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| Sun setting over our neighborhood; taken over our wall |
Week 2 in our job placements is going well and we are all starting to find our niches and get into a routine. Mike (the other Rostro vol working in Proyecto Misión) and I have been working out a schedule and reading a lot this week on the Hogar de Cristo organization, the demographics of Mount Sinai, and the National Development plan of President Rafael Correa. Additionally, all of us are helping out once a week at Ana´s after school program called Ave María (I go every Tuesday). It services children in the Mount Sinai area whose parents work very late or who have very rough home situations. And lastly, I am the Rostro de Cristo accountant and hope to learn more through this position on the inner-workings of an international non-profit.
I wanted to focus this post on my primary placement, community organizing at Hogar de Cristo. In order to understand the work I will be doing, it is first important to grasp the situation we live in now.
Mount Sinai is an invasion community that is 5-9 years old and has about 50,000 inhabitants. Plots of former farm and swamp land were sold by a pseudo-owner and residents from the city and mountains flocked here for the opportunity to own their own land. Although the residents paid for their land, the government does not recognize the land as legally theirs because it was sanctioned off for agricultural use before the land-trafficer sold it. Working towards legalizing the land with community leaders is one of the primary objectives of my office.
These communitties face unique challenges as it is not recognized as legal land. We have no running water - water is delivered by a truck to our home about once a month. We have only one paved road leading up to our neighborhood. In the dry season the dust causes many lung related issues and in the rainy season the mud will make some roads inpassable. We have no electric meters in Mt Sinai. Most all electricity is stolen, and frequent power outages are common. The homes here are most often single cane houses built on stilts for protection during the rainy season (Hogar de Cristo provides cane home for $25 per month over 3 years and donates them to those in desperate conditions).
The target group of citizens living in Mt Sinai of the project live in grave, difficult, and complex conidtions. 8% of people over the age of 10 cannot read or writeñ a grave difficulty in finding work and earning wages for your family. Only 7.2% of the homes have access to water through the public network - 87% have access through water trucks, wells, etc which pose health risks. 45% work in commercial jobs, domestic jobs, and in informal manners. 24.9% homes make less than $200 per month and 57% make between $200 and $499.
In collecting the above data, the (translated) objective of the project of my office is to identify 200 vulnerable families from the Mt Sinai sector to participate in a process of changes in order to better the conditions of life in their territory and to take advantage of teh existing resources and opportunitites for development.
I´ll end with a quotation from Padre Alberto Hurtado, S.J. (founder of Hogar de Cristo) that really resonated with me during our orientation:
Ante cada problema, ante los grandes de la tierra, ante los problemas políticos de nuestro tiempo, ante los pobres, ante sus dolores y miserias, ante la defección de colaboradores, ante la escasez de operarios, ante la insuficiencia de nuestras obras: ¿qué haría Cristo si estuvieron en mi lugar?
-Padre Alberto Hurtado, S.J.
(Faced with each problem, faced with the greatness of the land, faced with the political problems of our time, faced with the poor, faced with their pains and miseries, faced with the defection of collaborators, faced with the scarcity of production, faced with the insufficiency of our works: What would Christ do if he were in my place?
Love and miss you all,
Colleen
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