The Inevitable Question of Movistar vs. Porta

I’m really quite amazed by this country. I just put $35 into my wallet—two tens and three fives—with the intention of this amount lasting me all week. I’ll buy a lunch everyday with this money, any toiletries or any other general stuff I’ll need from Supermaxi, which is the Ecuadorian equivalent of Wal-Mart (but a poor excuse at that) and another round of saldo, or a recharge of the money on my cell phone account. Instead of cell phone plans like we have in the states, people here purchase a card worth a certain amount of money, and once this amount is used up, the cell phone won’t connect the calls. It’s actually ridiculously expensive to make calls within the country, twenty-five cents a minute if you’re calling Movistar to Movistar and forty cents a minute if you’re calling Movistar to Porta. I’ve chosen to buy a Movistar phone, which puts me at a particular disadvantage because everyone in the mountainous regions of the country buys Movistar phones, but everyone located on the coast buys Porta phones. So, once I start making Ecuadorian friends on the coast, it’ll be really expensive to stay in touch with them. The good part about having a Movistar phone, however, is that almost all the other volunteers have them too. I guess I’ve chosen to make myself more available to the volunteers in my program than to the new friends I’ll make on the coast.

It seems to me that there are two main jobs that the people of this country work. The first is as police officers or city guards. I mentioned this profession in the post that I attached the first set of photos to. The second job is more general than the first: people working as small business owners. Ecuadorians don’t believe in the one-stop shop like Americans do. No, they prefer to decorate their streets with a plethora of these small businesses that fall into a few main categories: tiny restaurants, hardware stores, internet cafes and movie and liquor stores. I think at some point, some high-ranking city official created a stamp that included these places and marked out a plan for Quito using it as his only tool. Maybe you’re reading this and thinking that this is really no different than any other city, but I can assure you someone wouldn’t get lost in an American city like he could in Quito.

Other people resort to other, less lucrative, forms of entrepreneurship. There’s really no sort of regulation or sanitation here, so they can get away with it quite easily. An Ecuadorian and an American’s sense of security (and responsibility for that matter) and two very different concepts. Let’s make a small comparison quickly. If a big, dumb guy was walking down the street and fell into a sewer in America, you could count on about fifteen separate lawsuits and the amassing of a small army of injury and special interest lawyers. If, however, that same big, dumb guy fell down a sewer in Ecuador (which is hardly out of the realm of possibility—sticks no thicker than a person’s wrists are used in place of manhole covers in certain places), there would be nothing more than a pair of broken legs, a lot of useless whining and a very stinky pair of khakis. Here, I’ve heard the mantra is así es la vida, which—loosely translated—means shit happens. I think something like 10-12% of the country is insured. Since something like 80% of the people here are living below the poverty line, I’m ultimately surprised the figure is that high.

For many others, the very notion of owning a place to conduct business is out of the question. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wondered about these street vendors, asking myself how it’s really possible that they’re able to eek out a living, making sales that are invisible to me no matter how many times I pass them by. When Isaac, John and I walk out the door at about 6:15 in the morning, the first thing that we’re greeted by is the gasman, honking his horn down the hill, reminding the neighbors to change out their blue tanks of propane. If I can hear him honking his horn before I leave the Pazmiño home, I know I’m running late. Down the hill we reach the main street that leads south into the heat of Quito—this is la calle Occidental. The traffic itself is a phenomenon of this country. Taxis might buzz by at eighty miles an hour—traffic regulation enforcement is the lowest priority of the police here. (Walking home today, for instance, one officer was having a bit of fun with his authority by half on the street and half on the sidewalk.) Before we climb up the overpass that lifts us over la calle Occidental—a bridge my host father jokingly calls the gringo detector, because all of the locals have turned the Occidental’s median into a shortcut—there’s always a man or a woman with his or her cart, the same size and shape of a hot dog vendor. The cart carries an assortment of square-based bottles, the liquids inside various shades of brown and yellow. The liquid they combine is claimed and advertised to be medicinal, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it put a gringo like me on his back for a week. I might compare what they make to tea, which is what it looks like, but even the boiling of water implies a very rudimentary, albeit effective, sanitation. Any vendor will only remain in the same spot for nine days. I asked Miguel why nine days; what was special about nine days? He just said it’s nine days because that’s what it is. I suppose a new face has a better chance of making a sale every now and then. Apparently nine days is all it takes to get sick of seeing the same person. I’m going to test Miguel’s prediction as soon as I can. Right or wrong, now I’m left wondering how many years it takes for a vendor to sell from every available spot along the streets of Quito.

A lot of the things I mention in these blog posts are very critical of Quito and of Ecuador in general; I especially attack the city for its incredible lack of infrastructure, which I see as one of the main aspects this city needs to improve upon in the near future. (There’s so much to be said about this topic, especially when the country is in the process of rewriting its constitution and electing a new president at the end of the month.) But I remain so positive because of all the great things this city has to offer too. Practice teaching has introduced me to a diverse group of Ecuadorian students. The two youngest are two sisters, ages 11 and 14, and the oldest is a man who must be 60 years or older and can’t bring himself to speak more loudly than a whisper no matter how much I cajole him. Most of the students, however, are in their twenties. Some have taken English lessons before, in high school or elsewhere, but no one can read, write, speak or listen beyond a basic level.

The first official day of practice teaching was Wednesday. All the volunteers in my program teach at SECAP, which I don’t know too much about other than they provide each of us with a modest classroom in a rather large teaching complex. I teach in the evening, from 6:00-8:00 P.M., so many of these students work jobs during the day and come to English class for two hours at night. The class will meet ten times altogether and students were charged $1 for their instruction (the dollar charge is actually only a formality—we wouldn’t charge them a cent if it didn’t motivate them to show up for the class). Despite the hours they put in at other jobs and what not, all of the students are extremely enthusiastic to learn English. At least in the classroom, Ecuadorians are perfectionists. We performed a series of skits to acquaint students with certain English vocabulary, and not a single group was prepared to present before making sure everyone had his or her lines written down on paper, recited and a quick sketch was drawn on the dry erase board to provide their specific scene’s background. One group’s skit took place on a lake, for instance. No one in the group was ready to perform the skit until a group member had drawn a number of red fish in the water. The rest of the class watched on in anticipation as she drew, and one student near the front of the classroom yelled she should draw a shark too.

I’m so excited that my students actually want to learn this language. Coming from a family in which many of the members have chosen to teach for a profession, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that one of the greatest struggles many teachers face is motivating students to want to learn. I hope this part of my teaching experience remains the same in Santa Elena.

With regard to how practice teaching goes, we’ve been split by my volunteer organization into groups of three, so the first day consisted of me and two other volunteers making our way through a bunch of introductory games and some common questions in English. When we asked the students to write as many words that they could list about work or school or family or vacation, I was amazed to see how much they knew. I’m really blown away by how much American (or better put, North American) culture has pervaded this part of the world. For as much as we Salsa and down Latino-inspired drinks in quasi-American bars back home, there are just as many Nike outlet stores and KFCs dotted throughout this city. The Colonel is very, very popular here. He’s a symbol to me of the power of the American dollar and the advantages of a trans fatty acid free diet. I laugh too when I hear more Kurt Cobain in the bars here than I do back home.