The other Intag volunteers 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 bolei tournament.
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.
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