Dear friends and family,
For almost ten days now Mark, Craig and I have been conducting community assets surveys with the help of ten seventh graders from Aliñambi school, a school/clinic/ home-for-children-in-difficult-family-situations. We've also partnered with HealtheClinic, a US-based health non-profit. So far we’ve completed 190 surveys, and have hopes of interviewing over 1,000 households before the end of the summer- a number that is both daunting and exciting. We’re happy finally to be conducting interviews with the seventh graders. Getting to this point has taken months of planning, including a 2-week capacitación, or training session, for the kids on how to survey a household in a professional and mature manner.
The idea of the survey is four-fold: 1) to collect information about existing assets and services in the community, 2) to better understand the social/ cultural make-up of the community, 3) to learn about individual skills and talents of people in the community, and 4) to teach the Aliñambi students self-respect, the value of completing a task, and a little bit of self-confidence. Ultimately, our goal is to be able to strengthen the assets that already exist (local clinics, businesses, etc.) by connecting individuals with each other and with local institutions.
We continue to build friendships with the seventh graders conducting the surveys, whose story in itself is inspiring: 7 of the 10 students live at Aliñambi and have most of their lives. Ana, Jazmín and Diana are on my team, and it has been a joy to get to know them. Just the other day, after 2 hours of doing door to door interviews, they mustered up the courage to ask me, in between giggles, “Tía Abbie, (they call all teachers and authority figures at the school tío or tía, uncle or aunt), have you ever had a boyfriend?” Their endearing, adolescent comment made me smile, especially since they looked so professional in their uniforms and interviewing identification cards.
For Mark, Craig and me, these asset surveys pretty much take up our lives in Ecuador- if we’re not conducting surveys, we’re discussing the surveys with Aliñambi’s Dr. Julia, examining maps of the community to figure out our next step, checking for mistakes in already completed surveys, figuring out software for data entry, writing about the surveys in the MPI monthly update… you get the idea.
We are committed to working as hard as we can to ensure useful, comprehensive survey results that will greatly benefit the community we work in, and are asking for your financial help.
Attached is the formal survey proposal, if you are interested in viewing it. If you’d like to donate, please email me back and I’ll send you the details.
Sending our best from Ecuador and thank you!
Abbie
p.s. click here for pictures, videos and past updates.
Jazmin and Ana waiting at the door to conduct a survey.
Ana and Diana interviewing
Diana interviewing a family. See the rainbow on the right?
