Cuenca, Part I – First Impressions and the City Itself
As some readers may remember, Matt and I long ago promised to do school visits as part of our year in Ecuador. Language difficulties, side projects, bureaucracy, vacations, family visits, inertia, and the Ecuadorian conception of time all delayed the start of that plan. But in February we finally completed our first school visit to a thousand-student elementary and high school in the city of Cuenca, a 35 minute plane or 10 hour bus ride south of Quito.
Our Friday flight landed on schedule, and an hour and a few phone calls later the school Director came to pick us up. 
As we drove toward the school, we admired the ring of mountains surrounding a city of 500,000 settled in a valley at 8,000 feet. The drive took us beyond the boundaries of tourist maps to the neighborhood of Gapal, where the Fe y Alegría school sat on a hill overlooking the city. Like many Fe y Alegría schools, this one was built in a horseshoe around a cement and dirt courtyard containing prized soccer fields, where ten year olds would soon school us at the world’s most popular game.
the school
The exterior was painted a bright, cheerful yellow and the classrooms squeezed in 40 kids each. While we would soon learn that the teachers had their share of complaints about the lack of infrastructure, this was one of the nicest and largest Fe y Alegría schools we’d seen.
The Director was kind enough to drive us around the city, and brought us to his house to meet his wife, children, and grandchildren. We then headed back to the school to settle into our apartment adjacent to the teachers lounge. By “apartment,” we mean room with 6 bunk beds, a plastic table, cracked windows, burned out lights, and no lock on the door. We didn’t have a kitchen, except a microwave that would provide oatmeal, instant noodle, and popcorn salvation over the next month.
our home security system
The Director advised us that the neighborhood was “muy peligroso,” and recommended we prop a bed frame and chairs up against our door. With that warning, the Director bid us good luck, and left for a week long meeting without telling his staff members that we’d be living at and observing the school for the next three weeks. Oops.
Despite the fact that we never walked in our neighborhood past 6:30, we did start to feel more comfortable after a few days. We toured the beautifully restored colonial center of Cuenca, took walks by the nearby river, bought non perishable food and a dozen $1 DVDs, and even managed to obtain light bulbs and a lock (After our second or third visit to the local convenience store the owner rang us up, looked at us quizzically, and asked, “What are you doing here? Do you live here?”…confirming our suspicion that gringos were rare in these parts). Plus, we realized we’d have no shortage of kids of keep us company/wake us up in the morning. Apart from the elementary school that ran 7:30—12:30 and the high school running 1:00—6:00 Monday through Friday, on Saturday the school collaborated with a local NGO to provide supports for at-risk kids, and on Sunday 600 adult students attended a radio-based, distance learning program focusing on computers and engineering.
We’ll talk more about the school itself in our next post, but first, a little more about the city and surrounding area. Although we were quite far away from the city center, the faculty slowly adopted us and brought us on tours and walks of Cuenca’s architectural wonders. We swallowed our we-are-not-tourists pride and took a double-decker bus through the city, affording close-ups of gilded balconies, aged facades, and possibly more churches per square foot than Rome.
The topless towers of Cuenca
The city’s most famous cathedral was intended to be the biggest in South America…and while it is huge and impressive, when it came time to add the final domes and turrets, someone realized the architect did his math wrong and the whole thing would fall with any added weight. Hence, pretty cathedral but sort of abrupt rectangular towers with no tops.
Aside from its architecture and urban planning savvy, Cuenca is famous for a national park – El Cajas – located half an hour outside the city limits. After waiting an hour for a bus that never came, we bargained with a local taxi and soon arrived in one of the wildest places we’ve ever been. With an area of 290,000 acres Cajas boasts over 270 lakes amidst a labyrinth of jagged terrain.
El Parque Nacional Cajas
Everyone we met worried that we would get lost and freeze in the park’s quickly changing climate, but we successfully navigated a three-hour stroll on a chilly, misty morning. Our hike started at 13,000 feet and took us along the edge of Torreadora lake, around the base of a small mountain, through a stretch of dripping wet forest filled with twisted orange-brown trees, and finally onto a plateau with a view of more lakes, marshes, and rugged mountains. Thanks to the awful weather, we didn’t see a soul and generally felt like we’d stumbled onto the set of Lord of the Rings. We were awed, but after a few hours were glad to hurry out of the cold and back to our cozy(?) room in Cuenca.
Stay tuned…in the next post we go to class, talk with teachers, get adopted by 5-year-olds, and administer a survey that accidentally stirs up a small scale rebellion.
