A Happy Easter?

It´s hard to believe that it´s April...my ambitions back in September to blog weekly now seem fairly distant. But here I am again, trying to catch up on the last several months. Time goes even more quickly without waiting for the long Minnesota winter to end. Even the holidays do little to mark the passing seasons. Easter here came and went with little more than a bowl of fanesca - the souply cuisine made of fish and twelve grains (to represent the disciples) that everyone eats during Holy Week. It never before occurred to me to that in Catholic countries, there is more emphasis on somber Good Friday than on triumphant Easter...but here, that´s the way it works, and so most people attend mass on Thursday or Friday and then pass Easter with a shrug.

My students seem fascinated by these religious differences as well...once during a conversation in class, my student Mayra asked if I was Catholic. I tried to explain that I grew up Protestant. "How is that different?" she asked. "Well," I said, "it´s like Catholicism but without Mary and the saints." I thought that might be the easiest way to explain it to an English language learner. Mayra thought about this for a minute. "Oh," she said. "So you´re a Jehovah´s Witness." After that the class turned into a religion debate just as much as an English class.

Even though the Easter holiday was nothing like I was used to, Ecuador did introduce me to a new holiday about a month ago - Carnaval. Carnaval marks the beginning of Lent, and to celebrate my fellow teacher and friend Klara and I, my boyfriend Michael, and several other volunteers piled into a bus to Guaranda, one of the smaller towns nearby, to celebrate in unmitigated lunacy. The streets of Guaranda were crammed with people, all throwing flour, dousing passerbys with buckets of ice water, and spraying neraby victims with foam. We were quick to buy foam as well and soon commenced in chasing down ten-year-old local kids, who fought back with equal vigor. Nobody exactly wins these fights...really, they end when everyone is so covered in foam that it´s impossible for anyone to see.

Things are of course more mellow now. I´ve started a new semester with forty students (more than triple what I had last semester) and the energy of big classes is starting to energize me too. I have also been volunteering in a local school for special needs by teaching English. It would be hard to think of a bigger contrast from the University - I typically teach about five new words per lesson, have kids falling asleep or hopping out of their desks, or occasionally throwing a pencil case or two. But like any class, there are also the attentive ones who really do want to learn another animal name or another simple song. In any case, it´s a side of the Riobamba community I hadn´t seen before, and I still find it fascinating.

That´s all for this blog...Riobamba is now gearing up for its independence day by electing its beauty queen, advertising concerts, and practicing for its parades. It should be exciting...and probably a bit tidier than Carnaval too.