So unfortunately I completely forgot that it was St. Patty's day... and wore my only green shirt the day before. So silly of me! Anyways from my journal I find this...:
"Happy St Patty's Day! This morning Christine, Shannon and I went on the bread run with Theresa. The bread is so good here! After breakfast we went to Joceline and Juan's casa. They were two of the kids from Semillas who also go to Nuevo Mundo (a private school in Guayaquil). We talked about Harry Potter en espanol and their mother asked about our customs and daily life in the States (that is really weird to say!) It really made me realize how much they do want to learn about us, just like we are here to learn about them except most of them will never have the chance to visit the US which is very unfortunate. We also went to the Nuevo Mundo day care in Duran and go to do puzzles with 4 & 5 year olds, which is so fun, of course!
In the afternoon we went to the third after school program in an invasion community - a community where people simply just move in and sometimes the owners of the land will bulldoze the land and make them leave, and probably will just come back. This program was at the Alan Lynch private co-ed school and was called Manos Abiertas (Open Hands). These kids were the WORST and didn't listen, plus it was hot as *****, per usual. It was really hard to connect with any of the kids there and all of us just seemed completely drained. I just cannot stop comparing each program to the otehr and reflecting on how the kids act as proving a point about the community or barrio around them."
Wow, holy long journaling day! Unbelievable that here we are about half way through the week. The idea of an invasion community really just blew my mind, that that is how communities start in Ecuador is through a group of people just moving to empty land - EMPTY LAND... now that is a concept we don't understand. The new neighbor, by the way, is called Veintiocho de Agosto.
PS: LOVE that I used some vulgar language to describe the heat. Clearly I was over it!
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Wait, I don't understand about the invasion community. So, do people just illegally start living on empty land until someone tries to get them to leave? do they build houses and stores and things...or is it more of a camp?
ReplyDeleteIt is a foreign concept to us... since we don't have empty land. But what happens is that a group from 20 to 100 people move to an empty plot of land and build homes, etc, for themselves until the government or the owners of the land come in and kick them out. If they want to go back, they will return and resettle, and the process can go on until whomever owns the land just says, okay. here is the land. but no one owns their own small plots of land anyways, so it will most likely continue to be in the possession over the government or the original owner, and they just "lease" it to this new community of people.
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