Category Archives: Ecuador

breakfast for will

Will leaves tonight for Buenos Aires. It’s been great having him around. He’ll fly back to Quito on June 15th, and then he’ll travel some more — maybe to the beaches of Ecuador, maybe to Peru, maybe to Costa Rica. His return gives us another landmark in time that illuminates how soon we’ll be back in Wisconsin. He comes back here in mid-June; a month later, I’m heading home to move into the house and re-roof.

I’ll start petitioning everyone now: we need a big homecoming party for Eileen, so set aside August 1st or so. We’ll know the exact dates soon. Also, keep some time free after July 20th to help me move into the house. Will’s going to ask a former-roofer friend of his to help us re-roof the house before Eileen gets back. It should be a two or three day project.

The above picture, by the way, is of me giving Will breakfast in bed last week.

bella y cachorros

Last week, the landlord’s dog Bella gave birth to four puppies. They came to get me at 10:00 to say that she was starting to deliver. I really wanted to see it. But when Will and I went over there, she didn’t perform. She was visibly uncomfortable, but it would be another four hours before the first puppy came. I stayed up and went over there a few times, but by 12:30 I had given up hope that it was going to happen soon. In the morning, there were a total of four pups. Two black ones, a white one, and a tan one. The white one is the only male and is the runt.

They’re going to keep one of the pups and sell the others. They’re trying to decide between the oat-colored one (as they call it) or the black one with the beard and tie (she has two patches of white, on her chest and her chin).

Their eyes should open in a week. Their tails have already been chopped. Cute little things. They keep telling us to take one back to “Winsconsin.”

Well, it’s been a slow week in Lake Wobegon. I mean Quito. So this week is picture week. We’re gonna post a new picture every day. How about that?

Below, you will find a picture of the drain in our living room (?). It is covered by a paper towel folded in fourths. It is always covered. If someone accidentally kicks the paper towel off the drain, we usually smell it before we see it. It used to smell bad. In the first months, before we knew what was happening, we mistakenly thought that bathroom odors were somehow drifting down the stairs. We frequently accused each other of “ripping one.”

Now, however, the smell that is occasionally allowed to escape from the fiendish hole is not simply bathroom stench. It is raw sewage meets pickled vomit meets toxic swamp. It is like a dead frog that you find underneath a wet, moldy towel that you left in a plastic bag out in your back yard. It is like a tipped port-a-john at a rowing regatta where at least three teams had gotten food poisoning at Chuck-E-Cheese’s the night before. Indeed, it is a porthole to hell itself.

If only we could blog smells.

the porthole to hell

Suffered a brief bout of stomach bugs on Thursday. Thursday night was ugly. I’ve now thrown up six times in Ecuador. As I was throwing up early Friday morning, I was thinking, “okay, this really isn’t so bad.” You kinda learn how to control the heaves. And you almost always feel much better after the second session.

I haven’t really had any colds down here. Certainly no sinus infections. The net quantity of sickness has been the same, really. It’s just the quality that’s different.

Other news: Will leaves for Buenos Aires next Thursday. We are astounded to realize that in three months, we’ll be home. Tim has begun having teaching-high-school nightmares.

I really wanted to make a pun of some latin phrase, substituting “vomitas” for one of the words, but I don’t know enough latin.

That’s all for now.

So. My police came back to class yesterday. There were eleven of them, which brought my class total to 27, and my percent of students who don’t understand me to 41%. I made sure to make the class a little more difficult than usual to scare some of them off, and I certainly succeeded. After class, they came up to me and asked what they could do. “We were completely lost,” they said. “Maybe you can give an extra hour-long class every day for the next month in the police station,” they suggested. I think my face betrayed my reluctance. “What are our alternatives?” they asked.

And before I could really answer, they asked me to come to the station to talk to the Major about the options.

Uh. . .

“No, it’s best if you talk to him, Tim.” Ok, but . . . “He’ll listen to you.” Yeah, um . . . “You have time, don’t you?” Uh. . .

And so I went. A summary of the whole situation would be boring. For reasons I don’t understand, the Major wouldn’t allow the group to be divided, meaning I couldn’t just take the four competent students and send the other seven to a lower level. So the question was whether all of them should enter my class and struggle, or if they should enter Westra’s lower level class and be okay. The remaining question was whether or not SECAP would give a certificate of completion to the students who didn’t pass all the levels. Such a question would not be asked at the vast majority of educational institutions in the States – especially by policemen.

(An interesting aside: one of my policemen was showing me all the nifty toys on his policeman’s utility belt – bullet clips, cell phone, baton, toothbrush and toothpaste even – and the only thing missing was the pepper spray, which, he explained, had been stolen at the police station!)

This afternoon, I rushed to get the grades ready to take down to SECAP for a meeting with the director, Ernesto Gonzalez. I would ask him myself whether or not the police could get a certificate of completion having missed a month and failed others. When I arrived, however, the gates were locked, and a sign was posted claiming that classes were “suspended” for the time being. It gave no information about why. The guard wasn’t helpful, and he wouldn’t let me through the gate to talk to the director. In fact, he said the director was gone.

I didn’t leave right away. I hung out and text messaged one of the police and Jess, the WorldTeach director, to try to figure out what was going on. As I was waiting for a response, I saw the SECAP custodian coming toward me. I said hi and asked if any police had come to talk to Ernesto today. Yeah, he said. Is Ernesto gone? I asked. No, he’s in the office.

Aha!

I half-asked the custodian and half-asked the guard (again) if I could go to the office to talk to Ernesto. This time, he let me through.

I interrupted a card game to ask Ernesto what had come of the meeting with the police. They’ll wait a month and enter Westra’s class, he said.

On my way home, I heard from Jess. At the north SECAP, they were basically staging a coup. They shut down operations and demanded that the national director, Fernando Alban, step down. They said they would then elect one of their own as the national director. It was more or less a miniature version of how Lucio was ousted.

It’s funny. This morning, I was in the bathroom standing at the urinal. I had made the conscious decision not to close the door. I see about five men every day peeing on walls in Quito, so just being at a urinal, I figured I was exceeding the city’s standards. I looked around the bathroom at the dark yellow pool of stagnant water in the toilet that doesn’t flush; the sparse wads of toilet paper in the rusting garbage can; and the thin, ripped and stained carpet.

Recently, they’ve posted signs in all the classrooms that say “Señor participante, ponga la basura en su lugar.” Literally, this means, “put garbage in its place.” It works on so many levels — the trash being the president of the country, the national director of SECAP, failing students, or wads of toilet paper.