Ecuador Omnibus

Quilotoa Loopy

After a stagnant past several weekends here in Ambato, I finally packed it up and made a trip out of the Big-A with two of my friends, Caitlin and Ariana. We headed to a natural formation about two and a half hours away from Ambato called Quilotoa.

Ari and Caitlin riding dirty

We left Ambato bright and early at 6:45am to catch a bus to a nearby city called Latacunga, immediately followed by another bus to a town called Zumbahua. Once at Zumbahua we paid some guy with a truck to take us through the Saturday market and afterward drive us to Quilotoa. I still don't feel comfortable when random strangers approach me and ask me if I want a ride in the back of their pickup truck, but sometimes in Ecuador that is the only option to get to less visited places.

Quilotoa used to be a volcano, but through some process that I still do not fully understand after reading the Wikipedia article, it collapsed and is now a lake at the bottom of a crater. It is a particularly interesting sight because the water is a dark green color due to the dissolved minerals in the lake. When we arrived at Quilotoa we talked to some people and learned that while the hike down the crater to the lake is manageable, the hike back up is quite difficult. We resigned to hiring some guy to bring horses down to us at the bottom so we could ride them back up when we were done looking at the lake.

Quilotoa from the outlook above

Just like the man had said, the hike down was not too bad. Due to the high altitude, the weather in Quilotoa is quite chilly so we had a comfortable trip down to the water level of the lake. Contrary to what the man had said, however, when we reached the bottom there were not three horses waiting for us. He apologized for not having enough horses and we were faced with the decision of how to get back up the crater (NB: The night before in a discussion about how we all control our weight in Ecuador, Ariana was quoted as saying, "Exercise just isn't my thing."):

Horse Guy: Here are the horses and you can all go up right now... psych, psych, psych! We can either make two trips up with the horses we have or you all can walk.
Krishna: Walk.
Caitlin: Walk.
Ariana: There isn't even a donkey or something we can take up?
Krishna: Well he's got the two horses, but by the time we make two trips up to get us all to the top it will end up taking longer than if we walk.
Ariana: O.K., but I'm warning you two that I haven't done anything even closely resembling exercise in several years.

Ariana was hesitant at first, but she quickly jumped on the champ-wagon and we started up. After a long, hour and a half hike uphill, we finally reached the top and were able to eat lunch and head home exhausted.

Taking a photo break during the hike. No one said Ecuador would be easy.

On the ride from Zumbahua back to Latacunga, we got on the smallest bus I have been on yet in Ecuador. I was the last person to get on and there were no seats left, so it looked like I would have to stand up for the hour and forty minute ride. To make matters worse, the ceiling was about five and a half feet high, so I had to tilt my head at a 45° angle to stand up straight. About two minutes in the lady working on the bus came to the rescue and, demonstrating typical Ecuadorian resourcefulness, gave me and Caitlin stools to sit on in the aisle.

SECAP: Pros and Cons

I have talked about the advantages and disadvantages of working at a broke government school before, but a recent incident was the best example of my love-hate relationship with SECAP yet.

A few weeks back, the lights in my classroom stopped working so my evening students and I had to move to a classroom in a different building. The second day that the lights weren't working, my class saw I was upset about having to move to a really beat-up classroom to have class, and as we were walking around outside to get to the new room someone asked if we could play soccer on the small SECAP field we were passing. I called their bluff and said, "Sure, who's got a ball?" When no one had a ball to play with I dragged them into the classroom and I tried to teach them something as usual.

The next day the lights still weren't working and I was furious that SECAP still hadn't fixed them even though I asked them to two days earlier. Again we walked around the building outside to get to the other classroom and one of my students asked if we could play soccer, only this time someone actually had a ball. I was so angry that SECAP wasn't paying attention to my complaints that I gave in to my students' request and instead of having class we just played soccer outside for two hours. I was impressed that every one of my students was excited and played really hard except for two: Angel because he has a (alleged) heart condition and Heliana because she was wearing heels.

So while it is nice that the well-run schools in Ecuador provide their teachers with books and curricula, it is definitely not bad having the option of playing soccer instead of teaching English if I'm not feeling the crappy room I was assigned.

Another advantage of working at SECAP that I have talked about is that most of my students are adults so they like to take care of me. After class last Thursday I was telling one of my students that my host family doesn't eat dinner so I always have to find food for myself at night, so four of my students took me to a restaurant and bought me dinner. Today one of my students invited me and Caitlin to her house for lunch and even took us out and bought us ice cream afterward.

Dealing with the unorganized administration at SECAP is frustrating sometimes, but being fed by students is certainly better than taking paper balls to the back of the head like some of my other friends who teach high-schoolers.

Silly Americans, Spanish is for Ecuas

As much as I try not to, I frequently laugh out loud at the things my students say because they just sound so funny saying English words with their Ecuadorian accents sometimes. Because of this it is always a relief when I say something incorrectly in Spanish and my class gets a chance to laugh at me and see that people mess up speaking a foreign language even when they have been studying it for close to a decade.

My class couldn't stop laughing at me the other day when I was introducing someone to them and said Esta es mi ex-alumna (This is my ex-student). Apparently my translation was too literal because my students informed me that what I said came off as offensive because demonstrative pronouns are only used for objects, not people. I learned that the correct way to refer to someone is to use the subject pronoun, and I should have said Ella es mi ex-alumna (She is my ex-student).

This week my class had a chuckle because I couldn't pronounce the word desestresante after multiple attempts. I gave up when my ego could no longer take the building hysteria of giggles closing in around me, and I had to resort to threatening to draw marker mustaches on them (my go-to disciplinary technique) to get them to calm down and continue with class.

Caitlin had a real winner at lunch today when she recounted our failure to acquire horses on the climb out of the Quilotoa crater. She said something along the lines of Quería montar en un caballero (I wanted to ride a gentleman) instead of Quería montar en un caballo (I wanted to ride a horse).

Another Caitlin classic, and perhaps my favorite "I don't know the word in Spanish, but I'll take a guess assuming it is something like English" attempt was when she didn't know the word for sneeze. She was banking on an onomatopoeic word with a typical Spanish verb ending and threw out achuchar. Coincidentally, chucha is a strong, vulgar word in Ecuadorian Spanish that means "cunt". My director heard this story and suggested that achuchar would probably translate to something like "pussy-up", an undefined term which is nevertheless one of my favorite English expressions now.

Teacher Talk

My Spanish teacher also happens to be an English teacher, and sometimes during class we have very interesting discussions about the differences between English and Spanish. I have a lot to say about how they are different from the perspective of a native English speaker, but it is always enlightening to hear how he views their differences as a native Spanish speaker.

One of the differences he mentioned the other day was prompted from a question I had about which vocabulary word fit better in a sentence about shortening a trip, abreviar or acortar. He told me they both worked fine and was confused about why I was unsure because he was aware that we have a cognate in English, "abbreviate."

I explained to him that in English we only use abbreviate for technical situations, and while someone would be understood if he said "We can abbreviate our trip by an hour if we go by car", it would sound very unusual. He noted that in Spanish there are not many distinctions between formal/technical and informal vocabulary as in English, and that most of the time in Spanish you will be just fine using the fanciest word you know in a sentence.

In Ecuador, people always use the word cachar to check for comprehension and find out if someone has understood something ("Catch my drift?"). It can also mean "catch" in the sense of capture or grab, although it is used less frequently that way. I always thought it was a coincidence that cachar sounds so much like "catch" and they have almost identical meanings, but my teacher told me it is an adapted word from English. I'm not entirely sure if I believe him though because they don't use that word in Mexico (from what I can remember), and it would be strange if American English has had more of an influence on Ecuadorian Spanish than on neighboring Mexico's variety.

A long time ago I noticed that the Dictionary.com Word of the Day "lagniappe" came to American English from Quechua, the indigenous language of the people of the Andes. It is interesting to see how even words from an indigenous language can penetrate the vocabulary of the language of a more dominant culture quite a distance away.

In my Spanish class I also have painfully static arguments with my teacher over punctuation every time he reviews one of my essays. We argue because he is convinced that the punctuation rules are different in Spanish and that I need to use less periods in my essays because regardless of how they are used in English, my usage is considered incorrect in Spanish. I am all about learning Spanish and familiarizing myself with their syntax and orthography, but as long as I am writing from left to right I will never change my beliefs on where a comma, period, and semicolon should go. Never.