CHANGE THE LIVES OF 300 CHILDREN IN ECUADOR

The Intercultural Center A mano manaba (CIAMM) sits in the middle of the tiny fishing village of Don Juan.  It houses a Children’s Library, multi-purpose workspace, garden and a suite for volunteers.  Volunteers come from around the world and stay for a couple of months.  With our programs we try to attract young couples that embody respectful gender relations while sharing their different skills and knowledge with the community.  This time we hosted Hsuan Ying Chen , an artist from Taiwan, and her boyfriend Eduardo Nava, an English teacher from Mexico. We invited Hsuan and Eduardo to intervene in the grim surroundings of the CIAMM and help us enliven the environment by engaging our young library patrons in an art project. After two months of hard work they have accomplished wonderful things. Not only are the children excited and interested in art, but they have learned to work with each other and, on top of this, we are now enjoying a beautiful art mural that narrates the vision of Don Juan. Hsuan and Eduardo are nearing the end of their stay with us and we would like to share their experience.

FAMM: Tell us how you found us and why you decided this was the place where you wanted to volunteer.  EDUARDO:It was my turn to find a volunteer post, so when I found CIAMM on the internet Hsuan said to me: “it´s a Library, are you sure?’ I said yeah, its perfect, we’ll do murals and teach English at the same time.  You will see.

 HSUAN: This is what I´ve always wanted to do, not necessarily in alibrary, but with a studio that offers different programs. When I arrived I said “wow! This is how I had envisioned it, a place where kids want to come and explore their interests.” I didn’t set out only to do murals, but this is my third one in Latin America: Guatemala, Colombia and now Ecuador.

 EDUARDO:What makes this program different from others we´ve seen is that nobody makes these kids come, they come on their own, and they’re always ahead of schedule. We open at 3:00 in the afternoon. At 2.30 they start to show up. I can hear them yell at us, “hey,when are you opening?”  And I yell back “it´s 2:30 and I´m taking a nap, come back at 3:00.”  But they don´t leave! They wait outside for us to open!  Even though it’s a library there is so much going on. Kids come to do their homework, read, paint, play, do taekwondo or just hang out. 

HSUAN: I always wanted to create anart studio, open to the public, where people could come in and out freely.  What I like most about this library is that everyone is having fun and learning.   

EDUARDO:It’s pretty dynamic.If a kid wants to read she can, but if she wants to do something else that´s fine. 

FAMM:  Hsuan, when you were training as a professional artist, did you ever picture yourself doing volunteer work in a fishing village in Ecuador?

 HSUAN: I studied at Washington University, St. Louis. Along with conceptual art we were  encouraged to do social art projects. As a student I had a lot of classes, but not much practice.  When I finished I was tired of it so I went back to China and worked for several years in commercial projects. It paid well but lacked any social impact.  I saved money so I could travel to do more social art projects. I started volunteering because I wanted to make myself useful. 

FAMM: How would you define a social art project?

 HSUAN:  It’s when people participate in the planning, development and delivery of an art product.  Each participant is changed by the experience.

FAMM:Do you see differences from a couple of months ago and now?

HSUAN: Yeah! More kids draw! In the beginning nobody wanted to draw anything. They would ask for instructions, what do you want me to paint? They wouldn’t touch a blank page, let alone a wall.  Now they want to paint on their own. When I first suggested painting a wall there was no interest. It took several days of showing them big mural projects, street art. They would ask, so you can really paint a house like that? They were amazed.

FAMM: What’s the narrative in this mural?

HSUAN: It combines what we discussed with the kids and with you guys (CIAMM directors). When I learned about the devastating 2016 earthquake, I didn’t know if we should address it directly.  You suggested not to avoid the earthquake but let this be an opportunity to share memories of the quake.  So after a couple of weeks of talking and drawing with the kids I included the earthquake in the mural along other things that please them like the flowers and hearts. The narrative begins with the earthquake and moves on. The kids talked more about the new houses than the sea, which was surprising for us. We incorporated a lot of things in the mural, for example, the muñequitos or “little dolls”  which is how kids refer to archeological objects they find in the beach. We wanted to put a library in there but it ended up as a flying book! 

FAMM: I like the subtle commentary about the cramped housing project in a spacious beautiful beach. There is beauty in that, but there´s also a statement about space, territory and landholding systems.

HSUAN:  You could read it like that, but the kids don’t.They see the houses like toys. One girl said “hey, look how pretty the houses look.”

FAMM: You are planning to come back at some point after you travel south. What would you like to do ideally?

EDUARDO:  Yes we definitively want to come back, because when you volunteer for 2 months you think it’s a lot of time, but you really need more time to change things. We´ve been able to engage the kids with the mural but now that they have their own ideas, we´re leaving.  Next time we want to support the kids with their own projects. The designs should come from them. This time together we changed an ugly grey wall into a beautiful mural.  They now realize that things don´t necessarily have to stay ugly. They´ve learned to be proactive with their surroundings. I think that it’s not so important what you learn, but to know that there are options. If their house is white because the government gave them white houses, they can be changed, if they want. You can change the colors, you can choose, you have options. I can relate to these kids because I come from a different background, from poverty. I always say that if my parents had showed a little bit more interest in me, maybe I could have been an artist or a soccer player.  Kids only need a little push, some respectful attention from adults.  This project is telling them that they can dream big: if you want to be an artist you can be an artist. From what I have seen, kids here don´t always get that kind of support at home.  This place gives them that support. You are telling them that it’s alright to be ambitious with their future. The most gratifying thing is when the kids come the next day and are proud of what they did. This builds self-esteem.  When they pass by the mural, they can say “we did this”.

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Picture a young donkey on the beach, his pannier packed with colorful children´s books. As he steps over the rubble and devastation left by a 7.8-magnitude earthquake, his bell calls out to the children left homeless to come and read, and, for a brief moment, forget the desperate situation around them. This was the beginning of what, two years later, is A mano manaba Children´s Library. And this attests to the fact that, yes, books can turn adversity into opportunity.

It all started when my husband and I left our tenured academic positions to live and read with the children of a small fishing village in northern Manabí, Ecuador. Little did we know that a month after this life-changing move, our home, along with every single house in this tiny village, was to be destroyed by a catastrophic earthquake that caused 650 deaths and left 650,000 people homeless in Ecuador on April 16, 2016. A few days after the shock we discovered that our pet donkey could carry books in his pannier and so, we set camp on the beach where all the children of the village would come running to pet him and look at the books.

When there was no electricity, running water, schools or medical services we “played Library” on the beach with colorful books, notebooks and crayons, sharing happy and constructive afternoons with the children of Don Juan.

Today Fundación A mano manaba is a non-profit organization that offers educational programs in Don Juan, that tiny fishing village in northern Manabí, Ecuador. The Children´s Library sits within a beautiful bamboo building in the center of the village. It offers remedial reading programs, homework assistance, teacher training, arts and crafts workshops, adult education, and taekwondo and self-defense training for girls and women. Our main focus is on young girls. We believe that girls age 10-12 are the motor of a needed change in local gender dynamics that will unsettle the patriarchal domination that burdens women and children in this community.

Life in Don Juan is simple, very affordable and organic. Our operating costs are extremely low, and our employees (including ourselves) receive the minimum wage in Ecuador, which is sufficient. Along with one of our neighbors who is working hard to finish high school, my husband and I run the Intercultural Center and the Children´s Library. International and national volunteers support us in areas such as science, technology or sports. A nominal volunteer fee helps us cover operating costs like electricity, water and connectivity.

Now that our pet donkey is pasturing on a nearby farm, we are fundraising for a Library bus that will take us to remote villages and replicate the programs that have proved successful in Don Juan. We want to share the generous donations received and basic know-how for Library services. This is the foundation of a future circuit of Children´s Libraries along the pacific coast of Ecuador.

We continue to expand our circle of influence. Once we finish cataloguing our books, the lending service will enhance our effect. Some of the measurable results we expect to obtain are: active leadership, especially among women; increased school graduations; and reduced gender-based violence.

In the teacher training and remedial reading programs we are working with the Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar del Ecuador. Their approach has been tested in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. Their phonological, rather than syllabical method shows rapid advances in writing-reading workshops with children from different age groups.

Literacy is a complex asset that speaks of a lettered context. Unfortunately in developing countries this usually means urban middle class surroundings. In addition to children and teenagers, some of our Library patrons finished grade school a long time ago and have had very few opportunities or need to use their literacy skills. Many have lost the ability to read or understand what they read. This underlines the necessity of a Library system, something that is quite alien to the national government’s plans for education in rural locations. The core value of this venture is the grounding of a lettered environment in a community historically neglected by educational services.

The butterfly effect contends that given certain conditions, the distant flapping of a butterfly´s wings can alter the course of a tornado. Likewise, the continued page turning in this small Children´s Library is broadening life opportunities in this tiny village. Thus turning adversity into possibilities and loneliness into community.

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