Language and Social Service Exchange On Your Computer
Want to help empower street kids and exploited Afro-Ecuadorian sharecroppers?

Want to align your study of Spanish with an understanding of the world, it's problems, and the visions of the world's experts (poor people themselves) for making things better?

You can make a real impact from your dorm room with a new Language and Social Service Exchange.

Using free voice chat software you can talk live with social change-makers in Ecuador. All you'll need is a microphone, the internet, and curiosity.

You don't even need to speak two words of Spanish. You can talk in English because many of our partners are leaning English for self-advocacy and eco-tourism projects.

Click the pictures to meet your partners... (Quicktime files)
Youth leaders working to preserve their traditional music, keeping alive strong African roots. They'd love to share the heritage of Bomba music with you...
want to trade musical ideas on the internet?
Help to build bridges for eco-tourism, lay the foundation for a Fair Trade recording studio to free them from being musical sharecroppers as well. Right now they usually don't own their own recordings.
Help broadcast their music so others can feel the rhythm and will visit, on the web or in person.
These street kids beg for a living, and are viewed as criminals-in-training. But if you look closely, they're still just kids.


                       Enough said.
By exchanging language skills with your Ecuadorian partners they can develop English for Eco-tourism, self-advocacy, and other community organizing needs.

You will partner with college students on the front lines of social change, who are organizing these sharecroppers and taking the street kids under their wings.

In the process you can polish your Spanish, loosening your tongue and tuning your ear without the pressure of grades. Or you can just talk in English.

Remember, speaking the language is not the same as speaking la cultura.

CURIOUS?

We are looking for LEADERS to bring this program to Harvard during a pilot phase this semester, to develop this as a tool for Spanish-language social service projects or Spanish language classes.

EVEN IF YOU DON'T SPEAK TWO WORDS OF SPANISH, you can do your homework or thesis research with world-experts for classes related to the economics of poverty, Afro-Latin history, ethnomusicology, street performance...

This program is still being developed, so there are MANY leadership and even THESIS opportunities that will come out of this project. 

VERITAS is everyone's birthright. But it will take action to make that felt. You can help democratize access to computer and language education for some of the most marginalized people in Latin America, while learning more from them.
Maybe it's not racism, maybe it's just coincidence, but the schools of black kids are far worse than even most remote schools of non-blacks. And if you look closely, you'll see that someone even drew the devil on the back wall... as the MASCOT!
Jose Miguel is a street kid I met living in a bus terminal. It took less than $20 and only 7 hours to help him to find his mom in a nearby city. (They were separated for over a year.) Here you see him with the microbusiness that I started with a kind street vendor. We train street kids to make a living "honradamente" (i.e. no stealing!) by selling puppets and other toys. If you want to get a discussion going, LET'S TALK ABOUT THIS:
we run a child labor business, though it goes way beyond "non"-profit, we spend money on it. But we're seriously open to suggestions on better alternatives than kids having to work.
What you think?      Drop us a line.
Want to get ACTIVE... then get TALKING!
Email  Andy Conrad to get invovled:    
[email protected]
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