Back to School

Monday, September 3, was Back to School Day in Tolte, and things went just about as one might expect. Instead of the carefully prepared introduction to life, in Miss Peach’s classroom, massive traffic and bus delays meant that Sonia arrived 15 minutes late, while Luis and Luis arrive an hour and 15 minutes late, having had to wait for the next bus. The day lasted about an hour, most of that spent in an impromptu meeting between the teachers in the plaza, and then the kids went home. This may be a more authentic representation of a school year than most teachers would dare offer on the first day, but maybe the kids got a truer picture of their year than children do on the first day of school in the States.  And in some cases their answers seemed more  I offer this for US teachers as an introductory statement: “This year, children, I will work in an atmosphere of blame, chaos, and insecurity, doing what I can for you while satisfying the irrelevant demands of a bunch of grown-ups so that I can keep my job. At the end of the year, you will take a test, and you and I will be blamed for the results. Recess for the rest of the day!”

On Tuesday, though, I did show up ready to work. I mean, I was ready to work Monday, but knew I wouldn’t because of first day events which never happened. I was completely prepared for the kids to have forgotten everything. After all, I took off for the US a month before the actual end of the school year, and had not given them a class in 3 months when I saw them on Tuesday. I was ready, armed with Simon Bolivar’s famous quote, “He who serves the Revolution plows the sea.” He who teaches children a foreign language that they will probably never use does the same. And yet they remembered. The children remembered almost everything that I ever taught them, and in some cases their answers seemed more correct and fluent than I remember hearing before. Children who couldn’t respond to me during their final exam (a 5 minute oral response to my questions) managed to respond brightly on Tuesday. How about that? I may have to accept that what I say and do in front of a classroom matters. Sorry, Village School, the message got through a little too late.

What this means is that I have started teaching English pretty much from where we left off in June. I’m using a textbook that is a little more advanced (and useful) than the one used for the first year English course in Ecuadorean public high schools. My new approach is to amplify what they learned last year. For example, last year we learned how to respond to “What is your name?” This year, the children can now respond to “What is my name?” “What is her name?” “What is his name?” “What are your names?” and “What are their names?” With the building blocks apparently in place, the sky’s the limit. In addition, the children’s nightly homework is to teach the day’s lesson to their parents. English as community education: “Yes, it’s cultural imperialism, but the intention is good.”

The good news doesn’t stop there. I finally seem to have a steady flow of customers for my night school English class for adults. We will assume, for the moment, that the motivation to study English is to participate in community tourism, not to flee to “El Jhonny.” The first night I had a good mix of about 14 students, ranging from the seventh grader who was my best student last year up to the AVANTI University scholarship students. They all promised enthusiastically to come back the next night, and if only a few of them did, well, we’re still settling in. But I have had a workable group of 6-10 young people ever since, and things are going well. As the high school kids develop the ability to use the dog’s breakfast of grammar and vocabulary they have been taught, things could get really exciting.

A little side note on language acquisition. Adults both here and in the US are always saying to me, “Isn’t it wonderful how rapidly little kids learn a foreign language?” This year I am not only teaching grades 4-7, but grades 1-3 as well. Trust me: the high school kids are picking things up much, much faster than the little kids, who are only managing to learn about a word a day. When you can’t sit still, have the attention span of a mayfly, and can’t use reading or writing to jog your memory, you’re going to have a tough time learning a foreign language. Sure, the little kids might do better in an immersion situation, but that’s not what we have here. So I’m content that they all know the word “pencil” after four days of instruction, and we’ll leave it at that. If I ever get to the point where I can manage the first grade for more than 15 minutes at a stretch, things may improve. I can handle the third grade for about half an hour, and they’re doing pretty well, I think.

I would also like to mention that Tuesday and Wednesday were big days for concrete. Damasio lured me into mixing and shoveling cement at Mecias, the Teniente Politico’s house on Tuesday, and I was astonished at how much cement it took to cover the roof. Cement alone totaled over 2500 pounds, with equal amounts of sand and gravel to make concrete. Add the water, and something like 5 tons of material were shoveled into buckets and hauled by single pulley (two men pulled on a metal bar at the other end of the rope) up to the roof. Let’s say the buckets held 200 pounds of cement. That’s about 500 bucket loads. All I can say is, I can’t understand why the whole building didn’t just collapse. I also got to know Mecias’ father, Jesus, somewhat better. Here’s a 75 year old man who comes up to my armpit who moved a lot more cement last Tuesday than I did—and then went back to his regular farm labor on Wednesday.  His nephew, the other Mecias, once told me that Jesus used to be really strong, but that his health had been damaged by drink. One can only wonder.

Wednesday was community cement day, as we applied paving blocks to the road nearest m y house. This was difficult as the underlying dirt road is very rough and uneven. Sand was smoothed over it by hand, as one might do for a custom kitchen floor back in the States. We did get the pavers we had placed, but there’s still a ways to go before we reach my house. I can’t say that I was very useful; in this task, as I kept losing track of where I was and walking over recently smoothed areas. But between Tuesday and Wednesday, I don’t suppose I should have been surprised when I threw my back out reaching for my hat on Saturday.

Saturday was another round of the “indoor” championship in Iltus. Tolte defeated Los Tigres del Norte 12-2, which required us to consume more beer and trago than was good for us. I left before the serious trago fest started, thereby saving myself much, though not all, discomfort. I have heard that later that night, there was a rematch between last year’s battling cousins, as reported in an early blog entry. Apparently, this time Wiliam got the expected victory over Gonzalo, which I hope means that Gonzalo will not be challenging for the championship again anytime soon. My theory is that Gonzalo tries to fight with Wiliam because he knows that Wiliam won’t really try to hurt him, being that they are cousins. Except that this time, he was wrong.  Somehow, the Tolte team recovered sufficiently from this experience to win its quarterfinal match on Sunday, with a 15 year old as the goalie. I guess the fighting spirit is not quenched with Pilsener.

Sunday included the usual trip to Chunchi and a farewell party for Ramon and his family, who headed back to England on Monday. I was very sorry to see them go; who knows when or if I’ll ever see them again. Ramon is definitely one of the most loved Toltenos out in “el Extranjero,” and he has a beautiful family. It was hard for me to watch all of his relatives saying goodbye—it must have been even harder for them, although they seem pretty stoical about it. They busied themselves making packages of all sorts of local fruits and vegetables, just in case there’s some sort of food shortage in the UK. Ramon’s nephew David (one of last year’s seventh graders, now at work full time on his mother’s farm) and I carried the luggage out, maybe not the smartest thing I could do considering that the back spasms that started Saturday had not let up in the slightest. But you can’t wimp out in Tolte, so I took myself and my back spasms to school, where my sudden gasps of pain seemed to amuse my students no end.  I’ll have to remember that next time I need to raise their spirits.

So now I am alone in Ramon’s house, which feels very big and empty.  I am expecting an engineer named Gonzalo, from the Ministry of Agriculture (hereafter referred to by its acronym MAGAP) to move in during the next week or two, which should break the silence. I am hoping to persuade him to include some organic agriculture ideas in his extension work. We’ll have to see how that goes. He seemed receptive when he came to work on the integrated farms project that gave me my start in soil conservation in Tolte. I‘m hoping for another lift.

Missing Memories

So much for my new resolve to record my adventures daily and blog weekly. I haven’t done either for almost two weeks, and I can’t say that I have a clear impression of what has happened during this time, although certain moments do stand out. On the bright side, I was concerned about being under-occupied until school starts on Monday, and that hasn’t happened at all. I’ve found things to do every day—I can’t recall exactly what they were, but they happened.

One notable change since I arrived is my internet connection. I bought a wireless modem from the Claro mobile telephone people, and now I have internet access whenever I want it. On the downside, it doesn’t seem to be able to connect to skype, which may be more a function of my location amid the mountains than any technological limitation. I may try hiking up to the highway to see if I can improve my reception. Of course, since my computer’s battery life is down to about 10 minutes, it may not be much of an advantage. But I can still skype from Chunchi if I need to, so I’m not entirely cut off. And I wonder if Facebook chat or Google chat will work, even though skype doesn’t. I’ll have to test this out.

One of the more memorable experiences occurred directly after my last blog. I went to Chunchi as usual that Sunday, with the barber shears I had promised to bring to my friend and barber, Don Lucho. This wasn’t even a gift, exactly, I just brought the particular brand and model that he asked for. The look of delight on his face, though, was absolutely on the order of “child on Christmas morning” joy. Whatever effort it cost me to bring it was very, very well spent. I’m sure there’s a lesson in there somewhere about joining gratitude with joy, but don’t look to this blog to try and draw it.

The next Sunday, Don Lucho regaled me with a tale from his time as community president of Llarucun, a little place between Chunchi and Tolte that make Tolte look like a booming metropolis. At its peak, Llarucun only had 24 families—it is now down to 8. But back in its peak days, there were enough children that they wanted their own school, because the walk to the school in Yuquillay was a long one. Lucho took a scientific approach to this problem, applying trago in sufficient quantities to gain cooperation and manpower from the surrounding communities. Twelve dump truck loads of material were brought to build the school, but Llarucun is quite a ways up the mountain where the trucks could not go. But 300 men, 180 horses, and 50 liters of trago got the material to where it was needed in about 48 hours. I think this is a story worth keeping in mind, although for the moment we will say that it reflects Ecuador’s past more than its present.

I have been more dedicated to attending community meetings since I got back, because I think it is a real responsibility of my new and improved Avanti job to participate in these things. Community meetings are difficult. They start at 8 PM and rarely last less than three hours, which is sort of hard on a community that wakes up between 5 and 6 AM. Much of the content of recent meetings has had to do with tourism, which is seen as critical to Tolte’s future.

Let me digress for a moment about why people are looking to tourism for salvation. Although there are about 350 people living in Tolte, as many as 500 Toltenos are scattered across the globe in pursuit of employment. In the two months I was away, Bolivar, Alberto, Narcisa, and Laura and Cristian and their little boy Ariel all moved to Quito. One of my students went to Cuenca and another to Naranjito (both of these children were older than usual for seventh grade—graduation was the sign that it was time to get a job). I might be aware that a couple of people went to the US illegally, or at least tried to go. Jose Manuel Guaylla, also known as Carabali, died when he crashed his motorcycle head-on into a truck on his way back from Chunchi one Sunday. He left a wife and five little children, and there is no life insurance in Ecuador. Jorge’s wife went home to her mother. It is not clear if this situation is permanent. Graciela has simply disappeared, but was clearly suffering from overwhelming financial problems. She may be in Cuenca. The bright spot is that Mariana’s husband, Jacinto, came home from Spain after ten years away. The trend towards emigration and loss from Tolte is overwhelming. Those without land to farm cannot get enough work to stay, and everyone is hoping that tourism can change that.

One of the biggest elements to this tourism is construction of a mirador/restaurant with a great view of Nariz del Diablo and the train station a quarter-mile below. There have been a certain number of tourists coming through Tolte in cars during these months of school vacation. The hope is that they will decide to stop and spend a little time and money in Tolte itself. I confess to doubts about this. Restaurants are tough businesses, and while the location is good, there is certainly more choice a short drive away in Alausi or Chunchi. But Nariz del Diablo is a big tourist attraction, and the train ride is very expensive, so there may actually be a niche for a family restaurant serving those who would access Nariz del Diablo by other means.

All is not well and peaceful in the world of Tolte tourism, though. After going through months of tests and other delays, Tolte was finally allowed to start taking tourists from the station on a short horseback ride to a nice vista point above the station. In a cruel twist, however, the railroad company decided to give the people of Sibamabe, on the other side of the river and considerably more affluent, the right to do the same. Not only that, but they gave Tolte Tuesday through Thursday, and Sibambe Friday through Sunday. It is not hard to understand that the value of these days is very different. What is hard to understand is why the railroad people did this. Other aspects of the station, such as folk dancing, are shared equally between Tolte and Nizag. One might say there is something rotten in Denmark, or, more likely, in the railroad headquarters. I find the dependent relationship of Tolte with the railroad a bad one, but there doesn’t seem to be anything to make it more equal in the short-term.

The agrotourism group is experimenting with a fruit stand at the point where the horseback ride ends, and I spent the first day of this experiment with them. Of course, in placing the stand at this point, they see only a tiny minority of the tourists, but that don’t have permission to sell in the train station and there seems to be some problem with getting it. The train people seem obsessed with the idea that tourists will get sick if they eat anything other than the “lunch,” a ham and cheese sandwich on white bread. My thought is that the fruit stand might do better up on the Pan American highway, which is closer to Tolte than the horse trail. I’ll have to try to get them to test this theory one day. Alicia and Elena spent the whole day at the fruit stand and sold less than $20 worth of fruit, mostly cherimoyas (“custard apples”) which are going out of season. The group had decided to emphasize avocadoes, but these really didn’t sell at all. I suppose the riders wanted something more refreshing after their trip.

The last meeting I attended was the one where the junta directive reports on how the budget money was spent during the past year. Most of it went to paving some of the main street of Tolte, and putting up a couple of cement retaining walls. I’m proud to have participated, at least a bit, in these projects, as you will know from reading previous entries. I had wondered about the emphasis on these things, but it turns out that each level of government is assigned certain “competencies” in the Ecuadorean system, and planning and maintaining roads is a major responsibility of the parroquia. An especially notable part of the meeting was that when the vocals spoke about their “portfolio” area, including roads, education, environment, and health, all of them mentioned litter as a focal point. Tolte has some litter baskets, but apparently not enough. We are in an evolving mode of trash disposal, where we now bring our trash to the plaza to be hauled away by the Chunchi garbage truck every Tuesday, as opposed to the old method of throwing it into the ravine. Maybe our consciousness has not quite caught up to that fact.

I have been practicing with the Evangelical Christian Folkloric band, Winari, and the garage band, Estasis, on a regular basis. Needless to say, Winari sounds a heck of a lot better, and I am learning a few things about Ecuadorean folk music. Estasis, as usual, sounds awful, especially since I brought overdrive and wah-wah pedals from the States. But we are practicing with renewed enthusiasm, and maybe something good will result from that. We’re still looking for a kind of music that our vocalist can actually sing. Finding such music, if it exists, will be critical to our success.

I also have survived a sick day of the sort one should expect when one lives in rural Ecuador. I have to say that the Cipro I was prescribed for this condition worked like magic. When I think back to the kind of long term suffering I have experienced in the past, sometimes takes a week or more to fully recover, having a medicine that worked within an hour and restored me to full health by the second dose seems miraculous. Hats off to the inventors of Cipro.

And I got a day of farm work in yesterday. Joaquin and his wife were picking beans that had been nterplanted with corn on one of these near-vertical fields that I find so disturbing in Tolte agriculture. Bean picking isn’t as demanding as potato picking because you can do it standing upright, if you can stand upright on a field with a 70% slope. It was a long, hot, windy day, and I was glad when we finished. I was also glad to find that I could handle the heights and steep slopes about as well as I could when I left in June, and far better than when I arrived last year.

In other agricultural news, one of the Ministerio de Agricultura technicians is going to be assigned to work full time, Monday through Friday, in Tolte. I am hopeful that this will help my work in sustainable and organic agriculture. If I can convince Gonzalo to work more in that direction, these ideas will seem more reasonable coming from him than coming from me. Sometimes when I propose stuff like mulching, I feel like my farmer friends are looking at me as if I had just grown a third eye, or something. It may seem less alien coming from an Ecuadorean.  And that might mean I could get something good done

Now it is Friday, August 31, and I’m not sure how I will fill today. I suppose I could use it to prepare for the English classes that will start on Monday. There seems to be more interest in English for tourism this time around, so I may finally have the adult class or classes that I wasn’t able to put together last year. We’ll see if my new TEFL certification helps at all. I imagine it will, because the course reminded me that preparation is not optional, just because you have a curriculum. We’ll see how that goes. As far as regular school teaching, the same cast of characters will once again be present, somewhat to my surprise. This year, Sonia wants me to try to give some kind of English lessons to the children in her class (grades 1,2,3) as well. Last year, I didn’t think I could manage them. This year, I’m willing to see what happens. If it’s really awful, I can always tell her that I’ll be happy to do it once she gets them under control. Since that didn’t happen last year, it should keep me safe this year as well.