Volcano Woes

Tungurahua Angry

For the past couple of weeks, our local volcano Tungurahua has been erupting, coating the city with a dusting of ash. Yet again my foreign friends and I were slightly astonished by the fact that we live so close to an active volcano and that volcanic ash ends up all over Ambato (and depending on the wind, can travel as far as Guayaquil on the coast) while Ecuadorians are just annoyed that the dust bothers their eyes and people with sensitive lungs have to wear masks outside.

On the worst day there was so much ash coming out of Tungurahua that the sky above the entire city was hazy, and another day it rained and piles of wet ash fell to the streets and dirtied everyone's clothing. The ash has certainly been annoying and it has bothered my nose and caused some allergic reactions on my skin, but I guess of all the bad things that can happen to a city located close to a volcano, having some ash in the streets isn't so bad.

Teeth


After having two of my appointments canceled with the dentist I was first recommended, I went back to his office to retrieve my x-rays and I went to another recommended dentist who could pull my wisdom teeth. I had the guy's name and the floor of the building he works on, but he appeared to be part of a larger operation of doctors all sharing a common waiting room. I walked in and asked the receptionist where I could find the doctor I was looking for and she pointed to the door of his procedure room. I could hear some kind of mechanical tool going and knew that he was in the middle of seeing a patient, but when the receptionist saw me awkwardly looking around looking for a clue as to what to do she assured me that I should just knock and go in.

I knocked on the door and the dentist leaned back in his chair to open it for me. Sure enough, he was sitting in his chair working on a female patient. The scene became even more bizarre when I realized that the woman reclined in the chair with her mouth wide open was holding a baby on her chest while the doctor was working on her. I guess answering the door or letting a patient hold on to an infant in the middle of a procedure aren't considered unprofessional in Ecuador because the doctor happily talked to me for a few seconds to figure out what I wanted and then told me to wait outside for him.

(Aside: a similar experience worth noting was when I got my haircut this week and the woman cutting my hair stopped to answer her cell phone three times. The second time she pinned the phone between her head and shoulder and continued to cut my hair while chatting.)

While waiting in the lobby I noticed that all the paintings in the room were signed by the same artist who had the same name as my dentist. I talked to him about it after my consultation and it turned out that he was the artist of all the paintings. The next day I walked by his office building again and noticed an advertisement that said he was also an architect. I was concerned that he was, as my mother put it today, "a jack of all trades but master of none" but my sister knows a lot of dentists and assured me that because of the creative aspects of dentistry, many dental professionals are also involved in artistic endeavors.

This multi-talented dentist charges $120 a tooth as opposed to other estimates I have heard of $40 a tooth. I have a hard time believing that anything good could come of a surgical procedure that costs $40, so I think I am going to splurge on this one and go to the fanciest dentist in town.


Who Said English Would be Fun (or Easy)?

I am finding out that one of the tricky things about teaching English is the expectation most students have that English class is supposed to be fun. I can't think of any math, science, or history class that I went into expecting to have fun, and if I did have fun in the class it was always a pleasant surprise. On the contrary, the students in my class demand that we do fun things all the time, and whenever I hand out a worksheet or give them a writing assignment they freak out and start whining.

This mindset makes for really terrible students because they never want to put in the work to learn the grammar that they need to be able to speak and understand spoken English. It kills me when I put effort into coming up with games that reinforce grammar so that they can use it correctly without help from me, only to grade their tests and see that a bunch of people still bombed because they didn't put in the time outside of class to master the admittedly boring, but necessary aspects of learning English like memorizing vocabulary.

I truthfully do like being in front of a class and teaching, but having unmotivated students makes the work much less rewarding than it could be. Even if I get into medical school, I wouldn't be surprised if sometime in the future I ended up teaching something again, whether it be with medical students as an attending physician or giving a course on medical Spanish in a hospital, since I bet both medical students and physicians take good notes and are pretty good about studying.

Evolution

I am now a solid two weeks into my third semester teaching at SECAP, and time is flying by. The first two weeks have always been stressful because students continue to pick up and drop the class in the beginning and it is hard to prepare materials, learn the level of my students, and get an idea of what I want to cover with them by the end of the module. Now that the classes have, for the most part, settled into place, I finally got around to making another book for my new Intermediate class and figuring out a rough syllabus for the semester. I think my Intermediate class will be fun to teach because they have all got a pretty solid understanding of the basic tenses in English, and they now know enough to start being creative with it and try new constructions and words to see if they work.

This semester in my Advanced class I have three new students who all speak English fluently. One girl lived in New Jersey for seven years, another lived in South Africa for a year, and the last lived in Malta for a semester. These new students have changed the dynamic of the class quite a bit because along with some of my best students from last semester, I now have enough students who speak English confidently to have pretty serious discussions/debates in class.

Still, a serious problem arises when my students who lived abroad are the first to answer and they dominate the discussions, or when I start teaching to the level of the best students and leave the rest of the class completely lost. This is the first semester where I have had so many students with good spoken English, so I will have to try a few different techniques until I can figure out how to give a class that all of my students will learn from.

As it turns out, being a teacher is really easy if you don't care, but if you take any pride in your work and the progress of all your students, teaching multi-leveled classes can be very difficult.


Fig and Cheese Strike Again

Back in February during the Festival of Fruits and Flowers, I fell ill from eating two too many fig and cheese sandwiches from street vendors. I knew from the beginning that I shouldn't have been eating anything with cheese—let alone something with cheese served from a street cart—but they just looked and smelled too delicious to not be tried.

Last Thursday at lunch my family served me fig and cheese, and before I could reason to myself that eating it would be a bad idea it was already in my belly. I felt pretty good for the next few hours until the end of my first class when we ended early and decided to play Caitlin's class in a game of soccer with our remaining time. Running around playing soccer sparked a violent fig and cheese reaction in my stomach, and I battled with a brief attack of what is known in Spanish as diarrea explosiva.

So please, if you ever see me about to eat anything containing figs and cheese, stop me regardless of what I say to try to convince you otherwise.


Culture Comfort

Before I came to Ecuador, I was warned by my program's pre-departure literature that at some point during my time living abroad I would be annoyed by the cultural differences and become homesick. Some of my friends who I have talked to have expressed their desire to be back at home so they can eat the food they like, work in a place where schedules are closely followed and people show up to things on time, and not have to see so much hair gel and eye makeup every time they go out.

With two and a half months left in Ecuador, I admit that I am starting to feel anxious to return home. However, I don't think my desire to be back in the States has as much to do with my discontent with the Ecuadorian culture as much as with the fact that I miss my friends and want to get my career in the States started.

I feel like I have done a good job adjusting to the decidedly un-American things that happen in Ecuador: lateness, lack of attention to detail, starch overload, loud noises in public places, and having my personal space invaded multiple times a day. Most of these things are consequences of a culture that is less workaholic and, consequently, much more laid back. Instead of fighting these things I have tried my best to roll with them and enjoy my relatively stress-free and nap-filled life for the moment.

What I am having a hard time with is not having seen many of my friends since I graduated last May. Although I returned to the States twice for interviews, my now post-college friends are based out of cities all over the country and most of them weren't in New York when I went back.

I can't help but think out loud that July 23rd would be a good time for my friends to come to New York and have a surprise "welcome back" party for me at the airport. Not that I'm saying; just saying.

Vote or Get Arrested

The consumption of alcohol was prohibited this past weekend as Ecuador had a nationwide vote on a number of issues. Everyone in the country is required by law to vote, so I guess the government figures that people are more likely to actually make it to the polls if they are sober. Like a lot of laws in Ecuador, the dry weekend was not very strictly enforced, and I saw people buying alcohol by knocking on the metal gates of alcohol stores that were ostensibly closed up for the weekend.

I admittedly know very little about politics, but one of the topics being voted on that I have a strong opinion about was whether or not they should ban bullfights in Ecuador. From my perspective as a North American, it is a disgusting practice that has no place in a civilized society. The idea of slowly killing an animal solely for entertainment is barbaric, and any attempt to disguise it with ceremony and costume to pass it off as art is a disgrace to whatever culture it supposedly represents. It is a dark aspect of human nature that we are so strongly drawn to violence, but I think it should be obvious to everyone that seven men stabbing a bull to death to please a crowd is something we don't need in the year 2011.

When I found people who were for keeping bullfights legal in Ecuador, they took one of two positions. The first is that the government is only holding a vote on that issue to distract the public from other, more important issues. I don't really understand what that means since people are capable of voting on a number of topics in any given election, and it doesn't take very long to check "yes" or "no" for that question on the ballot.

The second position was that bullfighting should remain legal because it is a part of Ecuadorian culture that should be preserved. I was very confused by this argument because as far as I know, bullfighting is a very Spanish tradition that was brought by the conquistadors to Ecuador. I don't think it can be defended as a part of Ecuadorian culture if it was brought over by the people who imposed their religion and customs on the indigenous people and built over their cities.

I had a pretty interesting discussion with my Advanced class about the extent to which Ecuadorians consider themselves to be Spanish. The entire class agreed that they do not consider themselves Spanish at all, and one student who traveled to Spain on vacation claimed that the Spanish waiters did not want to serve him because they believed that they were better than South Americans because of Spain's history of dominance in the New World. There is obviously still some resentment between Spain and its former conquests, and I am still confused as to why any Ecuadorian would defend bullfighting on the grounds that it is part of his culture.


Latin American identity is a very complicated matter that I will never fully understand since I am not Latino myself, but I do think that Ecuadorians need to reevaluate what their representative customs really are and stop resorting to confused "preservation of culture" defenses of animal cruelty that tarnish their host of otherwise beautiful traditions.