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Published: February 15th 2005
Me and the niños de la calle
Me and two kids. I genuinely don´t know their names.Well I´ve been here for two weeks and thought it was about time I put down a few memories in this blog. I am now learning spanish and helping at a project with street kids in quito.
I have been in two houses with families so far, not at all what I expected. The first guy´s house who I was in was the ex-finance minister of Ecuador, knew Bill Clinton before he was in office and is mates with Donald Trump.
The school for the street kids is real fun they´re surprisingly tactile with visitors and volunteers, but are very violent with each other. One of the most disturbing things to see was a 3 year old actually put up his dukes like a real fighter against an older kid, and when he punched he didn´t punch slowly and wimpily like you might expect from a 3 year old but punched incredibly fast (for a toddler) and was aiming for ribs deliberately.
Nuns ´run´ the school for the street kids but very rarely teach leaving that to volunteers whom they offer no training. The nuns hit the kids too essentially conditioning them to only do what you say
Juan montalvo
So called because whenever you ask his name he answers in full. if you hit them, so I´ve resorted to the more first world friendly practise of bribing using cookies and games in activities. The power the head nun has over the kids is absolute, one day a week and a bit ago 4 or 5 rooms full of furniture two floors up needed to be moved for painting she just clicked her fingers and 40 kids were bringing down tables balanced on their head or stacked chairs in front of them.
Indigenous or even partly indigenous people here, I have learnt, are superhumanly strong, there was a 2x1x1 metre box full of books and newspapers another guy and I tried to pick it up and could barely move it and were thinking of ways we could empty bits into other boxes so it could be done bit by bit, one guy with a bit of indigenous blood in him just heaved it onto his back and jogged down two flights of stairs with it. In the street you can also see proper old men who sell vegetables on the street with a cupboard (as big as them) FULL of (say 50 or 60) cabbages or whatever and they just put a
rope around it and carry it round on their back.
A few other tit bits of Ecaudor...
Fire engines are actually fire landrovers with no visible means of actually being able to put out a fire, I have yet to be at the scene of a fire but it would no doubt be interesting.
Police here have about 30 different sounds for their sirens, and they often just play with them rather than do any work, one car sits outside my new house now and that´s literally all he does. Amongst the sounds are ones you would associate with a kids toy gun, and Saturday night by Whigfield (imagine bing pursued by the police with that ringing out).
Normal people also buy sirens themselves so if they are at a traffic light and they dont want to wait they just whack it on and drive through.
People pay no attention to traffic lights here, the only way they get them to work is by coupling them with police officers.
If youve got this far thanks, it was all a bit disjointed and I forgot my USB cable so no pictures as yet, but soon
Older girls in the project
Always try and make me say the word bum in spanish. no doubt soon.
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