Removed
This past Monday I finally cornered a dentist and got him to remove my wisdom teeth that have been bothering me for over a month. Even though I had been assured by more than one Ecuadorian that he was the best dentist in Ambato, I was still nervous about getting the procedure done here and I was shaking in the chair the entire time.
The dentist only gave me a local anesthetic for the procedure so I was awake the entire time. After my face was good and numb, he took out a pair of pliers and applied them to my top wisdom tooth which had already emerged from my gums. I'm not sure what I thought was going to happen, but he gave it a strong push and pull and then ripped it out. I never realized how easy it is to pull teeth out, but even given that the procedure lasted mere seconds, it was still startling to have a tooth removed from my mouth with a pair of pliers while I was awake and watching.
The second tooth was a bit more difficult because it was still underneath my gums. Even though I didn't feel too much pain because of the anesthetic, I still felt pressure when the dentist was moving my tooth around. He had to cut into my gums and break the tooth into pieces, so he used a screwdriver looking tool to crack my tooth and twist it into a position to get at it with a drill. It was an incredibly uncomfortable sensation the entire procedure, but I got out of the chair feeling like a man for knowing that not a single drop fell from my trembling, tear-swollen eyes.
Dentistry is barbaric... Barbaric!
When the procedure was over, I wiped the blood that had squirted out of my mouth off my glasses and paid the dentist in the procedure room in cash money. The dentist didn't sew me up because he said the gum flaps were close enough together, and he didn't give me any restrictions on what I could eat. When I got home I looked at my mouth and was shocked to see a large hole in my lower left gum. Again, I don't know what I was expecting to see there after my tooth had been removed, but since he said stitches weren't necessary I figured it would be more of a slit than a wide open gap.
That day at lunch I ate regular food, but I had my head tilted to the right the entire time because I didn't want to get potato matter stuck in my tooth-hole. A week after the procedure I am a little concerned that I am still feeling the same kind of pain that brought me to the dentist in the first place, but I hope that it will go away as my gums heal, and I really hope that the cause of the original pain was actually my wisdom teeth because recovering from that procedure sucks.
Lunch Meat
I used to be a really difficult, picky eater when I was a kid. I remember my diet consisting mostly of macaroni and cheese and hot pockets, and I was not too keen on trying out new foods. I have come a long way since then, and as an adult I pride myself on my willingness to try new foods and my diverse tastes. Recently, my host family has been challenging my culinary bravery and making me long for the simple days of microwavable, pepperoni stuffed pastry crust treats.
For instance, liver is disgusting. There is no reason why anyone should be eating organs when there is so much delicious meat on a cow's body. This one is a favorite of my host family, and I almost killed my host brother the other day at lunch when he requested that we have it more often.
Last week we had something which appeared to be a sausage filled with couscous, but that smelled suspiciously like an asshole. I have eaten enough questionable animal parts in this country to know not to ask what anything is before I try it, so I ate a whole mystery sausage before I came to my own conclusion that based on the taste, smell, and appearance, I must have been eating an animal rectum and that I didn't need to be doing that if I wasn't winning money for it. I still haven't found the courage to ask my family what it was, and I'd like to keep it that way.
I know my American sensitivity to eating non-traditional animal parts is slowly fading when we had tongue for lunch the other day and I didn't think twice about it. Seeing the taste buds was a bit of a challenge for me, but I cut them off and actually enjoyed eating something that wasn't an organ or anus.
I'm just waiting for the lunch when I sit down and see a fried udder on my plate.
DELE
This past Friday I took a trip to Quito to take a test of Spanish proficiency called the DELE. The only interesting thing about the day was how I missed an entire section of the test because the proctor didn't explain to us how far we were allowed to go in the booklet in the first hour.
As I was doing the first section I thought that it was an awful lot of time to do the three short readings and answer questions, but since I had never done a complete practice test I had no idea how long I was supposed to have had. I figured I was just really smart (a supposition that always ends with me realizing how stupid I am) and looked over my answers with all my remaining time. When the first hour was up the proctor asked us for our answer sheets and mine was the only one half empty.
I almost freaked out that I paid $150 dollars to take the test and studied for the past three months only to blow an entire section because I didn't understand the directions, but then I remembered that I was still in Ecuador so I asked the lady if I could answer the questions with my time from the next section. As I predicted, she didn't see a problem with that so I finished up with some of my essay time.
I don't know if I will pass the test or not since I'm not sure how hard they grade the written and oral sections, but I'll get the results in a couple of months. I really had no motive for taking the test other than the fact that it was something to study for and a way to improve my Spanish, but it will be nice to have some kind of evidence that I speak Spanish proficiently instead of having to depend on people taking my word for it. After all, it is never very convincing to write on a resume "fluent Spanish" since that means something different to different people.
A wise man once said to me, "It's not about what you know, it's about what you show" and I think that holds true for just about everything you work for in life, including language proficiency.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Boom Town
Playing Hookie
Since each of my classes is 2.5 hours long, I have had trouble trying to regulate attendance and timeliness. The first semester I didn't have a rule about being late, so people would sometimes stroll into class 1.5 hours in. I couldn't let that slide so I added a rule that if you come late to class you have to wait outside until the second part started after the break. This also became a problem when students would come a few minutes late and miss an entire hour of teaching. My most recent rule has been that students can enter class during the first half late so that they don't miss the entire lesson waiting outside, but it will be marked as a half absence.
So far this has been an effective approach, and after the first few weeks students see how many class absences they have accumulated through consistently coming late to class and they tighten up for the remainder of the semester. However, my students have recently found a new way to infuriate me by missing class even with this system in place.
This past Thursday the weather was really nice outside and my students were incredibly reluctant to continue for the second half of class. One of my students, who is in college, came back from the break and said she had an important test to study for and asked if she could leave early. I reminded her that all my students are adults (with the exception of a few seventeen year olds) so she was obviously free to do whatever she wanted, even if I didn't recommend missing class. She asked about the consequences and I told her it would be half an absence just like when someone comes to class late, and without hesitation she said goodbye and left. The rest of the class must have overheard that conversation because six of my thirteen students present then proceeded to leave the class, apparently not concerned about the half-day of attendance they would all be docked.
I was then left with a difficult decision to make: should I keep teaching half the class or cancel class since so many people were going to miss it? My gut instinct was just to keep teaching since there were still people who wanted to be in class and learn English, but when I thought about it I was going to be teaching to only half of my class, and knowing the culture of studying they have in Ecuador, the absent half of the class would not have a chance at passing the next test if they weren't in class to hear me teach it. So while I know that everyday Krishna would go on teaching and have the rest of the class deal with the consequences of missing a lesson, teacher Krishna had to wonder if that would be the best move to make as a teacher whose goal is to make sure the class learns the material no matter what.
When I learned that I would be teaching adults, I really thought that I would be able to take the former approach with no problems, because why would an adult sign up and pay for classes that he wasn't going to attend? Unfortunately, teaching my unmotivated adult students has been much more like having a class of reluctant high school kids who are forced to study English by their parents, and I think I will have to start treating them accordingly if I want them to come out of my class with a satisfactory knowledge of English.
Outside of the issues the new-found loophole in my attendance policy has caused in my professional life, I am finding that it is also hard to separate work from normal relationships as a teacher with adult students, because the truth is that by spending ten hours a week with them and going out on field trips, I have become friends with a lot of my students. I understand that none of my students meant to leave as a personal attack on me, but it was still hard to see half of my class pick up and leave when I had prepared a lesson for them that day.
The expectations that students in the States and students in Ecuador have of being in a class are very different. In the States, students go into a class knowing that they will have to do the work and that the teacher is there to guide them and answer questions as an authority on the subject. Students usually end up fighting for the teacher's time when the floor is opened up for questions because they realize that they can get an immediate answer instead of having to look it up in a book. I suppose that in a lot of classes students are scared to ask questions if they don't understand something, but I think that that mostly stems from the very limited classroom time for courses in the States, and teachers need to ignore questions to get through the material.
In contrast, my students (with a few exceptions) come to class with no intention of thinking or making any kind of effort. They just stare blankly at me while I do my teaching bit, don't ask any questions when I invite them to, and then ask their neighbor what the hell is going on when I assign them an exercise to do in class. My lack of teaching experience definitely plays a part in this problem and I know I could concept check better, but I still believe that an adult who took his education into his own hands would concept check himself and take advantage of the native speaker in the room while he was in class and ask plenty of questions.
Teaching students who want to learn is rewarding, but my students who fit that profile are few and far between and I have little tolerance for people who expect to be able to speak English just by sitting in class, without putting any of their own effort into it. I am learning a lot about motivation and managing groups of people by teaching, but it definitely isn't my calling, which is why I'm happy about this...
About Time
After two years of sending out applications and attending interviews, this past Tuesday I was finally accepted to a medical school: the State University of New York at Buffalo (UB).
I can't express how relieved I am to finally know what I will be doing when my time in Ecuador is up and how satisfied I am that in the end everything worked out the way I wanted it to. It obviously would have been a lot less stressful if I had been accepted somewhere the first time around and gotten a deferral to work abroad for a year, but I can't complain because I was still able to do a WorldTeach program while applying a second time and secure a seat for myself in an MD program in the States in the proces.
Med school applications were frustrating for me because of the nearly sole importance that schools put on grades. I didn't have a great first couple of years in college and that definitely got me screened at a lot of places before my application was looked at. I have to give credit to UB for actually reading my application and having a sense of humor.
Med schools have a habit of being attracted to students that are as full of shit as they are of themselves, so I was shocked when my interviewer at UB told me he liked the way I started my personal statement, which was an anecdote about how one time I thought a doctor in Mexico was telling me to kiss a patient (bésala) instead of weigh her (pésala). I won't detail what happened next except to say that I made an idiot out of myself and hilarity ensued. I think that the tone of my personal statement reflected my personality and that the way I presented myself at interviews was genuine, so it is refreshing to see that there is at least one school out there that values students who act like human beings.
There is a lot of pressure on prospective med students to appear flawless on paper and cram their resumes with as many cool sounding activities and pointless internships as they can, but I am happy that UB was impressed with my passion for the few things that I did do in college and acknowledged my maturation from freshman year to the present. Again, my interviewer surprised me when he was skimming through my grades and pointed out a C+, only to then immediately qualify it with, "Oh, but that was in calculus freshman year", readily acknowledging that my worth as a potential med student can not and should not be judged by a math grade I got four years ago.
I would have never guessed at graduation that I would end up in Buffalo, but I am nonetheless ecstatic for the opportunity to study at an MD program in New York. I suppose there is always the chance that I will be taken off the waitlist at another school, in which case I would consider that program, but until then expect "B is for Buffalo" to show up sometime next fall.
Moral of the story: the next time you meet someone who says he got accepted to medical school give him a high-five, because as it turns out, it's really hard.
Rest of the Week
On Monday I will finally be getting my wisdom teeth pulled, which will hopefully result in me no longer having to eat ibuprofen like skittles. I am also heading to Quito on Friday to take the Spanish language proficiency test I have been preparing for, the DELE. Next week I'll report on which experience was more painful.
Since each of my classes is 2.5 hours long, I have had trouble trying to regulate attendance and timeliness. The first semester I didn't have a rule about being late, so people would sometimes stroll into class 1.5 hours in. I couldn't let that slide so I added a rule that if you come late to class you have to wait outside until the second part started after the break. This also became a problem when students would come a few minutes late and miss an entire hour of teaching. My most recent rule has been that students can enter class during the first half late so that they don't miss the entire lesson waiting outside, but it will be marked as a half absence.
So far this has been an effective approach, and after the first few weeks students see how many class absences they have accumulated through consistently coming late to class and they tighten up for the remainder of the semester. However, my students have recently found a new way to infuriate me by missing class even with this system in place.
This past Thursday the weather was really nice outside and my students were incredibly reluctant to continue for the second half of class. One of my students, who is in college, came back from the break and said she had an important test to study for and asked if she could leave early. I reminded her that all my students are adults (with the exception of a few seventeen year olds) so she was obviously free to do whatever she wanted, even if I didn't recommend missing class. She asked about the consequences and I told her it would be half an absence just like when someone comes to class late, and without hesitation she said goodbye and left. The rest of the class must have overheard that conversation because six of my thirteen students present then proceeded to leave the class, apparently not concerned about the half-day of attendance they would all be docked.
I was then left with a difficult decision to make: should I keep teaching half the class or cancel class since so many people were going to miss it? My gut instinct was just to keep teaching since there were still people who wanted to be in class and learn English, but when I thought about it I was going to be teaching to only half of my class, and knowing the culture of studying they have in Ecuador, the absent half of the class would not have a chance at passing the next test if they weren't in class to hear me teach it. So while I know that everyday Krishna would go on teaching and have the rest of the class deal with the consequences of missing a lesson, teacher Krishna had to wonder if that would be the best move to make as a teacher whose goal is to make sure the class learns the material no matter what.
When I learned that I would be teaching adults, I really thought that I would be able to take the former approach with no problems, because why would an adult sign up and pay for classes that he wasn't going to attend? Unfortunately, teaching my unmotivated adult students has been much more like having a class of reluctant high school kids who are forced to study English by their parents, and I think I will have to start treating them accordingly if I want them to come out of my class with a satisfactory knowledge of English.
Outside of the issues the new-found loophole in my attendance policy has caused in my professional life, I am finding that it is also hard to separate work from normal relationships as a teacher with adult students, because the truth is that by spending ten hours a week with them and going out on field trips, I have become friends with a lot of my students. I understand that none of my students meant to leave as a personal attack on me, but it was still hard to see half of my class pick up and leave when I had prepared a lesson for them that day.
The expectations that students in the States and students in Ecuador have of being in a class are very different. In the States, students go into a class knowing that they will have to do the work and that the teacher is there to guide them and answer questions as an authority on the subject. Students usually end up fighting for the teacher's time when the floor is opened up for questions because they realize that they can get an immediate answer instead of having to look it up in a book. I suppose that in a lot of classes students are scared to ask questions if they don't understand something, but I think that that mostly stems from the very limited classroom time for courses in the States, and teachers need to ignore questions to get through the material.
In contrast, my students (with a few exceptions) come to class with no intention of thinking or making any kind of effort. They just stare blankly at me while I do my teaching bit, don't ask any questions when I invite them to, and then ask their neighbor what the hell is going on when I assign them an exercise to do in class. My lack of teaching experience definitely plays a part in this problem and I know I could concept check better, but I still believe that an adult who took his education into his own hands would concept check himself and take advantage of the native speaker in the room while he was in class and ask plenty of questions.
Teaching students who want to learn is rewarding, but my students who fit that profile are few and far between and I have little tolerance for people who expect to be able to speak English just by sitting in class, without putting any of their own effort into it. I am learning a lot about motivation and managing groups of people by teaching, but it definitely isn't my calling, which is why I'm happy about this...
About Time
After two years of sending out applications and attending interviews, this past Tuesday I was finally accepted to a medical school: the State University of New York at Buffalo (UB).
 |
| Unfortunately, the coolest picture I could find of a buffalo was this one getting smoked by a lion |
I can't express how relieved I am to finally know what I will be doing when my time in Ecuador is up and how satisfied I am that in the end everything worked out the way I wanted it to. It obviously would have been a lot less stressful if I had been accepted somewhere the first time around and gotten a deferral to work abroad for a year, but I can't complain because I was still able to do a WorldTeach program while applying a second time and secure a seat for myself in an MD program in the States in the proces.
Med school applications were frustrating for me because of the nearly sole importance that schools put on grades. I didn't have a great first couple of years in college and that definitely got me screened at a lot of places before my application was looked at. I have to give credit to UB for actually reading my application and having a sense of humor.
Med schools have a habit of being attracted to students that are as full of shit as they are of themselves, so I was shocked when my interviewer at UB told me he liked the way I started my personal statement, which was an anecdote about how one time I thought a doctor in Mexico was telling me to kiss a patient (bésala) instead of weigh her (pésala). I won't detail what happened next except to say that I made an idiot out of myself and hilarity ensued. I think that the tone of my personal statement reflected my personality and that the way I presented myself at interviews was genuine, so it is refreshing to see that there is at least one school out there that values students who act like human beings.
There is a lot of pressure on prospective med students to appear flawless on paper and cram their resumes with as many cool sounding activities and pointless internships as they can, but I am happy that UB was impressed with my passion for the few things that I did do in college and acknowledged my maturation from freshman year to the present. Again, my interviewer surprised me when he was skimming through my grades and pointed out a C+, only to then immediately qualify it with, "Oh, but that was in calculus freshman year", readily acknowledging that my worth as a potential med student can not and should not be judged by a math grade I got four years ago.
I would have never guessed at graduation that I would end up in Buffalo, but I am nonetheless ecstatic for the opportunity to study at an MD program in New York. I suppose there is always the chance that I will be taken off the waitlist at another school, in which case I would consider that program, but until then expect "B is for Buffalo" to show up sometime next fall.
Moral of the story: the next time you meet someone who says he got accepted to medical school give him a high-five, because as it turns out, it's really hard.
Rest of the Week
On Monday I will finally be getting my wisdom teeth pulled, which will hopefully result in me no longer having to eat ibuprofen like skittles. I am also heading to Quito on Friday to take the Spanish language proficiency test I have been preparing for, the DELE. Next week I'll report on which experience was more painful.
Sunday, May 8, 2011
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.
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.
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Time Out: Part 2
After traveling to Loja and Machala during the first week of my vacation, I returned to Ambato to see a dentist about my impacted wisdom tooth that was giving me trouble. The dentist I saw freaked me out a little when he told me that he needed to remove the permanent retainer on my bottom teeth because it was causing interference between the energy fields of the left and right hemispheres of my brain (science!), but I convinced him that all I really needed was to have my tooth removed, so he scheduled me in for an appointment with an oral surgeon. Since the appointment wasn't for another week and I didn't want to spend any more of my vacation time in Ambato, I packed a bottle of Ibuprofen and headed out to the jungle town of Tena with my go-to travel partner, Caitlin.
Tena
Caitlin and I had originally planned to go deep into the jungle so we could fight jaguars and learn more about the relatively isolated indigenous peoples that live in the Amazon. As we did more research the day before leaving (which is what always happens when you put the two most procrastinative and indecisive people I know in charge of planning a trip), we discovered that going deep into the jungle is actually surprisingly expensive and time consuming. I also learned that my chances of finding a jaguar in the wild were slim, and if I really wanted to see one I would probably have to settle for seeing it in captivity.
As our first stop in the jungle, we agreed on going rafting in Tena because our friend Justin lives there and he pretty much did all the setup work for us, meaning we wouldn't have to really plan anything ourselves except for getting on a bus over there (which we still ended up kind of botching by missing the first bus to Tena).
Tena is a five hour bus ride from Ambato, which seemed like a joke after our nine hour trip from Machala to Ambato. Tena is a small city with a surprising amount of foreigners, who I think mostly come to Tena to take advantage of the great rafting available on its many rivers. I was concerned that the weather in Tena would be unbearably hot and humid like the coast of the country, but it turned out to be very bearable and not nearly as hot as Guayaquil or Machala.
I had the chance to hang out with some Peace Corps volunteers placed in Tena and we got to talking about the physical features of the locals. I commented that Ecuadorians with a lot of indigenous blood sometimes look Asian, and Asian looking Ecuadorians are sometimes given the nickname chino, which is what all Asian people in Ecaudor are called regardless of what their ethnic background is. These features are sometimes observed on indigenous people in the Sierra, but they are definitely more pronounced on the people in the rainforest. One of the Peace Corps guys explained to me that there is actually linguistic evidence to suggest that indigenous Ecuadorian groups came from Asia and that they probably do share ancestors with Oriental cultures, which is pretty trippy to think about.
Rafting
One of the awesome things about Ecuador is how laid back most organizations are compared to how anal and overcautious we can sometimes be in the U.S. For example, when we signed up for rafting in Tena, all we did was sign a form and get a five minute talk on the way to the river about what to do if you fall out of the raft. I remember going rafting once in the United States and we had to sit down in a group and actually attend a class about all the different safety procedures.
The laid back attitude extended into the actual rafting part, and our guides were doing ridiculous things like trying to stand up on the raft while going through rapids, getting out of the raft to climb and jump off of big rocks, and purposefully making the raft capsize just to scare us. Rafting ended up being a lot more fun because our tour guides were out of control, but the most memorable part of the trip for me were the awesome stories they were telling us about their rafting adventures.
My favorite story they told me was about Bear Grylls, the host of the television show Man vs. Wild. I was always a big fan of that show until that scandal broke about the footage being cut together in a clever way to mislead the audience about what really happened. Apparently he also sometimes sleeps in hotels at night and his camera crew helps him build things.
Our tour guides helped Bear get to his locations in the rainforest, and they told us about all the things they did to make his trip appear more adventurous than it really was. For instance, in one scene he supposedly comes across a pond with piranhas where he spears them for food. The truth is that piranhas don't live in the part of the rainforest where he was, so the guys in the tour company caught a bunch of them at a different location and put them in a pond for Bear to hunt. In another scene, Bear is seemingly riding on a log and steering it down the river, when in reality they were towing the log down the river in a raft right behind the camera. Regardless of how much outside help he receives, he still does do some ridiculous things that make the show entertaining ("He just drank a bottle of his own pee, are you serious!?"), so I'll probably continue to watch reruns when they come on Discovery Channel and act like I don't know what's really going on.
Zoo
I was pretty devastated when I learned that it is nearly impossible to see big animals in their natural habitat in the jungle, but I figured that a zoo was still better than nothing so we headed to an animal reserve just outside of Tena called El Arca.
The zoo had some pretty cool animals, although I'm not sure that all of them are native to Ecuador, let alone the rainforest. Among the animals we saw were an ostrich, lions, crocodiles, turtles, parrots, and spider monkeys. I also learned that the Spanish word for "sloth" is perezoso (translation: lazy), which made me happy.
The best animal we saw all day was a little monkey that was just jumping around following the visitors. Somehow, feeding the animals was not prohibited in that zoo so people were giving the monkey potato chips. At one point the monkey snatched a little girl's lollipop and ran away with it. I'm very surprised that feeding the animals isn't prohibited because I'm sure lollipops and potato chips can't be good for monkeys, but I do admit that it was really funny to see the monkey licking the lollipop and later trying to open it by banging it against a rock.
Feeding the animals was just one surprising behavior from the Ecuadorian visitors in the zoo. People were reaching into cages and touching animals, even waking up a poor sleeping anteater. At one point a guy grabbed a fruit from a tree and gave it to his kid to eat. The whole time the guide didn't ever scold anyone for being disrespectful and disrupting the animals.
The mindset of the Ecuadorian visitors seemed to be "We paid to enter the zoo, so we'll do whatever we want." This is in contrast to the mindset in our zoos in the States, where visitors are expected to not bother the animals and respect the zoo's facilities and the work of the caretakers.
Tubing
A fun advantage of having friends who live in the places I visit is that they know what the locals do and what kinds of activities are typical in the area. This is an experience that is frequently lost when visitors just do touristy activities, because no one really spends time at the tourist spots in his own neighborhood (go to NYC and see how many people you can find that have ever been to the Statue of Liberty besides on a grammar school field trip). Tena is well known for its rafting and that is what most tourists spend their time doing, but the truth is that very few people in Tena actually go rafting for fun. One of Justin's friends suggested that we participate in an activity more popular with the locals: tubing.
Tubing in Tena is grabbing an inner tube, buying a bottle of veintecinco, and floating down the river that runs through the city. Veintecinco is a type of Ecuadorian alcohol that our Peace Corps friend describes as "Ecuadorian moonshine." The explicably named (it costs twenty-five cents a cup) and inexplicably pronounced (they pronounce it veinteshinco) alcohol tasted terrible, but I wasn't about to miss the chance to have an authentic Tena experience.
Since it rained the entire night before, the water level in the river was high and it was moving unusually quickly. Unfortunately, the river wasn't high enough to let us float above all of the rocks on the river floor. Every few minutes someone in the group would jump out of their tube and scream after being violated by a pointy rock hiding just beneath the water level.
I left the river more beat up than anyone else because I was the only genius who didn't wear shoes. It turns out to be pretty hard to stand up on sharp rocks in a fast moving river, so I had to be given a piggy back ride by my buddy John when he felt sorry for me after watching me progress only two feet after five minutes of trying to walk to the shore. Tubing was still really fun, and I'll have to find a good river and a bodega that sells veintecinco in NYC to start a tubing craze back home.
My vacation was awesome, and I'm glad that I saw most of the remaining parts of Ecuador I wanted to visit and had the chance to hang out with some WorldTeach friends in their natural environments along the way. Now it's back to teaching for my third and final semester at SECAP. It has been nerve racking this entire year not knowing if I will be accepted by a medical school this cycle and pondering what I would do if I am not, but with my time in Ecuador quickly running out, I am determined to enjoy the job and home I have here in Ecuador in spite of my uncertain future, and to keep writing it down so that in a few years when I have a real job in the States with copious amounts of stress, I can think about what an idiot I was for leaving my relaxed Ecuadorian lifestyle.
Tena
Caitlin and I had originally planned to go deep into the jungle so we could fight jaguars and learn more about the relatively isolated indigenous peoples that live in the Amazon. As we did more research the day before leaving (which is what always happens when you put the two most procrastinative and indecisive people I know in charge of planning a trip), we discovered that going deep into the jungle is actually surprisingly expensive and time consuming. I also learned that my chances of finding a jaguar in the wild were slim, and if I really wanted to see one I would probably have to settle for seeing it in captivity.
As our first stop in the jungle, we agreed on going rafting in Tena because our friend Justin lives there and he pretty much did all the setup work for us, meaning we wouldn't have to really plan anything ourselves except for getting on a bus over there (which we still ended up kind of botching by missing the first bus to Tena).
 |
| Bridge and boardwalk in Tena |
I had the chance to hang out with some Peace Corps volunteers placed in Tena and we got to talking about the physical features of the locals. I commented that Ecuadorians with a lot of indigenous blood sometimes look Asian, and Asian looking Ecuadorians are sometimes given the nickname chino, which is what all Asian people in Ecaudor are called regardless of what their ethnic background is. These features are sometimes observed on indigenous people in the Sierra, but they are definitely more pronounced on the people in the rainforest. One of the Peace Corps guys explained to me that there is actually linguistic evidence to suggest that indigenous Ecuadorian groups came from Asia and that they probably do share ancestors with Oriental cultures, which is pretty trippy to think about.
Rafting
One of the awesome things about Ecuador is how laid back most organizations are compared to how anal and overcautious we can sometimes be in the U.S. For example, when we signed up for rafting in Tena, all we did was sign a form and get a five minute talk on the way to the river about what to do if you fall out of the raft. I remember going rafting once in the United States and we had to sit down in a group and actually attend a class about all the different safety procedures.
The laid back attitude extended into the actual rafting part, and our guides were doing ridiculous things like trying to stand up on the raft while going through rapids, getting out of the raft to climb and jump off of big rocks, and purposefully making the raft capsize just to scare us. Rafting ended up being a lot more fun because our tour guides were out of control, but the most memorable part of the trip for me were the awesome stories they were telling us about their rafting adventures.
My favorite story they told me was about Bear Grylls, the host of the television show Man vs. Wild. I was always a big fan of that show until that scandal broke about the footage being cut together in a clever way to mislead the audience about what really happened. Apparently he also sometimes sleeps in hotels at night and his camera crew helps him build things.
Our tour guides helped Bear get to his locations in the rainforest, and they told us about all the things they did to make his trip appear more adventurous than it really was. For instance, in one scene he supposedly comes across a pond with piranhas where he spears them for food. The truth is that piranhas don't live in the part of the rainforest where he was, so the guys in the tour company caught a bunch of them at a different location and put them in a pond for Bear to hunt. In another scene, Bear is seemingly riding on a log and steering it down the river, when in reality they were towing the log down the river in a raft right behind the camera. Regardless of how much outside help he receives, he still does do some ridiculous things that make the show entertaining ("He just drank a bottle of his own pee, are you serious!?"), so I'll probably continue to watch reruns when they come on Discovery Channel and act like I don't know what's really going on.
Zoo
I was pretty devastated when I learned that it is nearly impossible to see big animals in their natural habitat in the jungle, but I figured that a zoo was still better than nothing so we headed to an animal reserve just outside of Tena called El Arca.
The zoo had some pretty cool animals, although I'm not sure that all of them are native to Ecuador, let alone the rainforest. Among the animals we saw were an ostrich, lions, crocodiles, turtles, parrots, and spider monkeys. I also learned that the Spanish word for "sloth" is perezoso (translation: lazy), which made me happy.
 |
| Comin' at ya! |
 |
| This happened minutes after the guide assured me that the monkeys in the zoo never steal things from people |
The mindset of the Ecuadorian visitors seemed to be "We paid to enter the zoo, so we'll do whatever we want." This is in contrast to the mindset in our zoos in the States, where visitors are expected to not bother the animals and respect the zoo's facilities and the work of the caretakers.
Tubing
A fun advantage of having friends who live in the places I visit is that they know what the locals do and what kinds of activities are typical in the area. This is an experience that is frequently lost when visitors just do touristy activities, because no one really spends time at the tourist spots in his own neighborhood (go to NYC and see how many people you can find that have ever been to the Statue of Liberty besides on a grammar school field trip). Tena is well known for its rafting and that is what most tourists spend their time doing, but the truth is that very few people in Tena actually go rafting for fun. One of Justin's friends suggested that we participate in an activity more popular with the locals: tubing.
Tubing in Tena is grabbing an inner tube, buying a bottle of veintecinco, and floating down the river that runs through the city. Veintecinco is a type of Ecuadorian alcohol that our Peace Corps friend describes as "Ecuadorian moonshine." The explicably named (it costs twenty-five cents a cup) and inexplicably pronounced (they pronounce it veinteshinco) alcohol tasted terrible, but I wasn't about to miss the chance to have an authentic Tena experience.
Since it rained the entire night before, the water level in the river was high and it was moving unusually quickly. Unfortunately, the river wasn't high enough to let us float above all of the rocks on the river floor. Every few minutes someone in the group would jump out of their tube and scream after being violated by a pointy rock hiding just beneath the water level.
I left the river more beat up than anyone else because I was the only genius who didn't wear shoes. It turns out to be pretty hard to stand up on sharp rocks in a fast moving river, so I had to be given a piggy back ride by my buddy John when he felt sorry for me after watching me progress only two feet after five minutes of trying to walk to the shore. Tubing was still really fun, and I'll have to find a good river and a bodega that sells veintecinco in NYC to start a tubing craze back home.
 | ||
| With Justin and Caitlin at one of Tena's two bars after a hard day of tubing |
My vacation was awesome, and I'm glad that I saw most of the remaining parts of Ecuador I wanted to visit and had the chance to hang out with some WorldTeach friends in their natural environments along the way. Now it's back to teaching for my third and final semester at SECAP. It has been nerve racking this entire year not knowing if I will be accepted by a medical school this cycle and pondering what I would do if I am not, but with my time in Ecuador quickly running out, I am determined to enjoy the job and home I have here in Ecuador in spite of my uncertain future, and to keep writing it down so that in a few years when I have a real job in the States with copious amounts of stress, I can think about what an idiot I was for leaving my relaxed Ecuadorian lifestyle.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Time Out: Part 1
I recently spent two weeks enjoying my vacation time in between semesters by traveling to several of the places in Ecuador I still hadn't visited. It started with a trip down south to get acquainted with Loja and some surrounding small cities followed by a short venture to the coast to visit a friend in the banana capital of the world, Machala.
Day Bus Blues
Traveling in Ecuador by bus is a great option because it is so inexpensive (roughly one dollar per hour). Additionally, due to the small size of the country, it is a viable option to get just about anywhere save the Galapagos Islands. One of the downsides of bus travel in Ecuador is that under certain circumstances it is incredibly dangerous.
Due to the mountainous terrain, the roads in Ecuador are winding and barely guarded by barriers to prevent vehicles from falling over the edge. Since I have been in Ecuador, I have heard of at least three horrific bus accidents that involved buses rolling off the edge of a mountain road, resulting in the death and injury of many of its passengers. Most of the accidents happen late at night in scenarios where the bus driver falls asleep at the wheel. Because of this, WorldTeach has prohibited any of its volunteers from taking buses at night (not that I would take them anyway) and our only option is to take buses during the day.
This is obviously a huge disadvantage because instead of getting on a bus at night with a bunch of quietly sleeping passengers and waking up in your destination city (without having to pay for a hostal that night, might I add), you end up spending half of your day and all of your daylight on a sun-heated people oven that either smells like a locker room or a gas station bathroom—depending on how many infants are sitting around you—and sounds like a wrestling match or salsa club—depending on whether the bus driver puts on a Van Damme movie or blasts the radio through the bus speakers.
I was traveling with my SECAP co-worker Caitlin, and we decided that Loja would be our first destination. With the drive clocking in at a whopping twelve hours, we agreed to make a stop in Cuenca for the night to make the trip more bearable. One of our WorldTeach friends lives in Cuenca and her host family runs a hostal, so we stayed at her place for a very reasonable $3.50 a night.
Before we left for Loja the next morning, we walked around one of Cuenca's parks. I remembered the park from the first time I was there because of the ridiculous statue it had of Ecuador's only Olympic champion, and Cuenca resident, Jefferson Perez. I say the statue is ridiculous because Perez won an Olympic medal for racewalking.
For the uninitiated, racewalking is a sport in which you move as quickly as you can without picking both feet off the ground at the same time and while keeping your leg straight while your foot is in contact with the ground. While the idea of walking as fast as you can sounds (and looks) ridiculous, good racewalkers actually move incredibly fast considering the restrictions on their movement.
To give you some perspective, the fastest racewalking mile time I could find online was 6:07. If you have no idea what that means, my freshman year of college I ran a 6:20. I guess the spirit of racewalking is kept alive in Cuenca by the statue of Perez because that morning we saw multiple groups of people racewalking around the park and looking absolutely foolish doing it.
(Aside: Every now and again I will mention an absurd internet video that I saw a long time ago to a friend of mine, only to question myself later when I am alone about whether or not I had actually seen the video or just fabricated it by mixing up old memories. One such video was a prank where they scared Jefferson Perez to see if he would racewalk or run to escape. I confirmed that the video in fact does exist, and it is funny to see him admit that he only runs a little bit faster than he walks.)
Loja
Loja is a city way in the south of Ecuador nearly at the border with Peru. It is a small city known for its live music, clean Spanish, and proud people. Loja was actually my first choice city when coming to Ecuador (the WorldTeach application doesn't have a section for city preferences, but that didn't stop me from listing mine). It turns out I had a pretty good taste in Ecuadorian cities before I got to Ecuador because I had a great time in Loja and could definitely see myself living there.
The city seemed small compared to Cuenca, but the streets were alive with people and there was a great energy everywhere we went. Even though it rained every day we were there, it didn't stop us from visiting the city's many attractive streets and plazas, and watching a live outdoor concert and dance performance.
The first afternoon we were in Loja we met a guy who was selling sucre, Ecuador's former currency before its dollarization and switch to U.S. currency, as souvenirs. I don't really know anything about how currency or economics work, but it was interesting to hear him talk about how bad the inflation was (Wikipedia tells me 25,000:1 at the time of dollarization). The guy had all other kinds of world money too, and it was incredibly frustrating to see how pretty much every country in the world has more fun looking money than the U.S. dollar.
Two other interesting sights from Loja that have no accompanying narrative are the following: a store called "Seven & Leven" and a place that sold pizza cones.
Around Loja
While we were staying in Loja we visited a few nearby cities of interest. The first one we visited was Vilcabamba, a town that became famous because of rumors that the people there regularly live to be over 100 years old. We went horse riding in town, and my guide told me that the oldest confirmed person from Vilcabamba is 115 years old since they only started officially recording birthdays 115 years ago.
Vilcabamba was tiny and filled with gringos. We met an interesting character from Virginia called Charlito, who referred to his eponymous restaurant as "conspiracy theory headquarters" because it is where the crazy local expats gather to talk about all the illegal things they think governments are doing.
After starting up a conversation with us, Charlito told us more about his life and how he ended up in Vilcabamba. Apparently he got fed up with the lack of freedom in the United States ("You can't even put a dog in the back of a pickup truck anymore!") so he sought* out a place where he would be free to carry as many animals outside the cabin of his moving vehicle as he wanted. He claimed that he settled in Vilcabamba because the weather there is the best in the world, which was hard for us to believe because it rained the entire time we were there. As we were leaving he encouraged us all to consider moving to Ecuador to start an English school because it is impossible to not make money since there is no real business competition here. I'm not too sure about that, but "Krishito's" does have a ring to it...
After Vilcabamba, we checked out two other little towns called Saraguro and Zaruma, known for their jewelry and gold mine respectively, that had nothing worth writing about.
*I tried to type "seeked" and just learned that it is not a word.
Machala
The last stop we made on the first leg of our trip was to a city on the coast called Machala. Machala is the fourth largest city in Ecuador (behind Guayaquil, Quito, and Cuenca) and since I live in the fifth largest city (Ambato), I have now visited the five largest cities in Ecuador, which I feel like is some sort of accomplishment.
Machala is not known for being a tourist spot since there is really not much there except for ports where bananas are shipped to different parts of the world. Still, it's neat to look out the window on the bus to Machala and see miles of banana trees on both sides.
Interestingly enough, although there are a ton of bananas in Machala, people don't really ever eat them plain like we do in the U.S. Instead, they have several different varieties of cooked, mashed bananas that show up in many of their typical dishes. From the first minute I stepped off the bus in Machala I started looking for a banana to eat, but it wasn't until two days later as I was about to get on a bus home that I finally stumbled across a restaurant with bananas on the tables and the owner let me buy one from him.
The whole trip to Machala was basically just an excuse to see our friend Amy who lives there, so we spent a lot of time hanging out with her and we were even invited to spend the night at her place by her gracious host family, which was nice since the hotels in Machala are pricey.
Outside of seeing our friend, Machala was really no different than any other area of the coast I have been to. The Spanish was nearly unintelligible, I was sweating the entire time, and I had tasty seafood.
Caitlin and I considered continuing to travel up the coast on our way back to Ambato, but my impacted wisdom tooth thought otherwise and I ran home crying so I could see a dentist and hopefully get my tooth pulled before we headed out east to the jungle town of Tena for part two of our vacation.
Day Bus Blues
Traveling in Ecuador by bus is a great option because it is so inexpensive (roughly one dollar per hour). Additionally, due to the small size of the country, it is a viable option to get just about anywhere save the Galapagos Islands. One of the downsides of bus travel in Ecuador is that under certain circumstances it is incredibly dangerous.
Due to the mountainous terrain, the roads in Ecuador are winding and barely guarded by barriers to prevent vehicles from falling over the edge. Since I have been in Ecuador, I have heard of at least three horrific bus accidents that involved buses rolling off the edge of a mountain road, resulting in the death and injury of many of its passengers. Most of the accidents happen late at night in scenarios where the bus driver falls asleep at the wheel. Because of this, WorldTeach has prohibited any of its volunteers from taking buses at night (not that I would take them anyway) and our only option is to take buses during the day.
This is obviously a huge disadvantage because instead of getting on a bus at night with a bunch of quietly sleeping passengers and waking up in your destination city (without having to pay for a hostal that night, might I add), you end up spending half of your day and all of your daylight on a sun-heated people oven that either smells like a locker room or a gas station bathroom—depending on how many infants are sitting around you—and sounds like a wrestling match or salsa club—depending on whether the bus driver puts on a Van Damme movie or blasts the radio through the bus speakers.
I was traveling with my SECAP co-worker Caitlin, and we decided that Loja would be our first destination. With the drive clocking in at a whopping twelve hours, we agreed to make a stop in Cuenca for the night to make the trip more bearable. One of our WorldTeach friends lives in Cuenca and her host family runs a hostal, so we stayed at her place for a very reasonable $3.50 a night.
Before we left for Loja the next morning, we walked around one of Cuenca's parks. I remembered the park from the first time I was there because of the ridiculous statue it had of Ecuador's only Olympic champion, and Cuenca resident, Jefferson Perez. I say the statue is ridiculous because Perez won an Olympic medal for racewalking.
For the uninitiated, racewalking is a sport in which you move as quickly as you can without picking both feet off the ground at the same time and while keeping your leg straight while your foot is in contact with the ground. While the idea of walking as fast as you can sounds (and looks) ridiculous, good racewalkers actually move incredibly fast considering the restrictions on their movement.
To give you some perspective, the fastest racewalking mile time I could find online was 6:07. If you have no idea what that means, my freshman year of college I ran a 6:20. I guess the spirit of racewalking is kept alive in Cuenca by the statue of Perez because that morning we saw multiple groups of people racewalking around the park and looking absolutely foolish doing it.
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| A statue that captures all the excitement and awkward body movements of racewalking |
Loja
Loja is a city way in the south of Ecuador nearly at the border with Peru. It is a small city known for its live music, clean Spanish, and proud people. Loja was actually my first choice city when coming to Ecuador (the WorldTeach application doesn't have a section for city preferences, but that didn't stop me from listing mine). It turns out I had a pretty good taste in Ecuadorian cities before I got to Ecuador because I had a great time in Loja and could definitely see myself living there.
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| Plaza in Loja featuring a statue of a man who I assume is the most famous racewalker from that city |
The city seemed small compared to Cuenca, but the streets were alive with people and there was a great energy everywhere we went. Even though it rained every day we were there, it didn't stop us from visiting the city's many attractive streets and plazas, and watching a live outdoor concert and dance performance.
Two other interesting sights from Loja that have no accompanying narrative are the following: a store called "Seven & Leven" and a place that sold pizza cones.
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| They had great Slerr-P's |
Around Loja
While we were staying in Loja we visited a few nearby cities of interest. The first one we visited was Vilcabamba, a town that became famous because of rumors that the people there regularly live to be over 100 years old. We went horse riding in town, and my guide told me that the oldest confirmed person from Vilcabamba is 115 years old since they only started officially recording birthdays 115 years ago.
After starting up a conversation with us, Charlito told us more about his life and how he ended up in Vilcabamba. Apparently he got fed up with the lack of freedom in the United States ("You can't even put a dog in the back of a pickup truck anymore!") so he sought* out a place where he would be free to carry as many animals outside the cabin of his moving vehicle as he wanted. He claimed that he settled in Vilcabamba because the weather there is the best in the world, which was hard for us to believe because it rained the entire time we were there. As we were leaving he encouraged us all to consider moving to Ecuador to start an English school because it is impossible to not make money since there is no real business competition here. I'm not too sure about that, but "Krishito's" does have a ring to it...
After Vilcabamba, we checked out two other little towns called Saraguro and Zaruma, known for their jewelry and gold mine respectively, that had nothing worth writing about.
 |
| Except for this 7 Eleven in Zaruma I guess |
Machala
The last stop we made on the first leg of our trip was to a city on the coast called Machala. Machala is the fourth largest city in Ecuador (behind Guayaquil, Quito, and Cuenca) and since I live in the fifth largest city (Ambato), I have now visited the five largest cities in Ecuador, which I feel like is some sort of accomplishment.
Machala is not known for being a tourist spot since there is really not much there except for ports where bananas are shipped to different parts of the world. Still, it's neat to look out the window on the bus to Machala and see miles of banana trees on both sides.
Interestingly enough, although there are a ton of bananas in Machala, people don't really ever eat them plain like we do in the U.S. Instead, they have several different varieties of cooked, mashed bananas that show up in many of their typical dishes. From the first minute I stepped off the bus in Machala I started looking for a banana to eat, but it wasn't until two days later as I was about to get on a bus home that I finally stumbled across a restaurant with bananas on the tables and the owner let me buy one from him.
The whole trip to Machala was basically just an excuse to see our friend Amy who lives there, so we spent a lot of time hanging out with her and we were even invited to spend the night at her place by her gracious host family, which was nice since the hotels in Machala are pricey.
 |
| We ate a lot during this trip; I recall eating one too many banana things during this dinner and almost throwing up afterward. |
Caitlin and I considered continuing to travel up the coast on our way back to Ambato, but my impacted wisdom tooth thought otherwise and I ran home crying so I could see a dentist and hopefully get my tooth pulled before we headed out east to the jungle town of Tena for part two of our vacation.
Saturday, April 9, 2011
There's No Crying in Ecuador
After my last trip outside of Ambato to Quilotoa, I was reminded of how many cool things there are pretty close to where I live that I still haven't visited yet. This past weekend I asked around to find out what there was to do in a day trip and I learned about an intriguing train that runs through a nearby city. This past week also marked the end of my second semester at SECAP as I look forward to two weeks of vacation before starting my final semester here in Ecuador.
A Series of Unfortunate Events
Right behind my house in Ambato there is a set of unused train tracks that are beat up and overgrown with grass and weeds. My host brother told me a couple of weeks ago that a train used to pass through a large portion of Ecuador, and the now defunct tracks out back were once a part of that line. He said that since the trains didn't pass very often, when one came through Ambato all the kids in the neighborhood would hear it rumbling by and run to the tracks to wave at the passengers looking out. At some point during that conversation he mentioned that there are still some parts of the line functioning, and the most visited section leaves from the nearby city of Riobamba.
I did more research about the train and learned that the Riobamba section runs for several hours and culminates in an interesting stretch of track known as La Nariz del Diablo (the devil's nose). La Nariz del Diablo is a section of track which requires the train to reverse directions several times to zig-zag down a particularly steep section of a mountain. Additionally, I read from various sources that the train that leaves from Riobamba is famous because passengers are permitted to sit on top of the train for the duration of the ride as it passes through beautiful mountain scenery that includes great views of some of the area's prominent volcanoes. Some of the words I saw associated with the train ride included: exhilarating, hair-raising, and thrilling (remember these adjectives, because they will be necessary to contrast with reality to understand the extent of my disappointment later in the story).
When I found myself with nothing to do last Saturday, I remembered the train and convinced some of my friends to go to Riobamba with me and spend the night so we could buy tickets to get a good seat on top of the train that would be leaving the next morning at 7am.
(Aside: I've said many times that Ambato is a great place to live and I am very happy I ended up working here. With that being said, Ambato is the ugliest real city I have seen in Ecuador yet. Since Riobamba is only an hour away, I expected it to be a smaller and less impressive version of Ambato. It was small like I expected, but when we walked around I was surprised to see that the streets were very alive and the buildings were noticeably nicer than what we typically see here in Ambato.)
When we got off the bus and headed to our hotel, I walked into what appeared to be the train station (judging by the tracks leading out of the building) to try to buy tickets. It was there that our expectations for the trip started their sharp spiral downward into disappointment. I asked a guy who worked there where we buy tickets and he said a word I didn't understand. He repeated it and what I took away from the conversation was that we needed to buy tickets at "Alausí" and something about a bus. I assumed that the bus station in Riobamba was called Alausí and that the train now left from there instead of the old station.
I went to the reception desk at the hotel we were staying at to find out where exactly in Riobamba the Alausí station was and how we could get there. She was visibly stunned by how misinformed my question was and then set me straight. She told me that Alausí is the name of a city an hour and a half away from Riobamba, and we had to go there to get the train now. I looked on a map in the lobby, and it turned out Alausí was pretty much the end of the line and the train ride would only be about an hour descent and return through La Nariz del Diablo instead of a four hour journey through the mountains.
I thought, whatever, as long as we get to ride on top of a train down a mountain named after a body part of the devil I'll feel like I got the experience I set out for. Unfortunately, even that small desire was crushed when I asked the woman what time we would need to get to Alausí to get tickets to ride on top, and she told me that they no longer let passengers ride on top. The reason? Two years ago a cable came too close to the top of the train and decapitated two Japanese tourists. Yikes.
When traveling, things don't always go according to plan. What separates the traveling babies from the traveling pros is being able to make the best of whatever you've got to work with. After breaking the very disappointing news to my friends who I had convinced to come with me, I was very pleased to see that no one made as much as a disappointed groan; everyone agreed we should continue with the modified trip. That's what I'm talking about.
I was further impressed with two of my American friends who met us in Riobamba much later because they missed their bus stop at Riobamba and ended up stranded at a gas station in the middle of nowhere, and my Ecuadorian friend who couldn't stay the night in Riobamba so she took a bus at 4:00am to meet us on the bus to Alausí for our compromised trip. Uh, can you say "Champ Wagon"?
The next day we took the bus to Alausí and walked to the train station only to find out that (I can't make this stuff up) tickets for the train had already been sold out. At that point the group got really upset and we tried to get on the train anyway. We argued in English, Spanish, and even resorted to more childish methods such as pulling papers out of the "pick a number" distributor in the office, all to no avail.
After a few minutes of moping, our group pulled it together and yet again made the best out of the situation. We couldn't ride the train down the tracks, but there was no reason why we couldn't just walk down them, so that's exactly what we did. We got to see all the same scenery as the people on the train and we were outside already so we could take as many pictures as we wanted. The only slightly scary part was hopping off the tracks when we heard a train coming.
At the end of the tracks we ate lunch then started working on how to get back up to Alausí. We ended up hiring some guy with a pickup truck to bring us to a major road where we could catch a bus back to Ambato.
When the truck arrived there was already an unfriendly dog in the back where we were going to sit. We fed it some bread and it calmed down, but I still sat as far away from it as I could in the back of the bed. That was a good idea until we started bumping around and I realized that the car was beat up and the door latch probably wasn't in good enough condition to handle someone's full body weight slamming against the door. For safety, I latched onto an unwilling Ariana's arm. If that door opened I was either being saved or bringing someone down with me.
I have been in Ecuador long enough now that catching rides in the back of a stranger's truck is no longer a novelty. However, this particular truck ride took a turn for the ridiculous when two kids jumped on the back of the truck with live crabs in their hands. Dead crabs freak me out enough, so I was very uncomfortable the entire time they were waving crustaceans in my face. Soon after they jumped on the truck and we started moving again, the dog fell off and it was the funniest thing I had seen in months. Everyone started screaming that the dog had fallen off to alert the driver to stop the car, and one of the kids grabbed the dog and threw it on top of my legs. The dog was flipping out a little when one of the kids dropped a crab on me, then I started freaking out and laughing hysterically at the absurdity of the situation. It was a new twist on the usual Ecuadorian truck bed ride for me.
Another funny thing that kept happening throughout the trip was people asking my Ecuadorian friend Lis what tour company she was with, because that's really the only plausible explanation for one Ecua rolling with a group of six gringos.
Even though nothing went according to plan on this trip, we still had fun footing it and it turned out to be a memorable weekend for other reasons. Since the trip was my idea, I'm crossing my fingers that the numerous malfunctions we experienced will exempt me from having to plan any more group trips in the future.
School's Out
This Thursday was the end of my second semester teaching English at SECAP. I can say with confidence that this semester I was much more organized and I was better in front of my classes than I was last semester. This semester I had about half as many students as I had last time, and I was surprised by how different it is teaching a group of 11 students compared to a group of 24. Having fewer students means they are easier to handle as a group and everyone gets more chances to talk and participate in class, but it also means that there is much less energy in the room to begin with. The first semester my goal was getting everyone to focus their energy on the task at hand, whereas this past semester I found myself needing to get the class riled up at the start so they were awake and willing to participate.
This semester I was also much stricter about attendance, something that was a problem my last module. Round two I made two tardies equal one absence, and eight absences an automatic fail. I felt like kind of a jerk on Thursday failing two students with passing grades in the class because they missed too many classes, but I have learned that leeway on things that sometimes seem trivial (like being a minute late to class) shows students that they can do whatever they want. If you want to teach English like a boss, sometimes you've got to lay down the law.
Another thing I am learning the more I teach is that teaching a foreign language is much more than teaching students how to translate their ideas into English. Someone's ability to be good at using a foreign language (particularly writing) is dependent on their ability to use their own language. For instance, writing is not something that is intuitive by any means. Good writing is hard work even in the writer's mother tongue, so when a student doesn't understand the principles of adequate writing in his own language, he has incredible difficulty writing acceptable English. This is particularly frustrating in regards to punctuation. The majority of my students don't know how to put together sentences, and their essays usually end up looking more like long lists of sentence fragments or a page of loosely connected ideas strung together with commas. Of course, that is not to say that bad writing is exclusive to Spanish speakers; it is mostly due to the terrible writing I have seen in the English language that makes me believe that I could be a writer back home if I don't ever get into med school.
Butter Me Up
I have seen students in the States try to butter their teachers up with the hope of getting something in return—usually a grade—but they always try to be subtle about it so that the teacher doesn't realize what is happening (because no Embryology professor wants to believe that she gave a student a better grade because he gave her a disc with a fetus design on it). My students try to win brownie points from me sometimes, but it is never even close to subtle and it is always embarrassingly shameless.
In one of my classes this past week a student came in early and handed me a box of cookies. When I was three cookies in, she jumped to the point and asked me if she could leave because she had to do something with her family. I felt like I had been used, but the cookies were so delicious that I let her go and finished the box in disgrace at being so easily manipulated.
Another student who had cooked dinner for the entire class one night failed due to absences. On Thursday when I was giving out the grades the entire class was essentially staging a protest in the classroom trying to convince me to pass her, and she tried to make me feel guilty by saying, "But teacher, I cooked you dinner!" I'm proud to say that I didn't let that one go, but it was ridiculous to see a 26 year old woman trying to argue that point.
A funny student of mine had seen somewhere on T.V. that students in the States give apples to their teachers. He was failing at one point late in the semester, and I heard him joke to his classmates that he was going to bring the teacher a watermelon to save his grade (bigger fruit means bigger points, right?). Since he passed the class he never did bring me that watermelon, but next semester I might trick him into thinking he is failing to see if he actually does it.
Break
I have two weeks off now before I begin my third and final semester teaching here in Ecuador. I am planning to visit the last parts of Ecuador that I am interested in seeing before I return to the States, namely cities in the south like Loja, Vilcabamba, and Machala. Ecuador is a small country, but there are certainly a lot of cool little places to see. I can't say that teaching is my calling in life, but I also can't complain about the vacation time.
Teacher Traveler
I recently wrote an article for a teaching traveling website called teachingtraveling.com. If you are at all interested in teaching abroad there are a lot of interesting articles on the site, and you can check out my piece here.
A Series of Unfortunate Events
Right behind my house in Ambato there is a set of unused train tracks that are beat up and overgrown with grass and weeds. My host brother told me a couple of weeks ago that a train used to pass through a large portion of Ecuador, and the now defunct tracks out back were once a part of that line. He said that since the trains didn't pass very often, when one came through Ambato all the kids in the neighborhood would hear it rumbling by and run to the tracks to wave at the passengers looking out. At some point during that conversation he mentioned that there are still some parts of the line functioning, and the most visited section leaves from the nearby city of Riobamba.
I did more research about the train and learned that the Riobamba section runs for several hours and culminates in an interesting stretch of track known as La Nariz del Diablo (the devil's nose). La Nariz del Diablo is a section of track which requires the train to reverse directions several times to zig-zag down a particularly steep section of a mountain. Additionally, I read from various sources that the train that leaves from Riobamba is famous because passengers are permitted to sit on top of the train for the duration of the ride as it passes through beautiful mountain scenery that includes great views of some of the area's prominent volcanoes. Some of the words I saw associated with the train ride included: exhilarating, hair-raising, and thrilling (remember these adjectives, because they will be necessary to contrast with reality to understand the extent of my disappointment later in the story).
When I found myself with nothing to do last Saturday, I remembered the train and convinced some of my friends to go to Riobamba with me and spend the night so we could buy tickets to get a good seat on top of the train that would be leaving the next morning at 7am.
(Aside: I've said many times that Ambato is a great place to live and I am very happy I ended up working here. With that being said, Ambato is the ugliest real city I have seen in Ecuador yet. Since Riobamba is only an hour away, I expected it to be a smaller and less impressive version of Ambato. It was small like I expected, but when we walked around I was surprised to see that the streets were very alive and the buildings were noticeably nicer than what we typically see here in Ambato.)
When we got off the bus and headed to our hotel, I walked into what appeared to be the train station (judging by the tracks leading out of the building) to try to buy tickets. It was there that our expectations for the trip started their sharp spiral downward into disappointment. I asked a guy who worked there where we buy tickets and he said a word I didn't understand. He repeated it and what I took away from the conversation was that we needed to buy tickets at "Alausí" and something about a bus. I assumed that the bus station in Riobamba was called Alausí and that the train now left from there instead of the old station.
I went to the reception desk at the hotel we were staying at to find out where exactly in Riobamba the Alausí station was and how we could get there. She was visibly stunned by how misinformed my question was and then set me straight. She told me that Alausí is the name of a city an hour and a half away from Riobamba, and we had to go there to get the train now. I looked on a map in the lobby, and it turned out Alausí was pretty much the end of the line and the train ride would only be about an hour descent and return through La Nariz del Diablo instead of a four hour journey through the mountains.
 |
| Alausí: Quichua for "not a bus terminal in Riobamba" |
I thought, whatever, as long as we get to ride on top of a train down a mountain named after a body part of the devil I'll feel like I got the experience I set out for. Unfortunately, even that small desire was crushed when I asked the woman what time we would need to get to Alausí to get tickets to ride on top, and she told me that they no longer let passengers ride on top. The reason? Two years ago a cable came too close to the top of the train and decapitated two Japanese tourists. Yikes.
When traveling, things don't always go according to plan. What separates the traveling babies from the traveling pros is being able to make the best of whatever you've got to work with. After breaking the very disappointing news to my friends who I had convinced to come with me, I was very pleased to see that no one made as much as a disappointed groan; everyone agreed we should continue with the modified trip. That's what I'm talking about.
I was further impressed with two of my American friends who met us in Riobamba much later because they missed their bus stop at Riobamba and ended up stranded at a gas station in the middle of nowhere, and my Ecuadorian friend who couldn't stay the night in Riobamba so she took a bus at 4:00am to meet us on the bus to Alausí for our compromised trip. Uh, can you say "Champ Wagon"?
 |
| Ari was not pleased |
After a few minutes of moping, our group pulled it together and yet again made the best out of the situation. We couldn't ride the train down the tracks, but there was no reason why we couldn't just walk down them, so that's exactly what we did. We got to see all the same scenery as the people on the train and we were outside already so we could take as many pictures as we wanted. The only slightly scary part was hopping off the tracks when we heard a train coming.
 |
| If I keep botching transportation on trips like Quilotoa and Alausí every weekend, my quads are gonna get huge. |
At the end of the tracks we ate lunch then started working on how to get back up to Alausí. We ended up hiring some guy with a pickup truck to bring us to a major road where we could catch a bus back to Ambato.
When the truck arrived there was already an unfriendly dog in the back where we were going to sit. We fed it some bread and it calmed down, but I still sat as far away from it as I could in the back of the bed. That was a good idea until we started bumping around and I realized that the car was beat up and the door latch probably wasn't in good enough condition to handle someone's full body weight slamming against the door. For safety, I latched onto an unwilling Ariana's arm. If that door opened I was either being saved or bringing someone down with me.
 |
| Me, Ari, Lis, and Will. You can't see in this picture, but we were in fact riding in the back of a truck. |
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| Amanda fears nothing |
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| The zig-zag in the mountain is La Nariz del Diablo. (Not pictured: El Codo del Diablo) |
Even though nothing went according to plan on this trip, we still had fun footing it and it turned out to be a memorable weekend for other reasons. Since the trip was my idea, I'm crossing my fingers that the numerous malfunctions we experienced will exempt me from having to plan any more group trips in the future.
School's Out
This Thursday was the end of my second semester teaching English at SECAP. I can say with confidence that this semester I was much more organized and I was better in front of my classes than I was last semester. This semester I had about half as many students as I had last time, and I was surprised by how different it is teaching a group of 11 students compared to a group of 24. Having fewer students means they are easier to handle as a group and everyone gets more chances to talk and participate in class, but it also means that there is much less energy in the room to begin with. The first semester my goal was getting everyone to focus their energy on the task at hand, whereas this past semester I found myself needing to get the class riled up at the start so they were awake and willing to participate.
This semester I was also much stricter about attendance, something that was a problem my last module. Round two I made two tardies equal one absence, and eight absences an automatic fail. I felt like kind of a jerk on Thursday failing two students with passing grades in the class because they missed too many classes, but I have learned that leeway on things that sometimes seem trivial (like being a minute late to class) shows students that they can do whatever they want. If you want to teach English like a boss, sometimes you've got to lay down the law.
Another thing I am learning the more I teach is that teaching a foreign language is much more than teaching students how to translate their ideas into English. Someone's ability to be good at using a foreign language (particularly writing) is dependent on their ability to use their own language. For instance, writing is not something that is intuitive by any means. Good writing is hard work even in the writer's mother tongue, so when a student doesn't understand the principles of adequate writing in his own language, he has incredible difficulty writing acceptable English. This is particularly frustrating in regards to punctuation. The majority of my students don't know how to put together sentences, and their essays usually end up looking more like long lists of sentence fragments or a page of loosely connected ideas strung together with commas. Of course, that is not to say that bad writing is exclusive to Spanish speakers; it is mostly due to the terrible writing I have seen in the English language that makes me believe that I could be a writer back home if I don't ever get into med school.
Butter Me Up
I have seen students in the States try to butter their teachers up with the hope of getting something in return—usually a grade—but they always try to be subtle about it so that the teacher doesn't realize what is happening (because no Embryology professor wants to believe that she gave a student a better grade because he gave her a disc with a fetus design on it). My students try to win brownie points from me sometimes, but it is never even close to subtle and it is always embarrassingly shameless.
In one of my classes this past week a student came in early and handed me a box of cookies. When I was three cookies in, she jumped to the point and asked me if she could leave because she had to do something with her family. I felt like I had been used, but the cookies were so delicious that I let her go and finished the box in disgrace at being so easily manipulated.
Another student who had cooked dinner for the entire class one night failed due to absences. On Thursday when I was giving out the grades the entire class was essentially staging a protest in the classroom trying to convince me to pass her, and she tried to make me feel guilty by saying, "But teacher, I cooked you dinner!" I'm proud to say that I didn't let that one go, but it was ridiculous to see a 26 year old woman trying to argue that point.
A funny student of mine had seen somewhere on T.V. that students in the States give apples to their teachers. He was failing at one point late in the semester, and I heard him joke to his classmates that he was going to bring the teacher a watermelon to save his grade (bigger fruit means bigger points, right?). Since he passed the class he never did bring me that watermelon, but next semester I might trick him into thinking he is failing to see if he actually does it.
Break
I have two weeks off now before I begin my third and final semester teaching here in Ecuador. I am planning to visit the last parts of Ecuador that I am interested in seeing before I return to the States, namely cities in the south like Loja, Vilcabamba, and Machala. Ecuador is a small country, but there are certainly a lot of cool little places to see. I can't say that teaching is my calling in life, but I also can't complain about the vacation time.
Teacher Traveler
I recently wrote an article for a teaching traveling website called teachingtraveling.com. If you are at all interested in teaching abroad there are a lot of interesting articles on the site, and you can check out my piece here.
Monday, March 28, 2011
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 |
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 |
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. |
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.
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