El Rey de Adult English

Krysta and I have been teaching a Beginners English Class for adults every Monday and Wednesday, and on Wednesday we had our last class of the course (courses last six weeks). We will pick up right where we left off in our next course starting on Monday, but the end of this course meant two things: an exam and a fiesta!

Our students for the past 6 weeks were incredible. We had a full class of 10 students, who were all devoted to learning English. Their hard work was reflected in their exam scores. Krysta and I are proud to say the least. Our students learned how to introduce themselves, give personal information, say the date, use simple present of "to be", describe their surroundings and each other, etc. One of our objectives for the course was to engage students and teach them about United States culture.

With that in mind, our end-of-course fiesta was New Orleans themed. I gave a lesson on jazz music, cajun food, and Mardi Gras. Thanks to a recipe and plastic babies from Mama Booe, I was able to make King Cake for our class. Though it was a painstaking process (and took probably 5 hours in total), it was well worth it, and our class LOVED searching for the baby. After they found the baby, they named it "Gastoncito" (little Gaston) after one of the students in the class. They crack me up, and there is never a dull moment in the class. Our adults are so eager to continue learning how to speak English; their enthusiasm makes it an easy and rewarding job.

My first King Cake!

Finished Product

Silly students...

Some of our students-- THEY'RE AWESOME!!!!!

On the Radio... oh oh!

On Thursday Krysta and I went to Sangolqui to give our first radio charla. We are giving monthly talks on the radio about various topics. We decided to talk for 30 minutes on breast cancer. We arrived to the radio station (SuperK) ready to speak spanish live on air... ok, we might have been a little nervous.

We sat in a room opposite the DJ with headphones on so we could hear her prompts and questions. The only problem was that the headphones didn't work. So we ended up having to read her lips through the glass window separating us and strained our ears to catch about every other word she said.

We may not have answered her questions; we'll never know. But we kept frantically reciting different information about our topic. Worst case scenario: people turn into the radio every third Thursday of the month to hear the silly gringos... Even if we sound like fools, at least people are getting some information about important topics!

Carnaval

Last weekend was the infamous carnaval. In Ecuador, this holiday is marked by water balloons, water guns, and espuma (foam... or in many cases, shaving cream). Jackie, Krysta, Sarah, and I decided to spend our 4 day weekend in Tena... a town about as far east as you can go before you are in the middle of the Amazon. We experienced all that the "oriente" has to offer... rivers, wildlife, food, HOT weather, etc. Between relaxing in hammacks, exploring caves, and dodging water balloons, we also had one heck of an adventure. We got lost in the middle of the jungle. The story goes as follows:

We take a bus from Tena to go to a small town on the river. From there, we hop in a canoe and ask the guy to take us to our jungle lodge.

We go down the river for awhile and he takes us to the opposite bank. We get off and start following him into the jungle. Then, he disappears. We wait around for awhile to see if he comes back, and he does. Phew! So we follow this guy into a different part of the jungle. He suddenly stops at a trail and tells us to follow it straight for half an hour. Then he leaves to go back to his canoe. So we follow the trail, hiking in the woods with our huge backpacks... until it dead ends into the river.

We backtrack to try to find a fork in the road, and we find one! But it leads to an abandoned shack in the middle of the Amazon rainforest... creeeeeeepy. So we head back to the water to try to flag down a canoe.



So a man in a canoe comes to us and tells us that we were on the right path, but we needed to wade through the water. He says the lodge is less than 30 min away. So after a rest, we head back the way we came.

We wade through the water (start humming gospel tunes).



We walk another 30 minutes and finally get to A SIGN for the lodge!



And a man with a machete who tells us to "sigan recta" (continue straight).

So we do... and find yet another abandoned building. 2 hours after we got out of the canoe, we find the jungle lodge. After finding out that it's not all it's cracked up to be, we decide to head back to Tena.


We wait 2.5 hours for a camioneta to come close to the lodge to pick us up. We find a truck who says he'll take us to the closest town for $1 per person. We're in!!



We pile into a utility truck and after picking up 12 people and 10 100lb bags of corn, we go over the rickitiest metal SWINGING bridge known to mandkind. I'm hysterically laughing to keep from crying (and I love hights).

From the town we catch a bus back to Tena in time to watch the sunset.

El Fin!!

Retiro Numero DOS

This past weekend, we all ventured to Riobamba for our 2nd retreat. To say it was a fail of a trip, may be fairly accurate. The reason we decided to go to Riobamba was to go on the train that takes you to the "Nariz del Diablo" or "Devil's Nose". It weaves through the Andes mountains while you sit on the roof of the train, taking in the sites. When we arrived in Riobamba, we went to buy tickets only to find that they were sold out until the end of February. So we just walked around the city... in the pouring rain. We all were soaking wet. Sarah got sick. It was a mess. In order to salvage the trip, we decided to go on a hike the next morning. We woke up to an overcast day and horrible hiking conditions.

Plan B: We hopped on a bus to go towards Banos, where the active volcano of Tungarahua is currently errupting. We didn't go all the way to Banos, but we went to a neighboring mountain and got a great view of the action. It was really neat to see the smoke billowing out of the volcano (my seismology-loving, ex-geology major side came out for sure).

Group shot at dinner

In the camioneta on the way to see Tungarahua

We've got cows

Tungarahua in all it's glory (best picture I have... sorry)

The weekend just goes to show that even though things don't always go as planned, ecuador is an adventure por siempre!!!

I'm FAMOUS!!!

Well, I'm famous amongst a few people who surf the World Wide Web and read the MPI Ecuador Blog (Open Hands and Dirty Feet). I wrote a guest blog yesterday, so make sure to check it out!

Click here to read my guest blog.

As always, thanks for staying tuned!

In my famous panama hat with the famous Ronald McDonald

What do you mean by busy day?

I know you have heard of the elusive "business" that consumes so many of my days. Today I decided I'd let all my readers know what exactly I mean.

My schedule today:
6:45am-- Rise and shine
7:15am-- Leave the house and catch a bus to Rumiloma
8:00am-9:00am-- Morning Women's Exercise Class
9:15-- Catch a bus home to Conocoto
10:00am-- Arrive home and jump in the shower
10:30am-- Leave the house and catch a bus to Sangolqui
11:00am-1:30pm-- Shop for the soon-to-be kitchen in our "Centro de Manna"
We ran around between 3 different stores to buy everything from bowls, cutting boards, and
forks to an oven, a table, and pans. We hope to have everything installed and the kitchen by
the end of this quarter, so we can start cooking classes as soon as possible.
1:30pm-- Load the camioneta with all of our goodies
1:45pm-- Unload all of our goodies from camioneta and into the third floor of our Centro
2:15pm-- Catch a bus home to Conocoto
3:00pm-- Arrive home and print the quiz and "Song-of-the-day" for Adult English Class
3:45pm-- Leave the house to make copies for Adult English
4:00pm-- Catch a bus to Rumiloma
5:00-6:45pm-- Teach Adult English (emotions, present simple of "to be", sentance structure...
our class is AWESOME!!)
7:00pm-- Get in a camioneta to go home
7:30pm-- Arrive home, grab dinner, and immediately start our Spring Break meeting (over
dinner)
8:30pm-- Have a nutrition "pre-meeting" to get ready for the meeting we're having with
Alinambi tomorrow morning about the nutrition program
9:00pm-- Write tomorrow's guest blog for Open Hands and Dirty Feet

PHEW. 3 hours of transportation, 3 visits to the library, and 2 meetings later.... I'm going to bed.
Sweet dreams, world wide web.

Nuevo Nombre

We have officially changed the name of the workspace formerly known as the "Biblioteca" (library) to the "Centro de Manna".

Don't worry, we still have a library, but we felt that calling our whole space the "Biblioteca" was limiting. Out of the space we rent, we run the following:

Public Lending Library
Teen Center
Art Classes for Kids
Children's English Classes
Adult's English Classes
World Studies Classes for Kids
Women's Exercise Classes

We are in the process of building a kitchen to host cooking classes, and we also hope to open up a preventative health clinic on the third floor.

We have essentially 6 different rooms on two different floors of a building from which we run most of our programs. Therefore we felt like calling the whole space a library was misleading (women got confused when I would say we had exercise on the 3rd floor of the library). So we have officially changed our name to..... (drumroll please)...... "Centro de Manna". After many discussions, we decided that "Community Center" was too presumptuous (since all of our programs are still run by gringos), and since most of the community members recognize the name Manna, "Centro de Manna" was the final outcome.

Rest easy, now that you know the new lingo. Hasta la proxima vez....