I have a lot to say about my first week of teaching, but first, some overdue photos of my temporary home:
As I mentioned before, my host family lives in a rural area about 5 miles away from Peñaherrera proper. The community is called El Paraíso ("Paradise"), which is appropriate-- small, family farms are nestled in the green mountains, which extend as far as you can see. Raising animals seems to be the dominant revenue-generating activity on the farms in this area, but some families also grow fields of beans on the steep slopes.
There is a single dirt road that twists its way through the mountains. It makes for a good hike when I want to travel between home and town when the camioneta is not available (it makes its route only once a day, and not at all on Saturdays).
My family lives in a small, comfortable house surrounded by plantain, lemon, orange, and coffee trees.
People who live in town also run family farms with chickens, cuyes, plantains, yucca, coffee, and more. There's not much other business to be had, other than a few general stores that are tiny grocery-pharmacy combinations that also sell some clothing, shoes, and stationary items. One of the stores has a copy machine (currently broken, so no help to me in my classes) and a couple pay phones that can make pricey international calls. The students at my colegio mainly use the town stores as ice-cream suppliers.
There are two town centers in Peñaherrera: a stone plaza in front of the Catholic church and this park, which is near the town government office and the clinic. The wireless internet signal is broadcast from the government office, so I often sit in the park with my laptop to plan classes and communicate with people from home.
Today, I learned how to make coffee. At one point, Ecuador was the top global exporter of coffee—Hermania and Alvino, true Ecuadorians, grow, harvest, and roast their own beans. Hermania was very amused and delighted with the idea that I wanted to document each step of the coffee-making process. Since the whole procedure is so work-intensive, she makes about enough for two months each time she roasts and grinds the beans.
The coffee fruit grow on shiny-leafed trees and are harvested by hand--the ripe fruit are red.
Alvino’s brother owns a machine that processes the fruit to separate the outer skin from the white, mucous-covered seeds. After processing, the naked beans are dried in the sun.
Hermania roasts the dried beans over a fire in a ceramic dish (a family friend, Myra, watches). She stirs the beans constantly to roast them evenly, and whenever the wind changes direction, which is often, she needs to reposition herself to avoid the smoke.
After about twenty minutes, the smoke starts to smell sweet and rich. When the beans are entirely roasted, they are set out in a large tray to cool a bit.
My 10-year-old host brother David and I take turns on the hand-crank to grind the beans. One of us turns the crank, while the other feeds the beans in very slowly. We spend about an hour with one-third of the batch (one roasting dish worth) and leave the rest for Alvino and another man who helps on the farm.
Hermania makes the coffee with a sieve and a piece of cloth. Sometimes we have it with milk, sometimes with water, but always with a very generous helping of sugar.
I recently regained regular internet access-- this is a post from last Wednesday.
The other Intagvolunteers and I arrived in Otavalo uneventfully, but when we approached the ticket counter there, we found that the only bus to Cuellaje was completely full. This didn’t faze the bus assistant, who happily took our luggage and urged us onto the overflowing bus. We joined the other parados (“standers”) filling the aisles and held on to seat backs and metal handrails for the next three and a half hours. When I wasn’t concentrating on keeping my feet on the floor and my breakfast in my stomach during the bumpy ride on the winding dirt road, I enjoyed gorgeous views of the lush mountains and the occasional grazing farm animal.
When the bus arrived in Peñaherrera, I was met by my host sister Gardenia, who greeted me warmly and informed me that her house was an hour’s walk away. Glad to be on firm ground again, I accepted the news without pause. We walked through town to deposit my suitcase in a small house the family owns, and I was acquainted with several roaming dogs, chickens, cows, and pigs foraging in the plaza and in the underbrush on the side of the road. Our journey, which turned out to be more of a serious hike than a walk, took over an hour and was accompanied by welcome conversation and not-so-welcome rain. When we finally arrived at my host family’s farm, I was happy just to sit in the relative warmth of their kitchen, sip a mug of café en leche, and soak in the enthusiastic chatter of my host mother, Hermania.
My host family is almost entirely self-sufficient in terms of food. On their finca, they raise several cows and pigs, many chickens that like to peck around the dirt yard and tentatively poke their heads into the house, and dozens of cuyes, a real Ecadorian staple (the faint of heart may not want to investigate the above link; for non-Spanish-speakers, a cuy is a guinea pig). Since my simple wooden room is adjoined to the cuyes' house, I fall asleep every night to their high-pitched murmuring. On my first morning here, after being awoken at dawn by a very dedicated rooster, I was treated to the (formerly adorable) delicacy at breakfast. My family also grows several types of plantains, lemons, limes, mandarin oranges, yucca, corn, sugar cane, coffee, a variety of beans, and an assortment of other vegetables. Since arriving, I have milked a cow, picked and shelled beans for supper, and frightened sleeping chickens on nighttime walks to the bathroom (indoors, but only accessible by a very dark walk outside).
The rural lifestyle also means that I’ve been able to spend lots of time with my family. We don’t have a car, and there’s nowhere really to go if we did, so we spend our time at home talking, taking care of the plants and animals, playing cuarenta, and watching bad telenovelas. On Sunday I went to a festival celebrating the opening of a bank in a nearby town with Hermania. My host father Alvino was playing trumpet with his traditional Ecuadorian band there on the sidelines of an impressive boleitournament.
Starting on Monday, I have gone to my colegio (a combination of middle and high school) every day by camioneta, a type of transit truck that is the main form of transportation here. Unlike some of my WorldTeach comrades on the coast, I’m not learning to surf, but I’m sure that standing in the truck’s wooden bed and clinging to the metal railing on the terrifying slopes and turns has given me good practice. Though I have spent three days at the school, I didn’t step into a classroom until this morning. My school is wrapping up its first trimester right now (like many other Ecuadorian schools, its long vacation is during the winter rainy season), and this week, classes are overshadowed by competitive games, which run from 10 to 1 every day. The inter-grade fútbol, basketball, and bolei games are part of a celebration of the founding of the school, which will culminate in festivities open to the town this weekend.
The class schedule is very complicated, with eight 40-minute periods whose order varies daily, and with the morning games, the two classes that I teach didn’t happen until today. In fact, the way the schedule works out, I won’t teach again until Monday—my classes aren’t in the morning periods tomorrow, and Friday marks the start of the all-school festival. Next week, the older students have exams, and the week after that is the end-of-term break. Needless to say, it’s proving difficult to plan my classes and establish norms when I’m coming in during the middle of the term (taking over the position of another teacher with a different teaching style) and working around such an inconvenient schedule, but I’m trying to roll with the punches and wait until things settle down a little. I’m also planning to help another English teacher with her classes to bolster my light teaching load a little.
This is an entry I started a couple of days ago--sorry for the old news:
Though I’m getting antsy to arrive in Peñaherrera and start teaching, Quito has been keeping me busy and on my toes. Yesterday, Luis took our Spanish class on an expedition to el mercado de Santa Clara, an incredible indoor market whose vendors sold everything from exotic fruits to blocks of cane sugar, herbal medicines, and what we where told was some sort of shark meat. I didn’t have my camera with me, or else I would have been completely overwhelmed with trying to document the interesting sights and beautiful colors. As I mentioned last time, Ecuador is a country for fruit-lovers. A few of my favorites are the tomate del arbol, granadilla, uvilla (tomatillo), and guanábana.
In other news, this morning the group took a trip to La Capilla del Hombre (“The Chapel of Man”), an incredible museum dedicated to the thoughts and works of Oswaldo Guayasamín, a remarkable Quitano painter whose style is evocative of Picasso’s. Before Guayasamín died in 1999, he contributed to the design of the museum, which is a piece of art in itself. The building’s top floor is an enormous ring that is sandwiched between a domed skylight above and a red bowl and flame below that mirrors the skylight. It’s a beautiful piece of architecture that wonderfully integrates the duality of Guayasamín’s work.
The museum’s title comes from this duality: the human capacity for both cruelty and beauty. Guayasamín uses exaggerated images of hands and faces to express deep emotions, both of suffering and hope. Many of his paintings are responses to horrific genocides and wars:
Others highlight familial love and tenderness: He also painted many scenes of the city of Quito as viewed from his house, which is attached to the museum. You can compare his depiction (“Quito de la nube negra”) with my photo:
After four flights and a night spent on the floor of the Bogotá airport, I finally arrived in Quito on Tuesday morning. We’re staying at a beautiful hostel in a gringo-oriented neighborhood near the center of town. I’m not sure whether the best feature of our living accommodations is the fresh-squeezed naranjilla juice every morning or the hummingbirds that like to hang out in the small garden/patio area in front of the hostel:
It’s no surprise that the birds love this garden, because it is full of flowers like these:
Even though we’re in the middle of the city, it’s hard to walk two blocks without seeing an beautiful fruit tree or exotic flower. But of course, what really gives Quito the gorgeous city prize is the Andes mountains. No matter where you might find yourself in the city, nothing can block the view of the mountains above the rooftops:
Since arriving, I have spent the bulk of my time in a conference room at a hotel not far from our hostel learning about pickpockets and unpleasant intestinal ailments. WorldTeach is very interested in us being well-prepared for a couple months in a new country, so our orientation has included lots of talks on health and safety issues, the Ecuadorian education system, teaching strategies, and what to expect as a visitor to Ecuadorian culture. These sessions have felt a little long at times (especially when we were all running on our Columbian airport sleep the first day), but I’m definitely feeling more ready to deal with challenging cultural situations and/or uncontrollable diarrhea. We’ve also started Spanish classes at a local school. Today, my three classmates and I practiced our subjunctive skills by piecing together the lyrics of a beautiful song by the Cuban musician Silvio Rodriguez and learned how to play Ecuador’s national card game, Cuarenta. Our teacher Luis told us that the most important part of the game is the slang-filled intimidation and joking that goes on between players.
Yesterday, the group took an expedition to the old center of the city (“Old Town”), which dates back to the 16th century. At the main square of the old city, we overheard a band celebrating the contributions of Manuela Sáenz, Simon Bolívar’s longtime love interest and revolutionary compatriot. We also visited La Basílica del Voto Nacional (Basilica of the National Vow), a 19th century cathedral whose most interesting feature is its gargoyles:
It’s a little hard to tell, but they’re animals indigenous to Ecuador’s jungles and Galapagos Islands. From the cathedral’s plaza, we could see Quito’s Winged Virgin of the Apocalypse standing on Panecillo Hill.
Later, our bus wound its way up the incredibly steep slope, and we saw the aluminum-plated statue up close. The size of the towering structure was dwarfed by the sheer scale of Quito itself as seen from above:
More to come soon, but for now, I'm off to dinner.
