Newsletter: ¡Nourished by Food and Ceremony!
- Joshua Holmes
- Sep 10
- 2 min read
The following is an El Terreno newsletter published on 10th September 2025
As we head into the dry autumn season, I'm excited to share a little about the great work achieved by our interns in the past few months - particularly in addressing the high rates of malnutrition found here in rural communities.
I hope you'll join us in helping to scale this impact!
Joshua Holmes
Founder, El Terreno
Improving Family Nutrition
In rural communities surrounding El Terreno, infants in the nurseries have malnutrition rates as high as 80%. This is due to a number of factors - contaminated drinking water, unhygienic living conditions and a restricted diet.
In one of Summer 2025's more diverse internships, Yasmin 🇺🇸 Daniel 🇩🇪 Sophia 🇬🇧 🇷🇺 Yuval 🇮🇱 Emma 🇫🇷 Florian 🇩🇪 and Toby 🇬🇧 worked together to research the underlying causes of malnutrition and develop several pilot projects to address them, including a week-long intensive with American nursing students, water filters for nurseries and nutrition workshops alongside the Ministry of Health.
Watch their Final Presentation of their Inspiring Project:
Help Widen the Impact to 25 Families
This Friday, Toby 🇬🇧 will begin driving this initiative forward with the first of 7 interactive workshops for up to 25 mothers in San Juan de Llullundongo, allowing them to earn a qualification in nutrition. This not only improves their children’s health but also opens up better employment opportunities for them in the future. As Toby is a chef, he will also be leading some international cooking classes!
We're already halfway towards the $660 stretch target - including the food, stationery, expert facilitators, translators, graduation gifts and quality kitchenware for the mothers to take home.
We need your support to reduce infant malnutrition!
Indigenous Solstice & Equinox Celebrations
The autumn equinox is almost upon us, and as with most global indigenous cultures who live in closer connection to nature than industrialised societies, the local Andean culture has their rituals too.
Over the past 6 months, we've helped facilitate these celebrations of Pachamama, as a way of preserving the ancestral culture for the local population, while introducing the indigenous worldview to our international participants.
This work was part of Wies' 🇳🇱 internship, in an effort to reduce the drop out of students in an indigenous school by connecting them with their cultural heritage.
If you haven't already, watch her full internship presentation here:
Wrapped in Culture
Volunteers and interns at El Terreno joined together with our Kichwa teacher to make chigüiles, a typical dish from Guaranda.
They consist of a dough made of corn flour, fat, eggs, and cheese, wrapped in corn leaves and steamed. It's a dish steeped in history and tradition, especially popular during the Guaranda Carnival.
If you'd like to experience true Ecuadorian culture like this, why not come out to the heart of the Ecuadorian Andes and volunteer at our Cultural Exchange Centre?
Comments