Alternative bilingual school

A week ago, I went to the Escuela Fray Bartolome in the town center. This is the largest school in Salasaca, where there are hundreds of students, real classrooms, a load of teachers, uniforms, and all the typical stuff. The front of the school says “Foundation for the Ecuadorian Indians, Switzerland” so I guess maybe it was built by Swiss people or something. Most students in Salasaca attend this school.

My school, Katitawa, is an alternative school that receives no government funding. We only have one paid teacher who teaches all grades. The school is bilingual and instruction is in Kichwa and Spanish. We also have a strong focus on environmental education and the students learn as much about traditional medical plants as they do about math. We have 30 students in the whole school. I think we are kind of like Montessori schools in the US, in that we don’t have structured classes. Students learn what they want, when they want, and we are there to guide them, not to lecture.
I was invited by Padre Carmelo, the priest who is the director of Fray Bartoleme, to come to the graduation ceremony at his school to invite the whole town to take English and biology lessons during the vacation months. I was impressed at how different their school is compared to ours. It feels almost like jail, with dark classrooms with barred windows and a concrete playground. The students lined up to do their physical education, like jumping jacks and other boring stuff. At Katitawa, our physical education is growing the plants outside and hiking the miles to and from school, not jumping jacks. There is no concrete at Katitawa.

Two weeks ago in Katitawa, we celebrated Inti Raymi, the sun festival, and had our final presentation. We had invited the Fray Bartoleme School to come observe. Their students lined up in their uniforms watched in awe as our students, clad in ponchos, bayetas, and anakus, showed off the fields of medicinal plants and the lamb meat hanging from the volleyball net. Later, we cooked a whole lamb in the hole filled with volcanic rocks that the men had dug. We danced around it as a friend’s band played traditional highland music. That was our ceremony.

Tuesday, in Fray Bartolome, the teachers wore suits and the students formed lines. So different from Katitawa. The funniest part of the day was when it was my turn to announce the vacation classes. They were using a microphone to talk to hundreds of students and their families. Padre Carmelo handed the microphone over to me, and once it started working, I began to talk.

AND IT WAS WEIRD!!! I mean, obviously, I’ve heard myself speak Spanish. But it’s one thing to speak Spanish to your friends and students and quite another thing to hear that Spanish broadcasted back to you from several loudspeakers in the school and even across the whole town. You know how it’s weird to hear yourself in home videos and stuff, now imagine that, except shouted across a village, amplified, and in another language. And I have an Ecuadorian accent. It was like an Ecuadorian woman had stolen my voice and was making town announcements. I could hardly concentrate I was so distracted by my voice booming out fluent Spanish, which turned not so fluent once I heard myself chattering away from every direction. The women looked up from spinning their wool, and I just thought how strange the whole situation was. The small Kichwa women sitting on the concrete spinning their wool, listening to the voice of a tall white foreigner booming across the village, all of us listening and talking in our second language, Spanish.

Maybe Ashli has some comments… Ashli, perhaps you’ve spoken Russian via microphone to hundreds of people? Was it weird for you?