Update

Well,

Things have been happening. Though there would be many pictures, I don't have them with me right now. The kids have officialy opened their YCEM store. We all came together I think it was on the 15th December this year. about 10-15 kids gathered in front of the little mom and pop store by the side of the highway. I don't know how extremely well things are going. But I get the impression it isn't yet a commercial succes. I suppose this is good because otherwise the kids would just get it all for free, without putting a lot of effort into it in the beginning.

That night of the opening of the store there was a gathering in advance in front of the stoor while the kids stocked up the store with goods. After a couple of hours the night was beginning to set in and Laura (a leader of the smaller leaders) opened and Walter gave a speech, then Yenny and Yilbert and I think Laura herself too. We al had a little bit of home made cake and afterward the kids started to play some music. They actually asked me to dance to some of their music. I had been milling some grain earlier and now Juan Josey (a volunteer/visitor) was inviting me to use the milling motion to dance. So finally... after a couple of minutes I did and I started to dance to the music. Much to the enjoyment of all. Now it was not the most spiritual or the brightest music. But it felt acceptable to do so and made connection between me and the kids. If we are to make a change in the lives of the kids, having things in common with them that are enjoyable and fun is a great way to go.
Hugo, Juan Josey and Eider joined inthe dancing and festivities too and we continued until I think about 10PM. Many of the moms were there and one of them brought food.

One delightful thing that happened was that the kids were arguing over what kind of music to play. One wanted the regular cultural music and the other YCEM hymns. There needed not be any prompting from the YCEM leadership, and they were free to just play the regular music but still wanted YCEM hymns more!

A couple days earlier we had a leadership activity.  The mayor invited us to do things at the local park. We gathered there during the afternoon. Hundreds of people were invited. Personally. There were about 100 people there. I think about 2/5 were from YCEM and the rest visitors. There were many games played. The kids had prepared the games all themselves. They were quite creative too. The mayor had specified that he wanted some music to be played that I really abhorred. I was tired and not capable of resisting the music so i left early.

Thank you for reading and hopefully I will post some photos as soon as I get back!

Groceries and some small enterprises

Another day at the foundation… Many things going on… Let´s get my notebook, because I forgot much.

I was getting some fruits from the main city Roldanillo. It takes an hour to walk there, but I took the bus with Eider. Eider went to get some things in a nearby town and I went to get fruit and headed back by foot until I saw a small bus heading in my direction. The fair is $1.000 peso per person. Going back and forth costs $2.000 peso. $2.000 peso is about 1 dollar or 0.8 Euro. I bought $15,905 peso worth of things or about 7 Dollars. I think 2-3 Kilos of oranges, 2.4 Kilos of Granadillas (pronounce granadiyas), about 160 Grams of Almonds. 2 Kilos of Mangos (6 pìeces). I absolutely love fruit. Even though it doesn´t fill my stomach, so I eat some regular food too especially at the evening dinner.

Juan Josey was making spinach omelets with garlic for the evening dinner… and there were only men in the kitchen. Only men... it was quite a surprise to Eider, who was little involved in the evening dinner last night. Pipe, Christiaan and Nataliya (adoscelent kids) were here, in the main dining hall. Pipe was playing some Yo Creo En Mi hymns on the computer and Eider and me were dancing to it every now and then. Eider more then me, and she was the one who started the dancing. I had to balance helping Juan Josey with dancing. I was preparing the eggs for his omelets, which were quite complicated. Juan Josey also tried dancing halfway through. But he was very occupied with baking omelets. But he managed to dance quite well too even with the pan in hand, surprisingly well! Eider was often trying to goad Christiaan into dancing too, but he remained shy. I also tried encouraging Pipe and Nataliya a bit. Pipe danced a bit too, in his disco / robot style which I fervently did not want to dance to.

A couple of days ago Yilber, Laura and Yenny were at a charity fair, without Hugo or Walter. Walter did drop them off at the bus but not much more as far as I remember. Many charities showed up and were presenting their causes to all who would come to look and learn. Im not actually sure how successful it was.

They keep experimenting with making ice cream around here. One of the successful attempts is banana ice cream. Half a banana covered with some chocolate and some ground peanuts. It works quite well and the kids love it.

top picture is the result. Banana with chocolate and ground peanuts 

the below picture is with Andres Felipe, Felipe and Yenny making the banana ice creams.

Irusha just came here y-day. Already it seems like he has been here for 3 days because he is very active and has brought many things. Irusha seems to communicate very well, even with Spanish kids and people. Irusha his Spanish is already pretty good for someone who has only been in Colombia for 1 day. Irusha has been studying Spanish in advance. He doesn´t speak conversationally too well, but Eider and Juan Josey speak some English, Eider in particular and Juan Josey seems to be remembering a lot of it too. Still it is quite a relief to have another English speaker around. It is perhaps not too big a relief to Eider, who is the only woman of the volunteers and visitors that are here. We do have Vanesah (Walter´s wife), but she is not a volunteer.

At the evening meeting we usually hold with new visitors, I heard that Irusha has been given specific assignments. He is to make videos for the Television Station and Youtube. Walter wants there to be “Yo Creo En Mi News”. I suppose he means regular news bulletins about what is going on here. I suppose the blog may become a part of it. Irusha has studied Marketing, so it is a good fit. He was wondering what it would possibly be good for, but he has been realizing what it is good for when he started to think of being a volunteer at YCEM.

Irusha with Juliana and Lina (on the right)

Yesterday during the meeting for Irusha Walter & Hugo explained the vision and plans for Yo Creo En Mi. The objective is to empower the kids to become independent. The older kids will be working on the Tienda (store). From the looks of it it will be next to the highway. I think that’s a great location. This Saturday the kids have been told to invite everyone and everything for activities and games invented by the kids. Walter & Hugo are expecting about 400 people. Mostly kids and some of their parents. Im very curious to see how it will turn out and where exactly we will go to find the space for that amount of people… I wonder how many cakes will be made. It is a great leadership opportunity for the kids.

Sunday there will be an activity at the Tienda, to paint it. On Monday some of the kids will go to a seminar about public speaking. It was joked it would be death by PowerPoint, because that is seemingly all it will be. Mostly powerpoint for a total of 10 hours.

Walter wants the kids to be better at marketing, and to integrate the store in the marketing aspect. There will be many things happening.

Irusha asked where Walter wants YCEM to be in 5 months time. Walter wants there to be 4-5 new clubs, each with 30 kids. Another one in a marginalized neighbourhood of Roldanillo. One in Cali by Carlitos (also called Carlos) and Esperanza. One in a nearby village and a few others I don’t remember.  Perhaps in Bogota. In 5 months Walter also wants there to be 30 more kids in this club here. We have about 70 right now. Last month none of the kids left the club, which is an exception to the rule, additionally we got 20 new kids from what I heard and indeed I see lots of kids who I don’t remember. Yesterday evening here were also some kids here with 2 moms, Laura explained some things to them and then Walter talked to them. I think their kids will be joining too. We want this club and all other clubs to be led by the kids, for the kids. Walters vision is that each club is autonomous, led by the kids without requiring interaction from Walter.

Walter wants to satisfy the needs of the children everywhere according to the Mazlov pyramid. Physical needs (food, shelter, sleep), security (earning your own keep), social (friendships), self-esteem and self-realization. In that order, through leadership as taught by the 7 habits! Here in this marginalized community physical needs need to be satisfied, before we can focus on teaching them how to provide for their own security and living. Social needs are also met and afterwards self-esteem is boosted too. Physical needs are not completely met though, we don´t serve them breakfast, lunch and dinner. Only lunch, so there is incentive to grow and provide for yourself.

In Cali for example most kids will have their physical needs met. We still would have refreshments around, but not a whole communal dining program. There we would focus more on meeting social and self esteem needs.

I wish to end the post in a better way, but do not want to spend the time that I much need to do other things that are also important.

Blessings, Sander

More things happening.

Hey all,

Well… got to go…

Anyway… we went to go to Roldanillo. (Eider, Juan Josey & Me) Now Ive been left at an internet cafe and they will return later, hopefully exactly at the time when I run out of things to do on the internet. Internet here is cheap.

A situation occurred with one of the kids here. Hugo asked me to delete all modern music (disco music, rap, reagaton, heavy metal; the antithesis of harmony, classical and divine music) from the computers at YCEM. In the process I also deleted some videos and images of violence and violent cartoon characters.
I also made a few text documents with the new rule, that none of these songs, images or videos are allowed on the YCEM computers.

However… the kid I mentioned did not give up and the next day tried playing his music on his cellphone. It is allowed to do so, but only with ear plugs. Everyone could hear the music he was playing.  I tried to tell him that his music was prohibited. “Musica prohibida” “Parar tu Musica”… it didn´t give. He said "non entiende" at one point, but he did understand. He did actually stop his music for a bit, but walked away and continued it again as if nothing I said was understandable. A few half hours later I told Hugo what happened and he took it very seriously, a lot more then me. And he talked with him and it did become absolutely clear to me he did understand what I said. He lost like 15 points, or a whole days worth of good work. The points are an indication of how well you are doing and they help the leadership determine who gets raised in rank and who does not.

Hugo said this kid Josey and Pipe also would be running the club if they had not lost points through this. I´m not actually sure he was absolutely serious about that and now that I´m at an internet cafe, I can´t ask. I am at an internet cafe because I am downloading a file 189 MB´s big... and the computer at the foundation downloads at about 10KiloBytes a second when it decides to be stable. And the connection is not stable and last night there were half a second power outages that reset the computers and thus the download.

How loud and obnoxious the city seems. There is this moment a truck outside blasting commercials about blakberry with some terrible music, all very loudly. I´m glad it passes on, wait.. here it is again. Personally I´ve felt a bit frustrated because I was hoping to get some things happening that still have not. Like for example I want the rules for the kids to be hung on the walls and i mentioned it what seemed like a week ago. Altough, Hugo is always very busy... so I remain patient. Today he said a definitive date, Miercoles (Wednesday). If it isn´t up on the wall I´ll ask if I can try and get it up myself. Today one of the kids was playing prohibited music, and I had no rule to point to so that´s why this is bothering me. One little thing that also bothered me was that this music was played in front of one of the volunteers and that volunteer didn´t say anything... okay.. neither did. Not yet anyway.

About 15 of the older kids are involved in "Tienda YCEM" or "FLYCM". It is the little shop I will upload pictures of the instant it is opened. They seem to be discussing about it vigorously every day, but I haven´t been able to keep track of what it is all about.

I´m almost done downloading what i came for and Eider & Juan Josey are back.

¡Will type more later!

Bendiciones de Colombia, Sander

New Tidings

Hello everyone,

At risk of stating the obvious, many things have happened and will continue to happen.

Yesterday I taught some English with Eider using the 7 habits for one half of the class and simple conversational verses for the other half. Eider also taught with my help about sentence structure, and verbs, and descriptive words and all those technical things which I do not remember. This English class that I and Eider gave for Yilbert, Yenny and Giraldo (a policeman, who requested this class).

I will write more when more comes of it.

Last Monday we had Day of the Leader, which comes with an Ascension Ceremony. The ascension ceremonies performed on the Day of the Leader include a lot of marching and following commands, as a sort of show and sign of respect and deep meaning to the ranks that some of the kids are ascending to. It reminds me much of the military, where aspiring soldiers ascend up the ranks because of virtue and hard work.

I will write more about that later.

Some days ago we had a discussion about things. One thing was that the kids often come here to play and be entertained in some way. So for example the girls especially like to build the pyramids with the stacking cups and collapse them over and over and over... and usually they do it with a lot of screaming and without any apparant purpose. Other times the kids play monopoly or chess and usually just for entertainment without any end in mind, without any purpose. In a small move to more productive learning there is now a rule that no games are allowed before 2pm. I was also asked to remove all modern synthetic music from the computors to enforce the new rule that no bad music is allowed on the computers of Yo Creo En Mi (and also no images depicting violence). (bad music is the kind of stuff you can find on MTV and TMF and in Discos and often on the Radio). I put some of my favourite music in its place. The kids generally don´t like it... but still... the hymn of the "US military medley" seems to be appreciated by atleast a few of the kids. They voluntarily listened to it for atleast 5 minutes. But I have the feeling I or we may get some retaliation in some shape or form, for removing the kids music.

Regardless of this resistance, I feel the air has cleared a lot now that such terrible music is no longer on the premises. What a relief!

It also came up that we want to get the official permission from the parents, so the kids have been told they must convince their parents to sign a paper that gives us permission to have the kids here. This is to counteract  any idea that we are forcing the kids to come here against the parents will. We were a bit afraid that requiring this written permission from the parents would be hard, as some will simply not be motivated enough to come here for their kids. So instead we the volunteers go to many of the parents who dont come to us. In this process we also gather some contact details, so we can contact the parents if something happens to a kid while said kid is at the foundation.

This issue came up after it was mentioned that some of the kids try to get out of attending school by lying to the teachers that YCEM is forcing them to come. 

I´ll relate from a lot of notes I took about plans that Walter related. Great plans which are surprisingly and refreshingly realistic and hopeful.

Ill start with the fact that YCEM started just on Sundays inside a school. There was no rent to pay, there was no communal dining. There was very little. It started very cheap. Over time YCEM emigrated to a much more expensive model which seemingly isnt getting proportionally better results. Walter wants to expand the Club, and Carlos & Esperanza will try in Cali. They go to schools and show videos about the 7 habits and try to see if they can convince the teachers to teach the kids the 7 habits.
Another important point of new clubs is fun.

Also, some of the kids have learned enough to be able to do some of the things that Walter is presently doing. It is Walters dream that the kids run and manage the clubs for the most part.

Many mistakes have been made that have been grown out of. YCEM used to give caps out for free, and because of that the kids would be careless with them and lose them. Now they will have to earn the caps and so because they earn the caps they take care of them. The main YCEM club will be the example for all clubs across Colombia and the world. The 7 habits and the teachings of YCEM are univeral and must remain that way. Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Confucionists and Atheists alike can accept the 7 habits and apply them and transform their lives with them.

YCEM gets no more money then we need in order to grow. And now it appears to normal people we have no money left over and that is true. We don't need more money to grow. We have the kids and they have unlocked much of their power, we can use them to expand. The kids who are on fire for the cause of I Believe In Me are that which makes the whole club so valuable! New clubs will start humbly, by showing videos to teachers. It will be especially excellent if the kids do this and make presentations with their own voice too, because it shows the theory in the practice in the lives of 13 year old kids who are teaching leadership. 

Even if the kids come and go, so long as their hearts are touched they will remember and may years later as adults think back... and seek... and want to start a club too.

Will write more later