gettin into the swing of things

I hope this post finds you all well.

After three days of teaching, I am incredibly exhausted and at the same time relieved that so far, I really like my job. I am teaching four classes a day right now. The first is a beginners six to nine year old class, then beginners seven to nine years old, a level four (out of eight levels) 12-14 years old class, and lastly a beginners teen class (15-17 years old). There is definitely a benefit in teaching four different classes in a row in that time flies by, but by the end of the four hours I am exhausted mentally from having to teach in two languages. Planning for the lessons is going to be time consuming as well and the downside is that we don’t get paid for lesson planning. It seems like most teachers at the school rely on the books we’re teaching from for each class mostly and don’t do much more supplemental planning or out of the book activities. I can imagine that this is because they don’t get paid for lesson planning. It’s hard to want to spend a lot of time planning if you know that that’s more time you work without getting paid. I am trying to limit myself to no more than one hour per day of lesson planning. That way I am only missing out on getting paid four more dollars a day. Yes, the teachers at the school get paid $4.00 an hour. Ridiculous, I know, but I guess that’s just the way it works. Apparently it’s enough to make it here. But really, you can’t beat getting hugs from 30 young children every days. In Ecuador, it’s customary I guess for young students to hug their teachers. That certainly isn’t the case at home, but we were warned before starting to teach that a lot of the students are going to want to hug us every day. Adorable.

An update on Carneval, yesterday Annabel and I were walking to school to meet with the owner about signing a contract and a little boy hiding around a corner sprayed us with his water gun. Nothing serious, but a bit annoying nevertheless. In front of our school after classes, kids fill up water balloon from the faucet on the side of the building, throw them at each other, spray each other with cans filled with foam, but don’t do anything to the teachers (so far anyway). While just walking to the school right now, we saw a little girl get a bucket of water poured on her from a building above and a girl get an egg thrown at her (she was already soaked with water and foam)

In Ecuador, lunch is the biggest meal of the day. Most businesses, including our school, close from around noon to two in the afternoon every day for siesta. “Almuerzo”, or lunch, is served in most resturants as a soup, main dish with a meat and rice, and a drink. Sometimes even dessert. Almuerzo is always between $1.50 and about $2.50 depending where you go. Yesterday, Annabel and I wanted to try our first almuerzo so we walked around downtown Loja, went to two restaurants that are recommended in my Lonely Planet tour book. The first was a Mexican restaurant that was totally packed, no open tables, so we figured that they must have really great food, but didn’t stick around to wait for a table. We walked to another restaurant recommended by the book that was 2 blocks away and there wasn’t a single person in it. We walked in, waited for someone to approach us to get a table, but what we thought was the hostess desk was surrounded by woman talking and the only other person in there was a worker sweeping the floor. We waited a couple minutes, not knowing what to do, but then just left because no one took notice of us at all. Then we backtracked and went to a different restaurant we passed on the way and ate almuerzo there. The soup we had was pretty sketch. It was like a beef broth with plaintains, potatoes, and the most fatty, weird meat I’ve ever seen. Needless to say, I couldn’t eat the meat in the soup. After having been a vegetarian for over 10 years, there is still meat I can’t even bring myself to try. The main course was chicken with rice, which was fine. But the drink that we were served was like an horchata, chai tea drink that just tasted like what I think Christmas in a class tastes like. It was incredibly sweet, not awful, but certainly not a good match with chicken and rice. All ends well though because it only cost $1.75. I didn’t feel well last night or this morning though. My stomach is definitely not used to Ecuadorian food yet….

Well, that’s all for now. Just wanted to note that it’s warm and sunny here today. I am contemplating only staying for 6 months because the contact we’re signing is for 6 months, but we’ll see how much I love it here and if I want to stay longer as more time passes.