9/23

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9/17

Well, as soon as I got over the stomach sickness, I acquired the head cold Sean was carrying around with him. I´ve been getting a lot of rest and hopefully it will pass soon. I stayed home from school again today. I thought it´d be better of me to stay home and rest rather than expose the kids to a cold. Last night, our housemate gave Sean and I a very insightful winetasting. He worked in a quirky little wine shop back in Oxford, so he just seemed to know everything about the stuff. After a few sips of each of the wines, my head was pounding and I had to go to sleep. I had a headache to begin with, but I didn´t want to be left out. This weekend was a relaxing one and Sean and I stayed in most of the time, made tons of food, and watched movies. We went to play pool on Friday and Sean lost his voice recorder in the cab. He was so sad! Today we are going to go to get our Censo Card, which will be my ID while I´m here. Anyone staying over 90 days in Ecuador needs to get one. We´re supposed to get it within the first 30 of staying here, which expires soon for us. I think we´ll end up going to the office today, we´ll get an appointment and a list of the things we´ll need. That what my volunteer org told me, at least.

9/13

So, I´ve been feeling a bit ill the past three days, so I went home early from school yesterday and took the day off today. Volunteering has gotten easier now that I´m an assistant to the 2nd grade teacher. The kids are so wild that they haven´t learned anything yet! My Spanish vocabulary is now composed of phrases like, ¨Sit down, be quiet, stop, and listen to the teacher¨. I watched a video the other day about the Remar Foundation. It´s an international Christian organization that will take in people who need shelter, education for their children, or drug or alcohol abuse related counceling. So, they will take in these people in return that they work for them. All the money that Remar makes gets distributed throughout the people in their projects on a need basis. It´s very communist. I think it´s cool that I´m an agnostic-atheist-hindu-soto zen buddhist volunteering for an evangelical Christian organization. I´m not sure they would think it funny if they found out, though. Just trying to be well-rounded here. I have a ton of fun with the kids and I´m always exhausted by the end of recess. I went to watch that video Tuesday morning, and I returned to the classroom about two hours later, and a third of the kids put down what they were doing to run up and hug me. They call me ¨tia¨which means ¨aunt¨. It´s how they refer to all of their teachers, and I think it´s really sweet. I try to hug the kids as often as I can because I know that some of them come from really difficult situations. The woman in charge told me that about 75% of Ecaudorians live below the poverty line, and sometimes the parents will make the children go out and beg all day for money. If they don´t come home with money they are sometimes beaten. The woman told me that kids will come to the organization to get away from their family situations and the organization will have to go through a ton of paperwork immediatly to get them in their care, and sometimes the children have to return to their families. Some of these kids are really shy and adorable, and I have to repeat to myself ¨do not adopt one, Krystina¨.

Tuesday was Sean´s birthday. He´s now 22. He says he´s catching up to me. Both of us were too sick to eat birthday cake though, he with a head cold and me with a stomach thing, so there´s a whole birthday cake still siting in our fridge. Hopefully tonight will be the night for that. Tomorrow we have an appointment to look at an apartment. It sounds great, but we´re not sure about where in Quito it is. Sean´s getting tired of his super long commute every morning, understandably so.

9/9

So this was my favorite weekend in Ecuador, but I´ll get to that in a bit. My second day of volunteering was as exhausting as the first. Since everything was so disorganized on Thursday, I thought Friday would be similar and I could just do whatever I wanted. Wrong. After the kids did their morning stretches and song together, the principal led me into the fourth grade room and told me to teach them for 40 minutes. I had no lesson plan, or anything. He just took me to the front of the class and said this is your new English teacher, and the teacher & her assistant gave me the go-ahead to teach. I was dumbfounded. Completely unprepared. So I taught them ¨Good morning teacher¨and I attempted to teach them ¨My name is¨ and I had brought crayons and paper for them to draw ¨My name is...¨ name tag signs. I tried the Alphabet Song, which went well until about ¨Q¨. Then the principal came in, as it must have been 40 minutes later, and brought me into the next room - Second Grade. The teacher told me that they were busy with something and I should come back after the break. So, then the principal guides me to a high schooler that needed help with his English homework. He was creating a little English-Spanish dictionary, so that was fun. I thought I could use this time to page through the English material I had and create some kind of lesson plan for the second graders, but I spent the entire time helping that boy and fending off toddlers that were taking everything out of my backpack and throwing it around the room, and drawing in all of my books with my crayons. So one half of my brain was busy trying to understand what the high schooler was asking me, while the other half of my brain was trying to keep scissors and crayons out of the toddlers mouths. One of the little ones ran off with all of my crayons and I never saw him again. Then, before I knew it the break was finished and I was led into the Second Grade Room again. So, I´m still unprepared and now the principal is watching me. So I make all the kids stretch up with me and then stretch down. Then I had the stand up and then sit down. They were totally reacting to the up/down thing, and I thought that would be a good way to get ¨Sit down¨ into their vocabulary. They could say ¨Good morning teacher¨but then everything good went bad when I got them all in a line to introduce themselves while I gave them stickers. It was the stickers that did it. They were pushing and punching. I didn´t know what to do and the teacher was out the room at that time. So the teacher came back and helped me out. She made them all do their first homework assignment which consisted of them copying a zigzag line over and over again in their notebooks. It got them to settle down, for the most part. So, at the end of the class I told the teacher that it is really difficult for me to teach English when I can´t communicate in Spanish and I asked if I could just be her assistant until I understood the language more. She really seemed to like the idea, since it seems to me that she´s the only teacher without a volunteer assistant. It works out great for both of us because she that I could learn Spanish from her while she learns English from me. I asked if it was necessary for me to speak with the principal, and she made it seem like she was the one in charge and it wasn´t necessary. I guess we´ll wait to see what happens on Monday.

Saturday, Sean and I decided to go to Otavalo. It is a town about two hours away from Quito, with a big market on the weekends. The bus ride there was great; the scenery phenomenal. I spent way too much money. I found a big tapestry that I really fell in love with. The background is hot pink, and the colors really burst out of it. Anyway, the women wanted $65 for it, because it was probably the biggest tapestry they had. I really didn´t want to pay more than $35 for it, but I haggled them down to $40. I think it´s still a deal, as the thing will be hanging on one of my walls someday as a great reminder of this trip. I also bought a few other things, and I could´ve bought more if I hadn´t spent all my money first. I tried a bite of cuy at lunch, which is fried guinea pig. It was so incredible sad and I´ll never do it again. I was fine until I saw that I was holding onto a little claw foot. Oh man, that was a terrible feeling. I also had a giant tilapia fish staring at me from my plate, which I was entirely okay with. It´s weird what we become desensitized to, with food.

While in Otavalo, Sean and I saw the President of Ecuador! I don´t know what he was doing there, but we were only, maybe, two car lengths away from him. That was a big surprise and there was a mixed reaction from the crowd. Elections are being held later this month to choose the people that will be in charge of changing the constitution. There´s propaganda everywhere for the candidates. Every candidate gets to choose a number and so you see ¨vote 25¨or whatever stickers everywhere.

Today, the owner of our hostel took Sean, myself, our British friend and her friend (one of our neighbors) out to lunch for Sean´s birthday. We didn´t even tell her that his birthday is coming up (Sept, 11th), she just remembered from when she took down our passport info the first day we arrived! I wasn´t expecting her to take us out to such a nice place! There was a band there playing Ecuadorian music, and there was a huge buffet with great food. Sean, myself and Chris stuffed ourselves until we felt like we were going to explode. It was like we hadn´t eaten anything for weeks! What a sight. We were so grateful and we had to greatest time.

9/6

So I finally talked with the woman in charge of the Young Mothers´Project and she suggested that I teach English at an elementary school that her organization also runs. I told her that I don´t know Spanish and I´m not sure how to teach English and she didn´t seem to mind, because I would be working with kids and it would be basic stuff. I´ve always wanted to be an elementary school teacher, but today was daunting. I arrived at the school, which is only a five minute walk or so from my hostel, at 8 am. I met that woman in charge, who could speak English and she introduced me to the principal as their new English teacher. Then she left and I didn´t see her again. The principal, who can also speak a little English, led me to a small class of 11 to 15 year olds. They already knew some English, so I couldn´t do ¨A is for apple¨or anything. They kids weren´t really responsive to me, so I didn´t know what they knew and I wasn´t sure where to go with the whole thing. Then the principal came in and gave me an English workbook he had and told me to do anything I wished. If I wanted it to be recess, it was recess. So, shortly after that I gave the kids stickers and let them go play. There was a cute little girl named Camilla that told me the teacher is beautiful and drew me a picture that said ¨The teacher¨and it had a heart with little heart eyes and a little heart nose. Camilla was at my side most of the day. She´s awesome.

So, during the recess, I talked to another volunteer from the States, and she said that they may have said something to her about being a teacher, but she´s been there for weeks and has just been fixing up the school (classes just began three days ago) and has been playing with the kids. She made it sound like the people in charge didn´t really care what you did as long as you were nice to the children. So I just played with the kids for the next hour or so. They´re really affectionate. The other volunteer and I had kids constantly coming up to us to sit on our laps or play with our hair. Children were constantly hugging me, and a little girl named Maria was really fond of pinching my cheeks. She´s maybe four years old and she grabbed me by the hand and paraded me around. The principal put me in Maria´s class, actually, after a little while. There was another volunteer there and we were just looking after the kids as they did an assignment (which was not as easy as it sounded). The principal told me that the children were orphans or had parents in one the organization´s (it´s the Remer Foundation, by the way. It´s a Christian organization that does a lot of social service projects) other projects. He said most of the children had parents with drug abuse problems or were physically abused. So, I think I´m going to like just hanging out with the kids as I learn Spanish, but I hope I don´t have to teach again! The kids would ask me questions in Spanish, and since I couldn´t understand it was frustrating for both of us. So I guess I´ll show up at 8 am again tomorrow and see what happens! The place is in complete disorder, but I think the main idea is to just have a safe environment for the kids to grow in.

9/3

Because we weren´t sure of how to get to Otavalo, and because we slept in, Sean and I decided to go to the Teleferico yesterday. The Teleferico is a cable car that rises about 12,000 feet up into the mountains. It gives an amazing view of Quito, and as it turns out, you can hop out at the top and go for a hike. I´m not sure how far the path went, but we walked for quite a distance. Walking up the mountain was exhausting and I had to stop for breath at every new plateau. The view was breathtaking. At some points we were looking down at clouds. This whole venture is an absolute must for anyone who plans on visiting. Running down the mountain was a ton of fun, too. I employed the ¨duck stance¨I learned in martial arts to not get ahead of myself. Sean also employed a martial arts move of a different kind: the dive roll, which is something like a somersault, but one would roll from shoulder to opposite hip as opposed rolling on the spine. Sean biffed while running down a steep hill, he dive rolled and stood up cover in dirt. Well done, SeaniePants.