Pay Attention!

La escuela sits on the third floor above a dentists office and a candy store. It holds a maze of small rooms, each with a table and two chairs and a stack of books. The day begins with a stack of blank paper on which Fernando writes our lectures, scrawls new vocabulary, or draws pictures to explain them.

On our first day, he asked if we'd like to study on the roof top terrace and we've claimed it each morning since. The three of us sit at a picnic table under a yellow umbrella, which offers shelter from the sun and passing showers. After the lesson, we practice with a mixture of written and oral exercies. We read about Ecuadorian history, geography and culture. Always his lectures, explanations, jokes and praise, as they should be, are in spanish. We write it, read it, listen to it, and stumble through speaking it.

I had bought a notebook before I came to Ecuador in an effort to prime my learning. I worked through it, a chapter at a time, picking up basic vocabulary and grammar. In the six hours we studied on the first day, we covered most of what I had studied. By the afternoon of the second day we were on to completely new material. I fall asleep and wake to a litany of conjugations and vocabulary.

There are, of course, moments of great humor. When Fernado went to photocopy an exercise for us and mientras tanto (in the mean time) left us another task. We heard only "tonto" which means "dumb", and made us all laugh. And again when we struggled over the translation of students "puden atencion" or "put attention" to their studies. Imagine Fernando's dismay when we told him in the U.S. students "pagar" - pay attention! He covered his mouth and threw his head back laughing. Settling down, we put our attention to our lessons and moved on.