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.