Halfway Travels Pt. 1: Cuellaje, Mindo, and Quito

My colegio had an end-of-term vacation from July 8-18, and I decided to use the time to catch up with my scattered WorldTeach friends and see more of the country.

The first leg of my trip was the shortest, but perhaps the most adrenaline-packed. After walking the 7 km from home to town on Thursday morning, I waited in the park for a couple hours for a passing car or truck that would take me to the next town over, 6 de Julio de Cuellaje (Ecuadorians name everything with dates). Three of my WorldTeach friends are teaching in and around the small town, about 10 km away from Peñaherrera.

Just as I was losing hope of finding a car going in the right direction, a large pickup truck came speeding down the road, leaving an impressive cloud of dust. “Uds. van a Cuellaje?” I shouted to the men in the still-rolling truck. They were—what luck! The father of the family already sitting in the bed of the truck grabbed my duffel bag, and we were off, barreling down the dirt road and zooming around hairpin turns at a speed I don’t want to calculate. I wedged myself into the corner of the pickup’s bed, but I still had to hold on tight to keep myself from flying out of the vehicle-turned-roller-coaster.

After the terrifying and exhilarating ride, I arrived in Cuellaje and found my friend Matt at the parroquia’s colegio without any trouble. His school’s schedule is one week removed from mine, so the students were preparing for end-of-trimester exams. Soon after I arrived, the class bell rang, and I followed Matt to his décimo (~10th grade) class, eager to compare teaching experiences.

When the 40 (!) teenagers were seated, the English teacher Matt helps posed a question to the students: “Do you want to have class today?” “NO!” was the resounding, unsurprising answer, and the students lost no time in scrambling out of the classroom. I was baffled. The teacher explained that this week, the class was reviewing for the upcoming English exam, but they had already gone over all the material—there was nothing left to do in class! The students happily trooped towards the fútbol field, teacher in tow. I was dismayed but unsurprised to see that the attitude towards school is as generally lax in Cuellaje as it is in Peñaherrera. Fútbol, on the other hand, is serious business—I sat and chatted with the English teacher on the sidelines while Matt and the students played an enthusiastic game.

That afternoon, I caught up with the other two INTAG volunteers, Anthony and Chris, who are both teaching at elementary schools in communities near Cuellaje. All four of us are having very different classroom experiences, but it was refreshing to finally talk to people who have faced similar challenges and enjoyed the same cultural discoveries here.

The next morning, we caught the early morning bus to Otavalo, the nearest large city, en route to Mindo, an eco-tourism town also located in the cloud forest. At the bus terminal in Otavalo we met our friend Kelsey, who is working in Ibarra, and after some market-walking and lunch-eating, we continued on to Quito. There, we caught yet another bus to Mindo—we arrived in the early evening, about 11 hours after leaving Cuellaje.

I think now is an appropriate time to bring up what might be the greatest puzzle I´ve encountered in Ecuador. The country is relatively small—I´ve heard it compared to the state of Colorado in area—but it takes ages (and about five separate busses) to get anywhere. The trip from Cuellaje to Mindo is a good case in point. As the crow flies, the distance between INTAG and Mindo is quite manageable, maybe 140 miles, but actually traveling there, we had to 1) use extremely circuitous and steep dirt roads through the mountains and 2) go in the opposite direction from where we wanted to end up—twice. Thankfully, the scenery was gorgeous and the company good. In the last month, I have grown immensely more appreciative of the miracle of efficient transportation.

The long journey proved to be worth it, because Mindo exceeded our expectations for beauty and adventure. Another WorldTeach colleague, Ryan from Guaranda, joined us in the evening, and we all enjoyed more conversation over some surprisingly good pizza. At 6 the next morning, the group set out on a bird-watching hike with our friendly and knowledgeable guide, Herman. The birds and the scenery were wonderful.


Our Quito friends Emmett and Amol joined us in the early afternoon for lunch and an incredible zip-lining adventure.


The rest of the group had to leave at dawn the next morning—they all had a full day of traveling ahead—but the two Quiteños and I were able to spend Sunday in Mindo as well. We visited a beautiful butterfly garden, where we saw new butterflies emerging from chrysalises and many varieties of older butterflies feasting on over-ripe bananas (who knew?). All three of us kicked ourselves for not bringing our cameras.

The reason we left them at the hostel was that the next item on the agenda was tubing on the River Mindo, and we didn’t want to risk drenching them in the fast-moving current. The most exciting part of the trip down the river was observing our guides, who skillfully muscled our raft of rubber inner tubes away from large rocks.

After drying off and watching the excellent World Cup final in the company of lots of España fans, we packed up and headed back to Quito. I stayed with Amol´s host family for the night and accompanied him to class the next morning. All the Quito volunteers are teachers at a government-affiliated organization that offers vocational classes, so their students mostly motivated adults who have a career-related interest in knowing English. Amol teaches an advanced English class of about fourteen students; his teaching situation couldn’t be more different than mine, so it was really interesting to watch his class. I had a lot of fun helping him act out English idioms for the class. We found out that there’s a Spanish equivalent to “the pot calling the kettle black,” which I think can be roughly translated as “the donkey making fun of the rabbit’s ears.”

After class, I said goodbye to Emmett and Amol, and hopped on an “Executive Super Special” bus (it sounds less silly in Spanish) to Manta, a coastal city where two more volunteer friends are working. I forgot to mention one really nice thing about Ecua-travel: bus rides between cities cost about a dollar an hour. My eight-hour trek across the country set me back only 10 bucks—I guess $2 is the cost of being “super special.”

The even nicer thing I’ve found about travel in Ecuador is that bus companions (mine at least) are unbelievably generous and helpful. The woman I sat next to on the way to Manta, a Mantileño who has lived in New Jersey for several years, told me about the towns we passed, and insisted on sharing her lunch with me, buying me juice and crackers, paying for the telephone call I made to my friend in Manta, and helping me find a cab when we arrived in the evening. On the return trip (which I’ll tell more about later), I again relied on the friendliness of my bus-mates, who chatted with me, directed me to the correct ticket window at a bustling terminal, gave advice on staying safe in the city at night, and paid for a trolley ride across Quito. Maybe I’ve been hanging out with the wrong crowd, but I’ve never met strangers so kind in the US.

Photos so far

I have a lot to write about from my 10-day romp across the country, but for now, please enjoy this selection of photos:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2074706&id=1230822745&l=d276d40639

Some you´ve seen before, and some are new ones from Mindo, a lovely eco-tourist town full of beautiful scenery and exotic birds, and the coast, where I visited some volunteer friends and attended the WorldTeach mid-service conference.

Teaching

[a post started on Friday]

I have finished my first full week of teaching. My teaching load includes two middle-school-age classes at the Colegio Técnico Agropecuario José Peralta, an agronomy-focused secondary school (it is surrounded by fruit trees and other crops, all cared for by the students), and daily English tutoring at home with my host father Alvino and a young man who does farm work with him, Querubín.

I’ve encountered several major challenges in teaching at the colegio. To understand the first—lack of time—it is useful to look at the school schedule:

From a glance, it’s clear that the system is a complicated one, but it’s not immediately evident exactly how complicated it is. Students have eight class periods of 40 minutes every day, except for Fridays, when the school day is shorter—only the first six periods take place, and they are each 35 minutes long (I didn’t find this out until today, when the director told me I wouldn’t be teaching my second class). Students go home for lunch every day when classes end at 1:05, but there is a 40-minute recess in the middle of the school day.

Having eight classes a day does not mean that the students study eight subjects. The youngest students in the school, those in the octavo año de educación básica (basically the equivalent of 6-7^th grade) study 11 subjects. The eldest students have a mind-boggling 14 separate classes.

Some core subjects like math and language get double periods—80 minutes total—but I have no such luck with my English classes. As a result, I have to hit the ground running in my classroom. I find myself fighting the clock every day; within the time period of each of my classes, there is no time to take roll, check homework answers, or spend a single minute unproductively.

Another challenge I’ve had to deal with creatively has been a lack of supplies, or more specifically, a lack of a copy machine. I can make single copies at the town government office, where there is computer connected to a printer, so I have learned to base activities around shared, tiny slips of paper, some copied, some handwritten. I can also write things on the whiteboard for the students to copy (they are all very good at copying from the board), but that takes up precious time.

Also on the supplies/logistics front, I’ve had to get used to the idea that the classroom is not my own. Each grade stays in its respective room, and each teacher comes to the students, bringing his/her own whiteboard markers and rules about going to the bathroom.

Finally, I’ve been challenged by the size of my classes (large). Between my two classes, I am teaching about sixty students. Classroom management is a necessary first priority, because unless I have students’ attention, there is no hope for them to understand my English instructions. I still have a lot of work to do on this front, but I think my students are slowly getting used to my style of doing things. One point I’d really like to work on is collaboration between students. There are always some students who understand the class activities better than others, and some who want to pull me aside to explain if there is a word or two they don’t understand. As far as I can tell, they’re not very used to asking each other for help when they are confused, which perhaps is understandable given the large classes and lecture-style teaching they are used to.

Despite the difficulties inherent to a short-term job at a small-town school, I’m enjoying teaching very much. With noveno curso, we have been working on prepositions of location—on, in, under, next to, in front of, behind, etc. We’ve done a few activities that involved drawing and describing objects in a room and locating objects in our classroom. I also introduced prepositions of direction; the students directed a blindfolded classmate through a maze of desks using “forwards,” “backwards,” “left,” and “right.” They will have an assignment for Wednesday that combines these topics: a set of instructions for finding a hidden object on the school campus.

[Some octavo students with name tags-- I'm trying desperately to learn lots of names quickly]

Octavo curso, a class of almost complete beginners, has been focusing on a few introductory questions (“How are you?” “What is your name?” “Where are you from?” and more), as well as the use of numbers.

I’ve been teaching similar things to Querubín and Alvino. It’s interesting to have two very different teaching situations. While I often have to fight for the interest of my colegio students, both Querubín and Alvino are extremely enthusiastic students, sometimes to a fault. They can happily spend 1.5-2 hours repeating phrases, working to perfect their pronunciation (the biggest challenge for both of them). Sometimes, they are so interested in learning English words that they treat me like a dictionary. They ask about interesting and often random-seeming words “¿Cómo se dice gora en ingles? ¿Cómo se dice intocable en ingles?”

One night last week, I walked through the user’s manual of a new chipping machine Alvino and Hermania use to chop up sugar cane for the animals. Alvino already understood essentially everything in it, but he wanted to be sure he wasn’t making any mistakes in his care of the machine.

After teaching during the day at the colegio and tutoring Alvino and Querubín at home, I am completely exhausted. Even so, I have a lot of free time. Starting this week, though, I will have a little less because I will start teaching art and drama classes at the small elementary school near my house. I was walking home early from school one day last week and stopped by the school to wait for my host brother David. I started talking to one of the two teachers there (the whole school, ages ~5-10 is 17 students), and he asked me if I’d be interested in teaching some non-English classes. I couldn’t believe my fortuitous timing. Tomorrow, I will meet with him to discuss my plans, and my first day of classes will be on Wednesday.