Let it Bee.

When the going gets tough, and the rain never stops… you just keep on goin’. This is how I’ve been feeling during the past few weeks in Yachana. We kept asking locals, “And when is the rainy season exactly?” to which we received varying answers and a lot of confused looks that seemed to say, “I live in the Amazon RAIN forest; it always RAINS.” Now we (and most everyone else for that matter) are pretty certain we have stumbled right into the rainy season, having been given little time to prepare our minds or to change our moldy sheets. It rains every day. And when it rains, you’re not going anywhere. Movement from the high school to the lodge has become more challenging. The path is one big muddy swamp. We sink, knee deep, into what once was safe, solid ground. We slip and slide in a chocolate pudding slick as we trudge along with our bags of laundry and our laptops.

Other challenges have been an internet outage which lasted for just over a week. Not a huge deal. But I will admit that I was starting to get antsy with the lack of means of communication with the outside world. Not only that, but I had planned a whole jornada around the use of donated cameras to have the students create photo blogs in English. I am still determined to make it happen. But, like most things here in Ecuador, and most of all in the Amazon, things move a little more slowly than one might hope. And, you just keep on goin’.

We three volunteers are settling into our new position of “co-principals,” and, by default, primary authority figures of Yachana Technical High School. It’s still a little bit laughable to me when I really think about what I’m doing. Me? Running a high school in the middle of the Amazon rain forest? Disciplining students only a few years younger than myself? How did this happen?

But honestly, it’s really not just a big joke. It’s a pretty challenging situation, and one that none of us had expected when we signed up for this year. The issues we have most recently been dealing with is with kids sneaking out,  not returning to the high school after having been sent out to run an errand (such as carrying gas tanks to the lodge, or to fetch cheese for breakfast in the morning). I don’t mean to complain about the kids. They are good kids and I don’t expect them to get into any REAL trouble in which anyone truly gets hurt. At least on purpose. But we do feel a certain degree of responsibility for the kids and are trying to balance enforcing our authority, while giving them the space that they need as adolescents and as respectable kids. Not a lesson I planned on learning until I had kids of my own!

There are times when we find ourselves in a slump. Especially when we start to feel a little bit like the only ones invested in the school (whether a reality or just a suspicion). And I have started to notice that the mood of the group tends to dictate the mood of its members. It’s a bit like a bee hive. (Can you see where my mind is starting to turn?) When you approach the hive the bees’ buzzing changes in pitch. When you open the lid, there’s another change. The bees become agitated. So the beekeeper must move slowly, to minimize the extent to which the bees (as a hive) perceive a threat. I wonder: who perceives the threat first? Is there an individual in the hive who, upon first perception of threat, communicates that awareness to the rest of the hive? Or do the bees, as a hive, recognize the threat immediately, all together?  Who, then, calms the hive? Is there an individual who must inform the hive that the threat has withdrawn? Or is there a sort of “collective consciousness” – to get all Anthropology-ish on you – that regulates the mood of the hive?

In some ways, I wonder if the same questions can be answered through observations of our own group dynamic. I never sensed that one person became negative before the others. It just sort of happened before we even realized it. Now that I realize it, I feel that the sense of threat might not be a reality at all, but my own perception and feeling of abandonment. Now that I can recognize it as possibly just a perception, I can start to discard it as necessarily truth. Now I feel a little bit better. I don’t have to feel negative towards the situation and I can start to buzz at a slower frequency. I take a deep breath and smile at my students instead of blaming them for something that’s not their fault. There is not a real threat among us. They are going to make mistakes, and that’s okay. I make them too.

So can a smile change, even a little bit, the mood of the “hive”? Can it communicate to the masses that the perceived threat is no longer perceived? Or that maybe it wasn’t ever there at all?

Maybe I’m making a bit of a stretch here; I’m not trying to say that we function exactly like bees in their hive. But I can see some similarities. Either way, it’s high time to lift the group morale, and it might take a glimmer of a smile or a hint of a laugh to communicate to the group that things are alright. 

Oh the times they are a changin'

As I sit here listening to the Lambada blasting from our one GIANT speaker on the porch of Yachana Technical High School, I start to remember how different life is here. After about 6 and a half months of living in Ecuador, things seem pretty normal, or maybe abnormality is just getting more normal. Rather than weekend dances in the high school gymnasium, dances take place under the stars, on the outdoor volleyball court. Students prefer to dance to salsa, merengue and bachata to rap or electronic... although they do like to imitate the American tendency to jump up and down with one hand in the air when an electronic song does pass through the playlist.

The dances have a unique feeling to those that I remember when I was a high school teenybopper. Even at a young age, the dancing is traditional. There is lots of hip swinging and coordinated movements that you don't expect teenagers to be so skilled at performing. Yet for each young man there must be one young woman, so that everyone has a dance partner. If the numbers are off, the whole dance floor becomes a bit muddled. No one quite knows how to respond. Usually what happens is that everyone sees one lone dancer awkwardly shaking his or her hips among a sea of couples, and the floor is opened up into a giant circle of swaying bodies. Once in a while, when the music picks up, one or two people will enter the center of the circle and perform some sort of entertaining dance move. Zero dance skill is needed.

While things, as foreign and new as they are, have begun to seem commonplace, a lot has changed since I came down here. The first week was charged with meetings and orientation during which we volunteers, the 4 of us that there were at that time, came up with the schedule and face of what we are calling the Yachana "Gap Year." We came up with mission statements and goals, objectives and jobs for each person on our small team of Americans and Ecuadorians. We had a Principal and a Yachana graduate, Mauricio, who was in charge of leading the students in agricultural activities in the afternoons. We had volunteers in Quito supporting us with advice, suggestions and resources.

Since that time, our Principal has left the school, our agriculturist has become a free-lance jungle guide, our business volunteer has gone back to grad school in California, and Stephanie has moved to Quito to house students during their internships in Quito. This leaves Ryan, Chris and myself as the leaders of the Gap Year program at the high school. The first few days after Carlos had gone, we panicked, just a bit. We felt a loss of the support we came in with, and weren't sure how the students would react to the lack of a general leader. And we definitely weren't prepared to be the "Principals" of a school in the Amazon rain forest. None of us really felt qualified nor willing to take on that role.

We have had to improvise. The class part was easy. We have continued to teach our classes in the mornings. We are on a schedule in which each day, two of us teach for one hour while one teaches for two. The more interesting time of day is the afternoon. We have a considerably large farm area in which we grow plantains, orange trees, cacao (the fruit from which we make chocolate), aji (a type of very hot pepper), yuca and lemons. In the past, when there were more students living and studying at the high school, there would be as many as 30 students each day, morning and afternoon, working the fields. Now we have only 10 students, the occasional afternoon, and one agricultural specialist who visits the school for 3 days at a time, once a month. Therefore, we have begun to be not only the co-principals of the jungle high school, but also those in charge of the jungle farm. This, for three gringos, is no light undertaking. When I found myself hacking away with a machete at weeds taller than me and giant stinging nettle among the banana trees, I started to realize that I have adapted to some pretty extreme circumstances, and have begun to delve into tasks that I never thought I would find myself delving into.

It's interesting to watch the changes. But it's also slightly disconcerting that there are 4 months left of unpredictability. That's a good word for the jungle: unpredictable. You really don't know what will happen. There's just no way of knowing.