Yesterday morning, I gave a speech at my synagogue in West Bloomfield about my two years of service in Peace Corps Ecuador. For those of you who could not make it or would like to relive the experience, I have pasted the notes I used during the speech below.
I hope to continue to update my blog about my visit back home. I have been home for a week and have plenty of blog-worthy material to post. The issue has been finding time (I guess I could have eliminated this afternoon's siesta to blog a bit, but it was very necessary.)
Depending on weather: "It's a good thing that rain stopped. Because if this were Ecuador, people don't leave there house during the rain. No one would have showed. No minyan."
Shabbat shalom con todos y todas presente, Les agredezco por la oportunidd de compartir mis experiencias con ustedes.
So you think this would work better in English? Luckily I also printed up an English edition as back up.
Thank rabbi for giving me the opportunity to address the congregation this morning. It feels good to be back home, even though it might be a different house.
This week we have been talking about the Jewish people's 40-year journey from slavery to freedom. It was an epic journey with its ups and downs, with its wonders and difficulties. But at the end of the trek through the desert, we emerged as a different nation, one ready to face the challenges associated with independence. And these experiences built the character traits that continue to maintain us as a people.
We are all on journeys - as individuals, as a community, as a nation.
I would like to talk to you this morning a bit about the journey I have been on the last two and half years in Peace Corps Ecuador.
When I joined the Peace Corps in February 2009, I knew that it would be an experience unlike anything I had ever done. It seemed like an incredible opportunity to give back and put in practice the ideals of tikun olam
Opportunity for personal growth, greater perspective, learn another language
For those of you who might be very familiar with Peace Corps...
Agency started by John F. Kennedy in 1961 to promote world peace, sending Americans to countries in the developing world to provide technical and engage in a cultural exchange. It currently operates in 77 countries.
Natural resource conservation volunteer placed in a small coastal city of 17,000 in southern Ecuador, very close to the border with Peru
It is an agricultural town, whose primary crop is banana
The area is known as the world banana capital
Celebrate the fruit every year with the world banana festival
I worked with the local municipality in the office of environmental management
Tree nursery, gardening, environmental education, community bank, and recycling program. I also worked extensively with youth groups.
I have just now finished my two years and decided to extend my stay for another year and serve as Volunteer Leader. Instead of living in a small town, I will be based in the capital, Quito, working out of the Peace Corps office there.
As a Peace Corps volunteer, one is not there to impose solutions to the community's problems. Instead, one is supposed to work together with community members to identify those solutions.
If the process isn't participatory and the community doesn't take ownership over the project, it will not be sustainable. I saw countless examples of this in Ecuador, where people go in with great intentions but don't go about it the right way, and the initiative stalls out.
The idea is that volunteers empower the community to begin address some of its problems.
One initiative that I worked on is a community bank project, based on microfinance models made popular by Mohamed Yunus or C.K.Prahalad
• My counterpart agency was installing a running water project in an isolated community, about an hour and half from my house
• I had to take two buses and walk thirty-minute walk across three rivers to get there. The bus only ran twice a day. And in the rainy season, you could barely get there.
• It is a village of two families but thirty households
One day during a meeting of the water council, I talked to the members about what they thought were some needs of the community. As a small community, it was difficult for them to ask for a lot of resources from the government. So any initiative they wanted to undertake had to come from their limited resources.
They mentioned that a nearby community had started a kind of community bank, and the idea really interested them. I explained to them how the bank works. We started with two informational meetings to explain how it functions. The third week we elected the administrative committee that would be in charge of running meetings. The members write the constitution that will govern their bank. Because it is their institution, they have to decide up the by-laws
People are concerned for the security of their belongings in Ecuador, even in a village with two families. The community bank box has three different sets of keys and locks. The box itself is kept in the house of a fourth person so members can trust the safety of their deposits.
At the fourth meeting the members made their first deposits to the bank. After four weeks of deposits, they can start loaning out the money. These microloans, worth no more than $100 dollars have to be paid back within a month plus a small interest rate of 5% to 10%. The principal and the interest get returned to the box to be loaned out to the other members.
At the end of the bank's fiscal year, they divide up the contents of the box among the membership. That way the members would enjoy the benefits of savings in addition to the access to credit that they received throughout the year.
The bank is now on its third year and has 70 members.
While starting this bank was a beneficial experience for the community, I also found it quite rewarding and humorous.
Because of the bus schedule, I was forced to spend the night there every time I went for a meeting. One week I brought a frisbee to play with kids. Most people don't know what a frisbee is. They really enjoyed playing with the disc, but not in the traditional sense of "playing frisbee." One of the three-year olds in the village took his machete (yes, three year olds have their own machetes) and chopped a few holes in the frisbee, making it much less aerodynamic.
One week a self-proclaimed archeologist randomly showed up in our office. No one really knew what he was doing in town, but he charmed everyone with his stories of hidden treasure and convinced my office that on the way to the community bank meeting one night, we should stop at some guy's house and search for gold. We drive up to this shack, the archaeologist pulls out two copper rods that he used like a Ouija. He asks the rods a question and, depending on the way the rods move, he decides where to search. They spent a few hours digging and didn't find an tangible gold, but I found plenty of comic gold.
On the rare occasion that the municipality would give me a ride up to the bank meeting, more often than not, the thirty-year old jalopy would stall out on the road and we'd have to call another car from town to come pick us up. One time the car stalled only if we turned on the headlights. So we used my headlamp and cell phone flashlight to guide us home.
In addition to the bank, I worked with my counterpart agency on solving some of my town's numerous waste management issues. Local governments in Ecuador want to have smooth-running waste management collection operations that separate between organics and inorganics and also separate out recyclable materials so that they don't have to put as much in the limited space available in landfills.
The problem is that changing this culture is a long process. In Ecuador, the first instinct when someone has a piece of garbage is to throw it on the ground or out the window of the bus. Once, it came back through my window and hit me in the face. The first instinct when they have a lot of garbage is to make a pile and light it on fire. My neighbors liked to add gasoline to their daily 6:00 a.m. garbage fire. I assume that was for a bigger flame.
Because the city budget was a mess and trying to allocate a lot of funds for a big-time waste-management project was impossible, I worked with my counterparts to identify small-scale solutions to the problem. They thought that we had the resources to implement a municipal recycling program. We would locate recycling bins throughout the city, and residents would deposit their recyclables there — instead of burning them or throwing them in a field outside of town. We created posters and pamphlets to promote the project and recorded ads for the local radio station.
The bins were supposed to have been installed last October. But there were some unforeseen delays.
For example, the bins were painted with a kind of paint that would rust in the rain, so we had to get them all repainted. But it took a month to find someone who would paint the bins. Then the municipality delayed its payment and thought its own people could paint the bins. They were wrong.
Then, the local fiestas happened. The municipality went back to its initial contractor but continued to delay its payment. Then Christmas happened. Then they finally freed up some money to pay the contract, and the bins were finally painted at the end of January. Except that those bins were only painted one color — no one put letters indicating what could be deposited in which bins.
Last month, they finally put the bins around town. The radio ads have hit the airwaves. They were supposed to start the street-level promotional activity tomorrow, but then realized it was Easter Sunday and will probably start that work next week.
While all of these delays were happening, I was working with local schools, teaching students and teachers about the benefits of recycling. Working with my counterpart and another Peace Corps Volunteer, we developed a curriculum for teaching students about recycling. We hosted a recycling contest in two local schools, which my parents helped with when they visited, and gave a workshop to teachers and school staff about how the recycling program functions so that they can teach the students how it works. We had also planned to give similar instructional sessions to local government workers and student governments at the high schools.
I also worked extensively with local youth. I helped them start a community magazine. Working with thirty high school students and another Peace Corps Volunteer, we produced a magazine that talked about some of the positive community projects happening in Arenillas. The youth made seven editions in the first year and are now starting a television show.
At first, many were skeptical about whether or not the high schoolers could pull it off. It was that doubt that motivated our students. One of our journalist's dads told her, before we made the first edition, "Are you kidding me? Kids can't start newspapers."
They proved him wrong.
In addition to the technical exchange, Peace Corps emphasizes the cultural exchange between volunteers and Ecuadorians. Ecuador is more than 90% Catholic. Most Ecuadorians have never met a Jew before.
When I first moved there and was living with a host family, my host dad's first response when I told him I was Jewish was "oh, yeah. Like the raid on Entebbe? Very cool."
One of my favorite ways to share Jewish culture is through food. Every Friday night I would cook shabbat dinner for my friends and coworkers. It is my favorite time of the week in the States, and I wanted it to be that way in Ecuador, too. I would make challah, kugel, knishes, babka, matzah ball soup, pita, hummus, tabouli, mandel brodt, and shakshuka. (sorry to be talking about this stuff in the heart of Passover),
My friends liked the food so much they came back every week. Some of them even asked for the recipes. One day I went to my friend's house and her three-year old son was eating dinner. He had on his plate rice, chicken, and something else. I asked him, "Pierrro, what are you eating?" (but in Spanish, of course)
"Se llama kugel" (It's called kugel)
Not all experiences with Jewish cultural foods worked out so well. During shavuot my first year I baked a cheesecake to share with my coworkers. I offered it to a number of my friends to try, and they enjoyed it. The garbagemen, though, spit it out in my face. Cheesecake must be an acquired taste
While being a sole practitioner has is downsides, there some aspects that aren't that bad.
For example, my yom kippur services were about nine hours shorter than usual. Feel free to join me next year, but only up to eight people are allowed. If that happens, we'd probably have to start another non-minyan.
Last Passover, I had a very special guest. Adam Baruch was travelling through South America and visited me. He ate shabbat dinner at my house, helped me clean jametz, and we went to seders with the Jewish community in Quito - a 12-hour bus ride from my site.
The Quito Jewish community has 400 members, three rabbis, two synagogues, and two shokhets that don't recognize each other's hashkakhah. With my job being based in Quito next year, I look forward to become more active in - if only for kiddush luncheon.
Now I don't want to hold you up much longer before your kiddush luncheon - or today's modified kiddush. If you have any questions, you can find me by the dried fruit.
Shabbat shalom and jag sameaj - two j's. Think about it.
