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5 days of class left, 10 in the country... my time in Ecuador is drawing to a close. The last three and a half weeks have served me as well as the previous three and a half (if not better - I acquired fewer strange sicknesses). I think I'll sum them up with a lovely little montage of memories...

* traveling to Baños in a Transportes Amazonas bus loaded with boxes of fresh fish and garlic while the two women in the seats next to me attempted to nurse their crying babies

* the two-lane road to Baños repeatedly becoming a 4-lane road where suicidal cars played chicken with our bus, the driver paying no heed as he swerved along mountain cliffs

* hearing an enormous THUD under the bus and eventually pulling over on a conveniently situated hair-pin curve on the aformentioned "two" lane highway to fix the flat tire

* having an Ecuadorian follow me and my friends down the street in Baños, yelling "you were in Air Force One! I know you! You in Air Force One! You famous! Give me your signature!"

* yes, you speakers of Spanish, Baños means bathrooms, so laugh it up. It also means "baths," or rust-colored sediment filled springs, for which the town is famous. I didn't go in them.

Of course, I did more than just travel to and from Baños. I rode horses in Baños with 2 friends in the mountains and looked down into the valley at the city below. We ran for our lives in Baños in hopes that we would catch the last bus out of town back to Quito so we could teach the next morning...

Back in Quito I celebrated my birthday with my Ecuadorian family - we ate hotdogs smothered in potato chips and mayonnaise, and they shoved my cake into my face while shouting "¡qué muerda el pastel!" It was a unique way to celebrate my 20th. I went to eat ice cream with a college friend's girlfriend's Mom's ex-student, Pablo, who lives here in Quito. Never have quite feared for my life as I did as we sped through the streets of downtown Quito in Pablo's truck, but the ice cream sure was great. My little host-brother Bryan and his cousin Andres slipped smeared marker drawings of me under my door and then ran away and "hid" under the bed in the next room. I attended a church service with a student, which was absolutely wonderful - faith transcends all language barriers.

Of course, I have a few less-than-pleasant memories... like that time I got sick after eating Chinese food with Caroline in the small town of Ibarra (WHAT was I thinking? Chinese food in ECUADOR? They didn't even have noodles on the menu). My bag was stolen in a bus station, and my students chose to ask me the meaning of every swear word in the movie we watched - the only words they really seem to want to pronounce correctly.

What do I do all day? I mean, I am here to teach, after all. I wake up (usually to the sounds of a 4-year-old bawling and his mother shouting in exasperated Spanish) and eat breakfast, then am out the door by 8. I take Quito's public trasportation, the Ecovia, to a stop in the heart of businessland Quito and walk 15 minutes to the Ministry of Commerce. The walk is usually quite pleasant, except for the smog, the black smoke emitted from the buses, and the cat-calls from strange men on the street. The mountains, however, are INCREDIBLE - they loom in the foreground in all their green majesty. After teaching for a couple hours, I attempt to have copies made for the next day's class, but inevitably the copier is broken and I need to wait 5 "minutitos," which actually means I wait for an hour. I come home, eat lunch, rest up, do the email thang, run errands, then go teach at CONAIE for two hours. Home again for dinner, then planning the next day's lessons... ah, the life of a summer volunteer teacher. It's both repetitive and rewarding.

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I wish I could go back to the scared, apprehensive girl sitting at the airport on June 20th and tell her that she is about to have one of the most memorable times of her life. This summer spent traveling countless hours by bus on the weekends to new adventures and learning about the average Ibarrian life has been more than an event well captured by the six rolls of film I´ve finished off. I can see it is the students and my host family that I will miss the most though. I won´t sugar coat the whole experience - there were definitely some rough patches.like arriving in Ibarra on the Monday our classes were to begin and finding that not a single placement test had been given or a schedule worked out yet.or trying to find new angles to reach my 2:30 class, filled with expressionless faces as they had just been sedated by the regular five-course meal at lunch. And the cheating.ah, the zig- zagging of eyes, the whispering that could easily be mistaken for the hissing I endured everyday on the streets, and of course, the newly popular: passing the eraser back and forth with the answers written on it. Every test day would ensure "Evil Shannon" written in huge letters across the entire white board to remind each student exactly who I became during the test.

Push it all aside, and at the base, I had three classes of people so eager to hear what I had to say. It doesn´t hurt either that I am comparably a giant to them at 5´5" and brought a suitcase of clothes they find muy interesante. Each class was a sure bet for a new visitor - from stray dogs to my students´ children or friends, and every so often, smoke of a distinguishable kind seeping from the director´s office. On a long, bumpy bus ride to Baños one weekend (at the time, Ella, Caroline, and I thought we were so clever for grabbing the entire back row of the bus until we realized we were absorbing all the shock) I attempted to grade my students´ papers. I can´t think of a better way to pass the time than reading some of their work. like the older, somber man in my afternoon class who wrote, "I give the love to my wife from 8 am to 5 pm everyday," along with other interesting sentences from the prepositional expressions of time lesson. The creative poems assignment for my beginners was border-line disaster, leaving me with an aching stomach and watering eyes from laughing so hard with my students. From riding on giant cockroaches as a suggestion for improving transportation to serious pieces poetically describing the inequality between men and women in Ecuador, I was thoroughly impressed.and a little worried. I should have suspected that the "what am I touching?" body parts game for beginners would turn into a series of explicit questions by the men in the class. I wouldn't recommend it if you have an Irish or English background or are especially prone to turning tomato red.

As the last weeks of teaching began to unfold, more surprises showed up. During one evening class, I went to use the bathroom and came back to find all the desks had been moved to the sides of our octagonally-shaped classroom with music blaring - oh yes, I was forced to fake salsa and merengue while being surrounded by all the teen-aged boys who had taken the liberty to write "I love you Shannon" on different walls of the classroom.

Sometimes the hissing and "love you mama" s on the street were accompanied by an occasional outburst of as many Spanish insults I had learned from my very open host family at the dinner table (or should I say soft, salty cheese and bread table?) Of course, I had been warned by Karen and Josh right from the start but I suppose I had to learn through experience that things don´t change, even when you try hissing back to make them feel estupido. (Trust me, it doesn´t work.) So after some time, I took my revenge right into the classroom and educated every male student I had with the help of my Latino female students´ opinions to back me up. (If nothing else, in my own mind, I was helping to change the machismo in Ibarra!)

Wanting to cut my hair, I was never able to find my host family´s scissors as they were absolutely mortified that I would want even shorter hair. I felt 15 years old again, as I returned home from a weekend in Quito with 2 inches taken off. The father tried to cover his shock with a politely- forced smile but the 19 year-old daughter quickly announced that I was "loca." - I have to disagree though; I consider it crazy when you ask a foreign person in your home for the very first time what we call "the reward after sex" in English. But hey, that´s just me.

The "mainlanders´" weekend trips brought me the nickname "3 liter" when Ella was finally comfortable enough to tell me how ridiculous and embarrassing it was to be seen with a gringa who always has to carry around a giant thing of water.even to nice restaurants. Ella, I blame any and all dehydration on you! As I write this, I think I can say with confidence that I may be one of the few, if not only volunteer to avoid the oh-so lovely travelers´ diarrhea and other sicknesses. Finally, my somewhat paranoid- hypochondriac tendencies are paying off! I may gargle with fecal-contaminated water, but I always steer clear of the street food and scary meat doused with their all time favorite topping -mayonnaise! So hopefully I make it home without a worm - I already have enough responsibility with a cat.

On a more sentimental note (or as one student would say, "hurting feelings"), this summer has changed me - through and through. I arrived in Quito for my very first passport stamp ever and was unable to communicate with anything but odd gestures. Without studying Spanish here once, my comprehension and responses of "no entiendo" has increased more than I could have ever imagined. Of course, some things are still lost completely in the language barrier.like the time my host mother kept asking me if I knew the singer Xuxa (pronounced Sho-Shaw) and I kept answering that I was wearing canvas shoes that could not be shined. I will truly miss the hilarious misunderstandings, my host family, and the people I have had the chance to know this summer. I hope we can all keep in touch.until we meet again!

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