An Unforgettable Volunteering Experience Up the Onzole River
One month ago I began my journey to Ecuador to participate in a volunteer teaching program. This is something I have been thinking about for years, but I never took those final steps to sign up. It was such a wonderful experience that I'm getting choked up and teary eyed as I sit here and try to reflect on this experience and how best I can go about sharing it with others. I've thought about this community daily since I've left and hope that I'll be able to go back and continue to work with them in the future.
So grab yourself a cup of coffee/tea/or whatever beverage you fancy and settle in as I think this will be a long one!
T2T (Teachers 2 Teachers Global)
This was the organization that I was a part of. They have partnered with many schools around the world and organize trips each summer. What I really love about this organization is it brings empowerment to the local community. It's a sustainable way to volunteer because it forms a partnership with the local school and provides support for local teachers who will continue to work in that community long after the volunteer teachers leave.
The Onzole River Project
Started 10 years ago by a woman named Nikki from Canada, her nephew, Carlos, has continued to run the project and work in collaboration with T2T. Carlos has built a house in the community where the volunteer teachers live for the week and he works tirelessly to fundraise for future projects for the community. The vision of this project is "to ensure the future generations of the Onzole River are educated, empowered, and equipped, to keep leading their community toward positive change."
The Onzole River runs through the northernmost province in Ecuador, Esmeraldas, which borders Colombia and the Pacific Ocean. This province is home to 70% Afro-Ecuadorians. It is believed that the area was originally settled by slaves fleeing for safety and settling far up the river in the lush jungle.
Overt and systematic racism is still very common in Ecuador towards Afro-Ecuadorians. These communities along the Onzole River are very isolated and in the past have received little support from their government. I believe it was only 4 years ago that they got electricity, which still goes out quite often. There is no cell phone or internet service. (Having a week of disconnecting was rather therapeutic for me!) They are now beginning to set up a landfill and discussing waste treatment within the community. The river is commonly used for bathing and washing clothes.
After petitioning to the government, there is now a school in each community that is fully funded by the government (but that's not saying much.)
Student enrollment at the school in Santo Domingo de Onzole (where I volunteered) has increased due to other communities noticing the commitment and hard work the principal and teachers are doing to better their school as well as its partnership with T2T. The school has also grown beyond an elementary school and goes up to grade 12, making it one of the few high schools in the area.
That in turn created a new problem for the school. The school is in dire need of more classrooms and teachers due to its increased enrollment but the government has yet to come visit to assess the situation, let alone agree to build more classrooms. So currently there are classes being held outside. Desks, chairs, a table and a white board now sit outside in the dirt as a make-shift classroom. The community banned together and attached a roof over this classroom, but when rainy season comes and it's pouring down rain and flooding, this "classroom" will not be useable.
Currently the Onzole River project is fundraising for money to build more classrooms as rainy season is quickly approaching and the government doesn't seem to be stepping up. Carlos believes it will take approximately 20,000 USD to build the necessary classroom. He also mentioned the idea of setting up scholarships to help students access university. It's extremely difficult to have the means to leave the community and attend university in one of Ecuador's larger cities hours away. Now that the seed of further education has been planted there are many students beginning to dream of life beyond working in the fields.
I encourage you to take a look at the Onzole River Project's website, http://www.onzole.org/, to help give you a better picture of this community's struggles and determination to persevere and improve their community. Through years of isolation and racism, they have longed believed they are not worthy of an education or meant to do anything beyond laboring in the farms, but that mindset is slowly being to change. They are starting to believe in themselves and feel empowered to continue to fight to make a better life for themselves. I believe in this project and in the people of Santo Domingo de Onzole and I encourage you to donate if you feel moved by this project and community as well. Every little bit counts.
Ok, now back to the journey and experiences while volunteering.....
We began our journey in the city of Guayaquil. We took a 7 hour overnight bus north to Esmeraldas, then a 1 1/2 hour car ride to get to the river where we boarded our motorized canoe. After transporting our luggage and food onto the canoe, plastic chairs were placed for us to sit. It was a 2 hour canoe ride on the Onzole River to reach our destination: Santo Domingo de Onzole!
Overall, we were immediately being welcomed and accepted by many people in the community knowing that we were part of the teaching program and we were there to help and support them, but Carlos stressed the importance of taking the time to get to know the people and have opportunities to learn from them in addition to them learning from us. It's important for them to feel valued and proud to be able to share their knowledge and expertise with others instead of continuing to cement the belief that they are not worthy or valued or intelligent.
So we paired up with local families and spent the day with them. I spent the day with Sabreen, a fellow teacher, and Bri, who was an intern with T2T and one of our wonderful translators! We began the day by learning how to do laundry in the river. Our host mother has a washer, but she only uses it when there is a lot of water stored up from the rains. She handed me a bucket full of clothes and we began our long walk down to the river. I slowly followed behind careful of each step as not to trip and fall while her and her daughter seemed to effortless speed ahead down the path. I learned the procedure and how to use the board to scrub, but my favorite part was using a wooden paddle to "beat" some of the soap out of the clothes making it easier to rinse them in the river. Her daughter made it look effortless and actually a bit graceful with this twirl of her wrist. We tried and nearly hit each other with the paddle. Scrub, wash, beat, rinse....finally we were finished. We returned to her house and helped her hang up the laundry outside while the hens and little chicks wandered around us.
Our host mother proudly showed us her garden filled with herbs and vegetables that she planted herself. Some we recognized and some were new. Off the tree she planted herself years ago, she picked round greenish fruits that looked similar to oranges to save for our juice at lunch. She cooked us a delicious chicken lunch served with rice and fried plantains. The fruit was combined with lots of sugar to mask the sour taste. So yummy!
While helping our host mother with lunch, we learned that her husband makes about $10 per day. Minimum wage is about US$300 per month yet the cost of things are quite high - I think this is due to the isolation of the are because even the closest town which is a 2 hour canoe ride away is still quite far from larger cities. She told us a pair of jeans costs $30. That's just craziness!
Joining up with the other teachers we spent the afternoon walking through their fields. It's so incredibly lush and beautiful there. But where we saw one lush jungle, they saw, and pointed out, the community members who owned particular trees or entire fields. As we walked on, some of the women began shouting into the field at one of the men working. Before we knew it, he was chopping down a few coconuts and throwing them our way. The women quickly chopped off the tops with their machetes, passed the coconuts around and BAM we were drinking delicious coconut water!
Side Note: many farmers harvest cacao and on our last night we were fortunate enough to drink some hot chocolate made with cacao. Absolutely delicious! They are hoping with the new road being built to the nearest town, they will be able to increase their export and earn a better live. Currently though, the 2 hour canoe ride is faster than taking the road to the town!
The rain storms reminded of being home in Bali when the skies would open up and it would downpour in the afternoons. Many times I stood peering out the guest house's window into the community watching them play soccer, jump rope, and engage in imaginative play. One day a fellow teacher and I were intently observing these two boys trying to figure out what they were up to. Turns out they were "transforming" a piece of bamboo into a horse and we watched as they galloped off down the path on their horses.
At other times, it would be the sounds of the community that would get my attention: the roosters crowing at all times of day (reminding me our my neighbors in Bali), ducks and frogs making their voices known off in the distance, singing and dancing coming from the building up the hill.
Dedicated and Motivated Teachers
Some of the teachers recently received training in Quito from the government and brought back to share their learning with the rest of the school which was such an empowering opportunity! One of the tools they implemented was a class rules/essential agreement poster that is now being used in the classrooms to help with classroom management. The government has provided textbooks for students, but because the government has recently drastically changed their benchmarks recently, many of the middle and high school teachers are struggling with the content in math and science because they themselves do not have a lot of background knowledge in the content. So some of the volunteer teachers spent time working with those teachers on content. The rest of the time was spent conducting observations, planning with the teachers, modeling lessons, and co-teaching with the local teacher. Each day the volunteer teachers would take turns hosting workshops for the local teachers on a variety of topics. In total there were 11 of us: 4 translators, 7 teachers volunteering - 2 of whom were returning to the school for a second time through T2T!
It's a Team Effort!
Working with the grade 1 teacher, I introduced her to an ABC chart/personal word wall to help her students remember the sounds of corresponding letters and apply that knowledge in their writing. We spent time after school discussing how best to implement it and the next day she had the parents come to school and explained how they had to help their child find pictures for each letter of the alphabet and bring it back to school the next day. Now she didn't just have the parents come to school for this assignment. The previous day the students were misbehaving in class and so she told them they all had to bring a family member to school with them the following day. At the shock and horror of some of her students, she proceeded to fill the family in on what went down in class the day before. YES! I loved how she got the families involved right away and helped her students to realize the connection between home and school. Let's just say they were much more focused that day! Spending time with her and her class brought back many memories from my days teaching in north Philly. :)
Anyway, back to the ABC chart/word wall. The next day most students arrived with their charts completed! As students were coming in and beginning to unpack I noticed a group of them gathering together and showing off their charts to each other - so proud of their work! Then suddenly without any prompting by an adult, they began singing the alphabet and making the sounds of the letters. So wonderful to see them start to take ownership of this tool that will become so helpful to them in the following months. So wonderful to see their excitement and enthusiasm as they embark on the beginning of being able to communicate with others through reading and writing!
My Reading and Writing Workshop focus was on the over arching concept of why we read and write: to make and convey meaning to others. We discussed the importance of illustrations, picture books, and asking higher order thinking questions to promote critical thinking
Where IS She?
Out of the 7 teachers, I was the only lower elementary teacher and also the only teacher with a focus on reading/writing. The other teachers worked mainly with upper elementary-high school and had a math or science focus. One day while walking home from the school I ran into a teacher who works at a neighboring school up river. She had been waiting outside of Carlos' house trying to find that "reading and writing Elementary Teacher" all afternoon. She really wanted to have the opportunity to sit down and plan with me. So we made sure it happened and after dinner she came up to Carlos' house and we discussed her lesson plans for the following day.
This is a fairly typical occurrence for teachers to come to the house to receive additional support AFTER the workday and AFTER a 2 hour workshop they attended. That really showed me their dedication and desire to learn and improve their teaching. We also had lots of visits from the local kids who loved coming in to hang out with us!
Anyway, after talking to my local teaching partner and making sure she was okay that I wouldn't be working with her the following day, I journeyed 15 minutes up river with Jesse, another wonderful translator, and Sabreen the following day to teach with this woman who desperately wanted me to come to her classroom.
We were paraded around like celebrities and were excited to show this school that they matter too and we would be happy to work with them. We had a fun day teaching in her classroom and getting her students actively engaged in their learning.
After school ended, we had an impromptu English lesson with some teachers and older students. We even got to learn some of the indigenous language from the Chachi people!
With a Heavy Heart
As the week came to an end, I desperately wanted to stay. I felt like I was just beginning to know the community and the needs of the school. I wasn't ready to leave. After our final workshop on Friday, we all got together to say goodbye. Speeches filled such gratitude as the local teachers expressed their sincere thanks to us for making a long journey to come and help them when even their own government has forgotten about them. (I do love that about Latin Americans - they wear their hearts on their sleeves and are not afraid to open their hearts and share how they feel with others.)
I leave with a quote from Carlos that I feel pretty much sums it all up: "We are all small parts of something much bigger than ourselves."
That night before going to bed, I began jotting down more ideas of how I can further support the teachers and the school. I do hope one day I am able to go back and continue to work with them. For now, I will continue to share their story with others and send ideas for how to make their new school library more functional and integrated into the school. The local teachers felt that we gave up so much to come and work with them. They believed that WE taught THEM so much, but in reality we learned so much from them as well.
So grab yourself a cup of coffee/tea/or whatever beverage you fancy and settle in as I think this will be a long one!
The Organizations:
T2T (Teachers 2 Teachers Global)
This was the organization that I was a part of. They have partnered with many schools around the world and organize trips each summer. What I really love about this organization is it brings empowerment to the local community. It's a sustainable way to volunteer because it forms a partnership with the local school and provides support for local teachers who will continue to work in that community long after the volunteer teachers leave.
The Onzole River Project
Started 10 years ago by a woman named Nikki from Canada, her nephew, Carlos, has continued to run the project and work in collaboration with T2T. Carlos has built a house in the community where the volunteer teachers live for the week and he works tirelessly to fundraise for future projects for the community. The vision of this project is "to ensure the future generations of the Onzole River are educated, empowered, and equipped, to keep leading their community toward positive change."
Brief History of the Area
Overt and systematic racism is still very common in Ecuador towards Afro-Ecuadorians. These communities along the Onzole River are very isolated and in the past have received little support from their government. I believe it was only 4 years ago that they got electricity, which still goes out quite often. There is no cell phone or internet service. (Having a week of disconnecting was rather therapeutic for me!) They are now beginning to set up a landfill and discussing waste treatment within the community. The river is commonly used for bathing and washing clothes.
After petitioning to the government, there is now a school in each community that is fully funded by the government (but that's not saying much.)
Persevering Through New Struggles
Student enrollment at the school in Santo Domingo de Onzole (where I volunteered) has increased due to other communities noticing the commitment and hard work the principal and teachers are doing to better their school as well as its partnership with T2T. The school has also grown beyond an elementary school and goes up to grade 12, making it one of the few high schools in the area.
That in turn created a new problem for the school. The school is in dire need of more classrooms and teachers due to its increased enrollment but the government has yet to come visit to assess the situation, let alone agree to build more classrooms. So currently there are classes being held outside. Desks, chairs, a table and a white board now sit outside in the dirt as a make-shift classroom. The community banned together and attached a roof over this classroom, but when rainy season comes and it's pouring down rain and flooding, this "classroom" will not be useable.
View of the Outdoor Classroom
Currently the Onzole River project is fundraising for money to build more classrooms as rainy season is quickly approaching and the government doesn't seem to be stepping up. Carlos believes it will take approximately 20,000 USD to build the necessary classroom. He also mentioned the idea of setting up scholarships to help students access university. It's extremely difficult to have the means to leave the community and attend university in one of Ecuador's larger cities hours away. Now that the seed of further education has been planted there are many students beginning to dream of life beyond working in the fields.
I encourage you to take a look at the Onzole River Project's website, http://www.onzole.org/, to help give you a better picture of this community's struggles and determination to persevere and improve their community. Through years of isolation and racism, they have longed believed they are not worthy of an education or meant to do anything beyond laboring in the farms, but that mindset is slowly being to change. They are starting to believe in themselves and feel empowered to continue to fight to make a better life for themselves. I believe in this project and in the people of Santo Domingo de Onzole and I encourage you to donate if you feel moved by this project and community as well. Every little bit counts.
Ok, now back to the journey and experiences while volunteering.....
How to Get to Santo Domingo de Onzole
We began our journey in the city of Guayaquil. We took a 7 hour overnight bus north to Esmeraldas, then a 1 1/2 hour car ride to get to the river where we boarded our motorized canoe. After transporting our luggage and food onto the canoe, plastic chairs were placed for us to sit. It was a 2 hour canoe ride on the Onzole River to reach our destination: Santo Domingo de Onzole!
A Day in the Life
Overall, we were immediately being welcomed and accepted by many people in the community knowing that we were part of the teaching program and we were there to help and support them, but Carlos stressed the importance of taking the time to get to know the people and have opportunities to learn from them in addition to them learning from us. It's important for them to feel valued and proud to be able to share their knowledge and expertise with others instead of continuing to cement the belief that they are not worthy or valued or intelligent.
So we paired up with local families and spent the day with them. I spent the day with Sabreen, a fellow teacher, and Bri, who was an intern with T2T and one of our wonderful translators! We began the day by learning how to do laundry in the river. Our host mother has a washer, but she only uses it when there is a lot of water stored up from the rains. She handed me a bucket full of clothes and we began our long walk down to the river. I slowly followed behind careful of each step as not to trip and fall while her and her daughter seemed to effortless speed ahead down the path. I learned the procedure and how to use the board to scrub, but my favorite part was using a wooden paddle to "beat" some of the soap out of the clothes making it easier to rinse them in the river. Her daughter made it look effortless and actually a bit graceful with this twirl of her wrist. We tried and nearly hit each other with the paddle. Scrub, wash, beat, rinse....finally we were finished. We returned to her house and helped her hang up the laundry outside while the hens and little chicks wandered around us.
Our host mother proudly showed us her garden filled with herbs and vegetables that she planted herself. Some we recognized and some were new. Off the tree she planted herself years ago, she picked round greenish fruits that looked similar to oranges to save for our juice at lunch. She cooked us a delicious chicken lunch served with rice and fried plantains. The fruit was combined with lots of sugar to mask the sour taste. So yummy!
Sabreen and I with our host mother and her 3 children
While helping our host mother with lunch, we learned that her husband makes about $10 per day. Minimum wage is about US$300 per month yet the cost of things are quite high - I think this is due to the isolation of the are because even the closest town which is a 2 hour canoe ride away is still quite far from larger cities. She told us a pair of jeans costs $30. That's just craziness!
Joining up with the other teachers we spent the afternoon walking through their fields. It's so incredibly lush and beautiful there. But where we saw one lush jungle, they saw, and pointed out, the community members who owned particular trees or entire fields. As we walked on, some of the women began shouting into the field at one of the men working. Before we knew it, he was chopping down a few coconuts and throwing them our way. The women quickly chopped off the tops with their machetes, passed the coconuts around and BAM we were drinking delicious coconut water!
Side Note: many farmers harvest cacao and on our last night we were fortunate enough to drink some hot chocolate made with cacao. Absolutely delicious! They are hoping with the new road being built to the nearest town, they will be able to increase their export and earn a better live. Currently though, the 2 hour canoe ride is faster than taking the road to the town!
The Community
The rain storms reminded of being home in Bali when the skies would open up and it would downpour in the afternoons. Many times I stood peering out the guest house's window into the community watching them play soccer, jump rope, and engage in imaginative play. One day a fellow teacher and I were intently observing these two boys trying to figure out what they were up to. Turns out they were "transforming" a piece of bamboo into a horse and we watched as they galloped off down the path on their horses.
At other times, it would be the sounds of the community that would get my attention: the roosters crowing at all times of day (reminding me our my neighbors in Bali), ducks and frogs making their voices known off in the distance, singing and dancing coming from the building up the hill.
Dedicated and Motivated Teachers
Some of the teachers recently received training in Quito from the government and brought back to share their learning with the rest of the school which was such an empowering opportunity! One of the tools they implemented was a class rules/essential agreement poster that is now being used in the classrooms to help with classroom management. The government has provided textbooks for students, but because the government has recently drastically changed their benchmarks recently, many of the middle and high school teachers are struggling with the content in math and science because they themselves do not have a lot of background knowledge in the content. So some of the volunteer teachers spent time working with those teachers on content. The rest of the time was spent conducting observations, planning with the teachers, modeling lessons, and co-teaching with the local teacher. Each day the volunteer teachers would take turns hosting workshops for the local teachers on a variety of topics. In total there were 11 of us: 4 translators, 7 teachers volunteering - 2 of whom were returning to the school for a second time through T2T!
"The Yard" where the school would line up every morning and be greeted by the principal before being dismissed to class
The principal
During family day, the parents participated in a variety of games...one of them being a jump rope competition. This is one of the high school teachers participating. The parents were so involved and super competitive!
Science Class: Inquiring about plants
Friday was family day and some of my fellow volunteer math teachers set up a table to showcase various math games and different ways to use their new manipulatives that just arrived a month ago!
Scientists at Work! Another volunteer teacher brought mini microscopes and the kids were loving them!
These were the two classrooms I worked in. As I said before there is a need for more teachers, but the government has provided this so the local teacher I worked with technically taught grade 1 and 2, but not in a combined classroom. On a good and productive day, she would teach a lesson in one class, give them a task to do, and the assistant teacher would stay with that class as they completed their work while the local teacher would walk into the other room and teach a lesson to that class. Back and forth all day.
Working with the grade 1 teacher, I introduced her to an ABC chart/personal word wall to help her students remember the sounds of corresponding letters and apply that knowledge in their writing. We spent time after school discussing how best to implement it and the next day she had the parents come to school and explained how they had to help their child find pictures for each letter of the alphabet and bring it back to school the next day. Now she didn't just have the parents come to school for this assignment. The previous day the students were misbehaving in class and so she told them they all had to bring a family member to school with them the following day. At the shock and horror of some of her students, she proceeded to fill the family in on what went down in class the day before. YES! I loved how she got the families involved right away and helped her students to realize the connection between home and school. Let's just say they were much more focused that day! Spending time with her and her class brought back many memories from my days teaching in north Philly. :)
Anyway, back to the ABC chart/word wall. The next day most students arrived with their charts completed! As students were coming in and beginning to unpack I noticed a group of them gathering together and showing off their charts to each other - so proud of their work! Then suddenly without any prompting by an adult, they began singing the alphabet and making the sounds of the letters. So wonderful to see them start to take ownership of this tool that will become so helpful to them in the following months. So wonderful to see their excitement and enthusiasm as they embark on the beginning of being able to communicate with others through reading and writing!
My Reading and Writing Workshop focus was on the over arching concept of why we read and write: to make and convey meaning to others. We discussed the importance of illustrations, picture books, and asking higher order thinking questions to promote critical thinking
Where IS She?
Out of the 7 teachers, I was the only lower elementary teacher and also the only teacher with a focus on reading/writing. The other teachers worked mainly with upper elementary-high school and had a math or science focus. One day while walking home from the school I ran into a teacher who works at a neighboring school up river. She had been waiting outside of Carlos' house trying to find that "reading and writing Elementary Teacher" all afternoon. She really wanted to have the opportunity to sit down and plan with me. So we made sure it happened and after dinner she came up to Carlos' house and we discussed her lesson plans for the following day.
This is a fairly typical occurrence for teachers to come to the house to receive additional support AFTER the workday and AFTER a 2 hour workshop they attended. That really showed me their dedication and desire to learn and improve their teaching. We also had lots of visits from the local kids who loved coming in to hang out with us!
Anyway, after talking to my local teaching partner and making sure she was okay that I wouldn't be working with her the following day, I journeyed 15 minutes up river with Jesse, another wonderful translator, and Sabreen the following day to teach with this woman who desperately wanted me to come to her classroom.
After school ended, we had an impromptu English lesson with some teachers and older students. We even got to learn some of the indigenous language from the Chachi people!
With a Heavy Heart
As the week came to an end, I desperately wanted to stay. I felt like I was just beginning to know the community and the needs of the school. I wasn't ready to leave. After our final workshop on Friday, we all got together to say goodbye. Speeches filled such gratitude as the local teachers expressed their sincere thanks to us for making a long journey to come and help them when even their own government has forgotten about them. (I do love that about Latin Americans - they wear their hearts on their sleeves and are not afraid to open their hearts and share how they feel with others.)
I leave with a quote from Carlos that I feel pretty much sums it all up: "We are all small parts of something much bigger than ourselves."
That night before going to bed, I began jotting down more ideas of how I can further support the teachers and the school. I do hope one day I am able to go back and continue to work with them. For now, I will continue to share their story with others and send ideas for how to make their new school library more functional and integrated into the school. The local teachers felt that we gave up so much to come and work with them. They believed that WE taught THEM so much, but in reality we learned so much from them as well.
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