Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Peace Corps Partnerships

Just a quick note today. I am working on funds for my shredder project and am filing for a grant with the USDA for support. However, there is a limited amount of funding that PC Ecuador can get (100,000) for all the applicants, which may seem like a lot but since every recipient gets around 7,000...and when there are a lot of applicants, not all of them get accepted. Soooo....there is another program that Peace Corps does for funding called Peace Corps Partnerships. In this program I fill our my project sheet (what I am doing, the materials needed, how it is going to affect the community, etc) and hopefully, I recieve donations from friends, familily, organizations (profit or non-profit) from the U.S. to help finance the project down here, since my community can´t afford to pay for everything.

So if any of you are reading this blog (all 5 of you haha) and would be interested in supporting my project (if you don´t know what the project is...read my post called ¨a project¨), respond to the blog with your contact info (name, address, phone number, organization) and I will put your name of the list of potential people who could donate. Or if you have rich friends or know of someone or an organization that would be interested in donating, reply or send an email to me. In the form, I have to put down 8 or 9 people or organizations that could show an interest just so Peace Corps knows that there are people that could support this project, it doesn´t mean that peace corps is going to contact you asking for money, but it is more to gauge an interest. Check out the link below to read about other projects that PCV´s are doing around the world and to see how peace corps partnerships works...I kind of sound like a Peace Corps tool but hey...have to get the word out about this.

Here is the link

https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.donors

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

lets have a strike!

I guess when ecuadorians decide to do something, they really put their hearts into it. It really doesn´t matter what it is, drinking, partying, working, or in this case, striking. We don´t have just one national strike in Ecuador right now, but two. First, the teachers are striking because their benefits are being cut and many of the teachers that have put in the years are set to get a pay cut, some of them get their salaries cut in half. So basically the teachers in the large cities (Quito and Guayaquil) are striking and all the schools around the nation fall in line, usually. Some schools are teachers in Guaranda have crossed the line and have resumed school, others haven´t, especially in San Lorenzo. I think that some of the teachers are enjoying it because they get some extra vacation time but who knows how long they will be on strike. This means that I can´t work with the schools doing gardens and environmental education...which is a large part of my work, but it gives me more time to work on other projects so I guess their is an upside to everything.
The other strike involves the indigenous population, who are striking over water rights because the government wants to privatize water, or so is the rumor. The indigenous people are blocking the roads, especially near cities in the Oriente, where there are lots of groups. Honestly, I am not sure what to make of all of this but people rallying together against ¨the man¨is a pretty common theme in latin america, especially ecuador. We´ll see where it goes from here.
Oh, by the way, in addition to me duties in San Lorenzo, apparently I am a part-time firefighter as well. A few weeks ago I was tending to the garden I have at my house when my host-mom´s sister tells me to grab a shovel and help with a small fire that was on a hill in San Lorenzo. I wasn´t too shocked as most of the farmers here burn their land after they harvest their crops, in this case, corn. But this fire wasn´t exactly a controlled one burning just the intended area. So I rushed up the hill to join my fellow san lorenzens and put out the fire. The closest homes to the fire didn´t have hoses that could help put it out so we took our shovels and smacked down the flames while putting dirt on the others. The fires weren´t that big, but I would like to exaggerate the fact because it makes me sound like a real badass to put out blazing flames with a shovel and dirt. Anyways, the good part was that these fires were happening around 6pm in the afternoon so the cold of the night soon put them all out. That is about how exciting things get in San Lorenzo, you have to start fires to get people really excited about something.