Veggies, martians and beauty queens

Health Fair for my community:

I partnered up with Alimenta Ecuador, which is an organization that promotes healthy diets and distributes food to the poorer communities. The idea of the organization is good, but they tend to only visit the communities every 4 months or so to pass out food, so it is not very consistent but I guess every little bit helps. I gave my first nutrition charlas(workshops) at the health fair, and I taught about healthy fats, saturated fats, how to introduce more fruits and vegetables into their diets, etc. People here tend to use too much aceite (oil) when preparing their food. One woman told me she uses close to 2 bottles of aceite a week for her family of 5. (The recommended amount of aceite is 1 bottle per month for a family of 5) I am going to start giving cooking classes soon to try and offer some healthy alternative recipes.

My friend Delia and I teaching about the effects of saturated fat on a person´s heart.

I helped teach a gender equality conference this past weekend to a group of youth who will go back to their prospective communities, and teach what they learned. This particular lesson focused on the difference between sex and gender. One of the facilitators was pretending to be a martian from a different planet where there was no such thing as females and males. The youth had to describe the differenes and eventually realized that there are differences defined by society (which equals gender) and differences that are genetic (which equals sex).
I love working with the youth groups...can you find the gringa?! (acutally there are two gringas)
Waterfalls that we hiked to after the youth group workshops, which ended up being a 4 hour hike. If you look closely, you can see someone standing in the waterfalls. This picture makes the falls look smaller than they really were. The min-lake at the base of the falls is actually really deep, and is where I was dared to jump in to. (which of course I ended up doing, and then had to trekk back for two hours in soaking wet clothes. I was a mess when I got back but I would do it again.)

The youth I work with on our bus ride after our long hike. They wanted to have a mini dance party to have me teach them how we dance in the United States. (I seem to be the form of entertainment for them in many of these situations) Queso!

(Jose Abel, my host brother, is on the far right with the striped shirt)

My friend Jennifer and I on our way to a Beauty Queen Election...boy was that an experience. They are similar to a mini-Miss America pageant. The girls get all dressed up and wear different gowns, give speeches (which almost every girl forgot her speech, I felt for them) and dance on stage in front of everyone. The ceremony didn’t even start until midnight, and in between dress changes, everyone crowds the dance floor to bust out their best cumbia or salsa move. (They never just let the gringa sit and watch so I have been making my best attempt to dance cumbia.)