A glimpse into the place where I spend much of my time and energy: la escuela (school) Simon Bolivar. It is a Spanish language school in the city center of Cuenca that offers individual and group lessons for foreigners, arranges home stays for students, and coordinates volunteer experiences throughout Ecuador ... in addition to serving as a travel agency! I am enjoying my experiences here at the school, with my fellow students, teacher, and coordinators. And quickly found that I would be taught just as much about Ecuadorian culture as the Spanish language, which is GREAT but it took some getting used to the ways in which we are given such lessons.
I spend 4 hours each weekday morning one-on-one with my teacher, a kind and patient Cuencana woman around my age who speaks some English (but of course mostly Spanish with me, though it´s helpful when I really don´t get a word or concept and she can resort to English). She seems older, on account of her maturity (and my relative immaturity, or what I like to call ¨youthful disposition¨) and by nature of the reason we find ourselves in the same room together for so many hours a week. We quickly settled into a comfortable didactic student-teacher nurturing relationship, where I feel so dependent on her! But I like to think we learn from one another. We have a large classroom to ourselves within the spacious three-floored school, and take a break halfway for coffee (colored water) and the bread assortment provided for the day (mmm).
During breaks and after classes, us students congregate to meet and catch up with one another, as there is a constant flow of new and returning students at various stages of learning español. Luckily many are beginners like me. There´s a whole colony of Danish people, some
Germans, an Aussie for the moment, some Canadians just showed up today, and there are always many Americans. There is a middle-aged but lively couple from ¨Seattle¨(posers from da Eastside), a programmer from the Sierras, and one girl from Campbell (a burb of San Jose) who just left. We come from many different places for a variety of reasons - gap years between university, solo travel, volunteering, escapism - but we are instantly united by being away from home and not knowing Spanish to help us interact with the very busy world outside. We can participate in various activities arranged by the school, from Latin dance to Field Trips around town. But our main lessons come from the individual classroom, during interactions with our teacher and following our trusty lesson book.
And what interesting lessons they are, laden with social commentary. My first day was spent relatively light - learning vocabulary and sentence structure to be able to tell someone else about my family, and of course if I am married (hahaha, I stumbled on this THIRD question posed to my teacher, ¨Do you have a boyfriend? ¨I paused, partly because I was thinking ¨why is that so important eh?¨ and also because I was considering the different options she had just explained about levels of relationshiping, from boy-girlfriend, fiancee, spouse and some other thing I still don´t get ... though still not sure why that caused me pause in answering for myself. Don´t worry mom & dad, I´m not yet married to the Ecuadorian of my dreams who will build be a castle and for whom I will birth many babies). But, simple enough to start with.
Then Day Two, in between vocabulary on parts of the body and intro to conjugation, I am asked to read one of the various notas culturales in the lesson book, little blurbs on Ecuador & Latin America (like fun facts, about the importance of open air markets and info on the major cities). This one was about family life, and I happily started reading out loud the description on family structure - that most people marry young and couples live with one of their parents and have many children right away, for cultural and economical reasons. Oh, and of course there is Latin machismo to contend with, where men decide everything, and sometimes cheat on their wives if they don´t outright leave the family altogether. And there´s not much concept of family planning, on account of the role of the church, so the family is big ... but united and very close. Yay. And end of the nota cultural. My teacher added a lot and I encouraged her, because luckily I can understand much better than I speak. We conversed (meaning she spoke, I gesticulated and said claro, which for me means everything from ¨I get it¨ to ¨Really, tell me more!¨) about a cascade of topics from there, about family life and gender expectations tying into the larger societal, cultural, economical religious concerns. She introduced the daily struggles for the average family to make ends meet in this globalized world, which invariably involves immigration to another country (10% of all Ecuadorians immigrate, mostly to the US). And the pervasive level of corruption that permeates every aspect of Ecuadorian life, where you buy everything from your way out of a ticket or jail to passage to another country. And horror stories of immigration failures and lives lost, sprinkled with questions to me such as ¨is it true George Bush is building a giant wall at the Mexican border?¨ And then nearly in the same breath, my teacher moved to the next topic as if to say ¨that lesson done, now time to conjugate important verbs.¨ Whereas for me, this was a lot to digest - and I couldn´t help thinking we don´t discuss or present US society in lesson books with quite the same style.
These social issues are constantly brought up in our lessons, and I do find that discussing them is helping me learn the language - though it is EXTREMELY frustrating to consider complex topics internally but not be able to express much externally. I want to say and communicate and ask much more but am limited by lack of vocabulary or ability to form sentences. I end up settling for simple remarks and having to leave out contextual or thorough information about my opinions, which leaves me feeling shallow or that I cannot appropriately answer my teacher´s questions to me to describe what it is like in the United States (from the social norms in getting married & creating a family to enforcement of laws and policy formation).
And I do not feel that my teacher or the school is pushing any type of agenda or make any judgement towards me as an American (which is good, considering my Guilty American Complex). I knew a hard part of travelling for me in this region would be coping with the understanding of more poverty and economic & social hardship in some places, compared to the relative wealth of being American. And that many global problems are a result or consequence of Western actions in the past and contemporary policies. But my Guilty American Complex is not being stimulated the way it was in watching ¨Hotel Rwanda¨or hearing about other friends´experiences being a foreigner abroad. Every day I have a different reflection on my positionality here in Ecuador, and overall the people have been very welcoming and genuine. I take in the constant discussion of social problems as learning the local perspective and have not felt any negative response or appropriated judgement to my being American.
Although my teacher gave me a hint about tomorrow´s lesson plan: women´s liberation movements, anti-discrimination laws, and social roles of women in various countries. I predict more exposure on a personal level between us and the different lives we lead. What happened to learning activities like making a childrens book about fruits coming to life, like I did in high school French class?
I spend 4 hours each weekday morning one-on-one with my teacher, a kind and patient Cuencana woman around my age who speaks some English (but of course mostly Spanish with me, though it´s helpful when I really don´t get a word or concept and she can resort to English). She seems older, on account of her maturity (and my relative immaturity, or what I like to call ¨youthful disposition¨) and by nature of the reason we find ourselves in the same room together for so many hours a week. We quickly settled into a comfortable didactic student-teacher nurturing relationship, where I feel so dependent on her! But I like to think we learn from one another. We have a large classroom to ourselves within the spacious three-floored school, and take a break halfway for coffee (colored water) and the bread assortment provided for the day (mmm).
During breaks and after classes, us students congregate to meet and catch up with one another, as there is a constant flow of new and returning students at various stages of learning español. Luckily many are beginners like me. There´s a whole colony of Danish people, some
Germans, an Aussie for the moment, some Canadians just showed up today, and there are always many Americans. There is a middle-aged but lively couple from ¨Seattle¨(posers from da Eastside), a programmer from the Sierras, and one girl from Campbell (a burb of San Jose) who just left. We come from many different places for a variety of reasons - gap years between university, solo travel, volunteering, escapism - but we are instantly united by being away from home and not knowing Spanish to help us interact with the very busy world outside. We can participate in various activities arranged by the school, from Latin dance to Field Trips around town. But our main lessons come from the individual classroom, during interactions with our teacher and following our trusty lesson book.And what interesting lessons they are, laden with social commentary. My first day was spent relatively light - learning vocabulary and sentence structure to be able to tell someone else about my family, and of course if I am married (hahaha, I stumbled on this THIRD question posed to my teacher, ¨Do you have a boyfriend? ¨I paused, partly because I was thinking ¨why is that so important eh?¨ and also because I was considering the different options she had just explained about levels of relationshiping, from boy-girlfriend, fiancee, spouse and some other thing I still don´t get ... though still not sure why that caused me pause in answering for myself. Don´t worry mom & dad, I´m not yet married to the Ecuadorian of my dreams who will build be a castle and for whom I will birth many babies). But, simple enough to start with.
Then Day Two, in between vocabulary on parts of the body and intro to conjugation, I am asked to read one of the various notas culturales in the lesson book, little blurbs on Ecuador & Latin America (like fun facts, about the importance of open air markets and info on the major cities). This one was about family life, and I happily started reading out loud the description on family structure - that most people marry young and couples live with one of their parents and have many children right away, for cultural and economical reasons. Oh, and of course there is Latin machismo to contend with, where men decide everything, and sometimes cheat on their wives if they don´t outright leave the family altogether. And there´s not much concept of family planning, on account of the role of the church, so the family is big ... but united and very close. Yay. And end of the nota cultural. My teacher added a lot and I encouraged her, because luckily I can understand much better than I speak. We conversed (meaning she spoke, I gesticulated and said claro, which for me means everything from ¨I get it¨ to ¨Really, tell me more!¨) about a cascade of topics from there, about family life and gender expectations tying into the larger societal, cultural, economical religious concerns. She introduced the daily struggles for the average family to make ends meet in this globalized world, which invariably involves immigration to another country (10% of all Ecuadorians immigrate, mostly to the US). And the pervasive level of corruption that permeates every aspect of Ecuadorian life, where you buy everything from your way out of a ticket or jail to passage to another country. And horror stories of immigration failures and lives lost, sprinkled with questions to me such as ¨is it true George Bush is building a giant wall at the Mexican border?¨ And then nearly in the same breath, my teacher moved to the next topic as if to say ¨that lesson done, now time to conjugate important verbs.¨ Whereas for me, this was a lot to digest - and I couldn´t help thinking we don´t discuss or present US society in lesson books with quite the same style.
These social issues are constantly brought up in our lessons, and I do find that discussing them is helping me learn the language - though it is EXTREMELY frustrating to consider complex topics internally but not be able to express much externally. I want to say and communicate and ask much more but am limited by lack of vocabulary or ability to form sentences. I end up settling for simple remarks and having to leave out contextual or thorough information about my opinions, which leaves me feeling shallow or that I cannot appropriately answer my teacher´s questions to me to describe what it is like in the United States (from the social norms in getting married & creating a family to enforcement of laws and policy formation).
And I do not feel that my teacher or the school is pushing any type of agenda or make any judgement towards me as an American (which is good, considering my Guilty American Complex). I knew a hard part of travelling for me in this region would be coping with the understanding of more poverty and economic & social hardship in some places, compared to the relative wealth of being American. And that many global problems are a result or consequence of Western actions in the past and contemporary policies. But my Guilty American Complex is not being stimulated the way it was in watching ¨Hotel Rwanda¨or hearing about other friends´experiences being a foreigner abroad. Every day I have a different reflection on my positionality here in Ecuador, and overall the people have been very welcoming and genuine. I take in the constant discussion of social problems as learning the local perspective and have not felt any negative response or appropriated judgement to my being American.
Although my teacher gave me a hint about tomorrow´s lesson plan: women´s liberation movements, anti-discrimination laws, and social roles of women in various countries. I predict more exposure on a personal level between us and the different lives we lead. What happened to learning activities like making a childrens book about fruits coming to life, like I did in high school French class?
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