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.
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