Category Archives: Ecuador

crumpled paper

Eileen�s parents were kind enough to put together a little care package for us in the form of an extra suitcase sent along with Eileen�s friend Joni. It was packed with clif bars, vitamin water, xbox magazines (bathroom reading), livestrong bracelets (gifts for my students), a couple of birthday presents for me (I made a list for those of you who want to get me a little something), and a bunch of newspapers for padding. It was like Christmas morning, opening up the suitcase. Today, we just finished packing it up with things we don�t need for the next couple of months. We�re a little worried that it�s going to be hard to get everything home in July.

Yesterday, I read several of the crumpled Madison newspapers. And I got a little foreshadowing of how a complete understanding of the language I�m living in will be annoying. Right now, I�m comfortably ignorant of the daily idiocy that appears in local newspapers.

I was first lured in by a headline that read, �Lure of CDs snared terror fugitive.� About a third of the way through the piece, I read, �They burn and break in by night, melt into the mainstream by day. They work alone or in tiny cells motivated not by profit but by passion. The Animal Liberation Front . . .� Wait. What? The Animal Liberation Front? Tell me something. Prior to September 11th, would The Cap Times have used the same ridiculous rhetoric in their headline? Terror, huh?

Good grief.

I decided to move on to some local education issues. The first thing to catch my eye was a very compelling headline from the May 16th Cap Times: �Be yourself, graduates told.� That�s front page news? A clich�d, ho-hum commencement speech? No need to read that article.

I uncrumpled a �Metro� section which had an article written by a friend of mine, Lee Sensenbrenner, about the school referendums. I�ve been out of the loop on the issue, so I read it. Unfortunately, the names I read there brought back my worst memories of my teaching career — the career I�m returning to.

I turned to the Lifestyle section next. It had an article entitled �Why we need good English.� I figured maybe the piece would make me feel more appreciated, so I read on. Ironically, the writing was at about 6th-grade level. And it quoted Barbara Coonradt, of Albany, N.Y., who said, �When people speak or write improperly, I immediately view them as not very intelligent. While I realize that my perception may be incorrect, it�s hard for me to forgive the misuse of English when proper usage is something most people can learn easily.�

Barbara, listen to me. I�ve spent the past year trying to teach people how to speak any form of intelligible English. And prior to that, I spent five years trying to teach people some things about �proper English usage.� It�s NOT easy to learn. Have you ever been to a country where you didn�t speak the language, Barbara? How many languages do you speak other than English? If someone had grown up in a culture where �proper English� was not the language, would you still contend that �proper English� is easy to learn? (I�m not just talking about foreign-born people.)

Barbara, I know the difference between lie and lay. I know the difference between effect and affect. I know that in the sentence, �It is I,� I is the predicate nominative and thus should be in the subjective case. Barbara, I�m sure I could kick your proper usage ass in a grammar bee. And I�m telling you as a teacher of English that it is not an easy thing to master.

Good Lord. What�s really scary is that there�s a 90% chance that this idiotic article got posted on the bulletin board in the English department at West.

No wonder I never read the local newspapers.

The real �terror fugitive� in all this is the career I�m going back to. I�m terrorized by the thought of returning to the likes of Joan Knoebel and people like Barbara Coonradt. I console myself with the knowledge that Madison is not a town full of idiots, and that there�s lots to love.

I’ve been reading Mirror, Mirror, which is Gregory Maguire’s retelling of Snow White. (He’s the guy who wrote Wicked, the retelling of the Wizard of Oz.) In his rendition, Maguire tells of Snow White (Bianca de Nevada) arriving at the cave where the dwarves live and then sleeping for years from her exhaustion. When she awakes, she eventually gets around to asking how long she’s been there.

“You’ve been here long enough to grow, I suppose,” he said without interest.
“I’m here four years, or five, certainly. Or six?”
“I don’t know.”
“And what have you been doing in all those years?”
“Waiting. Waiting for you to wake up.”
“Standing here around me? For years? What did you do all that time?”
“To the extent we are capable,” he said with a slight grin, “we were thinking.”
“What do you think, then?” she demanded of him.
He considered. “Slow thoughts.”

Now I’m not saying I want to be a dwarf, but there’s something enviable about this outlook on time. In the story, the dwarves are old. Older than the trees. They can afford to sit around like stones, observing and thinking their slow thoughts.

At end-service last weekend, one of the questions we were to ponder was what surprised us most about living in Ecuador. Somebody answered, “how long and short a year is.” It’s a sentiment we can definitely relate to. Right now, we’re a little homesick, looking forward to going back in a couple of months. But we know how quickly those two months will go.

Increasingly for me, time seems to go faster and faster. I can already see how my life will go by before I can do everything I want to do with it. There are so many possibilities, and where as ten years ago, it also seemed like I had a world of possibility, that world was more finite. I thought I would find something I loved and stick with it. Now I know there are many things to love and many things to learn. There’s not enough time.

And since this is the case; since we’re humans with short lives rather than dwarves, there’s a sense of urgency to everything.

Later in the story, Snow White tells one of the dwarves she wants to return home.

“You are bitten with the usual human rage of wanting,” replied the dwarf, munching on a bone that looked unsettlingly like a human digit.
“Nonetheless,” she said, “I am human, or used to be, and I don’t see any shame in it. I want to see the place I come from.”
“Don’t we give you all that you need?”
“I have clothes, I have a book of devotions to read and a small Spanish guitar to play. I have food . . . [but] I want to see [my home].”
“Aren’t you happy here?” asked the dwarf, a bit morosely. And then more slyly, “Were you ever happy there?”
“I was something there,” she said. “Aware of something sad, but real. Living on the forward edge of any ordinary day. Things happened. I don’t know how to answer your question about happiness. Happiness doesn’t signify.”

We humans have trouble waiting it out. Last July, our mind was on Ecuador. Now, our mind’s on this coming July.

In our rush to live life, do we avoid living it?

First Communion

So a couple of weeks ago, our landlords invited us to their son, David’s, first communion. Actually, David invited us when I wasn’t home. Eileen told me about it, and then an hour later or so, David returned to our apartment to ask us if we would be his godparents. I said sure with a non-chalance that could only be possible with a lack of comprehension, which was the case at first. As David was leaving, I realized that he had asked us to be godparents. Whoa!

We went with them to the “rehearsal,” which was unusually similar to the actual thing, including a first communion. The above photo is from the rehearsal. Unfortunately, the actual first communion (technically the second) was this past Saturday, so we couldn’t make it.

We’re a little apprehensive about what being a godparent entails, but our landlords are not very religious or traditional, so I don’t think they’ll be angry if our godparentage only entails keeping in touch.

Solid

I tell you, we won’t miss dodging Bella’s crap. She poops on the driveway, which is also our path to get to our front door. Last night, she pooped on the roof, so I stepped in it when I was on the phone with Eileen’s parents.

The other day, after returning home, I encounter the above poop formation in the driveway. I like this one. It’s more visible, and its surface area is smaller — or rather its contact-with-ground area is smaller, thus making the chances you’ll step on it slightly less.

At end service, there was a lot of talk about our re-entry into the States. People expressed their excitement and trepidation about going “home,” a concept which has now turned problematic for some of us. Some of the WorldTeach volunteers have lived in countries other than the US and Ecuador; I think for them, the talk about reverse culture shock and re-entry was a little boring and tedious, just as all the talk about teaching is sometimes boring and tedious for me. I also think that for those who grew up in a different country, culture shock and reverse culture shock are different animals.

At one point, we were assigned the task of deciding upon the top five most impacting changes of our lives and drawing a little timeline of it. I drew my timeline and then paired up with Jessie to talk about it. We had both put high school and college on our lists, the commonality being that in both situations, you are allowed an opportunity to create a different identity for yourself. You get into high school and you’re no longer so nailed down into the role you had in middle school. Similarly, in college, you now have a new opportunity to explore other facets of yourself. Many people go on with this search after college, becoming a ski bum, or traveling in Europe, or some other cliché of American soul-searching. When people go off on these missions to “find themselves” it’s seldom a spiritual journey. It’s usually an attempt to find people who accept them, or to become a person who people will accept.

We latch onto acceptance so tightly. At end-service, you could see how people pretty much sat with and conversed with friends from their site placements. Sometimes you could look around and point at different sections of the table and say, “those are the Manta people, those are the Quiteños, those are the Cuencanos, there are the Guayacos,” etc. Again, I come back to my main thesis about what living in Ecuador has taught me about the US: In the States, being cool is paramount; you have to struggle to fit in, to be popular, to be accepted. Here, people are more family oriented and so they have that acceptance automatically. Changing oneself to become popular with friends doesn’t make as much sense.

If you’ve grown up in the states, this aspect of the culture is a part of you. More so than American ideals of female beauty; more so than the “American dream” of wealth; it’s this aspect of our culture – this competitive popularity contest — that is the basis for the other cultural baggage. We are a culture which doesn’t provide people with acceptance, and so we must all vie for it. You find and stick with people who accept you because acceptance is so hard to come by.

And this is why for us Americans who have been affected by this culture of cool, the reverse culture shock of returning from a developing country (where acceptance is practically just your birthright) will be so difficult.

Let me give an example. When I went home back in December, I went to school and talked with some of my colleagues. One woman asked if I was dreaming in Spanish yet. And then practically before I could answer, another colleague of mine said, “well, when I went to Turkey, I was dreaming in this Turkish gibberish. I mean, it happens pretty fast.” Nevermind that her argument was absolutely stupid and ridiculous. Her point was to make my accomplishment seem less. She might as well have said, “oh don’t pay so much attention to him just cuz he went to a foreign country. Pay attention to me. I also went to a foreign country.”

That’s America. It’s this constant competition for acceptance.