16 years ago and is now married to an Ecuadorian called Edwin. They live just out of Santo Domingo with their two daughters, Amanda who's 3 and Olivia who's 18 months. Along with Sharon we embarked on Christmas part 2, the English version, with a proper English Christmas meal with all the trimmings....and no rice in sight! Bare in mind we had just eaten a full meal the night before at around 10pm, it took quite a long time to get through the main course and make our way onto the Christmas cake, Christmas pudding and Lydia's homemade mince pies! It was, however, well worth the effort. We even ended the day in the time honoured tradition of watching Frozen whilst fighting the food coma.
It was a very special Christmas for us and an amazing testimony to the love that flows within the family of God. We were spending Christmas 5,000 miles away from our home, family and friends but God provided people who took us into their family and loved us as family. I'm still blown away by the fact that you can go so far around the world but wherever there are people truly living the love of God you will always find a real family, a family who's bond runs even deeper than just being related by blood.
Traditionally the main Christmas meal in Ecuador is eaten late on the night of the 24th with the 25th really just a day for rest from all the partying. A wonderful lady from church called Petita invited us to her house to share the meal on the evening of the 24th along with her three sons, a life long family friend from Spain and Sharon, who is very good friends with Petita and is the other CMS missionary in Ecuador. It was a really wonderful evening, Petita and her boys welcomed us so warmly and we felt part of the family immediately. We really had to put our Spanish to the test as, before we ate, we had to talk about our 2017 and what we were looking forward to in 2018. It was great to talk and reflect on all that had gone on in 2017 and to hear everybody's different hopes for 2018.
On the day of the 25th we had been invited to Claire and Edwin's to have English Christmas lunch. Claire first came to Ecuador around 16 years ago and is now married to an Ecuadorian called Edwin. They live just out of Santo Domingo with their two daughters, Amanda who's 3 and Olivia who's 18 months. Along with Sharon we embarked on Christmas part 2, the English version, with a proper English Christmas meal with all the trimmings....and no rice in sight! Bare in mind we had just eaten a full meal the night before at around 10pm, it took quite a long time to get through the main course and make our way onto the Christmas cake, Christmas pudding and Lydia's homemade mince pies! It was, however, well worth the effort. We even ended the day in the time honoured tradition of watching Frozen whilst fighting the food coma.
It was a very special Christmas for us and an amazing testimony to the love that flows within the family of God. We were spending Christmas 5,000 miles away from our home, family and friends but God provided people who took us into their family and loved us as family. I'm still blown away by the fact that you can go so far around the world but wherever there are people truly living the love of God you will always find a real family, a family who's bond runs even deeper than just being related by blood.
A sample of all the delicious food we ate on the 24th and 25th. It's easy to see which one is the Ecuadorian meal, it's the one with rice!
The New Year rolled around and we made the decision that we were going to start in January no matter what. We knew we had at least one person who was interested, we hoped that once we started others might hear about it and want to join in. Susie was coming out in the last weeks of January so we decided to launch the project when she was here.
It was then that we approached Federico who is a member of the church and who has mild learning disabilities. He's 35 and we came to find out he didn't have a job and spent most of his time in his room. We originally had said we would only work with people with physical disabilities in the initial year as, in most cases, working with people with intelectual disabilities requires much more 1 on 1 intensive teaching which we knew we could not do in the first phase of the project. We thought and prayed about it however and after speaking to Pastor William and some others decided we would ask him and his family what they thought. The day we went to visit him and his family with Pastor William was amazing, they really got the idea and were so excited from the outset, especially his mum. She agreed to come along with him for the first few weeks to see how he settled in and then we'd take it from there.
So we were set, we were going to start on Monday 22nd January with two trainees. Susie arrived safe and sound on Friday 19th and we started getting ready. Every Saturday afternoon the church holds a "Sunday school" on our land for all the children living near by. As this was going on Susie was about to go and join in when she felt led to go up to the main road instead. When she got there she saw two men on hand-bikes riding on the main road. She got talking to them and invited them down to the site to talk about the project. I spoke to them with the best Spanish I could muster and fortunately Katie was there helping with the Sunday school and was able to translate the bits I just couldn't manage. We gave them both letters explaining the project and they said they would think about it. They said they also had another friend who is a wheel chair user and who has an adapted car so he could drive them out to the project. We waved goodbye not knowing if they would come on Monday but very happy to be getting the word out.
Thank you to all who have donated, it really will make a massive difference and we couldn't do this project without you. If you haven't yet donated and want to, please use the button at the bottom marked 'donate here'. Thank You.
Monday morning came around and Federico arrived very early with his mum. We greeted them, Lydia gave them a short welcome talk and then got on with teaching them the paper making process. After a little while there's a crunch of gravel as a car, with a blue disabled sticker on the windscreen, comes down the lane. My first reaction was one of surprise, we'd been finding it so difficult to find trainees that we didn't actually expect the guys to turn up on Monday. Then I was worried as I realised we didn't actually have a ramp to get them up a concrete lip to the workshop area! Happily we found a spare piece of wood and welcomed Ramon and Pedro into the workshop. Pedro had been one of the two guys we spoke to the previous Saturday and Ramon was his friend with a car. Lydia got on and give them the welcome talk and within what seemed like minutes everyone was busy learning something.
On the Tuesday we had our first day with everybody as, due to my mixup, Fatima and Annabel had not come on the Monday. It was amazing to see everyone settling in so quickly, getting to know us and one another and being so enthusiastic about the project and the things they were learning. Lydia was in her element and doing an incredible job of managing all the different learning groups and making sure people always had something to do. Her time spent as a manager in Costa was instantly proving itself to be useful and it was wonderful to see her being able to put her managerial skills alongside teaching of art and design which she loves so much. By the end of that day everybody had managed to make a card (see the photo below) which was an incredible achievement.
It was then that we approached Federico who is a member of the church and who has mild learning disabilities. He's 35 and we came to find out he didn't have a job and spent most of his time in his room. We originally had said we would only work with people with physical disabilities in the initial year as, in most cases, working with people with intelectual disabilities requires much more 1 on 1 intensive teaching which we knew we could not do in the first phase of the project. We thought and prayed about it however and after speaking to Pastor William and some others decided we would ask him and his family what they thought. The day we went to visit him and his family with Pastor William was amazing, they really got the idea and were so excited from the outset, especially his mum. She agreed to come along with him for the first few weeks to see how he settled in and then we'd take it from there.
So we were set, we were going to start on Monday 22nd January with two trainees. Susie arrived safe and sound on Friday 19th and we started getting ready. Every Saturday afternoon the church holds a "Sunday school" on our land for all the children living near by. As this was going on Susie was about to go and join in when she felt led to go up to the main road instead. When she got there she saw two men on hand-bikes riding on the main road. She got talking to them and invited them down to the site to talk about the project. I spoke to them with the best Spanish I could muster and fortunately Katie was there helping with the Sunday school and was able to translate the bits I just couldn't manage. We gave them both letters explaining the project and they said they would think about it. They said they also had another friend who is a wheel chair user and who has an adapted car so he could drive them out to the project. We waved goodbye not knowing if they would come on Monday but very happy to be getting the word out.
Thank you to all who have donated, it really will make a massive difference and we couldn't do this project without you. If you haven't yet donated and want to, please use the button at the bottom marked 'donate here'. Thank You.
Monday morning came around and Federico arrived very early with his mum. We greeted them, Lydia gave them a short welcome talk and then got on with teaching them the paper making process. After a little while there's a crunch of gravel as a car, with a blue disabled sticker on the windscreen, comes down the lane. My first reaction was one of surprise, we'd been finding it so difficult to find trainees that we didn't actually expect the guys to turn up on Monday. Then I was worried as I realised we didn't actually have a ramp to get them up a concrete lip to the workshop area! Happily we found a spare piece of wood and welcomed Ramon and Pedro into the workshop. Pedro had been one of the two guys we spoke to the previous Saturday and Ramon was his friend with a car. Lydia got on and give them the welcome talk and within what seemed like minutes everyone was busy learning something.
On the Tuesday we had our first day with everybody as, due to my mixup, Fatima and Annabel had not come on the Monday. It was amazing to see everyone settling in so quickly, getting to know us and one another and being so enthusiastic about the project and the things they were learning. Lydia was in her element and doing an incredible job of managing all the different learning groups and making sure people always had something to do. Her time spent as a manager in Costa was instantly proving itself to be useful and it was wonderful to see her being able to put her managerial skills alongside teaching of art and design which she loves so much. By the end of that day everybody had managed to make a card (see the photo below) which was an incredible achievement.
Left to right: Pedro, Fatima, Annabel, Ramon, Federico
If there's one thing the folks who live in our village love, it's a party. The word "party" has different connotations depending on your age and culture, for the guys here a party usually starts around 11pm and goes on until 6 or 7am with music up to 110% the entire time. As the house is a breeze block wall with tin roof construction there is no real sound-proofing to speak of and as such sleep is neigh on impossible on these occasions. Happily the big parties are quite rare and happen when there's an event on such as carnival or New Year. With this in mind we decided to leave San Pablo for New Years Eve and go to the much more sedate city of Cuenca.
We took an 8.5 hour night bus from Santo Domingo, arriving at 5:30am to a very sleepy Cuenca. I knew that it was in the Sierra and therefore was high altitude but I'd forgotten quite how high. Turns out it's 2,500m above sea level, only 300m lower than Quito. As such it's cold at night, properly cold. Combine this with the fact that in Santo Domingo the coldest it's ever been is 19 degrees centigrade and you can appreciate why my teeth didn't stop chattering until we got into bed in the hotel when it finally opened at 8am! The altitude also came back to bite me the following day when after walking around under cloud for the whole day, we stopped at 4pm to have an ice-cream and realised that we were both very, very sunburnt.
As for N.Y.E itself we had an amazing time. The tradition in Ecuador is to build a guy, called a muñeco, from papier-mâché and burn it at midnight. In Cuenca they take this one step further and organise these muñecos into scenes. Each barrio is responsible for making their own scene and people spend the day walking around the city looking at them all before they're burnt at midnight. Some are political figures (the theme of corruption was high on the agenda this year) and others seem totally random (like sponge bob square pants)! It was fascinating to spend a few hours walking around and seeing them all and then to watch the midnight fireworks from the roof terrace of our hotel.
We spent a couple more days just wandering around and seeing everything the city has to offer. It's got wonderful colonial architecture and a church on practically every corner. There are also quite a lot of Americans who retire there so it's not too hard to get a good coffee and a meal without rice, two things which are very difficult in Santo Domingo. We had a wonderful time, we are so lucky to be able to go and explore other parts of this beautiful country and it was great to relax and refresh ourselves before the hard work started in 2018.
We took an 8.5 hour night bus from Santo Domingo, arriving at 5:30am to a very sleepy Cuenca. I knew that it was in the Sierra and therefore was high altitude but I'd forgotten quite how high. Turns out it's 2,500m above sea level, only 300m lower than Quito. As such it's cold at night, properly cold. Combine this with the fact that in Santo Domingo the coldest it's ever been is 19 degrees centigrade and you can appreciate why my teeth didn't stop chattering until we got into bed in the hotel when it finally opened at 8am! The altitude also came back to bite me the following day when after walking around under cloud for the whole day, we stopped at 4pm to have an ice-cream and realised that we were both very, very sunburnt.
As for N.Y.E itself we had an amazing time. The tradition in Ecuador is to build a guy, called a muñeco, from papier-mâché and burn it at midnight. In Cuenca they take this one step further and organise these muñecos into scenes. Each barrio is responsible for making their own scene and people spend the day walking around the city looking at them all before they're burnt at midnight. Some are political figures (the theme of corruption was high on the agenda this year) and others seem totally random (like sponge bob square pants)! It was fascinating to spend a few hours walking around and seeing them all and then to watch the midnight fireworks from the roof terrace of our hotel.
We spent a couple more days just wandering around and seeing everything the city has to offer. It's got wonderful colonial architecture and a church on practically every corner. There are also quite a lot of Americans who retire there so it's not too hard to get a good coffee and a meal without rice, two things which are very difficult in Santo Domingo. We had a wonderful time, we are so lucky to be able to go and explore other parts of this beautiful country and it was great to relax and refresh ourselves before the hard work started in 2018.
Now we're into our third week of training and the trainees are producing cards at a rate of knots. When Susie left she spent a day in Quito taking the cards to various shops and asking if they would be interested in stocking them. Quite a few said yes and took them off her then and there, we've even had phone calls from one of the shops asking when we can get them more to sell! It's so encouraging to know we have a market not just in the U.K but in Ecuador as well and we are very proud of the quality of the product that is being produced even at this early stage.
You'll also be able to get your hands on them in the U.K very soon. Craft Aid International are in the process of setting up an online shop which will stock products from the projects in Ecuador and Peru so when it's ready, head on over to the website and splash some cash.
It's been an incredible 3 months since we last spoke with times when nothing seems to be progressing and other times when everything is changing at a very rapid rate indeed. God has been faithful through it all however and we feel we are in a much better place than we were even 3 months ago. To have finally started the project which is the whole reason we are here is a huge relief and the amazing manner in which it has begun is just an added blessing.
That's about it for now, we'll be in touch very shortly but in the meantime don't forget to check out the Facebook page, Instagram and website to keep up with things going on here...just use the links at the bottom of this email to get connected!
God Bless
Mark and Lydia
You'll also be able to get your hands on them in the U.K very soon. Craft Aid International are in the process of setting up an online shop which will stock products from the projects in Ecuador and Peru so when it's ready, head on over to the website and splash some cash.
It's been an incredible 3 months since we last spoke with times when nothing seems to be progressing and other times when everything is changing at a very rapid rate indeed. God has been faithful through it all however and we feel we are in a much better place than we were even 3 months ago. To have finally started the project which is the whole reason we are here is a huge relief and the amazing manner in which it has begun is just an added blessing.
That's about it for now, we'll be in touch very shortly but in the meantime don't forget to check out the Facebook page, Instagram and website to keep up with things going on here...just use the links at the bottom of this email to get connected!
God Bless
Mark and Lydia
