My First Trip to the Amazon!

When I was in the fourth grade, I had an amazing teacher.  As a teacher now, I think back on her classes, and I'm always impressed by how much she impacted my life.  She was the first person to teach me about simple machines, my state's history, the middle ages, and, of course, the rain forest.  And now, over a decade later, I've made it to the Amazon!

On Monday the 29th, as my motorboat sped for two hours down the Amazon, I couldn't believe my own luck.  I whispered little thank yous to my teacher as a toucan's notorious beak caught my eye just before it soared into the trees.  I remembered having spelling tests over drip tips and bromeliads as I noticed different ferns and orchids from the boat.

I was traveling into Cuyabeno National Park, the second largest in Ecuador.  One of my guides told me that Cuyabeno has twice as many opportunities to see wildlife asYasuní National Park, which has gained more publicity and tourists due to its oil-fields and law suits.  Maybe it's a testament to how much I fell in love with the area, but after four days there, I believed him.  Among the things we saw were monkeys (at least four types), bats, birds (too many types to remember), white and red piranha, caiman, snakes, turtles, river dolphin, tarantulas, frogs, assorted insects and fish, peacock bass, an enormous arowana, and a gecko. That doesn't include the flora, like the Ceibos trees, a type of palo santo tree, sangre de drago, and some honeysuckle-like plants that I kept referring to as "chupitas de miel."  I couldn't possibly sum everything up in one blog post, so I'll stop here and start the photos.  Thank you to Cuayabeno National Park, the Siona tribe, Jamu Lodge (highly recommended), my assorted travel partners, and, of course, my fourth grade teacher!   

swimming and sunsets on Laguna Grande

piranha fishing

 hiking on the Tapir trail

almond-scented centipede

Monkeys!

"­¡Qué chévereee!"

People-watching

People-watching is a favorite activity of mine, odd behavior is a specialty, and odd behavior bordering on the philanthropic is even more amazing.  For example, once in Spain, I turned a corner down a disturbingly dark alley only to hear "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" coming from the depths. As I crossed the shadows and cobble stones, what I found was even more surprising: a man with a ukelele had rigged strings to his fingers and arms so that his music was accompanied by a tiny mannequin with his own tiny ukelele.  It was hokey, but unexpected.   A pleasant surprise after a day getting lost in the city.

In Guayaquil last week, I was a little angered with a car that had stopped suddenly in a busy crosswalk as pedestrians were trying to rush through.  "Typical Guayaco driver," I thought as everyone had sped up to avoid getting hit. But, as I looked back to give the driver an angry look, a tiny, old nun stepped out of the car with a large, plastic bag.  She reached the pedestrian island, scooped into her bag, and rained cat food down on the pigeons in the vegetation.  The nun smiled with delight, watched a moment as the pigeon's ate, then hobbled back to the car. It was over as quickly as it had begun.  She drove off and everything went back to normal, all just a part of the daily routine.

Virgencita, Help me

I don't offer a lot of glimpses into the minds of my students here, but this time I'm making an exception.  My kids handed in their final notebooks last week, and there is a particular brand of notebooks they have that cracks me up.  Here's a sampling of some of the messages the children tried to stick in my head before I gave them their final grades:

"Ave Maria, give me a shot."  I especially like the worried face next to it.

"Little Virgin, I swear that I studied but give me a hand."

One that I somehow failed to photograph offered a rubric of ways to grade the student.  The options included:  buena, buenissima, and buenisisisisisisima.  There's more of the less religious/grade-concerned types below.  Apologies for quality as they were taken with my webcam while I was at school.

An included folder/bed complete with sheep and pillows.  "The 5-star hotel for your loose papers"  The chameleon says things about the types of papers that may rest there.

"Official lunch planner"

This notebook says such wonderful things about school as: "Lunch is the best moment of the day!"  Beneath this is a menu suggesting various comidas tipicas for the student: "Monday:  cheese empanada with sugar, Tuesday:  salchipapa (french fries and hot dog bits) with mayonnaise, ketchup, and cola, etc., etc."

They're super-cute, spunky, and quirky, a little snapshot into the "verdadera bombacitas" in my classes.  And, yes, the ninth-grade girl inside me wants a few. 

Vacation Accomplished

Four to five meter-high waves greeted any beach-goers during the 10 de agosto holiday weekend, and as always, I forgot my camera to record it.  Amidst whale-watching, sun-drenched private beaches, amazing seafood, and a tiny little earthquake on Sunday, there is a lot to record in Ecuador...if you can remember your camera.  Unfortunately, all I've got is my words, and if there's one thing I learned from reading "Moby Dick," it's that reading about whales is way uncool.  Seeing them in person, however, is amazing, and I highly recommend it.  And, hey, if you've got $6,000.00 or so to spend on a vacation, might I recommend building your own beach home in Puerto Lopez?  Yes, that's a real price for beach property.  Yes, you should retire here.  Or maybe with all these recessions in the first world, Ecuador should have a new slogan for tourists:  "Why not live here?"

I need a vacation

When you're practically traveling for a living, it might seem selfish to say this, but I need a vacation.  My school, which typically has a 10 to 12 week bimester, is now running on week 13 of a 14 week bimester.  The students are used to being on vacation by now, and they seem ready to burst.  As they have been fond of reminding me this week, it is like "everyday I'm shuffling."  In between reminders to sit, stop singing, and talk in an inside voice, my inside voice is praying for the weekend.  Until then, I'll be dreaming of things like this:

If it were my home...

I just heard about the amazing website If It Were My Home.  For anyone who has ever lived abroad, this is the perfect website to email to friends and family members when they ask what it's like to live in a developing or third world country.  If you're like me, your stories never seem to have the same impact that they have on you.  Numbers are harder to argue with.

If I tell you that the average person in Ecuador makes $7,000.00 a year, and then I tell you that a dvd costs between thirteen and eighteen dollars here, then suddenly you understand why there's an industry for fifty cent pirated dvds.  While these numbers don't cover everything, it's an inventive way to see the world with new eyes. 

Día del Niño

Last week, Ecuador celebrated Día del Niño.  It's a day set aside to honor children, much like Father's Day or Mother's Day in the United States.  In Ecuador, children receive gifts from their families.  Most schools have special events or take a half-day off.  While it may seem strange to first-world people, it's an important holiday to celebrate here.  Many parents are not able to take care of their children the way they would like to.  Their kids have jobs or take care of brothers and sisters while mom and dad are gone all day.  Many poor children do not go to school, or if they do, they may not attend regularly.  For these reasons and more, Día del Niño is a day to honor children for their contributions.

The impact of this holiday wasn't obvious to me at first.  I work at a school where most students own several Blackberries and parents regularly beg their little ones out of tough situations.  These kids seemed pampered enough.  The reality of the holiday became obvious to me over the weekend.  While some children played with new Power Wheels and bicycles in the park, others were out selling flowers and candy to make a living.  On Saturday night, while I was out drinking with some friends, a young girl stopped at our table to sale roses.  Everyone saw her coming, and we all seemed to be uncomfortably preparing ourselves for the moment when she would finally reached our table.  Then the worst thing happened.  One of my friends said cheerfully, "Oh, hi Maria!" (not her real name). The demeanor at our table changed immediately.  No one had wanted this child to have a name or to be memorable, but suddenly we had no choice. 

This is because my friend works for an organization that assists families in need.  Her job is to give working children a break.  We all knew that some of the children were found while they were working on the streets, but we had never realized that she might run into them while she was out celebrating the weekend. I was amazed at how collected she was while she talked to Maria.

In the face of all this, I began to understand the importance of acting like my friend did.  She set aside a moment to face the problem, then moved on with the evening.  At a time when I have spent too many afternoons feeling helpless in the face of such enormous problems, it suddenly made sense to me.  No, setting aside one day to break the mammoth into smaller pieces doesn't immediately solve anything for Maria.  However, it does bring the situation out of the "What can I possibly do?" paralysis.  While living in a country surrounded by economic and social hardships, sometimes that is enough.

*Edit:  This week while reading U.S. news, I stumbled across the following excerpt from a piece submitted by Jonathan Franzen to the New York Times.  I think it sums up the difficulties one person faces in trying to grapple with social change far better than I could explain it:

"...My anger and pain and despair about the planet were only increased by my concern for wild birds, and yet, as I began to get involved in bird conservation and learned more about the many threats that birds face, it became easier, not harder, to live with my anger and despair and pain.

How does this happen? I think, for one thing, that my love of birds became a portal to an important, less self-centered part of myself that I’d never even known existed. Instead of continuing to drift forward through my life as a global citizen, liking and disliking and withholding my commitment for some later date, I was forced to confront a self that I had to either straight-up accept or flat-out reject...
When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might love some of them.

And who knows what might happen to you then? "