Homemade Gifts and The Green Triangle

As I write this I am just a few days past the valentine making-phase I go through each year with our kids.  This year, since our oldest is in middle school, only Annie and Daniel made valentines for their classmates.

I do kind of dread the end of January when the valentine project begins.  I get this immediate mental exhaustion response even before cutting the first heart.  As the kids get older they do much more of it solo, but I find I still need to build in some structure to allow it to happen.  My reminders, support around what to write on each valentine, creative suggestions (when requested), and help with clean-up are still required.  Each year I invariably think, is it worth it?

I guess it must be worth it because we continue to embark on this endeavor year after year.  However, this time I looked at the homemade valentines from yet another angle, the Green Triangle.

In 1990 Ernest Callenbach wrote an article describing his idea of the Green Triangle.  It boils down to this:  when you make a positive change in one area of your life, it also affects other areas positively.

The three points of the Green Triangle stand for MONEY, ENVIRONMENT, and HEALTH.  The classic example Callenbach uses is someone commuting to work by bicycle.  Perhaps she made this change in order to save money on gasoline and car wear and tear.  In this case the behavior was initially begun in order to save money.  However, riding one’s bike to work also helps the environment by reducing pollution and carbon emissions.  And thirdly, riding a bicycle to and from work daily improves a person’s health.

This year as I sat with my gluey-fingered valentine creators I pondered how our homemade valentine effort fell on the Green Triangle.  We began making our own valentines when Todd was still in graduate school and we needed to save money any way we could.  Thus we began at the MONEY point of the triangle.

When it comes to ENVIRONMENT, we are reusing items we already own for much of the valentine making (cutting up old Christmas cards, or reusing other art projects in some way).  So we are not generating more stuff that will eventually end up in a landfill.  We also don’t travel anywhere to buy the valentines.  This seems small, but I suppose if we fashioned many more of our own things, we’d create less pollution from our reduced car time.

Next we come to the point of the triangle labeled HEALTH.  You may skeptically wonder, how does making your own valentines increase your health?  When I think back to the all of the inky, glue spattered fingers which are invariably licked in the process of creating valentines, I have to agree we’ve got a few points against health there.  However, being a psychologist, I’m never far away from the topic of mental health.

In fact, I believe MENTAL HEALTH is the main reason I continue to do this project with my kids each year.  A little background:  early on a teacher required each valentine to include a compliment for the recipient.  I loved this idea and we have continued it annually.

Therefore during valentine making, my kids have to spend time thinking of an appropriate compliment for each child in their class.  This part is actually what takes a while.

We spend time thinking and talking about each child in their class as we make valentines.  Sometimes this conversation leads to a discussion of a struggle my child is having with a classmate and we take time out to problem-solve.  However, usually this exercise gives my kids an overall feeling of gratitude.  It makes sense:  they’ve just thought of positive things about the people with whom they spend their school day.  How could they not come away feeling appreciative?

As you may have guessed, my kids have to write more than “You are nice” on their valentines.  But I also don’t require them to shoot for the moon.  They tend to write compliments such as,  “I really liked the poem you read in class.  You are a good poet.”  Or, “You dribble the ball really well on our basketball team.”

Helping my kids spend time thinking about the children at their school is also valuable because it helps them better understand their social world.  These days it seems too easy for kids, especially boys, to go through childhood without thinking much about the experiences of others.  Reading social cues in the classroom is a skill that makes school smoother for kids.  I didn’t realize it when we began our valentine-making routine, but this is a rather painless way for my kids to work on this skill.  And they can practice gratitude simultaneously!

Since the valentine creation process takes place over many days at our house, I had ample time to consider the Green Triangle concept.  It was fun to think of different changes we are working on as a family and fit them into Callenbach’s idea.  It’s also such a hopeful way to view making a change.  In our busy lives, it can feel overwhelming to take on something new.  It helps me to remember that a new behavior may be affecting more than one area of my life positively.  It nicely addresses my parental need for efficiency!

In reading about the Green Triangle, I came across another writer who suggested the triangle be changed to a Green Square with the final point labeled COMMUNITY.  I like this idea because it supports psychology research findings that people who are more socially connected are healthier and less depressed than isolated folks.

After school on Valentine’s Day, Annie received a phone call from a girl in her class.  In first grade you don’t receive many phone calls, so this was exciting in and of itself.  It turned out the little girl was so happy to have received Annie’s heartfelt compliment on the uniquely designed valentine that she wanted to phone Annie to thank her.  The girls chatted for a while and Annie was beaming when she hung up.

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Update:

Our son Stephen loves geography.  He’s our kid who puts atlas, globe, and geography book on his Christmas wish list.

These days many schools offer a Geography Bee (similar to a Spelling Bee but with geography questions).  Stephen had some success in these during elementary school and set his sights on winning his middle school Geography Bee which would allow him to move on to the big one at the state level.

Stephen’s middle school’s Geography Bee took place last month.  He truly studied hard for it, practicing nearly daily for two months.  But he didn’t win.  He won’t be going on to the state Geo Bee this year.  He was pretty disappointed, understandably.

If you read about my stepfather’s Failure Payment system, you may be thinking what I was thinking.  It was the perfect situation in which to give Stephen the first “Dan’s Good Failure” payment, and we did.

( In case you are wondering, I did get Stephen’s okay before writing this.)

Starfish One By One: An Amazing Guatemalan Non-Profit

Half the Sky, by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, has been very inspirational reading for me.  It demonstrates the creativity people use to make ends meet when given a leg up, via a small business loan or scholarship.

Prior to our trip to Guatemala, I learned of an organization called Starfish One By One located in that country which would make Kristof and his wife smile.  As they mention in Half the Sky, much research indicates that putting money toward educating and supporting women is the most efficient way to raise communities out of poverty.  This is just what Starfish One By One is doing in Guatemala.

Watch this lovely video to find out the story behind the organization’s name and more details about what they do.

http://vimeo.com/9474614

After hearing about Starfish One By One, Annie, Daniel, and Stephen decided to collect school supplies for this program before we left for Guatemala.  We would be there for almost a month learning Spanish and could deliver the supplies in person!

The non-profit told us they were in need of computer flash drives, calculators, digital cameras, and large world maps, among other things.  These wouldn’t have been at the top of our list.  Glad we contacted them!

Next our kids informed their classmates about our collection plans.  Many families were wonderfully generous, and soon we’d filled an extra suitcase with school supplies.  Did you know that if you bring a suitcase of donated supplies, the airlines don’t require a luggage fee?  I just learned this recently (about 7 months too late), but maybe this information will help one of you!

That summer, after our Spanish school had ended, our family traveled by van, along many mudslide-induced detours, to the Lake Atitlan area of Guatemala to visit the Starfish One By One program.

Starfish pays poor Mayan girls to stay in school through 12^th grade.  The majority of these girls in Guatemala drop out of school after 6^th grade because they need to earn money for their families.  Starfish also gives students a local mentor to support them throughout their schooling since few young women take this educational route.  The Starfish students meet as a group each Sunday morning for a life skills lesson, and also as a means of support.

When we visited the Starfish program one Sunday morning in July, we were somewhat exhausted by many aspects of our Guatemalan experience (see previous post).  It didn’t help that our taxi driver had gotten lost and dropped us off far from our destination.

When we eventually found the correct address, we were facing a nondescript, gray, cement block building which houses the Starfish program.  Our family was welcomed in and led up a central staircase with photos of smiling Mayan girls and their artwork hanging on the walls.  

At the top of the stairs was a covered balcony room with a panoramic view of the city and surrounding mountains.  There, a group of seventeen Mayan girls was being taught by one very energetic Mayan teacher, Candelaria.  (She makes an appearance on the video above as do some of the girls we met that day.)

Candalaria knew beforehand we were coming.  We gave the girls the school supplies we’d collected and they thanked us in excited voices. The girls were dressed in beautiful woven tops and skirts, the patterns and colors of which indicated the Guatemalan region in which they lived.  They were fifteen and sixteen year-olds who had been with Starfish One By One for a few years already.

Candelaria had a small, red and yellow hacky sack ball which the girls tossed from person to person.  The catcher had to introduce herself.  Each student told us her name, the pueblo she was from, and how far she traveled to get to the city of Panajachel where the Starfish One By One meeting was held at 8am each Sunday.

At the end of her introduction each girl said, (in Spanish) “After graduating, my dream is to be a…”  Many said they wanted to be teachers, two wanted to be doctors, one wanted to be an accountant, others wanted to own a business.  The girls were so sweet and hopeful when revealing their dreams to us.

Next, we introduced ourselves.  Stephen and Daniel told the girls in Spanish what their goals were after graduation.  Annie told them too, with our help.  I shared that I was a psychologist, but I’d finished my schooling before I’d had the kids.  I told them that for me it was so much easier to have completed my education in this way.  Candelaria’s face lit up when I said this, as waiting to have children is part of what Starfish One By One aims for with their students.

The day we visited the Starfish program, Candelaria was teaching the girls how to start a small business.  She didn’t assume that they’d all choose this as a career, but she wanted them to have this skill along the way to their long-term goal.  She instructed the students about the importance of saving a little money every time they were paid.  She mentioned to Todd and me that the girls are from very poor families which are always facing one hardship or another.  Therefore, the skill of saving is never taught to them.

During this lesson Daniel and Stephen told the girls that they had a small business at home where they shovel snow, rake leaves, and take care of pets when neighbors travel.  The girls were quite surprised that American kids would work for money.  Then we talked about what percentage of money Stephen and Daniel save each time they are paid.  Candelaria highlighted this comment because she was about to teach the girls percentages as part of this class.

Later Candelaria proudly told us what some of her students had accomplished.  One girl, Marina, was the first in her pueblo to become a teacher, ever.  Marina was about to graduate.  She pointed out Marina’s town high atop a misty, forested mountain and said that to get home, Marina took the bus for an hour then walked a steep trail though the thick woods for thirty minutes.

We also heard about two girls who usually take the bus to Starfish meetings, but recently their road had been washed out.  For the past month they’d hiked up and over a mountain path to get to the Sunday meetings.

The girls then broke into small groups, drew maps of their towns, and noted the small businesses already in existence.  After this lesson we said goodbye to the girls and headed downstairs.  On the bottom floor we were briefly introduced to a group of 15 twelve and thirteen year-old girls.  These students were in their first year of the Starfish program.  They looked so young, it was hard to believe this was the age that most Mayan girls dropped out of school.

On our way out, we met a table full of boys of varied ages, one of the only boy groups in the Starfish program.  Candelaria also told the boys about Stephen and Daniel’s neighborhood services business.  These boys had been learning about the importance of saving money regularly too from their teacher, Candelaria’s husband Gregorio, another mentor in the Starfish program.

I’m trying to put my finger on why I found Starfish One By One so inspiring. I think it was because it confirmed the research I’d read in books like Half the Sky.  Focus on educating girls, and they will then pass along their increased resources to their communities.  Additionally when Starfish takes on a student, it supports her to the end of 12^th grade, through all the crises she encounters along the way.  Sitting with the girls that morning, I saw how much having Candelaria as a mentor, a woman from their own community, was a key to the success of this program.  Candelaria was clearly like a second mother to the girls.  She took them seriously, and they in turn took themselves and their schooling seriously.

I thought of our time at the Starfish program again one early morning as our family canoed on Lake Atitlan, which was peaceful and placid that day.  I shared a canoe with twelve year-old Stephen, and as we paddled we came across groups of young Mayan women doing laundry along the shore.  They stood in the water, with their long, bright-colored skirts knotted above their knees, and scrubbed items of clothing.

As we canoed along the shore for probably two miles, we must have seen ten groups of women and girls washing.  Most of them looked quite young, perhaps between twelve and eighteen.  Stephen and I talked about the fact that if his female classmates in Colorado had been born here in Guatemala, we’d be seeing them washing clothes with their older sisters and mothers on this day.

I think this real-life comparison made an impression on Stephen.  It definitely made one on me.

I’d love to hear about additional non-profits doing needed work like this.  Leave a comment!

Spanish Language Immersion in Guatemala

(Names of our Guatemalan friends have been changed.)

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, our family has traveled to Central America for Spanish language immersion two summers in a row.  Initially we went to Costa Rica which was a fitting first destination since we could drink the water there.  When traveling with kids, this little detail makes life infinitely easier.

For our second trip, when our kids were 7, 10, and 12, we studied Spanish in Antigua, Guatemala for three weeks.  In Guatemala we had a rich cultural experience, seeing and learning about Mayan traditions, and exploring ruins of old monasteries.  As in Costa Rica we lived with a family, and this time we could only drink filtered water which wasn’t always easily available. This required some careful planning, but it wasn’t all that challenged us in Guatemala.

Our Wet Arrival

We entered Guatemala along with Tropical Depression Alex.  Thus while we were learning our way around, it was pouring rain and fairly chilly.  During those first days we also realized that homestays in Guatemala do not provide towels or soap.  Sounds like a small thing, but it required us to trek across Antigua’s cobblestone streets to the massive and initially overwhelming mercado to buy these necessities.

The market had tiny stalls one after another selling every sort of thing, and was both in and outdoors.  The inside was fairly dark and dank, due to all the rain.  The crisscrossing aisles were narrow with no rhyme or reason as to stall placement: someone sold meat beside someone selling kids’ shoes. We quickly lost all directional bearings (even Todd, and this is rare).  Stephen, Daniel, and I began to feel pretty claustrophobic.  There weren’t exit signs or sunlight peaking though to suggest a way out.  When we eventually escaped, we vowed never to return to the inside portion of the mercado without a guide!

While Costa Rica was, in our view, a mostly developed country, Guatemala, wasn’t there yet.  The kids noticed this immediately and we spent much of the first afternoon attempting to pull them out of the homesickness that descended when they saw our room there.  It didn’t have much to offer.

Our Home in Guatemala

Our homestay was organized around a long, narrow passageway.  Part of this red-tiled walkway was covered and part was open to the elements.  The family we lived with included two girls, Emelia and Nadia, 5 and 11, whom our 7 year-old Annie quickly befriended.  They were very welcoming to her and their friendship with all of us was one of the highlights of our Guatemalan experience.

Upon returning from Spanish school each day, Annie would run off giggling with the girls to play some form of hide and seek or help them care for their baby cousin.  Soon Annie became much more familiar with the nooks and crannies of our foreign abode than the rest of us.

At one point along the narrow central hallway there was a small door, only a third the size of the others.  I thought it was a closet, since the door was sometimes cracked open and seemed to hold random supplies stacked every which way.  But one day Annie informed me, “No mama, a 90 year-old grandma lives in that room.”

Not being comfortable exploring the room myself, I couldn’t verify this fact.  I’d forgotten all about it until our final days at the homestay when the sun presented itself with some regularity.  At that time a sweet, diminutive great-grandma was indeed wheeled out of the room to spend time in the sunlight. Visions of the great grandmother character in One Hundred Years of Solitude came to mind.

Here’s one of my emails home describing some of the trials of our daily living in Guatemala:

It’s amazing how much energy it takes to simply live life down here.  Consider, for example, when it’s raining at night (a common occurrence) and a kid needs the bathroom.  For this we must bring a flashlight, an umbrella, and flip flops, or we will literally come back soaked since we must walk outside to the bathroom.  The flashlight has become even more crucial of late because after all this rain, a foot-long hole has opened up in the middle of the cement walk.

The other night while walking through the rain with most of the necessary items, minus an umbrella, I noticed the lemon tree had dropped perhaps eight small lemons onto the walkway.  I was kicking them to the side so no one would sprain an ankle, when my oversized, green flip flop flew off my foot into a puddle.  I had to momentarily decide, “What’s worse, leaving the flip flop and walking back with one bare foot (picture the floor of a public shower), or getting poured on in my only set of  PJs?”

I chose the latter and was pretty wet upon returning to bed.  And this doesn’t even address the issue of not using the water for brushing our teeth, not getting it in our mouths when we shower, not drinking it, not eating off of a plate that is still wet having been washed with water we shouldn’t drink…

Spanish School in Guatemala

All the Spanish schools in Guatemala have a one-to-one teacher to student ratio.  At our school, we sat around a pretty courtyard at small, wooden tables with white boards.  There was a lovely stone fountain in the center with a jungle of plants tangled around it where we regularly spotted butterflies.  But the courtyard could also be a tad noisy and distracting with perhaps 40 other tables of teacher/student pairs.  Life in Central America was simply noisier than life in most of the US.

My Spanish teacher, Maria, was an energetic, recently divorced, 60 year-old Guatemalan woman who had lived the majority of her life in Antigua.  She had three grown children and three grandkids.  She also had a liberal view of the world and strong opinions.  She soon told me she thought that kids in Guatemala didn’t read enough and didn’t have enough access to birth control, and that overpopulation was the main problem in the world.

Maria was on book three of the Twilight series and had read all of Harry Potter.  We talked about Isabel Allende’s books a lot.  She and my son Stephen enjoyed discussing the Harry Potter series (in Spanish).

It was rewarding to work daily with Maria for three weeks because we became quite close.  Over time I asked her about her personal experiences during the Guatemalan Civil War.  It was sad, frightening, intense, and fascinating to hear about that time in her life and the experiences of others she knew during the war.  And it was challenging but gratifying to be able to understand the majority of her stories, since she told them in Spanish.

Spanish Language Learning the Second Time Around

Having taken some Spanish in Boulder, then studying intensively in Costa Rica, we found it much easier to get by in Spanish in Guatemala.

Here are some of my comments at the time on learning Spanish:

It’s always interesting to observe the ups and downs my mind swings to during a Spanish lesson.  At times I’m sure I’m nearly there.  I can get around.  I can be understood.  I can understand.  Life in Spanish is good.  But then moments later I am drowning in some aspect of the language that previously I never even knew existed, and feeling completely hopeless.  It’s wild.  And I’m sure it has something to do with the challenges of being in such a foreign place.

By the way, all of us are having really strange and vivid dreams down here.  Magic realism type dreams.  Are they just a Central and South American phenomenon, these colorful nighttime stories?  If so, perhaps this is why their writing contains so many magical themes and images.  Or more likely our brains are attempting to come to terms with what we see and deal with each day.

Annie learned Spanish both at school and at our homestay running around with Emelia and Nadia. They played cards in Spanish and I’d overhear her saying, “mi turno,” “tu turno,” and “uno momento,” among other phrases.  One day Daniel asked, “Where are the scissors?” and Annie immediately repeated, “Donde estan las tijeras?”  She was also more comfortable being in a very foreign place the second time around than she had been in Costa Rica.

Daniel’s Spanish learning in Guatemala reminded us of Stephen’s in Costa Rica.  Often when we adults were speaking in Spanish he’d say, “I understood that!”  He spent many hours conjugating verbs with his teacher, when he wasn’t taking a break to pick the sour, green-skinned variety of oranges hanging from delicate branches above his school table.  Daniel’s interest in codebreaking came in handy when learning Spanish.  I kept reminding him it was like one big code to figure out.

Stephen’s Spanish really soared.  He and his teacher once read an article on the solar system and she informed me later that he’d updated her on all the facts the article omitted.  He didn’t become fluent, but he became much more at ease using the language to get around.

Even more so than in Costa Rica, our experience living in Guatemala taught our kids that not all parts of the world are like their home town.  Getting to know Nadia and Emelia allowed our three to stand in the shoes of other children who live significantly different lives.  There were no playgrounds or soccer fields in Antigua, and kids there tended to play inside rather than out.  Not only was this eye-opening for Stephen, Daniel, and Annie, but it helped them (as well as Todd and me) to appreciate many things about our home.

When the schooling part of our trip ended, we traveled to the Lake Atitlan area for a small getaway and to visit a non-profit we’d learned of in Boulder. We’d collected school supplies for them from people at home.  It turned out to be a wonderful organization which deserves its own blog post.  Read about it next week!

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Recommended Reading:

The Family Sabbatical Handbook: The Budget Guide to Living Abroad with Your Family, by Elisa Bernick.  I really enjoyed this book!  It was helpful to read about the experience of the author’s family abroad, be reminded that a sabbatical can take many forms, and benefit from many of the lessons she learned “on the road.”  This book also contains many helpful lists and websites.

How To Hook Kids Into Civic Engagement

Last fall my kids had a memorable day at our local playground.  They met our mayor.  Quite a thrilling event in their young lives, yielding much excited conversation as they ran home to tell Todd.  “She was really friendly, but she didn’t look like a mayor,” Daniel informed his Dad.  Annie was so proud she could hardly speak.  It came out later that she assumed our mayor worked daily with Barack Obama.

It wasn’t entirely random that the kids met their mayor that day because it was actually the ribbon cutting ceremony for our new park.  We’d taken a long and circuitous path to this point.

A year and a half prior, enough neighbors had sent enough email and made sufficient numbers of phone calls to our Parks Department that a critical mass was finally reached.  The Parks Department decided to renovate our broken down playground.

Ours was the only park in Boulder which still had a 1960’s era metal spinning merry-go-round.  Remember those?  It looked like a huge Lazy Susan which little kids clung to as big kids spun it faster and faster.  Our park also contained one of those tall metal slides that burned kids’ bottoms on sweltering summer days.  We’d been warned by the Parks Dept., “We’re not fixing the merry-go-round. When it breaks, it goes.”  It was already warped on one paint-chipped side.

Half of me knew the merry-go-round was dangerous.  I recalled stories from my childhood of kids flying off the edge at top speed or getting their heads stuck between the metal disk and the ground.  But my kids LOVED it!

Over all the hours we spent on that structure, we only had one bad experience: the time Stephen, who’d been lying on his 6 year-old tummy watching the ground blur by, suddenly flew off the side like a lawn dart.  Luckily he landed in some actual lawn.

Then one day the merry-go-round had vanished, leaving nothing but a small hole in the playground sand.  Most likely it broke in some minor way, and under cover of darkness, the Parks Department hauled it away.

Now at last we were getting a new playground!  Fliers were pinned and taped everywhere, inviting neighbors to come to a community meeting to discuss their desires for the new park.  Stephen and Daniel had definite ideas, and I brought them along to the meeting.

The meeting room was full of adults seated in fold-out chairs facing our Parks Department moderator.  As these neighborhood meetings are wont to be, this one was fairly intense.  People had distinct visions of what they did and didn’t want.

Daniel and Stephen asked me to voice their top choice, an eight foot basketball hoop on a half court.  After I stated their request, a number of neighbors became quite concerned about the noise this would generate and the folks who might gather playing basketball at all hours.  Stephen and Daniel’s eyes were wide as they watched and listened to the impassioned discussion.

In the end, the basketball hoop was voted down.  Daniel, age 8 at the time, had tears in his eyes and Stephen looked like he was replaying the conversation in his head.  The community group moved on to other park-related topics.

As the meeting was coming to a close, I noticed Daniel raising his thin arm as high as he could.  I had no idea what he planned to say.  When the moderator called on him the room became quiet.  Daniel said in a determined voice, “I’d like to recommend a tire swing.  I’ve noticed at other parks that kids of all ages play on them.  And plus they’re really fun.”  Every one smiled and nodded in agreement.

We couldn’t attend the next community playground meeting and, therefore, didn’t know what came of Daniel’s tire swing suggestion.  But about a year later when they were installing the actual playground equipment, Daniel came running home to tell us there was indeed a tire swing!

The day he met our mayor, Daniel walked her to the tire swing and retold this story.  For adults this would of course be a rather small victory.  For Daniel though, it made a big impression.  He proposed a good idea and grown-ups had listened.

I used this community meeting experience to talk to the kids about how our government makes decisions.  The next time I was writing a letter to our congressional representatives, I showed the kids.  After describing the issue I was supporting, I asked if they wanted to add something.  It happened to be a topic that they also felt strongly about.

As I mentioned in a previous post, this year for his “Green New Year’s Resolution” Stephen decided he wanted to write our congressional reps about a climate change topic.  Two weeks ago he came home from school regaling me with news of an Amtrak train in the Texas region that is partially fueled by beef fat.  After telling him I thought this was an urban legend swirling around his middle school, we googled it.  Sure enough it was true.

Stephen decided to write our congressman, senators, and new governor to suggest that Colorado should have one of these trains.  Only ours shouldn’t be fueled by beef, but by locally grown sugar beets.  He told them we could call it the Beet Train.

Stephen looked as proud mailing his congressional letters as Daniel had telling us about the tire swing.

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Update:

Stephen just received a personally signed letter back from our governor.  I love it when they give a special response to kids who have written them.

Book Recommendation:

Guerilla Learning: How to Give Your Kids a Real Education With or Without School, by Grace Llewellyn and Amy Silver.   (Thanks for this suggestion Sarah.)

This book offers some creative ideas.  I thought the book’s title was one of its best aspects.  Mostly it gave me support and motivation for things I’ve already been working on with my kids.  However, it lists numerous resources for guidance with this type of parenting or schooling.  And who doesn’t love a good dose of support and motivation?