Where to start, where to start…

First of all, I´m starting to really like it here. I realize that all of my problems have arisen due to the language barrier, and I shold be able to break that down more and more as time goes by. All I need is some patience. That specific virtue has never come easily for me, but lord knows I´m getting a lot of practice working in the elementary school (more on that to come). Other than the language barrier, I like the general way of life here better than in the states…my way of life that is. I have more free time, and in that free time I play a ton of sports and read books that I never had time to read in college. I say ¨my way of life¨ because it’s a little different from the way most of the people here live. While no one is ever really stressed out, but they work a lot here…some hard, some not so hard, but they still work. A lot of the guys I play sports with are still in high school, which they attend from 6:30 to 11:00 at night so they can get up and work from 7:30 to 5:00. Then they play soccer from 5:00 untill it gets too dark to see (around 6:30, right when classes start) then they eat dinner and shower, skipping the first period. For this reason, many of my friends are 19 or 20 years old and still have a year or two to go in school.

And what a grand school system it is. Every day I grow more and more frustrated with the incompetence on every level. The teachers are generally lazy. For example, today I went into the second grade classroom to retrieve a class room full of screaming, fighting, and crying 7 year olds for gym class. Their teacher was no where to be found, and hadn´t been in the class room for an hour…an hour! You can´t just leave 30 seven year olds alone for an hour! That’s negligence in the states, but here it´s a daily occurance. Upon seeing a child (one of my favorites mind you) crying after being punched, I had had enough and confronted the teacher. I asked him who was watching the kids (¨no one¨,obviously) and where he was (¨right here¨, unashamedly). For the first time, I stood up to him and the backward system and said, ¨you can´t not just un care to 30 kids are alone. they are crying, hitting, no adults. serious¨. Zing, I got him good.

Apart from the negligence, the kids have never even been taught how to learn. All of their exercises consist of mindlessly copying verbatim everything a teacher has written on the chalkboard. As a result, all the kids have stellar hand writing (you should see the signatures people here have. big, loopy beauties) , and can color code like it was their job. But they never actually learn anything, and original thought is unheard of. The only questions I am asked in class are ¨what color should we be writing in?¨ and ¨This page is full of writing (copying), what should I do now?¨ I tried to do some exercises that required a low level of mental cognition, but the kids not only couldn´t handle it, but the teacher totally nixed the idea before I could even give them a chance to think it though and use their brains a little. ¨That is not how the kids are accustomed to learning.¨ No shit. The kids here aren´t accumstomed to learning at all.

Case in point: I´ve been helping my 18 year old host sister with her English homework, and after 6 years of studying English, she cannot speak a single word. Here, I do not exaggerate. Not a single word. She has a work book full of diagrams of the human body with the organs labled in English, and translated songs by billy joel, but apart from using her optical nerve to transduce the refracted light signals off the chalkboard and motar neurons to tell her hand to write, she has never had to use her brain for anything. Math is the same way. She asked me to help her with Logarithmic functions (which I never learned…we have calculators for a reason) so I had to teach myself. Once I had seen enough problems, I had figured out the basic rules, and once that was done the problems were just applying the simple guidelines to novel sets of numbers. I pointed this out to her, and she then told me that the teacher had given her the rules, but she couldn’t figure out how to use them with the problems. I tried to help her for 2 maddening hours but made absolutely no headway. She’s not stupid, the school system here is just absolutely ridiculous. Its moments like these I´m grateful I went to good schools that, if not actually teaching me any applicable information (believe it or not, I haven´t had to explain the Kreb´s cycle to anyone here yet), they at least taught me how to think. It also makes me want to be a teacher at a progressive public highschool, since I now know how much more valuble experiential learning is: I can communicate enough to get by after 3 months of emersion, compared to language I didn´t learn in the 4 years of Spanish I didn´t study in high school.

So yeah. I never thought I would be stressed out and irritable after playing with kids for 4 hours a day (did I mention that they don´t discipline here, and whining is operantly rewarded?), but after lunch I generally need to lie down and recover. Luckily, I (finally) start work tomorrow with the Patronato, which is what I came here to do. That should be sweet.

Looking back on my my frustrating time spent as a teacher, it actually seems pretty ideal. The Patronato work will be amazing, but it will take me away from town on adventures frequently. While i´ve always loved me a good adventure, staying in town has given me a chance to get to know the people, and I´m going to stay on and teach gym class one day a week, which will give me a chance to stay connected with the kids…who outside of class are awesome. I see myself in a lot of the ones I am continually attempting to discipline…

Besides everything I´m involved with on a daily basis, i´ve learned to embrace the randomness that comes when you move to a place you don´t know, full of friendly people you can´t understand.

Examples:

Last Sunday I woke up with absulultely nothing to do besides wash my clothing, clean my room, and nourish myself. These activities can, in fact, take an entire day to accomplish if you wash your clothes by hand, your roof is made of decaying wood, and you don´t have a fridge. Also, if you’ve learned to reverse your multitasking ways and take as long as possible to to anything and everything. That’s a skill. So I went to the store (why go to the store once a week when you can go twice a day?) and on the way back some guy I had talked to a couple times (Marco) invited me to go to his farm. Another lesson: never turn down an ivitation. Instead of a boring day spent washing clothing, I got out into the campo (in the back of a truck!) and milked cows, witnessed and aborted attempt at bull rape, ate freshly slaughtered chicken and freshly dug up yucca, and contributed to rainforest descruction for purposes of small scale cattle farming with a freshly sharpened machete. Upon returning from the finca, I was invited to dinner and ate freshly made ¨cheese¨ with freshly squeezed juice. I also grew to hate the school system here more. Marco (a teacher) is one of the smartest guys i´ve meet. He can put himself in my shoes and explain things to me in terms i´ll understand…as opposed to my host mom. One time I didn´t know what olla meant, so she explained by saying ¨olla is olla¨. Aggravating. Marco would say ¨you use an olla to boil water or cook soup on a stove¨ then he would make the shape with his hands. Brilliant.

Even though he´s clearly one of the brighter people here, he still managed to spend 8 years on the states without learning the language or culture. I told him it was pronounced ¨mouth¨, not mouse, and it meant boca, not nariz. He also thinks that there are no farms in the states and that everyone eats hamburgers exclusively. One reason for this is lack of resources, as he never had the opportunity to travel outside of New Jersey. I believe the other reason is that the inept school system he grew up with next instilled the importance of learning. Upon moving to Ecuador, everyone in my group instinctively learned everything we could about the culture and language. It had been ingrained in us…why wouldn´t we? Whereas Marco, a bright guy and hard worker, spent 8 years hanging out with other Latinos and buying yucca at the one store that sold it. Why wouldn´t he? Why try to understand your surroundings more when you´re getting by O.K. as it is?

The next weekend I had no planned activities, and the start of the day played out almost identically to the previous Sunday morning that led me to get to know Marco and his family better. This time, I went to the bread store and invited myself to go fishing with the bread makers. We were to be gone all day, but they didn´t pack any food or water…with freshly baked bread sitting right there. I was a little puzzled, but I always try to do as the locals do, so I didn´t pack any food either. After jumping in the back of 2 different trucks to get to the river, we came upon a road that was lined with guyava and guava (no idea about spelling here) trees which we took turns climbing to get the fruit. I´ve always considered myself part monkey, and an excellent tree climber, but these guys put me to shame. Climbing up a featureless trunk, then manipulating a bamboo pole with one hand to reach up and knock the fruit from a high branch. wowy.

The fishing was unsuccessful (we netted the ugliest 3 inch fish ive ever seen) but on our way back up the fruit lined road we ran into some shuar hunting with blowguns, which they let us try. I instantly got mad props, because out of my 5 friends I was the only one to hit the target the first try (si tu puedes!) However, when we started to hunt birds (which is really hard, with any weapon) my friend ¨The Sheep¨, who was by far the worst during target practice, got lucky twice and killed two birds (two darts, not one stone). Nobody else hit anything, not even the shuar. Lucky sheep.

The third, and final, random story. Last night, just walking around, I came across the ¨gym¨ in town that I hadn´t known about. I poked my sunburnt nose in and instantly 3 overweight women invited to join them for aerobics, which I did despite the fact I was wearing sandals and had just drank a liter of whole milk. While gyrating about, the latter made me produce sounds that I blamed on the former.

After I was thoroughly sweaty, for the fourth time that day, a song came on (like the rest, that generic thump thumpy techo beat that makes you want to gel your highlighted hair and fight someone at the same time) that happened to have really dirty English lyrics This was the first time since arriving i´ve profited from the language barrier. I don´t want to come out and say the lyrics (there might be children reading) but suffice to say the singer really appreciated the flavor of either a specific cat or a specific organ of a specific female´s anatomy, as he dedicated the entire song to repeating the same sentence praising the taste over and over again. As the women continued to step clumsily and unawares, I was absolutely dying of laughter.

So the point, if there is one (which there isn´t) is that i´ve learned embrace randomness. Getting out and doing something is always better than staying in a doing nothing, even if you have no idea what you´ll be doing 5 minutes before it happens. Also, the public school system here sucks.