Puyo, Ecuador~ New Home

Lots to update on...  Made it to bus terminal in Puyo, got friendly pickup from project director Laura and her 16 month old daughter.  Made it to the volunteer house (there were four of us total at the time), this week we are back down to 3.  Another co coordinator, Henley, myself and an 18 year old volunteer.  He has Peace Corps experience in Costa Rica and Sarah can cook (and bake, more about that later).  I spent the week enjoying fresh fruits and veggies, waking at 5.30am, doing diagnostics at all our schools, learning new bus routes and hopping off the wrong ones, hitchhiking home (in pairs, more common than I thought, although some hitches actually function like unmarked taxis, so just make sure you know whether or not you'll be paying before you hop into someone's truck...), making dinners and spending time reading in hammocks.  Not sure why I feel tired if the school day ends around 12.30/1pm, but we have long bus rides that put us back home around 2 or 3pm.

I'm learning a lot about the achievement and resource gap between urban and public schools here.  The places where we work are all along jungle land, small one or two room school houses, my biggest school has about 40 kids, the smaller ones 16.  Some classes are going to function more like one on one tutoring sessions if you know what I mean so I'm trying to wrap my head around how to plan for all this.  Supposedly these kids are supposed to be getting at least 2 hours of English instruction a week, by law, but many local teachers are not TOEFEL certified, so that means volunteers (who have little or no teaching experience), become the replacements, or fulfill this requierement for about 40min once a week.  No wonder the diagnostics were abysmal.  I think I'm going in to this with the wrong mindset, and maybe part of that is prior education experience making me think that I can design this semester, improve my organization and planning skills and track their progress to the T...  Here is that really necessary, who am I to say the systems they already have in place are wrong, or inefficient, I really am not in the position to judge them at all.  Soo, after a two hour lesson planning session where we banged out some gold old fashioned INM, GP, IP, I'm trying to release all that and realize that I don't have control over the circumstances here.  There are first graders who have never been to school, and in the 4.5 hour school day, yeah, maybe I will have the school director who decides to take the kids down the hill on a nature walk and have them draw the view, wasting over an hour of precious instructional time.  Ahh, how could this be, I was screaming inside, no wonder they are so behind and start planting yucca at 12 instead of continuing on to the city schools in Puyo.  But, this is my chance to observe all these judgements that are passing through my head.  The pleathora of travel lit inside the house has given me a lot to reflect on, and I'm realizing I probably just need to be quiet.  Shh.