Week 3: Call Out the Childcatcher!
Sunday
I woke up early without an alarm this morning (a rare thing for me) and decided I felt well enough to brave the expedition to Manta. I´d planned to ask Flor and the girls for advice, but when I emerged from my room, they´d already left, leaving me breakfast with a note saying they´d gone to Lopez for the day. I wrote back telling them where I´d gone, with thanks for breakfast, and set out to Salango´s bus stop (a rickety wooden bench by the roadside).
The sources I´d consulted say that Manta´s two hours away by bus, but this is a lie. It´s much closer to three hours, even counting in the half-hour when then the engine broke down and we all sat around while the driver and his buddies took turns trying to fix it. The local busses aren´t as fancy as the one that brought me from Quito, but they´re comfortable enough, and the scenery going up the coast is pretty similar to that around Salango and Puerto Lopez - hills covered in sand, grass, and scrubby trees, with lots of little dusty towns that have as many chickens as they do people. The bus left at a little after 10, and by the time it pulled into the Manta bus terminal, it was past 1.
Quito isn´t a very upscale city, but Manta (pop. 100,000-200,000) makes Quito look like NYC. I may have just been in a bad mood from the delay, but everything looks grimy and run-down. I had been hoping to find a shopping mall, or at least a store larger than a Mom-and-Pop, but that did not look promising at all. Since my map wasn´t very detailed, I thought that I´d just start walking along the main seaside road and see what I found, avoiding streets that looked obviously perilous (since almost every street looks like one that would be "obviously perilous" in the US, this isn´t an easy call to make).
Not far down the main street I found a tourist map, and was able to locate markers for 'shopping' and 'fast food'. With visions of picture books and cheeseburgers dancing in my head, I set out.
I was disappointed on both counts. Here in Manta, 'fast food' translates to little family-run chicken restaurants, and the biggest store I found was a sort of half-sized Wal-Mart, selling groceries, stationary, soap & shampoo, etc. Not wanting to leave empty-handed, I bought some markers and pencils, and a few other school-related odds and ends. The highlight was a bag with a good selection of little plastic farm animals, which I thought could be a present for my brother.
Despite the signs, I found no other worthwhile shopping locales, and the only bookstore I found wasn´t due to open until October. By now it was midafternoon, I was hot (I don´t normally perspire much, but today I was soaking) and tired and hungry, so I decided to call it quits, have a late lunch, and go home. There were no burger joints to be found (oh, my kingdom for a cheeseburger!), so I settled for a pizza restaurant the guidebook recommended. It wasn´t anything too special - an open-air patio with paper tablecloths and visiting flies - but pizza is pizza, and if it´s got chicken and extra cheese, with a chocolate milkshake to finish the meal, it´s hard to mess it up.
Back at the bus terminal, I found one that was going to Puerto Lopez without much trouble. The awkwardness came from the people. While I was sitting on the bus waiting for it to start, a janitor came through to sweep up, and tried to strike up a conversation with me. This would have been okay, except that his main question was if I was single or married - when I told him I was single, he did a "Thank you, God!" motion (nothing further, though). Later, after the bus was on its way, the guy sitting behind me also started a conversation, which consisted of him repeating the same three or four English questions ("What is your name?", "Where are you from?", "How old are you?" etc.) over and over and over again, regardless of my giving the same answers and telling him I´d already answered that question. I tried telling him that I understood Spanish and we could converse in that, but he still kept up, and saying I was exhausted from my walk and didn´t feel like talking made no difference either. Eventually I just said "I´m going to sleep," and leaned against the window pretending to sleep. I guess he got the hint, because when I sat up to listen to music an hour later he didn´t bother me.
I had hoped that we might make better time if the bus didn´t break down again, but it still took nearly three hours to get to Puerto Lopez. I´d told Flor in the note that I´d be home at 6, but it was 7 by the time I actually returned. Fortunately Ecuadorians are very flexible about timing (it´s not unheard of for everyone to arrive half an hour or more late to a meeting), so all was well, and I was able to collapse.
Monday
There were no classes on Monday, so I took the time to rest from Sunday and catch up on my reading and Internet. Nothing too exciting.
Tuesday onward
This week marked the first one that I followed my new schedule: 45 minutes with each class, 5 classes a day, meeting with every grade at least twice a week.
I´d hoped that the shorter classes would mean the kids would be less rowdy, but nope. I am adapting, though. I think I´ve developed a bit of a reputation for being "the nice one", because the kids are always approaching me with smiles during breaks and saying "Hola!" etc. when they pass me on the walks, and I haven´t noticed them be this cheerful with the other teachers. Thus, when I do get angry, it stands out more. When I want attention, I wham the dry erase board once with the back of the eraser - it makes an incredibly loud, sharp sound that´s much more effective than my voice (and don't worry, it damages neither board nor eraser).
I don´t have the training to know if it´s really effective or not, but I have a sort of half-strategy in mind - rather than be intimidating, I´m trying to be friendly and cheerful with all the kids, and when they do misbehave, I ask them why they´re misbehaving, and explain that they´re hurting my feelings and being rude to me and the other students. Basically, I´m hoping that guilting them into submission will be more effective and longer-lasting than scaring them into it.
I had my first real trial of this strategy when I met with my nemeses from last Tuesday. This time, I actually did read "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish", but the boy and girl (they´ll come up again, so I´ll call the boy JP and the girl B) from before were a problem again, especially B. To be fair, though, they´re not the only kids who make trouble in that class - there are two other boys that I suspect will continue to be a problem. A few pages away from the end, when B still wouldn´t quit and kept riling the other kids up, I closed the book and told them that I wasn´t going to keep reading if nobody would pay attention, apologizing to those few students who were behaving. It was almost time for me to go to the next class anyway, so I took the time to get up in front of the class and ask them why they kept acting like this; I came to this country especially to work with them, and I wanted us to get along and work together; did they not like me, or not want to learn English?; I was sad. With that melodramatic turn, I departed, to the faint sound of their homeroom teacher giving a followup. I guess I´ll see how it went when I meet with them again.
A similar thing happened when I met with two classes later in the week, including the one I worked with my first day. I didn´t get up and do a melodramatic guilt-speech, but during the last ten minutes or so of class, when everyone was at their worst and I couldn´t get any attention, I just sat down in my chair with my face in my hands, not quite pretending to cry but looking close to it (I´m determined that I will not cry, and I´ve never felt near it, but I did feel tired and frustrated and wanted to show that). It worked - after a few moments, the kids noticed, and they calmed down as much as 40 semi-bored kids are likely to do. I promise that I will use this ability sparingly, and only for good.
During these last few weeks, I´ve been thinking a lot about To Kill a Mockingbird, specifically the chapter about Scout´s first day of school. In a way, my situation is a lot like that - the kids and I aren´t trying to be malicious to each other, but we come from different worlds and different ways of thinking, and it's a rocky start learning to work together (I am, however, very actively trying not to be like Scout's teacher).
And I do think things are starting to smooth over. All the kids are very friendly outside of class, even JP and B and the other known hellions, and I´m the same to them. When I pass students in town, we always say hi to each other. Too, the stuff I'm covering right now, basic traits of English and words for colors, numbers, common phrases, etc. isn´t very interesting, but unfortunately it´s very important. I hope that when I get to more interesting things, they´ll pay more attention. Next week I plan to start on words for people and family members, and then words for animals (I'm planning to have the kids pick which animals I give the words for - inviting chaos, but hopefully catching interest too).
My mom´s also sending a package of teaching materials (thank you so much, Mom!), which I hope to get ideas from, and sets of crayons in the colors I´m teaching - I had an idea of creating a sheet with the English words for the colors in outline, so the kids could color each word in the appropriate hue. I´ve drafted several possible guide-sheets to hand out, too, but before I can get them copied it´s always near dark and I need to head back to Salango. I'm understanding what real adults mean when they complain that there's never enough time.
This was my first time teaching on a Friday, and I got to experience another phenomenon. When the bell rang for my last class to go home, they all came up and said goodbye to me one by one, complete with a hug and a kiss (or at least a kiss gesture with a "mwa" sound) on the cheek. I know this is an Ecuadorian custom, but to an American mind, it´s odd to be kissed by 30+ kids in a row, boys and girls alike. I returned the little "mwa" sound, at least, since it´s the polite thing to do.
I also had my first chance this week to another volunteer besides Marianne. On one of my bus rides home from Lopez, I sat next to a (very cute) guy from Toronto, and across the aisle from two of his friends, a girl from Saudi Arabia and another girl who was from either the US or Canada, I didn´t hear which. They were all starving, so I gave them the bags of Cheetos I´d bought - they were very grateful to have American junk food. We all chatted about what we were doing, and I learned that they were working for five weeks in a village several towns over, building a day care and things like that. I told them where I was teaching, and we talked about possibly meeting up sometime (I don´t know if we actually will, but I hope so!). Since they would be going to Quito when their service was done, I told them what was worth visiting there, especially La Basilica and the museum, although the guy was happiest to learn that there was a McDonalds across from the museum (oh how we American visitors beseech you, Ecuador, why have you no cheeseburgers?). I returned to Flor´s a touch twitterpated.
Saturday
Most of my Saturdays here are pretty much the same: sleep in, have a late breakfast or early lunch, and then either blob for the rest of the day or go to Lopez and use the Internet. Today I did the latter.
The one real highlight was on the bus ride over: I sat across the aisle from a guy who had a chicken in his lap. A live chicken. A big white one. I read in the guidebooks that this is not uncommon, but it´s still the first time I´ve seen it. Having watched Flor´s chickens a lot over the last few weeks, I find it easy to believe that birds evolved from dinosaurs - when you look into the eyes of a rooster, you can see the yellow, reptillian eyes of a mini-velociraptor looking back at you. Eep.
