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.
