Friday May, 22 -- A night flight into Quito. It’s late and the hotel bed is much welcomed as is the next slow two days until the students and Jane Hardy and I meet to go to the Centro de Formacion on Sunday evening in South Quito, one of the poorest urban sections of this very large Andean city.

 

The Centro is a lovely compound in South Quito that exists, like an oasis, both physically and academically, to offer south Quito youth positive options opposed to a life that can become immersed in alcohol, drugs, violent behavior, and grueling physical work. During the summers, youth in this part of the city can come here during the day and have enriching academic and social experiences at an extremely low cost. 

 

Right now though, Quito schools are still in session, so it is the job of the 12 Wabash and two DePauw students to live in the compound and to walk daily to a local “Colegio” or high school (ages 12 – 18 plus) to teach English as a Foreign Language to Ecuadorian students in the mornings, while teaching thematic units everyone prepared in March and April on campus to groups of students in the afternoon at the Centro. We arrive holding our breath, ready for a week’s worth of hard but exciting work, work we hope will bring a true service to an area in need. One of the first things we notice as we enter this lovely compound is the faint twinkle of sharp glass edging the top of the compound walls. This juxtaposition of beauty and ugliness is pretty much a metaphor for the week.

 

We learn immediately that nothing is what it seemed. There will be no students at the Centro for us, and our Colegio classes will be the third shift at night, 6:20 to 9:45 every evening. Que lastima! What will we do? We are about to learn our first life lesson: it takes resilience to quickly shift gears, modifying plans Monday morning and afternoon to fit our new groups of students. 

 

Monday night we learn that this high school, with roughly grades 6 – 12, is like nothing that any of us ever attended or taught in. Picture each room as a concrete box: there are no acoustics, just four concrete walls, a concrete floor, one blackboard in the front of each room with 45 – 60 desks filled with students in each room, no projectors or computers or DVD players. The windows are all either open to the sound of the central courtyard below or the glass is broken out. In either case, the noise from other rooms and from outside is deafening. Sounds echo constantly, as Wabash and DePauw students quickly find out that the English level of most students is well below that needed for their prepared lessons. More resilience as we all quickly revise and move to teaching students what they normally don’t get: how to communicate in English about real topics and questions they may use now or in their futures.

 

We all worked hard to make the experience work, and at Tuesday morning’s debriefing, we question: Will what we do make a difference? And this is where our resolve wins out: Wabash and DePauw students in this Colegio have already brought out the energy and the eagerness to learn in their classrooms for most students. These students were delighted that the Americans came to their school, to their English classrooms, a privilege so often reserved for the better schools of Quito. They are important enough for this to happen. We may not see the difference that our teaching makes this week we agreed, but for how many kids will our presence send a positive message that they matter? That their speaking English matters for their future? 

 

On Tuesday, Victor Nava appears at break and says to me: “I have a bone to pick with our education program!” “Why?” I ask. “Well, nowhere in our methods courses did I ever learn how to teach in the dark and what to do when my students bring their babies to class! I think we will have to re-do the education program curricula.” I ask,” Well, what did you do?” “I asked the baby’s name as we all introduced ourselves, and we just kept talking and trying to learn.”   Good ideas all; I don’t think we can teach him how to make those decisions in a methods course!

 

On Wednesday and Thursday I watch Patrick Garrett ham up his vocabulary teaching, putting himself into every moment, and I see that every kids’ eyes are on him; all are smiling and laughing and repeating everything he wants them to learn.  They learn, but what about Patrick? “Confidence,” he grins.  I watch Alex and Jake, Jon and Michael take command of the board and the classroom and role-play and involve their classes in English speaking role-plays, getting kids up and saying English who have clearly never done these things before. I see Josh cover a science class because no teacher showed up that night to teach. I watch Ryan, Chris, Drew, Danni and Carolyn work with their small groups, and during break, I see Ian teaching Ecuadorians how to dance in the school courtyard. The Ecuadorians are charmed. They can sense the care and the interest from all of us. Jane and I ask about “low points of the week” later and Victor says: “I had no low points this week!”

 

Was it all collaborative and smooth? By no means. Two afternoons Wabash and DePauw met the Ecuadorians for “futbol” competition. As helpful as I think we all were in the classroom, the Wabash/Depauw team members were savages on that field. For the record, the Ecuadorians won one game and we won one. In spite of Evan’s twisted ankle and Jon’s blisters, we held up pretty well!

 

It’s hard to know in one week if you really made a difference. The last night, Jane and I asked our students to spend five minutes at the end of the night asking the Ecuadorian students what they had learned, generally and specifically. In one classroom, one student in the back jumped up out of his chair and said looking at Jake: “What is your favorite color? My favorite color is blue.” I left on that note as Jake looked at me, pointed at that particular student, and said: “That is HUGE!” Maybe it is for someone who doesn’t get many chances to speak in English sentences.

 

June 1 - And now it is on to Yachana for Wabash, and back to the States for me. I will miss seeing what Ecuadorians AND the Americans learn, but I have a feeling it will be something as unforgettable as this past week.