Hello, internet friends. It’s been a while! We’ve been so busy this year, and we’re SORRY we’ve hardly updated the blog. So here’s what we’ve been up to.

Remember the program Crecer con Valores? It’s a dynamic and innovative character building program for kids. Last year we implemented it with four grades (120 children) in Ararca, our little island village. 

Okay, so after having gone through the work of developing the program, and after seeing the very encouraging results, we thought: We want this program to reach a lot more children. Not just in Ararca, but in a lot of other villages like it. Character and education are vital building blocks for effective lives. And in many of the desperately underdeveloped coastal communities near Cartagena, the kids aren’t going to get that foundation at home.

The Arriba las Manos team sat adown and asked this question:

What do we have to do so that Crecer con Valores can reach ten or a hundred times as many children?

We examined the program. We thought, if we can modify the program so that instead of volunteers teaching the workshops, the teachers from the local schools are the ones receiving training and the tools to be able to implement it, the program can be scalable.

So we got to work. We rewrote the teacher manual in a language the local teachers would understand. We strengthened it with supplementary material. We structured CCV so that it could fly on its own, with minimal coordination on our part. We packaged it so that it would be readymade for introduction into schools across the coast.

After the preparation, it was time to get to work, a la out-of-the-office-and-into-the-mud. (Read about mud here.) In March, we began the Crecer con Valores 2.0 pilot in Ararca. This time, the program is reaching 300 children, more than twice as many as last year. Awesome!

The first step was to lay the foundation with the 12 teachers from the Centro Educativo de Ararca, which we did through some really fun and constructive workshops. They were a total success.  (Thanks, Friends for Colombia!)

Now we’re seeing the truly delightful part. CCV is taking off on its own. The teachers are getting the hang of how the workshops go. They’re learning how to draw out the children so they insert their own imagination into the workshops and really take the lessons home with them. And the best part of all? The teachers are thrilled. They love the new tools, they love the support that comes through CCV, and best of all, they love the way the children are responding.

Of course, not everything has been a breeze. And we weren’t expecting it to be. After all everything in Ararca is an adventure. We’ve had logistical hurdles to jump, like power outages and instances of threatened violence in class. We’ve had to work hard to refine communication with the school’s director in order to ensure the success of the program. Also, the methodology of CCV is very, very different from what the teachers are used to. CCV is all about active participation and getting the kids engaged, and a lot of the teachers are used to an old-school, one-way sort of approach. But they’re adapting.

These difficulties have meant that we’re spending more time working closely with the teachers than we’d anticipated, doing intensive one-on-one coaching. The third grade teacher Dorianis told us last week:

“The way of teaching the Crecer con Valores workshops is really different, but I’m liking the challenge because I can apply this method to my other classes.”

Just fab. That’s one wonderful side effect of CCV 2.0, that the training the teachers receive for the workshops has spilled over into the rest of their teaching. The CCV program in Ararca has given the longsuffering and often strained teachers a boost, and now the whole school is a little bit stronger. We couldn’t be more happy.

We’re learning from this experience in Ararca. Hopefully, next year the program will be even more refined, and who knows, maybe instead of 300, it can reach 3000 kids. Yes!

If you’d like to get involved and support this program, please get in touch or follow our updates on Facebook.

Camila, first place, with her well-earned prize.

All of us at Arriba las Manos are happy to be in a new year and eager about what this year is bound to bring. But before venturing too far into the future, we wanted to catch you up on some activities we did late last year.

Well, December 23 we had a party in Ararca. If you’ve connected the dots, you might have guessed that it was pure ADVENTURE. You'd be right.

At 7:30 the entire Arriba team had gathered on the beach in front of the Bocagrande Hospital to catch the boat to Ararca. We were armed for uncertainty and large crowds of very excited children. Whippee!

Mode of transportation for the day was a motorboat. And the motorboat was kind to us—until we got to the mangroves that surround Ararca. Despite what the boatmen had assured us, the boat was not narrow enough to navigate the winding canals that lead to the little island village.

Shucks. We were effectively stuck, nestled tight between mangrove rods.

Ararca was only a couple earshots away, but there was no way we could wade through the mangrove swamp with all the boxes of supplies and equipment. Also, it's not the kind of swamp you wade through if you can help it.

We were buzzing away on our out-of-range cellphones trying to find a way to get to Ararca. There were no more boats available. We could get dropped off at the (relatively) nearby ferry dock, but there was no land trasportation from there to the village.

300 kids were waiting for us in Ararca.

But this man rescued them from dissapointment.

Janer is 19 years old. He was born and raised in Ararca. And he's one fine young man. When he couldn't find the owner of the village's resident passenger canoe, he took matters into his own hands and borrowed it anyway in order to take us from our mangrove-trapped motorboat to the village.

He found his way to the motorboat amidst the maze of mangroves by following the shouts of joy our team was shrieking at his approach.

Yay. In two canoe trips (read: two delicate balancing acts), Janer brought us and our small mountain of supplies to Ararca. We set up shop in a large patio outside an Ararcan home. Community leaders already had the sound system ready. By the time we'd fetched benches from around the village, some 200 children had assembled. They were bouncing and buzzing with excitement, eyes bulging out of their sockets.

They were waiting for the song and dance contest to start. Their own personal X-Factor. The activity was thought up as part of the Clean Hands campaign, to promote important personal hygiene principles in an exciting and relatable way. (Read about it here.)

The children had put their hearts into preparing for their performances. The young ladies came decked out is special dos. The dance groups worked out matching outfits. And it was all worth it, because the entire crowed cheered madly and danced along with the performers. Dancing is what Ararcans do best.

If you've spent some time in Ararca or some other similar costeño community, you can appreciate how out of the ordinary it is for them to put thought and effort into some activity in the future. Foresight is something that’s practically foreign to them. This is one of our most important missions: to encourage the children we work with and their families to prepare for their futures so they can break the cycle of poverty. We incorporate the concepts of cause-effect and delayed gratification into our programming, so the children go getting the hang of it naturally.

Look how beautiful they are:

All 45 of the kids that participated received special gifts, with the grand prizes (bicycles! field trips!) going to winners in each category.

Thanks to the generosity of the Cartagena community, all 300+ children in Ararca got little Christmas presents to add some cheer to the holidays. Plietty and Ana Mercedes, you're the best!

And to everybody out there reading this, thank you for joining us, even cyber-ly. We’re counting on you to have your best year ever!

xo

Arriba las Manos

PS: Videos of the winning perfomances

We thought we’d fill you in a bit on the new Arriba las Manos program La salud comienza por mis manos—which translates to “Health begins with clean hands.” It’s campaign specifically designed for these edge-of-Colombia communities, for whom running water is a recent commodity. Clean Hands teaches basic hygiene principles and makes them *fun* through a succession of of activities that children and mothers participate in together. Using song, dance, and theatre, Clean Hands injects hygiene into the community’s consciousness.

Here are some pictures of the first campaign activities we conducted back in October. We held hygiene workshops with 120 children and 30 mothers in Ararca. For many of the mothers, it was the first time they heard about the importance of disinfection. Imagine! The kids were walked one by one through the steps of optimum hand-washing. 120 kids—that's a lot of hand washing!

Clean Hands was developed in conjuction with some pretty amazing students from the Universidad de Cartagena. Here’s a holler for Gustavo and Ruddy and the rest of the team. They’ve endured mud up to their knees, perilous modes of transportation, long hours in the studio, and invested the campaign with their formidable creative muscle. Those are the kind of rockstars that make Arriba las Manos possible! Don’t stop!

What’s that? You’re famous?!?

Tiny little Arriba las Manos got featured on the It Starts With Us blog. We’re giddy! It’s the first time we get interviewed for web (we’d done an interview with Radio Todelar here in Cartagena a few months back.) So go on and check it out. Leave us some love comments.

Big holiday kiss,

Arriba las Manos

Every trip into Ararca is an adventure.

Last month Colombia was celebrating Love and Friendship day. Two of our Crecer con Valores instructors (including yours truly) were in Panama working on visas. No worries—Some of our faithfulest volunteers filled in for us. In our absence, volunteers got their feet dirty pushing the car out of the notorious Ararca mud on their way to a special holiday video-workshop we'd prepared for the children. Besides that, they had to wrestle cooperation from the school's equipment and spent an hour getting the power to (finally!) work—all hour while simultaneously trying to calm and organize an uber-excited group of 80 children. But in the end it all worked out. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. Though they did get home pushing midnight.

That's right—Our volunteers are awesome!

Here’s an amazing picture of the ferry crossing to Ararca by night:

Mutsumi Kamiya took these great pics. Mutsumi has been our number one most regular volunteer. She’s in Ararca with us every weekend rain or shine. She's a total celebrity there. The kids start running up to the road screaming, "Mutsumi! Mutsumi!" the minute they see our pick-up pulling in. Her portrait shots of the children are some of our favorite. She’s put together a really interesting Facebook album that you can check out here.

What's new?

Next week is going to be a power week in Ararca. We'll be launching a peer-to-peer hygiene campaign. So we'll have workshops first with the mothers, and then with the kids. Not to mention—HALLOWEEN! Which in Colombia is Children's Day. Are you in Cartagena? Because if so—WE NEED YOU. Check out the Spanish blog for the details of how you can sign up to help with the Halloween party. Don't miss it!

Just like we promised in yesterday’s post, HERE ARE THE PICTURES!

Skye Clark is a filmmaker from New Zealand, that land of netball and hāngi dinners. She came with us on Wednesday to get some footage of the kids in Ararca. We ran into all the difficulties that are par for the course of working in a forgotten Colombian village, but it was the last possible opportunity to get some footage, so we went ahead anyway despite the hazards of a fierce Cartagenean thunderstorm.

Start here: How to film in Ararca—Part 1

In Ararca, funny things happen when it rains. The whole village can still seem to be somewhat asleep, even at 11 o’clock in the morning. The more lighthearted children say they love the rain. Because they get to shower. You see them frolicking about on the rims of the streets, right under the edge of the roofs where the water pours down. But most everyone else stays within the shelter of their home. They tip toe through the puddles and crevasses when it's time to buy the food for lunch. Or they take advantage of short periods of reprieve to gather in huts where they play dominoes.

The teachers start to arrive at the school just before midday. The crossing by ferry can be complicated when the canal is swollen from rainfall. And once you get to Baru Island, the 15 km of potholed road between the ferry crossing and the village are perilous to traverse by mototaxi, the transportation of choice for Ararca’s educators. Everything in Ararca is an adventure. Everything.

Feast your eyes:

Note the sneakers being swallowed by the mud in picture 14. (Click the image to view larger.)

Be sure to HOLD YOUR BREATH to see our very own kids from Ararca captured by Skye Clark’s expert lens. And check out Skye’s film project, The Beach Children, when you get the chance.

Signing off,

Arriba las Manos

If you’ve been hanging around our Facebook page in the last week, you were probably just as excited as we were about Skye Clark’s offer to make a film about Ararca and the work Arriba las Manos has done with the children there. Well, Wednesday was the Big Day for shooting. Skye is catching a plane back to New Zealand today, Thursday, but she decided to dedicate her last day in Colombia to this little project. That’s right—she’s a darling!

We woke at 5:00 am on Wednesday to another thundering rainstorm, just like the ones we’ve had all week here in Cartagena. For a place famous for it’s mud, it wasn’t exactly ideal weather. But it was the only day we had, so we decided to head for Ararca anyway.

Skye is no ordinary woman. She’s probably descended from Jupiter and Juno. Not just anybody would spend their last day in Colombia risking her hi-def camera and braving the rain to catch the inhabitants of a forgotten little village on camera. But Skye did. And when she sunk six inches into the muck and the mud, she didn’t complain.

Skye is the creator and director of a beautiful film project called The Beach Children.  She’s spent the last months teaching a group of kids from La Boquilla—a beach on the northern end of Cartagena—how to use cameras. Skye has captured the children as they’ve learnt to capture their own stories. When she gets back to Auckland she’ll edit the footage. So we promise to let you know when the film comes out. You can thank us later.

DON'T YOU MISS IT—Come back tomorrow to see the rest of the pictures from the epic shoot!

Sandri (on the left) with two of her friends.

We had to share this story with you, because it made us smile for a good hour. On one of our walks through Ararca with the children, we came across some men who were sitting next to a peripheral road.

Have we told you about the mud in Ararca? When it rains, entire streets become giant potholes. That’s one reason why so many people are barefoot much of the time in Ararca—shoes would be impossible to keep clean.

The men were soaking up some sun. There were shovels lying around. One of them started talking to us:

 “Come here and take pictures of the roads. Show people about how lousy they are. Yeah, tell the world how people live here in Ararca. No one fixes our roads. Tell someone to fix our roads.”

We didn’t pay much attention to them, as we don’t like to encourage complaining, begging, or a feeling of victimhood.

But then we heard a little voice say:

“Well, if you’re just sitting there doing nothing, you’ll just have to live with it.”

The voice had come from Sandri, a blithe first grader. We couldn’t help but smirk to ourselves. Here a little 6-year-old had had the perspective to tell these grown men a thing or two about the way the world works.

Moping isn’t an effective way of working things out. And even if it were, we definitely wouldn’t be spending our time in underdeveloped communities promoting it. One of the most rewarding aspects of our work is showing people that they can obtain things by means of their own hard work and ingenuity. They don’t have to wait for someone to come around and hand it to them.

Next week we’ll tell you about a new initiative of the local sports association.

The kids in Ararca, that village on the edge of Colombia, are a bucket of fun. They’re spunky and loud, charming and unruly and altogether terribly lovable. We’ve been getting to know them through Crecer con Valores, a program that teaches skills for overcoming challenges and effecting change.

It’s sometimes surprising to realize exactly where these kids are coming from. The other day Daniela had a new girl in her Crecer con Valores workshop. She was cutting in line and demanding color pencils... being rather pushy. All good—this is a teachable moment. Daniela stopped her and told her, “Pide por favor”—a.k.a. say please. The little girl looked up at her with eyes that said huh? and asked, “Why are you always talking in English?”

Okay, so it’s comical that please and thank you could sound like a foreign language to someone. But it looks like lots of our kids are having fun with the new manners they’ve picked up through Crecer con Valores. Abigael Torres, one of the village teachers that makes the trip every day into Ararca, told me that last week a mother came to him to congratulate him on her daughter’s new bizarre behavior. She said she was fixing dinner when her daughter came into the kitchen and said, “Would you please serve me a cup of water?”

The mother’s jaw dropped to the ground.

She’d never heard her daughter speak like that. Abigael Torres is delighted.

Omaira with her perseverence fish: "Don't give up!"

The kids had to cut out some paper fishies for a magnetic fishing activity last Saturday. Yes, that's right--magnetic fishing. Jorge reports that at the beginning, they were grabbing the scissors, rarefied instruments in Ararca, straight out of each other's hands. He stopped to explain to them the proper way to pass the scissors, pointing the handle at the other fellow and waiting for him to take it. By the end of the workshop, the kids had made a sport of passing the scissors around politely. They were all smiles at each other.

This illustrates one of the best qualities of these kids: They learn very, very quickly.

Stay posted for some more Crecer con Valores stories later this week.

Jorge showing Eulises, Brenda, et al how to strum a D after a CCV workshop.

O-KAY! Ararca has a new soccer court. The only ones more excited than us are, obviously, the kids in Ararca. See for yourself:

Yup, that's excitement right there. Here's a shout-out to Gabriel Rodriguez for making this possible. You were awesome!

The whole operation was community-centric, of course. Officials from the fledging local sports association helped coordinate and got their hands dirty digging the holes for the poles. The children wanted to be a part of everything, from start to finish. They helped carry the goalposts from the school across to the other side of the village. (Alright, fine: Some carried the goalposts, other hung from them.) They insisted upon escorting the cement to the field, a.k.a riding in the car with it. Naturally, they did LOTS of playing around as well. We've got a veritable pile of adorable pictures of them monkeying around BUT--we're saving them for another post.

The new court is in a public space, which means the kids get to use it whenever they want. The sports assosiation is thrilled about the activities they'll be able to do in the court. It'll be a boost to the budding soccer club.

Why is having sports facilities important? In Ararca, where children and teenagers are so often bored and idle, opportunities for getting into trouble are growing at the same rate as the booming tourist complex. Besides contributing to the children's healthy development, practicing sports keeps youngsters away from other activities that can prove to be harmful.

Feast your eyes:

Well, for those of you who haven't heard yet, last Saturday we offcially launched Crecer con Valores, a super-rich character development program for children in our little island village of Ararca. Boy was it fun!

Really, we owe a HUGE THANKS to Friends for Colombia, our partners from A to Z. The event would have never happened without your support! Friends for Colombia also brought along a bunch of  volunteers, who were absolutely the ones that made the day awesome. We'll miss you! Thanks for coming! Also, we'd like to thank Jeanne and Scott Hoversten for their generous contribution that covered transportation costs and lunch for 200 people. We don't even know you and we already like you!

Here are the pictures. It'll be like you were REALLY THERE! (For pictures of the boat ride, click here.)

Arrival in Ararca:

Crecer con Valores workshops (150 kids!):

Thanks to IDER Cartagena, the kids enjoyed a full hour of fun and frolic after the workshops. Marisela and Brayan, you were great.

Lunch:

Below: Best farewell ever. The kids came running to the canal shouting things like, "Thank you! We learnt a lot! Go with God! And Mary and Joseph! Come back soon!" The sweetest.

All of us:

Wondering what exactly Crecer con Valores is about? Click here!