2017 Antonia

Week 1: May 22nd, 2017

Ecuador has been an amazing experience so far! I’ve felt pretty much everything on the spectrum of emotions this week–excited to experience a new culture and new country, nervous for service at INEPE (and for potential encounters with big, hairy spiders), embarrassed and frustrated with my Spanish conversation level, overwhelmed with kids, hopeless with my ability to empower the communities around me, but nevertheless fulfilled with the relationships I’m forming with the cohort. This week has felt so long but so short at the same time, and I feel like it’s all going to go by too fast for me to absorb everything even though I’m trying to soak in everything I can.

Without a doubt, the United States differ from countries in Latin America, with the most apparent quality being emphasis on family/community. I think this is part of what drew me to Ecuador–I highly value the people around me, relationships, and loyalty. People here focus a lot less on individual successes, and with this, word spreads about opportunities to support someone that your friend of a friend of a friend knows. For example, our connection with Yanapuma, Maria José, mentioned the possibility of having 600 people at one’s wedding–if one person finds out, they excitedly tell all their friends that this person is getting married, and those friends tell their friends, and everyone shows up to have a good time.

This inherent connection to each other is also what drew me to INEPE, a school located in one of the poorer areas of Quito. One of its goals is to provide a wholesome, comprehensive, community-based education for students of all ages, all the while embracing and empowering individual identities and one’s contributions to society. I want to help the kids grow to feel safe and confident in who they are and their roles in their communities, but am worried that since I am only in Ecuador for six weeks, their expectations of relationships with potential role models will just crumble. This concern was heightened when I first entered a classroom of 5-year-olds: at least seven students ran up to me after the teacher, Miriam, introduced me as someone from the United States. They ambushed me, shouting “ESTADOS UNIDOS?” with awe, and asking what my name was. Amidst all the buzz of me being an extranjero there to hang out with them and help out in the classroom, one student asked me, “¿por qué venías a Quito?” He completely caught me off-guard–even though that question wasn’t meant to be deep, it rang in my head for a long time. I couldn’t come up with a quick, summarizing answer on the spot, so I think I went with something lame like “because I like to hang out with you guys,” but the more I thought about it, the less I was certain of that response.

I still don’t have an exact answer, but after our first reflection dinner on Thursday, I had more of an idea. I am passionate about working with marginalized communities, and want to gain more perspective on the world. I want to support organizations that aim to empower people to achieve their fundamental human rights, such as the right to education and health, but I recognize that these rights or values may not be the same across cultures. Just because I value my education doesn’t mean that these communities do too, but I ultimately want to help them achieve the freedom to achieve an education if they desire one. Working with kids and building those relationships can be super frustrating, especially with the language barrier (but watching them speak has made me this much more motivated to be good at Spanish!) and the fact that our stay isn’t permanent, but I’m trying to focus on the bigger picture of helping INEPE as an organization itself.

I know these next five weeks aren’t going to be easy–I’ve already experienced many tears of frustration and being overwhelmed–but seeing the looks on those kids’ faces reminded me that I do have a purpose here. In the classroom, they were fighting for my attention with math problems (I literally had to say “un momento!” to six different people shouting “¡compa!” or “¡ayúdame!” and shoving their clipboards in my face every five seconds). During recreo, a group of five grabbed onto my hands and legs and wouldn’t let go, so I walked around the playground a lot heavier than normal. Looking back at that snapshot of kids clinging onto me on Friday is making me laugh–I would’ve never pictured that happening to me at any point in life, especially because I don’t consider myself a master of bonding with kids in the slightest, and I’m always worried about messing them up or being insensitive. I don’t want them to feel reliant on me, so I’m trying to just converse with them, exchange ideas, and help with school. Ultimately, I hope they feel happy and comfortable with who they are, what they can achieve, and what immense value they have in this huge world, and I’m so thankful I have such a stacked cohort that encourages me to be comfortable with my ability to help people (and remain calm around big spiders) as well.

 

Week 2: May 29th, 2017

My underlying assumptions about Ecuador and INEPE emerged this week, leading to more frustration and confusion with the school’s administration and my role as a volunteer. I spent much of this week thinking about how useless I was at INEPE as we settled more into our responsibilities–on Monday, I helped out in a few 7th and 8th grade English classes, pulling three students out at a time to practice talking about hobbies, chores, and advice. Some of the students were reluctant to be called on, and therefore were shy with their English. This made me think about the amount of interactions the students have with English speakers–it seemed like they learned mostly from volunteers who don’t necessarily have a curriculum (like me), and this lack of structure could impede upon learning an already difficult language. So I questioned my ability to teach English–shouldn’t there be a curriculum for volunteers instead of just letting them awkwardly try to get students to repeat weird words? I feel like I was just distracting the students from paying attention to their teacher, but maybe I was helping by giving kids more pressure to actually speak English and be engaged, responsibilities they might not hold in sometimes distracting classrooms.

It seems a lot of classes have trouble focusing enough to get started with class, and this especially stuck out to me when I went to work with more 7th grade classes. Apparently one of the classes needed restructuring because the students were always rowdy, so when I entered, the teacher just wanted them to focus on asking me questions, which a lot of students have been doing. I felt weirdly important–they treated me, a person from the United States, as if I were an image of the “good life” in America with a ton of money and resources. At the same time, I was just serving as another distraction for a classroom that already had trouble with learning from and respecting authority. I’m smiling confusedly as I’m writing this because I would probably never be considered rich or extremely privileged in America, but to students in Ecuador, having flown on a plane to get here was a symbol of wealth and worldly experiences. What does this say about my assumptions of wealth? If I don’t consider myself rich in America because I receive a butt load of financial aid from Vanderbilt and I can’t afford a lot of things, then what/who do Ecuadorians classify as poor?

I feel bad that I distract these classes from actually learning important English–when I’m in the classroom helping out a student with Down’s syndrome (I’ll call them Laura for privacy reasons), students around always leave their seats to talk to us and ask me more questions–but I also feel that I’m forming more of a connection with the INEPE students. Compared to the 4 and 5 year olds, I can understand the 7th and 8th graders’ Spanish so much easier, and we converse without one of us staring at the other really confused.

My schedule on Tuesday was empty except for the last two classes, where I was supposed to work with Laura. I was thrown into helping someone take photos of every single student at INEPE (there are 600), but all I did was run back and forth retrieving kids from the classroom and bringing them to and from the camera outside for two and a half hours. I was also supposed to meet one of the piano teachers that day to discuss potentially teaching classes, but that didn’t happen until Thursday. Also, Laura had to go home when I was supposed to work with her, but I couldn’t find anyone when I was looking for her and spent a long time wandering around the school, and eventually when I found someone to tell me what to do, they instructed me to go hang out with the 4 and 5 year olds. I understand that those classrooms need extra help–younger kids are definitely a challenge, especially for one teacher–but again, all I did was distract them. They kept on playing with my Fitbit, and because I was just thrown into a classroom, I had no idea what I was supposed to do or what the teacher was trying to do so I just sat there and tried to talk to them while they climbed all over me and cried into their soup at lunch. I’m trying to get better at working with younger children, but I was already drained from running up and down a total of 96 flights of stairs (thanks Fitbit) between the camera and the classroom, so I barely had any tolerance or motivation to hang out with the 4 and 5 year olds. Why did the administration put so many holes in our schedules? Maybe they were just allowing us to try a bunch of different things around INEPE, and then we would meet at the end of the week to talk about what we liked and felt most useful at. The latter was supposed to happen on Thursday, but it unfortunately never did, so I might end up doing other random assignments next week too.

After feeling like I wasn’t performing any meaningful service at all on Monday and Tuesday, I dreaded going into INEPE on Wednesday both because I didn’t want to be useless and because I had been running a fever the day before and had other physical burdens when I woke up. After a few hours of teaching English to the 8th graders, I was completely drained of energy and ready to nap for days, but I finally met Laura in the afternoon and she completely turned around my day. I don’t have much experience working with people with different abilities so I was really nervous to hold this responsibility of helping Laura with English, but after talking to some friends from home and actually meeting Laura, I realized that the communication barrier would open a lot of opportunities for us to learn from each other, and I’m looking forward to developing that relationship and showing her that I care about her.

I guess my frustrations this week at INEPE came from assumptions that everything would run super smoothly, which in a way brings together why we are volunteering in the first place. Maybe we can help the administration with organization–but would we be imposing our own ideals of how things should run? Maybe we are serving to ease the workload for faculty members–but they are inherently more qualified, so would the ends meet our goals of learning from populations different than our own and becoming more educated, global citizens?

As we approach week three, I aim to go into INEPE with more energy, excitement, and openness to learn/converse with not only the students but also the faculty. I didn’t think I had any expectations going in, but clearly my frustrations and my feelings revealed that I thought I’d be able to communicate better in Spanish, that things would be more organized and transparent, that I’d have more energy to work with younger students…I don’t anticipate these things to stop bothering me, but maybe I will start with just acknowledging those feelings and creating an opportunity to keep learning and asking questions.

 

Week 3: June 5th, 2017

Having spent most of this week in bed due to illness, I’ve had a lot of time to think about everything, but unfortunately I don’t have much to say in regards to site development or Ecuador or even myself. I went to one of the piano teacher’s studios at INEPE on Monday to help teach a lesson, but the student didn’t show up, so Paúl and I spent the time reviewing various methods to teach piano. We went through the first Suzuki piano book, which brought back a ton of memories from my Suzuki violin and cello days, and he emphasized affirming students on what they did right instead of criticizing their wrongs. I was a bit surprised learning that teaching methods for the most part paralleled those in the US, and even more so that INEPE used the Suzuki method instead of a method from Ecuador or Latin America itself. Maybe this surprise stems from my subconscious association of classical music with Europe and other “Western” areas.

I’m excited to learn more about Paúl as a piano teacher himself, his teaching methods, and hopefully therefore more about the Ecuadorian music education system. I’ve been thinking about living in a Spanish-speaking country for a couple of years after graduation–I really want to be fluent in Spanish and this trip has reminded me that I have to speak it a lot and be exposed to it (unfortunately, an episode of Narcos a day will not do the trick). Because I’m a music major at Vanderbilt, hands-on learning about the music education here would be important if I wanted to live in Latin America, not to mention everything else I’m learning here about Ecuadorian culture.

One thing that strikes me again and again is the racism here. In the states, it is often more covert and demonstrated through microaggressions, but here it is so blatant towards black and indigenous people that one almost feels powerless to do anything about it, especially if they come as slaps in the face from adults we are supposed to respect. I urge you to read other OACS Ecuador blogs for people’s numerous, exhausting encounters with racism, to make their stories heard and affirm their experiences. I would like to learn more about racially (and economically, though those often intertwine) marginalized people’s experiences here in Ecuador and what needs to change in society to empower these humans, and bring this back to my experiences in the United States with calling out harmful language, ideas, and implications.

 

Week 4: June 12th, 2017

I’m afraid that I have stopped caring as much about meaningful service and making the most of the next two weeks here, especially when finishing days at INEPE feels no less exhausting than the first few days there. I feel that everything has become routine and I’m sort of just waiting to get out of here because I don’t feel useful helping with English in the 7th and 8th grade classrooms. At our reflection dinner this week, we dove into the difference between being useful and being needed, and I think that INEPE needs help and support, but I am not necessarily doing the most useful or pragmatic thing for it, which frustrates me. I thought this program through OACS would focus more on community building, advocacy, and fundraising for the sites, but maybe I’m wrong to assume those things work for education in Ecuador just because they are tactics I’ve explored with Partners in Health Engage at Vanderbilt.

I still felt pretty isolated and ready to go home this week because of the frustration with INEPE, health issues, and that we hadn’t had much whole-cohort time, but I definitely got closer to some people this weekend, for which I am so grateful.

I’m looking forward to continuing these relationships with the cohort and hopefully find some more inspiration to keep learning about Ecuador!