One full month at the Foundation

We mentioned in our last post that the temperatures in Temuco were topping 100 degrees, and the heat was pretty hard to escape. We woke up on Monday morning to a city full of smoke.

After texting with Susana, we found out that over 15 forest fires have devastated the countryside (and even some nearby to Temuco). She tried to reach a lot of the artisans in the areas that were affected, but so many don’t have cell service. We spent the day working from our apartment and staying in contact with Susana. Yasmin, who is in charge of PR, was quick to create a campaign to collect flour, water, cleaning supplies, and canned food for the families. I created a flyer to post on social channels to help spread the word. We found out there have been 4 artisans that have lost some part of their crops to the fires. Luckily, no one lost their homes or animals.

Tuesday was spent at the Foundation, but it was pretty quiet. Susana didn’t come in, so we were heads down with some work and working with the Brazilians. Nick worked with Victor on transferring data from the microcredit loan booklet. I still am cranking out as many videos as I can to get them up on social sites and use them for the website, but they do take a good amount of work. Sometimes I feel like I want to make progress on so many different projects, but they all require a lot of time, so right now, the progress to me seems minimal. I spent a good amount of the afternoon trying to research crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe or using Facebook. Easy, right? Not in Chile. Virtually none of the crowdfunding platforms are supported in Chile, which lead to the greater realization that gathering donations digitally for the Foundation is a problem (or should we say, just doesn’t exist). That is something that is being added to our to-do list after some conversations today. It has to be easier to support the artisans.

Wednesday the whole crew was back in action. We found out more information about the campaign, and the flyer was shared over 130x on Facebook. (!!) I found out there were more issues with the Google for Non-Profits migration (sigh) but we have made progress on the logo! So that’s good news. Below are some favorites:

The wifi at the Foundation has proved to be an issue more than once, but I do enjoy going to the Foundation. It’s always a bit cooler, there are chickens all around, and this nice lady Isabel, and puppies, so we usually just do what we can and catch up on outstanding to-dos when we get home. But today, the wifi was especially terrible. We had put it outside to try to get a better signal, but by the afternoon, we hit a breaking point. Yasmin went out to check on it and found that the puppies had chewed the connection and the internet was completely out.

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We connected to Susana’s phone for the rest of the afternoon and it seemed to be a lot faster! So all is well that ends well.

Thursday was a big day for us: American lunch day. There is a tradition for all the volunteers to prepare food from their country for everyone. A few weeks ago, we instantly knew what we were going to do: Consuelo Corona Kelly’s famous chicken enchiladas. (For those of you who don’t know, my mother is Mexican so I grew up eating a lot of Tex Mex food). The only problem is, Mexican ingredients are very hard to come by. Even just salsa in a jar. And corn tortillas are still nowhere to be found. So we had to shift our menu.

Side note: something that made me proud was how happy Nick was when he found taco seasoning and Mexican-style hot sauce. He’s hooked on the Corona/Kelly Mexican food!

Something that is readily available here is allllll the typical American things like hot dogs, hamburger buns, chips, ketchup, mustard, etc. So we did our best to do a true-to-America meal, that included:

• Juicy Lucy burgers
• Nick’s famous “Cowboy Salsa” and tortilla chips
• Pasta salad
• Deviled eggs
• Lay’s Potato chips (cortar Americano!)
• Oh! and a store-bought apple tart and ice cream

Pretty sure everyone thinks we eat an obscene amount of food, haha. But I think the burgers were a hit!

We finished the day with some meetings with Susana, Yasmin, and Viviana in trying to wrap our heads around the goals of the campaign for the artisans affected by the fires and go through the microcredit log. At this point, we know that the organization needs financial assistance, but we’re still trying to understand how to get money, and also what exactly the money will go towards. Now factor in the wildfires that have impacted some artisans and there are additional needs. Once we have things more figured out, we’ll definitely to be reaching out to our readers for some donations! 🙂

We’re heading to Budi Lake this weekend to get some camping in, so looking forward to being outside and unplugging a bit after a busy week!