Avoiding a Real Introduction
I’m having a hell of a time starting this one; I’ve started, stopped and erased the whole works about three times now. Usually the words just sort of fall into place, but this time is different. I think it’s because—subconsciously—I realize I still have a ton to say, and yet this will be my final blog entry.
That’s good, though, isn’t it? That there’s still so much to say? Ecuador and it’s culture are complicated and intricate topics, but it’s that very complexity, the sums of our similarities and differences with this place and its people, that makes what I’ve been doing for the last ten months so cool and exciting. If there weren’t so much to say, if there was a final destination when I might be able to say, “Well, now I understand Ecuador,” if the place and its people weren’t constantly changing and redefining themselves just as we are in the United States, what fun would that be?
A Recap of the Last Few Weeks
To make a long story short, I’ve been traveling quite a bit. I took a day off after my last day of teaching to say my goodbyes to the peninsula. My students, despite all of the problems I was having with them, were surprising distressed to see me go. I really didn’t believe that it bothered them that I was leaving. On a Wednesday night, I hopped a night bus after a fond farewell from Adam and Sarah and made my way here, to Quito, for the last official meeting we were required to attend for my volunteer organization. I said a lot of my goodbyes at End of Service. Our directors also did a wonderful job of mentally preparing us for some of the expectations we could bet on for readjusting to life back home. I can’t say it’s going to go as smoothly as I originally thought it might….
After tugging on all those heartstrings, I only had an afternoon to blow before my dad and brother were arriving for our trip to the Galapagos. They had a wonderful time here and almost everything went extremely smoothly (surprisingly enough). Steve even knew a hell of a lot more Spanish than I thought he would. Go, Steves! After eight days on a cruise ship in the Galapagos—which are absolutely stunning, by the way—we were able to get in a little mountain biking down Ecuador’s second largest volcano (correction from a previous post, Chimborazo claims Ecuador’s highest elevation) and a quick trip to the cloud forest. Even now, we’re still cracking jokes over Pato, our lovable and infectiously comical tour guide in the Galapagos Islands. (And so…!)
Since then, I’ve secretly been counting down the days until the 1st of July and try instead to convince myself I should be living in the present. Again, I’ve been filling the time with travel. The day after my dad and brother left, I took off for the northern coast, to a place called Atacames, with Sarah (from Guayaquil) and her friend Liz, who’d come to visit from Massachusetts. It was nice to catch some rays and see the Pacific Ocean one last time. I returned to Quito only a day later so that I could begin my journey to the Oriente, or rainforest, with another friend and volunteer, Ava. We had an awesome time dodging bats while canyoneering, lazily tubing down the ice-cold Napo River and otherwise exploring what the selva just outside of Tena had to offer. Although, of all the cool stuff we got to do and all the neato medicinal (and hallucinogenic…) plants we had the chance to learn about, my favorite activity was the hike we took to visit an indigenous Quichuan community. I’m still awed by how closely they live to nature, how remarkably they’ve been preserving their less complicated form of living for generations. You want to toss around the word “eco-friendly”, try mimicking the practices of a one of those interior jungle families.
After all that, though, I find myself back here in Quito, waiting out the next three days by passing the time with my beloved Sierran host family, the Pazmiños. I was thinking of traveling this final weekend back to Cuenca, but I’m either too lazy or, in an effort to simplify my own life, just want to sit back and let life come to me. Just so that I can feel good about my decision, we’ll go with the later. Either way, I can’t think of a better way to say goodbye to Ecuador than to be back here with these people who’ve helped me along so much throughout this experience.
An Important Realization
It’s a frequent game I like to play with myself: I try to think back on the way I used to perceive a topic and weigh it against how I perceive that same topic in the present. I like to believe that the difference between how I felt about something and how I feel about it now is something like mental progress, that after challenging my old precepts, gaining some new information or going through some new experiences, and re-filtering all those inputs through that sieve of a brain of mine, I might arrive at a better place—at least, mentally speaking—than I was at in the past.
Right now I’m considering some of the ways I used to believe Ecuador would change me. I thought seeing a more prevalent form of poverty would humble me. That was true. I thought I’d be nearly fluent in Spanish. That one wasn’t. I thought I might to learn to live better than I had been in the past. For this, my truth lies somewhere in between.
I’ve come to understand that neither the way that people live here or back in the United States is strictly “better.” More accurately, the ways we choose to live are different—incomparable in certain instances, the proverbial apples to oranges. Perhaps it’s possible to look at very small practices and think to oneself that what either of us—here or there—is doing is more advantageous. For instance, I’ve really fallen in love with the ways families here operate like small communities, coming together to help each other out, maybe even more than we typically do in the U.S. But anything I might claim is subject to individual interpretation. Yes, there are some facets of family life that I prefer here, but at what cost to the system we’ve elected back home? What’s to be preferred: more extensive support networks or individualism? What’s “better”: having one’s family help you through a situation, or learning to cope through that situation on one’s own. It’s not that one style of living should be considered superior to the other, it’s just that either one more directly promotes certain core values.
Having said this, though, I’ve got to mention that it’s crucial for all of us to realize that there’s a ton we can learn from a place like Ecuador. My general belief is that it’s impossibly easy for us as “Americans” to get trapped. After all, we’re the best, aren’t we? We’ve got the biggest economy, the most innovative sectors of science and technology and the most world influence. (Hell, we’ve got the bombs!) But that doesn’t mean that we’ve got it all. It surely doesn’t mean our ideals are the best, or that our purposes are the purest, most ethical or in closest agreement with some supreme being’s ultimate direction. Furthermore, especially as the superpower that we currently are, it’s simple (maybe even fun!) to write off a place like Ecuador. “Oh, the people there need to get a stronger work ethic,” or “They’re government’s just too corrupt,” are things we might say without knowing more about this place. But maybe that’s all wrong. Maybe we can learn just as much from this place as they can learn from us (maybe more…). Money, influence and power might go on and continue to make all of the world news headlines, but far be it for me to believe that controlling those things makes one more knowledgeable about a truly wiser form of living.
Goals Set, Goals Met?
Truly, I came to South America with a lot of semi-admirable purposes. I wanted to learn Spanish, which I hope will make me a more marketable physician and invested citizen in the future. I wanted to increase my self-sufficiency and independence by proving to myself that I could handle such a significant life transition in a new and foreign environment. I wanted to travel and see places and people I’ve never seen before. I wanted to have the opportunity to give something back (however small and indirect) to all of you who have supported me and been so generous in uncountable ways over the years. And, perhaps greatest of all, I wanted to achieve a newfound sense of worldliness. I’d made it my goal to better understand this world we’re living in (and the United States, specifically) by doing something I’ve never done before, by doing something I thought would be significant. And, to me, this has been a very significant event in my life.
To varying degrees, I’ve achieved everything I sought out to do. (Add in the surf lessons as a bonus.) No, I’m no a fluent Spanish speaker, and no, I’m not perfectly adapted to life here, but I’ve surely come a long way in so short a time (relatively speaking…). If there’s one thing I’m truly proud of, it’s the gains I’ve made in that last purpose I mentioned above: toward my sense of worldliness. I can only imagine how Ecuador will continue to help me as I move forward.
Have I just written all of this to pat myself on the back…?
Top Fives
I thought it might be a fun and kind of a cool way to bring a little closure to my experience here by predicting the top five things I will and won’t miss about Ecuador. Surely, these lists will be ongoing for me (because I probably won’t realize the things I really miss until I’m gone—yes, the heart grows fonder), but why not share them with you guys back home first? I’ll start with the positive, but I think it’s understandable enough for me to mention that not everything about this country has been a cakewalk:
The Top 5 Things I Think I’ll Miss About Ecuador
Greatly reduced cost of living (eating out, transportation, etc.).
A more communal family lifestyle.
Extreme geographic diversity within relatively close borders.
Relaxed schedules and shorter workdays.
Rico coastal food!
The Top 5 Things I Think I Won’t Miss About Ecuador
1. Having to think too hard to speak.
2. The average Ecuadorian’s idea of timeliness.
3. All the nasty litter and pollution.
4. Blatant machismoism (being pressured to drink a lot, hissing at women, etc.).
5. The gringo tax.
A Fond See You Later
While, in the strictest sense, this isn’t my last goodbye to Ecuador, this is goodbye to writing this blog. It’s been incredible for me to write it and thereby help myself organize, think over and catalogue all of these experiences I’ve been going through in my ten months here. It’s important to reflect on life. But these reasons aren’t the main ones explaining why I started this blog. Since I started, I’ve wanted a means to share with all of you the things I’ve been doing, to maybe shed a sliver of light on another part of this Earth and the ways we might go about considering it in our minds. More than my own reflection, I hope I’ve offered an avenue for all of you to reflect upon your own lives.
The experience doesn’t end here, though. In a hundred different ways, I plan to carry these last ten months with me, in both who I am and what I do. One small example, I’ve saved a whole bunch of Sarah’s recipes, and I want to continue cooking some of the dishes I’ve been eating from the coast. One much larger example, I’ve made it a personal goal to avoid purchasing a car once I get back to the states for as long as I’m able. While it could become an absolute necessity for medical school, given the slew of detrimental effects our oil consumption costs us (as well as the personal costs of car insurance, repairs and the $5/gallon cost of gas), I want to put off getting a car as long as possible. Simplify! Right?
I’ve said it before, but it’s appropriate again here: Ecuador has changed me. I’ll be very truthful in saying that I used to be scared of re-immersing myself in American culture. I was afraid that life would be too fast-paced, that I’d be surrounded by a million examples of the things I’d decided I didn’t want to be doing with my life, and that I’d be helpless to resist the pressures to conform to the rest of society. I’ve come to understand, however, that this isn’t a process that’s out of my control; in fact, it’s just the opposite. My choices in living are informed by a wider breadth of knowledge now, a greater sense of worldliness, as I called it before. Really, I’m the decider of who I am and what I want to do with myself, and I don’t plan on reverting to who I used to be in certain aspects.
So… after all the lengthy descriptions and half-digested internal dialogues, it comes to this. I’m particularly shitty at goodbyes and I’ve grown tired of my own wordiness, so why don’t we keep this little bit to an absolute minimum.
You know what? Screw it. Goodbyes are too permanent, and neither I nor Ecuador will be anywhere out of reach:
Gracias por todo. Nos vemos pronto! (Thanks for everything. We’ll see you soon!)
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Dust in the Wind
White Shoes
Nothing here stays white for long. Before I left from home this most recent time, I bought myself a new pair of Asics running shoes. They have orange trim and dark gray interiors, but the outsides of the shoes are mostly white. I justified buying white because I had only two months left in Ecuador at the time, and I thought to myself, how dirty can a pair of shoes get in two months?
The answer is… very dirty. The topsides of the laces are saturated by dirt in places, the white entirely replaced by brown. They might have been brown to begin with, if I didn’t know better. In other places on the shoes, the dirt is choosier in where it’s decided to accumulate most. Over the toes, for instance, and along the bottoms are particularly coated. I run only three or four times a week, usually for around an hour, but I never run more than two and a half hours in a row. As such, that means I’m outside with these shoes for under eight hours a week, but this is how they look now. I have an older pair of white shoes to compare them to, and they were over a year old by the time I quit using them as my running shoes. My new ones went from sparkling white to looking like they’re older than the Nikes in a matter of weeks.
That’s how dusty it is here. I wonder how many pounds of the stuff I’ve obliged my nasal passages into dealing with in all this time. I wonder how many times worse it is than the air back in
In the last post, I’d written that I thought Sarah’s worries about the empleadas working here—what I’ve come to call the Elsi Situation—had come to an end, but that didn’t really paint a complete picture. I said that Justina (who’s real name actually turned out to be Faustina, a mistake on all of our behalves) was going to be Elsi’s permanent replacement in my last big post, but she quit showing up after a certain date for reasons that I’ll never know. So then we were back to Mariella for a while. But that was only for a few days. Now Anita, who’s totally new, is here, and I’m hoping—for Sarah’s sake—that she’s going to stay. In the end, Elsi might even ask for her old job back. There were rumors flying around during lunch today. I just don’t know what to believe anymore. I’ll have to email Adam a few weeks from now to see how the Elsi Situation has evolved.
Adam and I have been getting along really well since he got here. We make fun of each other all the time now, which probably means our friendship has grown. Adam’s a pretty talented musician and he’s brought his guitar up to play on the patio a number of times. I always like to hear the stuff he has to say about music and how it’s influenced him.
Maybe Adam gave me this thought, but I think a lot of people learn about the world through sports when they’re young. At least, I should say, I learned a lot from sports. I learned about what it means to be a part of a team, about self-confidence and a little bit about discipline. Furthermore, I had a great time with sports and it connected me to other young people and their parents. But where I had sports as a younger kid, Adam had music. We took a little trip to Montañita a few weeks back, and it was really interesting to hear about his path of self-discovery through learning to play different musical instruments. All those Saturday mornings when I was running around after a soccer or football, he was jamming out with other kids somewhere near
Before then, I didn’t know that the two were comparable—playing the guitar versus playing soccer. To me, it seemed a bit like comparing apples to oranges. But now I think I see it slightly differently. They’re both ways of approaching the world, of learning something about yourself by learning about something from the world around you and by trying to master a skill. I find that to be an incredible thought….
Peter is doing well in
Tom got back on the 10th of May. To be honest, I really haven’t gotten to talk to him that much, seeing as he’s been super-busy and I’ve been running around so much on weekends. My best chance to catch up with him will be this coming weekend, so maybe I’ll have more to say about Tom next time.
Teaching
This is absolutely crazy to think about, but I’m actually down to under a week left of teaching. I plan to submit this post by tomorrow, Thursday, in which case, I have till only next week Tuesday before I’m totally done—one more day this week and two days next week. I really can’t believe it. I’ve been counting down the days for some time now, but I can’t seem to come to grips with the fact that I’ve finally come to the end.
Now is both a wonderful and a terrible time to be leaving.
I’ll start with the good. I’m having a real tough time with a number of my students. Since my teaching assignment’s change in the last month, teaching’s been more difficult than it ever was in all the months prior to now. I’m constantly dealing with discipline issues, and even though I know I can handle my classes and could continue to handle them for some time, that doesn’t escape the fact that teaching has been pretty damn draining lately. On most of the days, I hightail it to an Internet café after work for a while, and then I crash on my bed for at least a few minutes before eating lunch with Sarah and Adam. If no one wakes me up, I’ll usually sleep for half an hour.
I’ve had to find ways to understand my students’ apparent lack of motivation to learn English from the beginning, but now it’s been worse than ever. When I was teaching private lessons through CELEX, it was easier because they’d paid a small sum of money to be learning from me, so at least they had that financial motivation pushing them. The classes were also smaller, so it was a more inviting place to learn for most students. Now, however, students only pay to be in school at Nuestro Mundo and have a whole schedule of other subjects to worry about, in which case, English is frequently low man on the totem pole. Whereas I used to think that motivating my former students was a challenge that had a tendency to leave me feeling disappointed, I failed to realize that things can almost always be slightly worse.
The upside of this is that I’m only required to tough out teaching for less than another week. My time is almost up. And yet I still feel some remorse for cutting and running. Even though my students do get on my nerves and don’t seem to pay attention a lot of the time, I enjoy the challenge of teaching them. A good deal of my students are learning from me and enjoy speaking English. I feel bad about starting up as their teacher and now stopping all of a sudden. I’ve been steadily improving in the whole classroom management realm, and I was finally figuring out each class’ dynamic and how to make things as good as they could get for everyone.
Perhaps more than anything, though, I just need to continue reminding myself that teaching isn’t what I want to do for the rest of my life. I went in knowing this was a temporary sort of position I was taking on. I haven’t exactly been hiding it, but a number of students have caught wind that I’m not going to be around after next week. A few of them have approached me after class, and always with the same question, why do you leave? I always respond the same way (and in English because the only way to really get someone to listen is by telling a secret, a joke, an insult or something interesting about yourself). I tell them that it’s not my dream to be a teacher, and that I’m going to be a doctor instead. Really, being in
Between my last post and today, I’ve done quite a bit of traveling, but most of it is stuff I’ve done before, so I’ll try to keep this short.
Three weekends ago, I went to Vilcabamba, the town way to the south (almost at the Peruvian border, in fact) where Isaac lives. We took another run into the mountains on Saturday, where one of the funniest things that’s happened to me in
It was fairly improbable that someone would chance by. After all, we weren’t exactly in stark wilderness, but there aren’t all that many people who need to head into mountains when the town of
They passed my half-naked self without the slightest hint of embarrassment. This was nothing for these people. In fact, even though they passed so close to me they might have touched me, I’m not even sure the lady behind the man noticed me. There was no hesitation, no indecision and no recognition in their faces or in their actions. I might have been a cow and the end result would’ve been the same. I shamefully walked back down to the bridge, possibly laughing harder than Isaac was. We chalked it up as another cultural experience. The Ecuadorians’ reaction wouldn’t have been the same in most places in the
The weekend after that, two weekends ago, Adam and I went to Montañita to celebrate his birthday. Lisa was putting on a barbeque for all the students at the Spanish school she’s the director for, so she put Adam and I to work on grilling detail. The grill was big and I grilled a lot of meat. We learned that more charcoal, which means more heat, is not always the best choice. Yes, some of the chicken was burned, but we still mowed it down.
Sarah from
Last weekend I traveled back to the Sierra to a place called Baños. Baños is basically the mountain version of Montañita in that vacationers from a larger city (Quito instead of Guayaquil) feed into it during high times, there’s a lot of really touristy stuff to do and, most noticeably, the place is packed full of gringos! Baños is particularly well known for the scenic bike ride you can take from there to a nearby town called Puyos along the main stretch of highway. The group of us who’d come to Baños rented a bunch of bikes for $5 a piece and started on our way.
As part of all of the mountain scenery along the way, you can also see all of these really spectacular cascades. We hiked down a ways to see a particularly amazing one and eat some sandwiches we’d packed along. After that, our group split into two: one group carried on to Puyos and the other went to check out one last waterfall, and then call it quits on the day. I was part of the later group; I really hadn’t been feeling well all weekend. Our group biked a bit further along to another trailhead that lead down to another waterfall. The best time I had all weekend was sitting in the ice-cold river that ran below this waterfall. I must have just sat there, staring into space with the sound of all that crashing water around me, for over an hour.
I’ve spent too many hours the last few weekends on buses. It was twelve to fourteen total hours, for instance, for either the ida or the vuelta to Loja. To and from Baños was closer to eight, which is still too damn much for a single weekend’s travel. Not fun. I’m fed up with traveling on buses here. They’re uncomfortable, stinky and I can never sleep on them. Furthermore, I couldn’t hate Jason Stratham more. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen The Transporter movies now, but I now that my life could’ve been a little bit happier had I never seen more than the first five minutes of either of them. I’m considering fighting the man myself, even though the movies should’ve made it all too clear that doing so was the same as suicide.
How’s It?
I talked to my parents on Memorial Day and I couldn’t even deny it anymore. I’m anxious to get home. I’ve done so much great stuff here, and I’ll probably always remember
Having said that—and I realize I’m still just over a month out from my final return date—this is likely to be one of my last posts. I teach until Tuesday next week, Wednesday I have off to organize myself and say goodbye to the peninsula and by Thursday I’ll be back in
This has all gone so fast, and yet what a wonderful experience it’s been. I can remember writing my first entry into this blog from my room at the Pazmiños in
Don’t worry, though. I’ll be sure to include at least one more post. I’m not ready to be done just yet.
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Views from Above
The top photo is a view from the refuge on Cotopaxi looking down the mountain. Notice all the happy Quitoan hikers discovering the wonders of snow.
The middle photo is a bunch of people from our group latching on crampons once we’d reached Cotopaxi’s glacier. I was worried the metal spikes were going to add on a lot of weight to each step, but they certainly weren’t as bad as I’d imagined them to be. None of my predetermined worries panned out as the ones with any real substance over the course of this adventure.
The bottom photo was one of the last pictures I took during the hike, a landscape shot from over 5500 meters in the air. It didn’t turn out exactly as I’d hoped it would, but not much can take away from a sunrise like that. Now I chuckle to myself to think of Isaac and Josh watching the same scene, then a deep rumbling growing in the ground beneath them. The noise increased along with their worry, their minds racing to think up a course of action, until their guide yelled, “Avalanche!” That’s when the commercial jet appeared over the ridge.
Volcán Cotopaxi
New Blue
Looking back now, I’m trying to think of what in Ecuador reminds me the most of. The honest answer is slightly unusual in that, unless you’ve traveled here, you probably wouldn’t expect it as my answer.
It’s passing landscapes that bring back memories of Wisconsin most frequently. It’s the way an open road unfolds between wide-open fields between the peninsula and Guayaquil. It’s the way cows look drinking from a natural welling of water in the soil. It’s the way miles and miles of uninterrupted fencing—barbwire attached to sawed off wooden poles—moves with you as you pass through the world behind a pane of glass. Sometimes the reminder strikes me because the trees look so similar. Sometimes it’s because of a certain plant or shrub, or even a swing set, clothesline or some other inanimate object that brings to life the right connections in my mind. Sometimes it’s none of these things. But I’m quite certain, the vast majority of the time, it’s because I’m searching for an excuse to think of home. It’s hard not to miss it knowing that the weather is improving by you guys day by day. Late spring and early summer in Wisconsin are really special times of year.
So what the hell is new here? I’ll tell you… as I always find myself doing.
Tom’s going to be back again on the 10th. In case you need a little reminder, he’s been receiving additional teacher’s training at home in England. Carla has been keeping me updatesd on what he was up to all this time, and it always seemed to involve a lot of “deberes,” or homework. I’m sure he’ll be happy to be back in Ecuador and far, far away from the time-consuming demands of furthering his education. No worries, though, Tom! I’ll have some ice cold Clubs waiting for you when you make it back.
I get a message every once in a while from Peter. We mainly stay in contact through Facebook, and it’s always nice to hear from the kid (Hopefully he doesn’t read this. I’ve gone to great lengths to let him know he’s a total jerk for leaving.). I believe at this very moment he’s home in England, enjoying a little downtime with the padres. He’s managed to track down a job for himself in Bordeaux, France, which he’ll be starting up shortly. Although I’m not quite sure what he’s going to be doing. We haven’t managed to get around making fun of each other for long enough to talk about anything substantial.
One reason I get such a kick out of talking to Peter is because the kid is in a hundred places at once. After he’d first left, I got a message from him saying that he’d had a good time in Buenos Aires but was currently home in England. Sometime later I got another one out of the blue saying that he was having a blast skiing in France. A week later I got a message saying he was going to visit his girlfriend in Germany. Sometime after that I got one saying that he was headed back to France to find work. Now he’s in England for a while. Once he’s done there (for the second time), he’s going back to France. What’s the most incredible, though, is that the kid had the audacity to write in the last message, “I’m going to be happy to be in one place for a while,” referring to spending some time at home in England. But you’re going to be living and working in France before you know it, Peter! Crazy kid. He’s a traveler through and through. He knows it just as well as I do.
Now… despite all the attention I pay to the happy goings-on here, something absolutely terrible has occurred since the last time I wrote. Elsi quit! Oh God, the humanity! No more Elsi!
Elsi was the empleada, or maid, that worked for Sarah here at CasaLeon. You might not remember me saying much about her, but I’m pretty sure I described at some length her enthusiasm for local politics and, more selfishly, her incredible cooking. I can say with absolute certainty now that there was not a single thing that she cooked that I didn’t enjoy. In the eternal words of Peter, the woman was a legend.
Elsi’s resignation came about rather abruptly. Her children were still off from school and she decided to take a bit of time off before their school year started up again. Elsi has four children, the oldest of whom is eighteen and the youngest of whom is around twelve—this is the only one of her kids that I’ve met in person. Elsi had book a couple of weeks for vacation, but this free time continued to grow as the two-week mark came and past. Sarah was at the beach and Adam and I were headed into the centro for whatever reason when we ran into Elsi just outside the main gate. We were the first ones to find out that she wouldn’t be coming back.
Elsi attributes the reason to her children, specifically mentioning that she wants to be around after her youngest daughter has a minor surgery done. Where I still don’t know about how difficult it is to recover from the type of surgery she’s getting done, Sarah questions whether Elsi was just tired of working. Having children who can make an independent living on their own means that the tables might have finally turned and now they’re supporting her instead of her supporting them.
Sarah is a little bummed with the whole situation, and understandably so. Elsi had been working here for over six years and replacing her means teaching someone else the ins and outs of this place. We’ve already gone through one temporary empleada who was filling in for Elsi for a while. Even though the replacement knew her time here was short because of her own children she’d committed herself to taking care of, she recommended Justina, who is—at least seemingly so—the new permanent worker. I like her. She’s nice and she smiles a lot. Even though training her has put an additional strain on Sarah, I have confidence the new arrangement will work out for the best. One thing is certain… Justina makes good chicken!
Weather
I make this a section only to make it all very apparent that la temporada, or Ecuadorian summer, has officially come and gone. While the sun stills peaks out from time to time, the best of the weather is gone. I’ve finally reached that terrible nexus where, once again, Wisconsin weather is probably more pleasant than it is here. Sarah went into detail a few days ago to tell me about how cold the water had become and how cloudy the sky was going to be from here on out. I thought about mentioning that the water would never get cold enough along an Ecuadorian coast to prevent a Wisconsinite from swimming, but it didn’t seem prudent at the time. I certainly don’t fear the temperatures, but it’s nice to see the sun (and why would I ever want to lose my tan?).
So, at this juncture, I’d just like to take a moment to publicly declare: NOOOOO! Damn it… it’s over. Chaocito, la temporada. It was good while it lasted. I’ll miss you, sol, and all of the underdressed Latin women you brought to the playa….
Teaching
My English teaching career can be summarized with one word as of late: compromise. In the last post, I talked about “reviewing” with my new class at Nuestro Mundo (as I’m now a fixture of private high school education in Salinas), which was a nice way of saying that my classes hadn’t been properly organized. I had a class but I didn’t have my class.
Well, now I have my classes, but I don’t have my materials. I’ve been teaching the last week or so without the benefit of a textbook. We were given a pair of copies of the first three unit’s workbook exercises to act as a general guide, but even so, these are simply a collection of questions and answers that don’t act as a comprehensive learning guide for students. The resource problems I’m having really haven’t caused too much of a problem for me because I’ve taught beginner speakers before, so I have a fair amount of experience with the target language, how to teach it and, perhaps most inconspicuously, the grammar rules I should be emphasizing. I suppose who I now feel the worst for are the new teachers who still lack a lot of experience, namely Adam and Daniela. Before me, they’d been “reviewing” with students for an additional two weeks, and now they have to continue with new classes but next to nothing for accompanying texts.
I hope I don’t sound too harsh on the administration. I don’t mean to blame someone like Humberto for this. I know it’s not his fault when he’s traveling to Guayaquil at least twice a week to secure our payments and the teaching materials we need. This is a problem that comes from a higher source than him, although I really blame anyone outright. Without having more information to base my decision off of, I believe this all goes back to the person in charge of CELEX and his ultimate decision (or should I say indecision?) to neglect programming here on the peninsula. Humberto’s fought really, really hard to keep things going for students and teachers such as myself, but that doesn’t mean that, short of being cut off, our programs still aren’t being ignored.
My classes changed two weeks ago. Logistically, I can hardly complain with my new schedule. I now teach in the early mornings, classes starting at 7:30 A.M. The schedule just underwent another minor shift yesterday (I pray this will be the last), which gives me an hour break between the two one-and-a-half hour classes—one class full of middle schoolers, the other with high schoolers—depending on the day of the week which of the two groups gets taught first. Therefore, I’m done teaching on any given day by 11:25, leaving the rest of the day open to my usual shenanigans.
Since things have changed, I’ve been given two new groups of students to work with. Even though each class’s average age is rather close in a relative spectrum—however incomparable when it really gets down to the core of it—I can’t decide whether the middle or the high schoolers are more savvy English speakers/learners. Depending on the day, I might say that either group responded more intelligently or would have scored better on a test. Whatever the case, it’s nice to only have to prepare one lesson plan (he he). I was skeptical at first, believing that teaching the same material back to back would be remarkably boring. But it turns out it’s not boring at all. Each class has different questions, different obstacles to learning and different things that happen during class (a lazy, looping hornet flew into the room to terrorize my high schoolers earlier this week) to remind you that life can be a total crapshoot.
In getting used to these new students, I wouldn’t say that the ones I have now are any less crazy than the ones I had before (the ones I struggled with during the “review” week), just that they’re crazy in different ways. My latest and greatest teaching problem has been dealing with random English swear words that seem to pop out from nowhere when my back is turned. The first f-bomb was thrown last week and we had another one this week, this time from the high school-aged kids. I do my best not to get pissed off, explain to them why it’s an offensive word and why it would offend me, but these little talks always end with my students discussing some random topic between themselves in Spanish more often than they end up achieving anything resembling a newfound understanding. I need to continually remind myself that these are high school kids, and they just don’t think the same way I do.
Still, I hope I’m not becoming more of a lax teacher as I near the end of my (at least foreseeable) teaching career. More frequently now than ever, my classes are distracted when regional conversations throughout the classroom repeatedly emerge. Telling my students to shut up (A habit of mine they most definitely find more enjoyable than threatening: Some of them have even taken to telling each other to shut up when they sense the times that I’m going to first.) is like playing the game at Chuck E. Cheese where you pound the purple gophers that peak up with the leather mallet. There comes a point when I just don’t care anymore, that I either can’t or don’t want to find a way to quiet my students down enough to continue teaching all of them. At these points I take a short break, usually reclining in a chair at the front of the classroom, before continuing to teach those few students who continue to pay attention to English despite their surroundings. These are the students who are the easiest to love.
Discipline is certainly not my strong point. I’m of the mindset that if you don’t want to learn, you don’t have to, and it’s not my job to make you. However, maybe this is precisely the mindset that enables me to avoid becoming a stronger disciplinarian. Greater still, I have to wonder if a middle/high school is really the ideal environment for me to be teaching in. I highly doubt it….
Volcán Cotopaxi
While I could probably go on quite a bit about Sarah’s host grandfather’s 80th birthday party in Guayaquil the weekend after last, this blog entry is already too long and it’s going to be significantly more interesting (however much longer) for me to stick to this one topic: the Cotopaxi climb.
I’m not quite sure whose idea was the original inspiration for the Cotopaxi climb, but I know I heard the first real push to do it from my buddy Isaac. Even before Easter, he’d been hyping the idea to me, even though I remained skeptical that I would do it until I put my final payment down. Whatever the case, I’d known about the climb since before I left for home. A flurry of emails started to fly in every which direction around that time, preparations being made and commentary issuing from different corners of Ecuador, but I remained strategically silent in telling others that I would be one of the participating climbers. Not only had I not researched the climb enough on my own, I didn’t want to do anything to encourage my mom to conduct any research of her own, thereby feeding any of the worries she might have been experiencing (Sorry, Mom. I hope you’ll accept it if I say I had your best interests in mind.).
Sometime during my two weeks back home, Peter, a volunteer who took the lion’s share of the initiative in organizing the hike, put down $50 in my name. Knowledgeable or dumb, now I felt compelled to do the thing.
The timing of the hike was planned when it was with good reason. Last week Thursday, May 1, was the equivalent holiday here as our Labor Day. In an almost whimsical show of generosity (after all, the same guy essentially removed a holiday previously in the year for all governmental employees), President Rafael Correa declared that Friday a national holiday as well, extending the weekend and giving all of us English teachers the necessary time to do something like this.
Anyway, I bolted from the coast last week Wednesday after teaching classes in the morning. I hopped a flight Carla and her friend miraculously helped me to book the previous day in spite of the holiday crowds. AeroGal got me into Quito around 4:00 that afternoon, after I went through a bit of the run around in the Guayaquil airport on account of my Swiss Army knife pen drive. I met up with a couple of other volunteers at the climbing company in Quito, finished paying up what I owed and sympathized a while with Morgan, the gregarious (and questionably sane) Swedish climbing aficionado at Moggley. I slept by a volunteer couple’s pad that night and a group of us got on our way toward Moggley’s climbing hostal, Valhalla, near Cotopaxi semi-early Thursday morning.
To give you an idea of the challenge we were pitting ourselves against, Cotopaxi is dormant volcano rising over 19,500 feet into the sky; it’s also the highest peak in Ecuador. The volcano is located about two hours south of Quito and many of the guides, like the ones who work for Moggley, climb it more than once a week. The nice thing about climbing Cotopaxi is that it isn’t a technical climb at all. You don’t need any “classic” climbing experience in the sense of having the proficiency to work pulleys and belays or being able to Sylvester Stalone your way up the sheer face of a cliff. You do, however, need to have the physical capacity to walk, step after arduous step, up slopes as steep as black diamond ski runs. The crummy thing about climbing Cotopaxi is that: one, 19,500 feet is no piece of cake even for experienced climbers; and, two, a body’s adaptation to the altitude and all it has—or lacks—to offer is potentially more essential to completing the climb than one’s physical capabilities at a lower elevation. As such, those among us living on the coast (raise your hand, Mark) certainly had our doubts close in mind. I will mention, however, that the Moggley guides were confident we’d allocated enough time to acclimate by arriving in the mountains by Wednesday afternoon.
As a couple of go-getters, Isaac and Charlie, who’d arrived at Valhalla a night earlier than us went on a test hike of a nearby mountain called Illiniza, the rest of us allowed our lungs the benefit of relaxation as we sat back and watched Casino Royale, all the while drinking mate de coca, a sort of herbal tea drink made from the leaves of the same plant that can be methodically manufactured into cocaine. (Supposedly, it’s good for altitude adjustment.) By that night, our entire group was assembled, minus a rather significant number of our group’s original signers. Due to some untimely sickness, Peter and his girlfriend Ella had been forced to drop out. Another volunteer couldn’t make it for a similar reason. Even among those who’d shown up at Valhalla, two of us weren’t doing so hot: digestive problems here as opposed to respiratory infections elsewhere.
The next day the guides appeared in a bus as Isaac, Josh and I were taking a little hike, being barked at by a different pair of country dogs for every fifty steps we took. After we’d returned, everyone got his or her equipment, the lot of us loaded up the bus and we got on our way to Cotopaxi.
Driving up the base of the mountain was like stepping through the Wardrobe and into a winter wonderland at the wrong time of year. Powering up switchback after switchback, the misting rain became a steadier downpour, which was eventually turned into a free falling snow shower. I’d been to Cotopaxi once before, but the number of people who were out last Friday made it seem like a whole new place altogether. As the hoods of cars and tops of buses were increasingly blotted out, Ecuadorians reveled in the snow, mashing gravel-laden groundcover into snowballs that they appeared fearful of throwing at their siblings. The guides informed us in Spanish to hold tight, that we’d make our way to the mountain refuge, our lodging for the night, as soon as the snow let up. My head felt funny; a number of others among our group were feeling the same way. I was thankful, however, that at least my bowels weren’t overactive, as they were for Kane’s friend who’d come to visit for a week from California. Poor guy.
Eventually, the snow did relent a bit. We emerged off the bus, threw on our water repellent clothes and tossed our gear over our shoulders as an Ecuadorian raced down the mountainside seated on a makeshift sled, a piece of plastic or glazed wood about the size of a paper plate. At the base of the refuge, only about a half an inch of snow had fallen, just enough so that when you stepped, enough of the surface was scraped back by your heels and toes to reveal the black rock beneath. Isaac compared it to walking over a trail of crushed Oreo cookies, which I found apt, delicious and salutary to the Brothers Grimm all at once. Needless to say, I was quite encouraged when the three of us from the coast were among the top four to arrive first at the refuge. If climbing 300 meters was this easy, we’d only have to do ten times that to take us to the summit!
Friday night involved a lot of eating, hydrating and resting. We familiarized ourselves with our surrounding, the guides climbing philosophies and as much hot cocoa as we could get our hands on well into the afternoon. After a few hands of cuarenta, a sizable spaghetti and vegetable dinner and the safety pep talk that I was so damn proud I didn’t need to ask to have translated, we were told to hit the sack. By then the refuge had all but been emptied of the Quito folk milling about before the descents to their cars, and all that was left was us “serious” climbers.
The plan was to begin our adventure at 1:00 that morning. It’s important to get this early of a start so as not to be caught in the snow later in the day. Weather conditions are fairly constant on Cotopaxi, and the snow rolls in—just as it had that day—in the early afternoon. If we were going to make the summit, we’d be hiking all night and would arrive there a few hours after sunrise. This would allow us enough time to make it back before things got sticky. The guides informed us that if we weren’t able to make it all the way up Cotopaxi by 8:30 A.M., we’d be forced to turn back, so as to arrive at the refuge by noon.
I don’t think a single person among us slept more than an hour Friday night. Between the nerves, the 700-meter elevation jump since the night before and Isaac’s incessant farting, sleeping conditions were just not what they’d been at Valhalla. I was feeling claustrophobic as hell in the army style bunks, made worse by having squished into a sleeping bag that was much too small for me somewhere in the pitch-dark refuge loft. I was a happy camper when one of the guides woke us up to get things underway. One of Kane’s friends who’d been feeling under the weather made the last minute decision to try the hike. This brought the total number who would attempt the summit from our group to eleven. Things were looking up!
Changing into our gear was fast but chomping through a breakfast of bread and cheese was even faster. I goofed around and shot a few photos (with the new Olympus FE-340 camera I picked up while home—yeah!) before getting in line to take our mostly ineffective turns at trying to go to the bathroom. I was the last one to step outside the refuge doors, thereby the last to be stunned by the dazzling star field dangling overhead.
The first part of the hike was the easiest. Immediately outside the refuge, the landscape was—on the scale we were about to encounter—relatively flat and walking was easy. The guides stressed that we take things slowly. That, in fact, would be the key to our success. I began to think of myself as the Turtle in that beloved fable of ours.
We soon arrived at the glacier on Cotopaxi. Had three or four inches not been covering the ground, the hike to here wouldn’t have involved any snow at all. The glacier itself, however, was the beginning a thick, crusty sheet of ice that doesn’t disappear seasonally. I wouldn’t have necessarily known that had I not been to Cotopaxi in the past. This was where we put on our crampons, the spiked attachments worn on the bottom of our rented boots, and ran ropes through our harnesses. Each guide had been charged with a team of two climbers. Charlie, a fellow coastal volunteer, and I decided to team up. A quick sip of water and the real hike began.
The next part of the climb turned out to be the hardest of all. The hiking route can be broken into sections, and the section that began next was little more than a super-steep, super-long asskicker of a mountainside. Charlie and I took it slower than most of the other teams of three and, before long, I found myself with my head turned up, watching the headlamps disappearing over the ridge far above me. Seeing them fading away with the white sheet of snow laid at my feet and the vast array of stars piercing through like the gaping acne of infinity’s dimensionless face, impacted footprints carving my vision in triangular segments, I felt more on a Martian landscape than I did on Earth.
Charlie had to drop out before too long. He was feeling weak and wisely chose to cut his adventure short. Chris, another volunteer, and his guide were nearby, so I tied on with them. We continued a long ways up the mountain, but I knew Chris wasn’t going to make it either when my toes began to get cold from stopping too often. The last group behind ours was another guide and a Japanese man about our age who’d come to Ecuador to sightsee. I tied on with them, which would turn out to be the last change that I’d do.
As night gave way into morning, more and more parts of me began to ache. The first part of me that felt it was my calves. They burned like a mother in no time. The next part was my shoulders, a result of the daypack that carried some food, water and a few extra articles of clothing. I always made sure to keep my breathing in check. That was the most important thing to me: to make sure I was getting the oxygen my body required. Only for a little while did I begin to feel dizzy, a sure sign that the altitude is getting to you. But, then again, there are varying degrees of dizziness, and some just have to be endured.
By the time morning broke and the sun had risen, our guide, the Japanese man and I had made it to 5500 meters. Cotopaxi’s summit still loomed in the distance; it would’ve been laughing if it had the vocal elements to do so. I’m not sure what time it was then, but our guide regrettably informed us that we’d have to turn back—a Gatorade break first. Even though it was still early, the summit was still a three-hour hike away by normal standards and a five-hour hike by the pace we’d set. Two other groups had already past us on their ways back down the mountainside. The early morning light like a new hope chiding me forward, I asked myself to understand it was the prudent decision to get down now. Still, a part of me wanted to see exactly how far my body could’ve withstood….
Getting down was a workout for the quads instead of the calves, so we were all-round exhausted by the time we made it back to the refuge. I climbed back into my sleeping bag and tried to convince myself this pounding headache was simply a product of dehydration. The Motrin would work, I told myself.
Hours later and the only one group remained on the mountain. To make a long story short, Isaac, Josh and, not surprisingly, their guide made the summit. Isn’t that great? Despite Isaac and all of the preparation he’d put in before the Cotopaxi climb (putting many of us to shame really), Josh, I think, deserves even greater applause. He was one of the three of us coastal volunteers and managed the climb without much specialized training at all; he is, however, a pretty well exercised dude. We joked at the tables inside the refuge as they went through their stories at the cumbre. The most remarkable part to me (besides their sheer endurance) was how they came back down. Apparently, by then the snow over the mountainside was partially melted and clung to their crampons whenever they took a step. Each time they had to use their ice picks to hit the sides of their boots and dislodge the snow. What a frickin’ pain! I’m so proud (and kind of jealous) of them.
What an intense experience. I can’t seem to quit saying that word in relation to this past weekend.
How’s It?
I’m pretty much in the exact same emotional state as I mentioned the last time I posted. I’m doing well but I’m split between enjoying the rest of my time here and feeling a yearning to be back home for good. I don’t know whether or not that will change until I’m too close to coming home anyhow.
What I should mention, though, is that my plane ticket home has been finalized. Unless plans change (which I doubt they will unless the unexpected occurs… always a definite possibility), I’m coming home for good on July 1st. My journey starts from Quito this time around and instead of heading through Houston, I have to return home through Miami (another minor stipulation I have to abide by). I’ll be in the air or hanging around an airport for nearly twelve hours, which will put me into Milwaukee at 6:20 P.M—we’ll see is the airlines keep to that. Come by to welcome me back. Sí, sí, sí. ¡Hazlo!
Looking back now, I’m trying to think of what in Ecuador reminds me the most of. The honest answer is slightly unusual in that, unless you’ve traveled here, you probably wouldn’t expect it as my answer.
It’s passing landscapes that bring back memories of Wisconsin most frequently. It’s the way an open road unfolds between wide-open fields between the peninsula and Guayaquil. It’s the way cows look drinking from a natural welling of water in the soil. It’s the way miles and miles of uninterrupted fencing—barbwire attached to sawed off wooden poles—moves with you as you pass through the world behind a pane of glass. Sometimes the reminder strikes me because the trees look so similar. Sometimes it’s because of a certain plant or shrub, or even a swing set, clothesline or some other inanimate object that brings to life the right connections in my mind. Sometimes it’s none of these things. But I’m quite certain, the vast majority of the time, it’s because I’m searching for an excuse to think of home. It’s hard not to miss it knowing that the weather is improving by you guys day by day. Late spring and early summer in Wisconsin are really special times of year.
So what the hell is new here? I’ll tell you… as I always find myself doing.
Tom’s going to be back again on the 10th. In case you need a little reminder, he’s been receiving additional teacher’s training at home in England. Carla has been keeping me updatesd on what he was up to all this time, and it always seemed to involve a lot of “deberes,” or homework. I’m sure he’ll be happy to be back in Ecuador and far, far away from the time-consuming demands of furthering his education. No worries, though, Tom! I’ll have some ice cold Clubs waiting for you when you make it back.
I get a message every once in a while from Peter. We mainly stay in contact through Facebook, and it’s always nice to hear from the kid (Hopefully he doesn’t read this. I’ve gone to great lengths to let him know he’s a total jerk for leaving.). I believe at this very moment he’s home in England, enjoying a little downtime with the padres. He’s managed to track down a job for himself in Bordeaux, France, which he’ll be starting up shortly. Although I’m not quite sure what he’s going to be doing. We haven’t managed to get around making fun of each other for long enough to talk about anything substantial.
One reason I get such a kick out of talking to Peter is because the kid is in a hundred places at once. After he’d first left, I got a message from him saying that he’d had a good time in Buenos Aires but was currently home in England. Sometime later I got another one out of the blue saying that he was having a blast skiing in France. A week later I got a message saying he was going to visit his girlfriend in Germany. Sometime after that I got one saying that he was headed back to France to find work. Now he’s in England for a while. Once he’s done there (for the second time), he’s going back to France. What’s the most incredible, though, is that the kid had the audacity to write in the last message, “I’m going to be happy to be in one place for a while,” referring to spending some time at home in England. But you’re going to be living and working in France before you know it, Peter! Crazy kid. He’s a traveler through and through. He knows it just as well as I do.
Now… despite all the attention I pay to the happy goings-on here, something absolutely terrible has occurred since the last time I wrote. Elsi quit! Oh God, the humanity! No more Elsi!
Elsi was the empleada, or maid, that worked for Sarah here at CasaLeon. You might not remember me saying much about her, but I’m pretty sure I described at some length her enthusiasm for local politics and, more selfishly, her incredible cooking. I can say with absolute certainty now that there was not a single thing that she cooked that I didn’t enjoy. In the eternal words of Peter, the woman was a legend.
Elsi’s resignation came about rather abruptly. Her children were still off from school and she decided to take a bit of time off before their school year started up again. Elsi has four children, the oldest of whom is eighteen and the youngest of whom is around twelve—this is the only one of her kids that I’ve met in person. Elsi had book a couple of weeks for vacation, but this free time continued to grow as the two-week mark came and past. Sarah was at the beach and Adam and I were headed into the centro for whatever reason when we ran into Elsi just outside the main gate. We were the first ones to find out that she wouldn’t be coming back.
Elsi attributes the reason to her children, specifically mentioning that she wants to be around after her youngest daughter has a minor surgery done. Where I still don’t know about how difficult it is to recover from the type of surgery she’s getting done, Sarah questions whether Elsi was just tired of working. Having children who can make an independent living on their own means that the tables might have finally turned and now they’re supporting her instead of her supporting them.
Sarah is a little bummed with the whole situation, and understandably so. Elsi had been working here for over six years and replacing her means teaching someone else the ins and outs of this place. We’ve already gone through one temporary empleada who was filling in for Elsi for a while. Even though the replacement knew her time here was short because of her own children she’d committed herself to taking care of, she recommended Justina, who is—at least seemingly so—the new permanent worker. I like her. She’s nice and she smiles a lot. Even though training her has put an additional strain on Sarah, I have confidence the new arrangement will work out for the best. One thing is certain… Justina makes good chicken!
Weather
I make this a section only to make it all very apparent that la temporada, or Ecuadorian summer, has officially come and gone. While the sun stills peaks out from time to time, the best of the weather is gone. I’ve finally reached that terrible nexus where, once again, Wisconsin weather is probably more pleasant than it is here. Sarah went into detail a few days ago to tell me about how cold the water had become and how cloudy the sky was going to be from here on out. I thought about mentioning that the water would never get cold enough along an Ecuadorian coast to prevent a Wisconsinite from swimming, but it didn’t seem prudent at the time. I certainly don’t fear the temperatures, but it’s nice to see the sun (and why would I ever want to lose my tan?).
So, at this juncture, I’d just like to take a moment to publicly declare: NOOOOO! Damn it… it’s over. Chaocito, la temporada. It was good while it lasted. I’ll miss you, sol, and all of the underdressed Latin women you brought to the playa….
Teaching
My English teaching career can be summarized with one word as of late: compromise. In the last post, I talked about “reviewing” with my new class at Nuestro Mundo (as I’m now a fixture of private high school education in Salinas), which was a nice way of saying that my classes hadn’t been properly organized. I had a class but I didn’t have my class.
Well, now I have my classes, but I don’t have my materials. I’ve been teaching the last week or so without the benefit of a textbook. We were given a pair of copies of the first three unit’s workbook exercises to act as a general guide, but even so, these are simply a collection of questions and answers that don’t act as a comprehensive learning guide for students. The resource problems I’m having really haven’t caused too much of a problem for me because I’ve taught beginner speakers before, so I have a fair amount of experience with the target language, how to teach it and, perhaps most inconspicuously, the grammar rules I should be emphasizing. I suppose who I now feel the worst for are the new teachers who still lack a lot of experience, namely Adam and Daniela. Before me, they’d been “reviewing” with students for an additional two weeks, and now they have to continue with new classes but next to nothing for accompanying texts.
I hope I don’t sound too harsh on the administration. I don’t mean to blame someone like Humberto for this. I know it’s not his fault when he’s traveling to Guayaquil at least twice a week to secure our payments and the teaching materials we need. This is a problem that comes from a higher source than him, although I really blame anyone outright. Without having more information to base my decision off of, I believe this all goes back to the person in charge of CELEX and his ultimate decision (or should I say indecision?) to neglect programming here on the peninsula. Humberto’s fought really, really hard to keep things going for students and teachers such as myself, but that doesn’t mean that, short of being cut off, our programs still aren’t being ignored.
My classes changed two weeks ago. Logistically, I can hardly complain with my new schedule. I now teach in the early mornings, classes starting at 7:30 A.M. The schedule just underwent another minor shift yesterday (I pray this will be the last), which gives me an hour break between the two one-and-a-half hour classes—one class full of middle schoolers, the other with high schoolers—depending on the day of the week which of the two groups gets taught first. Therefore, I’m done teaching on any given day by 11:25, leaving the rest of the day open to my usual shenanigans.
Since things have changed, I’ve been given two new groups of students to work with. Even though each class’s average age is rather close in a relative spectrum—however incomparable when it really gets down to the core of it—I can’t decide whether the middle or the high schoolers are more savvy English speakers/learners. Depending on the day, I might say that either group responded more intelligently or would have scored better on a test. Whatever the case, it’s nice to only have to prepare one lesson plan (he he). I was skeptical at first, believing that teaching the same material back to back would be remarkably boring. But it turns out it’s not boring at all. Each class has different questions, different obstacles to learning and different things that happen during class (a lazy, looping hornet flew into the room to terrorize my high schoolers earlier this week) to remind you that life can be a total crapshoot.
In getting used to these new students, I wouldn’t say that the ones I have now are any less crazy than the ones I had before (the ones I struggled with during the “review” week), just that they’re crazy in different ways. My latest and greatest teaching problem has been dealing with random English swear words that seem to pop out from nowhere when my back is turned. The first f-bomb was thrown last week and we had another one this week, this time from the high school-aged kids. I do my best not to get pissed off, explain to them why it’s an offensive word and why it would offend me, but these little talks always end with my students discussing some random topic between themselves in Spanish more often than they end up achieving anything resembling a newfound understanding. I need to continually remind myself that these are high school kids, and they just don’t think the same way I do.
Still, I hope I’m not becoming more of a lax teacher as I near the end of my (at least foreseeable) teaching career. More frequently now than ever, my classes are distracted when regional conversations throughout the classroom repeatedly emerge. Telling my students to shut up (A habit of mine they most definitely find more enjoyable than threatening: Some of them have even taken to telling each other to shut up when they sense the times that I’m going to first.) is like playing the game at Chuck E. Cheese where you pound the purple gophers that peak up with the leather mallet. There comes a point when I just don’t care anymore, that I either can’t or don’t want to find a way to quiet my students down enough to continue teaching all of them. At these points I take a short break, usually reclining in a chair at the front of the classroom, before continuing to teach those few students who continue to pay attention to English despite their surroundings. These are the students who are the easiest to love.
Discipline is certainly not my strong point. I’m of the mindset that if you don’t want to learn, you don’t have to, and it’s not my job to make you. However, maybe this is precisely the mindset that enables me to avoid becoming a stronger disciplinarian. Greater still, I have to wonder if a middle/high school is really the ideal environment for me to be teaching in. I highly doubt it….
Volcán Cotopaxi
While I could probably go on quite a bit about Sarah’s host grandfather’s 80th birthday party in Guayaquil the weekend after last, this blog entry is already too long and it’s going to be significantly more interesting (however much longer) for me to stick to this one topic: the Cotopaxi climb.
I’m not quite sure whose idea was the original inspiration for the Cotopaxi climb, but I know I heard the first real push to do it from my buddy Isaac. Even before Easter, he’d been hyping the idea to me, even though I remained skeptical that I would do it until I put my final payment down. Whatever the case, I’d known about the climb since before I left for home. A flurry of emails started to fly in every which direction around that time, preparations being made and commentary issuing from different corners of Ecuador, but I remained strategically silent in telling others that I would be one of the participating climbers. Not only had I not researched the climb enough on my own, I didn’t want to do anything to encourage my mom to conduct any research of her own, thereby feeding any of the worries she might have been experiencing (Sorry, Mom. I hope you’ll accept it if I say I had your best interests in mind.).
Sometime during my two weeks back home, Peter, a volunteer who took the lion’s share of the initiative in organizing the hike, put down $50 in my name. Knowledgeable or dumb, now I felt compelled to do the thing.
The timing of the hike was planned when it was with good reason. Last week Thursday, May 1, was the equivalent holiday here as our Labor Day. In an almost whimsical show of generosity (after all, the same guy essentially removed a holiday previously in the year for all governmental employees), President Rafael Correa declared that Friday a national holiday as well, extending the weekend and giving all of us English teachers the necessary time to do something like this.
Anyway, I bolted from the coast last week Wednesday after teaching classes in the morning. I hopped a flight Carla and her friend miraculously helped me to book the previous day in spite of the holiday crowds. AeroGal got me into Quito around 4:00 that afternoon, after I went through a bit of the run around in the Guayaquil airport on account of my Swiss Army knife pen drive. I met up with a couple of other volunteers at the climbing company in Quito, finished paying up what I owed and sympathized a while with Morgan, the gregarious (and questionably sane) Swedish climbing aficionado at Moggley. I slept by a volunteer couple’s pad that night and a group of us got on our way toward Moggley’s climbing hostal, Valhalla, near Cotopaxi semi-early Thursday morning.
To give you an idea of the challenge we were pitting ourselves against, Cotopaxi is dormant volcano rising over 19,500 feet into the sky; it’s also the highest peak in Ecuador. The volcano is located about two hours south of Quito and many of the guides, like the ones who work for Moggley, climb it more than once a week. The nice thing about climbing Cotopaxi is that it isn’t a technical climb at all. You don’t need any “classic” climbing experience in the sense of having the proficiency to work pulleys and belays or being able to Sylvester Stalone your way up the sheer face of a cliff. You do, however, need to have the physical capacity to walk, step after arduous step, up slopes as steep as black diamond ski runs. The crummy thing about climbing Cotopaxi is that: one, 19,500 feet is no piece of cake even for experienced climbers; and, two, a body’s adaptation to the altitude and all it has—or lacks—to offer is potentially more essential to completing the climb than one’s physical capabilities at a lower elevation. As such, those among us living on the coast (raise your hand, Mark) certainly had our doubts close in mind. I will mention, however, that the Moggley guides were confident we’d allocated enough time to acclimate by arriving in the mountains by Wednesday afternoon.
As a couple of go-getters, Isaac and Charlie, who’d arrived at Valhalla a night earlier than us went on a test hike of a nearby mountain called Illiniza, the rest of us allowed our lungs the benefit of relaxation as we sat back and watched Casino Royale, all the while drinking mate de coca, a sort of herbal tea drink made from the leaves of the same plant that can be methodically manufactured into cocaine. (Supposedly, it’s good for altitude adjustment.) By that night, our entire group was assembled, minus a rather significant number of our group’s original signers. Due to some untimely sickness, Peter and his girlfriend Ella had been forced to drop out. Another volunteer couldn’t make it for a similar reason. Even among those who’d shown up at Valhalla, two of us weren’t doing so hot: digestive problems here as opposed to respiratory infections elsewhere.
The next day the guides appeared in a bus as Isaac, Josh and I were taking a little hike, being barked at by a different pair of country dogs for every fifty steps we took. After we’d returned, everyone got his or her equipment, the lot of us loaded up the bus and we got on our way to Cotopaxi.
Driving up the base of the mountain was like stepping through the Wardrobe and into a winter wonderland at the wrong time of year. Powering up switchback after switchback, the misting rain became a steadier downpour, which was eventually turned into a free falling snow shower. I’d been to Cotopaxi once before, but the number of people who were out last Friday made it seem like a whole new place altogether. As the hoods of cars and tops of buses were increasingly blotted out, Ecuadorians reveled in the snow, mashing gravel-laden groundcover into snowballs that they appeared fearful of throwing at their siblings. The guides informed us in Spanish to hold tight, that we’d make our way to the mountain refuge, our lodging for the night, as soon as the snow let up. My head felt funny; a number of others among our group were feeling the same way. I was thankful, however, that at least my bowels weren’t overactive, as they were for Kane’s friend who’d come to visit for a week from California. Poor guy.
Eventually, the snow did relent a bit. We emerged off the bus, threw on our water repellent clothes and tossed our gear over our shoulders as an Ecuadorian raced down the mountainside seated on a makeshift sled, a piece of plastic or glazed wood about the size of a paper plate. At the base of the refuge, only about a half an inch of snow had fallen, just enough so that when you stepped, enough of the surface was scraped back by your heels and toes to reveal the black rock beneath. Isaac compared it to walking over a trail of crushed Oreo cookies, which I found apt, delicious and salutary to the Brothers Grimm all at once. Needless to say, I was quite encouraged when the three of us from the coast were among the top four to arrive first at the refuge. If climbing 300 meters was this easy, we’d only have to do ten times that to take us to the summit!
Friday night involved a lot of eating, hydrating and resting. We familiarized ourselves with our surrounding, the guides climbing philosophies and as much hot cocoa as we could get our hands on well into the afternoon. After a few hands of cuarenta, a sizable spaghetti and vegetable dinner and the safety pep talk that I was so damn proud I didn’t need to ask to have translated, we were told to hit the sack. By then the refuge had all but been emptied of the Quito folk milling about before the descents to their cars, and all that was left was us “serious” climbers.
The plan was to begin our adventure at 1:00 that morning. It’s important to get this early of a start so as not to be caught in the snow later in the day. Weather conditions are fairly constant on Cotopaxi, and the snow rolls in—just as it had that day—in the early afternoon. If we were going to make the summit, we’d be hiking all night and would arrive there a few hours after sunrise. This would allow us enough time to make it back before things got sticky. The guides informed us that if we weren’t able to make it all the way up Cotopaxi by 8:30 A.M., we’d be forced to turn back, so as to arrive at the refuge by noon.
I don’t think a single person among us slept more than an hour Friday night. Between the nerves, the 700-meter elevation jump since the night before and Isaac’s incessant farting, sleeping conditions were just not what they’d been at Valhalla. I was feeling claustrophobic as hell in the army style bunks, made worse by having squished into a sleeping bag that was much too small for me somewhere in the pitch-dark refuge loft. I was a happy camper when one of the guides woke us up to get things underway. One of Kane’s friends who’d been feeling under the weather made the last minute decision to try the hike. This brought the total number who would attempt the summit from our group to eleven. Things were looking up!
Changing into our gear was fast but chomping through a breakfast of bread and cheese was even faster. I goofed around and shot a few photos (with the new Olympus FE-340 camera I picked up while home—yeah!) before getting in line to take our mostly ineffective turns at trying to go to the bathroom. I was the last one to step outside the refuge doors, thereby the last to be stunned by the dazzling star field dangling overhead.
The first part of the hike was the easiest. Immediately outside the refuge, the landscape was—on the scale we were about to encounter—relatively flat and walking was easy. The guides stressed that we take things slowly. That, in fact, would be the key to our success. I began to think of myself as the Turtle in that beloved fable of ours.
We soon arrived at the glacier on Cotopaxi. Had three or four inches not been covering the ground, the hike to here wouldn’t have involved any snow at all. The glacier itself, however, was the beginning a thick, crusty sheet of ice that doesn’t disappear seasonally. I wouldn’t have necessarily known that had I not been to Cotopaxi in the past. This was where we put on our crampons, the spiked attachments worn on the bottom of our rented boots, and ran ropes through our harnesses. Each guide had been charged with a team of two climbers. Charlie, a fellow coastal volunteer, and I decided to team up. A quick sip of water and the real hike began.
The next part of the climb turned out to be the hardest of all. The hiking route can be broken into sections, and the section that began next was little more than a super-steep, super-long asskicker of a mountainside. Charlie and I took it slower than most of the other teams of three and, before long, I found myself with my head turned up, watching the headlamps disappearing over the ridge far above me. Seeing them fading away with the white sheet of snow laid at my feet and the vast array of stars piercing through like the gaping acne of infinity’s dimensionless face, impacted footprints carving my vision in triangular segments, I felt more on a Martian landscape than I did on Earth.
Charlie had to drop out before too long. He was feeling weak and wisely chose to cut his adventure short. Chris, another volunteer, and his guide were nearby, so I tied on with them. We continued a long ways up the mountain, but I knew Chris wasn’t going to make it either when my toes began to get cold from stopping too often. The last group behind ours was another guide and a Japanese man about our age who’d come to Ecuador to sightsee. I tied on with them, which would turn out to be the last change that I’d do.
As night gave way into morning, more and more parts of me began to ache. The first part of me that felt it was my calves. They burned like a mother in no time. The next part was my shoulders, a result of the daypack that carried some food, water and a few extra articles of clothing. I always made sure to keep my breathing in check. That was the most important thing to me: to make sure I was getting the oxygen my body required. Only for a little while did I begin to feel dizzy, a sure sign that the altitude is getting to you. But, then again, there are varying degrees of dizziness, and some just have to be endured.
By the time morning broke and the sun had risen, our guide, the Japanese man and I had made it to 5500 meters. Cotopaxi’s summit still loomed in the distance; it would’ve been laughing if it had the vocal elements to do so. I’m not sure what time it was then, but our guide regrettably informed us that we’d have to turn back—a Gatorade break first. Even though it was still early, the summit was still a three-hour hike away by normal standards and a five-hour hike by the pace we’d set. Two other groups had already past us on their ways back down the mountainside. The early morning light like a new hope chiding me forward, I asked myself to understand it was the prudent decision to get down now. Still, a part of me wanted to see exactly how far my body could’ve withstood….
Getting down was a workout for the quads instead of the calves, so we were all-round exhausted by the time we made it back to the refuge. I climbed back into my sleeping bag and tried to convince myself this pounding headache was simply a product of dehydration. The Motrin would work, I told myself.
Hours later and the only one group remained on the mountain. To make a long story short, Isaac, Josh and, not surprisingly, their guide made the summit. Isn’t that great? Despite Isaac and all of the preparation he’d put in before the Cotopaxi climb (putting many of us to shame really), Josh, I think, deserves even greater applause. He was one of the three of us coastal volunteers and managed the climb without much specialized training at all; he is, however, a pretty well exercised dude. We joked at the tables inside the refuge as they went through their stories at the cumbre. The most remarkable part to me (besides their sheer endurance) was how they came back down. Apparently, by then the snow over the mountainside was partially melted and clung to their crampons whenever they took a step. Each time they had to use their ice picks to hit the sides of their boots and dislodge the snow. What a frickin’ pain! I’m so proud (and kind of jealous) of them.
What an intense experience. I can’t seem to quit saying that word in relation to this past weekend.
How’s It?
I’m pretty much in the exact same emotional state as I mentioned the last time I posted. I’m doing well but I’m split between enjoying the rest of my time here and feeling a yearning to be back home for good. I don’t know whether or not that will change until I’m too close to coming home anyhow.
What I should mention, though, is that my plane ticket home has been finalized. Unless plans change (which I doubt they will unless the unexpected occurs… always a definite possibility), I’m coming home for good on July 1st. My journey starts from Quito this time around and instead of heading through Houston, I have to return home through Miami (another minor stipulation I have to abide by). I’ll be in the air or hanging around an airport for nearly twelve hours, which will put me into Milwaukee at 6:20 P.M—we’ll see is the airlines keep to that. Come by to welcome me back. Sí, sí, sí. ¡Hazlo!
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
CrazyFace, not CrazyLegs
Coming Back
Well, it wouldn’t take much to realize I’ve since returned to Ecuador. The first time I returned home over Christmas, it was the sheer size of things in the United States the surprised me: roads were wider, the cars on them bigger, buildings were taller and even everyday American citizens were larger and more imposing than I could remember prior to living here. This time the big surprise came when I returned to Ecuador: I was amazed with how colorful the place was. Had it always been this way, or did something change for the two weeks I’d left? Ha. That’s a dumb question (which probably explains why I asked it…).
Maybe it was because after two weeks of watching a Wisconsin spring advance, anything is colorful. Maybe I’d gotten so used to brown grass, leafless trees and barren cornfields that anything other than brown would have been a welcome sight. Whatever the case, the morning after arriving back in Guayaquil was like stepping into a painting. Even the people dress more vibrantly here (which may or may not go against a slew of fashion don’ts that I would know nothing about).
I don’t have all that much to say as far as traveling goes (with good reason), so I thought I might write about some other stuff.
On Wednesday, I played beach volleyball with a group of Ecuadorians, Adam and Daniela, a half-British, half-Ecuadorian twenty-one-year-old I met through a friend of Sarah’s a few weeks back (Daniela is the newest edition to our English teaching family at CELEX—yeah!). It was the first time I played volleyball since getting out here. I really don’t think it’s that interesting of a topic, however, other than I met a guy who they all called “Cara de Loca,” which means Crazy Face. He did have kind of a messed up face.
I went surfing for the first time in a while on Thursday with Carla and Adam. Carla’s been practicing up now that she’s on vacation and has the time to devote to the sport that she didn’t have before. She had a board propped in the corner of her room for a number of years that didn’t see all that much action. When she took it out a few weeks back, it turns out the thing wasn’t quite watertight, as in, the foam core of the board was actually absorbing water. Not good.
On Thursday, we rented three boards from Surf Paradise, the small surfing company I’ve been rocking out with in Salinas, and Carla was pretty damn good. I definitely think she’s made progress faster than I did at the onset of my surfing education. Better yet, she was all smiles; even at Punta Carnero where the ocean was rough and all three of us got absolutely hammered by the waves (lots went up my nose!). Adam, for his part, had a great time too. Your first time out is always a hit or miss sort of experience; you can’t know exactly what to expect—surfing is deceptively different from the shore. We had a good laugh, though, because he was wearing one of his many Georgia Bulldogs T-shirts (it won’t be white for long), so he could always be proud that he was “representing” even if surfing can be frustrating as hell for beginners.
I had some success out there. They’d given me shorter board than I’m used to using, so I felt pretty good that I could still catch a wave and stand up on it (the shorter the board, the tougher it can be to surf). There’s a difference too between riding an actual wave and riding a wave after it’s broken. Riding a wave before it’s broken is much harder because the wave itself creates an incline down which a surfer accelerates. If you’re not good enough to handle the speed or the fact that your body and board are accelerating toward the ocean floor, you’re not going to be able to ride the wave. Riding the foam (“espuma,” as they’ll tell you here), or after the wave has broken, is significantly easier, especially because it really only involves acceleration in one direction—forward! I’m saying all this because I’ve never really surfed any waves worth talking about before Thursday. But I got one that day, which was pretty frickin’ awesome. Even Victor, my surf instructor, was impressed, which must say something because the guy doesn’t get excited for much of anything on the water.
To be honest, though, sometimes it’s the stuff that doesn’t even require a board that’s the best stuff about going surfing. For instance, on Thursday, there were these schools of black fish that swelled up into the incoming waves. I don’t know if they were searching for food or what, but all of a sudden, the top of these waves were loaded with little black bodies darting every which way. A bunch of flying fish were out too. It was so cool to be fighting against the waves when three or four of them would go flying past you. Sometimes they’d suddenly appear out of a giant wave coming at me, and sometimes they’d fly from the tiny swells between the bigger ones. Even just watching the ocean come at you is an incredible sight, the sun low over the water. I’ve mentioned it before, but the ocean at Punta Carnero is particularly rough, which, if you ask me, only adds to its beauty.
Teaching
Well, now that I’m starting a new series of teaching, I should have expected that my schedule would be as drastically different as it has been in the past. This may seem unusual, but I taught the majority of this last week and I still don’t have a class. Why’s that? Oh God, another explanation….
I’m a teacher for CELEX, a language program arising out of Guayaquil, but the actual school I teach at is Nuestro Mundo. Nuestro Mundo is a private school, having class options for middle and high school students all at one place, even though it’s a relatively small building we’re in. So CELEX provides English teachers to Nuestro Mundo, which is where people like Adam, Daniela and I come in. However, the reason I don’t have a set class right now is that a placement exam had to be administered first. While we’re waiting on the results of the test, none of the teachers have the class he or she is going to be teaching over the next few weeks. As such, we’ve been instructed to review and play games with different classes until the administrative underpinnings are sorted out. You see, the difference is that before I was working only for CELEX—I was teaching CELEX students at Nuestro Mundo. Now I’m working for Nuestro Mundo kids through CELEX, so the only thing that’s remained constant is the location.
On Tuesday, I was assigned as the teacher to a high school-aged group and to a middle school-aged group. The high school group has been a dream. They’re super smart, they listen well and they seem at least mildly interested in learning English. Working with them this last week has been an absolute cinch. The middle school group, however, is a different story. I’d estimate that I spend at least a third of the class trying to convince them not to punch one another. They’re insane! And even though they’re draining, I can’t say that I don’t like the challenge of trying to hold their attentions long enough to teach them something. (Mom, I have a newfound respect for the work you do).
I made it my goal to impress on them the differences between nouns, adjectives and verbs. Talking before them, however, did little. The only activities that seem to work well with them are physical ones. Captain Says (Simon Says for all of us), for instance, went over well, as did Telephone, the game where a sentence is whispered in a circle and the final student must repeat back as close to the original sentence as possible. Bingo, on the other hand, was speedily rejected, as was Twenty Questions. I’d know when an activity was failing by how many of them had resorted to begging me if they could go outside and play soccer in the courtyard instead of having English class. They just don’t seem to get it when I tell them, “We have English class now. You’ll have gym a little later,” (I must sound like such a dweeb! No wonder I don’t get very far). Anyway, I doubt many of them enjoy a single class other than gym.
I did my best with an age group I’ve never taught before, but a spirit of self-rule seems to dominate my classroom. I’m convinced it occurs as a result of not having a regular teacher and the fact that their classroom might be abandoned for an hour at a time depending on which day of the week it is. Sometimes the only person checking in on them is the director of the school, who surely isn’t the disciplinary type I recall from my middle school years. Leave a bunch of twelve and thirteen year olds to themselves and someone’s going to get hit… repeatedly hit. Maybe I ought to screw the English and teach them how to box….
But while they may be loud and obnoxious and so antsy you begin to wonder if there’s enough Ritalin in all of Latin America to solve your problems, they’re a nice group of kids. They participate well and ask more questions than any group of students I’ve ever taught before. They’re hungry to learn, if only I can find a way to get through to them. At this point I’m tempted to say kids will be kids, but I believe that’s dismissive thinking and distracts people from placing on them the responsibility they’re all capable of dealing with.
Ha. Then again, there are always those moments when it amazes me to think that these middle school students have the potential of one day becoming the calm and collective bunch my high school group is. Maybe that’s assuming too much. I have to keep them from killing each other on my watch first….
How's It?I’ve reached an interesting point now, and one that I feel entirely ambivalent about. Having recently submitted my request to return for good on June 29th, a date still not set in stone, I have just over two months left in the country.
I’m split because I like it here a lot, and Ecuador has helped me to learn a ton of stuff about myself and what I want to do with my life. Just Friday morning I was reminiscing with Adam about how my introduction to the peninsula and the beginning of my teaching career differed from his. Specifically, we talked about how I didn’t get off to quite the running start that he has. My Spanish was fairly pathetic, I was teaching a class I didn’t have any experience teaching and, worst of all, I had only a handful of contacts in the immediate area, none of which I then considered as anything more than mere acquaintances. I struggled with loneliness, and I feel as if that struggle has strengthened me, even if it didn’t seem like that at the time. Furthermore, I’ve gained a newfound confidence in myself and the things I do. After all, if I can succeed at doing a new job in a foreign country for this duration of time, what can’t I do? (Don’t answer that question… it’s supposed to be rhetorical.) Really, Ecuador has helped me to realize what I want the next step of my life to be.
But I’m also somewhat anxious to get home. Like I just said, I’m excited about where my life is going. Believe it or not, I’m really looking forward to starting medical school and buckling down on my education. This may sound weird, but I want to return to a time when my schedule is more established than it is here, when what is going to happen in my life is (at least marginally) more predictable than it has been over the past year of my life. I’ll explain. For at least some of my senior year, I’d gained the impression that I was headed out the door. I knew before Christmas that the Peace Corps would accept me (even though I wouldn’t end up accepting the Peace Corps); I knew by early spring that I was headed to Ecuador instead of Africa; I graduated in May and shot up to Shawano, Wisconsin, to start an internship by the beginning of June; by the time that finished, I had a month left before beginning my commitment in Ecuador. I want that sense of normalcy, of being able to define myself in a certain place, in my life again. More than anything, I want my life to contain the dedicated focus on one broad area of expertise (guess what that might be) that it’s lacked in recent years.
There are other reasons I seek to find myself in one place again for a more substantial length of time. Without being too mean about it, it’s kind of discouraging when people begin to write you off because they know you’re only going to be around for a little while longer. When I first came out here, my students would ask me how long I planned to stay in Ecuador, and I always told them around a year. Saying this was always greeted with approval, sometimes even surprise that I’d made such a lengthy commitment. Now I’ve reached a point when I tell them until the end of June. The reaction now is something closer to mild indifference; perhaps one of them offers up a grave nod of understanding as if to say, “This is what you have to do if you want to be a doctor.”
To a lesser degree, I miss the comforts of home. I say this because my views on what comprises comfort have changed. While I don’t live with a coffee machine, frequent air conditioning or plumbing capable of flushing toilet paper, my capacity to adapt to a living situation allows me to feel comfortable, even if I don’t have all of the gadgets and commodities that we commonly associate with comfort. At the onset of this experience, a lot of people raised objections about me living here: Wouldn’t I get sick too often? Wouldn’t there be too many bugs? Wouldn’t there be too much crime? Wouldn’t it be too damn hot (think of Robin Williams in Good Morning Vietnam)? I feel as if many of these concerns (and perhaps even more frequently, my own concerns—that ill-conceived phobia of rabies suddenly comes to mind) were exaggerated or founded on nothing substantial—maybe a vague impression, a pair of tidbits from a Wikipedia page and a Food Network special or a handed down story from a friend of a friend of a friend who, at one point of another, had something to do with one of those countries in that general region of the world. I had to get here to know Ecuador; the details just fell into place as I carried on with my life from day to day. (As a few words of encouragement to some of you reading this, I don’t believe what I’ve done in adapting here is anything special. The difference is that I’ve willfully embraced a change whereas many times life forces us into it. Nothing I’ve done to adapt here is out of anyone’s reach. I always find it crucial to remember it’s infinitely more difficult to get started than it is to keep going.)
When I refer to the comforts of home, I’m referring to some of those things I’ve sorely been missing since coming here that are anything but material (Minus my bike. Good God, I miss my bike). I’m talking about knowing what’s going on around me and having a greater insight into why things unfold the way they do. I’m talking about being able to call my friends for mere cents any time I want. I’m talking about a tiny, tumor-ridden Labrador that’s impossibly happy to see me when I come through the door. I’m talking about that all-important support network of my family and being that much closer to the love they give me. It doesn’t make a lick of difference if you’re drinking Miller or Pilsener, if you’re wearing Abercrombie or some offshoot of Quiksilver sewn together in Peru, if you get from place to place in a Land Rover or a candy cane colored Trancisa bus that sounds more like a Continental airliner with a terrible fever. Those things I’ve said above are what you really miss when you leave home.
But the solution to the way I’m feeling is a simple one. While part of me wishes I could’ve just stayed home for good when I was there, the truth is that now I’m here, and I’m going to keep making the most of this experience while I have the opportunity to do so.
In the end, two months is neither long nor short. Time moves along at exactly the same rate as it always has, as it always will. I used to think of time as my enemy, that I was competing against time to fit the most “worth” into my life. Now I think that’s a silly way to look at it. Not only is it a battle no one short of (insert protagonist’s name from The Time TravelerI—what’s with all the movie references?) can win, why even try? I shouldn’t have to maximum my time, and I certainly shouldn’t have to maximize my life. Maybe a better way to see things is that I’ll do what I can with the time that’s given to me. And, in the light of that, two months is the perfect amount of time to finish the important things I’ve set out to do here in Ecuador.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Los Simpson
New Blue
I don’t believe I’ve ever brought this up before, but I find it amusing that I can track how much Spanish I’ve learned by watching The Simpsons—the show itself is very popular here. Of course some parts (even individual characters) are easier to understand than others, but still. It’s kind of fun to flip on an episode sometime around 8 or 9 o’clock and see if I recognize any verbs I’d learned that week. That’s what I was doing earlier tonight. That was, before Carla came back and we ate some choclo and drank a few Clubs.
I have very little to say that’s new, which might be for the best as I have a tendency to get really longwinded with the whole blog thing.
Adam, the new volunteer, still isn’t down here. He’s finished orientation, yes, but he’s doing a bit of traveling before coming here to stay. I don’t know too much about it as we haven’t been texting each other as much as we might, but it’s all good. He’ll be here soon enough.
Peter’s been gone for over two weeks. Saying see you later was tougher than I thought it was going to be. We lived here together for five months, and I didn’t really realize how much I’d confided in the guy. We had a pretty happening send-off in Guayaquil before I went with him to the airport the day after. Maybe too good of a send-off….
Tom is still in England and is doing well, I hear. Carla is working her ass off on a project for the tourism she’s involved with. She’s on vacation from her normal job right now, but what she’s doing now might be even more time consuming than her normal job. Sarah, as always, is doing well. She’s been really busy with preparations for the re-opening of the museum. Allow me to explain:
As well as being a hospedaje (equivalent to like a bed and breakfast) and a really, really cool house, the place I live at actually houses the skeletal remains of one of the original habitants of the peninsula. Way back, when they were still building this home, the builders chanced upon a skeleton. Instead of moving it or selling the land, Sarah and her husband decided to make an exhibit of it. Along with a bunch of other artifacts and really old tools and stuff, it’s a cool little two-room museum. I’m not too sure why it was ever closed in the first place, but this coming Monday is the grand re-opening. Maybe I’ll get to meet the mayor! I understand he’s been invited.
Easter
I had a nice, relaxing Easter here in Ecuador. The highlight of last weekend was definitely fanesca. While Latin America doesn’t seem to be as big on Easter traditions as we are in the U.S. (no Easter egg hunts, for instance), around here, they do have only little thing they like to do—and that’s to eat fanesca.
I should mention that eating fanesca certainly isn’t as big of a deal as making fanesca is. The dish is a fish and bean soup, but it definitely leans more heavily on the beans than it does on the fish. There are twelve—count ‘em!—twelve different kinds of beans in fanesca, one for each of Jesus’ disciples. (Side note: I did my best to find out which one was the Judas bean, but no one seems to know or care.) Two of Sarah’s brother-in-laws had come down with their wives to celebrate the holiday, and even with the four of them, Sarah and one cooking-incompetent gringo, it still took all morning to make the stuff. But make the stuff we did! You should’ve seen the size of the pot we ended up using. Sarah’s been hawking the leftovers all week, and we only finished eating it on Thursday night. It was pretty good, but not that good. The soup had a lot of different consistencies, depending on which random bean constitution you spooned up for a mouthful.
Teaching
Now that I’m almost done with Basico A, it’s safe to say I’m familiar with the intensive course teaching style. Four hours a day is not to be taken lightly, and I only say that because of the last hour, not the first three. Getting through three hours of teaching is, at least for me, a piece of cake. Getting through that last hour, though, is a different story. It gets damn tough to keep a bunch of eighteen and nineteen-year-olds attentions! I’ve declared war on cell phones. I’ll never win, but that won’t stop me from fighting. My students think they’re so sneaky, but they’re not! I know all the tricks by now. I feel undeservingly powerful when I steal one of their phones for the remainder of a class.
Really, though, I still maintain that the group I have now is the best bunch I’ve yet had. A lot of them are really dedicated and student hard for the class. That’s nice to see.
Besides for a few untimely power outages and a lot of temporada heat (it’s been damn hot lately!), I really don’t have all that much to say here either. It really cooks in that little room (my classroom is fairly cramped; that’s a lie, it’s extremely cramped) when the air conditioner goes on the fritz. It seems to have taken a liking to doing just that, but I should expect as such in a new building when they’re doing electrical work.
Travel
I went up to Puerto Lopez this weekend to meet up with a few others volunteers who are on vacation right now. We went to Machililla National Park, just a little further to the north from Puerto Lopez, and did some hiking and swimming at the awesome beaches they have there. After that, we hopped a bus back to Puerto Lopez, and then another bus from there to Montañita.
The best part about Montañita was seeing Lisa again. She was gone for the month of March to visit her family back in California, but now she’s back. We went surfing on Sunday morning, and even though I haven’t been surfing in three or four weeks, I did surprisingly well. I even managed to turn the board so I was riding on the actually wave, instead of in front of it. This is something I haven’t been able to do before. I’m getting there!
What about Mark?
Feelin’ fine. I’ve been running a ton to keep the stress levels low and take in some pretty beach scenery near sunset. Slowly but surely, I’ve been improvising my running routes. Kind of exciting for old Mark here. I’d write more about it, but I don’t think it’d mean a lot for anyone other than me.
Really, I’m totally focused on having a few weeks off at home. I’ve been waiting pretty patiently for this, and I only have to wait a week longer.
Hopefully most of the snow is gone when I get back to Wisconsin. I don’t feel like trudging through all that slush. I despise you, spring slush. I’m sure a bunch of you are wishing for the same as me. C’mon, sun, do your job!
The only thing left to say is… happy birthday, Karin!
I don’t believe I’ve ever brought this up before, but I find it amusing that I can track how much Spanish I’ve learned by watching The Simpsons—the show itself is very popular here. Of course some parts (even individual characters) are easier to understand than others, but still. It’s kind of fun to flip on an episode sometime around 8 or 9 o’clock and see if I recognize any verbs I’d learned that week. That’s what I was doing earlier tonight. That was, before Carla came back and we ate some choclo and drank a few Clubs.
I have very little to say that’s new, which might be for the best as I have a tendency to get really longwinded with the whole blog thing.
Adam, the new volunteer, still isn’t down here. He’s finished orientation, yes, but he’s doing a bit of traveling before coming here to stay. I don’t know too much about it as we haven’t been texting each other as much as we might, but it’s all good. He’ll be here soon enough.
Peter’s been gone for over two weeks. Saying see you later was tougher than I thought it was going to be. We lived here together for five months, and I didn’t really realize how much I’d confided in the guy. We had a pretty happening send-off in Guayaquil before I went with him to the airport the day after. Maybe too good of a send-off….
Tom is still in England and is doing well, I hear. Carla is working her ass off on a project for the tourism she’s involved with. She’s on vacation from her normal job right now, but what she’s doing now might be even more time consuming than her normal job. Sarah, as always, is doing well. She’s been really busy with preparations for the re-opening of the museum. Allow me to explain:
As well as being a hospedaje (equivalent to like a bed and breakfast) and a really, really cool house, the place I live at actually houses the skeletal remains of one of the original habitants of the peninsula. Way back, when they were still building this home, the builders chanced upon a skeleton. Instead of moving it or selling the land, Sarah and her husband decided to make an exhibit of it. Along with a bunch of other artifacts and really old tools and stuff, it’s a cool little two-room museum. I’m not too sure why it was ever closed in the first place, but this coming Monday is the grand re-opening. Maybe I’ll get to meet the mayor! I understand he’s been invited.
Easter
I had a nice, relaxing Easter here in Ecuador. The highlight of last weekend was definitely fanesca. While Latin America doesn’t seem to be as big on Easter traditions as we are in the U.S. (no Easter egg hunts, for instance), around here, they do have only little thing they like to do—and that’s to eat fanesca.
I should mention that eating fanesca certainly isn’t as big of a deal as making fanesca is. The dish is a fish and bean soup, but it definitely leans more heavily on the beans than it does on the fish. There are twelve—count ‘em!—twelve different kinds of beans in fanesca, one for each of Jesus’ disciples. (Side note: I did my best to find out which one was the Judas bean, but no one seems to know or care.) Two of Sarah’s brother-in-laws had come down with their wives to celebrate the holiday, and even with the four of them, Sarah and one cooking-incompetent gringo, it still took all morning to make the stuff. But make the stuff we did! You should’ve seen the size of the pot we ended up using. Sarah’s been hawking the leftovers all week, and we only finished eating it on Thursday night. It was pretty good, but not that good. The soup had a lot of different consistencies, depending on which random bean constitution you spooned up for a mouthful.
Teaching
Now that I’m almost done with Basico A, it’s safe to say I’m familiar with the intensive course teaching style. Four hours a day is not to be taken lightly, and I only say that because of the last hour, not the first three. Getting through three hours of teaching is, at least for me, a piece of cake. Getting through that last hour, though, is a different story. It gets damn tough to keep a bunch of eighteen and nineteen-year-olds attentions! I’ve declared war on cell phones. I’ll never win, but that won’t stop me from fighting. My students think they’re so sneaky, but they’re not! I know all the tricks by now. I feel undeservingly powerful when I steal one of their phones for the remainder of a class.
Really, though, I still maintain that the group I have now is the best bunch I’ve yet had. A lot of them are really dedicated and student hard for the class. That’s nice to see.
Besides for a few untimely power outages and a lot of temporada heat (it’s been damn hot lately!), I really don’t have all that much to say here either. It really cooks in that little room (my classroom is fairly cramped; that’s a lie, it’s extremely cramped) when the air conditioner goes on the fritz. It seems to have taken a liking to doing just that, but I should expect as such in a new building when they’re doing electrical work.
Travel
I went up to Puerto Lopez this weekend to meet up with a few others volunteers who are on vacation right now. We went to Machililla National Park, just a little further to the north from Puerto Lopez, and did some hiking and swimming at the awesome beaches they have there. After that, we hopped a bus back to Puerto Lopez, and then another bus from there to Montañita.
The best part about Montañita was seeing Lisa again. She was gone for the month of March to visit her family back in California, but now she’s back. We went surfing on Sunday morning, and even though I haven’t been surfing in three or four weeks, I did surprisingly well. I even managed to turn the board so I was riding on the actually wave, instead of in front of it. This is something I haven’t been able to do before. I’m getting there!
What about Mark?
Feelin’ fine. I’ve been running a ton to keep the stress levels low and take in some pretty beach scenery near sunset. Slowly but surely, I’ve been improvising my running routes. Kind of exciting for old Mark here. I’d write more about it, but I don’t think it’d mean a lot for anyone other than me.
Really, I’m totally focused on having a few weeks off at home. I’ve been waiting pretty patiently for this, and I only have to wait a week longer.
Hopefully most of the snow is gone when I get back to Wisconsin. I don’t feel like trudging through all that slush. I despise you, spring slush. I’m sure a bunch of you are wishing for the same as me. C’mon, sun, do your job!
The only thing left to say is… happy birthday, Karin!
Monday, March 10, 2008
Feelin' Fine
Updates
Another lesson Ecuador has taught me—or at least has made that much more pronounced—is how transient relationships can be in this country. I mean, I had months to tell people and prepare for my original departure here. Everyone (well, for those of you who read this) knows when I’m coming home in April and when I’ll most likely be back for good. But here—perhaps it’s because people don’t always have the same amount of time to prepare—it’s different. Plans change on a whim. Nothing is “for sure,” not that it is anywhere, but I believe it’s much less so in Ecuador.
Peter will be gone in less than a week. We were going to hang out in the mountains over our last weekend together in the country, but seeing as he’s had to change his flight, that’s not going to be possible anymore. We’ve decided to spend the weekend in Guayaquil. I guess we’re going sometime this next Saturday morning. It’s so sad for me because the kid’s formed so much of my social and support network since November. I’m afraid I’m going to have to cope with loneliness all over again once he’s gone. Luckily, I do have a break from Ecuador coming up in April.
And yet, there’s always someone new too. The March volunteer, Adam, is a pretty cool dude. I might’ve mentioned this before, but he’s from Georgia and—yes, ma’am—he’s got a Southern drawl (some of the expressions he says are pretty ridiculously awesome too). He’ll be here for good before the end of the month, so that’s something to look forward to.
Teaching
Basic A, the class I’ve been teaching since the beginning of this month, is an awesome class. While I started off slightly terrified to be teaching four hours straight each day, it’s been going really well. They don’t even seem all that bored… for the most part. (I can tell because when things really start to drag, a bunch of them pull out their phones, hide them in their laps and begin to text their friends.) We have our first test scheduled for next week Monday, so we’ll see how well their doing academically at that point; but, judging from the quiz I gave them on Friday, they’re learning a lot. I think it makes a big difference having basic versus advanced students. Because everything is still knew to them and because so many core principles are being taught in basic, these students tend to be hungrier learners, which means that they also tend to pay more attention.
Teaching, however, has been hot! My room’s air conditioner has been broke since the very beginning. But, coincidentally enough, it just got fixed today. I couldn’t be happier about this. I’ve been sweating like crazy. And, to make matters worse, I forgot to put on deodorant before class one day last week. I had to jump past the fan in front of the room to keep my waves of stench from being blown right in my students’ faces. Ha! Not a good situation for them.
Anyway, all in all, Basic A is a great bunch of kids and I’m really happy with them. I’ve even adjusted to teaching in the morning. Can’t complain here!
Travel
Not much to report here seeing as I really haven’t gone anywhere since the last time I posted.
Adam came down this weekend, so I stuck around here. We ran a 10k race together in Salinas on Saturday morning. It went really well for me, other than the heat. Even at 7:30 in the morning, it must have been close to 80 degrees out. I don’t fare too well in the heat. Luckily, there were a lot of aid stations handing out water, which I almost invariably splashed on my head instead of drinking. It started off sunny, but eventually got cloudier while we were actually running the race. That was a big help too.
I wasn’t expecting quite the turnout for the run that actually came. Even in a pretty touristy place like Salinas, it doesn’t seem like that popular of a sport. For instance, I hardly ever see anybody out when I’m running. However, a lot of the people there (I think most of them drove in from Guayaquil) were very serious runners. Apparently, you weren’t anything special unless you were wearing a cool running jersey. Following this line of reasoning, Adam and I were nobodies.
Sarah, a close friend and volunteer living in Guayaquil, came to stay Saturday night as well. Peter, Adam, Sarah and I tried to have a night out in Salinas Saturday night, but after the club we were going to go asked us for $20 a head just to get in the damn place, we decided to hang out on the boardwalk and just have a couple beers. I was absolutely exhausted after having woken up early and run the race, so I made a quick night of it before retreating home.
On Sunday, Adam, Sarah and I hung out at the beach in Salinas. We played some soccer, swam a little and then just sat there for a really long time, discussing any and everything. After that, we went to a little restaurant and introduced Adam to ceviche (perhaps previously spelled cerviche, they are still exactly the same food). He liked it, which is good because you really can’t avoid it entirely on the costa.
Really, not too much to say at all. Just trying to relax and get some sleep.
Other News
Things are going fine. As always, Ecuador is a distinct set of ups and downs. I feel okay about most of the stuff in my life.
Shoot me an email if you get the chance! I could use it.
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