Clases de Inglés

Aside from San Roque, my main job at CENIT is organising, planning and, somehow, teaching English at CENIT's Primary School. Estar, the Primary School at the CENIT centre, has only 3 classes in it. Because it has to take children much older than they should be (market children who were not sent to school at the normal age often are refused entry into other schools, so go to Estar where they can begin at any age), it condenses 6 years into three, resulting in three classes of children aged between 7 and 16, and total chaos. When you tell someone in CENIT that you work English Classes, they give you a dry smile and wish you luck. There are 6 classes every week - 3rd Level have 2, 2nd Level have 3, and 1st Level have one double length class. There are either two or three volunteers in each class, and we run the classes alone. At present I plan the whole of 3rd and 1st Level, and together with another volunteer plan the 2nd Level. Improvement is slow, lessons in which no headway whatsoever is made are frequent, and the potential for disheartenment is very, very high. These children have energy that flares off constantly; they fight, they shout, they sulk - they have teenager problems, and they have very, very serious other problems. In the most terrifyingly offhand manner one Ecuadorian teacher informed me one day when all attempts at control and discipline had been abandoned, and the class had descended to something resembling a Medievil battlefield, that every child in the class was the subject of physical abuse at home, and that 60% were the victims of sexual abuse as well. Into this background step three gringos, trying to teach a language they don't want to learn...

Our principal challenges are preventing fighting, encouraging sitting down and actually doing some work, and creating work that will actually get done. Some are very, very clever; some are very, very sweet - most are very, very quick tempered, and the majority are just hitting those charming teenge years, which compounded with Latin Americans' love of dramatic and clichêd romantic gestures, means that they flirt, terribly, all the time. They kick, punch, throw furniture, pull hair, shout, scream, try to beat each other to death with broomsticks, and so on. They do not do the slightest bit of work without their teachers putting in 50 times more. We plan, very, very hard, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. On a good day they will work every example perfectly, and make the bounds of initiative that in children can so often lead to perfect understanding of something we hadn't even meant to teach, but the most clear explanation will escape everyone if one child is having a bad day, so there is not opportunity for their teachers to have bad days. I have been trying to steer the focus of these classes away from straightforward vocabulary to an understanding of how to form their own sentences by subversively teaching basic grammer rules. This means hiding the rule behind some kind of arbitrary process, and eventually demonstrating the extent of their learning by making them use their initiative on an unfamiliar example.

This approach, 'grammer without the grammer', means first using sentence templates and providing a very limited vocabulary list to try to force them to make their own sentences with a single subject type of a single verb, and slowly using the same type of template with other subject types and object types, always creating some kind of interesting theme to base them on (last week: insults with 'you are') and eventually springing a test on them which makes them realise that they can actually use the language that they know. It is a slow process, but every time they realise that they can do something, their sense of pride and achievement is amazing. I believe it will transpire in the coming weeks that their total lack of interest in the language is the result of having focussed for so long on learning massive vocabulary lists, and never feeling like their could actually say anything.

We have been concentrating on individual work - I make worksheets for them, try to make them look interesting and teach new rules clearly and subtly, and photocopy them for the classes - because this means we can mark their work and give it back witha grade, and allows us to identify in what areas each child needs help. The greatest thing this approach has achieved, however, is to develop some pride in their own work - a low grade, obviously considered and recorded, is an incentive to work harder, whereas a high grade makes them proud, giving them the self-confidence they need to use their initiative to learn harder rules. Successful use of their initiative gives them a sense of success, which in turn nurtures a desire to learn.

Ecuador

I'm not principally in this country to travel or explore, but after a week of Quito's buses spurting suffocating black smoke at you and people stalking up to you at all hours to sell you something or steal everything you have, the country outside the capital city is more than a little bit tempting. So at the weekends, we go places.

Leaving Quito in any direction is always an experience - the city draws your eyes into it, and there is seldom time to stare up at the horizon, but we really are surrounded by mountains, and as we drive out of the city the Andes yawn open, the valleys drop away below and the peaks sore up into the sky. Not far from Quito, up the enormous valley known as the Volcano Avenue, is the hostel we stayed at when we went to climb Corazon, Illinizes and, finally, Cotopaxi. It's a converted farm, and it's lovely, but the main attraction is the views. From the front gates the entire width of the Avenue gapes up at you, with Quito swimming in smog, dammed up against the Pichincha volcanoes before the Avenue begins its 2800m descent to the sea. At the other end, the valley snakes up into the Central Highlands (they have them here too!) where it is flanked by Cotopaxi, Antisana and, eventuall, Cayambe. On the opposite side of the Avenue to the hostel is a huge three-peaked ridge, part of the edge of the crater of a long extinct volcano, and, rising shear up to over 4000m, it cuts into the sky as if a section of the sky has been torn off the scene. It makes for some pretty impressive sunsets.

The Teleferico, a cable car, rises straight out of Quito to 4200m, and from this point it is possible (we discovered) to make the ascent of the Volcano Rucu Pichincha (dangerous - 3 people have died on it since we climbed it, all as a result of not taking a guide...neither did we) in a day. As the cable car ascends almost vertically out of the city, and the eyes drift from the streets and blocks below to the mountains on the other side of the city, the Andes really hit home. Quito, so demanding, so imposingly dangerous, is dwarfed and then swallowed as you reach the end of the cable car, leaving only the climbing peaks and a vast abyss to show where the city nestles below. At the top, a bowl-like plateau prevents us from looking down, forcing the eyes up at the peaks, but a short (but very, very hard) walk takes us to the ridge, where the Andes stretch out and the belief that a capital city could possibly be so close is tested to its limit.

But the Andes aren't all this lifeless majesty, and lower where the altitude permits life a different kind of scene awaited us. Driving down to the coast on the way to the beach we reached the cloud forest at dusk. Cloud forest is basically rainforest, but higher up, on mountains, and very, very cloudy. At dusk, it was amazing. From the road, clinging to the side of one of the precariously steep mountains, the view up the hillside was straight into a cloud, from which the twisted branches of rainforest trees and vines give a ghostly definition to the hill, implying a vast depth to the turmoil of grey-green the masked the ground itself. Out the other window of the bus the valley plunged down out of sight, so steeply that the other wise of the valley was only a hundren yards or so away, but the drop was immense. Of the other side, only the faintest definition of the hillside could be seen, but much higher up the clouds admit a glimpse of more tangled limbs reaching out through the murk. Again, higher, another sliver of floating forest, and higher up, another, each one further up and further away, leaving neither doubt nor actual proof of the mountain's incredible size. Higher, just above the highest greyscaled knitting of far off branches, the sun, glowing huge and red through the cloud, is setting behind the peak, defining it perfectly for a moment and shooting off blood red beams into the clouds before setting completely, and leaving us to the tangle of undergrowth at the sides of the road, seeming to get nearer and nearer as the light fades.

The coast itself, when we finally got there, is like a different world. Palm trees, or vast stretches of desert-like wilderness, and the world eventually severed by the beach. The Pacific Ocean, too vast to comprehend, cuts half the concern out of life - while the world goes on on one side of this terrible border, the other world, the other half of everything that you perceive, everything you sense and acknowledge is this eternal rhythm of the sea. It's not like the Atlantic, which one can imagine sailing over to America, nothing like the Channel or the North Sea, spotted with ships and oil rigs - with the Pacific, the horizon is where the Earth curves out of sight.

There is more left to see - the erupting volcano at Baños, where every night from a viewpoint searing orange and red lava floes can be seen worming down the mountainside, the Amazon basin where it steps out from behind the shoulder of the Andean Cordilleras, and the Andes themselves where they meet Peru, and the mountains turn dark as they slope Southward to Machu Pichu and Chile, far, far beyond...

With any luck...

Cotopaxi

A few weeks back, and following several weekends of fairly intensive training, we climbed Cotopaxi, the world's highest active volcano (5850m). It was really quite something:

We wandered up to the refuge at 4800m around lunchtime on Saturday, with all our equipment, which, although the walk is only about 800m, took 40 minutes because there was a lot of equipment. We then relaxed in the refuge for a few hours, and went to bed there at about 7 in the evening. I couldn't sleep - the altitude, which had other people throwing up and passing out, didn't affect me at all except when I tried to sleep, when I got wildly out of breath.

At midnight we got up, pulled on enough clothing to make me roughly the shape of a rugby ball with a wooly hat on, and had breakfast. Then, at about half 1 in the morning, we set off. We reached the base of the glacier just after 2 and, after strapping on crampons, me and Nicola (another English volunteer) attached ourselves to a guide called Lobo (it means 'Wolf' in Spanish; he had a gun, in case of puma attacks apparently...) and set off. We walked very slowly, which was fine at first. It was pitch dark, but it was a fairly clear night, and other climbers on the mountain made a trail of lights into the sky in front of us. Soon, however, we were on the glacier proper, and it was getting very cold. Eyes were adjusting, so I'd turned off the torch, but it was clouding over, and the mountains around us, and the ground below, were invisible - it was just ice, darkness and the moon, blurred by the clouds. We were still walking very slowly (you have to at that altitude - the lack of air is really rather noticable) but I was getting very, very cold.

Eventually we tied Nicola to another guide who was walking slowly, and Lobo and myself sprinted up the glacier to get some warmth back. Under a huge wall of ice that provided a little shelter we came across the only people from the group who were further up, Theo(dora) and Megan, with their guide Eran, where Theo was in tears saying she couldn't possibly go on. There was some arguing, and Lobo took Theo to go down, and I got roped on to Eran and Megan. Now it was getting cold in earnest, and it was about 4 in the morning - the clouds were getting very thick, but we were on out way out of the top of them. Now the moon was clear, and the ice glinted as we climbed through the dark, out of the clouds into the sky - that was all there was to see. Just ice, the crunch-clink-crunch-clink of crampons and ice axes, and the only ground we could see was the ice we were standing on.

Then we rounded a lump of glacier the size of a house, and the wind hit. No we were out of the clouds, and climbing into the sky. I have never been so cold. The last hour and a half of climbing was full on, hands and feet and ice axe ice climbing, no shelter or stops, and was too cold to go slow but too high to go fast. Suddenly day broke, but sadly and with barely more light than we had from the moon, and the cloud pulled back over the sky. We reached the summit in clouds and it could have been a meteor flying through some interstellar dust cloud, the place looked so totally unlike anywhere on earth. All there was to see was about 20 yards of scoured ice, twisted by the wind into somewhat terrifing statues, and clouds swirling past with the wind. I was 6.30 in the morning, 5850m up, and it was -20 degrees. We didn't stay long.

We were back at the refuge by 9am - only the two of us and Eran actually made it to the summit.