Welcome to the first blog posting about El Arenal. We are very excited to have this new platform to share our routine with our children and teenagers in Cuenca, Ecuador. We hope you become touched by the work of the many volunteers who are dedicated to making El Arenal a turning point in the history of our community.
In a normal day, the teenagers, aged 12 to 16, come to El Arenal at 8 am and attend their respective educational workshops for an hour and a half with Irvin, Chunchi, or Veronica. Together, they work on their homework and complete El Arenal assignments for the day. Later, they have a 30-minute break for snacks and socialization. On a nice day, you can easily spot them playing in the park across from El Arenal or perhaps painting and working with art at the organization. Moments such as the break times are important for the teenagers because it gives them a much-needed time to explore their personal interests.
After the break, they switch workshops and keep working on their activities until lunchtime at noon. It is common practice in El Arenal for the teens to wash their own dishes once they are done eating and cleaning after themselves - we believe this is an important way to teach them responsibility and encourage them to support their parents with their household chores. Once done, they are off to school!
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After the teenagers leave, the children (ages 6 to 11) get back from school and have lunch. After eating, everyone goes to the park in front of El Arenal to do physical activities and stretch to start the afternoon classes with energy. Here at El Arenal, we believe it is extremely important to keep children active every day and we are so fortunate to have a park right across the street from us, we might as well use it! Just as the teenagers, the kids attend their respective workshops, have a break in between for half an hour to play and eat a snack, and finally go back to their homes. During the sessions with the children, we receive the support of volunteers from local universities who come during the afternoon session to help the kids reinforce what they learned at school.
Despite the seemingly structured routine, every day at El Arenal is different. We are always being challenged by new questions that the children come up with, looking on how to implement an idea one of the teenagers had to improve the foundation, working to engage our local community in our activities, and much more. As we continue to develop and strengthen our operations and program offerings, we would kindly ask for any donation amount to support our growth. To donate, please click here.
Thank you for checking out our first post. We hope we were able to briefly show what a day at El Arenal is like. We are looking forward to our next post! See you then.
