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...)
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