Reactions In Cuenca To Ecuador's Police Strike

This morning, I taught my regular Saturday morning class at the Abraham Lincoln school (quick recap - to be a professor, I have to also be a private school teacher. Follow that logic? Me neither. Welcome to Ecuador). I was looking forward to it today because it was a chance to do a good survey of local reactions to this week's police strike in Ecuador.

The teachers at the school are a mix of Cuenca locals and foreigners. My students come from middle and upper class families, and they're the equivalent of sophomores in high school. My class is all girls and very sweet. They can giggle in two languages.

Anyway, our lesson today was on gangsters and heroes (I just follow the book, people) and we had to make sentences expressing who is a hero and why. Soldiers are heroes, because they save Ecuador from the police. This earned a number of solemn nods from around the class. Soldiers are also cuter than the police, which earned laughs.

The girls then confessed to having spent the day of the police strike in Ecuador mostly glued to the television with their families. Those who have relatives in Quito or Guayaquil checked in throughout the day by email and cell phone to keep tabs on the public unrest in Ecuador. Many of my Cuencana students do have family on the coast, and so checking in - especially after the roads closed - was important. All the public schools in the country were closed Friday, which the students dismissed as "boring" since exams are coming up and they had to study anyway.

Among the local teachers in Cuenca, the mood was cautious relief. Several confessed to having been truly frightened. "I'm not easily scared," said one, "but that really shook me up." Correa, after all, is supposed to be different, and not susceptible to the coup d'etats that took out a number of his predecessors.

One of the long-time foreign teachers expressed ambivalence about the whole situation. "This is my fourth coup," he said, shrugging. I didn't ask if it was his fourth coup in Ecuador, but dang. Can you imagine?

In terms of the mood on the street, there are a number of stores that should be open that are still closed today (Saturday) but no real sense of emergency. People seem to be a little shaken that it happened, but mostly relieved that it's over. Speculation about the political outcomes is rampant among expats, but the locals just shrug and say, "Who knows what will happen?"

I'm with the locals. It's Ecuador. Who knows what will happen?

From High School to College In Just 6 Days

Last week, I found myself waking up at 6 am for the first time in years. I wasn't on my way to catch a flight, either, which is generally the only acceptable reason for my lazy writer's butt to be up that early.

I was going to school.

By 7:30 I was dressed, armed with a backpack full of study supplies, and waiting for the bus. My fellow sufferer, SF, met up with me to ensure our 25 cents was duly plunked down into the slot for Bus #4. We managed to find a seat and bumped our way over the sleepy cobblestone streets until we reached our destination at the end of the line - Colegio Santa Ana.

It's worth noting here that a Colegio is not a college. It's a high school. Colleges are Universidades, and Colegios are high schools. I've studied Spanish for years and still think this is weird.

Anyway, Colegio Santa Ana perches on the side of a large hill overlooking the main city of Cuenca. Real estate developers in the States would kill for the vista off the playground alone.

Me? I would kill for some breakfast. It's a thought that occurs to me more than once as the morning drags on. The regular teachers are all in attendance for the final days of intensive curriculum planning before school starts. I'm attending as an observer, preparing to serve as a substitute for SF's first week of classes while he attends a wedding in the States.

I'm just there to see the place and find my classroom, right? Except instead I am getting a bird's eye view of the inner working of the curriculum administration system at a Cuenca Colegio. It's interesting, as they are re-doing the guides for each grade level, but there is a lot of discussion in circles and I'm praying that this all gets sorted by the time I start subbing on Monday.

Flash forward. Friday night I get a note from SF, who's now in the States, that his school is trying to get a hold of me, that they've got some kind of emergency. By Sunday morning, it's sorted out - the emergency situation was that I've been canned in favor of someone who was able to attend all of the curriculum planning sessions.

Sadness, right? Well, not really. I'm actually relieved to not have to make the long bus ride on Monday morning, especially since I would have just lusted after the panoramic view anyway.

48 hours later, I'm sitting in a windowless room taking notes. Welcome back to University, kiddo!

As I was celebrating my new-found freedom from subbing on Sunday, I got a note about a Profesora looking for someone to cover her maternity leave. The position starts in October, but the catch is being at the first day of class to figure out what's going on and if this is going to work. So I end up perched in the back row, utterly alone as not one of the other students in the class will sit with me. I later find out this isn't social shunning of the gringa - their previous professor penalized them for not sitting up front!

Anyway, the course is called International Relations. Asking if I'm interested in the subject is like checking to see if bears really sleep in the woods.

There's more to the story, naturally, because this is Ecuador and things are never perfectly simple. The way things happen here are twisty and turny and full of the unexpected. One minute you're a sacked sub, and the next minute you're on the road to being a college professor. Asi es Ecuador!