We know that Ecuador is different from the U.S.  But every once in a while when we’re taking notes during a Fe y Alegria meeting or observing in a classroom, a few numbers shock us, despite their context:

$280 – average cost per year to educate a student for FyA Ecuador

$224 – average monthly FyA teacher salary

$200 – cost per person of our (nice) Quito apartment

59 – number of students in a “full” classroom

60 – number of students at which FyA divides a class into two sections

We approached one ranchera and naively asked, “Is this the bus to the Bramadora?”  A man who looked to be in charge squinted at us, “La Bramadora?  Sí, sí, sí, La Bramadora, hurry up, hurry up, let’s go!”  We slung our bags up on the roof next to a goat and climbed inside the ranchera, the only gringos in sight.  Fifteen minutes later, still baking in the dusty heat, we decided to double-check the ranchera’s destination with our fellow passengers.  No one was exactly sure when the ranchera would leave, but it was definitely going to La Bramadora – albeit the long way around; the ranchera parked in front of us was the one that would get there in one hour instead of three.  So we climbed down from one ranchera and up into another, reminding ourselves to never trust a local Ecuadorian bus driver’s promises of route, destination, or expected time.

After spending much of the year in Ecuador’s mountainous and frigid highlands, our third and final school visit brought us to the 3,000 person town of La Bramadora – located in the middle of banana plantations and jungle halfway between the mountains and the coast. Here are a few postcards from the experience:

Living in the Tropics with Lots of Kids

Due to La Bramadora’s rural location, Fe y Alegría operates a “Casa Hogar” – or boarding house – for students who live too far away to commute every day to school. The kids go home to spend weekends with their families and return to the Casa Hogar Sunday night – many of their commutes totaling 3 or 4 hours, involving long walks and multiple ranchera transfers. When we arrived at the Casa Hogar for the start of the school year there were less than a dozen kids to greet us. As the weeks passed more trickled in, and by the time we left they were a crew of over 50, mostly between the ages of 11 and 17.

While the kids lived in 20-to-a-room dormitories, we were given a room in the second floor of a wood frame house that was just large enough for a bed, its mosquito net and two plastic folding chairs.  While our room was unbearably hot for the middle eight hours of the day, around sunrise and sunset we would catch a breeze along with rays of light that gave the banana leaves outside our window a silhouette of gold.  A hundred meters below our house, a mud-brown river provided bathing when the town’s water ran out, and gave rise to a greater quantity and variety of insects than we ever care to see again.

The mid-day heat in La Bramadora was unlike any heat we have experienced. During the 2:00 to 6:00 window even in the shade we dripped with sweat, and along with the rest of the town we could feel our walk, our work and our neurons slow into a sluggish haze. Unlike in Jahuapamba, a cold shower here – a head-level faucet dripping a weak stream of cold water – was very welcome (though the giant beetles that made their homes in the shower were not so welcome…nor was the translucent yellow frog that Jen once found on the toilet in the middle of the night). We noted that when we showered in the afternoon the cold water on our heads turned warm as it ran down our arms, and was fully hot as it slid off our fingertips.

However, in our second week in La Bramadora the town’s water ran out, and stayed out for our remaining weeks. As we were leaving, there were rumors in the street that the water would be back “any day now – if not tomorrow, maybe the next day…or possibly Friday at the latest.” Right. With no water, the kids of the Casa Hogar bathed in the river in gender-segregated shifts, clothes were washed in the river, and the older boys were charged with hauling large buckets of water up to the house to boil for drinking, cooking and flushing toilets. As guests, we had the privilege of standing in the shower and dumping buckets of cold river water over our heads.

As with any living situation, we adjusted over the weeks to the water, the bugs, and the heat, enjoyed our exotic views of banana trees in every direction, and took the opportunity to get to know the kids with whom we lived.

They were shy at first, but began to warm up after a few days – especiallywhen they learned that we were from the United States and spoke English. After school we began to hold “English Class” on some picnic benches shaded by a palm frond roof (picnic benches that one day were stalked by a tarantula – not my favorite day). As much as we tried to be good English teachers and pay some attention to grammar and sentence structure, the kids (the 13-year-old boys in particular) mostly wanted to learn to say, “my motorcycle is cool,” and “you are beautiful.” Wherever the country, kids will be kids.

School Will Begin on April 1^st April 8^th When You Arrive

As we mentioned, we arrived in LaBramadora for the beginning of the school year. Because winter runs from January to March and brings rain and flooding so intense that roads are washed out and nobody can travel, the school year begins in early April. We knew this. What we were not prepared for was just how long it would take for school to actually get going – of the approximately 270-student high school, barely 70 students showed up for the first day of class. The teachers explained to us that since school started on April 1^st (a Wednesday) and since the following week also had only three days thanks to Easter and “Semana Santa,” parents saw this as an opportunity for their older children to work in the fields two extra weeks during harvest season, and earn a little extra money rather than going to school for only six days. We watched in the following weeks as enrollment doubled, and then after the Easter holiday nearly all the students had reported for the third week of school. While this made our three-week school visit a bit frustrating (with 6 kids in a classroom one week, 23 the next, and 52 the third, teaching was a constant repeat and review), it was also a fascinating glimpse into the reality of life in this region.

The physical setting of the school was as novel to us as the setting of the Casa Hogar. Kids and teachers alike arrived on rancheras, on foot, and by motorcycle. The high school complex, as well as the adjoining elementary school, was surrounded by banana trees and wild vegetation. As we sat observing classes, we sometimes felt like there was a jungle just outside the room.

Despite the slow enrollment – which the teachers took as a matter of course – we instantly felt a camaraderie and coherence among the staff that hadn’t been present at our other school visits. The first day of school happened to be the high school principal’s daughter’s 15^th birthday – a big deal. After school he invited several of her classmates along with all of the high school and elementary school staff (including his wife who taught at the elementary school) to celebrate with cake and apple soda. This cordial social interaction – and the banter about soccer that drifted into the afternoon – set the tone for the professional interactions among staff during our visit as well.

Compared to the other schools we visited, this school had the basics under control. The Director was sharp, earned the trust and respect of his faculty, and delegated responsibility to each one of his teachers almost to a fault. The

Parent meeting

school had a large administrative staff for its size, including an Assistant Director in charge of academics, an administrator in charge of discipline and school climate, and an organized Secretary. Although planning and curriculum is much less structured country-wide in Ecuador than what we’re used to in the U.S., the Director and Assistant Director worked well together and facilitated relatively robust processes for planning, teacher training, and learning exchange. The Secretary had an intimate knowledge of the family and economic situations of the school’s students, knew which students were on full or partial scholarships, and which families truly couldn’t pay the monthly $12 tuition. She also confided to us that the school was losing some of the poorest students because there was not enough scholarship money to go around, and some were leaving for state-run schools – which by law must be tuition-free as of this year – or leaving school altogether.

While the school still had its challenges, having these core elements in place facilitated a different type of professional experience for us on our final school visit. It was something of a relief not to feel like our recommendations had to respond to four-alarm fires; instead we could bore into the details and focus on objectives like teacher-to-teacher observations, blackboard configuration, and inductions for new students and teachers. In other words, the stuff that can bring an already-good school to the next level.

Small Town Life and the Priest on his Motorcycle

The walk from the Casa Hogar to school traversed the length of La Bramadora – a walk of no more than five minutes from beginning to end past tiny convenience stores selling the same few snacks and drinks, three hole-in-the-wall restaurants, and an assortment of concrete homes. The small stretch of main street was paved, while all the other streets in town were lined with gravel and uneven stones that made for an awkward and sometimes treacherous walk. We left the Casa Hogar each morning just in time to see the 7:30 ranchera idling on the main street next to some posted donkeys, slowly filling up with locals headed into El Carmen to do their shopping for the week.

During our first few days we turned heads. We were the only foreigners in the town and people wondered if we’d gotten lost. But they were friendly and inquisitive about our presence. We would stop to buy a popsicle or cold drink, and the store owners would begin to ask us about who we were and what brought us to La Bramadora. We would ride the rancheras and strangers would strike up a conversation for the duration of the ride. After a week people began to wave and greet us as we passed by on our way to and from school. All together, La Bramadora was the perfect size for a small town experience – about 3,000 residents: small enough that everyone knows each other but large enough to buy a coke and even find a place to access the internet (which we found after several days of looking, and turned out to be a few computers in the first floor of someone’s house – the only wired place in town).

As with many small towns, La Bramadora came together around religion. Nearly all residents were Catholic, and the couple to runs the Casa Hogar invited us to mass with them and 10-or-so kids for “Sábado de Gloria” before Easter, during which their grandson would be baptized. We accepted grateful for the invitation, but with a little bit of trepidation. Many of our introductions to townsfolk had included “Are you Catholic?” as a conversation starter (usually followed up by “Are you married?” “Do you have kids?” and “Why not?”). We’d met the local priest a few times, and he unfortunately seemed to draw much of his inspiration from the 16^th century (except for the part where he greeted us while gunning it down main street on his motorcycle). Still, we were glad to be included in the festivities, and while the mass went on for literally three and half hours, it was interesting to experience the coming together of this tight-knit community. We saw several teachers at the church – the high school principal, his daughter, the religion teacher named Ulises

Nothing to do with church - boys on donkeys delivering beer to the town

who looked like elderly Marlon Brando and was also a motorcycle buff – and the baptized baby’s godmother turned out to be the principal of the elementary school. As we left the church, a full 20 people piled into the back of the pickup truck headed back towards the Casa Hogar.

A few days later we packed our bags. The kids at the Casa Hogar organized a surprise goodbye party, and did their best to embarrass us with singalongs and dancing with 12-year-olds. While we don’t miss the heat and the bugbites have yet to fade, we look back on the experience as one of our fondest in Ecuador. 

For more photos of La Bramadora, visit: picasaweb.google.com/jvorse

Ecuador is a great place – it’s got big mountains and nice beaches, verdant jungle and a diversity of people, plants and critters that should make the rest of the world jealous. Still, the day-to-day can be a little…well…“character building.” This post is a tribute to those moments over the past few weeks in Jahuapamba that won’t make it into the scrapbook.

Jahuapamba School from Above

Day 1: Arrive at school, attempt to be inconspicuous with our bags by using the back gate. The “friendly” dogs refuse to let us in, alert the whole neighborhood to our arrival (we’re told they don’t bite…this is not true). The principal greets us, along with 12 chickens that live at the school.

We check out our apartment, ponder which room to sleep in, choose the one room without a gaping hole in the roof. We move the damp and mildewy foam mattresses out of one of the rooms with said gaping holes, and notice our bedroom doesn’t have a light. Time to go shopping.

Day 2: It rained last night, which means there’s a lake in our kitchen (N.B. by “kitchen” we mean “room with tile wherein more water enters from the ceiling than from the crusty sink.” It should not imply access to stoves, fridges, or other frivolous appliances.)

Day 3: Time and accumulation of personal grime has not inspired the shower to turn itself hot. Freezing water is not a problem in the tropics, but at 10,000 feet with the chill of wind through your walls, it’s not so fun. We move personal hygiene down on our list of necessities, and stock up on boxed wine.

Day 5: We work up the courage to use the school’s industrial sized burners. Matt turns on the gas, sticks a match near the stove, and proceeds to burn himself on an industrial sized fireball. But at least Jen has hot water for coffee.

Day 6: Matt nearly electrocutes himself trying to rig hot water for the shower (does anyone have expertise repairing electric showers from the 1970s? If so, let us know.). A scorpion introduces itself to us in our kitchen. We introduce it to a stick.

Day 9: The school’s 20-gallon pots and spoons the size of oars are not conducive to cooking dinner. One can only last so long on raw ramen and canned tuna (grapefruit and carrots if you’re Jen). Hence, we buy more wine.

Day 10: While we’re observing third grade math a stray dog wanders in. The teacher chases it away with a stick.

Day 12: We hear reggaton at 3:00 AM and wonder what is going on.

Day 13: It’s a wedding! And they’re still playing reggaton! We walk down the road to check it out, and some guests invite us in for a beer. We trade Kichwa words for English ones, turn down the offer of blood soup, and after a while continue on our walk. We pass at least six old ladies carrying 12-liter crates of beer to the party. Glad they won’t run out.

Day 14: How long do weddings last? How long can they continue repeating the same song between the hours of midnight and 4:00 AM? These are important questions for us.

Day 15: Wedding still going on. Surrounding villages running low on beer.

Day 16: Apparently weddings last four days. Fifth graders at school tell us it was a good time. It is also actively raining in our bathroom.

Day 18: The school’s dogs lead the other neighborhood dogs in a nightlong chorus. A cow also moos for three hours straight. We consider poisoning them all.

Day 19: We spot a tarantula the size of a fist in our hallway, heading towards the bedroom. Not cool. Matt plays St. George to the dragon with a hiking boot.

Day 20: This week is ruled by bugs, which apparently like to fly through the holes in our walls. Jen now has 22 bites on her right ankle.

Day 21: We are chased off the road by cows. Self-esteem suffers greatly. Time to go back to Quito.

For reference, Jahuapamba is pronounced sort of like Cawabunga (Hawabamba).  It is a tiny indigenous town just north of Otavalo (2 ½ hours north of Quito), and the site of our second Fe y Alegría school visit.  While, like Cuenca, it’s at high elevation – about 9,000 feet surrounded by 16,000 foot mountains – pretty much everything else about Jahuapamba seems a world apart.

Our walk through “town” is along a dusty road flanked by cornfields and interspersed with cinder block houses with unfinished or tin roofs.  A multitude of young kids play barefoot in the street, and stray dogs wake up to bark half-heartedly as we pass.  A few bodegas line the road as well, their barred windows looking in on a few shelves of bottled water, soda, chips, and sometimes eggs.

Nearly everyone we pass is indigenous Kichwa, with darker skin than most Ecuadorians.  This region, despite its poverty, has been more successful that most in maintaining its indigenous traditions alongside modernization.  Kichwa is still the primary language; most kids learn Spanish at school, and many older people speak little Spanish.  The men and boys wear their black hair long and gathered behind their heads and often beneath a round dark bowler hat, along with white cotton pants, white sandals, and sometimes a poncho if it’s cold.  In turn women and girls wear black sandals, long blue or black wrapped skirts cinched with woven belts, and flowing white blouses stitched with delicate embroidery beneath ponytails wrapped in fabric and multiple strands of golden beads around their necks.  The combinations for both men and women are striking, and quite beautiful.

The school itself is perched about two thirds of the way up a hill with views of a valley and small towns below, and beyond that Mt. Cotocachi at 16,200 feet, which after storms is peaked with snow.  A stone wall and chain link fence form a large rectangle around the school.  Inside, multiple classroom buildings with tin roofs and concrete floors form an L around a hillside of unkempt grasses, a small playground, and a soccer field of dirt and weeds.  Below the classrooms lies another field and a cafeteria where all students and teachers receive free breakfast and lunch, prepared each day by different mothers and grandmothers, who often cook with babies strapped to their backs.

We live near the top of the schoolyard in a small and very leaky apartment (more about that in the next post).  We don’t have a kitchen so we head down each morning to the school’s cafeteria to boil water for coffee before school starts at 8:00.  Each day begins with all 140 students lined up by grades 1st through 6th for morning prayer, the national anthem, and often a chat from one of the teachers about being respectful and well-behaved.  Afterwards, the kids go to class – every grade has all its subjects (except English and catechism) taught by the same teacher, and grades 1/2 and 4/5 are each taught by one teacher handling both grades at once in the same classroom.  In total this brings the number of teachers at the school to five, one of whom is the school’s Director in addition to her third grade duties.

The school day runs 8:00 to 1:00 and there are no breaks for the teachers besides recess.  Because of this, it has been a constant challenge to talk to any of the teachers at length (most also study or work second jobs in the afternoon), and so we’ve fit in conversations with teachers before school and during the half-hour recreo.  Unlike in Cuenca where we were able to pick the brains of a large team of administrative staff who did not teach regular classes, the experience in Jahuapamba is much more about sneaking in the snippets of conversation and Q&A with teachers when we can, but then about sitting back, observing both inside classrooms and out, and spending more time getting to know the kids themselves.

Our first few days at the school were marked by smiles from a distance but shyness and running away when we asked the kids any questions.  In particular, we found it hard to talk to the youngest kids – we’d later learn that many students enter school speaking Kichwa but little Spanish, and don’t become fluent until around third grade.  After a few days, however, the kids warmed up to us.  Jen was adopted by a group of third grade girls who seemed endlessly fascinated by her blond hair, Matt took to playing soccer with the fifth grade boys, and we both served as an endless resource for Spanish-English translations (“How do you say ‘motorcycle’?”).

Talking with the kids during recreo and lunch, we learned that many of them work at home both before and after the school day, watching siblings, cooking, caring for livestock, and helping out with the family business (most commonly weaving – the entire Otavalo region is famous for its markets and indigenous handicrafts).  Most of the kids’ older siblings had stopped going to school after 6th grade to go to work, and the girls in particular marry very young.  However, most 5th and 6th graders we talked to said that they wanted to continue in school and their parents planned for them to do so.  This matched what the teachers told us too – that over the last decade more and more families saw their neighbors’ kids go to high school or even university, and year by year they stretched enough to offer the same opportunities to their own kids as well.

Still, encouraging the families to get involved in and value their children’s education (particularly for girls) remains a daily struggle for the teachers and the school.  While the last 5 to 10 years have brought change to the region, this town and its families remain rooted more firmly in (and dependent on) their businesses than in the opportunity of education.  Spanish is rarely spoken at home, most parents have only a primary school education at best, and many grandparents – and some parents – do not know how to read or write.   For instance, during a meeting one day with the Director, our conversation was interrupted with visits from mothers and grandmothers who had come to pay their students’ monthly tuition (at this school $1.50 per month, which about two thirds of students pay while the remainder receive scholarships).   Some signed their receipt, but several used an ink pad to give a finger print instead.  We realized that these women were likely illiterate.

When considering the difference between the generations – grandparents who do not know how to sign their names, parents who attended school through third grade, and now a generation of children who attend high school with increasing regularity – some days it is easy to sit back and be satisfied with the exponential increase in access to education over the last decades.  In Jahuapamba, Fe y Alegría is indeed providing an education for kids who otherwise may not have had the opportunity to go to school.  At the same time, however, we have witnessed very uneven classroom instruction and kids who seem to be a year or two behind their urban Fe y Alegría peers – let alone kids in U.S. schools.   While we realize the importance and differences of context, we are still constantly torn in our reflections about what “success” means in Jahuapamba.  In part, this school succeeds because it provides access to education, and for some the opportunity to continue on to high school. But does it provide the quality education that Fe y Alegría seeks? Our gut reaction: not yet.   The school faces significant obstacles such as a lack of basic resources, local poverty, quality of instruction, and cultural resistance to education.  Still, Jahuapamba has come a long way since its founding in the early 90s, and is slowly but steadily making its way.

To see more photos from Jahuapamba (and Cuenca!  and our visit to nearby Laguna Quicocha!), visit: http://picasaweb.google.com/jvorse

Monday Morning Meeting

During our six months in Quito, we accumulated enough cultural knowledge to realize that if we visited a school and started cross-examining the principal and faculty right away, the only answers we’d get would be along the lines of “oh yes, everything’s fine, thank you, everything’s going well.” People are much less direct here than in the States, while networks and norms of reciprocity between cousins, friends, godparents, or hairdressers are much more important. With that in mind, when we arrived in Cuenca for three weeks of school observations and analysis, we tried to resist our task-oriented, objective-driven, we-only-have-three-weeks-SO-LET’S-GET-GOING American instincts, and instead hung around the teachers lounge drinking more instant coffee than we’d care to remember, and slowly got to know the faculty. In the end, spending a week to build this trust and friendship proved more important than any “work” we could have accomplished.

As (a few) readers may remember, the initial point of our series of school visits was to analyze Fe y Alegría’s structure administration across four regions and 82 schools, and to explore the impact of Fe y Alegría’s religious-public-school identity on the experience and outcomes of its students.

Matt goes to class

But first, we had to figure out how the school worked, so we visited classrooms and started interviewing the school’s 34 faculty members. As we mentioned in our previous post, the school’s Director informed us last minute that he’d be gone for the first week of our three week visit. We later realized this was a blessing in disguise – the school’s Assistant Director, the teachers, and everyone in general was more open, more honest, and more relaxed without the Director around.

Through our initial conversations, we learned that most of the kids commuted from the outskirts of Cuenca from mostly lower-middle class neighborhoods. The school used to more directly serve the city’s poor, the teachers explained, but in the ’90s waves of Ecuadorian emigration brought remittances to the neighborhood from the U.S., Spain, and Italy. At its high point as many as half the kids had a parent living overseas; now the number is down to 10-20%. This influx of money bought houses, cars and televisions, but the lack of support at home brought behavioral and psychological problems for the kids, along with a new set of values where material possessions and exiting the country to work abroad became the modern definitions of success.

To meet these challenges as well as others more traditional to low income school settings, the school developed a comprehensive support staff – including a director, academic coordinator, learning specialist, clinical psychologist, social worker, and two coordinators for spiritual development and community engagement for a 600-student school. (note: this wealth of resources is atypical for a Fe y Alegría school; FyA Cuenca benefits from being the only Fe y Alegría center in Ecuador’s third largest and a relatively prosperous city, and has employed a variety of partnerships with government, city, and local religious groups to not only hire additional support, but to cover the salaries of half the staff members. While it was great to see this support network in action, we had to keep in mind that most Fe y Alegría centers share one psychologist with 12 other schools and can´t afford support staff).

Among the support team, it was particularly interesting to work with Fe y Alegría’s “Pastoral” staff. Pastoral broadly covers Fe y Alegría’s work in religious education, ethical development and community engagement, and we were fortunate to make friends with the Pastoral Coordinator at the school. She was in her mid-40s, at once compassionate and feisty, and talked to the kids about the kind of liberation theology and emphasis on ethics-in-action that we’d hoped to find in Fe y Alegría. During our three weeks at the school we spent many hours observing her classes, watching her charisma amongst the faculty, and talking over coffee or hot chocolate in her living room. As one of the school’s unofficial leaders, our friendship with her also went a long way towards gaining the confidence of the teachers.

Through these conversations with the Pastoral Coordinator and other faculty, it became apparent that despite the school’s resources and strengths, there was something deeply amiss in the school’s teacher climate and leadership. In our first week at the school we witnessed a curriculum meeting devolve into a shouting match between teachers, and a week later the director stormed out of a meeting while a teacher yelled after him, “You don’t treat us like people, you treat us like machines!” In short, it was odd to see that the respect and human values we saw the teachers successfully integrate into their daily lessons for the kids too often faded within interactions between adults.

After two weeks at the school, we developed an anonymous teacher survey to quantify some of our observations. We asked about community and family involvement, students’ engagement with their education, and the role of spirituality in teaching and relationships at the school. We ended the survey by asking what one thing faculty members would change about their school. After a few days of herding cats to get the surveys back (“I promise I’ll bring it mañana”), we rounded up 32 out of 34 and spent a few late nights on Excel. Coding and graphing the various responses, we soon realized we had a bombshell in the last question: half of the respondents had voted to change the school’s director. And we had already promised to present the results (in Spanish) to the faculty and administration two days later. @#$%!!

In some ways, this result was not surprising. Beyond the personality clashes, we’d observed a truly stunning lack of transparency and participation in the school’s leadership decisions. While he was personally a nice guy who had given his adult life to the school as a teacher and later administrator, the Director seemed incapable of delegation, played obvious favorites, and shut the faculty out of school decisions and even basic information. When we’d pressed him in interviews the Director said that everything was fine and the teachers just didn’t give any extra to the school…He had a minor point in that many teachers left right at 12:30 to work second jobs to supplement their $200 monthly salaries, but it was our view that the teachers were devoted to the kids and worked reasonably hard, but refused to give any extra to the Director.

So we found ourselves with 48 hours to assemble and deliver a diplomatic but honest presentation that we hoped could do some good for the school, faculty, and kids that we’d grown fond of (later on we will give similar but less sugar-coated results to Fe y Alegría’s national and regional offices).

Us with some of the faculty

We started our presentation with our less inflammatory results, and built off the school’s strengths – support staff, shared values and commitment to kids – to deliver our recommendations. As outsiders with a fresh perspective who had taken time to build trust with the faculty, we were able to gently remind them of the need to rebuild confidence and personal relationships as the first step for any change within their school. We presented the demand for a new director as a request for a more inclusive leadership, and tried to give a few structured examples of practical ways that teacher leadership teams could contribute to areas such as finances, curriculum, and faculty development. As the lynchpin to our recommendations, we proposed a change to the school’s current 7:30—12:30 schedule that lacked any time for faculty planning and collaborative work. We suggested that school begin at 7:00, and that kids be dismissed at 10:30 every Wednesday so that teachers had time to work together and exercise leadership within their school on a weekly basis.

To our surprise, both teachers and the Director were at least publicly receptive to our recommendations. We formed a committee to discuss them after we left, and the faculty agreed to consider starting the day at 7:15 to recoup at least an hour for collaboration, with a potential for larger changes in the years ahead. After our presentation we exchanged our goodbyes, and the faculty presented us with very well meaning but very geriatric looking scarves as a thank you gifts.

A few hours later we boarded the plane exhausted after our visit, but aware that our work for the year was finally in full swing.

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.

We’re becoming a bit Ecuadorian about the timeliness of these blog posts, but in early January when Matt’s family visited we went to Machu Picchu.  A few days after they left we stumbled upon a great last minute deal to the Galapagos Islands.  Both were amazing, but in particular Machu Picchu lived up to its world wonder reputation.  We could also spend a long time telling you how these places were amazing, but instead we’d recommend just looking at the photos.  Enjoy!

we were there

More Machu Picchu picture here: http://picasaweb.google.com/jvorse/MachuPichu

Tortise Power

Galapagos Album: http://picasaweb.google.com/jvorse/Galapagos

For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.
~Leonardo Da Vinci, mountain man

This post is about mountains. If you’d like to skip directly to the photos, follow this link – http://picasaweb.google.com/jvorse/ – and click on any album that looks mountainous. Otherwise, here’s a brief recap of a series of climbs we did just before Christmas. The pictures get better as the post continues, so read on!

Pasachoa

Pasachoa:
To prepare for greater heights, Jen, two friends and I climbed Pasachoa Volcano, about an hour and a half south of Quito. After a bus ride and getting overcharged by the guard at the reserve entrance, the four of us climbed through a

wet, tropical bamboo forest (though still huffing from the 9,000’ air) before emerging into paramo – a high altitude Andean ecosystem of mainly tufted grasses, shrubs and a few small trees. We walked up a ridge with panoramic views of surrounding mountains and valleys, and made it to around 12,500 feet before getting chased down by thunder. Oh well. Fun hike.

Corazón:
Means “heart” in Spanish – the day’s first cruel irony.

Corazón from the highway

The same group of four plus our housemate Matt rented a 4×4 and a guide/driver to conquer this 15,718 foot peak two hours south of Quito. The early morning clouds cleared as we turned off the highway, but after 10 minutes of bouncing over dirt roads we struck a mud puddle from which there was no escape. We pushed, pulled and skidded while our bald tires shot spumes of water, until finally a circa-1970 pickup

Mud 1 - Car 0

arrived on the scene, and with the help of a chain borrowed from a local tractor, towed us out of the mud.

We kept up the hill on a spiderweb of slick trails, but each in succession vanquished our not-so-mighty jeep, and we soon found ourselves stuck in the furrows of a potato field.  More waiting ensued, another tractor nudged us free with the help of a six-foot log, we continued up the hill, got stuck again, pushed the car free, got stuck again, jumped on the fenders, dug grooves for our decrepit tires, filled said grooves with sticks, grass and crushed potatoes, pushed the car in vain, decided to turn around, contemplated our failure over a muddy lunch on a beautiful hillside, and finally walked up a hill to ask the owners of the previous tractor if they wouldn’t mind giving us a push.  

Tractor, log, car -- in which we admit defeat

Around an hour later a tractor filled with potatoes and potato farmers rumbled down the hill, and after a nudge with another log and a series of jokes about our egg-bald tires, we slid our way down the mountain and back to Quito, appropriately in the rain.
 

Illinizas Norte:
16,818 feet, climbed with my housemate, Matt. As a first order of business we checked the tires on our ride. They had actual treads so we were good to go, and we left Quito with our guide, Wassa, to spend the night near the mountain and climb early the next morning. We arranged our gear and hurried to bed, and after a 2:30 wakeup and a short drive, we started hiking a little after 4:00.

Illinizas in the A.M.

The moon slid between clouds so we switched on our headlamps in the dark, and the sparse paramo gradually turned to fields of rock and shale, and the climb began in earnest. My lungs felt small as we trudged up hills of sand, and Wassa noted we’d passed 15,000 feet. I checked off the milestone in my head – the highest I’d ever climbed. A little before dawn with my fingers getting numb, we reached the caretaker’s hut and warmed up with anise tea and a small stove.

Illinizas Norte

A few hundred meters up the clouds settled and the surrounding peaks began to fade. We climbed a pitch of red sand and rock, then hiked up a narrow ridge with steep drops and great views down either side. For the first time, I really noticed the altitude. Each step was slow, my breathing short, and my head and equilibrium seemed just a little off.

The fun part

Our group roped together as snow started to mix in with the rock, and we managed a steep traverse on a section known affectionately as the “paso de muerte.” The last 45 minutes was an awesome mixed scramble up rock, dirt and snow, and I felt the altitude symptoms lift as my adrenaline kicked in. We pulled our way up a few more boulders, and finally

Matt and I on the summit

made it to Illinizas’ cramped, jagged summit at 16,818.’ It was damn cold but we could see the glaciated peak of Illinizas Sur a few miles away, so we celebrated with chocolate bars and a few pictures before carefully picking our way down.

Illinizas Sur from the summit of Illinizas Norte

 
Cotopaxi:
At 19,347, feet Cotopaxi is Ecuador’s second highest peak, as well as the world’s second highest active volcano (Hi Mom!). It’s size, glaciers, and

Cotopaxi from Illinizas

perfect cone shape make it a truly gorgeous mountain, and a popular one with climbers. Matt and I and three other friends decided to try our luck, so we set out with guides from Quito late one Sunday morning. After a few hours’ drive we made it to Cotopaxi National Park, where the paramo was littered with boulders to authenticate the volcano’s past. We drove to around 14,500 feet and hiked half an hour to Cotopaxi’s refuge, unable to see the massif behind a cloak of heavy clouds. 

At the refuge we made tea, cooked dinner, and generally tried (failed) to stay warm before heading to bed at 7:30 for a midnight wakeup and climb. We strapped on our gear by headlamp, and ventured outside at 1:00 to look up at a sky full with stars and the summit, glaciers and folds of the mountain silvery under a full moon. We soon switched off our headlamps to climb by moonlight, and kicked our way one slow step at a time up Cotopaxi’s long snow fields and occasional ice bridges. At first all I could think of was the absence of oxygen, but as we climbed higher I found a rhythm between breathing and my steps, and felt something between an athlete’s zone and a walking meditation.

just below the summit

A little before 6:00 our steep slope decreased to a slight hill, and I could see mountains in front of me crested by a rising sun. Adjectives at this point are a bit inadequate, so enjoy the pictures…

Cotopaxi summit, 5:55 AM

Sunrise 1

Sunrise 2

Sunrise 3

Cotopaxi's crater -- notice the rising steam

View from the summit

Group Shot -- Matt, Matt & Eric

Summit handstand -- crampons approximately 19,354' tall

The way down

Crevasse, and a nice view of the Illinizas

Big mountain

After two months in Quito interviewing members of Fe y Alegría’s national office, Jen and I were getting stir crazy, and it became increasingly clear that we needed to see some schools. Fe y Alegría Ecuador subdivides its work into four semi-autonomous regions, and as we’d already spent time in Quito and in the Sierra (two of the regions), we arranged three-day visits to the offices of Regional Sur and Regional Manabí-Esmeraldas, with a few days in between for a trip to the beach.  First up was Guayaquil – Ecuador’s largest city, and the center of Regional Sur.

We landed in Guayaquil after a short flight from Quito, and were at once engulfed in waves of noise and heat.  Guidebooks put Guayaquil’s population at around 2 million.  Taxi drivers told us 6-7, and compared to Quito’s narrow streets and empty nights, Guayaquil is a place apart.  It’s the tropical sprawl you see in photographs – concrete peaked doorways, peeling paint and seated, shirtless men with cigarettes, dominoes, and cold beer.  Outside our barred and open window, a six-lane thoroughfare shrieked with buses until 2:00AM, then started up at 5:00.  More true here than anywhere else in Ecuador, cars exist as an excuse to honk your horn.

As for schools, we visited four Fe y Alegría “centers” – the first two in somewhat impoverished barrios that seem to have ticked up in recent years.  There was a saying at these schools that Fe y Alegría educates “los ricos de los pobres” – the rich amongst the poor.  The other two schools do reach the poor amongst the poor; a more detailed look at one visit illustrates the challenges, accomplishments, and contradictions of Fe y Alegría’s work.

We visited “Centro Tio Paco” a sunbaked morning with one of Fe y Alegría’s regional coordinators.  The cab cost $7 – a huge sum in Ecuador, and a way of saying this school was located far, far from Guayaquil’s center.  As we drove north through traffic the buildings changed from gritty, low rise offices to one story cement homes with corrugated tin roots, to a mix of ramshackle bamboo, wood, and stone boxes, some propped on stilts, others crumbled to one side with their walls spilling into the streets.  The taxi turned up a hill onto one street, driving slow enough through dirt and potholes for us to see a crowded weekday market with rainbows of vegetables and large, shiny fish lined up on boards in the sun.  The taxi driver reached into the backseat and locked each door.  We watched the crowd.  They watched us.  Gradually the market thinned and the dust from the road increased.  It rose from the road in an opaque haze, and seemed to coat each house with a sheen of pale brown.  We turned left or right on same-seeming streets, past barefoot kids at 9:00AM, and crossed small streams where water, trash and waste had caked in mounds of clay under the 90 degree sun.  The phrase “poverty trap” kept marching through my head – Guayaquil center had lightly shocked our U.S. senses, but this was another world away entire, a proverbial forgotten slum.

Entrance to Centro Tio Paco

Finally we reached the school itself, where Fe y Alegría’s red, heart shaped logo on a high concrete wall made a rare sign of color along the street.  Inside the walls, the school was built at the base of a hill, such that a scattering of small homes could peer into the rectangular courtyard and classrooms for the 400-odd primary and middle school students.  Like other Fe y Alegrías we visited, murals and paintings decorated many of the walls, yet the paint here was not so new.  There were no basketball hoops in the concrete yard, and half the yard was unpaved with chickens scratching between ruts and large stones.

Tio Paco schoolyard

The principal gave us a brief tour of the school.  Each classroom around the courtyard had a chest-high concrete wall topped by vertical bars supporting a slanted metal roof.  Two rooms stood out.  The first was a technology room filled with 20-something new computers, which the principal called “a miracle…in this neighborhood.”  Second, the school had a large, peaked-roof multipurpose room with a stage and shiny tile floors, big enough for around 200 people.  As we walked out, the principal explained this space was used for school and community gatherings.  The week before a mother had asked the principal if she could use the room for a weekend birthday party.  “Of course,” the principal told us he replied, “this is not my space, it belongs to you.”

We continued to chat as we walked through the few remaining buildings.  We learned that the school’s main challenges where electricity and potable water, and that the principal rarely, if ever, visited classrooms to observe a teacher’s work.  The teachers were well trained, the principal told us; there was no reason to breathe down their necks, and besides, it could be offensive to watch and critique a teacher’s classroom.  At this point the principal paused, and said that we should really end the interview so we could get to the party.

Jen and I hadn’t heard of any party, but we walked with the principal back to the main courtyard where a few chairs had been set up next to a boombox blasting at full capacity.  We were told a Spanish psychologist had volunteered at the school for three months (a sorely needed contribution given high rates of violence, abuse, etc in the neighborhood, and the fact that all of Fe y Alegría’s 12 schools in the area share the same psychologist) and the school was throwing her a party to say goodbye.  Jen and I sat with the psychologist and a few teachers as each grade of students filed in to sit on the ground around the courtyard.  One by one, representatives from each grade presented some sort of gift, speech, skit, or thanks.  Third graders sang a wobbling song about opening their hearts; a kindergartner spoke very slowly and very loudly while holding a microphone half the size of her head; and sixth graders performed a Spanish-language version of Little Red Riding Hood that didn’t make much sense, but looked like a lot of fun.

Suddenly, we heard a loud yell, and a group of older students wearing eclectic green and red costumes and wielding a variety of noisemakers burst into the square and started dancing while throwing confetti in the air.

blowing fire - definitely not a sanctioned activity in U.S. schools

Gradually kids from other grades joined in, someone cranked up the music, and Jen and I were accosted by an army of second graders with outstretched hands until we had no choice but to dance as well.  We ran or skipped around the courtyard with all the kids and some teachers, two or three eighth graders were blowing fire, a facepaint war broke out, and everything in general was beautiful pandemonium.

Eventually, it all faded.  Some kids picked up confetti, and everyone went back to class.  How much work got done in the next hour we can only guess.

We share this story not just because it was a fun party.  Over the last few weeks of classroom visits and interviews, Jen and I have felt at times overwhelmed by the depth of the problems inside and abutting Fe y Alegría’s schools.  Beyond their contexts of poverty, we’ve particularly been troubled by a lack of evaluation, of quality control, or of a culture of continuous improvement that we think is so essential to providing any excellent education.  These gaps in measurement – combined with gaps in pedagogical expertise, management and funding – have left us, as consultants, asking, “Where do we start?” and have made it difficult to see how Fe y Alegría can efficiently improve their own programming.

Yet at the same time, the kids we talked to at this party and at the seven other schools we visited were without exception excited about their math or ethics class, they were eager to tell us how much they liked their school, and they generally seemed happy and proud to be in school.  Many of the walls we saw were explosions of color, murals and student art, and most principals reported waiting lists for enrollment.  In short – accountability, evaluation, standards – these all may be lacking – but it’s no small feat to make your school a place where kids want to spend their time.

These thoughts do not conclusions make, but they do tell us there’s something in Fe y Alegría’s identity/fabric/makeup/whatever that, despite the aforementioned ills, has made them able to survive and even grow over 44 years in Ecuador.  We will spend the next five months largely visiting schools, so we should have ample time to refine our understanding of Fe y Alegría’s identity as way to mitigate the many challenges their schools face.

nice beach in Puerto Lopez

But for now, happy holidays to all.  We also visited schools in Manta and beaches in Puerto Lopez on this trip, but don’t have space in this post…you can see pictures from those trips here and here.  Stay tuned for our next post – it’ll be much more pictorial…and about climbing mountains!

So this week a volcano erupted 60 miles from our house.  Walking home from work, we could smell ash in the air.

We were told the eruption was only “moderate” and nothing to worry about.

We feel better now.

For those of you who read Spanish, here’s a link to the local paper – http://www.elcomercio.com/noticiaEC.asp?id_noticia=235383&id_seccion=10.