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The past few weeks have brought Keiron and I into the clutches of hundreds of tropical birds and hundreds of dancing elementary school students in traditional Ecuadorian dress.It’s hard to say which experience was more vibrant and exotic - the first was a trip to the nearby nature reserve of Isla Corazon, or Heart Island, and the second was the celebration of Family Day at the Genesis school.
Amidst the prehistoric-looking mangroves off the coast of Bahía is Isla Corazon, where frigates, pelicans and foreign birds who’ve come to Ecuador “without visas” fill the air and sea with the sounds of splashes and flapping feathers.
As we explored the lush wilderness by boat with a local guide, the birds literally surrounded us. Pelicans swooped towards the water and plucked fish from its surface, only to be thwarted by mischievous frigates, who get 80% of their food by stealing it from other birds.
Dotting the dense trees of the island, male frigates with balloon-like red chests looked like brightly colored fruit. The chests puff out like that during mating season to attract females.
"My Body" projects
The marvelous work of first grade Once we’d been thoroughly impressed by the outside of the island, it was time for us to canoe through the narrow tunnel, covered overhead by stretching branches, that passes through its center. Towards the entrance of this watery path, a boa skin warned us of the Steve Irwin adventure within.
From the twisting, tangled roots of the mangroves, tiny red crabs and bright yellow birds watched us float past – a feat which became more difficult at the center of the island, where we hit bottom. The tour guide worked up quite a sweat getting us through to deeper water.
It was a day of exploration and peace, adventure and tranquility, but most of all natural beauty.
At the heart of Isla Corazon is bittersweet story, however, as what we enjoyed there is only a shadow of its past. The 1990s delivered two devastating blows to the ecosystem near Isla Corazon, ultimately leading to the locals’ decision to protect the island.
Fishing had been the traditional livelihood of
the area, in which the River Chone meets the Pacific Ocean at an estuary, since before the arrival of the Spanish. The area is full of artifacts from indigenous people. Mangroves lined the coast, holding back sediment and allowing the estuary, at a depth of 31 meters, to support diverse marine life, including sea turtles, sharks and tropical fish.
Now, the coast along San Vicente (across the estuary from Bahía de Caráquez) is almost bare. In place of the magnificent mangroves are netted squares, demarcating the shrimp farms that boomed during the 90s. Because of this unbridled development, the estuary is now only five meters deep.
After this tragedy, which expelled forever much of the aquatic wildlife, El Niño struck hard, flooding and destroying homes along the coast. As part of the rebuilding process, Isla Corazon was created as a protected area, preserving what’s left of a startlingly beautiful coastal landscape.
The most touching part about the story is the role the locals played in Isla Corazon’s conservation. Many of them were or are fisherman, who learned about ecotourism after El
Niño. Our guide, who was probably in his fifties, told us that because of the ecotourism project, he had recently learned to read and write. It is truly inspiring to see this poor, formally uneducated community take charge of the sustainability of their home.
The end of our Isla Corazon adventure, and the passing of a busy week with the little ones, brought me to Family Day, in which all of my classes had English performances, and I was co-MC. Japan experiences in mind, I thought this might include some kind of hilarious mishap, but I translated the script into English correctly and everything went well.
As for my students, if I thought they were cute during class, I clearly hadn’t thought about how cute they would be in tiny straw hats and flowing skirts, shaking their hips to salsa music (with five-year-old boys’ hands on the girls’ hips!). I had the chance to watch them practice early in the week, and the boys’ faces when they found out about that specific move were absolutely priceless.
You’ll have to check out the
video to
see how the English performances went. It’s my group of first graders along with the second grade class dancing to "Walk and Stop." During the performance they were all singing, but in the video you can only hear the ones who catch the microphone. The lyrics are: "Walk and stop, gallop and stop, skate and stop, jump and stop, march and stop, tiptoe stop," (I may have messed up the order).
From a few groups of mothers, we also had some dancing entertainment. One salsa number included, to her great embarrassment, our new friend from Wisconsin, whose son joined my first grade class a few weeks after our arrival. As one little boy in the class put it, “There’s a new student from America! He speaks English! We can’t understand a
word he says!”
After all of the performances, every grade level had a kind of potluck dinner (I teach more than one grade and got to dinner-hop). The sense of community here in Bahía is so strong, and it was wonderful to get to spend time with the kids and their parents.
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Mom
non-member comment
Love those kids
Oh, it is so much fun seeing you with those kids. Isn't teaching fun? We loved seeing the pictures from the island, too. What a story.