The Good, the Mal and the Pam in Malingua Pamba

    We went to the Latacunga bus station twice, worried about conflicting information as to when the bus would leave - apparently one can't simply dial a number and find out, let alone look on the internet. However, Pam was correct, and we took the one thirty bus, which was a coach just a little past its prime. The passengers were all Quechuan, and the driver stopped here and there to let some off or a few more on. 

    Our last stop before leaving the 'burbs of Latacunga was an open air grill where a team of young women charged onto the bus to sell skewers of chicken, pork and fruit, bowls of pork and mote, and so on. The passengers proceeded to choose their lunches, and after fifteen minutes the girls were hustled off the bus and we continued into rural Ecuador.

    The highway was two lane blacktop for a short while, then we veered off to the right onto a single lane dirt road that wound its way up and along mountains, and around hairpin turns before which the driver would honk to warn any oncoming vehicles. Encountering a vehicle coming the other way required utilizing the ditches on either side, on a straight stretch of road - there was no likelihood of passing on a curve, given the length of the bus.

    There were few trees. The land is not flat anywhere. The mountains in this area are rounded but the slopes are quite steep, and they are farmed by individual families of Quechua who obviously know each other but don't see each other on a daily basis, because they were quite pleased to greet a host of old friends as they entered the bus. I saw a woman swinging a hoe, but no motorized farm machinery, just some heavy equipment for roadwork. The hills are comprised of clay and some sand and gravel, not at all like the granite Rockies. They have a thin layer of topsoil that supports green growth, so that they look very green from a distance. We saw sloping fields of garlic and lots of onions, as well as potatoes and other vegetables.

    On our first night in the hostel at Malingua Pamba, a tremendous windstorm blew up which rattled and banged windows, doors and roof panels all night and through the next day. It took out the internet connection to the remote server, and as I write this we have no idea when the company will locate and repair the broken connection. It kept the kids indoors most of the morning – they begged to have a soccer break, but the school director said no – the wind would blow the ball away if not the kids, and they’d get gritty sand in their eyes and mouths.

    Here is a set of photos of our introduction to Malingua Pamba.  There's also a secret slideshow which I kept hidden for eight years, one of several that I shared only with Pam who had asked us to report on everything we saw and experiences.  It displays how slovenly our quarters were, and for the sake of illumination and posterity I've included it here.

    The hostel is very plain, and our room is missing certain basic amenities for a longer stay: a place to hang or put away clothes, a table, chairs of any description, curtains on the windows, pillows…they don’t seem to have or use pillows – one of the grade threes pointed to an illustration of a pillow in a book and asked what it was.

    There’s a spacious common area downstairs, with nice floor tiles, but the walls and cupboards haven’t been washed or repainted in decades, by the look of it; mind you, smoke from the propane cook stove would probably stain a fresh paint job rather quickly.  It is, bar none, the messiest, most disgusting "hostel" I've ever encountered, with any pretensions of being commercial.  

    There’s an old dirty nonfunctional radio far from any electrical outlet, with speaker wires unattached; no television, no comfy chairs, no bookshelf with books that former travelers have left behind, which you find in all hostels I’ve ever been in before. 

    There is a propane on-demand hot water heater for the shower that delivers a comfortable if lukewarm flow if you keep the tap at about half force; I’m tempted to improve on the shower head, but it does the job. The bathroom doesn’t get cleaned much, and some of the dust from windstorms has piled up on the toilet; there isn’t a mirror for shaving, not there or in the small upstairs “convenience” room which has a toilet and a cold water sink, with a blue sheet draped over a rope for a door, for privacy.  It didn't have a light bulb until Friday evening, just prior to the arrival of an important Rotary visitor. The hostel is also the home of the math teacher and his wife and three sons, so we share that bathroom on the upper floor.

    There’s an apparently bed-ridden old grandmother or great-grandmother in a room across the hall who begins hollering and calling out piteously for hours, starting even before the roosters, and sometimes through the afternoon. She might have dementia, but on the other hand I haven’t seen anyone sitting with her to talk, roll her over in bed, or help her up to the bathroom, so perhaps she has emotional and/or biological needs that aren’t tended to as frequently as she’d like. A bit hard to ignore, especially when her persistent cries puncture your last hour or two of sleep in the morning.  I have no idea what to do about her and I don’t want to intrude on a family or a cultural matter.

    All in all, it’s a bit like camping.  Those who know me realize that I loved the last luxuriously appointed apartment we stayed in for three weeks, but I could also be comfortable in a tent, so we’ll make do. For me, our accommodation isn’t much different than the homes of friends where I grew up in Zambia; I’m a little surprised that Deborah is accepting it so well, but she’s good at simply accepting things as they are when she has to, and we have travelled a lot together in Africa, Asia and elsewhere.

    As to the school and the staff, that was a bit more disconcerting. Pam Gilbert will get to read this, and it’s a straight up honest account for her, but no-one else related to the school, or the Rotarians, will. Pam is the loved "Pamelita" around here, whose 8 x 10 glossy adorns one of the classroom walls and we spotted a smaller print in the library. I’m sure she’ll appreciate seeing what we saw through our eyes, rather than being annoyed by anything that follows. It’s not sugar-coated; I’m going to mention some negative things about the school, but it’s my blog and somewhat private, so I guess I can do that. Only close friends and family have access to it, apart from Pam, and in reality it is nothing more than my personal diary.

    We were surprised at our lukewarm reception. Paulino’s son Bolivar gave us a tour when we arrived, and he was very helpful and friendly, although he seemed to want to devote a major portion of our tour to the graveyard rather than the school. We met Marcelo the "director" (essentially a teaching principal) the next morning, and expected to have an orientation or some sort of direction, but neither he nor Paulino were forthcoming. We were expected to finish our breakfast and then wander over to the school rooms, and when we did we had no idea who to report to or where to go. 

    We wandered about and looked at empty rooms, and finally disturbed one of the four teachers on site to ask where Marcelo was. When we finally found him he led us to a classroom in a different block where we were presented with a combined class of grades one, two and three doing seatwork, and no teacher present.

    Marcelo didn’t tell us anything about the students.  We had to figure everything out for ourselves, and it turns out we were immediately pressed into service as replacement teachers for a teacher who was away on a course for the day. She`d left no instructions, no day book, no program; there was precious little in the way of books or teaching aids in the room apart from their workbooks. If there’s a curriculum, I’m not aware of it. The children were left entirely without supervision until we arrived, and how could Marcelo and the rest of the staff have known we`d have been able to cope, or even been certain that we’d arrive on that day to cover for this missing teacher?

    I suppose if we hadn’t been there, they’d have looked in on the kids once in a while, but that isn’t adequate supervision, either. No-one came to check on us all morning, to see how we were doing. When Marcelo and Paulino questioned us later about our backgrounds, we realized they hadn’t even been aware that we’d been teachers, or what our strengths and abilities are.

    There were construction materials along the back wall, no toys, no classroom library, nothing on the walls – just workbooks for seatwork, which for the grade ones consisted of writing a whole page of numbers over and over – a row of 26’s. The grade twos had the same sort of task, but their lines consisted of capital and small letters of one letter of the alphabet for an entire page. As far as we could tell, this was her sole plan for the day, after copying out two sentences from the board into their books – what we call “bellwork”, intended to give students an immediate task to focus on, but just for the first five or ten minutes, not to keep them all busy for a four and a half hour day less half an hour for recess. We observed their seatwork, and Deborah improvised some basic English instruction – greetings, days of the week, etc.

    I should say that Pam Gilbert had warned us in an email that we shouldn’t expect direction, and that we would be expected to be quite autonomous, but I’d forgotten her warning, so I was more than a little shocked.

    There is little in the way of playground equipment. There are swings, but they are surrounded by rebar and concrete blocks at the moment, and no children use them. There’s a slide behind the building that is not in service, and is unusable because of its very high legs at the front, which would result in quite a final tumble for a smaller child – on the first day I saw it upright, and the next day the wind had blown it over on its side. That’s how strong the wind blew, and the slide was not anchored. At recess six of the oldest boys played volleyball on a concrete court with a net, fighting the wind, but the smaller children just ran around trying to amuse themselves, climbing on a broken wooden table, going up to the roof of the school to watch the volleyball game, or trying to improvise games inside an empty, unsupervised classroom.

    There’s an outdoor sink intended for the children to wash their hands after using the toilet, and for washing their dishes. It has been plugged and filled to the brim all week, and the children are washing their hands and dishes in filthy standing water. We asked Ignacio about that, and he simply said, “I think the dust from the windstorms has plugged the drain. Someone will have to come and fix that.” One could, of course, get a siphon hose and drain it over the edge, and give the kids clean water to wash up in; or, once drained, one could fish around with an improvised plumbing snake if you don’t have a real one (the workmen on site have wire and rebar), to see if you can clear the plug, or at least to keep the sink clear so that you can refill it with fresh water daily. But that apparently hasn’t occurred to Marcelo or any of the other teachers on staff. I’ve asked Paulino for a flexible length of hose so that I could siphon it myself, but it has not been produced for me.

    Some of our students asked to go to the computer lab, but the power had gone out and so that was off the menu; even when the power came back on, there was no connection to the remote server for the internet all day. During our first tour with Bolivar I checked the page history of the computer I had turned on to see what the students had been using – there were no commonly visited internet sites of an educational nature at all, even ones that older kids would use. There were only social media sites, mainly Facebook and Youtube. Later I saw a group of students using the lab, and those were the only pages they had open apart from email and non-educational time-filler games, except for one typing tutor game that Deb played with Hugo later in the second afternoon, and one girl that I saw playing chess.

    After recess we took our students to the “library”. This is a narrow room with nice tile and some desks, and it doubles as a classroom for smaller groups. Along both walls there are shelves, but they have not been tidied or organized for some long time. The room is filled with garbage, including papers, broken games and jigsaw puzzles, and books that are jumbled and unclassified – one wouldn’t be able to find any book in there that you might be looking for, even if you knew it was there. Some of the books themselves could be classified as garbage, being nothing either the students or their teachers ever could or would use. I might try to make the clean-up and organization of this room a focus of my volunteering for a day, or several. It’s sad to see such a poor excuse for a “library” when the books, many donated by Rotary International, are sitting there ready to be read, shared and cared for.

    Speaking of recess: for our first four days, the half-hour recess has lasted for about an hour (longer on the fourth day), but teachers are nowhere to be seen during that hour. They don’t supervise the students at recess, and we have no idea where they go – we haven’t been informed or invited to join them. They just seem to vanish. 

    It should be obvious that there’s therefore no opportunity for these teachers to learn anything useful from our career experience, or vice versa. Cross-pollination of methods and ideas should be a given in this kind of situation, not to mention cross-cultural exchange, but it is clearly a non-starter. One most glaring reason why it should be happening is that these kids get numerous periods of “Ingles” each week from teachers who can’t teach them how to pronounce the words, or how to form and produce an intelligible sentence in English – the grade 7’s, Bolivar’s class, have seven periods a week on their schedule, but we have done more in four days than they appear to have done since they started the subject in grade four or five. It appears that the most they get is a chance to copy phrases from a white board into a book. 

    You would expect that we would have been shown their English programs and any texts that exist to see where we could plug into what they are currently studying, to provide enrichment, but no teacher has approached us to suggest that, and they’re simply never around when we arrive at a classroom to take over, so it’s not something we’ve been able to suggest either. It does seems to me that either they shouldn’t be wasting valuable learning hours on a language they’ll never use, or their teachers should be serious about teaching it well enough that these kids might one day travel, host volunteers from overseas, or get jobs in trade or tourism. 

    When I reflect on how many fully bilingual kids we have in Canada, and the multilingual kids I've met in Holland, North Africa and elsewhere, I’m sure that’s not an unrealistic goal, especially with the help of a Foundation that sends them English books and bilingual readers, not to mention capable and experienced ESL teaching volunteers through Helpx and other sources.

    I sorted through the dust and pulled out an armload of books that ought to be in a primary classroom library rather than a dusty bookshelf in a book cupboard.  When we got ousted from the “library” to make room for some older students we went back to the classroom and had a typical librarian lesson in which Deborah introduced each book and the kids responded to the covers, guessed what they might be about, and then got to explore them, swap them, and discuss the illustrations.  A few of the grade threes even settled into actually reading them. 

    That activity lasted happily for the remaining hour that we needed to keep them amused. It was hard work for Deborah, though; the youngest students, in particular, did not seem used to this type of activity or the behavioural expectations it requires, and their attention spans were short. If it weren’t for Deborah’s ability in Spanish, we’d have been completely sunk. I expected that they might like to have a book read to them, but few students seemed capable of sitting quietly and simply listening to a story.  That could have been due to the time of day or the agitation of having their usual routines and classroom expectations shaken up by having two strangers run their day. Most kids certainly do like to have a story read to them, but they have to be somewhat habituated to the concept.

    When we saw the “library” for the first time, I’d noticed two old, dirty, neglected sewing machines under the bookshelves. Bolivar said they were functioning, but one ancient one had its power cord cut off; we didn’t dig the other one out to see if it worked. Pam had said she’s sent as many as seven sewing machines, so we asked Paulino if we could see them and test them for fitness before Pam bothered to send cloth, thread and spare parts if necessary. At first he showed us another ancient treadle machine which also had a motor, but it didn’t have a belt for the treadle or a power cord for the motor. Then the adult teacher Bolivar reminded him there were more in the cupboard of the computer lab, so we went up there, pulled one out and verified that except for a need for balancing or a bobbin that wasn’t so tight, it was functional. 

    Paulino suggested that he have them all placed out on the extra tables in the computer lab to create a sewing centre, and we agreed that would be an excellent idea. On Friday we completed an inventory of the remaining machines, and checked them all for function, missing parts, etc. Pam says the girls have been asking her for “suits”, by which she wonders if they mean cloth to make traditional womanly Quechua costumes. We’ll be emailing her to report how many functional machines she has to work with, and what she’ll need in the way of thread, needles, spare parts/bobbins, and plastic safety glasses.

    The water filter set up, among other projects, by the “Engineers Without Borders” who came here on a $12,000 Rotary Grant (if I’ve got that story right) is missing a simple plastic ¼” tubing. It feeds off a line that also enters the on-demand water heater. We were going to try to bring to bring the tubing with us from Latacunga, but there was some question about the size, so I decided to wait until I could see it for myself; now another volunteer is bringing a repair kit in three more days, so we’ll wait and see what can be done about it – Paulino apparently has tools, which begs the question of why he didn’t simply pick up the tubing in Latacunga and repair the filter himself. In the meantime, Elvia is boiling us water for brushing teeth, and we drink boiled tea at meals.

    Our first three meals were fairly plain but adequate: a mound of yellow potato with an egg over it, tomato and red onion salad, rice with an egg in it, cabbage and lentil soup, locro with some bits of chewy beef, that sort of thing. Breakfast our first morning was fun: a plate of popcorn, and another plate of miniature sweet plums, banana and papaya, more than we could put away at a breakfast sitting (and Deb can’t eat papaya anyway), and a fried banana as well. We had a banana and papaya “batida” (a smoothie made with fruit and water) for dessert at lunch. Not a whiff of coffee, however, which I sorely miss. I can’t decide whether my slight headache is from caffeine withdrawal or altitude, or both.

    Dinner on Tuesday was a big disappointment. Elvia had told us to come at seven, so we waited at the common room table but by 8 o’clock she still hadn’t come. Her three young sons popped in and volunteered to make us a salad for an “almuerzo” (“lunch”) – and admitted they were hungry themselves - but we declined and said we were waiting for Elvia who had told us to expect dinner. Finally another lady, Paulino’s sister-in-law Aurora, apparently, came in and heated up some noodles in a thin cheese sauce for us, but that was the extent of our dinner. I think the boys ended up over at her house for supper.

    Frankly, our first twenty-four hours were not a positive experience. We questioned the professionalism of the staff, and it is clear that the standards are not what we’d encounter in any Canadian school, even on a First Nations reserve; resources are extremely scarce, as well. The school site is a boring place to be after 1 p.m. when the school day is over if the internet is out and there are no books to read.  The immediate surroundings are not particularly pleasant (later discovered a few paths that might make for pleasant walks, though), and the adults are absent and/or only passing friendly or helpful; some drive all the way back into Latacunga as soon as the school day is over, and get up at 5:30 to get back here in time for classes in the morning. We had a dark cloud over our heads after our first day, and questioned our decision to come here.  First impressions are so important.

    On Wednesday morning we were launched into classrooms equivalent to grade 7, 8 and 10, devoid of teachers – I had expected to work with them, not take over for them. I don’t know where they go while we cover their classes, but there is no hand-holding and no oversight of volunteers, no briefing and no debriefing. There are no textbooks, no posters or aids, and no program design.  We thought on our feet and came up with our own beginner’s English program, trying to build on what the students had learned from previous visitors (it helped that I’ve been an ESL teacher in several instances, and Deb has taught French to beginners). They didn’t remember much they'd ever learned up until today, and pronunciation is a stumbling block – like teaching in Japan, even if they know the words in writing, being able to speak to make oneself understood by an English speaker is a major stumbling block. 

    We had fun going through greetings and introductions, days of the week, birthdays (months and cardinal numbering), devised some short skits for students to practice short conversations on their feet, and sang some songs in English and in Spanish. We expect to continue the same way for the next four weeks, and develop scripts for conversation as well as some songs that they can perform chorally in English. One group of grade eight girls sang for us and I was impressed with their pitch ability and the blend of their voices – partly due to being related, perhaps. They have a nasal singing style that I hadn’t noticed in speech; maybe it’s an affectation like the country music twang that even eastern N. Americans deliver. We are trying to develop a flexible script for Meeting and Greeting, and my hope is that they’ll perform this routine for their parents and future volunteers once they have the lines and the pronunciation down.

    By afternoon, with the internet back on and Elvia providing decent meals once again, Deborah said that she was happy with the way the morning had gone, found it comfortable to work with a partner in the classroom (me, in spite of my barely emergent Spanish ability) and felt much better about being here for a serious stretch of time. And that goes a long way to keeping me settled on our original plan…because as we all know, “If mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy!”

    I have a recurrent little headache that has become chronic.  I still can’t decide whether to blame it on altitude or caffeine withdrawal. I’ve only taken Advil for it once, so it isn’t that horrible, but Elvia has come up with a coffee plunger in the kitchen, and luckily I was smart enough to bring a few hundred grams of coffee with me from Quito, so tomorrow morning I’ll make myself a coffee and then I’ll know which it was. Deb has had a half dozen nosebleeds in the past month, in Quito and here; I think that’s a combination of altitude and dryness in the air.

    Jan 10th. I made myself two cups of coffee for breakfast this morning, and my headache, which is often worse in the small hours of the morning, cleared up. (I find myself waking up every few minutes to breath really deeply, so my headache is of the sort that people with sleep apnea suffer). Deb says I’m snoring really loudly now, although my sinuses are not blocked – that could also be a result of thin, dry air. The coffee cleared my headache – not because I was suffering from caffeine withdrawal, I believe, but because caffeine increases heart rate and respiration, which gets more oxygen to my brain, just as altitude sickness pills do. I think I’ll have to break out my altitude pills to take at night for a few days, to maintain a good breathing rate while I’m sleeping, and have coffee every morning.

    Thursday: Our classes were fun again today: we continued building on the Meeting and Greeting skits, learned the Hokey Pokey (for hand, foot, left, right, in, out, etc) and played Twister where they had to listen to instructions in English and employ their left and right hands and feet on the coloured dots, also called out in English. We did an extended coverage in one classroom for yet another teacher who is “away on a course”…hmm…

    On Friday we had an interesting experience after working on Pam’s sewing machines. The grade 10’s were scheduled to have English for their final period (the grade 9’s too, but apparently the 9’s don’t exist, i.e. there aren’t any, even though they have an “horario”). We went to the grade 10 classroom, but none of them came in. Some of the boys were goofing around in the hall near the computer lab while the girls were just walking around by two’s. Now, granted they didn’t have watches and there are no clocks in the building, but even after we asked if they shouldn’t be in class for English, they were evasive and tried to trick us into believing they weren’t the grade we thought they were. Again, there were no teachers in sight – in fact, Paulino was running errands in the truck and we don’t know where any of the others were, but some students were taking a recess that was about to stretch into the third hour by that point; I thought it must be a phys ed class playing volleyball, but the girls weren’t playing and there was no teacher coaching or supervising. So after ten minutes we wandered up to Marcelo’s class, and thank goodness he was there with his 5’s and 6’s and his three grade 1’s (not sure why, but they don’t go to the other grade one classroom). He came down and rounded up the grade 10’s and got them into their classroom.

    We began that lesson, as we had for a couple of younger classes in previous days (we’d also had a bad attitude and discipline issue with a few of Marcelo’s grade 5/6 boys, and again with some of the grade 8 boys), by framing our presence and theirs, talking about our purpose for arriving here, their purpose for wanting to learn English (they hadn’t the first clue why they would want to, which was obviously part of the problem!). We suggested future travel adventures for them, conversing with future volunteers and Rotarian visitors, work or study in other countries, perhaps as representatives of their Ecuadorian government, lucrative jobs in tourism, or trade, perhaps exporting their own local products, and so on. It was our second class with them, but only one of the eight – one of the boys – had brought his notebook with the notes we’d asked them all to keep from the previous class. We asked them how they thought it would make us feel if when they didn’t say hello, didn’t willingly attend class, left their books at home, and tried to trick us? We shamed them a little, and suddenly we had a meek and willing class, and everything clicked for the following forty-five minutes. We might have to return to the framing exercise, but I hope not.

    Anyway, that was the end of our first week, and we will spend this weekend here, and look forward to extending our Meet and Greet skit next week, along with bilingual story books and any English learning games we can dream up – maybe bingo with English words on the squares. We’ll be doing a service for Pam this weekend too, accompanying visiting Rotarians and interviewing farmers for a report that will support a huge irrigation grant request. Next Friday we will take a full day tour in the car of Paulino’s younger brother, to Quilotoa, Isinlivi, Sigchos, and other nearby sights.  We'll do a little shopping and a little banking, and I'll get a haircut. It’s all working out.

    And as I’m writing this, our cook for today, Jocelyn (Elvia is away for the day with Paulino) is out in front of the small store next door with her husband, slaughtering a pig that had been tethered under the tree across the road for a day. Deb and I were surprised at how long it took and how long the hog-tied pig continued to squeal – ten or fifteen minutes; I’ve harvested chickens a few times in my life, and worked in an abbatoir for a summer, and I’ve seen farmers dispatch a pig quickly and humanely with a good sized wooden mallet and a knife – one quick blow to concuss the pig, and a knife to slit the jugular and bleed it out before it has a chance to come to. We felt rather sorry for the pig, who will perhaps be part of our dinner or other meals in subsequent days...I’m glad we didn’t know its name.

Next post: the Adventure