I really am posting again, promise…

I know. I know. It has been ages since I have posted. Sorry! I guess the longer I live here, the more accustomed I get to the crazy cultural occurrences, and the less prone I am to realize that they would make quite entertaining blog posts.

First things first. I have decided to stay down here in Ecuador until at least August. There is a chance that I will stay down here until January, but either way, when I come home, it will be for good. The decision about how long I stay will rest on how I feel about teaching and living here through April and May. If I’m not completely content with everything about life down here, then you can expect me on a plane in August. Part of me is very anxious to move on to the next phase of my life, and part of me realizes that as soon as I do, I’ll look back and wish I was in Ecuador again. But I guess those feelings are a part of any stage in one’s life. One of life’s biggest challenges is learning to balance the looking back and looking forward with finding happiness in the present.

So the next question is, “Okay, so you are staying in Ecuador longer. What happens after WT?” I’ve been thinking a lot about career goals and kicking around many ideas. However, I think one of my first goals will be to find practical experience in public interest law. I’ve been seriously considering law school as a means of balancing my desire for meaningful work with my desire for a flexible graduate professional degree. However, without some sort of real exposure to this type of law, I feel I would be naïve to undertake a $100K debt and spend three years of hard work slaving toward an unsure goal with only hopes that I will like the work afterwards. To gain experience, I’m currently looking into an 11-month Americorps program in Massachusetts which provides hands on exposure from interviewing clients to providing legal support. However, the prospect of trying to survive in the Boston area on the Americorps salary of $17K a year seems near impossible. Many people who have done Americorps have resorted to living on food stamps. I know this would make mom and dad so proud, their college educated daughter living on food stamps! Maybe I’ll look for something in the Houston area… If anyone has any ideas, please share.

Definitely one of the things that I’m most thankful for about my time in Ecuador is that it has given me the opportunity to reflect on the type of work that I want to do with my life. I’m not necessarily talking about teaching, but about characteristics that I want in a career. I feel like there is so much pressure in the US to immediately step into a job and start climbing a latter without reflection on if that’s the latter you want to be climbing. For me, I think it would be so tragic to wake up one morning at 35 and realize that I was on the wrong path, that I’d achieved “success” but not in the areas that were really important to me. Ecuador has given me more confidence and insight into my ideal job.

Mini-Reflections on a Year in Ecuador

I’ve been through more in this year than I could have imagined, had time for reflection about the world and about my own life and personal goals. I have a better understanding of the complexity of the problems in a developing country, and a better appreciation for our own American way of life. I have a profoundly deeper appreciation for my family and friends back home, and a daily thankfulness for life. Ecuador generously gave me these things.

I came to Ecuador in a very hopeful world climate with little fear besides justifying my year abroad to employers. A year latter, I can’t turn on CNN without hearing about the economic crisis and some other major company laying off a huge majority of its employees. So far, no trickle down economic effect has visibly altered Ecuadorian life. However, unlike the US, the attitude here is one of resilience and passive acceptance of the inevitable. It’s not because the effects and changes in the economic climate aren’t real. It’s because the terrors in this country are the sleeping volcanoes, not the stock market crashes. The fears in this country are the earthquakes, not the shaking up of the housing market. The worries in this country are about poorly constructed bridges collapsing, not the collapse of easy luxury. When I ask most Ecuadorians about the economic crisis, they seem only slightly worried. When their banking system has failed several times before, and the government has reached into their coffers on many occasion, and they’ve managed to survive, economic woes are just one more part of is a part of daily life. They’ve made it through worse before. They’ll make it through again.

Reflections on Teaching

Teaching proved itself a rewarding use of my time and efforts, not only in regards to my students, but also in my own personal fulfillment. One of my own personal drugs is performing for people and making them laugh. What an incredible high to be able to this skill on a weekly, if not daily basis. Several times this year I have walked out of my classroom with the biggest smile on my face because I know that everything in the class just clicked. Working with groups of people and leading them through activities comes so naturally to me, and teaching allowed me ample opportunity to use these skills I enjoy.

For example, there was one particular lesson where my students had to read Jack London’s “To Build a Fire.” We had finished our class discussion and still had thirty minutes left in class. As usual, I did not plan class well and found myself having to improvise an activity. In “To Build a Fire” the main character, dying of hypothermia in the Yukon, tries to kill his dog as a means of warming himself up. Thinking of my feet, I asked my students to make up skits of what the man was thinking during this moment of the story and then, what the dog was thinking. Fifteen minutes later my students presented their skits in broken English. After they were done, they said, “Teacher, you do one. You do one.” I easily obliged their request and became the bitter, cigarette smoking Husky who thought his master was the biggest idiot in the world. My students were rolling on the floor. It was such an incredible high.

There is something unique that happens in a classroom, as any teacher can tell you. You can create a unique community of trust between students and teacher that is hard to imagine existing in a different setting. In my own class, I found the best way to create this community rested on my admitting my own mistakes and making a fool out of myself. My students, in turn, found themselves more freely making mistakes, but also stepping outside their comfort zone. I had the joy of watching several of my students come out of their shells in English and become so much more confident in their skills.

Quite possibly the biggest reward I got all semester was feedback from one of the parents of my students. She told me that her daughter absolutely hated English before she came into my class. By the end of a year with me, she loved English. She was now watching TV in English and listening to English music all the time. She got her other sister excited about English too, and they had both begun teaching their youngest sister how to speak in English. The mom said that she didn’t know what I had done, but that I was one of the best teachers that her daughters had ever had. Different students also gave me similar feedback. I can’t tell you how rewarding it is knowing that I’ve made a direct impact on my students’ lives. If students can be inspired to like a subject and want to learn it on their own, then the teacher has succeeded. I am reminded of the William Butler Yeats quote, “Teaching is not filling a bucket. It’s lighting a fire.”

Now, before you all send me congratulation cards on being the “English Teacher of the Year,” you have to realize that the Ecuadorian education system leaves much to be desired. I don’t think that it would be extremely difficult for anyone who had great teachers as examples to be a good teacher in Ecuador. In one of my host brother’s English classes growing up, the teacher made the students take a book in Spanish and copy the Spanish page out of the book. Then, the students had to translate the Spanish into English. That was their daily English class. Given that knowledge, you can understand how it wouldn’t be too hard to be a really good teacher here. Anything classroom would be better than that!