Strange Days

This has been an odd week, with strange doings nearly every day. I can’t say I understand it, but it has made for a quick wrap-up to January, a month I thought would really drag. It’s long, it’s the middle of the school year, and it’s still cool and cloudy every day. Of course, this is a spirit-raising improvement from heavy, can’t-see-across-the-street fog every day, but a little bright sunshine is definitely on my wish list.

Of course, now that I think about it, we got some bright sunshine on Wednesday, when the fourth/fifth grade class had an outing. The sixth/seventh grade was closed so that their teacher could submit some paperwork in Riobamba, so there was nothing better for me to do than to go out with the fourth/fifth grade. They were hiking down to the hacienda, where there is a reserve tank for the irrigation water, to go swimming. Not exactly the old water hole, but surprisingly close. We took the route that I found so terrifying initially, and I have to say that I’m getting better at it. It’s still scary, but nowhere near as much. And then we went off that route, down a much steeper (but less open) trail to the water tank. I confess that I didn’t go swimming, having left my shorts back at the house like a Village school student. Of course, the water does give me pause, as well. I don’t like to think what it would do to my gastrointestinal system if I swallowed any of it, and being the swimmer that I am, I’m pretty sure I’d swallow some. But it was fun to watch the kids who could swim splash around, and the kids who couldn’t try to learn. And almost all of them did try to learn—some by holding on to balls as floats, others by being hauled around on ropes held by bigger kids. There was also some leaping from the high ground above the tank. I gave that a look—I’m not sure I could make myself do it, but I’ll have a chance to find out when the sixth/seventh grade makes this trip in a week or two.

Another odd thing is the proliferation of some impressively large beetles in the plaza. With a little luck, pictures are attached. They are called Catu, and, unless my biology skills totally fail me, they seem to be built only for sexual reproduction. They’re much too awkward for anything else. The long forearms on the male beetles, which is what I believe I have in the picture, lock on to whatever they come into contact with. I assume they’re for grasping the female, which is almost as big, but doesn’t have the impressive rhino horn or long arms. I’d like to smuggle one back for Professor E.S. of Kutztown University, but I hope he can make do with this picture. As I understand it, by Carneval (Mardi Gras to you New Orleanians) the plaza will be covered with these things, a happy side effect of the rainy season.

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I also got to start my English enrichment class, which includes my best students from all four grades. I have one fourth grader, two fifth graders, four sixth graders, and three seventh graders. These are the kids who seem to be picking up English the fastest, and they may also be the most motivated. The teachers are letting me have them for the last half hour of the school day Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Wednesday and Friday are gym class (cultura fisica), and I know they don’t want to miss that. We’ve gotten right into talking about “What do you want to do?” “What do you like to do?” and “What do you have to do?” They want to play basketball and soccer, but they have to feed the pigs, cut hay for the guinea pigs, and move cows from one field to another. It’s kind of enlightening, at least for me. In the regular classes, they are learning how to describe people. That’s going slowly, but when it clicks, it sounds remarkably conversational.  I actually believe that these kids are going to speak some genuine English before I leave. That would be sort of strange, too.

Maybe the strangest event of the week was the spontaneous semi-fiesta that occurred on Thursday night. I came out of the computer room around 8:30 and was immediately invited to a shot of trago. Some of the older men had been to a kind of vote-buying political meeting, where they had been treated to wine, women, and song in exchange for a promised vote, as far as I could tell. So they were finishing the night off with some trago and water and the counter of the little store that overlooks the plaza. Naturally, I couldn’t say no to this offer, but I wasn’t the only one. Soon the two young guys who teach the fourth/fifth and sixth/seventh grades were involved, as were Francisco and his younger brother Florencio (recently arrived from England, where he has worked for the past ten years, and where he will return around the time that I leave Tolte), and the other Fredi, leader of the folk dance troupe at the train station. In the course of the evening, I carried Francisco home, rode in the back of a pickup truck to Chunchi where we bought more trago, heard the life story of the sixth/seventh grade teacher, who, like several of his students, was abandoned by his father and raised by an admirable mother, and spoke English with Florencio. By one in the morning, though, my system could take no more. I went home and managed to wake up in time for school, remarkably undamaged by the experience. The other teachers did better at absorbing trago, which they apparently did until five in the morning, but did not manage to make it to school the next day.

This led to the last odd experience. I wound up subbing for a while in the sixth/seventh classroom, where they were ready to perform the classic elementary school experiment of extinguishing a candle by putting a glass over it. I got to play science teacher for the first time in a year and a half, and it went pretty well. I was able to hold the attention of about three-quarters of the class just by posing difficult questions (“What is fire?”) for an hour, which sets new records of all kinds for my delivery of instruction in Tolte. But I didn’t try to keep subbing after recess. I do know my limits

This weekend looms unnervingly unscheduled. The concrete shoveling appears to be over for now, and the placing of pavers hasn’t started yet. I may get to look at a couple of farms, though, including one where cacao has been planted. This is a big surprise to me, because I didn’t think there was anywhere in Tolte that was consistently warm enough for cacao. That will be an interesting trip, if it happens. And if not, well, there’s always the weekly trip to Chunchi to break up the space between Friday and Monday. And next weekend, I plan to play tourist in Cuenca. 

Halfway Point

Today (January 19, radio listeners)  is, according to some fairly picayune calculations, the halfway point in my Tolte adventure, midway between the day I left New York, September 4, and the day I’ll leave Ecuador, June 3. Of course, my hope is that this adventure will in some way lead to another, but that will be another blog on another theme, I imagine. One only gets to describe a nine-month stretch as an English teacher in an Andean village once, I think.

To mark today as special, the sun has come out for the first time in almost two weeks. It’s a beautiful day, of the sort that all my Tolte days were until the end of November. The sun is brilliant, but the air is cool. But sitting in the sun today was the first time I have felt really warm in quite a while—maybe it’s the first time I have felt genuinely warm in 2012. I believe that I will have dry laundry after hanging it up last Saturday. Yes, a couple of things have dried before today, but now I’ll have clean, dry socks. It’s so difficult to have both. The day was also marked by a wolf howling at dawn, a truly beautiful sound, not frightening, but eerie and soulful. Okay, that actually occurred on Tuesday morning, but I;m going to consider it part of the halfway festivities.

I suppose I ought to look back and look ahead. Looking back, my Spanish was a lot rustier when I arrived than I had realized. It was difficult for me to understand a certain amount of what was going on around me or even said to me. This has improved greatly over the past four and a half months. I still can’t really eavesdrop and understand what people are saying to each other, but I can hold me own somewhat better in lunch or dinner table conversation. This is helped, in part, by having a better idea of who is being talked about. I know a good percentage of the population here, but do not necessarily know everyone’s name. I’m even less likely to know what people actually call each other, which is more likely to be some kind of nickname than his or her real name.

Looking back, I wasn’t sure how I was going to manage my classes. Discipline was never really a problem for me when I worked in the Village School. Or when I was a substitute teacher in Worcester, Massachusetts. But the school culture in Tolte is unlike anything I have ever seen, though not necessarily ever heard of. Year after year, children arrive in school and are indoctrinated by the older students to a belief that school is an endless recess away from the farm work they face at home. I will say that the kids do not treat their regular classroom teachers with the wholesale disrespect they offered me, but the problem was still mine to deal with. The suggestion of having a behavior chart with stickers as rewards was a brilliant one. Unfortunately, I only applied it to the fourth grade. I will say that the sixth grade was always well-behaved, and the fifth grade is coming around. The seventh grade remains a problem, but I can teach something to them most days.

Another positive development was my realization that the kids desperately needed additional reading time and support. I had been opening the computer room every afternoon, and sort of ignoring the library. At the beginning of December, I reversed that. Now the children have to earn minutes of reading in the library to spend in the computer room. In the fifteen days that the library has been open since then, about 35 of the 45 children in grades 4-7 have come in to read. They have only averaged about 10 minutes a day, but many have done better than that. And a total of about 45 kids from grades 1-8 have come in to do some reading or at least look at the pictures. I have started teaching a fourth grader to read, and I will also be working with other fourth graders to get their reading more fluent and improve their comprehension. This takes me back to my days in the elementary school library at Metairie Park Country Day School, my first job out of college. It was a miserable experience, but I think that I am remembering some things that have been helpful here.

I know that I also came here with the hope of working with the farmers of Tolte to do some organic agriculture or soil and water conservation. This has not gone so well. I have spent some good Saturdays with farmers, picking potatoes and the like, but I have not found a way to really contribute any knowledge to local agriculture. There are some things I see that might be helpful: improved fruit tree pruning, composted organic waste, mulching, and organic pest and fungus management (which may link back to pruning). I’d like to get someone to build bench terraces for soil conservation. There is little awareness of the erosion problem here, though there is plenty of obvious erosion. Looking forward, I hope that my credibility in this area may eventually reach a point where someone will believe that the English teacher knows something about agronomy. It’s going to be a tough sell.

I suppose the main goal for the next four and a half months is that the children and I will start to have legitimate conversations in English. We’re definitely getting closer. I am able to interview them about who they live with, names, ages, birthdays, and occupations, what they are wearing, and some of their likes and dislikes. This is all done without notes or texts of any kind, but all the result of speaking and listening. They can’t all do it, but those who can do give me a thrill. I’m considering starting an all-star class from grades 4-7 to further advance those who are doing well. I have to decide whether that would leave them bored during their regular class, and whom I would choose for such a group.

I have a sort of recreational goal, too. I definitely want to learn some of the folkloric music of Ecuador, which has a satisfyingly distinct sound. The only new music I have learned here so far are my nifty arrangement of “Anytime” and the flamenco Milonga I learned from sheet music on Sunday. Time to bear down on then local sound, especially with Carneval coming next month.

One thing is certain: these nine months in Tolte are good ones, the ones I;ve had already and the ones I’m going to have. I haven’t been this comfortable with what I was doing in a long time. Comfort isn’t my goal, but I do take it as a good sign.

Ortiga

This has been a week much like any other in my time here, although there are always points of interest. For example, this week, I was teaching the months of the year. One of the biggest attractions for most children in this topic is the chance to say when their birthday arrives. Much to my surprise, a good fraction of the children of Tolte do not know when their birthday is, which is especially strange because they do seem to have some notion of how old they are. But there you have it: there are children in the world who do not have birthdays, at least in the sense that children in the States have birthdays. And they don’t seem to miss them. I seem to recall that my birthday seemed like a day that belonged to me alone, and that seemed really exciting, at least when I was a kid. Not so much now…

As usual, Saturday provides the events that seem most worth reporting here, which makes no real sense, because I am actually accomplishing more during the week. The kids are learning English, sort of. What I do on Saturday is just something to entertain myself. This week, there was a “Padres de Familia de Escuela” minga to clean up the weeds in the little piece of land that belongs to the school. I don’t quite understand this piece of land or its purpose. I think that the idea is to grow things that can either be eaten during school lunch or sold somewhere. Crops include corn, beans, turnips, cabbage, and acelga, which my dictionary translates as beets, but looks a lot more like chard (sort of big, tough, leafy greens). Weeding here is especially exciting because a lot of the weedy growth is stinging nettle, ortiga, although not of the most ferocious kind. My hands are still burning a bit.

Ortiga is regarded as sort of a cure-all here, and maybe I’ve mentioned it before. You use it sort of like Ben-Gay. Whatever injury you have, no matter how severe the pain, you take some ortiga and flail it around the injury like a feather duster. This, of course, hurts a lot more than when you started, but rumor has it that it does something to heal the injury or reduce its pain somehow. There’s even a verb, ortigarse, for treating yourself with ortiga. So I could say that me ortigue las manos, but it was sort of by accident.

One really great thing was that the head of the Padres de Familia, Martina (whom you will recall from the episode about my perfect day in Tolte that involved me getting locked out of my house), gave me the chance to talk to the assembled parents, though not all of the parents came to this event. I had wanted to talk to them about using the library themselves, that the library is not just for kids. They seemed to capture the idea that reading was good and necessary for the future of their children, but I got the impression that few of them feel comfortable reading either. I did promise to help anyone who wanted to read, and to lend books on the spot, but nobody took me up on this offer. I’m going to continue to push this idea, though.

Another interesting word is lampa or lampon for shovel, which is called pala elsewhere in Latin America. It also has its own verb, lampear, shoveling, which is how I spent the rest of the day. I went back to the road crew, figuring (correctly) that they could use another pair of hands. Besides, Damasio was up there, which always makes for a fun day. I started by shoveling cement, which took me up to lunchtime. Pablo and Martina treated us all to lunch at their house. After lunch, a woman from Nizag and I were assigned the task of digging the trench that the cement forms would sit in. This wasn’t as atrocious a job as last week’s digging, but still pretty intense. The woman from Nizag didn’t give her name, but the crew decided that Mama Grande would be appropriate. I guess I agree, although I was more impressed with her strength and fortitude than her size. After shoveling cement until lunchtime, she did a swift job of picking a trench along the road for the cement forms, and then went on to shovel more cement. I was left behind in the trench, trying to drive the shovel through the stones that lay just under the loose soil. A couple of these stones were so large that no one is sure how we will get them out of the way. But most of the trench did get cleared eventually. Then I went and stirred cement with an azadon while Mama Grande and Damasio shoveled it into wheelbarrows.

I asked Damasio if his lower back didn’t hurt, kind of assuming that his didn’t. Mine was really in pain. Somewhat to my surprise, he said that his hurt, too. I figured that after years of bent over labor the muscles in his lower back were so strong that the awkward posture no longer mattered. It seems that the difference is more in knowing how much pain you can ignore, and how much you can’t.  Still, I think that I should continue to work on strengthening my back. The good news is that in spite of all the strain, I haven’t had any signs of sciatica or other spinal symptoms. And that’s good with me.

Tomorrow I’m off to Chunchi. Rumor has it that my paycheck will finally clear.

John Henry

 When John Henry was a little baby

Sittin’ on his Daddy’s knee

He picked up a nine pound hammer and a little piece of steel

And said, “What the heck is this supposed to mean?”

                --The Smothers Brothers

On Friday (Jan.6, Dia de los Reyes Magos and Ukrainian Christmas, to those of you playing along at home), school was closed again. The teachers were in Riobamba, hoping to be given contracts to sign fo 2012. Personally, I think it’s pretty strange to sign a contract for the calendar year instead of the school year, but that seems to be the way it is. Of course, if they didn’t get contracts, there will be no school on Monday either, and I’m not sure what my job would become. But Ecuador has taught me not to worry about such things.

Anyway, I didn’t want to sit home, so I put on my new rubber boots and went looking for work. Augustin and Elgar were working on something next to the teacher’s residence, so I let myself in. The work they were doing was cutting into a wall of earth to make room for the base of a wall that will separate the teachers’ residence from the road. This is a good idea, as the teachers’ residence sits in a kind of hole next to the road—a little mistaken traffic activity, and one of the teachers could find himself sharing his bed with an automobile.

The work involved was to cut a trench or opening under the wall of earth that runs along the side of the teachers’ residence. This work was already well under way, as Augustin, Elgar, Jose Manuel, and Antonio had been hard at it all week in the rain. Augustin, who’s plenty strong, was whacking away at the earth wall with a pick. Since the only tool I really know how to manage is a shovel, I picked one up and tried cutting into the soil at the back of the trench under the earth wall. That was ludicrous. The shovel just bounced off the incredibly dense, hard-packed soil. Soils here are clayey, and this stuff was sort of like an unbaked brick of gigantic size.

Elgar was using a vara, which simply mean bar. I’m not sure what you’d call this thing in English, though I know I’ve seen them. They are steel bars, about 6 feet long and weighing about 20 pounds. There is a chisel point at one end, and a sort of short, narrow blade on the other. You take hold of the bar and jam it into the earth (if you can) in hopes of chipping a bit of soil away. In other words, it’s like a jack hammer without any motor behind it.

So there we were, Augustin with his pick and Elgar and I with our varas, whacking away at the unyielding earth. Little progress was being made. Around this time, Jose Manuel (the one who showed me his farm in another climate zone) showed up with someone I don’t know and a small, electric motor driven jackhammer. And this is what made me think of John Henry. It is important to remember that John Henry was “driving steel,” not laying railroad track. Driving steel means hitting a steel pin into rock, so that chunks break off and you tunnel through the earth. We were doing something similar, without the hammer. I mentioned to Antonio that the soil was like cement, and he said no, this was worse, because cement shatters in a way that soil does not.

So, could we beat the steam drill? Let’s not be ridiculous. Not only could we not, we didn’t want to. We had hardly gotten anywhere in an hour. The little jackhammer immediately started cutting off big chunks of soil. All we had to do was shovel up the resulting dirt, put it in wheelbarrows and haul it away. And so we did, until all of our wheelbarrows got flat tires. By then it was about lunch time anyway, so I went and got lunch, did my afternoon in the computer room, and was glad I hadn’t done any more damage to my hands.

I did accomplish something, though. Antonio, who is in charge of this project, asked me to read the scale drawings with him. By understanding the scale of the drawings, and being able to relate one drawing to another, I was able to give him a clearer idea of what the engineer was telling him to do. My back may not be worth much, but my head seems to find a way to call attention to itself. It’s funny how an education really can make a difference in what is mostly a brute effort situation. I regret not having become an engineer of some kind. It might have been more helpful to Tolte if I had.

But the next day was Saturday, and I still had nothing to do, but the weather was pretty good for a second day and I rushed to do some laundry. While I was at it, Jose invited me to work with Pablo for the day. He told me it would involve passing bricks, something I already have some experience in. But when we got there, the job turned out to be pouring cement for actual American style curbs along on of the roads. And, because the curbs had to be a certain height, that meant cutting soil with a vara or any other tool that could accomplish the task. Because my vara skills were not too impressive, I was given a shvel, always my tool of choice, and sent to clean up chunks that Jose, using pick or vara, left behind. I also, depending on the moment, got to do a little vara work myself, to limited effect.

The funniest part of all this was that it occurred to everyone that I was a poor immigrant looking for work, as have so many Ecuadorians in the U.S. And the work was surprisingly similar to the work that immigrants do in the U.S. I moved 50 kilogram sacks of cement (not very far, but successfully), and I shoveled until we broke for lunch, and then shoveled the rest of the afternoon. The afternoon shoveling involved putting the cement into wheelbarrows. 20 bags of cement, which is what we used, is a metric ton (2200 lbs.) This was mixed with at least equal quantities of water, sand, and gravel to make concrete. I think I shoveled up my share of cement, so let’s say that in the afternoon, I moved two tons of concrete with a shovel. I don’t think I impressed anyone here other than myself, but I did last the whole work day, which I think was at least a positive surprise to my work mates. Of course, I don’t really think I would have liked to do it again today. I also understand that a more typical work day is 25 sacks of cement.

Another positive side effect was that I started hearing some of the things that people in my neighborhood are actually called. The idea here is that many people are not called by their names, at least when people are talking about them in their absence. The origins of these names are often lost to time, but the names live on. The gossip I hear may start to make more sense, now that I know who “Don Rata,”  “Zorro,” “Topo,” and “Pishungo” are.

It is now Sunday. It started out sunny, turned cold and rainy midday, and then opened up again about 4:30 for a magnificent afternoon and a spectacular sunset, which is filling the room I’m in with something like firelight. Oh, little Tolte, you sure are beautiful. 

Temporal

An extended series of rainy days is called a “temporal,” at least in Costa Rica, but probably here as well. I just haven’t heard people use the word. Mostly they just say, well, it’s the rainy season. It will be like this until March. I’ve mentioned this weather before, but every time it comes around, it seems a bit more intense. Not only have we not seen the sun since sometime on Sunday (that’s Jan.1, 2012), but much of the time visibility has been reduced and rain can start falling at any time. Maya would tell me that now I know what it’s like to live in Portland. I once lived in Seattle. I don’t remember it being like this. Of course, in Seattle the roads don’t turn to slick mud, and there are clothes dryers to handle your laundry. I have very little clothing that is both clean and dry.

After the extended Christmas vacation (we didn’t have a class day from Dec. 21 to Jan. 3), it has been a bit tough re-establishing momentum. I did a review day yesterday and found that the kids mostly did recall the major things we have covered since the beginning of the year. The things they have trouble with may have been mistaken topics to begin with. Prepositions are a bit rough, but I think that’s partly because they are so much from the beginning of the year. But telling time is a huge problem, and I suspect that’s because they can’t tell time on a standard clock in Spanish. Today I started teaching the days of the week, combined with “yesterday, today, tomorrow.” That seemed to go pretty well, but I’m not sure how I’m going to make the words real to my students. Almost as soon as I launched into this topic, I felt as though it was too abstract. Little children don’t pick up the days of the week until they’re pretty far along. On the other hand, days of the week are considered pretty basic foreign language fare. I had been thinking I would combine the days with months, and tie that to numbers by having the kids give their birthdays or birthdates. Now I’m not so sure. I’d have to teach them ordinal numbers from 1-31, and I’m not sure I want to get into that yet.  I’ll have to go back to the curriculum drawing board.

My main goal is to have the kids, at least the ones who care, able to hold some sort of conversation in English before I go. Yesterday marked 5 months left, which is a good chunk of the school year, but not much time. I’m going to have to give some thought to what people talk about, and whether I can get that into my students’ heads. I think the phrase “I like (to)” is going to be a big part of this. I’m not sure where to find out. And maybe the order doesn’t matter as much as a critical mass of words and phrases. I’m trying to get them to ask what time it is, for permission to go to the bathroom, to tell how they feel, and some other odds and ends, in English, so that they get used to the idea that they can. I hope it works.

In other, less interesting, news, I have started the New Year with another round of digestive problems. Fortunately, powerful medication is readily available. I’m just not sure how long I have to take it. Three days seemed to do it last time, but then I was told that 10 pills represent a 5-day course. I don’t think I could have handled 5 days last time. We’ll see how this works out. But one pill, and I already feel a lot better.

I know this isn’t much of an entry, but I’ll try to get my blogging rhythm back. I’ll also try to find some new things worth reporting. And things do tend to come up out of nowhere.