First Shift Completed

When we planned this trip, we had a choice to either work with just one organization for the whole time, or to split between different groups to find more variety. Variety won out, though at the cost of knowing that our contribution to each group is fairly minimal. Thursday was our last day working with UBECI, the organization that strives to proved education to the children of market workers in and around Quito. We are taking a few days off to travel (more on that later), then we head north to Otavalo to work in the next school.

For those who love children, it is difficult to resist the allure of a charming face, or the ease with which a young child can bond so easily with complete strangers. Fund raisers are well aware of this of course, hence the preponderance of the 'desperate' child gazing into the camera. UBECI have a policy of only allowing volunteers to bring cameras to the classes on their last days of working (and many are here for six months or more, typically in a gap year from college studies). Part of the reasoning is that we are there to work with the kids, not to treat them like tourist attractions. Given that, we can now post some pictures to illustrate more clearly what a day in the life of an UBECI class is like. Shown below is the sequence of volunteers traveling by bus to the market, collecting children, playing, reading, exercising and so forth. This is just one of three different markets we visit.

As written in an earlier post, it can become quite challenging to speculate about how many of these kids will benefit significantly in the long run from what UBECI has to offer. There is no way of knowing at present. Byron and Monica, the two who run the program are more or less forced to operate on a month-to-month basis, with funding often uncertain. We are left with the need to depend on hope - hope that funding will materialize, and hope that all of the efforts do indeed provide substantial benefit to many of the kids in the long term.

In the short term, there is no doubt that many of the kids are eager to attend, and enjoy the activities. They play with the toys, practice reading (in some cases), dance, sing songs, learn about physical exercise, and complete often basic but important elementary activities (such as learning numbers, shapes, or, for some of the older kids, practicing their math facts). At a time when so many people have so much to say and argue about educational policy in all its various forms, there is something very refreshing about simply being on the front lines, working directly with the kids, and seeing the gratification they get from taking a project home to their Mami's and Papi's when they return to their respective market stalls.