14 November 2006 12:00 PM

When it rains, it pours.

In my sickly state, I find myself indulging in long blog updates. If you’ve made it through my account of Peru and moved onto this, I’m impressed.

Today is Tuesday. Jon will be here the day after tomorrow, which is crazy to think about. And my time in Otavalo and at Muenala comes to an end next Wednesday. I have such a mix of emotions about this experience ending. On the one hand I’m counting down the minutes to my departure. I can’t wait to go home to food I love, a hot shower, expressing myself intelligently in a language in which I am comfortable, friends I’ve had for more than six weeks, and the list goes on. I’m also feeling really worn out by my teaching experience at Muenala, so I do feel somewhat glad to be almost finished with that too.

However, despite looking forward to going home, I am really sad about having to leave. First of all, I really love being in Ecuador. I think the people are wonderful, it’s a beautiful and diverse country, and it’s offered me a lot of perspective that I fear I may lose back in the US. Also, I’ve become really close to my host family, especially Rosario. She’s both mother and friend to me here, and it’s hard to imagine that in a week’s time I’ll have to say goodbye to her. I credit my host family for helping me get through a lot of the hard times here. They’ve welcomed me into their family and really took care of me.

And I have mixed feelings about the work I’ve done at Muenala. As I come to the end of my time at the school, I’ve been evaluating my success with my students. I do think they’re better off for having me as their teacher inasmuch as having another person to help teach 37 students is a good thing. But I don’t know if I really affected any long-term change, or that my teaching created some big improvement in the way they think. After all my effort in trying to teach them, my kids still don’t understand place value and therefore have trouble with subtraction, they still don’t understand how multiplication is a function of addition, and division a function of multiplication. Their reading comprehension doesn’t seem to be much better, nor their grammar. In four months I can’t really see that I did too much, and that’s difficult for me to accept. However, I have to remind myself that I’ve been teaching students who are used to learning through copying and memorization. I believe it would be impossible for even the best and most experienced teacher to change the way these students learn in only 4 months.

And I can’t help but feel that the expectations of the project itself are very low, and therefore incongruous with what I set out to accomplish by coming to Ecuador. Many volunteers are happy to play games with the kids, and maybe do a little bit of teaching, whereas I wasn’t here to play, I wanted to have a genuine teaching experience. But the students have been conditioned to see the volunteers as their playmates (and wallets), not their teachers, and as a result I ran into a lot more resistance with my class.

But even with all the difficulty, I still feel really close to my students, and I will miss them so much. I know that I won’t be able to simply walk away from the community in Muenala. My hope is to find a way to continue to support the education there so as to contribute to the future success of the people. But believe me, you’ll be hearing more about that soon enough.

As for now, I’m looking forward to enjoying my last week in Otavalo and the school, and more than anything, I can’t wait to see Jon on Thursday.