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