Teaching to the Test

In high school, I took seven AP tests. I'm not saying this to brag or even to promote the American system of education. Rather, I think it ruined me.

I spent the better part of my education preparing to take tests. In tenth grade it was European History: copying outlines off the blackboard, highlighting all of the important people and events in the textbook, not taking a moment to discuss, debate, or create. Later it was Calculus and Spanish and Physics. In Physics we hardly did any labs. Instead we took notes and crunched numbers and practiced multiple choice. You get the picture. So when I realized that in my classroom all we were doing was preparing for one test, I felt pretty bad.

We made the final English test on Tuesday morning, and after that point we were able to teach to the test. Class time was devoted to reviewing the vocabulary words appearing on the test that no one could remember (desk seems to be a particularly difficult one), phrases learned the first week and promptly forgotten (I am lost), and the oral questions I am going to ask today in my loud, over-articulated way.

Where's the fun in that? When are these kids ever going to need to say, "I make the chair in the cemetery with the mother?" They're most likely going to use English when they run into a tourist on the street or in the market. And when someone asks, "Where did you make this?" they're not going to respond, "In the cemetery with the mother."

So I let them have a little fun. Towards the end of class, Zoila asks me how to say "feo" in English. I made a deal with her: you tell me who you think is "feo" and I'll tell you how to say it English. She giggle shyly, unwilling to let me into the summer school gossip circle. But it doesn't matter how silent she stays; her over-eager friend answers for her. "Diego!" she shouts, referring to an older boy who came for the first two weeks of class and never returned.

"Ugly," I say. "Feo means ugly." I make her stay in for recess, the cost of curiosity. She translates a variety of sentences featuring the word ugly, starting from the simple "Diego is ugly," to the more complicated and less sensical, "I like to run with ugly dogs."

These sentences didn't discourage her; she asked for more. "How do you say guapo? How do you say bonito?" Her friend leaks the fact that Zoila thinks Nelson is handsome. We go over several sentences, concluding with, "I like handsome boys." I think it's a good example because it demonstrates the way that adjectives are placed before the noun in English, rather than after like in Spanish.

She's furiously scribbling it all down, wanting to remember, not because it's going to be on some test, but because she has a secret she wants to share. I can imagine her out on the rusty blue swings, telling some boy her feelings in another language.

The Cast of Characters

As my time here is coming to a close, I'm starting to think more about each kid's personality than whether they're going to do well in the class.

First I would like to introduce Nelson. He stands out because he is a sixteen year old among eleven year olds. We've been working on question words this week, and whenever I get to him during our oral review, I am shocked to hear "I have sixteen." Since he's older, he is at a much more advanced stage of puberty. The other day I caught him rolling up his sleeves and examining his muscles in class. The boy next to him, one so little that his feet hardly touch the ground, poked them, perhaps out of jealousy. I just ignored him, embracing a little bit of chaos.

This little boy is also worth introducing. His name is Vidal, and he doesn't take his backpack off during class. Him and his even tinier best friend Diego can't sit still during class and constantly bicker with each other. When they start picking at each other's hair, we ask, "Is Diego your dog? Then why are you petting him?"

We also love to tease Kevin. He is very smart and very loud about it. When he finishes a task early or whispers the answers to another student, he begins to chant "Es facíl. Más. Más," in a fairly apathetic voice. But if he gets it wrong, he's in big trouble because we begin mocking him. That gets a smile and several minutes of attentive silence.

Our other smartest kid, Jenny, is the exact opposite. While it's clear that she's naturally gifted, she also has the best study skills ever and is only too eager to do what she is told. She stays after school for extra help even though she understands way better than anyone else in the class. Last week she finished the test and the post-test activity before time was up, so I told her to draw. She looked at me blankly and asked what to draw. I told her to just use her imagination. After a few minutes she calls me back over to show me several little illustrations perfectly labeled in English. She reminds me a bit of me when I was little, so I want to tell her to dream more and to gain some confidence.

I hate to say it, but none of the other girls are terribly memorable. They are all giggly, hate speaking in class, and love clinging to my elbow. I wonder if this silence and uncertainty is a product of their indigenous culture, or if this is true of girls this age all across the world.

The only thing that really sticks out about them is the way they run screaming across the playground when Kevin chases them. It's a behavior that I believe is recognized across all cultures.

Happy Places

I seem to only write here when I have nothing good to say, so right now I've come to say that today was a good day.

My teaching partner got sick this morning, so I was all jittery about having to teach alone. But somehow it went perfectly. I covered everything in my lesson plan, got the kids talking a lot, and felt in control of the whole classroom situation. The kids even surprised me by guessing patterns that I had yet to explain to them.

My good teaching day makes me remember all the good of the past couple of days.

First there was the beach. Besides for the beautiful green water and the warm sun, the best part about the whole trip was the food. Not that the food at the hostel is bad, it's just that the daily portions of meat, starch, and vegetable can start to seem fairly boring and unsatisfying after a couple of weeks. On the beach, everything seemed like a treat. First there were the batidos. It's a fruit milkshake, but it's not actually as gross as that sounds. Then there was the fresh seafood. The best kind to get was ceviche, which is kind of like really chunky salsa with shrimp or some other ocean creature in it.

My personal favorites were banana splits and corn. You could buy either of these things for about two dollars on the boardwalk just a couple minutes away from our shoreline hostel. The vendors put the corn on the grill in front of you, and, once it's cooked, they roll it in seasoning and cheese. Probably one of the best things I've ever tasted. A banana split is pretty self explanatory. (I'm describing all of these things in such great detail because remembering them is almost like eating them again).

Last night we weren't ready to return to the routine of Otavalo life, so we headed out into the town after dinner. Night life is more or less non-existent here. The only ones out on the street after nine are the dogs, and it's a struggle to find an open restaurant or cafe.

First we headed to The Pie Shop which sells exactly that--pie. Strawberry, Raspberry, Apple. I would recommend the chocolate with ice cream. When it closed (probably around ten), we moved to the bar where the program director likes to play music. Again, we were the only patrons. We painted with watercolors and sipped wine and listened to music. Basically, we were the kids for once.

Theory vs. Reality

Over the weekend we headed out to the coast to relax on the beach and enjoy some non-Otavalo night life. While searching for the perfect beach-front bar, we spotted one that had swings in place of stools. Awesome! Right? That's what we thought, so we sat down and chilled. But as it turns out, you couldn't swing much at all without hitting your knees on the bar, and the swings were so widely spaced that you couldn't chat with your neighbor. Good in theory, not so great in reality.

That's how I feel about lesson planning. We sit around all morning grading papers, creating/photocopying homework, tearing paper into flash cards, and brainstorming ways to make it fun for the kids, but it never ends up happening that way.

You Win Some, You Lose Some

When they're hunched over their tests all silent (so that the only sound in the room is the wind rattling the tin schoolhouse roof) I start to think that maybe they've got it. That they're scratching pens are writing English words, English verbs that match the subject, English vocab that matches the Spanish. That everything I've spent the last two days trying to put into their heads is now spilling back out onto the page, into the silence.

But after about fifteen minutes they start to squirm. They stare off into space, flip the test over and over, run their little hands through their straight black hair. And the worst part is that this isn't boredom born of completion; it is the boredom born of facing so many blank spaces that you just don't know how to fill. English is rather "all or nothing" that way. No amount of thinking about it is suddenly going to bring you closer to the answer.

And some of the squirming is bad news. Bad news bears. Even after making an example of Klever's cheating attempt last week, the students remained just as bold. One girl's rustling turned out to be her fingers sifting through notes hidden in the backpack seated next to her. She received a zero. And another girl's impatient erasing turned out to be the only noticeable sign of her silent method of passing answers to her neighbor. Two points off!

Teaching is exhausting. But having to watch the students like a hawk to ensure that they don't cheat is exhausting in a whole new way. I guess the right word is disappointing.

My disappointment can never last for more than ten minutes at a time because the kids can be so cute. One girl finished both her test and the post-test activity before time was up, so I told her she could draw. She kept looking up at me as her pencil moved across the page, and I just thought she was nervous about being allowed to do something so non-academic. But when she finished she held her paper up to show me how she had drawn and labeled me and my three co-workers.

She wasn't the only cute one. All of them planned a surprise going away party for a leaving co-worker. They got us to open an extra classroom so that they could serve cake and soda and perform a dance for her. She got presents and cake in her face. It was so cute, but I just wish they would show their affection for us in some other way, like, for example, by studying, or by not cheating.

Party!!!

Even after we found our friends, we still failed to return to our normal routine.

We couldn't plan lessons because the press showed up shortly after breakfast. Since the whole province, from the red cross to the police to the indigenous people who live on the mountain and know it like the back of their hand, had come out to search for these three Americans, they all wanted to see them and to know who they had worked to save.

But seeing someone via cathode tube really isn't getting to know them. In order to allow for a face to face, more personal meeting, we decided to have a party at the hostel for all the people who helped us look for our missing friends.

We sat around the breakfast table cooking mad amounts of banana bread and chocolate cake and taco fixings for our incoming guests. All forty-some of them showed up around eight, beginning the biggest culture clash I have ever witnessed.

Someone pulled out their ipod and turned on old 90s R&B songs. Even without hitting the 150 beers we had bought for the occasion, we all started dancing and singing along beneath the wary gaze of the red cross, the police, and some indigenous mountain men. The guests all sat around the perimeter of the room while we took up center stage, both in physical location and in absolute volume.

It never really got less awkward, even after the beers came out.

First off, someone had great idea of serving the food buffet style. Buffet style, as it turns out, is an American thing. We couldn't convince anyone to get out of his chair to self-serve, so we all quickly became waiters and waitresses. Next, most people refused the alcohol. Red cross members can't drink in their uniforms, so we offered sweatshirts to cover them up.

Basically, the scene looked something like this by the end of the night: red-faced Americans singing and dancing with joy because their friends had been saved from certain death while the Ecuadorians looked on with what I hope was a more subdued brand of joy. Scratch that. I know it was a more subdued brand of joy.

Los Perdidos

We have this game that we play at home when we get bored. It usually starts at the point in the night when we've gone out to dinner, crossed town to get dessert, but still don't want to go home. We don't want to go home so we drive. The goal is to get lost in the city, but in our tiny mid-west excuse for a metropolis it's not possible. No matter what combination of left, right, center we choose, we always end up somewhere we recognize. Sometimes we discuss the fact that we can't get lost because we're not trying to get anywhere.

Ecuador is a different story.

On Sunday morning we got up at 4 a.m. to hike up Imbabura, a volcano an hour away from Otavalo. It was intense five hour climb to the summit, and I didn't even make it all the way up because several meters from the top I realized that I'm terrified of heights. Me and two other girls headed back down on our own, winding our way through the rain and the mud to the bottom, relying on our memory to get us there.

But three other volunteers who did make it all the way up to the top weren't nearly as successful in their solo attempt at descent. They took a wrong turn and headed down the wrong side of the mountain.

Of course, we didn't know this. Come Monday morning, we just knew that they were missing. The usual hostel routine--morning run, some joyful meals, lesson planning--went out the window as we put all of our resources towards finding our friends. We called parents and embassies and all of our high up connections. We ate our meals in silence. Instead of copying worksheets and test papers at the corner paper store, we photocopied fliers with pictures of our missing friends.

A group of girls took a taxi to the base of the mountain and showed the pictures around some of the smaller villages, hoping that our friends had managed to spend the night somewhere, a much nicer scenario to imagine than a scene of them sleeping in the woods.

The girls found them around seven o'clock on Monday night. Some random hikers had helped them out of the forest, and then the girls spotted them out on the road. They drove up to the hostel, honking all the way. We shared hugs and stories.

As it turns out, we had been far more worried than the hikers. They had spent their lost hours singing relevant songs (such as Destiny's Child's Survivor), debating when they would be found, and wondering what they would do when they got back. They had an adventure; we whiled away the hours waiting.

Markets

The fairly small city of Otavalo makes its way into guidebooks and onto traveler's itineraries because of its market. On Saturday mornings, the patterned sidewalks that already possess the power to swallow me become even more maze-like as stalls spring up on the side of the road and people flock to buy and sell their wares.

Early in the morning it was the animal market. We all got up at six and trudged up the hill past the newly erected tent poles to a vacant lot teeming with people and animal noises. We wanted to see the adorable wildlife. Usually there are large animals like cows and pigs and sometimes even llamas, but because of some disease that's going around, there were only little things today. Lots of little things. Crates no taller than my calf stuffed with ducks and geese and chickens that couldn't straighten out their necks properly, crates a little taller but not wider with shivering puppies searching each other for a nipple that could offer something to eat, cages with kittens whose eyes are congealed shut with mucus. The only animals that seemed happy were the guinea pigs. Herded together in big pens, they scrambled on top of one another with no care for the cold or the noise.

If someone wanted an animal, its seller would hoist it out, hold it by the feet, and offer it up for inspection. It was hard to believe the prices we heard. A dollar for a puppy. Three for a kitten, but you could probably haggle them down. The humane part of each of us wanted to take them home, feed them, coddle them. But we don't live here so the best we could offer was fingers through bars and some gentle pats on the head.

Men wandered through the aisles carrying buckets and offering warm drinks. By now, it's routine for everyone who lives here. We left quickly, climbed back into our beds, and pulled the covers over our heads to keep out the early morning light streaming in through our too-thin curtains.

But after breakfast we went to a market whose wares we were all far more comfortable with. We looked at clothing and necklaces and shawls and instruments and hammocks. And we haggled.

The sellers like to jack up the prices on weekends because that's when all the tourists come through. So a hat that should cost $1.50 suddenly becomes worth $6, which really sounds fine to me but is apparently a rip off.

Me and this other volunteer who speaks fluent Spanish worked them down. She talked about how she lives in Mexico (which is no longer true) and is not a gringa. That definitely helped. She also asked them about their lives and in exchange told them about hers. She needs this hat because it's cold where she teaches English.

We came home with more than just our wares.

Cheater, Cheater, Pumpkin Eater

When I think of tests, I fret over what questions to put on them and how to appease all of the teachers. But when kids think of tests (and I'm sure it's the same with more experienced teachers) they think about cheating.

Last week during their first test, the kids all had problems with wandering eyes, whispering, and even blatant paper trading. Since we had split them into two groups, we could lie and say that we had taken away points for cheating from some students in the other group. That seemed to do the trick because this week during the test the room was dead silent for the first fifteen minutes.

After that, this young kid aptly named Klever asked to go to the bathroom. Klever is aptly named. Even though fifteen minutes into the test he had written down absolutely nothing, he has smarts in other areas. He knows how to command the attention of the entire class, how to fluster his teachers, and how to cheat. Last week it ranged from whispering to other students to asking the teacher for the answers. Despite his efforts, the test period ended without his having filled all the blanks. And needless to say, his score wasn't very good.

This week he asked to go to the bathroom. And I let him. When my teaching partner caught wind of what I had done, she left the room and walked out to the bathroom. She returned several minutes later with a disgruntled Klever and a crumpled sheet of paper. "I found him with his and when I asked him about it he said, 'I'm reviewing.'"

He'll take a new test on Monday, and if he cheats again he's out of the program.

It's so strange to think that we're here offering these kids a chance to be the first in their family to go to high school and get and education, but that they're still not motivated. If I knew that failing this summer program and not receiving a scholarship meant that I would probably never attend school again, I would be working my ass off.

I think it's time to consider the differences, to reconsider our methods.

Testing! Testing!

This evening I'm finally feeling better, and my first activity back on my feet was to create the weekly Friday English test with the five other English teachers. We all sat in the tiny hostel office and argued for about an hour, all the while passing my computer back and forth.

In theory, all the teachers should administer the same test so that grading is fair across the board. That way, a student from one school who receives a scholarship is more or less just as intelligent as a student from another school who receives a scholarship. And the concept works really well for the math teachers. From day one they've been meeting each night after dinner to create homework, daily "mad minutes" (how many simple math problems can you solve in a minute), and weekly tests. But tonight, when we sat down to do the same thing, we struggled.

English is a hard subject to teach. It's not as though there's a certain number of facts or concepts to cover each day. There are certain vocabulary words and verb conjugations, but drilling those things into a kids head doesn't even come near helping them acquire skills such as pronunciation, confidence in speaking, and sentence formation.

In our classroom we play a lot of games to get the kids talking and practicing vocab. To get them to make mistakes. We teach them new words as they become relevant. For instance, when we ask the kids how many brothers they have, the most common answer is 11. Now, what they mean is something like 5 brothers and 4 sisters, but when you make the word for brother plural in spanish, it simply means siblings. So we used this common mistake to teach the kids the word siblings. But none of the other classrooms have learned this word.

There are so many instances like this. One group didn't learn a group of vocab words one day because they were have too much trouble with the old ones. Another group went over the conjugation of the verb "to be" over and over, so it should be a sizable portion of their test.

Eventually we came up with a "core" that each of the three groups will alter as they see fit for their group of students.

I can't wait to see what happens when we try to come up with a uniform grading method. I'm sure that we'll debate for hours about how much should be deducted for incorrect spelling, how incorrect the spelling has to be for it to be completely wrong, and whether a question that everyone got wrong should be omitted from the test.

But hey, maybe too many teachers perfect the student?

Three Wishes

Despite a fifteen dollar doctor's visit and another fifteen dollars worth of prescription medications, my condition remains unchanged. While I sit in bed, there are three things that I desperately wish for:

I wish....

1. The rooster who lives next door would understand the difference between dawn and other times of day.

2. The stray dogs on the street would stop mating and howling in the sidewalk.

3. My legs would have enough strength to make it up and down the stairs so I could talk to the family that owns the hostel. They are all really nice, especially this 15 year-old girl Nancy who basically cooks all day. Unlike the kids at school, they never make fun of my fumbling Spanish. Maybe this one will come true. I could head down after I rest up a bit.

Sick Day/Doctor Visit

I think I was out of bed for a max of four hours or so today. And in the bathroom for around five.

I watched an episode of Greys (which took about an hour to download), read my book, talked to people online, and found other sources of in-bed entertainment. It was a lonely day.

I tried to upload pictures to my blog, but the internet is also too slow for that. I guess it'll be like that John Mayer song "3x5." "I'm writing you to catch you up on places I've been. You held this letter, probably got excited, but there's nothing else inside it..."

The only real adventure of the day came at the end, when I walked across town in my pajamas (imagine the whistles that got) to the doctors office. Another volunteer helped me explain my symptoms in Spanish. The doctor listened to my stomach with a stethoscope, asked a few questions, and came up with a rather predictable diagnosis--bacterial infection.

But then she pulls out the needle. I've never gotten a shot for an infection before. Then my friend explains that I need to get this shot in my butt.

In Spanish they have a special word for butt cheek, "nalga." I learned it last semester in my Spanish class. In one of the stories we read, a fairly young widow swims in her pool while wearing a black, silk dress. Despite the dark color of her dress, her nalgas still manage to glisten in the moonlight.

This was nothing so dignified as that. My friend offers her hand and turns her cheek (una mejilla, not una nalga). The doctor pulls down my pink squirrel pants, inserts the needle, and leaves it there for quite some time. She explains that I need to relax and breathe so the nerves don't cramp.

Eventually it is over. It wasn't too painful, but horribly mortifying.

I shared at dinner, hoping I could show the" world through both my eyes."

Pictures of Baños

The waterfall named "The Devil's Frying Pan:"

Our hike over the rickety bridge that crosses the waterfall:

I just wanted to take a picture of the river, and then I realized that some young children were getting baptized there. Brrr:

A million little shops in Baños that all sell the same thing--taffy, guyaba candy, little oranges, and other sweets:

Vale La Pena

Vale la pena. In Spanish it means "worth the pain," and you say it when some particularly difficult activity ends up being incredibly rewarding. It describes our weekend perfectly.

We got up at 3 am on Saturday morning to squish into a tiny van for the six hour drive to the tourist town of Baños. We all tried to sleep, with varying degrees of success. The bumpy roads, the cold air blowing in through the windows, and the tight space really didn't help. But when I couldn't sleep, I was rewarded by the most beautiful scenery--snowy volcanoes and green mountains, all populated with cows and stray dogs and horses.

Baños is known for its hot springs and night life, but everything about it excited us, from the tortoise in the hostel courtyard to the warm weather.

Besides for the teaching part, life in Otavalo (especially the meals) can begin to seem relatively slow and repetitive. So a breakfast of pancakes and homemade bread served on a rooftop seemed incredible. And even more exciting was how cheap it all was ($3 max) and the strange beetle that dropped into our sugar bowl.

After breakfast we put on our bathing suits and headed to the hot springs. We had all imagined this gorgeous natural setting with little waterfalls and places to sit among the rocks, but instead we found lots of overcrowded cement pools filled with murky water. The dark water made everything kind of sketch because you never knew who was touching you.

The temperature varied from pool to pool. The idea is to go from the hot to the cold to improve your circulation. It was relaxing and fun, but it didn't quite seem worth the six hour drive.

When we got back to the hostel we collapsed. My roommates and I had no idea what time it was when we woke up because we're so used to relying on our cell phones for telling time that we don't have watches. We couldn't find anyone else from our group, so we just chilled in a complete daze.

Later, when everyone else returned from their hike, we went to dinner at an Italian restaurant. It was not a very memorable evening, and we passed out fairly early, missing out on the night life that we had all anticipated.

But Sunday made it all worth it. We went on a drive to visit the famous, cascadas, or waterfalls. We hiked down to one of them, and walked over it on a little rickety bridge. If that wasn't enough, we got to crawl through muddy caves to stand underneath the water. Boys with long arms could actually reach out and touch it; the rest of us just stood there and got drenched (and whistled at, because apparently girls here can't be wet).

We changed clothes in the back of a restaurant and then drove out to the San Francisco bridge so some people could jump off it. That's right. Twelve dollar bungee jumping. I didn't have the balls, but I ran from one side of the bridge to the other as the other volunteers swung like a pendulum underneath.

Afterwards I felt fairly sick, so everything is a blur. There was dinner and some puking in the streets and a very uncomfortable bus ride, but as I said before, vale la pena.

Frustration

I haven't written for the past couple of days because I come back from teaching completely exhausted. During the car ride out to the village of Chuchuqui, we talk and giggle, but on the way back, we simply stare out the windows at the passing mountains. In addition to the usual frustration of teaching things that are already so familiar to you that you've forgotten how to explain them (like how to say hello), there are so many more that I never would have expected.

First, language barriers. For some kids, spanish isn't a first language. They speak an indigenous language and often slip into it during class. Imagine if all those kids giggling at you in class were giggling while speaking a language you don't understand, leaving you free to imagine countless jokes as possibilities. Also, speaking of language problems, it is nearly impossible to command the respect of the students when they know you can't speak Spanish with absolute precision. They giggle at each mistake I make.

Second, pronunciation. Even though much of the curriculum is devoted to teaching usual language class things, from vocabulary to verb conjugations, none of that matters when the kids can't master pronunciation. Some of the sounds in English, like the "g" in girl and the "h" that is actually pronounced, are completely foreign to these kids. And even with endless repetition, it still doesn't seem to stick.

Maybe it doesn't stick because they've never been told how to study. They come in each day and it's as if we need to build everything from the ground up again. We give them homework and advice on how to learn new vocabulary (say the words out loud to memorize them), but it hasn't seem to sink in.

And then there is the vergüenza. The kids are too ashamed to say that they don't understand or need help or couldn't hear.

Oh. And there's this group of guys that hangs around the school and whistles at me. Actually, being white here means that when you walk on the street, men will whistle at you and say "hello."

I'll be headed back tomorrow. That's all I got.

In the Classroom

Since everything is new to me here, I'm on information overload and everything is going to come out in fits and starts. Maybe chronological order is the best way to go.

I started out the day with a run. One of the other volunteers knocked on my door at seven thirty (apparently this has been going on for the whole two weeks that everyone else has been here ), and a large group of us met up in the courtyard to go for a morning jog. Usually they just run around a track at a nearby stadium, but today they wanted to actually get somewhere and have hills, so they decided to run to the cemetery. I did not make it to the cemetery. Since we're up fairly high in the mountains, the air is a lot thinner and that makes it really difficult to breathe. The rest of the group says that it gets easier as time goes on, and I hope they're right.

I hope that as my lungs grow, my knowledge of this town will too. If we hadn't gone running in a group I would have been completely lost after about five minutes. Everything looks the same. It's not just the squat, pastel houses and small shops, it's also the short streets without traffic lights and equal height of all the buildings.

We spent the morning making posters of the English alphabet, gathering supplies, and generally preparing for the classroom. Everything was complicated by the fact that I had no idea what to expect.

We took a small van up to the school in the village of Chuchuqui. It stalled out on one of the hills, so we rolled right back down. I was sitting backwards because for some reason there's a row of seats facing the wrong way. It felt a lot like falling. Again, completely irrelevant.

Teaching. It's so hard to remember because I was so terrified the whole time. And something about speaking in Spanish makes it so much harder to have an awareness of what's going on. It takes so much effort that the only way to go is forward (rather than fretting about the past or the future). Most of the day was devoted to introductions and creating rules and discussing note taking skills. But we also spent a lot of time going over "l, m, n, o, p." Apparently that is one of the most difficult parts of the alphabet song. It's so easy to forget how foreign the most familiar things can be to people.

Arrival

After two days of travel I'm here in Otavalo, Ecuador.

I flew in yesterday, leaving my house at 10:00 and not arriving until 12:30 in the morning (actually 1:30 at home due to the hour time difference). My flight was delayed due to a medical emergency and an unexpected landing in Panama City. It was like something out of a movie, what with them asking if there was a doctor on board. I was so happy to see faces of other Swarthmore students that I recognized at the airport. The Program Director came to pick me up, and he was waiting with another arrival.

We spent the night in a hostel in Quito that had internet and free breakfast! It was only $10 (yeah, they use the USD here). Everything is so much cheaper.

We rode a bus to Otavalo today. While I did sleep most of the time, driving through the mountains was beautiful. And if the outside sights weren't enough to keep me entertained, people came onto the bus to sell ice cream and soda and other snacks. Some even jumped off while the bus was still moving!

Now I'm here at the hostel (pictures to come if I'm not feeling lazy). There are roosters that squawk and crow at all hours, as well as loud music that's coming from who knows where. Home?

Packing!

To get all of the nervous energy stirred up by the prospect of traveling to a foreign country where I can barely speak the language out of my system I've decided to focus on packing. The type of packing that involves a lot of lists and not too much actual decision making.

Previous volunteers say that the weather in Otavalo isn't very consistent because it's up in the mountains. It can be cold at night and in the morning but still relatively warm during the day. So I scribble little numbers next to the words "shorts" and "pants" on my list, wondering what the right combination is and how much will fit in my rolling duffle. I don't want to be the girl that shows up with too much, but I don't want to feel like I'm missing something! (I really hope thoughts like that seem really insignificant a week from now, when I'm in Ecuador.)

The easiest thing to pack was toiletries, but I'm beginning to wonder now if even that was a mistake because you can buy them there.

And as I'm gathering all this together, I can't help but imagine myself schlepping it all through three different airports and how heavy it will feel at 10:00 Saturday night when I finally arrive in Ecuador. I will be so happy when I find the program director at the airport!

My First End/New Beginning

Although my first year at school is over, I've still got plenty of things happening that are both worth recording and Swarthmore related. This summer I'll be traveling to Otavalo, Ecuador with the Village Education Project, a program started by Swarthmore alum Katie Chamblee. I'll stay there for four weeks to teach math and english to students preparing for high school. Students who maintain a certain GPA (on the 20 point Ecuadorian scale) will receive a scholarship that covers the costs of attending high school, such as transportation fees and uniform purchases. I'll use this blog to keep track of what happens.