Halfway Travels Pt. 2: Manta, mid-service, and the trip home

Here is a post written well after the fact and published many days after it was written-- sorry for the late news, but I'll try and give an update on recent goings on soon.

I spent about two and a half days with my friends Lily and Athena in Manta, where they are living and teaching in an enormous Catholic church. It’s a really interesting arrangement, and about as different as my situation as I can imagine: they teach parishioners of all ages in three 2-hour classes a day for a whopping six hour total, and instead of a standard host family, they live alongside about six very warm, very funny priests.

I had decided to visit Lily and Athena during my vacation time instead of friends in other parts of the country in large part because the WorldTeach mid-service conference took place on the coast during the last few days of my break, and I wanted to minimize travel time as much as possible. Manta is a ~3-hour bus ride from Puerto Lopez, the nearest city to the resort where the conference took place, so I figured that traveling there would be relatively simple. Thankfully (because I’ve learned to enjoy travel adventures), I was terribly mistaken.

On Tuesday, during an afternoon visit to the Murciélago beach, Lily, Athena, and I had received an incredible offer from a company that runs whale-watching trips from the beach. The summer is humpback whale mating season, and Ecuador’s coast is a hotbed of cetacean love. The friendly whale-boat representative told us that they could take us to Puerto Lopez in a few hours, and we’d be able to enjoy whale-dancing, snorkeling, and even a lunch (of our choice!) along the way—all for the low, low price of $20 each.

We thought the deal sounded pretty good, and the trip a lot more interesting than another bus ride, so (after an extensive verification of the details by phone—we wanted to be sure we could actually land at Puerto Lopez, not just hang around and watch the whales in its waters), we decided to go for it. The three of us, along with Bahía friends Becca and Kasey, arrived at the beach early Thursday morning, ready to travel to Puerto Lopez in nautical style. We were met by our boat-company friend, who, after discussing with a colleague, told us that the boat wouldn’t be able to take us to Puerto Lopez—it would take too long, and the boat couldn´t hold enough fuel to make a round-trip. The best they could do, he said after much deliberation, was to drop us off at another beach only about 45 minutes closer to Puerto Lopez. The boat people were quite apologetic (though certainly not very explanatory) about the misunderstanding, and offered to leave one representative—a colorful character named Jimmy—with us to help us find a bus to our destination and ¨protect¨ us. They even offered to pay for our bus tickets to Puerto Lopez.

We sighed, haggled for a discount, waited for another hour and a half, and were finally off. The whale-watching was wonderful, if extremely wet, but the snorkeling gear was left on shore, and we missed out on the advertised lunch because we were dropped off early. As promised, Jimmy stayed with the gang. After a culturally educational lunch (Jimmy had no qualms about sharing his opinions on serranos and Afro-Ecuas—both negative) we caught a camioneta to the next town over, where Jimmy told us we would have an easier time finding a bus.



In fact, he told us as we disembarked and assembled on a corner under a store awning, a bus to Puerto Lopez would be arriving “ya mismo,” a phrase that literally means “right now,” but (as we found out) in practice is used more like “Soon! Really, probably in the next few hours!” We waited two hours for a bus, and when it finally came, we were so anxious to get a move on that we forgot to remind Jimmy to pay. Though Manta was closer than any other site to the conference, thanks to the culturally enlightening scenic route we took, our group managed to arrive two hours late, after all the other volunteers.

The conference itself was nice, though I probably learned more (and spent more time) in getting to and from the event than I did actually being there. We had several sessions on various teaching topics and cultural adjustment, but for me, the best part of the conference was continuing my vacation pastime of reconnecting with volunteer friends after three weeks of relative isolation.

When I filled out the survey telling WorldTeach what type of teaching site I would most prefer, I asked for a small, rural community where I´d be able to get to know people well and have an experience completely different from my life in the states—Peñaherrera in a nutshell. I´ve happily adapted to a new diet, been almost completely immersed in Spanish, and felt welcomed by my neighbors, things that might not have happened in a more urban site or a place where I had another WorldTeach volunteer to keep me company. However, the side effect of these advantages is a feeling of isolation that extends far beyond homesickness. I found it incredibly refreshing to talk about my pent-up frustrations about my classroom situation and the sometimes baffling Ecuadorian culture with people who shared them. When the other volunteers and I weren´t busy chatting or listening to classroom management/lesson planning/etc. advice from the WorldTeach higher-ups, we built an impressive sandcastle and sang 90’s pop songs around a massive beach bonfire.



I can summarize my trip home to Peñaherrera by saying that it was an octopus of a journey—instead of the usual two or three stages, this trip had eight major legs (and a few smaller ones). It involved: 2 trucks (one ride in the cab, one in my familiar post in the back, hanging tight to a metal railing), 5 long-distance buses, 2 trolleybuses, 1 local bus, 1 taxi, and 1 cheap hotel, for a total of 28.5 hours on the road. I was traveling alone, since the other INTAG volunteers had their school vacations immediately after the conference, but as I mentioned in my previous post, I received lots of help from very kind strangers.

When my last bus finally pulled into Peñaherrera and I was greeted by familiar storefronts, faces, and sounds (roosters, mostly), I was surprised to realize how nice it was to be back. The regular Sunday afternoon cameon to El Paraíso was waiting for me, along with Alvino, who met me with a firm handshake and a broad smile. The bouncy ride through the green mountains never seemed so beautiful.

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.

Scenes from Paraíso and Pueblo

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.

Coffee

And another quick one from last Thursday:

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.

From Peñaherrera

I recently regained regular internet access-- this is a post from last Wednesday.

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.