Leaving CASA, looking ahead.

On Wednesday I left Pucará early in the morning, having spent all day Tuesday visiting families and saying my goodbyes. While in the pictures people are smiling (or not, since people tend not to smile in pictures here), the day was emotionally draining. In the course of my time living in the community, I rarely took time to reflect upon the impact I was having on people. Mostly, I thought about how much the experience was affecting me. But I made some really strong friendships with many of those families and saying goodbye was much harder than I expected.

What does this have to do with my position as coordinator for the Intag Spanish School? In short, everything. It would be inaccurate to separate my experience volunteering from my living situation. Unlike back home, where clear boundaries exist amongst coworkers, in Pucará the lines between friend, family member and coworker frequently blurred. For two weeks, I lived with the family of one of our teachers. Sometimes we met for one-on-one training sessions, and sometimes she made me breakfast.

For this reason, I did not accomplish all that I had hoped to during my time here. Rather than dedicating myself wholly to getting this school up-and-running, as I had planned when I first arrived, little by little I simply got caught up in living. Sure, there are good excuses. In total, I calculated that I was sick almost two complete weeks. Adding to that a week-long power outage and a two-week training course in Baños, significant chunks of time seemed to disappear into thin air. But there were also times when instead of working on the website, I was talking with family and friends, applying for jobs or simply getting caught up on news from the outside world.

In addition, this being my true first experience with rural development work, I saw how this project suffered a number of problems that plague many development projects. I constantly found myself stuck in catch-22′s. For example, we didn’t feel comfortable expanding web outreach before retraining our teachers. One of the original problems the school had before my arrival was that some students complained about the quality of lessons, saying that their teaching technique simply wasn’t up to par with the established schools in Quito. I feared expanding too quickly and developing a bad reputation. However, of the original 6 teachers trained a year ago, only 3 remained upon my arrival. The lack of work depressed the teachers, and fed up, half left to find work elsewhere. It became clear that if we couldn’t get more students through the doors, the whole project would fall apart.

Paula, our newest teacher, giving a lesson to Cathy, our newest student!

But that brings me to my main point: responsibility. To be honest, when I arrived things were not looking good for the school. Fired up, I rolled up my sleeves with the intention of single-handedly fixing everything and turning the school into a smashing success. But after a few weeks, I could already see that a lot of things would be beyond my control. Each of our teachers is unique and in my opinion great at their jobs, but all come from similarly tough backgrounds. Three have children, all have 2-3 other jobs and feel the intense pressure to make more money. Arranging workshops for everyone shouldn’t have been that hard, but in fact it was a logistical nightmare. Some worked 10-12 hours per day, not including familial responsibilities. Yet somehow we made it work. In purely economic terms, teaching pays more than almost any other job in town. Like I’ve said before, the average take-home pay for a day’s work on a farm is $6. Our teachers could earn that much in one hour.

The danger, of course, was the belief amongst our teachers that relatively little work could still result in a huge pay-off. I worked very hard to drive home the point that you can’t just hang out and talk to a gringo for an hour and call that a Spanish lesson. We collaborated with our teachers on forming coherent lesson plans and I actually ran through a number of mock classes in order to improve not only their technique, but their confidence. Kids and young adults tend to be very timid in the community, and that’s a direct result of the poor education they received from the state. Far from being encouraged to think critically, kids are taught not to question or challenge anything their teacher says. It will be a long process for them to unlearn years of submissiveness and confidently run a classroom. But I’m confident that they’ll do it.

Me with Ali and Steve, the two new coordinators for the Intag Spanish School.

So who bears ultimate responsibility? Pete, founder of CASA Interamericana and the reason the school exists? The volunteer coordinators, who are charged with finding students? The teachers, who obviously give the classes? Like any good unsatisfying answer, it’s some combination of the three. Before I arrived, that trio had ceased to function and progress had ground to a halt. I spent most of my three months just getting as back to zero. But now with a new (and awesome) addition to our current roster of teachers and two new volunteer coordinators set to work until July, I’m confident that the state of the school will improve rapidly over the coming months.

For me, the experience of coordinating this school has been immensely important. For one, I went from being “proficient” in Spanish to functionally fluent in just three months. To give you an idea of how far I’ve come, when I first arrived I couldn’t confidently string together two sentences. Now, well here’s a good example: last night, the hostel manager told me that I have a Cuencana accent. Cuenca is a city in southern Ecuador. The mere fact that I sound like an Ecuadorian, and not a gringo, amazes me. But in addition, this experience reinforced my belief that I love and I’m good at working in a cross-cultural context. This doesn’t necessarily mean that I have to work abroad. But I truly enjoy understanding and then communicating the nuances of the culture here and I get a real kick out of explaining it to Westerners. I think the importance of working collaboratively with people abroad will only increase over the coming decades, and that gives me hope that there’s a career to be made out of this decision. This summer I’ll start a job where I actually get paid to travel, so I think I’m on the right track.

If you have any questions or comments about my time spent serving as the coordinator for the Intag Spanish School, I encourage you to post them! If you’ve been reading my blog and never posted a comment, this is me calling you out.

Tomorrow? Transitioning from volunteer to traveler and then eventually to worker abroad. It’s going to be a good one.

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