Me and Julio down by the schoolyard...

I´ve been here in Ecuador for close to three months now. And still, there are certain things that don´t quite seem to translate or cross the cultural lines in the same ways...Some of the funniest moments I´ve had here have been while speaking with my students during our ten minute breaks of class.

The first occurred when I gave my students a very broad week-long assignment to write a story of 15 lines, with the only condition being it had to fall under one of seven genres (science fiction, romance, tragedy, etc.) Keep in mind my students are in Basic 1 and for the most part, have never taken an English class before. When I went around correcting some of their papers, I stumbled upon one by Francisco, who is a 20something student, who had recently scored a 60% on his first exam. Needless to say, Francisco was struggling a little with his English thus far. When I read his story, I felt as though I was reading an excerpt of a September 11th article from USA Today written by a well-read journalist. Francisco, the same student who wasn´t able to conjugate verbs in third person singular, all of sudden learned how to use contractions, hyphenated terms and my favorite was the simile of the World Trade Center to a ¨financial mecca¨. I, then, went into a long discussion with my class about plagiarism and pride in your work, etc. Shortly after, Francisco changed his topic entirely and wrote a very simple but adequate story about a ghost and a haunted house. We had learned these words around Halloween and it was something that was easy to produce based on a little work with some of our classnotes. Thankfully, I didn´t have to give him a zero, or take him to the principal´s office or worse...call his mom.

While the last incident was one of uncertainty as to how strict I´d be (apparently some teachers in Ecuador turn a blind eye to cheating), the other students were purely innocent, simply trying to learn as best they could and use what they´ve learned in their writing.

During the first week of class, I introduced what each title meant (Mr., Ms., Mrs., Dr.) I explained that Señor was the equivalent of Mr. and they diligently wrote this down in their notebooks. Fast forward to a few months later and I gave them the assignment to write about their favorite holiday. One girl chose Christmas. She asked me to be certain what Señor was in English and I answer Mister. As I read her holiday paragraph, I couldn´t help but giggle. I suppose 99.9% of the time Señor translates to Mister, unless of course you´re writing about Jesus and want to translate the phrase Señor Jesús, which would be more appropriately Lord Jesus and by no means, Mr. Jesus. The sound of that phrase still makes me laugh.

Finally my favorite cultural misunderstanding occurred when I was being bombarded by 20 questions from my students. All along the lines of ¨How long are you here for?¨, ¨When do you go back to the United States?¨, ¨Are you going alone?¨, ¨Who are you going with?¨and so on... Bombarded by all these questions, I answered what I thought was a sufficient answer of ¨Julio¨ (July), but alas my students misunderstood and assumed I had met an Ecuadorian boy named Julio, who I´d be taking home to the United States. To this day, they still joke about my new boyfriend Julio.

Other favorites have included confusing farm and pharmacy. For example, the farmer plants vegetables in the pharmacy. Close, but not quite. And of course, there´s certain pronunciation errors that you can´t help but giggle at: for example, bitch vs. beach. ¨I´m going to visit the bitch tonight¨ That very well may be but I think what you meant to say is that you´re visiting the beach tonight.

All in all, with only a month left to go in my first term as a teacher, I have really enjoyed my time with my students. There´s an interesting dynamic of age range from 13-65 years old and they´re great together.

One final note... clearly Thanksgiving isn´t celebrated here but in Quito, I was lucky enough to spend Thanksgiving (two days later, on Saturday) with friends I´ve met here. All in all it was a great blessing to have new friends to share the traditional holiday with and I even gave the first blessing and asked everyone to share something they were thankful for. It was a great day and made me appreciate being here and having a great family back home to be thankful for as well :)