Eric and I arrived on Saturday morning in Salasaka, Ecuador, a small village located between the cities of Ambato and Baños. Several months ago we found a volunteer opportunity online at Sumak Kawsay Yachay or SKY Ecudaor, a privately-funded Ecuadorian organization "committed to assisting and supporting educational programs throughout the country." In Salasaka, SKY Ecuador supports the Katitawa school and runs a public library.
Today I am on library duty, which means I get to sit on the internet all day and actually think about what I'm writing in my blog rather than just spit it out. :) The library is pretty slow during the day. There are 3 computers that people can use, and apparently I can expect maybe three people to stop in at some point. So far, there's been a whole lot of nothing going on. But one of the other volunteers is working on building some new desks for in the library and other volunteers sort of stop in and out, so I'm not totally alone, which is good, because I'm not totally sure what to do if someone stops in for a the internet or a book and my Spanish is only so-so.
In the evenings there's a little more going on at the library as volunteers teach adult classes such as Spanish and English for Artisans. There is an impressive textile market in Salasaka, and some of the artisans who were aware that better/any English skills would help them increase sales approached SKY to request a class to meet their needs. Kids also stop in at the library more in the afternoons and evenings since they aren't in school then.
The Katitawa school is perched on a hill overlooking the valley that Salasaka and other villages are set in. About 40 students attend the school, and between 20 and 30 are expected to show up on any given day. While there are several other schools in the area, Katitawa is a bi-lingual school taught in Spanish and the native Kitchwa. The school is free - families pay $0.50 per week per student to help cover a snack and lunch - and prides itself in an excellent English education since nearly all of the volunteers who teach at the school are either native English speakers or otherwise fluent.
The school is somewhat set in the Montessori method of education, which encourages exploration and self-directed education. That is to say, it takes advantage of a child's natural impulse to learn through observation and exploration, making connections through discovery. There are three paid teachers and a varying number of volunteers who lead several classes. There's a Pre-K/Kindergarten class and a group of older students who take classes in math, Spanish, English, art and, theater & music. Right now the school is also preparing for a Christmas/Winter Solstice program to be held on December 21st. (The solstices and equinoxes are very important in traditional indigenous cultures here, and while more than 80% of the population is Catholic, these traditional celebrations have been often been blended with Christian holidays.)
Currently there are 19 volunteers at Katitawa, which is an overly full house at the hostel that serves the Katitawa volunteers. I think there's typically 10-15 volunteers, but we're here at an overlap point when several new folks have arrived and some people who have been here a while are planning on heading out in the next week or two. Most volunteers stay at Katitawa for at least 3 months and some for even longer (6 months to a year if they can get a Visa). Eric and I will be staying for a meager 2 weeks, but out of an eight-week trip, I think that's pretty good. Who knows, someday maybe we'll come back for an extended stay.
Since we're only here for a short time, we probably won't do much in the way of teaching. Clearly, there's no sense in starting our own evening English class or anything like that. I will be subbing as a teacher's aide on Thursday in the kindergarten class, and we may help out with other classes as subbing or one-on-one tutoring is needed. However, it looks like our main projects will be construction based, since Eric is a jack-of-all-trades, and I know enough to help out and talk a bit of the construction talk (Thanks, Rebuilding Together!).
Yesterday we started on one of these projects. There's a grassy space in front of the school building where they've already started some landscaping, including a concrete patio with a sundial and a field stone wall at the edge of the terrace. The land in this area was very uneven, so we (and some others, especially some of the other newbies) started the process of hauling dirt from the garden in wheelbarrows to fill the low spots and cutting down high spots with a hoe. Eric is also working on finishing some concrete edging that lines the gravel path around the sundial and up to a space that will be a stairway down the hill.
This project is pretty heavy labor in and of itself, but it's complicated by the fact that we only have a smattering of hand tools to work with: 2 wheelbarrows, 2 or 3 shovels, a hoe. We were excited to finally find a hammer and tape measure yesterday. We have string and are using sticks for stakes to run plumb lines for leveling out the ground, but we don't have a line level, so we're just doing our best with attempting to hold a regular level over the line. And of course, children stop by to find out who we are and what we're doing, and to dig in the dirt we just laid down and leveled, and to jump on our plumb lines.
They're great fun though. I spent snack time yesterday running around the school yard and it's small farm (a few ducks, chickens and cows) with one nine year old named Michelle. She has a reputation of being a handful; she doesn't have much interest in staying in class which drives some of the volunteers nuts. She was hanging out with me during one of the breaks, but didn't go back to class once the bell rang. After a while I asked her (in Spanish!) why she wasn't in class. She said she didn't have class, and I replied that she had told me a few minutes ago she had Spanish class next. Then I observed that all the other students were in class. She smiled and ran off to join her classmates.
Michelle also likes to ask any boy and girl volunteers standing next to each other if they're boyfriend and girlfriend. I speak more Spanish than some of the other newbies, and it's great fun watching their faces when I translate for them. She's asked me if about 3 different guys are my boyfriend, and I say, You already know that Eric's my boyfriend! Finally I asked her who her boyfriend was and she ran off back to class.
We worked from about 8:30 to about 3, stopping for lunch at noon. In the evenings, the volunteers take turns cooking in groups for all the volunteers. I joined the Monday cooking group, and since the number of volunteers had increased so much over the weekend, they needed me to go to town to buy some more vegetables to stretch out the planned meal. Eric and I headed into town with two of the other new guys to buy supplies. We'd all been working on the earth moving, so we also stopped for a snack and a refreshing beer. (A liter bottle of beer costs a dollar, with $0.20 returned when you bring back the bottle.)
There's a decent sized farmer's market in Salasaka on Saturdays, but there's always someone with a fruit & vegetable stand at the Central Market during the week. Three large, fresh green peppers for $0.25? Eggs for pennies a piece? Fresh tomatoes, avocados, bananas, strawberries, oranges? Yes, please! There's also several small stores selling cheese, butter, crackers, fresh rolls, cooking oil and other staples in town, and some with a lesser selection on the road leading out to the hostel.
From the hostel it's probably a 20 or 30 minute walk to town, a 10 minute walk to the library and a 30 minute walk to the school. For the most part, Salasaka is agrarian, so we're walking along small plots with corn, cows, sheep, and the like. On the road heading past the library into town you can catch a ride in the back of someone's pickup for $0.10, but we've been enjoying the walk.
We made it back to the hostel right at 5, so I jumped in to help cook right away. Five of us prepared a cucumber and radish salad with a homemade vinaigrette; a baked pasta (aka, hotdish) including a fresh tomato and rosemary sauce, onions, carrots, green peppers, and a healthy dose of cheese; and finally a chocolate birthday cake with a strawberry sauce and yogurt ice cube. (It's almost lunch time, and I'm getting hungry talking about this!) I wish I could take some kind of credit for the brilliant meal, but an Austrian volunteer named Lisa (who is pretty much fluent in German, Spanish, English, French (or Italian?), and Latin) orchestrated most of the dinner. I did a lot of chopping and a lot of dishes.
So far Eric and I are both very happy with SKY Ecuador, the Katitawa school, and the other volunteers. It's an absolutely beautiful place. We can see the farthest point from the center of the earth from our back porch, as the equatorial bulge pushes a mountain here further away from earth's center than the highest point above sea level. And one of the two volcanoes within sight started erupting last night (just in a dust way, not in a "Lava! Run for your lives!" way) and we could see the plume on our walk into the library today. The volunteers are about half Americans and half Europeans, which makes for interesting Thanksgiving day plans... Eric's on the cooking team for that night with three European guys, so we'll see what they come up with for dinner.
Happy Thanksgiving to all! Right now I'm so thankful for your interest if you made it to the end of this very long entry. Pictures and more stories to come as we make ourselves more at home here.
If you'd like to learn more about where we're volunteering, please visit http://www.skyecuador.org/ Again, the school and library are privately funded, so if you feel so moved, feel free to make a donation at the website. Thanks!
