Highlights From The Past Couple Weeks

First, I want to apologize for not posting in for so long. I've been really angry at my internet connection for resetting every time I try to upload photos and losing whatever I was trying to upload. Leslie finally got her pictures uploaded to Facebook, so when she's done uploading stuff I'm going to try it for myself. My laptop is better than hers, so it should work.

Second, here is a list of notes, comments and highlights from these past couple weeks. I'm sure I'm leaving out plenty, but this is what I've remembered to write to to remind myself to write about:

-I've started taking basketball shorts to work on Tuesdays and Fridays, because those are my heaviest gym-class days and nothing is going to stop me from playing soccer with the kids. It's great practice for me, I'm losing weight at a fairly rapid pace and I turn recess into an opportunity to teach teamwork and sportsmanship. And no matter what the weather is like, be it cold and raining, I'm sweating enough at work on Tuesdays and Fridays that the shorts valen la pena.

-We finally have our tickets for the Ecuador-Uruguay World Cup Qualifier Match on Saturday, October 10th in Quito, Ecuador. First I'll explain the importance of the game, second the travel agency package we were able to purchase. Currently, Ecuador is in 4th place in South America for World Cup Qualifying. The top 4 teams in South America after the qualifying is over automatically qualify for the World Cup. The 5th-place team plays the 4th-place team fro North/Central America and the winner of that game also goes to the World Cup. Right now, after Ecuador beats Urugay on Oct0ber 10th (it's a home game and Uruguay SUCKS), they have to go to Chile who has been playing really well and has already accumulated enough points in qualifier matches to qualify for the WC. After beating Uruguay, the WORST Ecuador can do is place 5th in South America and play in the play-in game and the best is clearly qualifying straight-up for South Africa 2010.
So, our package. We have round-trip bus fare with luxury buses owned and operated by Boom Travel. Luxury means the seats are actually comfy and recline far enough that you can sleep during night rides. We leave from Cuenca on Friday the 9th at around 10pm and hopefully sleep during the 10-hour drive through the mountains to get to Quito. When we arrive, a breakfast is provided for us and we go directly to the stadium in Quito where we will get in line to enter the stadium around 8 hours before the start of the game at 4pm Saturday afternoon. We could only find general admission tickets, which means we can end up anywhere in over 70% of the stadium and no seats are reserved. So it's very good that we'll be able to wait so long to get decent seats. Our tickets are included in the package along with a sack lunch while we wait in line. Hopefully the atmosphere at the stadium will be exciting while we wait eight hours for the game to begin; I know hundreds if not thousands of people will have been sleeping in line at the stadium for a few days before the game so they should be pretty pumped by the time we get there. The package includes our bus trip to the hotel after the game and the hotel reservation. Though after the win I don't plan on doing much sleeping because the town will be going crazy. Breakfast the next morning in included as well, along with the bus ride back to Cuenca leaving at around 9am. Leaving then means two things. 1) We get back in time for a late dinner Sunday night and whatever lesson planning we have to do for Monday at school. 2) We spend almost the entire ride in the daylight, and the view of the mountains from the road between Quito and Cuenca is spectacular, so I've heard. But I may be doing a lot of sleeping on the bus, depending on how much fun I had the night before. And if Leslie gets tired early, this is one time I am definitely leaving her behind to party. so long as I get her to the hotel and into bed safely so she can get some sleep. The entire package was $100 per person, so $200 for the two of us. This game is my thing, so I paid for both of us.

-I don't want to talk about the Razorbacks. All my fears about this season and our coaching staff have already been confirmed.

-So we finally tried El Asador, the Saturday before we played frisbee and walked along the Riobamba. It's Ecuador's version of fast food. We had heard the chicken is good there, so we ordered a couple chicken dishes to try. It's more expensive than almuerzos, but tastes better and is prepared equally as fast. It's also not sketchy, and you can order full or half chickens with tons of side dishes and feed up to 8 people for around 2-3 dollars each.

-We learned a while back that going out and buying almuerzos (menu-of-the-day lunches at hole-in-the wall restaurants, $1.25-$1.50) are actually cheaper than buying food and bringing it home to cook. We've started getting almuerzos for lunch every day, every once-in-a-while going someplace a little nicer and a little more expensive.

-We bought Leslie a nice fake Ecuador jersey for five bucks.

-Santiago, the 2nd-grader with Downs Syndrome, has started playing soccer with us during recess. Most of the time it's a pain because he doesn't understand that the game has rules. He only understands that scoring a goal is good. One time, before the older kids were released to recess after eating lunch, Santi and some other young kids and I were playing soccer, Slocomb and Santi vs. everyone. I spent the entire time trying to get Santi opportunities to score goals. It was hard, because he just followed me around and said "Paseme paseme." Every once in a while whenever I saw an opportunity for him to score, I'd yell "Santi! Over there over there!" and point several times until he understood he was supposed to stop following me around and I'd pass him the ball and he'd get a good open shot. He scored twice. In a live, real game with a bunch of kids his age where nobody took it easy on him for being different. He was so happy each time that he had to cover his face. I don't know if that's a Santi thing or what; all I know is that I've never been so happy I had to cover my face. They talk a lot about integration and incorporation of kids with special needs into the classrooms with the other students. There is nothing more normal in Ecuador than scoring a goal in a soccer game playing with the kids from your class. That's a feeling he'll never be able to get in any classroom anywhere.

-I taught the 5th graders how to play 4-Square and they loved it. They're really the only class with enough patience to learn new weird games from the US. They had a lot of fun, especially after they had the courage to change the rules when they reached the King/Queen square. I'm going to try kickball in the next couple weeks, with all of the classes.

-I also taught Daniel, the 5-year-old son of the empleada who does the Coloma's cooking and cleaning, how to have thumb wars. He loves it.



-We're working on setting up a relationship with an elementary school in the United States so that our 3rd-5th graders and have pen pals. I have a friend, Jaime Kent, who teaches at a school in Washington DC in a Salvadorean neighborhood where all the kids grow up learning English at school and Spanish at home. I'm hoping we can get hooked up with them, so that our kids can write and receive letters in both English and Spanish.

I think that's it for now. If i realize that I've missed anything, I can always edit the post. Again, I'm sorry it's been so long in between posts.

Our Trip To Baños

I recommend that you visit Leslie's Facebook page for pictures of the spa we visited. I wasn't ever planning on going into too much detail about the spa, but I will give you the url for its website: http://www.piedradeagua.com.ec/ There's an English option on the webpage that opens.

These pictures are more about the view we got from a hill I climbed up and the last two are from the church in Baños. The inside is incredibly beautifully decorated, but I'm not taking pictures inside an active church. Museum/Tourist trap churches in Europe are another thing entirely.

I also want to say that we went to an incredible restaurant with lots of great grilled food. Their mayonnaise was phenomenal as well. A lot of places have homemade mayonnaise (made daily of course) with spices and oils and other tasty stuff and ketchup here is a lot sweeter that in the US. Whenever we go back to Baños for the spa we'll always go back to this place too.



This is Leslie in one of the fuentes termales.



This is me on top of a ledge I climbed (from the side you can't see.) I'm not sure if you can tell, but that's my Procter t-shirt. The Procter flag flies in the Andes.



This is another picture of me sitting on top of the ledge. I'm not sure why my eyes are closed; I was taking in the view.



The view was the reason I climbed up there. This is a part of it.



Eventually, Leslie climbed up there with me.



We sat up there for a few minutes being cute and wondering how we ever ended up living in the Andes Mountains.



This is a picture of the church at the top of the hill the town of Baños is on and the little market set up in front of it. I realized on the way there why they put their church where they did. Not only because it is most visible and most iconic at the top of the hill, but once you climb all the way up there you don't want to leave until the end of the day.



This is the view of Cuenca, down in the valley, from the top of Baños.

Saturday this Past Weekend

Nothing really important or interesting happened this past Saturday, except that Leslie and I tried out this chain restaurant "Restaurante El Asador," which is a bit on the expensive side but their chicken and fries are both good. It's the closest thing that Cuenca has to fast food in the US, and it's a fairly popular chain here we figured we'd check it out. The one we went to is very close both to our house and to the river Tomebamba: the river that cuts through the center of the valley in which Cuenca sits. So we took a frisbee with us to play in the grassy fields next to the river, and ended up walking up and down as much of the river as has grassy fields on the west side of town. I haven't posted pictures in a while; this post is really just an opportunity to share some photos. Nothing really important happened this past Thursday and Friday. Also, we finally got our passports back from the government and got our Ecuadorian identification cards today. I'm also finally confident that I'm better at soccer than all the elementary school kids that I teach. But most importantly, I think Leslie and I found out how we're getting tickets to the Ecuador-Uruguay game on October 10th. Tomorrow afternoon we'll go buy them. Hopefully I'll post again soon about our tickets. Okay, finally, here are some pictures from el Rio Tomebamba.



"Enjoy Coca-Cola"



This is a picture of an interesting juxtaposition of cultural phenomena: chulas cuencanas doing their laundry in the Rio Tomebamba right in front of a busy street and the grocery store where Leslie and I buy our vegetables and rice and sometimes our humitas.



There were a couple rock-chair formations like this, so I stopped at one to take a rest and Leslie took a picture.



This is Leslie, with some buildings and the mountains in the background.

Wednesday Was Supposed To Be An Easy Day...

...but I didn't know I wouldn't be teaching any classes. I was scheduled to do nothing until after breakfast the first recess, so I spent the hour nursing my sunburns (the skin on the back of my neck was peeling, you get sun burns WAY more easily up in the mountains), eating peanuts and helping Jen get her art class cleaned up after painting and glittering. I was scheduled to teach Language (English) to the 3rd-grade class after that, but we ended up having all the kids from 1st through 5th clean out the flower gardens of all the weeds and dead plants and water whatever was left. So I ended up going all the way to lunch and the second recess without teaching a class. Today is the day I was supposed to go with one of the directors to get sports stuff for Corporal Expression class, so after I ate my lunch during recess I went over to the offices to see whether or not we were going. I was told to get ready to go right then and there and to tell the national teachers that I wouldn't be taking their kids to CE class that afternoon because I would be gone with one of the directors. So I went and told them. Turns out, the two teachers who thought I would be teaching their kids weren't the two teachers whose classes were on my schedule, but we got it all worked out and now everybody knows where Slocomb will and will not be on Wednesdays.

So Braulio, the "I'm not sure what his official job title is because I'm still not quite sure what he does though I am sure that it's important," and Ramiro, the really cool really physically-fit caretaker of the school who lives and works full-time on-site (one time he climbed up the wall of a classroom and swung across the rafters cutting strings off on the ceiling, he's also from the Amazonian region of Ecuador so a lot of people call him "mono"), and I all went to the mall together to buy sports stuff and later to a ferrotiera (hardware store) get Rami (Ramiro) some stuff he needed to make repairs. We went to an expensive sports store called "Marathon," where Mark Odenwelder tells me I may be able to find a legitimate Ecuador jersey in my size because that's where he goes to get his (he's not my size, but he's not your average Ecuadorian either; we and another guy from the US joke that we three are of "un-rob-able" size), and we bought one nice basketball and one really nice soccer ball. The soccer ball is a Mikasa size 5, which is important because it is the official ball of ecuavoley. Ecuavoley is exactly what is sounds like: Ecuadorian volleyball. They play three-on-three and they use a soccer ball, probably because before volleyball became a big deal in Ecuador (which it is now, but only in its Ecuadorian form) that's all anybody had. Later we went to Carol, a "hipermercado" (Ecuadorian for WalMart), and bought a couple cheap basketballs, a couple cheap soccer balls, a cheap small soccer ball for the younger kids, a cheap volleyball, some tennis balls and some pong balls. I also saw that you can get a brand new guitar there for under thirty bucks. Of course, it's not a nice guitar, but for twenty-seven dollars I'll ask the music teacher and the school if he'll spend a bit of our free time together teaching me how to play guitar. Leslie could also teach me a bit I'm sure. My saxophone-learning process was delayed because the conservatory (which here means the place to learn elementary music, not the place for masters of music) was completely closed until all the kids went back to school, which of course when I started work so I haven't yet had a chance to go back and figure out what the deal is with learning the saxophone here in Cuenca. But it will happen. After the mall, which is pretty much just like any mall in the states, we headed back to school and stopped at a ferrotienda on the way to get screws and rope (for jump-rope because a normal jump-rope costs 4 bucks here and a hundred meters of rope costs a couple dollars) and a few other things. This stop took forever, because every couple minutes the lady running the store would remember where she had put a certain size screw Rami needed and every few minutes Braulio would remember another thing he needed Rami to fix and the lady would have to find that too. Then the lady had to run through all 20ish different things we ended up with and calculate the price for everything with a calculator. We got back to school just after all the kids had left, just in time for Braulio to stop in with the other directors and say a word and take Liv, Jen, Leslie and me to a restaurant near the Coloma's house.

The restaurant is called "Good Affinity" and it's owned by the parents of two of the students at our school who are both adorable, smart and speak very good English for their ages. It's a chinese vegetarian restaurant owned and operated by a Taiwanese couple and the food there is very reasonably priced and very tasty as well. We learned today (we plan to go there once a week, both because it's owned by the parents of a couple of our kids and they like to give us free desserts every once-in-a-while and because the food is good and fairly priced and Jen is a vegetarian and can order anything on the menu) that the "menu del dia," also known as the "almuerzo," is never as good as the other things on the menu and even though it's cheaper and we're all very money-conscious because we make sixteen dollars a day at work we're probably only going to order from the regular menu from now on.
Lunch was good. It started raining pretty hard when we first got there (we were sitting outside at first) and it kept raining for a long while after we were done eating, so we stayed until it stopped which wasn't a problem because it wasn't too busy and the people who run the place like us. Leslie and I walked home, which is only around ten minutes from this restaurant, depending on the traffic on the streets we have to cross.

When we got home, Nellie and Angel were here (Angel had been in out of town on business) and one of their friends was here as well. Angel and the friend and I (though we did the cordial introduction thing we never learned each others' names) spent a few minutes chatting about random Ecuadorian things like the game against Uruguay, traveling around the country and other topics. After Angel left the kitchen, leaving me alone to converse with his friend for a good ten minutes, he came back and asked me how I felt speaking with a coastal Ecuadorian because their accents and dialects sound so different. It was tough, but I was able to follow almost all of what he was saying because on the coast they cut up their Spanish the way we in the United States cut up our English. If they spoke English, the mountain Ecuadorians would say: "I'm going to the supermarket to buy some ice cream, don't you want to come with me?" Coastal Ecuadorians would say: "I'ma go to the store to buy ice cream, dontcha wanna come?" In casual settings, I definitely speak English like a costeño (This isn't me explaining what that words means {coastal person}, this is me explaining why I use parentheses so much. It's also the only time I'll ever use inappropriate parentheses grammar. I don't think in a linear pattern, and I definitely don't live life in a linear pattern either. I don't feel that my writing should follow the one-topic-at-a-time policy most people keep - especially now that my future doesn't depend on how it's graded - and I want this blog, MY blog, to reflect my life as much as it possibly can. Our mother used to always take us to the grocery store with her when Caldwell and I were young. When I was small enough to fit in the seat of a grocery cart - before Caldie came around - mom always had trouble with me pulling random foods off of the shelves and putting them in the cart. She'd end up at the checkout line with food she'd never wanted to buy or maybe even never seen before; eventually she had to pick her grocery stores according to how wide the aisles were. In my eyes, life isn't about taking the cart through the aisle. Life is about grabbing whatever you can and putting it in your cart.).

First Two Days of Teaching

Monday and Tuesday were the first two days that we international teachers had a schedule and supposed lesson plans. I say "supposed" lesson plans for two reasons. The first is that I teach gym class. For me, lesson planning a gym class just means keeping a record of all the games we've already played so that I can be sure to keep our activities diverse. It also means that I prepare ability-appropriate activities for students with special needs. I planned September last Sunday, in about ten minutes. Lesson planning for the Language classes I teach is different, however. First, we were told that the students would all have English Language books from which we would get our lesson planning (apparently here the lesson plan is "follow the book," so I'm going with the flow). So I lesson-planned September Language classes as "Follow the book." I also have a battery of wordy games and songs to do with the students when we reach the point in our 70-minute sessions of speaking in a foreign language (for the kids) when they just break down and the boys start fighting and the girls start coloring and doing their hair. Turns out, they won't be getting their books until October and we're supposed to be reviewing what the kids learned last year. Okay, I can handle that. But it would be helpful to know what the kids learned last year. So for right now all I'm doing is playing wordy games and singing wordy songs and with the younger kids I'm doing lots of repeat-after-me games and sing-along lots-of-motions songs.

Monday was a disaster. That's why I decided to wait until today to post on my blog because I don't like posting after a bad day; I'd much rather wait until after something good has happened so I won't sound angry. I didn't know I wouldn't have a book to work from until I arrived in the 3rd-grade classroom to teach English and the teacher told me what I just told you. And didn't tell me what I just told you that I still don't know. So I tried several games with the kids but it was still too early in the morning for them to be able to pay any attention to me. Failure. After that class, I was on duty to watch recess, which was fine. Then I had the middle of the day to myself so I made a gigantic Scrabble set out of letter tiles we have in the staff lounge to take with me to the 4th-grade class that afternoon. I had some trouble getting the 4th-graders to focus, mainly because they had just come inside from the second recess, so after a few minutes I just sat down and waited for everyone to get quiet. I'm still surprised that worked. My favorite bribe thus far for getting kids to do whatever educational (aka boring) is to tell them that whoever wins (because it's always a contest if I can make it into one, it helps make them want to do well) the current activity gets to pick the next one. That also worked with the 4th-graders, but after a 75-minute session with them and playing soccer with the kids a recess I was pooped and still had to teach Corporal Expression to the 5th graders. In my lesson plan, for the first day of CE and for all kids who are physically able (aka everyone that can both see and walk), I had tire relay races. Now, it is understandable for you to be questioning: "Tires? Why tires?" The answer is simple. They're my only resource for now until I can go shopping with one of the school directors to buy soccer balls and basketballs. I brought frisbees, but it's too early in the year for that. I pumped up two kickballs at the beginning of the year, but one has already exploded and the other is the only ball I have. There's also the basketball I found, but it's too old to be useful and the fact that the kids only want to kick it doesn't help the fact that I already have to pump air into it twice a day. The the basketball is in hiding until further notice. Yesterday was just a really stressful and tiring day. We also spent all afternoon shopping downtown and at the Cooperativa (I just call it the coop now) for food and other things for this week. We found a place where hopefully I can buy an Ecuador jersey that fits me, Leslie bought flowers, we bought a MoviStar sim card for our phone so that calling our friends will be 8-times cheaper, we bought food and we did something else I can't remember right now. And after all this and the Ecuadorian chocolate liqueur we bought to try I still couldn't sleep well last night.

Today has been a blast. I started the day with a doubleshot of second-graders (my 70ish-minute Language classes are two time blocks put together) for Language and I showed up mentally prepared to just play silly games and do silly songs. We started with head, shoulders knees and toes because when the kids sing along they're learning several parts of the human body. We also did a walkthrough of a regular morning with lots word reciting and of motions. Did you know how many things you have to do to be able to take a shower in the morning? Assuming you're already awake and out of bed, you have to take off whatever clothes you're wearing, open the door or curtain, make the big step into the stall, close the door or curtain, get the water started, get wet, put the shampoo on your hands, use the shampoo, get your soap ready however you prefer to use it, clean your body paying particular attention to your bottom because it's funny, wash all the soap and shampoo off of your body, turn off the water, open the door or curtain, take the big step out of the stall, close the door or curtain, grab your towel, dry off your body paying particular attention to your bottom because it's funny (you can also dry off inside the stall of course but we didn't), put your clothes on and leave the bathroom. And that's just taking a shower; what going through an entire morning routine would be like and imagine all the important words you can learn! Yes, today was a much better day than yesterday. The second-graders were too young to play with the big scrabble letters because they couldn't pay attention long enough to realize that you're supposed to use letters to make words, instead of using letters to build castles and tall stacks of nothing. What got them on the right track was that I offered to take them outside for our last several minutes together if each kid in the class made a word out of the letters on his or her table. The girls all spelled their names, which was no small feat considering their names are Arianna, Trinity and Lizbeth (my guess is that's the new trendy way to name your child Elizabeth in Ecuador). The other two girls needed considerable help from the national teacher and the therapist to be able to make words, but that's not because they aren't bright, only because they have physical limitations that make seeing and lining up tiles very difficult. A couple of the boys who really wanted to go play outside pondered and peddled their letters until they could come up with words like "cat" and "moon" and as soon as they had their words I let them go help the other several boys. Of course, that means that every other boy in the class ended up with the word "moon," but I thought that was clever enough to pass once and we went outside to play. Outside, I learned that these 2nd-graders are physically incapapble of lining up on a line and standing still for longer than it takes to say "Okay, what we're going to-." But it's all good, learning experience for me and nobody got killed or maimed. My next class today was these same kids for CE. Those who were able enjoyed rolling the tires around the concrete basketball/soccer area and I don't remember what we played after that but they enjoyed that as well. Actually I don't think they played anything after that because they arrived to my class around fifteen minutes late and the tires kept the entertained for the other twenty. The two girls Tati and Maria Josue, who both have trouble walking and Maria is mostly blind (I'm not sure what "mostly" means, that's just what I was told), sat down in the shade with Caro their national teacher and played pass by rolling the ball to each other with the basketball. I consider getting those two girls active in a CE class to be a special enough occasion for the basketball to appear.
My next class was CE with the first-graders. When they heard me say "Okay, everybody line up behind a tire" immediately their faces lit up and they didn't wait for me to tell them what to do. Those tires were rolling all over the place and they never would have stopped if some of them hadn't gotten tired and started to sit out. I wanted to play tag with them, but they'd never heard of it! What first grader hasn't ever played tag! Aside from the ones in the US right now, of course, because tag is obviously too violent an activity for children to be playing at school. Somebody might have an uh-oh and get a boo-boo and that's definitely not allowed at school in the US. The stranger part is that all the kids at the CEDEI school have heard of Sharks and Minnows and play in on the basketball court. I immediately changed the name of "Tag" to "Shark" and all of a sudden all the kids knew how to play. That was a lot of fun.
My last class of the day - I have more classes on Tuesday and Friday than any other day - I had CE with the 4th-graders. They were excited to play with the tires only because I told them the winner of the last race would get to choose what we played next. And they chose Red Rover. I had heard that the kids at this school love playing Red Rover (if you don't know what it is, wikipedia probably has a good page for it) So we played Red Rover which was interesting because the kids aren't old enough yet to be able to break each others' grips.
All-told, the day was much better because the kids enjoyed my classes more which made me enjoy my classes more and though I was equally exhausted going home from work I was in a much better mood.

Also, we're much closer to finding tickets to the Ecuador-Uruguay game. We're on a waiting list for a package deal which include a private bus roundtrip, one night in a hotel with breakfast, the game ticket and a sack lunch for eating at the stadium. We also think we've found people in Quito who can buy tickets for us (because they're only being sold at the stadium) and get them to us for a little more than the price of the tickets, which all things considered is incredibly cheap.

I'm excited for tomorrow; I only have three class periods and they should all go fairly well. Wednesday is my easy day. I may post again tomorrow evening, but after that I'll probably have to wait for the weekend :-P

The First Week of School

Sorry this post is so late; I told some people I'd post on Saturday and others on Friday afternoon. Well here it finally is.
I want to write about the first "real" days of school, Tuesday through Friday, and I'm gong to do it first by talking about the week in general, then by explaining some of the highlights of the week. Here it goes.
I should probably write something about this weekend too; that'll probably happen.

We were supposed to spend the week observing. What we ended up doing was running from classroom to classroom doing activities with the kids to give the national teachers a break, all while the other international teachers were trying to decorate their classrooms (painting, pictures, etc.) and I (not having a classroom to decorate) had to scrounge around for things I can use in gym class. My current list of resources includes: the basketball court with soccer goals, a basketball I found that had been in a ditch for a couple years and needs to be re-pumped full of air twice a day, three kickballs (one of the four I brought has already popped), and nine tires. I'm actually really excited about the tires; there's a lot that can be done with them relay-race- and spontaneous-activity-wise. I spent the week realizing that these kids are almost all younger than the campers at Procter, and so different games and activities spark and maintain their interest. I also learned that on the whole nothing at this school is ever going to be very organized. Except the international (aka USA) part of the team. Some of my activities worked well and some of them were "learning opportunities" for me. The two oldest classes of kids both love me and a lot more of the games to which I am accustomed work with them. I also learned a lot about how I can incorporate children with special learning/visual/physical needs into gym class. I'll write more about them in the highlights section. Which I guess is going to happen right now.

This isn't a very well-thought-out blog post, if you can't tell. I'm really just winging it. Unfortunately, that means I'm going to miss a few things from the week that I really wanted to mention. I'm sorry I waited so long to post.

First things first. The Razorback football team is 1-0 and is coming off of a bye week to play Georgia at home this coming Saturday. It'll be a sellout crowd, it's always a sellout crowd, and even though Georgia will be in the top-25 we'll be the favorites and we ought to beat them. I'm really excited.

My fantasy baseball team is gasping for air in the first round of the playoffs (though I must say, I'm impressed that in the first year I've ever cared about professional baseball, I made the 4-of-14-team playoff and had the second-best regular season record). However, my pitching is turning around and if I can pull out a few offensive categories by next Sunday I should be able to make the championship round.

My fantasy football team looks ready to win this first week. I'm the defending champion in this league, so it better win this week. My drafting strategy seems to have worked very nicely and I'm already scouring the free agents for good pickups and getting ready to offer some trades. I'm not going to give away my "in-season team improvement" strategy yet, because at least one other person in the league reads this blog occasionally. And if you're reading this, and I do offer you a trade, it'll still probably improve your team. It's just that I have a plan to use a combination of waiver-wire players and trades to make my team better.

I still don't care about any professional US sport enough to call myself a fan of any professional team. I still just follow the Razorbacks wherever they make it into the pros.

And regardless of whether or not you're reading my blog for sports updates, they're a very important part of my life - even here in Cuenca - and in my opinion definitely worthy of making a weekly highlight post.

Also, Leslie and I are looking into opportunities to go to the Ecuador-Uruguay World Cup Qualifier in Quito on Saturday, October 10th. We're going to the game, it's just a question of how and how much we want to pay for our seats.

Back to school. I'm not sure where to start. Okay, got it. There's a girl in the 2nd-grade class who has a crush on me. Her name is Tatiana but everyone calls her Tati. She has very little control of her body - she has a lot of trouble walking and using stairs and really only has one steady arm - and I think she has a crush on me because on Monday during recess I saw that she was sitting alone on a bench so I went and introduced myself and sat with her and chatted until she had to go back to class. She's incredibly bright, but incredibly shy when it comes to people who only speak to her in English. She understands us, but doesn't want to interact with any of the other international teachers. Whenever she needs to go somewhere and the national teachers don't have the time to walk her, generally I'm the one who helps her down or up the stairs. She's fiercely independent, but she wants you to sit and slide with her and she scuttles down the several staircases at the school. The school is definitely not handicap-safe on US standards. But we'll manage.

Another boy named Josue (Joshua) made my day one day when we were playing Simon Says in his 3rd-grade class and he was Simon. He's blind and his English isn't very good, but he's very eager to learn and to do everything everybody else does. And the class is willing and eager to help him. He'd been playing the game with us very well because each Simon said very clearly what they were doing and he could hear them and follow along with the actions. When it was his turn to lead, he would think for a second, yell out "SSSSSSimon says!" then he would think for a second, and he'd shake his body and flail his arms and jump up and down and everybody else would follow suit and laugh about how funny what they were doing was.

In the second grade class, a boy named Santi (Santiago) led the ABCs song for the class. He has Down Syndrome and is very socially awkward though all the kids in his class like him. He's really funny and clever. The best part was that after the song everybody clapped and shouted so loud that the national teacher came running back to the room to see what had gone wrong. Santi's face lit up in a way that adult's faces just can't. He was happier than anybody over the age of 15 ever will or can be. I'm almost in tears now just thinking about how happy it made him to sing the song and have everybody sing along with him and clap and shout for him. He was so happy that when Leslie and I had to leave the room he said "no vayan" repeatedly and tried to pull us back into the classroom and keep us there so that he could sing again. I wish we could have let him sing again.

I learned not to play soccer with the kids because they are better than me. Well, mostly I learned that I'm now a terrible goalkeeper even though that's almost all I ever did when I played on soccer teams as a young kid. I can play defense and handle the ball well enough to be better than these 4th and 5th grade kids, but not better enough to maintain that "I'm the teacher, you're the student" power relationship. Give me a couple weeks and I'll be able to work these kids like I'm drinking water. Every once in a while I can take the ball all the way down the court (we have to play on a cement basketball court), swerving around a couple or three kids and making the cross right in front of the goal to one of my teammates. I do it just to remind them that I'm still the teacher and they're still the kids. But I lose that power any time I try to be the goalie.

The kindergarten class (of 20 kids, which is WAY too many 4- and 5-year-olds for one class) will copy any motions I make, which makes entertaining them on the short term very easy. I got to read "Are You My Mother?" by P.D. Eastman (they have it in the school library!) to them, and I just scrapped the words and went around showing the kids the pictures and saying "Is this the little bird's mother?" and they'd all yell "Noooooo!" and sometimes they'd giggle when I pointed at some piece of heavy machinery. And they were all excited when the bird finally found its mother. That was awesome. "Are You My Mother?" by P.D. Eastman was by far Caldwell's and my favorite children's book growing up.

I read "Los Tres Cerditos" to the 2- and 3-year-old class. Which means I flipped through the pictures and said "Oh no! The big bad wolf is going to blow the house down!" and other things like that. The kids just stared pensively at the pictures, with their mouths hanging down and theirs eyes wide open. Every once in a while one would say "Lobo!" or "Casa!" It was cute.

The fourth-grade class loves me, and we think it's because they're just simply more responsive to guys and I'm the only male teacher at the school. They also had a male international teacher last year. As of now they're the only class that calls me "Tio Loco," just them and Tati.

The 5th grade class loves me too. With them, I use activities that inspire inter-student competition because they are mature enough to handle winning and losing. They're also capable of enough patience to play games like Hangman and Wax Museum.

Finding the basketball was a highlight. Teaching the kids not to kick it will also be a highlight.

Seeing Ecuador beat Bolivia 3-1 was also a highlight, because it put Ecuador back into position to qualify for the World Cup in South Africa this coming summer. Now the game at home against Uruguay is incredibly important because Uruguay sucks and the only other match left is at Chile and Chile is awesome. Ecuador needs to beat Uruguay in convincing fashion to have a chance to make the World Cup, and Uruguay has nothing left to play for, so the atmosphere in Quito should be electric in a way that no other continent can handle and the timing is just right for Ecuador to put a whooping on Uruguay. That's why we're going. Right now we know of a cheap way to go and get "General Admission" aka bad seats, but that's where the real (rowdy crazy noisy flag-waving drum-playing chanting screaming) fans will be which makes it where I want to be. The lower-level seating has a roof in case of rain and your ticket actually has an assigned seat so you know how good your seat will be when you buy the ticket. We'd have a better view of the game, but the atmosphere won't be nearly as powerful and exciting as sitting with the real fans. Mom always hated sitting next to me at important Wittenberg men's basketball games, because I was loud and rowdy and sometimes taunted the refs and the other team. She just wants to sit quietly and spectate a sporting event. That's one of the reasons why she likes the Witt women's team better.

That may be it for highlights from the week for now. Saturday, every football team I was rooting for lost. At least that means Georgia will still be in the top-25 when we beat them this Saturday. That'll look better for us. Today (Sunday) Leslie and I made our lesson plans for September and went to Mark Odenwelder's (director of CEDEI) for the CEDEI staff party and to watch football. He has NFL Sunday Ticket so I spent most of my time watching football and some of my time watching the nationals and a few foreign staff play Ecuadorian drinking games that don't seem nearly as fun as what we do in the US. All the teams I was rooting for lost, just like Saturday (but Arkansas didn't play, which is probably better considering my luck this weekend), but my fantasy players played well enough that I ought to win this week. We won't know until after Monday Night Football.

Our First Day with the Kids

Well the day began an hour earlier than initially expected; Prisi called us last night to let us know she had to go in early to finish setting up the room and we decided it'd be better to ride with her early than have to catch a bus. We got there, helped out a bit, then I went downstairs to meet and greet with the early parents and their kids. The kids are all adorable and the parents were all either very grateful or very shy. We're only allowed to speak in English when there are kids around, and most of the parents don't speak English so they were a little intimidated by being greeted in a language they don't speak. One lady spoke very good English, though.
We were originally going to spend 30 minutes in each classroom helping out and showing our faces and I started in the kindergarten room. When I introduced myself, a very dignified-ly dressed mother would translate what I said for the parents and the kids were off in space anyway. Her English was fairly good, too, but sometimes she said things that came out awkward. I was distributing finger paint for the kids and their parents to put their hand prints on construction paper and I came to the table where this lady, her daughter and her husband were playing with the paint and the paper. The father was joking around like he was going to green hand-print my $65 dress shirt and I pretended to joke around with him when in honesty I was ready to kick his hand. Then after I explained (in English) that I understand Spanish, I just can't speak it because the kids need to hear me speaking in English the father immediately said he wanted to teach me all the "malas palabras" in Spanish, that I should hang out with him and learn what Spanish is really like. I did the jokingly "Well, thank you, yeah," and laughed and the mother, the very dignified-looking lady, came up to me and said "He wants to teach you all the 'fuck yous'." My first reaction was did anybody else hear that? Turns out nobody did because if anybody heard it, especially a four-year-old kid, it wouldn't have been funny but nobody heard so I just said "Okay," and walked away so I could laugh. I had to laugh. I told all the other teachers after all the students and parents left and we all had a good laugh about it.
There's a new kid, Carlos, who's in first grade and he can already read and write in both Spanish and English. He grew up in Texas and has Ecuadorian parents and already knows his multiplication tables. We had a good conversation about his favorite games and sports and colors.
After the kids left, we had our little meeting where I told my story about the very dignified lady and then we had to move all the books from the library to a new room that is going to be the new library. All the books are categorized into several subsets so I decided to just carry the bookshelves and let the girls manage the transfer of the books, keeping them in the same order they were originally. After that we Leslie and I ended up downtown where we ate lunch at a $1.25 almuerzo place, which all things considered wasn't too bad. The tomato juice was more like a fruit juice than the tomato juice we're used to. It was sweet and not so tomato-y.
We then went on a mission to find Harry Potter in Spanish so that Leslie can use it to help her learn the language in a way she'll enjoy. When we finally found a libreria that wasn't just a school books store the guy was closing up to go home for lunch; he had just pulled down the metal shield that kept anybody from vandalizing his shop. When we told him we were looking for a Harry Potter book he was more than excited to open his store back up and find it for us. We weren't just muddling around not wanting to buy anything; the man was going to make a sale so he was overjoyed to let us into his store and get home late for lunch. The only one he had was Harry Potter 7, ten bucks. We also ended up in a DVD store where we bought a collection of the first five Harry Potter movies for a dollar fifty. That's a dollar fifty for all five movies, thirty cents each. Bootleg stuff is fairly common down here because the government doesn't care about copyright laws. We then headed to the central park to get some ice cream. We ended up in a good expensive ice cream place where Leslie got Nutella and I got Nata. When I say that she got Nutella, I mean that this place turned Nutella into an ice cream, and they did it very well. It tastes exactly like Nutella, except it's ice cream. The nata was no good. At least, it wasn't anything like nata in Salamanca. I think it doesn't ever get appropriately hot in Cuenca to really appreciate nata ice cream. In Salamanca, after having played several hours of ultimate frisbee down by the river and making the 40-minute trek uphill to the Plaza Mayor in 90-degree weather, the moment nata hits your tongue you are instantly refreshed. Your body doesn't realize that it's not sitting in an air conditioned room. Nata in Salamanca is that good. The stuff here just tastes like cream.
We then tried to catch a bus back home, and intentionally went the wrong way just to see where it would end up. Way out in the boonies past the airport and the military base and civilization. That was a mistake. We finally got home late this afternoon, exhausted and hungry. And that's pretty much everything important that happened today.

Orientation Week at the CEDEI School

In case you were wondering, I haven't been holding out on you. I decided after our training session on Monday that I was going to wait until training was done on Saturday and post about the whole week all at once. So now that it's Sunday I'll go through each training day's events, or at least the appropriate highlights.
Note: I revised this once, and when I went to publish there were problems with the internet connection. So if you find errors, it's because I don't feel like going back over the whole thing again.

Monday - Nothing. We didn't start until Tuesday.

Tuesday - Sucked.

Wednesday - I'm kidding. No, Tuesday really did suck, but I'm going to explain why. It didn't help, for starters, that Leslie and I saw our bus leaving from the Feria Libre as we arrived to get on it, having just made the 20-minute walk to the station. So we had to wait for the next #27 bus and we were worried we were going to show up late. We were supposed to get to the CEDEI School at 8:30, but when we walked up to the gate at around 8:33 we were among the first 5 of the 24 people to arrive. We didn't really get started until around 9:15, which was the beginning of the end for the Type-A personalities on staff (aka Leslie). We're still adjusting to third-world timing and organization; the only reason I would say something like this is that Ecuadorians say it of themselves. We covered very little pertinent information and whenever the person leading the meetings wasn't saying anything that concerned the international staff, she just went on in Spanish and never explained what she was saying for those of us on the inter team who don't understand Spanish yet. I can say "she" because no "hes" ever led anything; the only two guys teaching at the school are me and Jonatan, the new cuencano psychologist who works with the special needs students. We had been told the week before that there would be a break for a morning snack and also that we would have time in the afternoon to eat lunch. Bullshit. We went straight on from 9ish to 2ish and then we were told to go home, with no food nor time to eat the food Leslie and I (really just Leslie) prepared the night before. We came home totally frustrated and confided our complaining in each other. We decided to wait before we let our frustration be known, thinking that maybe the people in charge didn't have enough time to prepare and/or that it would get better as the week went on.

Wednesday, really - And it did get better and more organized, though those of us on the inter team with teaching credentials are still feeling like the whole school just flies by the seat of its pants. Wednesday officially could not be a bad day starting on the way to the Feria Libre when we saw a random cuencano wearing an Emory sweatshirt. I got his attention and asked him where he got the sweatshirt (in Spanish, of course) and he just said "un amigo." Either he was just shocked and scared because the biggest man he'd ever seen had just been yelling at him to get his attention or he really did get it from a friend, who would have had to been Paul Coloma, the son of the family we're staying with and the reason we're in Cuenca. He was my boss senior year at Emory; I was an RA and he was the building coordinator and we became good friends. When I told him that I / Leslie and I was / were looking for teaching jobs in Spanish-speaking America he told us that if we could find a job in his hometown we could live with his parents. But I digress. Not only did we see a cuencano in an Emory sweatshirt, we also saw some guys pitching dimes. Dad used to tell me stories of his childhood, in which he and his friends pitched pennies. I don't remember exactly how the numbers work out, but I know he left for school every day with either one or two pennies for milk money and if he won a couple more pennies he could get a doughnut with his milk that morning on the way to school. To play, everyone stands an equal distance from a walk and whoever can "pitch" their penny and land it nearest to the corner where the wall meets the ground wins all the pennies. These guys by the Feria Libre were itching dimes, seeing who could land them in or nearest to a crack in the sidewalk. I guess the comparison is that for two dimes a cuencano can get an humita at the market. For gringos they cost $.25-$.30 depending on how good your Spanish is and how fearsome you can look. I can look pretty fearsome.
Honestly, nothing that happened in the training sessions at school on Wednesday mattered as much as the two things we witnessed on the way, though we did learn some important stuff about how the school works and how they plan programs. I inflated one of my dodgeballs at school, and none of the nationals had every seen anything like it before. Everyone who wanted to see it dribbled it like a basketball or juggled it like a soccer ball and asked what it was for. The answer was of course a bunch of games they'd never heard of before because you can't play any of them without a dodgeball. I'm especially excited to get to teach the kids games like dodgeball and foursquare because I now know that they've never even heard of them. Unless they saw that stupid Ben Stiller movie.

Thursday - Leslie wanted to try walking up the big hill to school from an earlier bus stop in order to walk on a paved road instead of walking along the even part of the hill on bumpy dirt roads at the later stop. It didn't take long to realize this was a mistake. We spent most of the day at school talking about how to incorporate special needs kids into our classes. Simone, a Swiss national who now teaches at Wisconsin-Whitewater (thank you for finally beating Mount Union, btw) caught it before I did, but Ecuador is 25 years behind the rest of the Western world when it comes to working with people with special needs. The main thing about it that bothered me was that all of the strategies bottled up all the kids into the "special needs" group and treated them the same, claiming that the same activities and interventions will work with all of them. That's just stupid. I can't think of a swear word that would appropriately emphasize how stupid that is, so I'm just going to call it plain stupid. One thing that surprised me, though, was that the teachers who were at the school the past year all said that all the kids get along well regardless of whether or not they have developmental differences. That made me very happy, especially after working at the MRDD Center in Springfield where I constantly had to keep kids from getting into conflicts with each other.

There's something I would like to explain here; I'll get back to this past Thursday afterward. This is my explanation for why people with special needs deserve different treatment according to their particular individual abilities (I can't stress enough that every person should be considered an individual before anything else, particularly within the context of their own culture and society). It starts with an explanation of the general idea of rights. There are two kinds of rights: negative and positive. I really don't like using these words to classify them, because negative sounds bad when negative rights are actually easier to respect and more feasible to protect. Rights are classified as either Negative or Positive according to whether or not one's society is required to act in order to respect one's right. Negative rights do not require society to do anything in order for them to be respected. In fact, most of them require that society do nothing. Any right that fits this model: "Leave me alone so I can ______," is a negative right. Some examples are the right to free speech, the right the bear arms and the right to marry the person of your choice (though this one is tricky because that person also has to want to marry you). Positive rights are rights that require one's society to do something for him or her (peoples and societies can have rights too, but I'm not talking about those right now; I'm only clarifying all these things because I know at least a few of the people who read this blog enjoy studying Philosophy). Some examples are the rights to nourishment and education. Somebody's gotta provide that food and that schooling for you in order that your rights are respected.
The reason I want to explain this is to say that people with special needs have rights equal to those of any other person. The difference in treatment comes from the fact that people with certain special needs require more from society in order that their Positive rights can be appropriately respected. This is a major issue in the way the American (USA) public thinks about people with special needs. We call them people with special needs because they require special attention from society in order to have their rights respected to the same degree as everyone else's.

Thursday, again - I'm sorry for the digressions. I hate divisions between peoples, like "special needs" people and everybody else, but sometimes it's necessary, at least until we can find a better way to do things. So the important thing that came out of the day's discussions of incorporating special needs students into our teaching that concerned me was that I learned that I will be conducting gym class for blind kids. From what I've heard, each class will have a group of kids who want to compete and play contact sports and a group of kids who would rather pick flowers. My plan is to have two activities going at all times and let the kids pick which one they want to do. One will be a competitive activity and one will be more oriented towards kids who just want to goof off and play, and maybe also can't see.
Though in my opinion, the most important thing that came out of Thursday was an incredible discussion that happened by accident. The national staff went through an inventory of questions concerning how they felt in comparison to each other and the school in general. We all would have done it together, but they were the only ones who had any experience teaching at the school so they were the only ones who went through the questions. Afterwards their answers were explained to us in English. All us internationals were all thinking to ourselves that it was very interesting that they never felt that they were any different from each other when it came to their relations with the school. I dunno, maybe they were rushing through to go home or maybe they really thought of themselves as equals. When it was explained to us that none of them thought their skill sets for working with children and in groups were any different, Simone called bullshit. Not in so many words, of course, but I guarantee you they were equally blunt. What came next was incredibly revealing of the sentiments of the national staff and of cuencanos in general. Whenever cuencanos - and in my experience hispanic people of any kind from any place - express that something is different from something else, it is always implied that one thing is better than the other. In their minds, two things can't be "different" without being qualified as better or worse than each other. So of course none of them felt like their skills were different, because they were all good friends and they didn't feel like any of them were any worse or any better than any others. This evolved into a discussion of the closed-offishness of cuencanos - reflective in my experience of the closed-offishness of hispanic people of any kind from any place though I have heard otherwise of Caribbeans. Cuencanos never branch out of their own social groups. They all marry their high school sweethearts and think down upon people from other high schools. In my experience, and I feel this very strongly about Spain and think I'm sensing it here, this leads to materialsim. You can mark yourself as a member of your social group by wearing lots of jewelry and nice clothes inasmuch as you can afford them. We played a game earlier in the week where any time you "lost" you had to put a piece of jewelry in the middle of the circle we were all sitting in. There were rings and earrings and hair clips coming out of everywhere. Except from the internationals. One girl put in her shoe, another was lucky enough to have her sunglasses nearby, and I was lucky enough to be wearing my pen over my ear. Another unfortunate observation I've made that leads me to think about materialism is that there are other things that give away the financial status of the national teacher's families. They're mostly all our age, by the way, and still living with their parents. They're not all from the same financial bracket, but unless you got to know them you wouldn't be able to tell. I don't like saying things like this about people, but these observations were a part of my experiencing the discussion that the national teachers had about how closed-offish cuencanos are and how in the past ten years Cuenca has slowly become more other-friendly. I want you to be able to experience things as closely to how I did as is made possible by a blog and my writing skills. Still, if I didn't have Leslie and I'm grateful every day that I do, I don't think any of these girls would date me even if we were interested in each other.
The last thing that came out of Thursday was that Prisila, one of the national teachers who lives close to us, gave us a ride home and offered to give us rides to school. That cut our morning prep time by thirty minutes which we really appreciate.

Friday - We spent almost all day setting up the monthly plans for the year. We "visit" a country every month and "re-acquaint" ourselves with a region of Ecuador every month, as well as having nature-friendly themes and activities. My only particular responsibility is to provide visuals of Mongolia in June. I hope I can find a good video of the stuff some of the Mongolian tribes can do on horseback; they can stand on top of a running horse and hit a fox-size target with a bow and arrow. It's crazy. We spent a little time in the afternoon getting the classrooms ready for next year, and made plans to come in Saturday morning to finish the job. This was something we'd already planned on and was already in the "itinerary." Like we had an itinerary, but we were told the week before we'd be coming in on Saturday.