Last thoughts, Parthian shots

    Today we attempted to take charge. We put Dustin to work with the grade tens, doing math and logic. Ignacio was already giving the eights the heaviest phys ed workout I've seen here yet, with really hard exercises and a long run of many laps of the school complex; maybe he figured that would tire them out and settle them down for the morning - that's what I would have done. We asked the nines if they'd be willing to work with the 2/3/4's, and a couple of them smiled eagerly, so Deb got them set up in that room, and we took the sevens to the computer lab for some serious Duolingo time. They're getting better at it, and able to focus for longer periods of time. 

    Duolingo is similar to the individual French language labs I first experienced at university, where every student got to work at their own speed, and each was fully engaged, rather than watching a teacher interact with one student at a time. The only pain is that we get frequent instances where Deb has created email accounts for the kids to register and they have written their new email addresses and passwords carefully in their notebooks, and yet are unable to log on on subsequent days. We still haven't figured out that little problem. One workaround is to have Duolingo send the recorded password back to their newly created yahoo mail account in order to find out if it was entered correctly.

    With all this coverage, Bolivar the teacher got a little break, and was happy about it. He's been here all week while the other teachers have been in town. I asked if he had signed his contract, and he said no, the lines were way too long to bother, and he'd do it on Friday when vacation started. That's commitment. 

    We've been wondering why the other teachers knew well enough to get their exams completed the week before they walked away on Monday, but Marcelo didn't know enough to get a letter ready for the parents. We've wondered why Rosa, who we'd been told has a permanent contract like Marcelo, has been absent all week as well. We've wondered who takes attendance of the teachers, many of whom have had multiple absences just since we've been here; what accounting office checks to see if they're really ill, or docks pay for unexplained and unauthorized absences? Who reports it? How easy would it be for the one who ought to report it to take a little kickback to ignore it - say, a portion of that day's pay from the teacher who is off double-dipping somewhere else, like Ignacio on market days with his little truck? We've heard several stories about Manuela's and Rosa's absences that barely hold water. Obviously these questions are for someone else to answer, but one can't avoid entertaining them.

    Manuela the sister/daughter-in-law, perhaps the most extreme offender, finally dropped over to the computer lab yesterday and asked Deborah for some tips on how to continue the English instruction after we leave. Deb gave her our Meet and Greet chart and explained Duolingo, but I wasn't sure if Manuela was actually there more to get some internet signal, quite frankly. And oddly, her parting request to Deborah was, "Can you teach them lots of English tomorrow? The Ministry is going to be checking up soon on how much the students have learned." Yeesh! We're supposed to fill in her deficiencies? In a day? Even 25 days could barely do more than scratch the surface, especially considering the weekends, our "tour" and the market day, and the days we were following up on other issues for Pamelita.

    Deb had it out with Ignacio this morning; she'd been stewing quietly about his "tour" since we had it and she felt so ripped off (me too), and she finally said she couldn't leave here without telling him how she felt. When he looks at me I'm sure I see dollar signs in his eyeballs. He's a real gouging opportunist who has no shame in asking a high price for something and then not delivering on his promise. When she told him, "instead of asking for $20 extra, you should have offered to return at least $20!" He was shamed into at least returning the $20 extra charge he'd imposed on her. She tried to explain to him how volunteers feel if they feel they've been duped or cheated; Dustin also complained about that just before he left. He claims that Colombia is much more straightforward, there's clear and up front pricing even for tourists, meters that are actually employed in taxis, etc.  Since he's arrived in Ecuador he's felt that everyone he meets wants to overcharge him because he's a gringo.

    Dustin seems unlikely to return, sadly. He knows local food and restaurant prices as well as we do, and has travelled for a decade in Asia and now in South America. He calculates that the three meals Elvia puts in front of us cost her no more than $2 a day, and he's unhappy to pay $12; he was happy at the last hostel where he paid $18 but ate well and enjoyed his surroundings and the creature comforts of that facility. He says, "this place can't really be described as a hostel by Colombian or Ecudadorian standards...maybe a very run down dormitory, at best". He wants three eggs for breakfast and meat for lunch and dinner, and he knows that three eggs at the market only cost 23 cents ($2.80 for a flat of 36), that you can serve a heaping plate of potatoes, plantains and rice for a quarter, that beef is under $2 a pound (often pretty tough, mind you), etc. He feels that serious educational volunteers are only going to be taken advantage of here, and commented that the Ecuadorian Volunteers Association had discontinued recommending this destination. He was excited about the students when he first arrived, but doesn't want to starve in the process; at his age and size and with the energy he expends with the kids (he's extremely fit and enjoys teaching them physical skills), his daily nutrition needs are larger than ours, and even ours haven't been met to our satisfaction over the past 25 days. It's a shame, because he turns on like a light bulb when surrounded by kids, and they really find him fascinating.

    I haven't said anything about Alcides yet. He was an enigma to me for a while, with a blue bus that only runs on Fridays, while his three brothers and one sister-in-law are pulling down salaries at the school. Riding his bus last Friday, watching him at the market, and later doing four of his order invoices for him (he said he'd lost his calculator) solved the mystery. Although there's a letter lying around from the Ministry informing him that he's not actually qualified to drive his bus, he leaves very early on Friday morning and goes to the market. He comes back late at night, and if there's a roadblock, as William encountered last week, he leaves even later and takes the backroads, getting home at 1 a.m. last week. He does a six hour return run once a week, picks up passengers along the way who cover the cost of his diesel and more, and family members ride in and out for free, usually in order to help with the purchases and the sorting into bins for schools and other customers. His mark-up is a consistent 100% on every item I've seen on the orders. He does pre-orders, and stocks his store for anticipated walk-in trade through the week, plus an enormous volume of Pilsener and cane liquor happily disguised in Pilsener bottles - sells the Pilsener for $2 and the cane liquor for $1. Bolivar says the cane liquor is made in a real factory, not farmyard stills, but normally comes in a smaller can for $1.50, so Alcides must be able to come home with a bulk supply to pour into his beer bottle empties. He samples quite a bit himself, too.

    Aurora has a stall in at least one other small town market on Mondays where she resells fruit and vegetables that they buy in Latacunga. The four order invoices that I added up for Alcides came to almost $600, which must be for businesses like hotels, hostels or perhaps schools in the smaller centres like Sigchos, Isinlivi, El Salado, etc; at 100% mark-up, he'll make as much on just those four orders as a teacher reportedly makes in month, not even counting his other trade and the beer and liquor sales. It seems out of proportion, even considering the cost of owning and maintaining his old second-hand bus and the bald tires he keeps replacing his flats with. He's one of the few people here that I'm pretty sure could afford the airfare if he ever had a mind to travel.

    Paulino and Elvia have the school trade plus whatever extra load of orders they can fill, a propane truck that supplies the area, diesel that they sell out of 55 gallon drums with a siphon, a teaching salary, a hostel that could be more successful than it is, and Paulino is a representative of Malingua Pamba at the Sigchos county legislature, plus whatever else they've got their fingers into. Both he and Alcides have land and herds of sheep and cattle.

    We've spoken of Ignacio at length already.  William is in veterinary college but also uses his contacts to locate livestock for slaughter at a profit, and is eager to find a backer to invest in a taxi for which he would hire a driver and make sheer profit as a middleman (I refrained from asking him why the backer wouldn't simply buy the taxi and hire the driver himself!) In other words, it seems like the whole family has a lock on this school compound and is growing in power and wealth, somewhat at the expense of the surrounding community for whom the major form of assistance and largesse is Pam's foundation, Rotary International and Engineers Without Borders.

    As I write this, it is recess, and as crazy as ever despite our efforts to quash the behaviour on previous days, and Marcelo's - and Paulino's, the next day - warning speeches at lunch. The essential problem is that the teachers seem to consider recess their break as much as the kids, and none are on scheduled yard duty supervision as elementary teachers do in most other countries. Not one of them will patrol the yard and help us control the behaviour. There are kids racing up on the roof, which is covered with debris and a low wall around the edges; I am absolutely certain that a child will someday fall and kill him or herself from this roof. None of the teachers seem capable of catching kids who break the rules they've set, or providing consequences when they do, and it's gotten to the point that the students are simply mocking Deborah when she tries to enforce the rules the Director himself has set. The Director actually told the kids that water fights were only permissible if they were mutually agreed on! Can you imagine how kids "agree" on bullying each other with water balloons, mugs full of water, flour, stucco concrete dust and "carnival foam"?

    Clearly, I don't lay behaviour at the feet of the kids - kids are kids everywhere, and in a school setting their behaviour has to be guided and managed. Like the saying, "there are no bad dogs, only bad owners", there are (mostly) no bad children in schools, just mismanaged schools - and proper school management is a team effort that begins with the principal and requires the support and effort of all the staff. 

    Eventually Deb was worn out trying to fight the tide and finished the morning hiding out in the computer lab with me. She went out at one point and visited each of the classes to say good-bye and give each student a small Canada flag pin, fighting back a feeling that they didn't all really deserve a parting gift. It's been a fascinating glimpse into one tiny corner of the world, and we are glad we stuck it out just because it has been interesting, but it has been a tough slog in so many ways. Would we come back...hmm...well, not quite in a heartbeat, but we might consider visiting to see how things have grown and changed after a few years, knowing how the place has grown and how the gov't has become involved since Pam took it on, and as Paulino's political and community influence has grown.

    We got up at 3 a.m. but there were no lights on in Alcides' house and his bus didn't move, although he'd verified with us just before bed that we'd be riding with him. Suddenly Elvia and Paulino came in and told us we'd be riding in with Paulino at 5:30, so we could go back to sleep and wake him up at 5:15 to go and get his shower - he saw a doctor yesterday, has to do tests today, and an X-ray tomorrow. Deb knocked at his door and heard voices inside the room, so she thought he was up, but he wasn't. We were downstairs, packed and ready, and he hadn't appeared. Suddenly his brother, mother and sister-in-law raced up in his truck and began cleaning out the back, and they woke him up again.

    While we waited for him to take a fast shower, two of Alcides' kids got up in the dark pre-dawn and ran over to say goodbye, and the older one, whose name I forget although he's one of the nicest kids in the school, tied a bracelet of woven coloured threads around our wrists, a nice parting gesture. We hit the road at 6:16 and Paulino drove the truck like a rally driver, trying to make his 7:30 appointment. He was only five minutes late - we made the outskirts of Latacunga in one hour and 13 minutes, which he claimed was a record for him. It's normally a two and a half hour drive. What a white-knuckle ride it was! The views were spectacular (Deb avoided the ones that looked straight down) except for when the rising sun hit the dusty windshield and not one of the three of us in the cab could see anything. Llamingos and dogs ran across the road in front of us, oncoming cars and trucks swerved out of our way, and in one spot a burro with two packs had escaped from his owner, probably taking objection to her switch, and was preceding her down the hill at a trot on his own, staying carefully just beyond her reach. And suddenly, before we knew it, we were back in Latacunga, and here we are, back at Hostal Tiana.

    I think I'll end with a groaner I thought of one day last week and forgot to tell: the slopes are so sleep they're like Black Diamond ski slopes. The cows manage to stay on their feet, however. Making them Black Diamond cows. So now you know where Black Diamond Cheese comes from...ba-dum!

Next: Back to Quito, staying at the Belmont

Luis, the Saviour of Baby Hummingbirds

    Tomorrow (Thursday) is our last day here, and the students' last day in school. Their term break will last from Friday until Feb 18th, and will include the days of Mardi Gras and the final festival. Here's a final photo album and the tale of how the last two days have gone with hardly any contract teachers in the school.

    Tuesday: the craziness never really ends; it just takes different forms. On Monday at the end of the school day, we suddenly got word that the teachers without permanent contracts had achieved a settlement, and would not be here on Tuesday because they’d be in the city signing their new contracts, but that this was a process that might require as many as three or four days in some cases because they’d have to produce all kinds of paperwork. Later that evening Paulino told us that it was not easy to be a teacher, that some who were from districts who hadn’t voted for the president would not even be hired. He said, “This isn’t really a democracy, you know.”

    The Director Marcelo was caught off guard and hadn’t even had time to send a letter home to the parents. (I’m guessing he should have had a letter ready in anticipation of a settlement, mind you.) He had no idea how he was going to handle all the kids single-handedly the next day. We presented an idea to him of how to use the older students to work with and supervise the younger ones, and assured him we’d be there all day to help as well for which he was grateful. As it turned out, we also had the teacher Bolivar, which helped; that made four of us. Paulino was there as well, but he was hosting the visit of some social security visitors and conducting a meeting for them with people from various villages in his county.

    Late Monday afternoon we worked in the computer lab and let the boys – Bolivar, Roberto, Hernan, and Luis - into the lab to enjoy a little Facebook and Youtube time. Suddenly I spotted something fluttering in front of Bolivar’s monitor. He had a nest with two baby green hummingbirds in front of him. We explained that this wasn’t a kind thing to do, to steal two little birds from their mother. He said, “Oh, Luis stole the nest.” Of course, Luis, easily influenced, had given it to Bolivar. Luis is a somewhat sweet and simple grade 6 student, tall for his age, who cannot read or write, and watches cartoons that normally appeal to younger kids.  From appearances, he might have an above average awareness of nature.

    The boys were very resistant to the idea of giving up their little living toys, but we insisted, got quite fierce about it, and after arguing with them and getting nowhere, we simply ordered Luis to take me to where he’d found the nest so we could put it back and hope that the mother would find them before dark. Bolivar and Roberto began to accompany us, and Bolivar hung over Luis’ shoulder, whispering in his ear, thinking I didn’t understand, but he didn’t realize that body language also speaks. I stopped and ordered them back to the lab while I continued with Luis alone. Again, they were extremely resistant, and when they finally left us Bolivar shot a final instruction at Luis. Luis and I continued a very short distance further and then Luis pointed to the low branches of a sort of scrub cedar and swore that’s where he’d found the nest, and the mother would be sure to return for them there. So we left the nest there, and Luis, looking scared, said he had to go home.

    I returned to the computer lab, but Bolivar and Roberto didn’t. I knew something was up, so we locked up shortly afterward, and as we walked back to the hostel I watched for him and spotted him handling something. When he saw that I was watching him he stuffed the something into the branches of a nearby bush. It was clear that he’d told Luis where to leave the nest so he could find it again. I walked straight to him, not in a rush, reached in, and brought out the nest. By now I was becoming really angry, for the risk to the baby hummingbirds as night approached, and the dishonesty and lack of respect that the boys were demonstrating. Deb and I scolded him severely, said that absolutely for sure this would be reported to his parents, and told him how ashamed he should be for being so cruel, selfish and dishonest when he was the “President” of his school. (It bothered me a little that I was scolding a kid whose Mom would kill a chicken and have it prepped and on our plates in a half hour flat, for not caring about two tiny birds, but I ignored that thought.)

    I took the nest once again and walked up the hill, much further this time, and found a place in the high branches of a bush that camouflaged them quite well – the same timbre of green. I returned, still incensed, and after a while their cousin Hernan came to apologise for his part in the lie. He called to Roberto, who came and apologised, and to Bolivar who was still hanging back but finally came and also apologised. They tried to convince us that it was Luis’ fault, that he liked to kill birds, that he would catch and eat hummingbirds, and that he was afraid because his mother was very fierce. I told him that was ridiculous, if Luis would try to eat them the baby birds were so tiny they’d get stuck in his teeth.

    Deb spent a long time delivering a lesson about taking care of God’s creatures, like his older brother William who is studying to be a veterinarian, and about caring for the environment, and about how the mother needed to cover her babies from the cold at night as well as to feed them, and we humans had no ability to provide food that hummingbird babies can eat, so by stealing them from the mother, we were actually killing them, which was a crime against God. They finally seemed to get it, but I had no confidence that the two little birds would be alive by morning.

    Still, in the morning I took Luis, with Marcelo’s permission, up the hill to see if they had survived. He went straight to the tree where he’d left them the night before, and was shocked to find the nest missing – looked all around, and below on the ground. Apparently he hadn’t realized that Bolivar had intentionally duped him into leaving them there so that Bolivar could retrieve them later. I told him to follow me further up the hill to the higher location I’d left them in. Amazingly, although the wind overnight had blown the bush to the point where it even looked different, one bird was still in the nest and with a little search on the ground below, Luis found the other one. Both were a bit energetic, trying to flap their little wings although they were still days away from being able to fly, and probably quite hungry by now. They’d probably survived on the warmth of the nest, which contained bits of cloth and their mother’s down, as well as each other.

    Luis led me up over the hill and pointed down an 80 degree cultivated hill into the next valley, to where he’d originally found the nest. He volunteered to go on his own, probably quite aware that it would be a difficult descent and an even worse ascent for me. I agreed, and he went bounding down the hill holding the nest carefully in his hands, through one gully and on to the further one, where he climbed a bit and reached up into a bush on the gully wall.  He spent some time carefully securing the nest back in its original location. I took photos of the safe return of the little birds, and Luis climbing back up the hill.

    When we got back to the classroom, we reported with pleasure that the birds had survived the night, and that they were safely back where the mother would find them and care for them once again. We built Luis up as the Saviour of the Baby Hummingbirds, and told the class that when they saw a beautiful green hummingbird flying around in coming months, they would know that this was the one of the hummingbirds that Luis had saved, and that they should remember The Story of Luis and the Two Hummingbirds for a long time, even when they were grown up. Then we played several rounds of Twister in English.

    That evening Paulino returned with an indigenous leader of the Kitchwa, someone Paulino assured us was a much more powerful person than any elected politician or government official, and his wife and entourage of two, perhaps a friend and/or a driver and younger bodyguard. He didn’t look terribly powerful, and he didn’t speak Spanish much, but he took the time to tell me that the Quechua live in Peru, and that his people here are known as the Kitchwa, with more of an “ee” than an “eh” sound. (Mind you, that could be local accent or dialect, because I’ve heard Josefina say “No si” instead of “No se”, as well. Maybe e’s become i’s locally.) Eventually the group headed back to the city and Paulino spent a little time describing his dealings with a group of thieves who’d recently been caught, after an exciting chase, according to Elvia. Alicides came over, Bolivar the teacher joined us, there was some Pilsener happening, and Bolivar had me taste some “cane liquor” that was basically clear, over-proof rum, but actually quite tasty and with a slight effervescence to it.

    On Tuesday we reported early at the school to help Marcelo, and Bolivar as it turned out, supervise “cafecito” for the students who arrive early for some nutrition before school starts. There was a cauldron of hot drink mixed up from a powder enriched with vitamins, calcium and iron, and a cereal bar for each student.

    An interesting point that will have my colleagues shaking their heads: the Director Marcelo was further unprepared for this absence of teachers which appears to resemble a walk-out, basically, although not a strike action per se, since the official reason is that it will take them some days to get signed up with their new contracts. Marcelo had no master ring of keys to open the library and the computer lab, etc. Luckily Rosa’s classroom door had been left open, unlike one previous time when she’d been absent and hadn’t left her only door key. This time, the teachers had taken Paulino’s keys with them, and Bolivar seems to have lost the “school president” set that he used to carry around.  Marcelo said that he’d lost his own set as well. We were stymied until it suddenly clicked that there were two additional small keys on the piece of red yarn that our hostel room key was on that were about the right size and shape for the padlocks, so I tried them, and voila! We were in.

    We wandered around looking to see where we should pitch in, but every class, from the tens down to the ones, was working in notebooks and workbooks, extremely well behaved. There seemed little point upsetting the apple cart, so we began our day in the computer lab. Recess arrived, however, and lasted too long. And the students, who’ve been “practicing” for “carnival” for two weeks already (it doesn’t actually happen until February) began chasing each other all over the schoolyard and the roof of the schoolhouse with mugs and bowls full of water, spray cans full of “carnival foam”, flour, and water balloons. Sometimes they make a mess inside the classrooms, chasing each other in there as well. Deb turned into the dragon lady, and we managed to put the lid on it between the two of us, with no effort from the other two teachers. At one point Deb discovered that the “flour” a student was using was actually stucco cement he’d swiped from the construction workers in the next building.

    After recess we had a shortened time with the grade sevens in the computer lab, and just after we’d started with them, Josefina came rushing in and insisted that we come home for lunch right away, at noon. We protested that we’d just started, the lesson time was much more important than the convenience of her lunch schedule, and so on; however, she just insisted that if we didn’t come now, the food would be cold and that they’d be leaving right away for Latacunga. She said, “teach them tomorrow!” It was frustrating, but we decided we could leave the nine grade sevens alone for a few minutes in the lab, rush across the street to eat, and return in a hurry. Josefina wasn’t there. Elvia said the students would be fine without us, but I had my doubts – just as we were leaving, eighteen grade eights showed up insisting that it was their turn in the lab. We had told them earlier that we would work with them next, but we had just got started with the sevens and we had to go to lunch, so we apologised but insisted that they return to their room and wait until we could come and get them. They left finally left with terrible sulking and scowls on their faces that looked like trouble to me.

    Sure enough, we got back to find that the grade eight boys had bullied their way into the lab and forced the grade sevens out. Once again, I was furious at the lack of respect, and yelled at them all to leave – they don’t get teachers yelling at them much here, which may help to explain the lack of discipline and stubbornness of some of the students. Marcelo the director is an old softie, and there doesn’t seem to be any form of discipline for any infraction. 

    After we got the sevens back to the class, we went down to the grade eight class and invited about a third of them, mostly girls, who’d obeyed our wishes and stayed working in their classroom, up to the lab. We told the boys and a couple of girls who’d been with them that they weren’t welcome because they were dishonest and disrespectful, and didn’t deserve to be in the lab being taught by us. They hung around the door, sometimes banging on it, acting entirely angry, whiny and petulant, some giving us puppy-dog eyes, others petulant scowls, and they seemed to believe I would relent, but I was unmoved. I was secretly pleased that we didn’t have to work three to a machine anyway, and be constantly kicking sneaky boys off the machines for opening Facebook instead of studying duolingo with us.

    At the end of the morning when they lined up for lunch we had a word with Marcelo, who stood them at attention and chewed them all out for their behaviour and their disrespect to the “voluntarios”, reminding them that we communicate with the “Madrina Pamelita”. He forbade them to play at “carnival” tomorrow. In a situation like this in a Canadian school, administrators can make that call based on the safety of the students with insufficient supervision, so Deb and I suggested it to him, being a little “up to here” with the behaviour of the students during the second half of the morning. He and Bolivar discussed whether they could ask the students to stay home tomorrow until their teachers returned, but decided they couldn’t, and decided to take a chance and hope that the speech would make a difference. We’ll see…

    In the late afternoon a new guy arrived. He’s a 28 year old fellow named Dustin Tosi , whose home is in Alaska.  He showed up out of the blue with a red beard and a shaved head, having learned about the school and hostel online. He’d tried to email Pam but hadn’t had a reply, but after two months in Colombia he’d spent a few days at the Llullu Llama hostel in Isinlivi and decided to show up here and teach for a while. He left Alaska at the age of 18 and worked in Taiwan teaching for ten years, mostly English, using computers for educational purposes (Yeah! Definitely need him for that here!) and high school math, which will please Paulino who asked me for a little algebra coaching when I’d arrived, but I was reluctant to strain my brain over the language barrier. Now that I’ve taught in Spanish a bit, I might be more willing to try. 

    Poor Dustin’s timing is a little off, however: he has two more days to help us keep the lid on at the school, maybe the weekend to meet the colegio students and staff, and then he has to find some way to entertain himself until school starts up again on February 18th. He says he might head to Cuenca and come back when he can be useful, but in the meantime we’ll see what he’s made of, helping us to keep the lid on here for the next two days.

    Wednesday morning: so far so good, Dustin is happy to begin his day here with Rosa’s grade 2/3/4’s, who were about to endure their second day with no teacher and no supervision. He’s a hit with the kids, since Marcelo hadn’t followed through with our suggestion yesterday that he assign the six responsible grade 9’s to take care of them for at least half the morning, two per grade.

    I managed to collect the right sequence of photos for a slideshow that we showed the whole school in the computer lab, in three sessions back-to-back. The grade 8's were forgiven, and got themselves some computer time, including Facebook and Youtube access after they'd worked a sufficient amount of time on Duolingo. The behaviour has been much better today, since yesterday’s speech at the end of the day, and Deb’s dragon-lady impersonation, and the fact that I clamped down tightly today at the first evidence of water balloons and foam – created a collection of confiscated spray cans in the library, reducing one boy to tears until I convinced him that I’d return them after school is over. Paulino decided that will be after the end of term is over, i.e. tomorrow rather than today. I'd collected seven this morning, plus a few water balloons and a mug of water that was about to be thrown. Dustin also told the kids he wouldn't stand for it, which helped, because they are fascinated by him - he's very cool because he can do kung fu (from Taiwan), magic tricks and knows lots of other games children like. Haven’t seen any flour or stucco concrete powder today either, thank goodness.

    At recess Paulino called a staff meeting to present Deb’s politely delivered suggestion of a master ring of keys for Marcelo never to let go of, and a back-up even for that. We talked about completing the library culling, and requiring the assistance of the elementary teachers to move that forward, because they're the only ones who can decide which books at their levels should remain, and which should go.

    We also spoke about the difficulty of volunteer visitors who want to teach and manage classes but have no way to manage discipline and not enough back-up from the regular teachers. Hasn't been a major issue for us because we have a combined sixty odd years of experience in classrooms, but the pre-"carnival" behaviour was way out of hand, and has been for over a week, until we got fierce about it yesterday.

    The teachers who were present, including Rosa's husband who showed up mid-morning to cover her class, thanked us for our suggestions and our efforts at the school.

    One more day to keep the lid on before the end of term vacation begins...

Next: Parthian arrows

Low Points and High Points in the Andes

    There are two photo albums here.  The first is of our trip to the Market in Latacunga, and the second is of the colegio dance performance to entertain those who'd been kind enough to buy their raffle tickets and attend the draw, often from quite a distance. The fundraiser was to get enough money to go to Esmeraldas on a school trip, which they are all extremely excited about. Mountain kids will get to see the coast, the ocean, and the beaches that are another part of their country.

    The photos are full of colour and sometimes humour. I think you'll enjoy being transported to Latacunga and Malingua Pamba for a few minutes. It kills me to decide which photos to delete to make a slideshow that's short enough to be comfortable, because they all feel so fascinating and amusing to me. It's an agonizing proces.

    I will begin by saying that the Latacunga trip wasn't our idea, and I was reluctant; it isn't like I haven't been to rural markets all over the world before, and although I'd happily go there as a short adventure while staying over in Latacunga, I knew it would turn into a long day of travel and waiting around all day for about one hour of photography. And it did. Paulino and Elvia said, "Would you like to come to the market with us tomorrow? Oh, by the way, if you choose to stay home, there won't be any meals because we can't find anyone willing to come in and cook for you." Huh...? What about that string of other women who'd been doing it up until now? And who will be cooking for the boys?

    Both of them do work awfully hard and long days; this entire weekend Paulino has been out of sight - "selling gas" is the constant explanation (is he branching out into another line of business? Is that what the $9,000 loan application was for? No se...), and is only now completing delivery of purchases for the schools in the canton that he made on Friday, and that's after a lot of destinations were covered by shipping the groceries to them by bus. Elvia says she couldn't get anyone to cook, and couldn't get people to help her in the market either, even though she offers $10 for the day. Mind you, it's a long day and the official minimum wage works out to about $2 an hour ($4,000/year), so maybe she's underpaying. I do believe from what I saw loaded on the truck and not sorted into bins for the school that there's business over and above the school food - nothing wrong with that, of course, might as well combine time and gas costs. But I'm guessing they're also pinching every penny instead of spreading the wealth by delegating and paying others to help them accomplish this mountain of work.

    It was a stupidly long 17 hour day that included sleeping in the bus and napping in the truck at the bus terminal, waiting for Paulino who never did appear, and then waiting for William who after positioning his truck and getting Elvia and Enma to distribute the various school bins to the various buses that showed up (I helped carry a few sacks and bins), took off to his house for two hours while we contined to wait for our return trip to Malingua Pamba. That very long wait, that I can't believe they couldn't have anticipated and been honest about with us, was one of the low points mentioned in my title.

    One silver lining is that we fed ourselves like a king and queen at the market on the same daily amount of money we were supposedly paying Elvia. (Pam has recently insisted that because of the amount of work we've been doing for her and the awkwardness of having it out with Elvia over the menu, she prefers to pay for our stay and take our notes to a discussion with Elvia when she arrives here in April.) The ladies asked us several pointed questions about what we'd eaten and what we'd paid, and Josefina insisted we'd actually overpaid for a great meal! And the upshot is that meals have been considerably better through the balance of the weekend, with the inclusion of eggs and chicken at least twice a day. The chicken is always tough and undercooked, leading to intestinal gas, but at least it's animal protein.

    When William finally returned we set out, only to encounter a police roadblock and check stop of some kind. Oh, oh! He didn't have a licence, wouldn't have one for another four months...so that's why they'd kept asking me if I could drive a truck! I was reluctant, especially after remembering I'd left my Canadian driver's licence at home, with no expectation that I'd have to rent a vehicle or drive one for someone else. If caught, William expected he'd have to pay $200 to the corrupt cops right on the spot to avoid jail time. 

    After pretending we were taking a pee break beside the road, and then pretending we were just tourists taking photos, we caught an incredibly lucky break when two construction workers in a little truck drove up and opened the barrier of a closed road we'd parked beside. They instantly comprehended William's situation and waved him through the barrier with them, and from there we took windy, bumpy back roads through potholes filled with water, past villages, and finally found our way out onto the Pan-American highway after the roadblock. William was relieved and elated, and crowed about outwitting the "Polichivatos" - the "goat police", an expression related to the old English one about tugging the beard of the old goat, who represents any authority figure.

    Saturday was pleasant. The colegio is in the middle of exams, but we got one class registered and running with duolingo.com, which we hope they'll continue to use after we're gone to acquire more English than we can provide them with in this short visit. We arranged email addresses for a lot of them so they could register.

    On Sunday we managed the same thing with two more classes, but in one of them a few students walked out on the class when they realized we were completely serious about using all machines for academic purposes only during class time, and they couldn't get away with opening their Facebook windows every few seconds! A twenty minute recess turned into an hour, there was only one teacher (out of four) in the building and he was hiding out alone in his room with his laptop. The kids were going nuts chasing each other, banging doors, throwing water at each other from all directions, and squirting cans of shaving cream on each other - practicing for "Carnival" someone explained (which isn't until February!). 

    They were very excited about the dance presentation and raffle they were going to present in the afternoon, but I wasn't convinced that the teachers couldn't have kept the lid on if they'd been there to manage the situation. Ignacio returned and I suggested with some mild annoyance that if they really expected Pam's foundation to assist with the costs of their Esmeraldas trip, they ought to be a bit more serious about studying and teaching when that was supposed to be going on. He did a bit of scolding, including being upset about the water and shaving cream in the classrooms, and we ended the morning well with all six networked computers being used for language study and nothing else. He promised that those who'd walked out on the class would be disciplined, but I'll only believe that if I see it with my own eyes, I'm afraid.

    The dance performance was probably the "High Point in the Andes" for us during our stay here. The colegio kids, most of whom we've come to know to some degree in the classrooms, did a great job of presenting traditional dances and humorous skits in traditional costumes, not for tourists but for their own community, in grateful appreciation of their families who were supporting their fundraising effort for their school trip.

    One of the highlights of the afternoon that split guts all through the courtyard was when one of the chickens held up to demonstrate that particular raffle prize took exception to being put back in the cardboard box and made a dash for freedom. The kids chased him all over the schoolyard while the parents and teachers howled with laughter. I couldn't zoom and focus the camera fast enough to catch the action, just the final act of stuffing him back in the box. That was the Premio Pollo, the prize chicken, that we ate for supper - Paulino won the second place draw, which included three chickens. Elvia's mother won the first place prize, which included the young goat.  It was a little odd to me that the draw prizes went to the richest people in the village.  The prizes also included three rabbits (conejos), three guinea pigs (cuyes), a couple of fine wool blankets and a dish or pot set called a vajilla - I didn't get to see what was actually in that parcel.

    A couple of days ago we had it out with Ignacio, who had come to believe that the constant presence of our camera and our frequent communication with Pam had blamed him for deficiencies at the school, some of which he insisted were a government matter and not a community matter. We managed to convince him, finally, that our purpose wasn't to blame, but to be eyes and ears for Pam and the people he expected to continue sending money and talent to help improve his community, including the school, the hostel, the irrigation and potable water system, etc. Some people feel very uncomfortable under a spotlight, and I recognised that, but couldn't let him get away with imagining that anyone from any part of the world would simply hand out cash with no oversight and no expectations of how their gifts would be stewarded, like winning some sort of lottery. Bottom line is, if you respect and appreciate what you've been given, you show that by taking care of it; and if you want to largesse to continue, you co-operate willingly with the process of deciding in what ways that money could be most effectively used. That was a difficult conversation, and Deb bore the brunt of his onslaught because she could (barely!) keep up with his Spanish, while I simply played tough guy through translation. He came to the gunfight fully loaded - he'd even looked up the word "hurt" in English to make sure he could get his point across! I managed to convince him that others (Eden, Pam) could feel equally hurt if their gifts were not respected and cared for.

    All in all, a weekend to feel positive about, which included lots of chores for Pam as well. We got a good start on culling the library, cleaning and making space on the shelves, did some basic accountancy training with the irrigation board at Tunguiche, felt good about launching duolingo with most of the college students, and so on. I believe we'll spend our four remaining days just teaching what we can to the elementary kids before we leave for Latacunga at 3 a.m. on Friday morning and back to Quito on Saturday.

Next: Baby Hummingbirds

The Ferengi have landed in the Andes! But there's a Lili in the valley...

    Last night's dinner didn't include a cup of tea, so I got out my instant coffee and made myself of cup. Perhaps that was a mistake. I slept well but woke up in the middle of the night, along with a rooster, who keeps yelling "Who the heck are you!" to a rival a distance away. I heard the 4:30 a.m. bus heading from El Salado to Latacunga, and in a while I'll hear what I once thought, in a fog of sleep, was someone drawing water at a rusty hand pump outside, until I realized it was a burro up the hill from us. Then as the earliest risers begin to move about the school site, we'll hear the dogs start up.

    I have to create a list of menu deficiencies for the lady that runs the hostel. Having been here long enough to know what food items cost in the markets and what a decent $2 chicken dinner tastes like and consists of in the restaurant around the corner from the Hostal Tiana in Latacunga (soup, rice, salad, good hunk of chicken right off the rotating spit, and fruit juice), we have been surprised to be fed meals here that must cost less than half that standard. The restauranteur covers his cost of food and his overhead on those prices, and so we'd expect that a buck for breakfast and $2 each for lunch and dinner would keep us fed in a similar manner. That's half of what our hostel charge is; the other half goes to a fund for upkeep.

    We've had daily disappointments with regard to meals, however. Elvia has returned and breakfast and lunch have been okay, but Deb's been keeping a meal diary since she got sick. Examples of substandard fare include a supper that was an hour late and was nothing more than a plate of noodles with a thin cheese sauce, and a supper plate that consisted of a pile of thirteen boiled potatoes with two thumb sized pieces of beef that are barely more than gristle and shoe leather, very hard to chew, with a bit of onion.  Except for a some boiled chicken that was rubbery and undercooked last night (I got a slender leg in my soup), that beef is what we've been served for the past four meals, ever since we complained about the lack of animal protein. Until then we'd had a stretch of at least four days of no meat at all, and now that we've been getting bits of beef, we are disturbed to see that the uncooked portion remains sitting on the kitchen counter, uncovered, open to the flies, and attracting the cat and the dogs that we are constantly trying to shoo out of the hostel dining room. Deb spotted the meat on the counter and put it in the frig last night. There's fish, the stuff I showed in the last blog that we bought from the snack ladies on the weekend; Elvia's kids get it, but we don't. And it's not like we can vote with our feet; Elvia's kitchen is the only game in town.  We can't step across to the competing restaurant across the street, or buy our own groceries anywhere.

    We've asked for "avena" (oatmeal) for breakfast, especially when Deb got sick; we got it maybe three times. An egg for breakfast has happened about fifty percent of the time, but the chickens seem to be laying less in the past week. I supply my own coffee. Maybe the eggs can be sold for cash, so they aren't really for us. The pig that we saw slaughtered over a week ago certainly wasn't. We don't get the lovely buns that Aurora bakes but probably sells for cash - I see the school kids selling them at recess some days, but I've only had two since we arrived. 

    The breakfast fruit situation has declined in the past week, except for fried plantain, a cheap staple (sometimes we get papaya and cut up banana in addition to the fried banana, but Deb can't eat the papaya so I have to eat hers as well as my own).  Occasionally we get popcorn for breakfast, which I actually like, but it isn't very nutritious. Usually there has been a mug of juice, or tea, but yesterday's lunch juice was too acidic to drink even with sugar added (some kind of "tree tomato"), and there was no tea or juice at supper, which is why I made the unfortunate mistake of making myself a coffee.

    There are usually two starches at lunch and dinner, sometimes also at breakfast - one always potato, the other noodles or rice, but the rice has been gradually more and more "al dente" and undercooked lately, as if the ladies are in a terrible rush to get the food prep over with. There are not many veggies. 

    There has been a succession of ladies in the kitchen to replace Elvia, who has been driving back and forth to town with Paulino all week: Josefina, Aurora, Marta, Sonia and two or three others who don't seem to be as concerned with elements of the meals or with kitchen clean-up and hygiene as even she would wish.  She and Paulino both complained about that when they got back, and her own standards aren't that high. On weekends we've been asked to take our lunches at the Colegio cafeteria so she doesn't have to leave classes - good for her for being committed to an education, but the food there is also pretty sparse, being what they feel they can afford to serve in bulk to the students; mostly soup broth and rice.  The students only get protein in their lunch if they purchase it from the snack ladies at recess, which for us would be more expense on top of the $10/day that we are already paying for our keep.

    It seems that in spite of what we are doing for Pam, Rotary, EWB, and for the students of the school and the colegio seven days a week, Elvia must be thinking to herself, "What's in it for me?", or "How can I make a good profit on this?" On top of our "tour" experience with Ignacio and some other little things I've noticed with this little family dynasty - the only people who live on site, apparently - I've begun to wonder if there isn't a streak of Ferengi genetics running through the family.  The fact that we could just walk away from all of this doesn't seem to factor into her calculations.

    On the other hand, there's Lautaro, who seems a pretty good sort of guy.  Some of the teachers seem like they'd fit right in at the Toronto school board (George for sure, Bolivar probably), with the stark exception of Manuela - the "English" teacher who left her grade seven students with pages of English phrases to copy and memorize for a test the next day, and then walked out of the classroom. The poor kids have no dictionaries and have not had the phrases translated for them. The words are nothing but squiggles on a page to them. 

    No wonder they don't know any English after years of having it on their schedule! They must hate the darn subject. The grade sevens have seven periods of Ingles a week on their schedule, and barely know seven words of vocabulary. Manuela has never approached us to sound out whether we might be a resource for her; now I understand why. She's probably too embarrassed. Lili asked us whether Manuela can speak good English; I had to say, "No se", because she's never spoken a word to us...I refrained from saying, "it's one thing to know how to speak English; it's another thing altogether to know how to teach".

    On the day when the exam was scheduled, Manuela stayed home.  The grade 7's had three Ingles periods on their schedule, so we spent the morning with them, creating email addresses and getting them registered and started on duolingo.com.  After recess we taught them to make the paper fortune tellers with English words on them that have to be spelled out aloud with the letter of the alphabet in English. We chose eight colours, eight familiar animals that they see wandering around the pueblo every day, and eight compliments with words that are similar enough in Spanish to be easily understood (i.e. cognates). Grades five to seven love them; Bolivar has just brought his over to Deborah here in the hostel this afternoon to practice it with her.

    Manuela wasn't the only person missing today. The lady that makes the lunch for the whole school has another job. I don't know whether she gets paid for both when she doesn't show up here, as teachers do, but she didn't come, and the kids had to go straight home without their usual almuerzo.

    And then there's Lili and her early childhood centre, the subject of some of the photos in this slideshow. Lili stays over in the room across from us in the hostel most nights. She is a devoted, light-hearted, kind and loving teacher who is trying to be as professional as possible in running a still-revolutionary sort of learning environment in Ecuador, a rural centre for early childhood education and care. 

    Lili has to work in a building that is under construction and endures constant pounding outside her door and above her head. The kids don't look that happy in the classroom; I'm guessing they're suffering from PTSD, literally shell-shocked from the incessant loud banging around them. There are no washroom facilities, so she can't bathe them except with a cold standpipe outside her door, and they come from farmhouses where there are no bathing facilities. Pam had showers built in the Edificio Grande that was photographed in an earlier blog, but they are non-functional. 

    Lili does what she can: I watched the motheres counting out flat beans onto papers with squares to teach counting; they have scissors and paper and glue and manipulatives, and they teach the kids language and songs, and more than that - Lili knows and and can explain the pedagogy behind what she's doing. She loves the songs because they cover language, pitch, movement, large and fine motor development (the actions), rhythm and awareness of time, and emotive development, among other benefits.  She gets the kids outside and gets a little laughter and joy bubbling out of them to counter the effects of the pounding.

    Today's photo album is short, and has some elementary kids and some colegio kids, but it is mostly about - and devoted to - Lili and her students.  There was a hidden photo album that included photos for Pam to illustrate how the people on site have not been maintaining or even using the beautiful new facilities that she has provided for them with money from U.S. donors - the showers that remain broken and unused, the hot water on demand systems that provide no heat for the showers while the rooms are used for construction storage.  When I reviewed and edited this blog, I decided to make them visible.  Unfortunately there's some overlap in the photos, but if you've already seen one you can click quickly to the next one.

    Tomorrow Elvia and Paulino tell us there will be no-one available to prepare meals for us (we wonder who will be preparing food for her sons), so they will have to take us to town with them, and the students will to have to do without us for the day.  We will have to get up at 3:30 a.m. to go into town on Alcides' bus; we'll experience the market with Elvia, and purchase our meals in town. 

    We hope the Tunguiche irrigation board will show after 2 p.m., when we return, to have their books audited. They've been avoiding us for ten days now, it seems. We're still trying to organize a library minga and a computer graveyard minga...next week, ojala. (Ojala "o-hala" - is an Arabic word meaning "I hope" - can you hear the "Allah" in the word? Not every Spanish speaker knows that...)

Next: low and high points in the Andes

We're in the clouds, but few silver linings...

    We were without power for two days – showering romantically by candlelight because there’s no window source of light; eating dinner by candlelight, too. There’s no light for reading once the sun goes down, no internet, and once the laptop battery is gone, no recharging. We’re two hours from Latacunga, and within half a day we knew there was a pole down somewhere not so far away. The college students know where it is and have discussed it on their cell phones, yet the linemen took two days to locate and repair it. Crazy...life in rural Ecuador in 2013.

    Mind you, even though the power came back on after two days, the internet is constantly going out on us, often for twenty minutes or more at a stretch.  It is particularly noticeable on windy days like this morning. I’m guessing it is because somewhere in the string of radio masts that brings the signal to us, there is a loose connection that has to remake contact or be reconnected each time. This morning it was functional for about an hour very early in the morning, then it went dead for the rest of the school day (Monday). We were about to show the grade 9’s some English learning sites on the internet when it went down, and our plans were foiled. At lunch today the electricity also went out again for about three hours.

    For a perfect trifecta, the water was stopped for a few hours this morning. Paulino says it's because the laundry used too much; Deb points out that she has turned off the tap to the laundry tank once before when it has been overflowing and untended.

    I didn't think I'd do another blog so quickly, but thoughts tumble when you don't have television, friends to visit and do things with - no choir, tennis, no garden to tend, and no internet. What follows are basically some negative impressions interspersed with positive ones:

    I had more time to think about our experience with Ignacio, and other thoughts. Being his first paying job with his new truck, perhaps Ignacio wasn’t clear yet on how to balance opportunism with killing the goose that lays the golden egg. At one point he saw a sign near the Qilotoa for N. American and European tourists who are either wealthy or don’t know their options; it advertised a trip into Quito and a few other directions from there for $100. His eyes lit up and he began doing math in his head. It didn’t seem to occur to him that those tourists would be riding in significant comfort in an SUV rather than being squeezed into the front seat of his truck. Later he began reading off kilometre distances from direction signs, and adding those up. At the end of the trip he justified his 25% price increase to Deb by saying we’d covered 500 kms that day – how he came up with that number I have no idea. In seven hours, less an hour waiting for road construction, at least two hours waiting for Sonia to collect volcano crater water and a ½ hour for lunch, and with most stretches of road at forty kms an hour and some as slow as fifteen to avoid damage to the truck tires from sharp stone surfaces, I’m guessing we actually travelled three and a half hours and maybe 200 kms, 140 miles, at the most. At about a dollar a gallon for diesel (I helped Lautaro serve a visiting farmer buy some for his tractor, so I learned the family’s retail price, but they probably buy it much cheaper than that) and the mileage he’d get on the small truck, a $6 surcharge would have covered it. His negotiated take-home amount, at $80, was already as much in a day as a teacher makes in a week of teaching school, and of course he took a day off school but still collected his teaching pay while doing it.

    It wasn’t that we couldn’t afford it, obviously; it’ll take him a while to pay off this truck and maintain it, and he has in fact had two flat tires over the following two days to repair - quite an expense, and it saddened him considerably. What it boiled down to for me was wishing I’d seen everything I expected to see, including some incredible photos I wanted to take but he wasn't able to stop.  I have no desire to make such a trip again to see what we’d missed. One was of a lady in full traditional dress running along with her "llamingo" (a large llama) just off the road, with her sheep dog, surrounded by wisps of cloud, moving a small herd of sheep.  Another was of a couple carrying large sacks over their shoulders up their 70 degree field. Two days later Ignacio sat down beside me and asked me how I’d liked the tour. I didn’t feel like polite lying, so I said, oh yeah, it was great, but a little short...I mentioned the teachers phoning several times to ask when we were getting back to Malingua. He diverted by saying there was also a load of poles he had to deliver. I refrained from trying to find enough Spanish to say, “Not part of our deal!”

    He’s asked several times when we plan to go into Latacunga – fishing for another paying trip. I was reluctant to pay his price to Latacunga the first time, having ridden all the way from Quito to Latacunga in comfort for only $20; and now I’m stubbornly and resentfully against the idea.

    Deb contends that this is part of a pattern of gouging the volunteers, which extends to our food. We are boxed in here with regard to meals: there's a set price, no restaurants or any other kind of competition, and no store to buy healthy snacks in. We eat what we're given. We debate whether, for example, we should be getting meat with our meals at least once a day, having had a really decent $2 meal of soup, rice, salad, large chunk of chicken, and glass of juice at a lunch restaurant around the corner from Hostal Tiana in Latacunga.  We wonder, therefore, how much Elvia makes from feeding us. 

    During our morning break from teaching the colegio students, we followed them over to an older school building which is being allowed to fall apart – a puzzle to me, because it seems structurally sound – where a group of ladies provide a morning snack of egg and chips or fish and chips for the students. A good sized bowl of chips with an egg on top is a quarter; put a whole fried fish on top of the chips instead, and it still only comes to 75 cents.

    This is why Deb contends that Elvia should have no trouble adding an egg for every breakfast and a bit of meat to one or two meals a day for the two of us from a food budget of $10 a day (the other $10 a day that we pay goes to a fund for maintenance and upkeep of the hostel, apparently), and could cut back on the mountain of potato that forms our staple diet. On the weekends Elvia doesn’t provide us lunch anymore; she goes to the colegio herself, so we’ve been invited to eat with the students – tasty but not very nutritious fare; today, for example it was a bowl of white rice topped with a hot salsa of a few slices of carrot and a couple of thumbnail sized bits of grisly beef. I wanted to sing “On Top of Spaghetti”, reminded of how small the single poor meatball was when somebody sneezed.

    Now mind you, Elvia often, perhaps usually, has provided a little egg (sometimes less than a whole egg!) and/or meat each day; but somehow in the last four days our animal protein items have dwindled in size and frequency, some days to none at all. She tends to call our supper “merienda” (light lunch or picnic) rather than “cena” (dinner)…not a good sign. 

    I haven’t been unsatisfied with the taste of what we are being served, and I’m not packing on pounds from being over-starched.  I have to admit that we’ve both felt a little nervous about meat in our meals anyway while Deb was ill. But I also admit that we’ve watched the family and extended family eating in the kitchen – they don’t like to sit at the table in the Great Room with us, maybe too much trouble to walk that far, or they're just "kitchen people"(?) - and they almost appear to be hiding while feeding on chicken and fish while our meal in the Great Room doesn’t include any. The frequency of nothing but potatoes in potato broth with a bit of salt and some swiss chard is increasing. 

    Elvia's sister-in-law Aurora bakes delicious buns, but we’ve only been served them once, maybe twice, in two weeks. Now, having said this, the fare is inconsistent rather than consistently poor: this morning we were served quite a lovely attempt at a tomato omelette, and we asked if we could have "pan" to go with that, so Elvia ran over to Aurora's store and brought back a bag of buns but they turned out to be pretty hard and stale - I guess what she hadn't sold to her customers.  We consistently get fresh fruit for breakfast, usually a bowl of papaya, banana and pineapple - I'm guessing at least two of those fruits would have to have been shipped in from the coast. But by the end of the day, with Elvia not here and nieces and a sister-in-law covering for her, we haven't had any meat on our plates, yet again...supper was slightly warmed rice and noodles, mostly.

    Deborah further contends, therefore, that while the children are as delightful and trusting as everywhere else in the world, except for the normal ratio of rapscallions in grade 1 and grade 8, most people we encounter here tend to see us more as rich dilettante tourists to either ignore or try to make a profit from in any way possible, with as little effort as they can get away with, rather than volunteers who bring them anything else of value. That, I suspect, extends to the teachers, for whom we seem to be nothing more than a chance to get an undeserved break from the classroom, a great windfall of opportunity for free time – with the sole exception of Jorge, "George", clearly, who after team-teaching English with us for the second weekend in a row, was keen to have his own separate photo taken of the three of us, with his own camera. More about George below.

    It brings up an interesting philosophic and economic discussion, though, and not a new one. Does one allow people to take financial advantage of you because they have less than you to begin with and you feel sorry for them? Does that distort the local economy and make the cost of living higher for the people who live within it? Or do we take advantage of people with a lower standard of living by buying at local prices, also knowing that we’re receiving in many cases a lower standard of goods, services or fare than we’d be receiving at home, goods and labour sourced more cheaply, etc? 

    We were strongly told by our hosts in Quito not to let taxi drivers overcharge us - like the obnoxious kind of show-off American big tippers, it was implied; because they then expect to be able to do that with all foreigners, whether short term visitors or not, and including young travellers on shoestring budgets trying to see the world, who often do volunteer work along the way. Does one engage in the kind of hard bargaining that tourists try to learn in many third world market situations, or simply pay the asked price, hugely inflated compared to what the local standing next to you would be willing or able to pay?

    Yesterday I got a good set of photos: Paulino did a good job of organizing a rather large minga, sending groups of farmers and villagers out in different directions with their hoes to trace the water lines and locate leaks, and other water sources in the hills that the EWB could dam and tap for the irrigation project. I was worried they’d break pipes with their hoes, but I didn’t hear anything untoward afterward. 

    He borrowed my camera, which scared the hell outa me because it’s the only photographic tool I have to record my travels and I probably wouldn’t get another one until back in Toronto. He said the battery was dead on his. I was pretty sure if mine got dropped or broken he wouldn’t be able to replace it for me.  It seemed like an important enough purpose, but I’ve got to find a way to tell him that’d be the first and the last time I’d lend my camera to anyone, not just to him. 

    We’ve lent our phone to Paulino and Elvia because they are out of minutes even though Eden bought them some just last weekend, but we only have an “emergency” number of minutes on our phone, and we don’t know how to top it up from out here, so we’re going to have to say no to that practice as well. I wonder why Alcides doesn’t sell phone cards in his store?

    On Saturday evening I wanted to sit with Paulino and crop the photos he took so they would have meaning on someone else’s computer monitor, but he had another “very big meeting” to run away to as soon as it got dark; we’re guessing it was actually the party of food and pilsener which celebrates the completion of a day’s minga. However, today we finally managed to pin him down and got quite a bit accomplished, after also reviewing Alcides accounting procedures and making suggestions about creating totals and balances that can be carried forward instead of having to add pages full of sums every time he needs to extract information from his records. (I'm wondering how he does bookkeeping for his store and his bus, now.)

    On Sunday afternoon the power finally came back on. Deborah sat with Alcides trying to solve the mystery of why he hasn’t been keeping the columnar entry system that Pam says he was taught to do. She’s decided to use the record keeping method he’s developed for himself and used so far rather than overlaying something completely new and creating extra anxiety and work for him; but she’ll try to get him to record and keep a running total of his expense invoices as they come in. She’s adding totals for him going back three years. He appears to have only a simple notebook rather than a columnar accounting book. Lautaro teaches spreadsheets to the colegio students, but we’re not sure what the family politics would be of having him take over the accounting function, and we’re afraid to broach the idea of training Alcides in computer literacy to the point where he could do spreadsheet accounting.

    Besides George, alone among the teachers, Paulino too, it seems, is extremely grateful for our presence and our "minga" time spent with him, teaching him useful new things and helping him stay on top of stuff. This evening after reviewing Pam's list and learning from us how to change the resolution on his camera, learning about an English language learning website, and watching Deb work with Alcides, he suddenly opened up and expressed his gratitude profusely and without reservation, almost making a little speech about it to us.

    And yet, it seems that no matter what I observe and note, there's a bright side and a dark side.  At 12:30 we showed up to do the grade 8 class, who'd been running around unsupervised since at least recess; they were in the computer lab doing their "informatica" class, which consists largely of Facebook. We can't always tell you what the teachers do, but we can often tell you what they don't do: Paulino is the teacher for this "informatica" class according to the students, and where is he? Why, hanging out all alone up at the hostel, doing sweet nothing from what we can tell. We chatted with him a few minutes ago about taking a photo of the frig. There are kids running up and down the halls of the schoolhouse on both floors, banging doors and yelling, and no teacher steps out of a classroom to control them; in fact there are two only closed classroom doors, but I'm not certain there are teachers inside. The director Marcelo is in a classroom quite removed from this building with his own grade 5 and 6 class; he seems fairly dedicated to his own class, but doesn't have a clue how to provide oversight to the rest of the building.

    Luckily the internet, which had been out all morning, came on just in time, and since we were in the computer lab with them anyway, rather than try to find crowbars to get them away from the computers, we did something I'd wanted to try for a while: we sat them three to a computer (six computers with internet, eighteen students) and got one person in each trio to register (free) on duolingo.com. They seemed to find this an intriguing way to learn basic words in English, and we had no trouble maintaining their focus. I was amazed to learn that they didn't know words like boy, girl, and woman...what does Manuela the English teacher do with them? My hope is that some of them may log on and continue learning after we're gone - duolingo is good at sending out email reminders to people who begin learning a new language and don't continue to make at least a little progress every day.

    We had one really impressive group today though: the grade nines were awesome, showing impressive uptake of what we taught them two weeks ago - only a single lesson, that I can recall - and with great pronunciation.

    Jorge (“George”, please!) impresses us more and more. He’s a weekend college teacher who runs a plant business in town through the week. He sits in with us on his classes, and seems responsible for English programming for the colegio students, along with whatever other subjects. Pam asked if we’d sit in on lessons delivered by the other teachers, but when we asked about that we learned that they were sitting exams this weekend and next (oh, gosh, darn…), and there would be no lessons to observe until February, when we’ll be gone.

    George actively team-teaches with us, helping with instruction and classroom management, and is a great role model for his students, attempting pronunciation with them and encouraging them. One class has had only two periods with us, and he said they came from an elementary school where they’d had no English at all.  Since they’re Quechua, we’re trying to coax them into becoming tri-lingual (including developing proficiency at Spanish) rather than just bilingual. There are vowels and some consonants they don’t employ in their own language, so some of the pronunciation we’re working on is even harder for them than for a strong Spanish speaker.  Some of the words that I want to take for granted as possibly being similar enough to be understood (selecciones, alternativas, participacion, etc) are vocabulary that is a little above them even in Spanish.

    There’s one poor kid in a higher elementary class who can’t read at all, and who is written off by his peers a bit; but when I do the Meet and Greet skit with him orally, he’s fine. Which is another interesting point: when we meet kids outside the building and teach them simple sentences orally, they often mimic and pick up the pronunciation so much faster aurally than when we write it on the board for the older students, who’ve learned to associate “I”, for example, with the “ee” sound, and find it very hard to ignore sound associations that are by now almost hard-wired into their brains. There’s a good argument to be made for spending your whole time on nothing but oral mimicry and translation, and once those common English phrases are locked into their aural memory, then one can deal with the written appearance of the phrase. However, that’s a two stage process that we have no time to refine in this short visit.

    We did meet William, finally. He’s Alcides son, home for the weekend from Veterinary college, and he is a very good English speaker – he’s mastered the pronunciation of exactly the set of phrases we’re trying to teach the elementary and colegio students, and enjoys exchanging greetings with us. I think he’d like to have a longer conversation in English, but we haven’t had that opportunity yet.

Next: Ferengi in the Andes

"What's that, you say?...Killer-toa?"

    Back in school on Friday after a weekend of long meetings, a short market trip (Monday), a day spent typing up minutes - a two person job - and other chores (Tuesday), a day when Deb couldn't get out of bed or eat anything while I suffered my own bout of what my Mom the nurse calls "flatus" and burping (Wednesday), and a tour of the hills and the volcanic lake at Quilotoa at breakneck speed (Thursday). 

    Now we're waiting for the teachers to show up to school.  They went en masse to Latacunga yesterday in Ignacio's new truck as soon as we got back to Malingua Pamba, and they aren't back yet. The school kids are playing soccer, having their early morning "cafecito", and some have settled into empty classrooms and cracked their books on their own. Bolivar the student is opening up the computer lab and library in their absence.

    My blog is filled with school observations because of my background, by the way, but also because there are so many teachers in my family and some former colleagues who find these details interesting.

Just after 9 a.m.: Marcelo and some of the teachers finally returned, minus Bolivar the teacher who Marcelo said had had an accident in his vehicle, and several others. Until then we had only one young teacher on site, Manuela the English teacher, who is Lautaro's wife.  She helped the kids get their "cafecito" and intended to cover for Rosa in the primary classroom, but Rosa had stayed in Latacunga, apparently doing something for the Ministry of Education (...again?) and had not left her only key to the classroom behind. No spares, no key in the director's pocket. No access to the kids' notebooks, the reading books we'd moved to that room to create the seeds of a classroom library, or any other essential resources of a three grade primary classroom.

    Manuela's an enigma for me: she's had "a sick baby" since we've been here, and hasn't been teaching any of her classes, at least on the days we've been around. The timing was perfect for her during the first week because we were present each day, but not during this past week. Yet this morning she covered for the missing teachers and Sonia took care of the baby, which is part of Sonia's role through the week when she's not in class herself. I don't know why that hasn't been an option on the other days; the baby, maybe seven months old (?), didn't look terribly ill to me, but I'm no pediatrician. Is Manuela simply shy to display her competency as an English teacher? Is she afraid we'll be more critical than helpful? We tried to chat her up a bit at lunch, and she did say she'd enjoy sitting in on some of our classes, or get some lesson prep time with us, which we said we'd be delighted to do...wonder why it took her so long to ask? She hasn't actually spoken English with us, except at the end of lunch, just a few phrases, which were certainly delivered more fluently than that of any other teacher here. Mind you, her Spanish is delivered at machine gun speed, too.

    Manuela begged us to keep the primaries in the computer lab while she took the older kids - at least she had some resources to use with them. We read Goldilocks and the Three Bears in Spanish, and one other book, then Marcelo suggested we stay there and put the kids on the computers. We asked for age appropriate educational games for them, and he suggested Tux Typing. However, he couldn't find it. 

    We eventually found it on some of the machines: of the six Ministry of Education computers, one didn't have it, one had all instructions in English, and one in Tamil. The sound was deafening as the kids began shooting falling comets with the letter of the keyboard on them, and some kids opened a non-educational PacMan-like game with loud train whistles. It sounded like an arcade in there, with roaring arcade music on top of the shooting and train whistle sounds. We couldn't hear ourselves think, let alone give any instructions. We scrambled to find volume control, with no success. The speakers are inside the tower and the sound is hard-wired; finally, with the help of an older student we learned how to turn off the music and shooting, but it required constant monitoring; in some machines, it just kept coming back on - and I don't think the kids did it on purpose, I think it just resets every time they start a fresh game.

    I was disappointed to find that there is so little educational software on Ministry supplied computers. Deb managed to figure out how to change the languages to Spanish so that the kids could at least shoot down words in their own language, and we banned the train game completely, which took some fierce yelling in "teacher voices" to overcome the resistance of the students. 

    I looked online for web-based typing tutors in Spanish, without luck. Later I located some educational games for Spanish children that might have been useful, but you can't spend time locating them when there are fifteen little fireballs demanding direction from you, and you can't introduce new activities suddenly, off the cuff, in a controlled way either. With only six computers connected for fifteen kids, it wasn't easy to keep them all engaged. It's a bit of an onslaught, and Deb took the brunt of it by default, having the language skills - and painfully pinched a nerve in her hip while frantically bending over between the chairs, trying to figure out how to kill the volume on each machine.

    So, the long and the short of it is, we baby-sat all morning, making one full week when we haven't been able to deliver the English lesson we've developed and written out on chart paper. Maybe next week. We did figure out how to show fairy tales from Youtube in Spanish through the InFocus projector. After recess, Deb read one more book, and Ignacio assured us it would be a shortened day, so we watched The Shoemaker and the Elves.  The best version we could find turned out to be "The Shoemaker and the Gnomes", on Youtube.   Sometimes it's hard to find exactly what might work for your group. 

    One thing we learned is that there aren't any external speakers for any computer in the room, and it was hard for the primary kids to hear the sound if there was the slightest discussion of the video by the kids, shuffling of chairs, or older kids trying to gain access to the lab. I found two sets of Logitech external speakers in the computer graveyard that might have been loud enough, but neither pair had a power adaptor or a mini-stereo cable to take the sound from the headphone plug of the computer. I was puzzled that the arcade games had been deafening but Youtube videos were so quiet, but I've noticed before that Youtubes do seem to have varying degrees of volume.

    Knowing we'd be finished early, I ran out to try to find the three missing teachers from last Monday's photo shoot while Deb supervised the video. I looked everywhere.  By my count, there were four teachers on site out of an eight teacher complement. Ignacio listed the reasons for me why the other teachers were absent: illness, accident, Ministry business...and sure enough, by 11:30 a.m. we were done, and the kids were called to line up for their school lunch, after which they, and we, were expected to be finished for the day. 

    Was this a typical day? Maybe that'd be stretching things, but it didn't seem to be an unusual day. With so many days like this, it's easy to see why there seems to be lots of potential here and lots of common sense, but not much actual "book larnin'" going on. If it's like this in 2013, the teachers themselves must have grown up with the same paucity of instruction. They remind me of some parents I've interviewed at home who didn't understand why their children were being exposed to new methods of instruction and classroom management, when the three R's and strict discipline had worked just fine for them, and they were such well-educated people. Sometimes it takes a lot to look beyond your own experience and begin to perceive a fresh present perspective and a vision of the future.

    Today's photo album is just twenty photos of yesterday's tour. Ignacio was very keen to take us on Thursday rather than Friday or the weekend. We discovered that he'd purchased a 6 year old diesel truck from the Cooperativo last Friday, and this was his first paying job with it. It was a bit of a white knuckle journey for him, especially when he misjudged the height of a rock (his new truck didn't have the clearance of his older brother's) and heard it banging off the undercarriage. We stopped and looked for fluid leaks from oil pan, transmission pan or any other damage, but as far as we could tell it had merely banged against the frame, and the damage wasn't tragic.

    $16,000 for a six year old diesel truck is a big investment for a teacher who makes less than a quarter of that in a year - at his teaching job, at least - 1/20th what the average teacher in Toronto earns. If there's any question about the dedication and professionalism of rural Ecuadorian teachers for their chosen career (and I do have some), it has to be well salted with the awareness that status rather than pecuniary reward must be a big part of why they do it. Low pay, questionable depth of training, scarcity of resources including instructional aids and equipment - these are all factors to be considered. If we criticized out loud, I'm sure some of them would say, "Oh, for Pete's sake, what do you want from me, already?"

    I noted that Sonia, who must be close to twenty, is a bit more keen on engineering or social work than teaching. She finished ten years of elementary but still has to go two days a week on weekends for six more years to finish her colegio while doing work within the family on the weekdays, before she can qualify for trade school or university. The colegio training, from the few fly-on-the-wall lessons I've observed, isn't as sophisticated as average high school classes in N. America. This is a significant delay to acquiring career training, and eventual earning power.

   On our tour, the road across the valley was blocked by the same roadwork Eden had experienced in my last blog.  We had to race a very long distance around high mountain roads with steep drop-offs to get to the towns Ignacio wanted to show us. We started late; luckily for Elvia we had to go past the highway where she could catch a bus into town, so she was able to hop a ride, but at that spot we also had to wait for another section of roadwork for forty-five minutes that Ignacio said they'd been working on for a year. 

    While we waited, I saw another green hummingbird with a split tail. I got my camera out, but it was too elusive for me. It looked like a swallow-tail from the "Twenty Hummingbirds to see before you die" web page from two blogs back, but seemed more green than the bluish one I'd seen there. We flew through Zumbahua, Quilotoa, Chugchilán, Sigchos and Isinlivi as if we were on fire, and got home two hours early. Crammed three abreast in the cab of Ignacio's new truck, it's not a tour I'd recommend. Cost us $80 plus $20 for diesel plus lunch and cookies for four, and we didn't really see much of the towns, didn't even manage a stop at some well-known hostels like Jean's Llullu Llama Lodge, or the Black Sheep Inn. The reason we got home two hours early, apparently, was because Ignacio kept getting phone calls from the teachers asking them when he'd be back to take them to Latacunga in his truck, since Bolivar's SUV wasn't available as a result of his accident. All in all, I felt ripped off, but I enjoyed what I did see as much as I could, and swallowed my words.

    One very interesting thing that I noticed was that as soon as we'd crossed the border out of Sigchos canton, every home on the hillsides had its own lovely blue plastic water barrel, somewhere between 250 and 500 gallons - a nice, stable cylindrical barrel, not a tapered one. There was piping in places; I saw one guy moving a flexible hose with a sprinkler head for his crop irrigation. I wondered if it could be a curse rather than a blessing to be served by EWB, since few people in this canton seem satisfied with their irrigation solution, yet perhaps because the gov't considers that EWB has provided for it, they don't have to. In any case, I'm hoping EWB has studied the system in the neighbouring canton as part of the due diligence for their own project here. (I also noticed one interesting home with an inverted roof, so that the peak was below the top of the walls; I wonder if that was a clever solution to collecting rainwater from your roof.)

    The day of our very rushed tour was clear and sunny, and the views spectacular. The hills are different here, majestic but in a gentle rounded way, not as sharp as the Rockies, and greener.  We arrived at Quilotoa, and Sonia's grandmother Josefina had given her three six-litre jugs to fill with water from the lake in the crater of the volcano. Although other visitors claim it is "poisonous", Josefina believes that the salty, suphurous water is good for her animals, and she told us she has bathed in it herself. Sonia had to run all the way to the bottom of the crater with the empty jugs - took her fifteen minutes to jog down. That's about four kilometres. Then she filled the three jugs and began to climb all the way back up. Ignacio and I decided we'd try to meet her halfway and help her carry them...Deb declined to go down, but I began, and after a few hundred yards we decided Sonia was still an awfully long way down, so we went a little further...and then further...finally met her about halfway up, resting in a scenic spot. I grabbed one jug, Ignacio grabbed two, and we turned to go, but after about a hundred yards I had to surrender my jug back to Sonia. Gasping, dizzy, heart pounding, resting every few feet, I struggled my way back to the top, wondering every few seconds whether this was when "the big one" would hit, and they'd have to airlift me out, probably already dead. Deb asked me later whether I would have rented one of the horses we saw being walked down to the lake. At that moment, you bet I would have!

    I don't know how much of that was that I'm simply that out of shape (but I play tennis for hours all summer at home) and how much is that fact that I just haven't developed the haemoglobin to manage the oxygen uptake I need for strenuous exercise. Or how much is just plain being sixty, for that matter. I began to worry about how I'd cope with the altitude at Machu Picchu if this was such a killer experience, but Ignacio stated that the altitude at Quilotoa is almost 13,000 feet (4,000 metres), whereas Machu Picchu is actually only 8,000 feet; Quito was 9,000 feet, so we should be much better off when we get to Ollantaytambo.

    It was an experience...another "aventura" - Deb told Ignacio that she didn't go down because she was smarter, and that men are simply more "aventurosos"...and that's probably why we die younger. I now want to remember the volcano's name as "Killer-toa".

I think the frequency of blog posts will drop off over the next two weeks. We expect to spend our time teaching and doing little chores for Pam Gilbert until we head back to Quito for our flight to Cuzco, Peru.

Next: life in the clouds