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

Aventura!

    Saturday morning broke quiet and sweet. Eden was coming – Pam’s “Champion Rotarian” – and big things were afoot. The dogs and roosters let us all sleep in except for one lone rooster, "Colonel Coxcombe", I called him, who tried single-handedly to rally the troops. “What are you, men or chickens? Stand up and greet the dawn with your chest out!” The rest were all subdued, reflecting, no doubt, on the fate of the pig yesterday afternoon. Mind you, some of these chickens sound a bit like a loud rusty gate; I’ve been considering asking Pam to include a bottle of chicken gargle-oil with her next shipment to the school.

    "The Rotarian is coming!"  The burnt out light bulb in the upstairs bathroom was finally replaced late last night, and a fresh propane bottle was hooked up to the on-demand water heater, with full pressure.  This morning’s shower was so scalding hot I had to add some cold, which to my mind was preferable to turning the hot tap more and using more water than I need for a shower, as I'd had to do on previous days.  Water is a scarce resource here, which is a central focus of Eden's visit.

    It was so quiet, I thought the old great-grandmother had been relocated, but she was still there in her bed. We say hello to her as we pass her open door; she waves, and her black eyes glitter, but she doesn’t make a peep.

    The college teachers are here for the weekend. Students from 15 to 24 study with them on Saturdays and Sundays.  I assume students of this age have jobs through the week.  We took some class photos for Pam. The teachers immediately pressed us into service delivering our now well-developed Meet and Greet Skit to the older classes; so much for Deb’s expectations of a day off. One class was missing…according to Paulino, they were away for the day selling beer as a fundraiser for some sort of “reunion”. That might have been the huge load of beer I saw arriving on top of Paulino’s brother’s coach just before dark last night. Yes, there are some distinct cultural differences.

    Mid-morning, I spotted Paulino, Marcelo and Bolivar (the director and two of the elementary teachers) finally clearing the childrens’ wash sink in advance of Eden’s arrival, so I stepped out of class to help. They had to break the PVC pipe below the sink.  It should have a trap and section that can be unscrewed and removed so it never has to be broken again. The problem wasn’t just sand, although there was a lot of that; as I suspected, it was also compacted food scraps (I’m sure I saw kernels of corn flowing down the hill when the blockage finally cleared) and wrappers from the cookies that are handed out each morning. Paulino and I discussed the potential for bacteria, disease which could spread from child to child and even to the teachers and parents; it’s not like he wasn’t aware of why the sink shouldn’t have been full of standing water all week. The drains need removable strainers, stainless ones with stainless screws so they can be removed easily by a teacher in the future, but not by the students, either on purpose or by accident. They also have no plumbers snake and no toilet plunger on site, both of which would be useful tools in a situation like this (not to mention if they ever experience a blocked toilet!) However, by the time Eden walked past the sink on Sunday morning, it was clean and had a newly repaired drainage pipe as well.

    Afterward, Paulino began a set of repairs to the hostel, including a small cupboard in our room, which was, however, missing a hinge that he doesn’t have.  At lunch time we found a whole family work bee going on in the dorm area, sorting and folding an immense pile of laundry and bedding for the hostel room across the hall, the floor of which had also been sluiced down and swept out. There must have been many other last minute chores, cleaning and improvements, including, it looks like, a brand new mattress; "the Rotarian is coming…"

    We were delighted, during our third and final presentation this morning, to have our first teacher to take advantage of our presence and attend our class along with his students. George (Jorge) told us he is genuinely trying to learn English himself. We congratulated him on his initiative, in front of his students. It will certainly rub off on his students, both in terms of skills and of positive attitude toward learning a new language – that’s positive modelling. We were mindful to begin his class by framing their purpose and the possible future benefits to learning English, which seemed to set the tone perfectly.

    Later in the afternoon we met Eden from Colorado, and Jean who is a British born and raised long-time resident of Ecuador, and who until last Saturday owned the Llullu Llama Hostel in Isinlivi, which one can google. She is a friend of Pam’s and will translate for Eden tomorrow as he absorbs everything he can about the needs of farmers in the area for an irrigation system. Deb and I will ride along, and Deb will record interviews with the farmers while Jean is busy translating back and forth. We are looking forward to that.

    A sharp disappointment for me that actually made me regret our decision to stay over for the weekend was that the internet went down from noon on Saturday. I had promised my family, who were gathering for a multiple birthday celebration (my mom’s 80th, my youngest brother’s 50th, and my Inuit niece’s 4th), that I would Skype with them. Eden and I worked in the computer lab on a number of equipment related questions, and we tried to get the company responsible to locate the problem and restore service, but it didn’t happen despite a couple of dozen phone calls. In fact, by Sunday night it was still down. 

    Eden was not impressed: he’s an electrical engineer who owns and runs an ISP at 9000 plus feet in Colorado, and he is able to pinpoint outages on the computer monitor in his home, and have service to his customers swiftly restored. On a previous visit he spent a lot of time going up and down mountains until he found the perfect spot for a radio transmitter for line-of-site internet signal that would reach every village in the area, and proposed a solar powered transmitter tower that could be set up for $8,000, (no maintenance, always-on even if the electric system fails) but before Rotary could take it on as a project the Ecuadorian gov’t said they’d provide internet service to all the remote parts of the country. However, what they really meant was that they’d contract it out to a private company which didn’t provide coverage to all the villages Eden knew that he could have, and they continue to have outages that they can’t locate and fix.

    Sunday.  It rained overnight for the first time since we got here, but Sunday morning was clear. We waited…and waited until late morning with Eden and Jean. Paulino had gone to a meeting in Sigchos until 10 p.m., then partied until 4 a.m., so he slept really late. While we waited, Jean made her series of phone calls to the ISP, Eden and I worked in the computer lab figuring out that the existing laser printer works but came with only a starter cartridge which was now empty, and had no paper; it wasn’t hooked up to any of the computers, and couldn’t even scan and copy any more. It’s programmed in Spanish, so maybe it was a government installation, like the six new computers. However, by removing and shaking the dry toner cartridge, I got it to print out a few test sheets for us, both scan and copy, and print some text from my laptop.

    Jean got frustrated with the number of times we shooed the chickens, dogs and cat out of the hostel because none of the family members or visitors could remember to close the door behind them, so she got a hammer, two nails, a plastic bottle of water and a piece of string, and made what she calls a “dictator”, which automatically closes the door, just with the weight of the water bottle. I was blown away with the simplicity of the device.  It worked perfectly.

    Once out of bed, Paulino had deliveries to make to all the kindergartens in the area, and in between we tried to pin him down as to the meetings he was supposed to have set up for Eden, which he hadn’t arranged. There was an important meeting in an neighbouring town, a wedding in a second town and a fiesta in a third this weekend, so it was hard to find any of the farmers and community leaders, even the women, that Eden was supposed to be here to meet and interview for the Rotary irrigation grant and other projects they were hoping to initiate or advance.  So much for thinking ahead...

    I was astounded that Paulino and the local farmers and community leaders would risk losing out on major improvements that had been proposed by not making themselves available for a meeting, after Eden had paid his own airfare and come so far to investigate and report back to Rotary. I came to understand that there was simply no way one could command the tide of local custom to ebb – these people were going to attend their weddings and fiestas, and that was a first priority for a weekend, regardless of Eden’s schedule. 

    We finally managed to pin down a handful of farmers at a village down in the valley called Tunguiche, and were able to produce a report for Pam and the Engineers Without Borders, with Jean translating, Deb recording as secretary and me listening carefully and then typing up the report from her notes afterward. 

    On the way back we photographed one of the ill-conceived tanks first installed by the EWB for water capture and distribution. They are like giant blue plastic drinking cups, tapered down to a narrow base. The more water they receive, the more unstable they become. One fell over and almost killed a lady who was trying to attach a pipe or open a valve, and now most villagers are afraid to approach them or use them. They are 500 gallons in size. 

    The farmers wish to have concrete tanks of 1000 gallon capacity built in situ to replace them, and they will use the 500 gallon plastic ones closer to their homes as pressure break tanks (these are used to avoid pressure from a long fall of water building up to the point where it can break pipes) and further distribution points. It will also triple the capacity of each capture system from 500 gallons to a total of 1500 gallons, and might allow irrigation over more than the twenty percent coverage of arable land that current users are achieving to grow crops. The plastic 500 gallon tanks can be placed lower down, in an area where a hole can be dug to place them into (or at the very least, a frame with much better bracing triangulating outward instead of inward toward the base) to avoid the possibility of future accidents.

    Later we went for a drive. Paulino’s deliveries to one side of the valley had been frustrated by three big piles of gravel and sand dumped at the end of a bridge and a trench across the road further up where a road crew was installing pipe. He made it past the sand piles, but turned back at the trench. Eden and Deb and I got to the bridge and Eden thought we’d go as far as the trench. I encouraged him - unfortunately, as it turned out. Paulino had made it around the sharp corner in his longer truck, so ours should do it, right?  Wrong. Our little truck had no weight in the back end, not much tread on the tires, one axle instead of two, and not enough power. Deb told us not to go through, but my unfortunately infamous rallying cry was “Aventura!” (Adventure!) 

    Not only did we not get by the piles, but in trying to back up we got bogged down in the sand, which was like quicksand for the little truck.  In rocking it to try to break free, we ended up sliding continuously sideways until finally we were jammed against a concrete post on the bridge and couldn’t go forward or back. We had an anxious hour wondering if we’d be there all night – we had no phone service, and everyone in the region was gone to the festival at the village of El Salado. We found a boy and asked him to go up the hill and find Jean at the hostel to get help. He said he would, and we paid him, but later we discovered he hadn’t!  He just took the money and ran, it seems.  Luckily for us, Paulino had managed to organize a porter party to meet him at the bridge and carry the food he was supposed to deliver by truck past the trench and up to the village. They came marching down the hill to find us sitting there waiting for rescue, and there were enough of them to gather around the little truck and lift first the front end and then the back into a position where Eden could reverse it down back onto the bridge.

    Several times this evening, when the embarrassing story has had to be retold, Deborah has hissed at me, “Aventura!”…

    In the evening we sat waiting for two people from the “drinking water committee”. Paulino had said they were coming to answer questions about the collection of fees for Pam.  They were required to show us their books to be photographed. Apparently Pam has asked to see the books before and the answer was always “tomorrow”, at which point Jean suggests they probably begin running around trying to collect the fees to improve the look of the books before they show them to Pam, who actually never gets to see them. Of course, we waited in vain…these two people did not show up at all. Eden’s suggestion is that they be told to bring the books to Deb and I so that we can photograph the pages and email them to Pam – that way they can’t (but I betcha they can!) use the excuse that the books will be made available “tomorrow”, since we’ll likely be here for three more weeks.

    There is supposed to be another group of women arriving tomorrow morning to be interviewed, for which Eden has now extended his time in Malingua…we’ll see how that works out. He was supposed to have a meeting with a local mayor, but that hadn't been set up. Jean is thinking she should have made a prior trip herself to do all the arranging herself that Paulino was supposed to have done, and that the requests be made earlier to give him more time to accomplish the set-up.  I'm not not sure whether that might have made a difference. As Eden said, he doesn’t know where the middle ground is between not giving him enough time, and giving him so much that he has time to forget what he is supposed to do. 

    Paulino is an awfully busy guy, and Eden has wondered if he shouldn’t be taking on a “vice-president” or an apprentice that he can mentor, to be able to spread himself out as far as he needs to at times like this. His whole family seems quite enterprising and forward thinking, but that doesn’t jive with how he responded to the challenge before him this weekend. I couldn’t help wondering if he really understood how important it was to have these meetings set up, and if he appreciated in the slightest the cost and effort that Eden made to come here and try to help the villagers in the area break the cycle of poverty. As their population expands, without irrigation and more sustainable permaculture practices, they won’t be able to support their growing families using the subsistence farming they have employed up until now; and there are other issues to be addressed, like nutrition and sanitation, and basic medical care.

    Road engineering and erosion control is a necessary focus: locals cut away the soft hillsides to create roads, to get buses and trucks to the villages, but wash-outs happen frequently, sometimes partially caused by free-range sheep chewing the vegetation off the steepest hillsides and destroying the root structure that holds the top layer of soil together. The EWB taught the communities to buttress the weak areas with stone (there are granite stones that wash out of the hills in places), and they have undertaken this repair process in similar places on their own, which Jean was pleased to see.

    By Sunday night I went to bed thinking that trying to get them to work with you to set the stage for an optimistic future seems to be sometimes like the old saying that “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.” Or at least, that uptake is a very slow, gradual process.

    On Monday, I learned that my weekend impressions only applied to the weekend. There were no women for the promised seven a.m. meeting, so after breakfast Aurora begged Eden to drive her to the Monday market at Guantualo, and he invited us along to see the market and the scenery between here and there. Deb helped her set up while I wandered to get photos in a hurry before we headed back. Great spot for visuals, but the sound of yearling pigs in the livestock market was nothing less than mass hysteria!

    We got back to Malingua at 9:30 a.m. and walked into an assemblage of community leaders and women numbering twenty already, and that number continued to grow over the hours of a very long meeting until it had doubled. The mayor of the canton showed up with his personal assistant and a radio journalist complete with digital recorder, and did some politicking. Topics included the next phase of development of the irrigation project, which involves major accounting and projections for materials on paper by the different community groups; more courses for women, composting, revisiting the design and use of the gov’t built toilet in the school, greenhouse training and materials, seeds from Jean for the women, and the crappy internet service to the valley. 

    The mayor got really excited when Eden described his system in Colorado, a completely wireless line-of-site radio internet system with very high bandwidth that serves 600 local clients including schools and businesses for a total start-up cost of around $3500, and that could serve 2000 with an additional $1000 investment. That’s a pretty small capital investment, and he lives (and travels to Ecuador on his own dime) on the revenue his business generates. High bandwidth is the major cost, not the radio relays; but the bandwidth costs are passed through to the users, so it’s a non-issue for him. He’s convinced that there would be enough business use and internet cafés here to generate sufficient income to pay for high bandwidth for everybody else, if the mayor invested in the installation…which the mayor seems extremely excited to do.

    After the mayor had been served lunch and left, Eden and Jean, Deb and I had our lunch. I passed off what I thought was a deep fried chicken foot onto Deb's plate, but it turned out to be the upper dentures of a hapless cuy (guinea pig), needle-like incisors protruding. By the time Deb realized what she was eating, she already liked the taste, so she gouged out its cheeks and continued chewing happily. Now she has had cuy, and so has Eden - for his first time in five years of coming here. I had to settle for deep fried chicken, which looked almost the same, but wasn't.

    Eden and Jean left late in the day, a day after they had intended to have returned to Latacunga, to try to make it back in time for their Rotary dinner there.  Eden was finally satisfied that he’d accomplished something significant, and hadn’t come all this way for nothing. I was impressed with the ability of the community to hold long meetings, although still dubious that words would lead to actions on the part of the mayor or the local water groups.

    The next day the internet was back up by late in the day.  I spent the day typing Deb’s transcript of our meetings.  I helped Deb set up an accounts ledger to teach some bookkeeping skills to the two guys who collect fees and record expenses for the potable water system and the irrigation water system – they haven't recorded those expenses now, they just keep a loose and messy stack of invoices. As a result, they don’t know how to make projections to propose fee increases to the community users of the water system. They haven’t been diligent at collecting fees or cutting people off for non-payment, which means they only collected about 75% full payment for each of the past three years; people who didn’t pay were still allowed to stay on the system, but they’ve gone through periods of low water availability, and now they have a leaky tank and not enough money on hand to repair it. The two guys didn't show up for their training.

    Of those 25% who haven’t paid, 10% are not living here and using the water, even though their land holdings are here; they’ll have to decide what to do about that. Of the remaining 15%, there are a few genuine hardship cases, including a mother with four kids who spoke to us tonight. She was one of the bright sparks in the early set of training for women that Pam and Eden were involved in, but her husband died in a tragic construction accident.  She can’t get a decent well-paying job; she needs to buy books for school for her kids, especially for the eldest who is in a trade school – a serious investment for the family. She came rushing in to pay her delinquent water bill, but she was next to tears as she explained how broke she was. On the other hand, as Eden and Jean suggested, she might have money for other things, including attractive western clothing and participation in the weekend fiestas. I’m sure it’ll be heart-breakingly difficult for the water fee collector to know where to draw the line; he was already squirming in anticipation of having to make those kinds of decisions and firm actions, and he doesn’t seem tough enough to be a bill collector.

    Anyway, tomorrow we’ll be writing a letter for this lady to Pam, sending our meeting transcript to Pam, Eden and Jean, teaching bookkeeping, and hopefully publishing this blog and a photo album, if the internet gods smile upon us tomorrow after a three day outage. Maybe I’ll even get to Skype my family. On Wednesday and Friday we’ll return to teaching our evolving Meet and Greet skit to classes in the school.  On Thursday we’ll take our tour of the surrounding countryside and the volcanic lake Quilotoa.  On Saturday we might connect once again with the college students and carry their Meet and Greet skit forward as well. That’ll mark the halfway point of our stay here.

    Eden was dubious that English lessons would ever stick; it troubled him that he met a grown-up Pedro who knew less English now than he’d known on a previous visit. However, I remember my first words of French from Africa, some words of African languages, and a significant amount of German I learned “on the pillow” from an Austrian girlfriend thirty years ago, so I think it can stick and form a foundation to be built upon – I can still read and understand a lot of German text. These days, with the reach of the internet into the villages, Youtube videos and DVD’s, there’s a much better chance that the language will be reinforced between guest teachers.  If the Spanish teachers used programmed instruction sites such as duolingo.com, they’d advance by leaps and bounds.

    There’s still the debate about whether this is a value-added proposition, but the world is shrinking year by year, and we can’t pretend to predict or anticipate what the future benefits will be.  Facility at English may allow some students the confidence to travel someday, to make trade connections, to serve in local tourism or gov’t tourism positions, to do translations, to read English equipment manuals, to host non-Spanish speaking visitors and volunteers to their community and make them feel welcome, and even – as this school site grows into a genuine pueblo, as it clearly is with all the public buildings under construction making it an education centre – generate revenue in the Hostal Sacatoro, with young Bolivar, Roberto or Hugo speaking English to guests who can be coaxed to detour slightly from the usual Latacunga/Isinlivi/Quilotoa routine.

    I’m hoping that by the time we leave here we’ll have a fun farewell slideshow for the school community using the InFocus projector, as well as some relatively polished public performances of the Meet and Greet skit...and no more "aventuras", unless they are of the most positive sort!

Another link to the photo album, in case you missed it in the text.

Next: Quilotoa

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

Quietly Quitting Quito...and 19 more hummingbirds to see before I die

    I heard this week that Spaniards talk about food the way that British people fill their conversation with observations about the weather. I must be part Spanish...you'll see food featured once again in today's photos, and a special prize for Peter...{;>)

    We had our first Ecuadorian ceviche soup yesterday. Maggie led us to a diner she knew about. We ordered Ceviche Marinero, which had every kind of ocean critter in it that you can imagine, swimming in some sort of fish stock with vinegar and lime. Fortunately the Ecuadorian version of ceviche is cooked, but it came to the table cold, which is apparently the norm. I can't stand cold soup, and Maggie and I get nervous about bacteria as well, so they kindly nuked our soup for us, and then it tasted pretty good. However, Deborah - who has tried to get me to eat cold soup before, usually gazpacho - ate hers cold and is still alive today.

    It was served with a side plate of popcorn, "mais tostado" and light, thin, fried plantain chips. This is also very common in Ecuador, where they eat corn in several incarnations at the same meal; mais tostado is a large grain corn that is roasted golden brown and it splits open slightly and almost becomes like puffed wheat - except that with a bit of salt and oil, it does taste just like popcorn. It often has some dried caramelized onion bits in it, and sometimes some spice. I enjoy it as a snack, maybe even more than popcorn or peanuts.

    We drove in a taxi to Latacunga this morning, a two hour trip for $20 in a comfy SUV on a very good highway down a lovely green valley between scenic mountains - I wished I'd had the ability to take video as we drove so you could see the scenery and the houses. 

    We checked into a hostel here overnight to give us a chance to step out and see another Ecuadorian town. We could have had pizza for lunch in any one of several pizza parlours, and ice cream for dessert - there are more ice cream parlours here per city block than anywhere else we can recall - but instead we walked to a local hole in the wall and stepped down into the gloom of a tiny restaurant to eat Chuychucaras.  This is a local plate consisting of mote (another very common large grain form of corn, but this time comprised of soft, moist white kernels) topped with some sort of deep fried greasy tripe with ground meaty bits and possibly sheep's blood, which they call Chuycharones, and for which the plate is named. 

    There seems to be a competition going on between towns and regions as to who can claim the most "offal" food as their local dish...pun intended. On a separate plate, we were served lean pork chunks, popcorn, mais tostado, empanadas with a trace of some kind of sweet cheese inside, fried plantain and fresh fried potato slices...all of which was somewhat more palatable, even quite tasty. There were also some sort of crisp airy chips made from pork crackling, rather like the shrimp chips you can get with Chinese food, with the name "cuero reventado" = "busted (burst, popped) leather".

    In the photo you'll also see one of "Twenty Hummingbirds to see before you die" - I couldn't believe my eyes. We saw #19, the Red Tailed Comet. Now I only have nineteen to go.

    There's a pink house in the photos. I wanted to get it with the statue of Christ on a tower quite far behind it, with stairs going up the tower to a set of very large bells. If we'd gotten here earlier this Sunday morning, we might have heard them. I got Deb to stand at the corner and yell at me when to take my photo so that I could get a yellow cab in front of the pink house in front of a blue sky (I knew there'd be one soon, they're everywhere). Then - bonus! - a blue and yellow tour bus came into the frame. 

    The public buildings along these narrow streets have rather large, very cool lanterns on their front walls - you might notice one on the "false front" building. I'm guessing they were originally gas, in the days before electrical street wiring.

    We stayed at the Hostal Tiana, which hosts young visitors who take the climbing trail to Quilotoa - more about that in a future blog. I have nieces and nephews who would love to take this hike. There's a room with rental helmets and high altitude camping and climbing gear next door to the room we're sleeping in tonight, and a very tall climbing wall just up the street for training in rope technique.  

    Jan 7th: We went to sleep a little early, and the hostel was quiet and as dark as a grave in our room - no windows. There's adequate ventilation through the cracks in the floorboards. There's music playing somewhere, and it woke me as it reverberated through the concrete block walls, which are painted a cheery yellow and have attractive woven Quechua blankets and tapestries hanging on them. The doorways are arched (thick walls) and the ceilings high, white and decorated with painted borders. 

    It was a little chilly and misty this morning, and some locals began the day in thick down jackets, but we didn't need those. At seven we had breakfast - included in our room rate: two croissants, fresh juice (strawberries? blackberries?), butter and jam and a banana, and we spent 50 cents extra each for a scrambled egg. Coffee and tea are free throughout the day. Not a bad deal, at all. After a hot shower, we were ready to repack and stroll until it was time to catch the bus to Malingua Pamba.

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