Mangolandia

So, we have designated Thursday afternoons as “brothers day”. It is when Manuel and Antonio get to come to la Casita, hammock-fight, play iPad games, work in the garden, cook and maybe, just maybe, get some homework done on our couch. For the last few weeks, this brother day, occurred on any or all days of the week after school, but that got a bit disruptive to our working life, so we did a bit scheduling and chose Thursday as the day.

So, yesterday was the first brothers’ day and it was a resounding success! We managed to do a bit of everything. There was extreme hammock-fighting, nearly all homework was completed and together we made an excellent batch of muffins, fresh butter from cream, and ricotta (accidentally). Manuel read the entire English muffin recipe out loud and impressed Caye and I a ton with his pronunciation and comprehension. He also added every ingredient and performed all other steps right up to checking their “doneness” with knife insertion.

Tomorrow morning, we are doing breakfast at Caro and Fernando’s house. Then we’ll head back to la Casita and try really hard to knock our to-do lists down and start doing more interesting things with our time.

I just came back from the first – next steps – meeting of the Galo Plaza Foundation. This is the organization I have been talking about in some of my previous posts. Needless to say, I have a lot to learn! I studied how organizations work at Beloit, I worked with a few in a college context and was  on the one board of directors, but I mostly served while I was abroad. So, hello real world.  The meeting lasted close to 3 hours and it included a rainbow of people who didn’t necessarily have to do much with the foundation.

It is hard for me to put my thoughts down in words after this meeting, for there was a lot of frustration and thinking – on my part. Let me start by telling you a little about Galo Plaza, who’s name and work inspired the creation of this nonprofit in 1995. Plaza was the president of Ecuador from 1948-52, during his presidency he implemented a number of revolutionary laws that benefited the country’s poor. He was also the Secretary General of The Organization of American States, an ambassador of Ecuador in the United States and for the UN, he received a honorary degree from Harvard and did many other important things in his life.  Anyway, Plaza was also my great-grand father which is the reason why his legacy inspired this foundation to honor his “mission, vision and life”.

The foundation has five main areas in which it is trying to work: education, environment, social-economic empowerment, anthropology/archeology and history. Each area has at least one working project and more than three potential ones that could happen. The amount of dedicated people that surround each area are, “lets call it, limited..” and the funds almost none existent. But these are not the reasons why I ended up frustrated in this meeting, although I do think they are spreading themselves too thin – or maybe not, who knows. The motives for my frustration were from two things, getting back into “team-work mode” and trying to come to terms with reality of non-profit work, which involves doing stuff that one is not as excited to do, dealing with lots of people with various levels of enthusiasm and finally remembering that money is KING. After this meeting, I started thinking how I see my self in relation to the foundation and the projects.

I haven’t yet reached a conclusion. For now, I will just keep learning as much as I can from the new president of the foundation, who is truly a remarkable woman, and later I’ll decide where I fit in the whole picture and how much of myself I should invest.

A year ago this week I graduated, weird. As I scroll through Facebook, I see friends from the class I should have been graduating with wearing caps and gowns and I get a strange feeling inside. Beloit College gave me an incredible liberal arts perspective to the world and it equipped me with a critical mind. My field of study was global public health and I loved every minute of it – not true I HATED Organic Chemistry – but overall my three years there were very positive.

Now, I am siting in Ecuador, after having sailed through the middle of the United States. A graphic design and branding book lays open to my side and multiple Illustrator and Photoshop windows are open on my screen, filled with mockups of websites, logos and advertisements waiting to be given their finishing touches. I am the co-head of one business and the co-creator of three soon to launch ideas.

In my world, public health has only been present in my constant independent-studying of the evolving field and related issues and my Wednesday meetings with a non-profit foundation that works in the area. It is weird how it has all turned out up until now. Even though I am not practicing in my field, I am learning how to use very powerful tools that keep my mind engaged and I am very blessed to have the job I have, with it’s location. However, I do hope that at this time next year, I am working more with in-need women and film.

On another note, today, two local women came to visit us and brought with them local eggs and fresh-picked beans as gifts! It has been great to find so many local people willing to share their home-grown local produce with us! Many people around the area are surprised that we chose this life, having had the option to live and work both in Quito and the USA, so they want to help us as much as possible. Tomorrow we have a long meeting for determining the foundation’s next steps! I’m so exited for the  opportunities that will arise with this.

To follow: a randomness of photos…

We took on a challenge today

de escribir un poema for this morning of May.

My mom y Caro entienden esto

his mama is learning, cierto.

Around the world hay muchas mamas

all of which express themeselves in muchos idiomas más.

Every day we wish them good health

pero hoy we gift them love wealth.

De Ecuador a USA

y todos los paises beyond there.

We love you very much

y esperamos que reciban hugs in a bunch.

Soon we will post about some muffins

that you can eat as puffins.

Enjoy your day

maravillas of this earth.

PS. we love you

siempre y especialmente yours

Jaxon y Caye

Finally! Finally, we had a day to just dedicate to making this house nicer, prettier, more comfortable, warmer, less mouse-filled and just generally homier.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about what seems to be a bit of a theme in our lives. Hardware stores. More specifically, visiting hardware stores every couple days for months, while making a home. If you’ve been following along here since last summer, you’ve probably picked up on this pattern a bit as well.

12 months ago, we were happily tucked away in our Beloit apartment. We were there for three years and made it into a great space. Nearly every single piece of furniture, we built ourselves, right there, with 40-90 year-old tools and salvaged lumber. We had so much fun making that space personal and filling it with plants, photos, art and a 1000 pounds of kitchen utensils and ingredients. Just a few months later, 36 hours after deciding to buy our boat, we packed up every last bit of that apartment into a u-haul trailer and moved our whole lives. The following 3 months were spent visiting hardware stores and making our small floating apartment into beautiful and comfortable home. We lived in Surkha for a total of 6 months, before hopping on a plane for a “short trip” to Ecuador. Then, surprise! we decided to stay for a year or two and guess what? We needed somewhere to stay.

Now, 3 months after beginning to rehab “the worst living space in the Hacienda” and dozens of trips to the hardware store later, here we are making more fun plant-holders, scrap-wood knife racks and shelves from salvaged crates. It’s all so so similar to the boat and Beloit.. – something that is both strange and very comforting.

So, long story short. We built a ton of stuff today. We created a huge “pantry” from flimsy wooden fruit crates and old flooring, a beautiful plant holder from hose-clamps, salsa jars and some wooden siding from a ancient shepard’s shack, a bar for hanging pots and pans made from a steel gate tubes and bent re-bar, a door-”plug” to keep the mice from entering under our front door, a scrap-wood knife rack for the three sets of knifes that family lent or gifted us and lastly a fantastic “bread station” with storage for my baskets, clothes, peel, razor, etc. (thanks beautiful!). We also cleaned every corner of the house, made another batch of yogurt and organized all our foodstuffs in the new pantry.

Now I am sitting in perfectly organized living room, listening to more French-cafe music, with incredible smells of a huge curry dish in from the kitchen where Caye is perfecting her art of phenomenal curry-making. We are both feeling great, accomplished and a bit more relaxed, with so much less left undone in our living space.