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.