Mi futuro

We've been looking into the future. The children have been making and decorating telescopes and then drawing their future dreams. The children were fully absorbed, spending ages decorating their individual telescopes with bits of shiny paper, foamex, tissue paper and the occasional pair of wings. The kids had some fantastic aspirations; lots of teachers, footballers, nurses, doctors, policemen and women, one president who wants to play football in his spare time and a little girl who was very keen to become a butterfly.

 

 

To warm up the kids we played a game we've christened 'Les gustos' (likes and dislikes). We shouted out all sorts of words like 'ice cream', 'school', 'singing' or 'mosquitos' and then the kids had to run to the appropriate side of the room, one side labelled 'Me gusta..' (I like...) and the other 'No me gusta...' (I don't like). It appears that 100% of the children of Guayaquil are partial to a scoop of ice cream and not so keen on spiders.

Paint on your face

Following on from last week's theme of getting to know each other names this week we've worked with getting to know everyone's faces. First we warmed up with a couple of games focusing on looking at each other; we played a mirror game where everyone had to copy the actions of one person. Actions started with a simple reflected wave of the hand but within five minutes we became a synchronised bunch of dancing monkeys. After we had demonstrated the game we asked for a volunteer and one young boy thought it would be a great idea to have everyone doing 20 pressups.  We also held a 'no blinking' competition, with the children showing tremendous ability. Even when we tried to cheat by pulling faces or making ourselves cross eyed the kids came out on top.

We ran a series of drawing activities using black and white photographs of the children. We started by giving the children one photograph of one side of their face and they had to complete the picture by drawing the other side. The children also made funny faces by folding their photographs to create a new face and changed their face by painting on hats, glasses, wild hair or beards

 

-some kids didn't restrict themselves to use just paper…

Como te llamas?

We've been here just over a month and been called many names. Lone's name  was initially confused with the Spanish word for moon so we were quickly christened Luna y Sol to much amusement. There was also an attempt to label Andy, Casper the Friendly ghost, due to his pale complexion but thanks to a slight bronzing of the skin the name has never stuck. Our latino names of choice now seem to be Manolito (a diminuitive form of a very manly man's name) and Juanita for reasons that have never been explained.

Names are important to us at the moment as we're going to be running workshops with about 100 children in the coming months and we're keen to get on to a first name basis as quickly as possible. We've spent this week running a series of introductory workshops, playing name games and asking the children to make and decorate name badges to enable us to greet them properly and avoid merely grunting in their direction. The kids were enjoying making their badges and loving having their picture taken afterwards, all beaming with pride!

Hola

So we're here in Guayaquil. It's hot, it's sweaty and it's the place we now call home (sorry Mum). We owe a BIG thank you to Laura and Nina, who have been amazing in showing us the ropes, how to eat bananas with cheese and introducing us to delights of Ahí (a hot chilly sauce not for the faint hearted).

We arrived in December and received a warm welcome from the local charity JUCONI, with whom we'll be running our art workshops with children aged between 3-12. We spent the first 3 weeks helping out with the many christmas parties arranged by JUCONI, giving street working children and their families the opportunity to enjoy the festive season. It was great to meet the children we will be working with in the forthcoming months and get a feeling of who they are as well as the communities they live in.

We'll be running art workshops in 4 different sectors of Guayaquil during the week and also help out with family visits with our JUCONI colleagues, who are all trained psychologists and social workers. Our first visit to the sectors was quite overwhelming, the living conditions are shocking but the children are fantastic, full of energy and curiosity.

Rainy season is just about in full swing so we're armed with ponchos and yellow wellington boots and feeling very excited about the months to come...