Published November 24, 2003

Hi,

Its Sunday and we are back in Quito from Ibarra and Otavalo. It was great. Wonderful families and great choices for of wood, leather and textile crafts. Last night we went to the Ibarra RC s annual bingo extravaganza. We were there with a few hundred people until 3 a.m. playing bingo and hoping to win prizes. The grant prizes included refrigerators, stoves, bicycles, CD players and trips.

We stop here at the Hotel Sebastian to meet with our ride to the airport later this afternoon. We will fly to Manta at about 700 p.m.

Published November 21, 2003

Hello to all,

We leave for Ibarra tomorrow. The national teachers' union has gone on strike, so it will be interesting to see if we will be able to see any public schools next week in Manta. Today, we did see two campo public schools that are being helped by Rotary clubs. Even though the teachers are on strike nationally, the teachers at these schools came to work and contacted families to send their children to school, so that they could be there for our visit, and thereby supporting their Ecuadorian Rotary partners. What a fresh approach for unionized teachers to take!

Every time we go to a new location, it is always a guess as to when or how I may access the internet, but until then, take care.

Bill

Published November 19, 2003

Hello to All,

We are in Quito now.  Our families are great and everyone here has been great and well organized.  I get the feeling the Rotary District here spoke with them to assure that there was better communication and accountability after what seemed to be an embarrassing mix-up in Ambato.

We will be here until Friday, and then we'll leave for Ibarra to the north.  On Sunday, we will leave Ibarra and return to Quito to take an air flight to Manta on the Pacific Coast.  From Manta we will visit other communities as we work our way south back to Guayaquil.

In Quito we are working with five of the eleven clubs to see various projects and other activities.  Yesterday, we saw schools supported by Rotary that serve children who live in prison with their convicted parents.  The kids leave the prison during the day to go to this great school which is colorful, warm and supports them academically, as well as with medical, dental, clothing, bathing, etc.  Then we saw a center for training youth with disabilities.  The center is supported by a Rotary club which wants to help the private foundation that runs it to establish a second center.  These students would not otherwise have any kind of training to support themselves as adults. The center includes training programs for carpentry, food processing, restaurant operation, ceramic production, handicrafts for the tourist market, etc.  Lastly, we visited an experimental public high school in the center of the city that has the legal flexibility to ignore some of the educational laws as long as their results demonstrate success.  Sounds like a charter school, no?  The school was gaining support from Rotary and private companies because of the reforms implemented.  We then attended an evening club meeting that went well.

Today, we visited the private University of San Francisco de Quito and its affiliated k-12 school.  This is the elite of Ecuadorian education and provided a stark contrast to the support and environments in the public schools.  The University is only about ten years old, yet its environment and faculty rival American schools.  The k-12 school is taught in English with some Spanish as a second language offered for exchange students.   Class sizes are small and specialty teachers for fine arts, physical education and computers are included.  The cost is well above what most Ecuadorians can afford yet less then comparable American Schools.  The director is an American who has been in charge for the nine years it has existed.

Until next time,

Published November 17, 2003

Hi Everyone,

Since I wrote the last time, we left Cuenca and traveled by bus to Rio Bamba. This was our most worrisome trip thus far due the narrow winding road along steep mountain ledges with a drive who loved to speed downhill and beep his horn always expecting others to give the bus space to pass. Suffice to say, we made it without incident.

We all had great family experiences in Rio Bamba. We saw one local club project with a most deserving public school in the town. Dirt floors, limited electricity, sick and malnutritioned children, scare educational materials, poor sanitation, few toilets--all parts of the classical poverty scene. Then we worked with the Rotarians to find another public school that they had heard about and not yet investigated. It was worse. The club said they were going to adopt it. While, hear we have tried to view the four volcanos that are on the skyline with limited success. Rain clouds and the smoke from the one active volcano have thus far prevented clear views.

After two nights we left again by bus for Ambato and have been here two nights so far. We are staying in a hotel. It seems that there was a significant breakdown in communication and accountability between the District and the local club about when we were arriving and the responsibility to identify families. The local club president said he didn't know about our visit until the day before our arrival, yet the district coordinator said that the club knew about it for months. Anyway, more flexibility. The president put us in a good hotel that his family owns, and everything has gone well since.

Yesterday, we traveled out of Ambato higher into the mountains to visit three very poor and remote public schools. The school visits were probably the most information and impressionable of our visit. The schools are communities are very poor. I was repeatedly reminded of my Peace Corps experience while touring the schools and talking with the teachers, parents and kids. There is one thing you can say about poverty---just when you think you have seen the worse, a lower level of total human degradation appears. These were definitely schools deserving of some help. The schools need help with potable agua, student health, sanitary practices, new buildings, etc. There is child care operation run by the parents as a cooperative venture that had horrible sanitation practices. I give the teachers high marks for their professionalism and dedication. They travel about 20 kilometers each way daily over narrow, dirt roads along mountain precipices. They earn $80 per month and spend $30 of it for transportation to work. (There are currently national demonstrations and threats of teacher strikes over the governments failure to increase salaries by $10 per month.)

Published November 4, 2003

Hi Everyone,

The GSE team arrived in Ecuador and has already seen a lot of the country and met many people. After two nights in a hotel in Guayaquil, we are now staying with families. I am staying with the family of Luis Chonillo, the District Governor for Rotary for all of Ecuador. He has a wonderful wife and three sons.

So, far I have taken trips to see the Pacific Ocean, the historical hill in Guyaquil called Cerro Santa Ana where the city was founded, then a stroll along the famous Malecon. Today, we visited a public school in an extremely poor area. The families´ houses are made of bamboo and sit atop stilts because the ocean tide comes in underneath and there are also lots of snakes. The school is so poor that it has one classroom only with a small chalkboard, very humble seats for the little children and nothing but a sun screen roof. The school doubles as a chicken coop at night. The floor is dirt and when it rains, there is no school because it becomes a mud hole.

In the afternoon we saw a private school which was much nicer. It had a completed program for grades preschool through 12. The teachers seemed to be excellent, and for those of you in education, they were using Whole Language and a total bilingual program with English and Spanish beginning at three years of age.

Then we saw a community of very humble block houses that Rotary helped to finance. While humble by our standards, they are great homes for the people who have come from bamboo houses.

This evening we go to our first Rotary meeting.

I hope you are all doing fine at home. We will leave Guayaquil on Thursday by bus for Cuenca in the Andes. Later we will travel north by bus along the Panamerican Highway to various towns, eventually arriving at Quito, the capital for the following weekend. Then to Otavalo, a famous town with a stupendous outdoor market, and then back to Quito. We will fly from Quito to Manta on the coast and then continue south by land, eventually, returning to Guyaquil.

Take care to all of you,