Doing

So what have I actually been doing lately? Mainly working at the colegio and escuela, going to various types of meetings, hanging around the house with my family, eating seafood and fruit, going into town to run errands, reading, and (occasionally) running on the beach. When I go to the escuela the director sends me to one or two of the classrooms (one classroom per grade, kindergarten, or grade 1, to grade 7) and I teach them some combination of the next lesson in their science books, a charla on an environmental topic, and some English. I’ve gone into grades 7, 5, 4, 3, and kindergarten so far. The 7th graders have been the most fun to teach and the 3rd graders have been the hardest since I can’t get them to stop talking or stay in their seats. But they are cute. At the colegio (grades 8-10) I sit in on the science and English classes or hang out with the teachers and help with their lesson plans. This past week was the colegio fiesta. Monday I went for a flag ceremony where they presented sashes and diplomas to the 10th graders. They had me sit at the head table with the school director, some of the teachers, my counterpart the Junta president, and my sister who’s now the president of the parents’ group. I helped hand out diplomas. On Thursday I went to the fiesta celebrating when the colegio was founded. They had me sit at the head table again and whenever someone goes up to talk they address the people at the head table first, so they say like “Good afternoon Gonzalo Alava, President of the Junta Parroquial, Ramon Ruano, Director of the Colegio, Monica Luna, President of the Padres de Familia, Kiki…” This always makes me laugh, partly because they don’t know my last name and Kiki just sounds so informal after all those intros, partly because they are unclear of my title, and partly just the way they say it, like they are as amused as I am that I’m sitting at the head table. But I don’t think I’m supposed to be laughing at these times.

Last week I went to a meeting with Nazca and some people from Conservation International. I got put on the team of people from my Junta to work on informational signs in my town and two others for the reserve. We started in my site yesterday by repainting the bus stop and adding the name of the reserve on the wall with a board to post information and announcements. Later in the week I went to a 2 day meeting with my USAID counterpart Cristobal and other people from the Costas y Bosques program, people from Ecolex which works with USAID here, from SocioBosque the payment for conserving forest program, and from the Ministry of the Environment. They were giving presentations to people from the town councils of each town around here. Reyes, the other volunteer working with Cristobal, was there too on Friday. The meetings were good and I learned some stuff although a lot of the Spanish went over my head. But I think just being there to meet everyone was important for me and at the end on Friday Reyes and I sat down with Cristobal, the two Ecolex guys, and two guys who work with Costas y Bosques to plan what they have going on in June. So I’m getting to work! The meetings were at a hotel on the beach that’s about a 15-20 min drive from my town, one of the closest places to me. It’s a gorgeous location and the owner, Judith, is from Vancouver and has been there for 18 years. I met her when I got there on Thursday and she said she’s always happy to have foreigner neighbors and I told her I would come back to visit, which I’m definitely going to try to do. She seems very nice and like she would be interesting to talk to, she said she traveled a lot before settling in Ecuador and she’s known other PCVs.