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 Wisconsin. I wonder all of the problems the stuff causes other than making my pretty, new running shoes less pretty in a terrible hurry.

New Blue

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 Atlanta, Georgia, experimenting with a lick of some song they all liked.

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 France but he’s bored. He works in the office of a French school there, a school for tourists, but he says it’s just not the same as teaching and is somewhat jealous of the teachers there. He misses Ecuador a lot and spends a good deal of time sending me stupid messages on Facebook to avoid working. Admit it, Peter, it’s true!

Tom got back on the 10^th 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 Ecuador has done a lot to strengthen my resolve in wanting to go to become a physician (which is good because medical school is expensive as… yeah, it’s expensive). And in order to take that next step toward reaching that goal, I need to come back to the U.S. and buckle down as a student for another few years. I’m definitely ready for that, even though being a teacher has been an incredible experience in the here and now.

Travel

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 Ecuador occurred. I won’t go into too many details (for the sake of both of our dignities), but suffice to say that the simple act of running has the tendency to get things moving in your digestive tract. As such, Isaac and I had just gotten into the meat of our run when Mark was in need of some relief. We were atop a bridge spanning a river when Isaac pointed me in the direction of the trail ahead of us. He said that I could probably hide myself somewhere up ahead and not be seen by anyone while I was going to the bathroom.

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 Vilcabamba was located in the opposite direction. For God’s sake, we were running along a horse trail! Anyway, I did what I could to conceal myself before my body started to make demands of me. However, I didn’t get as far back as I should have because it hurt and because the surrounding vegetation directly off the trail was so thick. The worst of it was over when an Ecuadorian couple rounded the corner a short distance away from me. I didn’t even hear them coming, so here I was with about thirty feet quickly closing between us trying to decide which was more polite, standing and apologizing or staying stock still and pretending nothing was going on. I decided on the later.

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 U.S.

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 Guayaquil spent the night here on Saturday. The three of us got up early on Sunday to make bolón, another common food from the long list of things you can make from verde. A little later on, Sarah (host mother Sarah) gave the three of us a ride into Salinas for some early afternoon wakeboarding. We managed to convince her to come on the boat with us. Sarah (Guayaquil Sarah) and Adam did really, really well for beginners. Mark was extremely impressed. What was perhaps even more impressive, however, was watching the boat owner’s teenage nephew, who’s currently training to be a professional wakeboarder, do his thing when the three of us had finished riding. I got kind of freaked out when the driver gunned it through a bunch of other boats putting around outside one of the swim areas off the beach, though. It’s been said before, but they are crazy drivers down here—boats being no exception.

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 Ecuador with a lot of fond memories, but I’m looking forward to being back in Wisconsin.

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 Quito for my End of Service meeting, which is my last official act of service through my volunteer organization. The End of Service meeting goes for three days, after which I have a little over three weeks in June to do a bit of traveling and say my final goodbyes to the Pazmiños, my old host family in Quito, all the other volunteers and the rest of Ecuador. I don’t know how much I’ll contribute to this blog beyond next week, but I doubt it will be much. If anyone has any questions or would like to contact me for whatever reason, please shoot me an email.

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 Quito, and now here we are almost a year later….

Don’t worry, though. I’ll be sure to include at least one more post. I’m not ready to be done just yet.