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Published: August 8th 2007
Teeeeeacher!
Some happy kids from Ab Linc about to get flattened as I fall on them.Zut alors, I´ve been away for so long! OK, once again forgive me for typos because I have a lot to type and a wonky teeth keyboard to type it on...
So last week was pretty much business as usual. Mornings were spent at Ab Linc escuela, mainly teaching La Bamba and Clementine. I´m not quite sure how the latter is supposed to help the children learn anything at all, as the words that we were given didn´t even make sense in English. Seriously, "light she has like a fally/folly (not sure about that one, couldn´t read the teacher´s writing but I don´t think it made sense either way)/and her shoes were number nine/herring boxes without topses/sandals were for Clementine". Say WHAT?! In the afternoons I´ve been working at CENIT, and on Monday I began my first day of proper work in the Tutoria de Juegos. The idea is that there are three teachers and six children, who all live or work in a nearby market. The children that are selected have behavioural disorders, or don´t really know how to socialise, or are chronically shy, and the programme is designed to give them a few hours a week of intensive play and
creativity so that they can express themselves and learn to interact with other children in a safe and non-judgemental environment. CENIT runs a number of programmes, mainly for children living in markets around the poor south of Quito, for example, there´s a dentistry programme, homework clubs, schools and nurseries, and crafts, as well as clubs for women, such as art, literacy, and a cheap doctor´s clinic. It was set up by nuns and families pay a certain amount to have their children enrolled in the programmes, with the intention that one day all children will have a chance to be employed professionally. I have now met all of the children in the Tutoria, and I can honestly say that although they can be a handful, I really look foward to the play sessions. Not only because we get to pick all the childhood activities that we all enjoyed but never had the chance to go back to (papier mâché, paper people chains, colouring in...) but because you can see how much each child needs and enjoys our attention and help. However on Wednesday a child got glue in my eye, so that was not great.
This week the weather took an
jungly jungly
Ben, Claire and I in a cloudforesty setting. unwelcome turn. When we arrived in Quito (a month ago! Can you believe it?) everyone kept raving about how unusual the weather was, and how it was normally chucking it down with rain and freezing cold, yadda yadda yadda... Well, now the Ecuadorian winter has caught up with us, with gusto. The day starts off kind of cloudy, and there´s the whole flip-flop versus trainer debate, and then it brightens up and is lovely and toasty by about 11am, and we´re all wishing we´d gone for the trainers... By the time I get to the south (1.30pm) the cloud have started sneaking down the volcanoes, and before you know it (ie, 3pm) we´re experiencing torrential downpours, thunder and lightning, you name it. All very exciting, but it is getting a bit tedious.
As family life goes, I haven´t really been around enough to have much to relay. After CENIT I travel to the Mariscal (Gringoland), and last week the evenings were spent searching for jungle tours, reserving a jungle tour for Easter, eating yuca pan and trying to work out which bus takes me home (by the way, Ecuadorian buses are the place to be for a bit of an impromptu
disco! I reckon the drivers choose the music, and the other day I was bouncing down the road to the tune of Funky Town. Imo and I were having a proper boogie, but somehow the rest of the bus managed to resist). However, I had a very interesting conversation over dinner the other day with my padres. We had been listening to the radio in the car on the way home and I vaguely registered that it was talking about Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Anyway, I was sat there, eating my rice, minding my own, when my madre suddenly turned to me and said "do you believe in UFOs?" Erm... excuse me? "Do you believe in UFOs?" Well... not really. Why do you ask? (Here she explained that the radio programme was about the lunar landing and how when they got there there were already foreign spacecraft tracks, much bigger than those of the American craft. I was about to ask if that wasn´t all a hoax anyway, when she began to say something that sounded like this😊 "Because I have a friend who´s been to other planets" (accompanied by wiggling fingers on head - helpful) "and he says
Truckin'
About to embark on another whirlwind adventure... that there
are aliens, and some are bad and some are good. And they communicate by telepathy" (accompanied by telepathy-like hand movements). Well, I wasn´t really sure how to respond to that, so I managed an interested sounding "Oh", before she went on: "do you have my UFOs in England?" Erm... not really. Do you have many here? "Oh yes. My husband´s seen one" (nodding from husband) "just above Pichincha one night" I... see. Maybe they like it here because... it´s higher?
Quite possibly the most surreal conversation I´ve ever had. On Friday night after CENIT the Quito girls embarked on their next weekend adventure to a small cloudforest community called Mindo. We weren´t altogether sure where to get the bus from to be honest, so we ended up waiting in the dark and rain at some godforsaken roundabout in the extreme north of Quito, with very little idea of what the bus would look like, or where it would be going. Nevertheless, with some guesswork, perseverance, and a lot of interpreting by Ben (he and Ezim decided to join us for the weekend as they were home from Yunguilla, the village where they work during the week), we managed to
La Cascada Reina
More waterfall fun. catch a bus by 7pm. After about 2 hours on a crowded and steamy bus, we were dropped off in the middle of nowhere, and loaded straight onto a truck that was waiting rather conveniently next to the Welcome to Mindo sign. A little bit TOO conveniently, we thought as we rattled down a darkened dirt road, and wondered whether Caroline was in the front of the car or whether she was still sat on the bus, headed for the coast. But we reached our destination safely, had a bit of an argument with the driver who tried to charge us twice as much as everyone else, and then piled into the Casa de Cecilia hostel, Mindo. Cecilia (legend!) was waiting for us, and had a lovely log cabin type dormroom for us, and pointed us down the road to Babylon restaurant, which served excellent vegetable pasta and a full meal for $2. After that we slapped on a bit of mosi-spray and fell to sleep in our rustic bunkbeds, to the sound of the pounding rain outside.
The next morning we rose early and realised that what we had thought was torrential rain all night was actually the river that
Wildlife!
So it does exist... ran past the open air hostel kitchen. When we explored the building it turned out to be a jungly version of the Weasleys´Burrow, with crazy extensions, underground rooms, hammocks slung wherever, an adjacent internet café, tropical plants growing wherever they liked and a sunbathing platform next to the river. Cecilia fixed us a hearty breakfast of boiled eggs, as much bread as we could eat, manjar de leche, honey, coffee, bananas and oranges (which are generally green here). Then we jumped into the back of another truck, which took us to a part of the cloudforest where there was a cage on a zip-wire which zinged us across the valley to a different part of the forest so that we could hike for an hour to the Cascada Reina, which most of us threw ourselves into before enjoying a well-earned lunch of bizcochos and more manjar. No sooner had we finished than that pesky Ecuadorian winter turned up, and we had to troop back to Cecilia´s decked in our best waterproof and umbrella combos. We had planned to horse ride in the afternoon, but the weather dampened our enthusiasm somewhat, so instead Claire, Emma, Ben, Imo, Tamsin and myself piled
Horse riding!
Nestlé Classic and I back into the truck and were taken to the river for our first tubing experience. Tubing is like white water rafting, except that everyone sits on a tyre inner tube, strapped together into a circle, and guided by two local loons. My loon did a good job of keeping us away from the rocks, but the rest of the time he spent pushing us through the most perilous currents and rapids, communicating through sign language with the other guide (who looked absolutely scared to death for most of the ride) and laughing maniacally as we avoided imminent doom by a hair´s breadth. All in all it was a lot of fun, and we didn´t feel too bad about being totally soaked as it was raining anyway. In the evening we ventured into a cocktail bar which served excellent lemon daquiris, but which had no other customers all night apart from ourselves. We also saw a frog there, but we didn´t managed to catch it in time to take photographic evidence. Dinner was again at Babylon, then back to Cecilia´s where we got told off for talking too loudly by a group of Germans, but Imo and I managed to bag ourselves a hammock each on the open deck, and we slept to the sound of the river and circling mosquitos.
On Sunday morning we arose even earlier than the previous day, to glorious sunlight and another slap-up breakfast grâce à Cecilia. We walked across the village to another hostel which boasted a beautiful hummingbird garden. They were so amazing! They live there quite happily, lapping up the tropical plant sap, unphased by the gawping tourists that arrive every morning to see what it looks like when something flaps its wings 120 times a second. Blurry, that´s what. By the way, if I haven´t mentioned wildlife much before in my blogs, it´s because there isn´t really any in Quito. It´s too high for most bugs, so all we see are dogs, and the occasional cow. After the hummingbirds we went back to Cecilia´s to await our steeds, as we had booked a group horseriding session. It was my first time on a horse (discounting the time when I was about 5 and someone put me on a horse and I cried so I was taken off), and I think it went rather well! I almost fell off once, but we managed a bit of a canter, a decent trot and a very satisfactory walk. My horse (Nestlé Classic) was very amiable, but Claire had the feisty Galak, who kept deciding he wanted a snack, or wandering off down a different route to the rest of us, or randomly stopping for no reason. All very fun, and we finished in time for the rain. So at 3pm we caught the bus back to Quito in high spirits, after a very successful and jungly weekend.
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Mamà
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Felt sorry for you because no-one has added any comments to this one. Glad you've overcome your aversion to horses. We weren't aware that a childhood experience had scarred you so much!! Was it in Wales? What is that fruit?