I love so many things about my school, and I'm sure I'll get around to telling you about them eventually.
Meanwhile. there is another school that has taken on an unexpectedly prominent presence in my life... It's a public school whose schoolyard I can see into (and certainly also hear) from my 10th floor living room window. It has become a never-ending source of fascination, and not infrequently, consternation.
The first mystery of the public school outside my window occurred several weeks ago, when all of a sudden it became evident from the shrieks and sounds below that complete and utter pandolerium had been unleashed in the schoolyard. Naturally, I had to nose over to the window and investigate the racket. All I could see was swarms upon swarms of uniformed kids milling and fading and shouting and moving erratically around the schoolyard. This was made more confusing because of the fact that it was getting close to 6pm, and would soon be dark. This was no extra-curricular program, this was hundreds and hundreds of kids.
Soon, my ears were accosted by the grating, nasally, metallic, thunderous roar of what I could only assume was the lady in charge, or possibly a demon from the underworld, shouting things into a megaphone. I couldn't make out many of the words, but there was certainly no mistaking her imperious yet desperate, piercing tone. There was also no ignoring her VOLUME! Ten stories above the megaphone monster it sounded as if she were cupping her hands around my ears and bellowing as hard as she could into my eardrums, so I can only imagine what it sounded like to the masses down below.
After several excruciating eternities, the hordes ended up in more or less orderly straight lines, so I deduced that they were practicing, (in probably the most painful, inefficient and disorganized way possible) their evacuation drill.
Finally, mercifully, the captives were released, the megaphone stopped reverberating across the mountaintops, and there was peace in the schoolyard.
For a while...
To my extreme distress, I found that the following week, the satanic ritual was being repeated, only this time there were dark clouds in the sky and it looked as if rain were imminent. And in fact, it was.
Just at the key moment when order had begun to settle in among the throng, the clouds burst, rain poured down in torrents, thunder crashed, and all the kids scattered and ran for cover, shrieking as they went.
Last week I was relieved that no drills had been required...
And then I discovered that drum line season has begun. And they practice for about two hours after school on Thursdays and Fridays.
Uncle.
Monday, September 28, 2015
Sunday, September 27, 2015
44 Days in Quito
I guess I am just about on schedule, having been here for a month and change, to find the stars beginning to dim from my eyes, my open mouth begin to close. (Thankfully, I'm also finding I have a little more air in my lungs...)
In case you were wondering, the simple act of moving to a different country has so far not fundamentally changed who I am has a human being. Dishes still pile up in the sink. I still often avoid taking my vitamins days even though I know it only takes 10 seconds. I have more than once let myself fall asleep on the couch in front of Netflix at 7:30pm. I still sometimes delay grocery shopping until I am rummaging through the freezer wondering how I could potentially make a bag of frozen blueberries into a dinner.
Yes, I am the same person, but I've also noticed my perceptions about Ecuador start to gradually change,
The eucaplytus and palm trees that I found so novel and captivating when I arrived are starting to be just "trees."
The boxy, cinder-block architecture and hand-painted signs that line my bus route to school no longer seem exotic and Latin American. They're just buildings and signs.
It no longer crosses my mind how sweet and quaint it is that the school bus picks me up on the corner every morning to take me to school. Now it's just transportation. I used to find it titillating that the bus driver leaves the door open has he chugs down the block to the next pick-up. Now it's just part of the morning routine.
Getting in a taxi, not only am I able to effectively communicate where it is that I want to go, I can orient to the extent that I would have a clue if the driver were bringing me in the wrong direction in an attempt to abduct me.
This is certainly not to say that things have become boring or hum-drum. There's still plenty of newness to keep me occupied.
For example, I did spend about 15 minutes in the cleaning aisle of MegaMaxi, wondering which of the many colorful and intensely perfumed products people might use to clean their floors. I thought about texting Nicole, but then I said, NO! I will do this on my own! And persevered reading labels until I found one that clearly had the words "floor" and "clean" in it, and that didn't make me gag from the scent. People here seem to really like heavily perfumed products.
This was only after another quarter of an hour or so that I spent at the ATM, trying to activate my bank card for the first time. The problem was that I read so slowly in Spanish as I was trying to parse out the instructions, the machine kept spitting my card back out at me, figuring I must have changed my mind about my transactions after all this time.
I have also figured out how to pay my bills, and in fact it is extremely convenient: Bertita, my landlord and neighbor pays them for me, along with her own, and I reimburse her. Perfect! And I have learned to fry empanadas (granted the are pre-made supermarket ones, but I don't let that dampen my feeling of accomplishment.)
And I am trying not to lose track of the super-saturated colors of the blossoms on the trees -- hot pink, deep purple and vibrant neon orange. These were stunning to me when I first arrived, and I intend to continue being stunned by them.
Socially, I am slowly but surely starting to make new friends. It's actually an odd thing, to have to go and make all new friends at the age of 30 (well, thankfully not ALL new, because I still have Nicole.) But it's a strange sensation to be surrounded by perfectly lovely and pleasant people who have no idea about your past history or anything much about you, other than they, like you, decided to move to Ecuador this year. I guess I had kind of forgotten what it feels like to have to actively pursue relationships with people, and to do the work of getting to know someone. It feels strange, knowing that I have so many friends and family at home who know me and understand me and love me deeply and unconditionally, and here I am dipping my toes into little friendship pools, making the perfunctory jokes, finding polite topics of conversation, searching for common ground.
My work life, however, feels like it's becoming pretty solid. For the last month I've been totally immersed in school and all the work of setting up a classroom, carefully building piece by piece my little ecosystem designed to help my students thrive. There's a lot that goes into it, but the good news is that I think we're starting to reach homeostasis, where the kids and the room can function on their own. Boundaries have been drawn, expectations have been set, and we can start to shift our attention as a class from the basic understanding of how we do things to the more interesting task of what we're setting out to do.
One of the focuses of our international curriculum is teaching the students to be balanced. This is an interesting task for someone like me, who has a tendency to throw myself into my work and focus on nothing else, almost as a coping mechanism... especially here, in a world where everything is a little different and strange, where there is so much I don't understand, where even basic errands still require quite a bit of forethought and planning, and inquiring, and looking up words in the dictionary... it has been comforting to focus my attention on what I do understand - grading rubrics, charts about place value and order of operations, behavior systems, learning objectives. My dear old friends, comfortingly the same on this continent as they are back home.
But now I feel like I am ready to start venturing out of my safe school zone and exploring the world around me a little more. I want to set up routines so I can enjoy my life here, not just my work.
And with that said, time to go meet Sarah for dinner!
In case you were wondering, the simple act of moving to a different country has so far not fundamentally changed who I am has a human being. Dishes still pile up in the sink. I still often avoid taking my vitamins days even though I know it only takes 10 seconds. I have more than once let myself fall asleep on the couch in front of Netflix at 7:30pm. I still sometimes delay grocery shopping until I am rummaging through the freezer wondering how I could potentially make a bag of frozen blueberries into a dinner.
Yes, I am the same person, but I've also noticed my perceptions about Ecuador start to gradually change,
The eucaplytus and palm trees that I found so novel and captivating when I arrived are starting to be just "trees."
The boxy, cinder-block architecture and hand-painted signs that line my bus route to school no longer seem exotic and Latin American. They're just buildings and signs.
It no longer crosses my mind how sweet and quaint it is that the school bus picks me up on the corner every morning to take me to school. Now it's just transportation. I used to find it titillating that the bus driver leaves the door open has he chugs down the block to the next pick-up. Now it's just part of the morning routine.
Getting in a taxi, not only am I able to effectively communicate where it is that I want to go, I can orient to the extent that I would have a clue if the driver were bringing me in the wrong direction in an attempt to abduct me.
This is certainly not to say that things have become boring or hum-drum. There's still plenty of newness to keep me occupied.
For example, I did spend about 15 minutes in the cleaning aisle of MegaMaxi, wondering which of the many colorful and intensely perfumed products people might use to clean their floors. I thought about texting Nicole, but then I said, NO! I will do this on my own! And persevered reading labels until I found one that clearly had the words "floor" and "clean" in it, and that didn't make me gag from the scent. People here seem to really like heavily perfumed products.
This was only after another quarter of an hour or so that I spent at the ATM, trying to activate my bank card for the first time. The problem was that I read so slowly in Spanish as I was trying to parse out the instructions, the machine kept spitting my card back out at me, figuring I must have changed my mind about my transactions after all this time.
I have also figured out how to pay my bills, and in fact it is extremely convenient: Bertita, my landlord and neighbor pays them for me, along with her own, and I reimburse her. Perfect! And I have learned to fry empanadas (granted the are pre-made supermarket ones, but I don't let that dampen my feeling of accomplishment.)
And I am trying not to lose track of the super-saturated colors of the blossoms on the trees -- hot pink, deep purple and vibrant neon orange. These were stunning to me when I first arrived, and I intend to continue being stunned by them.
Socially, I am slowly but surely starting to make new friends. It's actually an odd thing, to have to go and make all new friends at the age of 30 (well, thankfully not ALL new, because I still have Nicole.) But it's a strange sensation to be surrounded by perfectly lovely and pleasant people who have no idea about your past history or anything much about you, other than they, like you, decided to move to Ecuador this year. I guess I had kind of forgotten what it feels like to have to actively pursue relationships with people, and to do the work of getting to know someone. It feels strange, knowing that I have so many friends and family at home who know me and understand me and love me deeply and unconditionally, and here I am dipping my toes into little friendship pools, making the perfunctory jokes, finding polite topics of conversation, searching for common ground.
My work life, however, feels like it's becoming pretty solid. For the last month I've been totally immersed in school and all the work of setting up a classroom, carefully building piece by piece my little ecosystem designed to help my students thrive. There's a lot that goes into it, but the good news is that I think we're starting to reach homeostasis, where the kids and the room can function on their own. Boundaries have been drawn, expectations have been set, and we can start to shift our attention as a class from the basic understanding of how we do things to the more interesting task of what we're setting out to do.
One of the focuses of our international curriculum is teaching the students to be balanced. This is an interesting task for someone like me, who has a tendency to throw myself into my work and focus on nothing else, almost as a coping mechanism... especially here, in a world where everything is a little different and strange, where there is so much I don't understand, where even basic errands still require quite a bit of forethought and planning, and inquiring, and looking up words in the dictionary... it has been comforting to focus my attention on what I do understand - grading rubrics, charts about place value and order of operations, behavior systems, learning objectives. My dear old friends, comfortingly the same on this continent as they are back home.
But now I feel like I am ready to start venturing out of my safe school zone and exploring the world around me a little more. I want to set up routines so I can enjoy my life here, not just my work.
And with that said, time to go meet Sarah for dinner!
Sunday, September 20, 2015
Things I have been adapting to in Ecuador
- milk in a bag
- the neighborhood dog that barks for a solid hour at sunup and sundown, every single day, like this: bark BARK, bark BARK, bark BARK, bark BARK, bark BARK, bark BARK...
- crossing busy streets Frogger-style due to scarce pedestrian crosswalks
- washing fruits and vegetables in vinegar solution before eating them. (This has not been helpful for my already abysmal track record of not consuming enough fruits and vegetables)
- Alan not being around, then being around for a week, and now not being around again
- Aji (tangy hot sauce) on everything
- Hulu, Songza, and Pandora being blocked
- feeling house-bound after dark unless I'm going somewhere with someone
- empanadas available in the supermarket!
- daily hummingbird sitings
- cool mornings, warm afternoons
- soccer games on Sundays
- haggling with taxi drivers
- volcano and earthquake drills at school
- not drinking water from the tap
- wearing a watch instead of taking out my cell phone to check the time
- carrying $20 or less and no cards with me unless I am on my way to go shopping
- speaking Spanish! I have overcome my period of awkward mutism
- Two types of beer: Pilsener and Club.
- Fruits I have yet to indentify
- catching the schoolbus in the morning to get to work
- no recycling of glass
- no ice of unknown origins (unless you are willing to risk a bout of Ecua-belly)
- the peculiar squeaky/honking sound that advertises the presence gas vendors as they drive around in their trucks in case you need a new canister for your stove
- vehicles piled high with family members, including children who are definitely not strapped in and definitely are not riding in a car seat
- people doing things like smoking out of the window of a public bus
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