Luces, Cámara, Acción!

I shall now reveal a heretofore secret project I've been concocting with a couple other PCVs: we aim to make a short documentary about children who come from various backgrounds and live in different parts of Guayaquil.  We teamed up with two starry-eyed film students who were willing to work for next to nothing and to take on the project as their own, since we know zilch about making a movie.

Above are PCV Hannah with our two student filmmakers.  For our first day of filming, we went to my barrio, Guasmo Sur.  Since the idea is to capture the kids in their natural environments as they go about their everyday lives, we wanted to film some of the kids I work with as we completed a typical activity in one of our classes at the Casita de Chocolate.  

This was an interesting event, because (a) all of the kids who showed up that day were girls; (b) some of the kids were new, so not everyone knew each other; (c) because we'd had to have a legal representative sign a consent form for every child we filmed, lots of curious parents and grandparents showed up to watch the goings-on in class.  

The result was a really fun couple of hours of arts & crafts that felt like Girl Scouts (SHOUTout to Troop 3571) and united three generations of women and girls.  Who knew recycled bottles, construction paper, and pipe cleaners could have achieved that. 

So that was my favorite part: watching the grandmothers and mothers interact with their daughters as they all learned together how to make flower vases out of these materials.

Above is PCV Jessica, the third collaborator on our documentary project.

It was a successful first day of filming.  We will be shooting at other locations around the city during the coming weekends, and hopefully all of our shoots will go as smoothly as this one did.  The end goal is to have a final cut by the end of June, so we can screen the finished documentary for the kids we work with and give them a taste of what life is like outside their own neighborhoods.  If enough funding comes in, we may even travel outside Guayaquil to feature kids who come from different parts of the country.  For now, however, we'll start by exploring the many facets of the "Pearl of the Pacific," my Guayaquil.