Category Archives: Ecuador

We just posted some pics in the coppermine. They’re in “Home Scenes”

I wrote about my most recent bout of homesickness a week or so ago. It’s not as intense as our November epidemic, but there have been several factors converging together these past few days. One is that we’re slightly bored. Since our holiday plans fell through, we’ve been here in a quiet Quito, not socializing much, mostly getting our entertainment from American media. Two nights ago, we watched Cold Mountain, which has some beautiful North American landscape shots, and plenty of North American “traditional music.” We also listened to an episode of “This American Life” yesterday, and today we listened to Saturday’s edition of “All Things Considered.” In fact, we subscribed to both “All Things Considered” and “This American Life” for a month through audible.com.

Additionally, we’ve been talking about future travel plans. Eileen has a substantial break at the end of March, during which time we may go to the Galapagos or Peru or Chile. Eileen may even make two trips during that period. Her friend Joni may be coming to visit then, and my brother and sister are talking about coming down sometime soon. Since Eileen has whipped through most of the books we brought back from the states last month, we’ve also been investigating some recent books that we could have people bring us when they came in March.

We’ve also got to book our flights home pretty soon. So yesterday, we were talking about our possible departure dates. I’m done in mid-July, a full two weeks before Eileen, so one possibility is for me to come home a week or so earlier than she does and begin moving into the house. This option would make August less hectic, and it would probably be better for our marriage not to be moving into a house in the August heat with school’s increasingly larger shadow looming overhead like a meteor.

We still have five and a half months here, so we’ll have to live “in the now” (man). But in June and July, it will be tough to be here entirely, just as last summer, we were already in Ecuador a month before we left.

I’ve tried multiple times to improve the registration process at my SECAP (the school where I teach – Servicio Ecuatoriano de la CApacitacion Profesional). At SECAP, they create classes based on demand. And from my experience, whenever you have a situation where classes are created by demand, you need some sort of pre-registration. Both Shabazz and West High School worked this way to a certain extent. The problem is that in Ecuadorian culture, people don’t really follow through on their promises. So if you had students “commit” to an English class in the mornings from, say, seven to nine, they wouldn’t necessarily show up for that class. Thus, a pre-registration doesn’t really work. Instead, on the first day of class, the director of SECAP posts a list on a bulletin board which says which classes they’ll offer and when. It’s a really clumsy system, which this past month led to them creating a Basic 1A class in the morning; but since neither Westra nor I could teach that class, they hired an Ecuadorian English teacher – not quite the same as a North American native English speaker.

On Friday morning, the director interrupted my class at about 8:40 to say that we would be combining the two morning classes and moving me to the Basic 1B class. I have 24 students in my current morning class and Westra has about the same if not more. So there would be 40-50 students in Westra’s class. Ridiculous. The first I heard of this new plan was when the director interrupted my class. The students in my class complained and tried to appeal to the director; after he left, the remaining 30 minutes of class was useless.

From the perspective of SECAP, they want to have as many students as possible cuz that’s how they earn money. But this means that as students proceed to subsequent levels, they will probably change teachers and may even have to change time slots. The bottom line is that the system itself makes it difficult for students to stay with English for more that a few months.

But it’s just now that I’m starting to see some promise in my students. Just this past week, I thought, “wow, by July, these people will be able to get by; they’ll be able to communicate with English speakers walking around the streets of Quito.” I see how SECAP wants numbers, but as “WorldTeach volunteers,” we’re not really helping anyone if we just teach a Basic 1A class for a month and then get a new batch of students and teach them a Basic 1A class all over again. The potential of WorldTeach to actually be effective lies in the students I have right now, the ones who will be able to get by in English if they stick with it for 5 more months.

And really, if we’re gonna “make a difference” here it will be on this simplest of levels – the student level. I feel absolutely powerless to effect change within the administrative element of SECAP even though they really need it. And at the national level, they’ve just fired or hired new people, so the staff is different once again. There is so much instability at the national administrative levels, that even if you convinced one person that there’s a better way to run things, chance are that person would be gone after a year. With this latest change, we will have a major delay in getting paid.

In talking with my students Lourdes and Natalia about government here, I learned second-hand about the fact that every facet of government is corrupt. And if there’s a capable, honest person moving up through the ranks, they eliminate that person cuz he or she will be a threat to the little circle of corruption at the top.

It’s a hopeless feeling. You feel like there’s too much to fight and that the battle itself is doomed to fail. But it’s not an unfamiliar feeling.

On Friday after class, I went to an ATM to get some money. The machine ate my card. On Saturday, we tried cashing Eileen’s check, but the bank wouldn’t honor it. We then went to the ATM, but when we tried with Eileen’s card, it refused to give us the amount we needed. As we walked away, we passed the stupid Tame office. I muttered something along the lines of “developing nation infrastructure is annoyingly inefficient.” Actually, I may have said, “Ecuador sucks.”

I’m glad I live in the US, where operations tend to run more smoothly on every level. Still, there’s plenty to be disgruntled about in the US. And there’s plenty of fights in the US that seem doomed to fail from the get-go.

One of my favorite quotes of all time comes from the Roman philosopher Seneca: “Always fight for the good, knowing you will lose.”

I put up some videos of the demonstration. Over there on the right, click on videos.

We were gonna go to Vilcabamba, which is the “Valley of Longevity,” in the south of Ecuador. It’s supposedly a beautiful place. Ecuadorians talk about it like it’s magical. Our WorldTeach friend, Heather, lives in Vilcabamba, and we had talked excitedly with her about going to Vilca for Carnaval, but alas, it was not to be. Last week, we checked the internet every day for times and prices for tickets to Loja, the nearest airport to Vilcabamba. It’s a 16-hour bus ride from Quito to Loja, something Eileen’s knees can’t handle, and something I don’t want to do. I think it was about four or five years ago when I finally burned out on long road trips. In the spring of 2000, I had traveled from Philly to Madison then to Fort Collins, Colorado. Six weeks later, I went from Fort Collins to Philly, then Philly to Fort Collins, then Fort Collins to Madison. A 16-hour ride on a bus made for small people doesn’t sound appealing at all. However, the 45 minute plan ride to Loja sounded pretty ok. In our internet searches, we ascertained that there were suitable flight times and it seemed there were many spaces. We emailed Heather, giving her the all-clear. She booked a room for us at an ecolodge you have to hike to. We were pretty excited. Everyone in Quito says that Carnaval is “feo,” meaning ugly. People here “play Carnaval,” which entails throwing water balloons or buckets of water on random people walking in the street. They do it all over Ecuador with the exception of a town called Ambato, where it’s outlawed. In some places, they also throw flour at each other. Eileen and I have so far managed to avoid most of the water, though yesterday, we did get sprayed with a water pistol in a drive-by shooting.

Vilcabamba is not exempt from the playing of Carnaval, but the ecolodge would be much more tranquilo, as they say. Last Saturday, we went to the Tame office (Tame is the only airline that flies from Quito to Loja). Unfortunately, we arrived at 12:08, eight minutes after they closed for the weekend. No problem, we thought. We’ll just make a reservation on the internet.

Well, as one of Eileen’s fellow teachers at the CEC said, South America and the Internet don’t really get along yet. I went into the Tame office on Monday morning with our passports and enough cash to cover the purchase of two tickets. I said I had made a reservation over the internet. That’s all you can do; you can’t actually purchase a ticket online. The woman at the Tame office looked me up and found nothing. Ok, I said, well are there any flights to Loja on the 5th? Nothing. The 4th, maybe? Nope. The 6th? Yes.

The 6th would be a Sunday; we could leave on Sunday and stay two nights, then come back on Tuesday so that we’d both be back for class on Wednesday, the 9th. But, no. There were no Loja to Quito flights available on Monday or Tuesday. Despite the fact that every internet search we had done the previous we claimed there was space on flights, the woman at Tame told me the flights had been booked for 10 days. There was no way we could get to Vilcabamba unless we took the bus.

So here we are, in a pretty empty Quito. We thought about going to Ambato, which is a mere two and a half hour bus ride away, but Ambato’s really popular, so the crowds will be huge, and there won’t be any hotel space in town, so we’ll have to come back to Quito on the same day.

We apologized profusely to Heather via email; we feel terrible that we may have ruined her plans to do something else. The last we heard, a couple other WorldTeachers were gonna go to Vilcabamba, though, so hopefully, it’s not all bad.