Teaching English in Cuenca

I can hardly believe I’ve been teaching English in Cuenca for 10 weeks!  I gave the last final exam on Saturday.   Now we have a 2-week break before classes resume on July 3.  I am really looking forward to my vacation and I also know that I’ll miss the relationships I’ve established with my students.

I’m teaching at CEDEI, www.cedei.org.  At it’s 20^th anniversary celebration last week, I learned that it was originally set up as a non-profit dedicated to promoting intercultural understanding.   But because they need to run it as a business, tuition costs unfortunately prevent the majority of Cuencanos from attending.

CEDEI building in downtown, with typical traffic jam

Most of my students probably represent the 1% of Ecuador.  I'm guessing that their parents perhaps pay $3.00/hour for English lessons—not much by our standards but far out of the reach of most Ecuadorian families.  One of my students told me that he and his family are traveling to Europe this summer.  A couple of my other students will spend time at their home on the beach—coincidentally, the same beach where I spent several days after my English teachers’ training.  One of the members of this beachside community is a former President of Ecuador who spent his time under house arrest in his luxurious seaside home.

Despite the fact that I’m teaching a lot of rich kids, I do enjoy my job!  My favorite class has been a group of young adults, all in their 20’s, who are eager to learn and always ready to laugh.  After the last class, they took me out for pizza!

Class taking a break in the CEDEI courtyard

At the other end of the age spectrum has been my class of two 11-year old boys.  Because one was quite hyperactive, I had to keep things lively.   I hope that between games of Pin the Tail on the Donkey and Tic Tac Toe they might have picked up a bit of English.  

The most challenging has been the 4-hour class Saturday morning made up of 6 teens who would no doubt prefer to be in bed at 8:30 am.  Over the past 10 weeks, they gradually warmed up to each other (and to me) and they actually got a bit rowdy toward the end.  Here we are celebrating the end of class at a popular ice cream parlor downtown.

I am reminded how much I love teaching!  I could be the grandmother of most of my students and sometimes feel a bit motherly (or grandmotherly) toward them.  I gather that there is a lot of pressure put on them to get into the right private high school and to achieve.  My hope is that they leave this English school with a positive experience learning English –and the confidence & desire to continue studying it.

Next week I'll be traveling to the coast for a few days with a couple of my fellow English teachers.  We hope to see some whales on our day trip to Isla de la Plata also known as "The Poor Man's Galapagos."  More about that later!

My mornings in Cuenca

The excitement of living in Cuenca is wearing off and I’m settling into a daily routine.  Thought I’d share a bit about it.

I’m living in a 3-bedroom apartment in a residential section of this city of 500,000.   My apartment is upstairs, above the apartment of my American friends, Peg and Mike.  Here's a photo of the apartment with Peg and Mike outside our gate.  We are well fortified against "ladrones" (thieves.)  Like most Ecuadorians, we not only live behind a locked gate, but the downstairs windows are barred and each apartment has two locked inner doors as well.

We live across the street from a public elementary school and around the corner from a private school. The first thing I become aware of in the morning is the sound of children’s voices as they gallop down the street or pile out of cars and into their schoolyard.  Yesterday I watched a taxi pull up in front of the school and eight children emerged from it!   

The kids in this school wear a uniform of sweat pants and athletic jackets.  Other schools have more formal attire, typically plaid skirts & sweaters for girls and pants & blazer for boys.  There’s one school downtown where all the students look like little doctors because they wear long white coats over their clothing!

School starts at 7 a.m. and school traffic noise must begin a good half hour before that.  If I should happen to sleep through the noise of cars and kids, the P.A. system will surely wake me up.  The entire school seems to gather in the courtyards for morning announcements which often go on for a half an hour.  I can barely understand a word—due to the terrible quality of the broadcast system more than my elementary Spanish.  Occasionally, a tiny squeaky voice comes on.  I figure it must be a prize student whose reward for good work is the privilege of addressing the student body.  I always smile when I hear this child’s voice first thing in the morning.  Here's a view from my window of the rather dreary school playground.

The school play yard is nothing more than a muddy field with one moveable soccer goal.  I’m reminded of the great creativity of kids as I watch them running around chasing a ball with no semblance of structured teams, or throwing the ball over the goal as if it were a volleyball net.  They all seem to have a great time.  Interestingly, the private school around the corner has a manicured play field with well-maintained playground equipment.  A visual reminder of class differences.

At 7:30 am, without fail, I hear a new sound—seven car beeps in a row followed by about 4 seconds of silence. I’ve learned that this strange Morse Code of Ecuador signals the arrival of the gasman.  Most houses, ours included, heats our water with gas canisters that are hooked up to “on demand” water heaters.   When we no longer get hot water we know it’s time to flag down the gasman to get a new canister.  He hoists it on his shoulder, practically runs up the stairs with it and carries the old off to be refilled.  The only problem with this system is that I never know when the hot water will stop functioning.  I keep fingers crossed it won’t start running cold when my hair is full of shampoo!

Speaking of plumbing (one of the essentials of life, of course), it took me a few days to master the art of shower taking.  Found out that in order to get hot water in the shower, you have to run the hot water in the bathroom sink at the same time.   None of the plumbing in Ecuador is up to the task of handling toilet paper, so all of us gringos have to develop a new habit of putting TP in the waste basket.

I don't start teaching until 3 p.m. on weekdays, so I usually can have a leisurely start to my day.  My morning routine includes making myself a cup of coffee using the ingenious invention of a "coffee sock"--a reusable cloth coffee filter on a metal frame.  Here's a photo.

Until yesterday, I was making due with a tiny apartment-sized refrigerator, but Peg and Mike have just improved my life immensely by buying a full-sized one for this apartment.  I cook using a 4-burner hotplate, but so far I haven’t really missed an oven.  As I do my morning dishes, I can look out the back window and observe the activity of the mini-farm behind the house.  Our indigenous neighbors keep busy tending their chickens, calves, sheep and lovely golden retrievers.  They make a little extra money running a car park for teachers of the private school in the empty lot next to their house.  Here's the view out my kitchen window.

So that's how I start the day!  I'll write more about my teaching experience in my next entry.