Finally at Colegio Americano!

Greetings! I am now in my second week in Guayaquil, and have a new blog address, because something has happened to the domain I had been using. Using blogspot is better anyway, because it’s easier to figure out how to include pictures, even though making them look nice is my next challenge! Everything is still going well here, except that I have a nasty head cold that just started yesterday. It’s been quite a while since I felt so sick, though it’s just the same congestion cold that I usually get in the summers in Minnesota. It’s hard for me to keep moving from hot, humid air outside to dry, cold air in the classroom. I hope it doesn’t last long, and since I should have plenty of time to rest this weekend, I expect to get better quickly! However, I’d love your prayers for this, along with everything else going on!





I’ll just pick up where I left off last week. On Friday, Mari Ani, Beth, and I went with Rosa and Anamaria, two teachers from Colegio Americano, to Malecón 2000, a walk downtown by the Guayas River. Rosa and Anamaria teach five-year-olds and four-year-olds, and they are both very friendly and speak English well. Rosa drove downtown, and then we walked for a while until we came upon a little blue tour truck and found out that a ride and a tour would be only a dollar for each of us. Of course, this was if we wanted a tour in Spanish; a tour in English would have been five for each of us, if I remember right. We were fine with the Spanish, though, because we had plenty of translators. Malecón 2000 has several museums, some really sweet fountains, playgrounds, a few restaurants, and a statue of the famous Simon Bolivar shaking hands with San Martin. If you don’t know much about South America, just know that Simon Bolivar is a big deal. Much of South American money is called bolivars, the country of Bolivia is named after him, and there are statues and tributes all over the place. He negotiated and worked for independence of many South American countries. We also ate at a restaurant there, and though I liked the food I got, we had to wait a ridiculously long time. Beth and I told each other later that we had both expected to pass out before the food came, since we were pretty tired from all the running around we had been doing! Then Rosa took us to the market to do some shopping, since it was one of Mari Ani and Beth’s last chances to get souvenirs. I bought a dress for ten dollars, and a postcard. I have plenty of time to shop, so I’m pacing myself! We wound up our big afternoon at the mall, browsing through a few stores and getting smoothies in the food court.





Mari Ani is very close with many of her classmates from high school still, and whenever one of them comes back to Guayaquil to visit everyone who still lives in the city gets together for a party. Friday was the night, and Mari Ani brought both Beth and me, which was very good, since most of Mari Ani’s friends aren’t very comfortable with their English. The name of the game was karaoke at her friend Alejandra’s apartment. About ten of Mari Ani’s classmates came, and most of them brought significant others. A few of them are married, and two of them have kids, so pictures were shown all around. I sang two songs: “All My Lovin’” and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” I wasn’t quite brave enough to sing in Spanish! The pitches weren’t very good, since I didn’t get to pick a key, but it was still fun. One of Mari Ani’s classmates told everyone he started falling in love with me during the second song, but, alas, I never figured out his name. So much for that!



The night went pretty late, and we were very ready for bed by the time we got home, especially because Kiko wanted to take us early the next morning to climb the famed 400 steps to get the bird’s eye view of the city. We didn’t end up leaving very early, but we did make the hike, which wasn’t bad at all, even though we were disappointed to find out that there were 444 steps, not 400. False advertising… There were some really fun gift shops and art galleries on the way up, and very cool places to take pictures. Both Mari Ani and Beth were art majors, so they kept taking pictures that they were planning to paint when they got home. I wish I could paint. When we got home, we found the relatives in the middle of a crab dinner, complete with wooden boards and hammers to crack the crabs. Mariana was upstairs resting, since she had not been feeling well since the beach. She also doesn’t do too well in the air conditioning, and we were quite chilly in the condo in Salinas. I probably have the same thing that she had, though I hope not, since she’s still not feeling her best. Anyway, the crab was a very fun experience. I mainly grew up eating imitation crab meat, which is definitely not as good as the real stuff, and of course it just feels good to pound the daylights out of a helpless dead animal. I kept trying to get the little cousin, Waikeng, to talk with me, but he kept acting shy, though he obviously isn’t! That night I went to mass with Mari Ani and her aunts, who are super sweet ladies. I was encouraged and definitely had communion with God there, but the combination of not being Catholic and not speaking Spanish fluently made it a little difficult. I was able to follow along with the lessons very easily, since I could read them in the bulletin while they were being read in front, and I already was familiar with all the passages, but I got very little out of the homily! On the walk back, we visited with Mari Ani’s godmother Marisol and her friend Klaus, who were both very nice, and then we had pizza when we got back to the house, and two of Mari Ani’s classmates came to hang out with her on her last night in Guayaquil. I went to bed kind of early that night, after saying goodbye to Beth and Mari Ani.





I just relaxed on Sunday, and waited impatiently for my first day at Colegio Americano on Monday. The next morning Mariana and I left the house at 7:45, and Mariana took me to the office of the Director’s Secretary, Sandra, so that I could wait for Billy Dwyer, the director of the English Academy, to tell me where I should be. He just told me about all the teachers and told me that I could decide where I wanted to be, so I decided to sit in on Dino’s class. Dino is an Ecuadorian who used to teach computer science until he became the general director of technology at the school, and now he just teaches summer classes. His English is excellent, and Billy told me that he was the most experienced teacher working in the academy, so I thought he would be a good person to observe. He has ten students in his class, three boys and seven girls, who are all between twelve and seventeen years old. A few of them actually attend Colegio Americano, but some of them are just enrolled for the summer program. I really like them, even though they are all rich kids, so they’re kind of spoiled. One particularly troublesome and adorable muchacho, Arturo, is trying hard to drive Dino crazy. He comes late every day, and he either talks or plays with his cell phone all the time. I wondered at first if he was just acting up because I was visiting, but before I even asked, Dino said that Arturo seemed to be behaving better than usual. Like I said, he is very cute. The ornery ones often are. Four of the girls are his best friends, so they do whatever he tells them to, and the other five students are all very quiet. I wish I had more time to get to know them all. I’m not even down in Ecuador that long, and I will only be with the English Academy for one more week.

It’s also been very fun to explore the campus. It is quite sprawling, with many long, shed-like buildings making up the secondary school, a partially enclosed larger building for the primary school, and several colorful little buildings for the preschool. I also saw my first iguana up close. Guayaquil is full of iguanas, but I had only seen one from inside a restaurant until yesterday. I was walking through the campus when I saw a funny looking lump on the ground, and when I saw the eyes and the back, I thought at first that it was a huge dead fish or a statue. Then I think it moved, and I realized what it was. I was just proud that I didn’t scream or show my surprise too dramatically, though I don’t think anyone was watching me. I’m definitely not used to seeing huge lizards crawling around on the loose! One of the nicest buildings on campus is the library, which excites me quite a bit. I looked around there a little bit today, but I have a great deal of exploring yet to do.

I also met my cooperating teacher, Philip Dixon, on Monday. We went out for lunch and discussed some ideas and made some plans, which was very exciting for me. Philip is quite young; he graduated from college with his English BA from a university in New York, and then started working as a reading coach in Colorado with Americorps, which was when he realized that he enjoyed teaching. He got his license through an alternative program in the schools out there, and then decided to move down to South America to teach. He’s only been at Colegio Americano since last August, but I think he’s enjoyed it pretty well so far. He’s been working on his Spanish since he got down here, and it’s coming along “poco a poco” (little by little). We talked about a new reading program he wants to implement with some ELL (English language learner) novels that he found, about plans he has to incorporate time on the computers, and about what my focus might be during my time that I take over his classes. I need to be teaching every class for at least three weeks, but more is better, so hopefully that will work with his plan. Because the students are ELLs, we are trying to figure out how much we can expect from them writing-wise, and we thought that we would start out writing narratives, so I will probably teach a unit on writing short stories, with interspersed time to read, to work on grammar, and to write blogs and journals. It’s pretty exciting! We’ll be starting the school year on March 30th, and our students are in primer curso, the first grade of secondary school, which is somewhere in between our sixth graders and seventh graders. I can’t wait!

That’s about it so far. Mariana and I are taking it easy this weekend, since we are both not feeling very well, and Kiko is on a work trip in Chile this week. He works as a mechanic for Bosch, and they just had their annual meeting for South America. He will be back on Saturday. Pray that he would stay safe. Pray for Mariana’s health, because she still doesn’t know the real cause of her sickness, and she is supposed to leave for an education convention in Bógota on Wednesday. Pray also for my Spanish. It’s really a little bit harder than I expected, because of how long it has been since I spoke it, because the Ecuadorian accent is a little bit harder to me to decipher than others, and because I never knew that much to begin with. Pray for my sister Julia’s plans to go to Russia with the East European Missions Network this summer. She is in the thick of fund-raising, and is kind of nervous about that. I would love to hear from you! I pray you are all doing well! I'll put up pictures of the school and the iguanas soon! God bless, Christina