Hi! So I haven´t updated this in almost an entire month, and no matter how much I tell myself that I can make time for getting to a cyber to update the blog, there are so many other obligations and invitations and it just feels like never any time to actually make it happen. I have about twenty minutes to recap the past month, so here goes...
We went to our very first futbol game! There are two main teams for Guayaquil, and everyone is very particular about who you root for. It reminded me a lot of the teams in Sevilla. It seems somewhat similar to the Mets/Yankees thing that New York´s got going on. The teams are Barcelona and Emelec. Our in-country director, Megan, is a strong supporter of Barcelona and she said that she may just love to take some of us to a game should we decide we love Barcelona hahaha safe to say a bunch of us signed on for a game at the end of last month. It was hilarious. Barcelona lost to Penarol (a team from Montevideo, Uruguay) but the game was great. El Sur is the part of the stadium behind one of the goals and it is insanity at its finest. This is where a lot of the hardcore fans watch, and it invovled lots of fire and confetti and people running up and down the seats. It looked like the herd of wild buffalo from the Lion King (yes I just used that as a reference). The game got even funnier when everyone around us started asking us to take pictures with them. Not only were we a group of eleven gringos, but we also were all sporting slightly obnoxious Barcelona jerseys. We felt like we were characters at Disney World.
Like I said before, I am the English teacher for the septimos (our equivalent to sixth grade) at Santa Marianita. I have been teaching classes, but the previous teacher has still been in the classroom, which has been extremely helpful in terms of classroom management. There are thirty to thirty-five crazy kids in each of my classes, so getting their attention is anything but easy. One day last week I arrived a few minutes late to my class and they actually cheered. Now, I´m not sure if this cheering is because they think they´ll be able to get away with more with the gringa as the teacher, or if they´re genuinely excited for me to be teaching them. It´s funny because they have a fascination with the way I speak. Oh, and they thoroughly enjoy Justin Beiber and WWF Smackdown, so I´m frequently interrupted in the middle of class to translate lyrics or wrestlers´ names. I don´t even get mad when this happens because I think it´s too hilarious. I should probably try and get a bit more serious haha and it would probably be a good idea to start this tomorrow, seeing as how the professor has now gone on maternity leave and I´ll be teaching the class completely on my own tomorrow. I´m slightly nervous, but also really excited to get into the swing of teaching. This is the last thing I´ve been ¨waiting for¨ to happen, so I´ll be excited to just start.
The soup kitchen ladies have been amazing, per usual. Last week they gave me a huge grocery bag of vegetables to bring home to my community. We got lots of peppers, carrots, something that we think is kale (I don´t know how to spell that but it looks like lettuce), onions, broccoli, and parsley. They also give me lots of recipes to try out, including Coco-Cola chicken (yes, you read that correctly), which was awesome (unfortunately we had to skip out on the Coco-Cola and use Pepsi because for whatever reason the Pepsi was way less expensive, but I´m sure it still tasted pretty much the same). The best part was buying the chicken. It still had some feathers on it. Caitlin and I went to the store to ask for ¨pechuga¨, which is chicken breast, and the dude pulls out two full birds (already dead but still) and just chops them up and gives us the part we need. We walked back to the house with chicken feet sticking out of our bag. And I have no idea how we knew what we were supposed to do with the chicken, but we ended up preparing it pretty damn well.
The soup kitchen ladies aren´t the only ones giving us food to try. In Arbolito, there are four sectors, and the higher the number, the less developed the area. We live in sector three, but a lot of our kids that come to Semillas live in sector four. There was gang activity in that area that prevented us from going into sector four to pick kids up before Semillas, but things have calmed down a bit so now we´ve been heading out there to both drop off and pick kids up before and after Semillas. We´ve talked a lot with Leon and Melina´s mom, Maria, and she was so kind last week to present us with seco de pato (which is duck). We found out today when we went back for lunch, which included pig (intestines and all), that both the pig and duck were pets that they had killed for food. Yum. It was particularly weird when we looked outside in the yard and saw many more ducks and chickens and pigs. I wonder when they´ll get eaten.
We´ve been having the opportunity to spend more and more time in the neighborhood, and although this has been awesome, we still haven´t found enough time to visit everyone we´d like and to also rest. Last weekend we had lots of meetings for RdC and we barely rested. The weekend before we were asked to dance with some of our Ecuadorian friends to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Nueva Generacion, which is the rock group that plays the music for the mass. Both Aide and Ricardo (two twenty-somethings that work for Rostro; Aide works at Manos Abiertas, and Ricardo works with us at Semillas) play in the band, and they asked if we would like to dance with them in a ¨special presentation.¨ We said we definitely would, and I´m pretty sure there´s now a video up on Facebook of us dancing to ¨Rock Around the Clock¨, which they introduced as an international American dance. The dance consisted of Ricardo basically flinging his arms around everywhere. If you can watch the video, the mass of flying limbs is Ricardo. Caitlin was his partner. She said she´s never had a more difficult task than trying to dance with Ricardo. It was hilarious.
Our first retreat group was here in earlier September! They were a group from Santa Clara University in California, and they stayed in the AJS retreat house and Tasha was their leader. They spent an afternoon at Semillas and we had a great time with them. It was so weird to think that after only being here for just over a month that we were suddenly considered experienced enough to be their guides. Our next retreat group is VILLANOVA (holler) and I know a few people coming on the trip, so I´m really excited to see them. They will be staying in the Arbolito retreat house and Jon is their leader. We still have about two weeks until they get here, but time here goes by so fast that they´ll be here before we know it.
I felt like myself a lot yesterday when Caitlin, Brendan, and I decided to try going for a run. There´s only one paved road in Arbolito, and it´s probably not the best to run on, so we´ve been wanting to try out this alternate road. It´s a private road behind our house, and we can access it by going through a fence and walking over a small bridge. We ran a bit down there and followed some trails that led us along the river. That was really fun. It felt almost like running in Cape Cod, which is weird because I am in Ecuador. The roads were dirt and there were more plants and flowers along the road, with a light breeze. I might as well have been running in Eastham. It just felt really good to get back out on the road.
Things are definitely going well here, and some days are harder than others. It´s hardest when you have a rough day or get stressed out, because it makes you homesick because you realize that you can´t really call or talk to anyone you would have relied on before to talk things through with. That´s why it´s so great that we live in community. We really have been here for each other so far, getting ourselves through bad days and celebrating with each other when things go well :)
Paz, Amor, y Ecuador <3
