I left you last the night before we had our retreat at Sierra Azul, in the jungle. Well, technically Sierra Azul is in the transitional period between the highlands and the rainforest, “el bosque.” Its not quite rainforest, but hopefully I will see that too in the months to come. I have never been in a place so luscious. On our hike, I could only see between five and twenty feet off either side of the trail, depending on how close we were to the river we crossed several times. The lodge itself was great; if you are looking for a secluded place to spend a weekend in the bosque in Ecuador I recommend Sierra Azul. They have a huge recreation room, with a fireplace and couches (to read and play catchphrase), large tables (to play card games), a pool table, foosball table, ping pong, and a dart board. The rooms themselves are cabin-esque, and comfortable, if rugged-natural looking. They have hot water, and I mean hot water; the kind that you have to mix with cold water to make it bearable. This was a great treat after showering with electric shower heads (read: widowmakers) since arriving in Ecuador. The whole place is also run on generators, which makes it bright and inviting until they turn the generators off around 22h30.
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I had been informed beforehand that my huge, American feet would be too big for any rain boots they had for us to wear at Sierra Azul. That wasn’t really a surprise, because I’m just too big for this country in general. So, I brought the pair of Merrell “jungle moccasins” (slip on shoes) that I had picked up in the adoption corner earlier this summer, intending to hike in and ruin those if need be. However, after the girls came back from a short hike Friday, they told me that rubber boots were a necessity. Fernando, our guide, thought hiking in these slip-on shoes was also a terrible idea. In a move of desperation, I brought out my chacos and asked if they would be better, and they passed the test. So, while everyone else was in knee-high rubber boots (or tennis shoes and hiking socks in Erik’s case) I walked 13 km through the jungle in sandals. It was muddy. Crazy muddy. At least about every time it went from soothing to uncomfortable, we would cross a river and I would get to rinse off. But overall, the hike was great. The waterfall was gorgeous, my feet held up, and I think it’s a pretty unique experience to walk that far with such exposed feet.
Mike and I joined an Ecuadorian soccer league (most of the girls joined too, but we play on different teams, so I will keep the coverage to me for now). Some of the taxi drivers in Conocoto we have gotten closer to invited us to play. Men’s games are on Saturday; the specific time changes. Our team is part of the liga deportiva “Club Football Brazil,” which has its fields up at punte tres on the autopista (this will all make sense when you come visit). It isn’t the nicest of facilities, but it is already growing on me. I play on equipo Rumiñahui. It’s a family team, with several generations all playing together. The rest of the team isn’t incredible, but they are better than I am. I got to play about 30 minutes in the second half yesterday, and it was rough. I have been running (a little) to get in shape for soccer and the mountains I want to hike, and I apparently have a lot more to do. They ran me ragged. But the team was nice about my performance, and hopefully I will get better as time progresses. It is certainly a unique way to spend some time on the weekends while I am here.
Another big activity I have recently attended was the Ecuador-Uruguay World Cup Qualifier last weekend (Oct 10). Ecuador lost 2-1. They then lost to Chile on Wednesday, so they will not be in the 2010 World Cup. But just because we lost didn’t mean it wasn’t worth going. I bought my ticket for $13.50 off of the old PDs, who had bought a package. On game day, tickets were about $35 for general admission (which were were in). Still, $35 for international sports-play? Sounds like a deal to me, even though I am no longer even willing to pay $1.50 for a DVD.
The game was at 5pm. Our Ecuadorian friend told us to leave the house by 10am, which we did more or less. The Ecovia was closed off one stop before the stadium, so we had to get off early and clear a police checkpoint (only those with tickets were allowed in) where entire blocks were fenced off before the stadium. The security line for our section of general was about two blocks long, and it was pretty slow moving, but we were still in the stadium by 12, where we then got to wait for 5 hours with the same three songs about Ecuador playing. Here is another example of the type of inefficiency that makes me want to pull my hair out (read: making me spend 1.5 hours physically going and paying the water bill in cash), perhaps if all of the seating wasn’t general admission so much time from all the fans would not have been wasted. But the time passed, and we even made friends with the people sitting by us. One man had his face painted like the joker; Mike asked to have his picture taken with him in the security line and he must have taken a shining to us. He came over and told us that we had picked bad seats (too close to the fence) and that the fans might come crushing down and punch us; needless to say, we moved over. One nice thing about sporting events here is you can bring in food; Erik had rugby practice until early afternoon but in return for saving his seat he brought in a 3 liter bottle of Coke and 40 dumplings from our favorite Chinese restaurant, which was the perfect greasy meal/snack. This stadium is set up much like the coliseum, where it is just one tier and quite wide. By game time, I don’t think I have ever seen a more electrified crowd. EVERYONE was in yellow Ecuador jerseys. It was as loud as or louder than a game in the Allen Fieldhouse, and this was an open-air stadium, not a limestone building. Ecuador lost 2-1 on a penalty kick in stoppage time, which is too bad because they really did play well. The fans, which had been so electric for the game, were not happy. They probably threw bottles on the field for half an hour after the game. Our friend, the joker, came to the rescue. We had great seats, probably 5 rows up from the corner of the field. He and his friends told us to just sit down and wait, and eventually as the stadium cleared out put us in a single file line and marched us out of the stadium to a relatively clear spot in the parking lot outside. We took an uneventful public transport ride home.
I spent the past two nights watching Benecio del Torro's "Che," the epic two part film that came out recently. Recuerdas, I don't do history, but I thought they were great movies and a great introduction to the kind of terrain that is in Cuba and Bolivia (I guess, and Bolivia isn't very high on my list of places to be sure to go to while I'm here). Put them at the top of your netflix queue. And that is my free time recently; on to programs.
Everything is running pretty smoothly. Adult (and teen) English continues to have people inscribe. I don’t know if my teaching has improved any, but we are definitely getting better at doing in-class evaluation of the material taught. We gave our first quiz Wednesday (which, at an hour and over pretty much everything we have covered, was much closer to a test) which will hopefully be a useful tool in evaluating our teaching. We still lack a good curriculum though; I have been fabricating lessons as we go along. While empowering to me, I worry the class lacks continuity. At least we have three heads planning the classes, which are a real asset to designing evaluations, vocabulary, worksheets, and a song of the day (all of which we have every class; two hours is a long session). I also have some leads to more permanent curriculum we can use now and in the future, hopefully they will pan out. Stay tuned. Originally we planned to have a one week break between classes (which would occur next week) but because of the week we will get off at Thanksgiving, we are just going to roll straight into the next one.
Art is art. The kids love it. We are about shin-deep into “Fun with Shapes Month” after a successful “Animals Month.” I really do hope this month will be a good way break down some of the barriers to creativity and rampant copying we see; so far we have had mixed success on this front. On the past Thursday we had our first paint project. Sonia and I cut potatoes into basic shapes, which they were supposed to use to draw more complete pictures like rubber stamps. They had a lot of fun stamping, but we didn’t get many complete pictures. They were also done 20 minutes into our hour class. Luckily, we could just send them back to the library, but it was still a definite learning experience. However, we spent about triple the amount of time setting up and cleaning than the kids did painting.
I still see big things in the near future for Microfinance (sadly, I also say this about Vanderbilt football). We had the training for the business class all set up, and it fell through on CIDE’s part (recruiting was “complicated”). However, we have the next class set up for the 26th. I fully expected the first class to fall through, working with another organization. However, I also expect this one to go through. Erik and I also plan to start shadowing/volunteering with EPV one morning a week. We have brought up the idea with them and they were okay with it, so it is about time for us to set that up for real. I also need to start my search for additional funding and grant writing.
First Quarter reports on program progress were due last week. I drew the short straw and got to write the reports for all three programs, which really wasn’t all that bad. It is much easier to write 15 single-spaced pages of what I have done than it is to write five double-spaced pages about the syntax of Donne’s sonnets or study for one math test. And fear not, reader, I made those reports about as sassy as you can get away with for an actual report with an actual organization. Bibi and I also spent some time last week going over the metrics we collect and the metrics we should collect to evaluate our program effectiveness. We certainly clarified and streamlined what we collect, and hopefully these will be useful changes for years to come.
I was fielded a great question recently of "How did Ecuadorian's react to Obama's Nobel Peace Prize," which is a great question; keep them coming. The honest answer is I don't really know. There was a short article in the paper Saturday (it made front page and continued on) with a great picture of Obama running in suit and tie with an American flag in the background. I will continue to keep asking people about it until I feel like I have enough to make a general response for an entire country, but until then I will simply remark that I do not believe it will be as big of an issue here is it will in America. Did you know that Ecuador was on the road to insolvency before it got an injection from the Inter-American Development Bank?
And that is way more than you could possibly bring up in polite conversation. Luckily, I can simply refer people to here. I only have three grad school applications left, of which I think I will submit two this week (hopefully) and the third STILL hasn’t released theirs yet. Hopefully, once I submit these I will have more time to explore Quito, learn to play the Mandolin, and write blog posts.
Chao,
Chet
Song of the Blog: “Bandera de Manos” by Juanes
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