Month: October 2009

Saturday in the Store

Last night I ran sound for Gedeón again, and after packing up from the concert, grabbing a quick dinner at El Arbolito (“the little tree”), the only restaurant we could find open in the sector that late at night, and heading back to Av. Brasil to drop off people and instruments at English Fellowship Church, it was roughly 1:00 am when I finally walked through the door of my apartment in the north. So this morning I did something I almost never do here in Quito: slept in until 8:30.

Breakfast and a Trole ride later (the second most packed Trole experience of my life, I might add) I was back in the South at Lourdes’ and not quite sure what the day would hold for me. I had heard that the plan was to play soccer today, but it absolutely poured from lunchtime until just after dark1. Lourdes and José were out when I got here, and the store was busy enough that an extra body would have been more in the way than helpful, so I went upstairs to work on a few of my ongoing projects.

When Lourdes got back, we all had lunch together, including Adrian, who is not usually here in the afternoons because of his work schedule. Adrian finished up quickly and took off to his room. Lourdes explained that he had to go “practice.” About then there was a loud crash from his direction, and Lourdes explained that the restaurant where he works is somewhat on the showy side, and Adrian has to learn to juggle plates. After waking up the entire house the other night (apparently the one night last week I spent in the north) by breaking one of his mother’s dinner plates during a late night practice, he’s switched to plastic plates at home.

After lunch, Lourdes and José headed out to do some more shopping, looking for a couple of pieces of furniture for the new place. Adrian and Erica (Marta’s daughter) both had to go to work, so I was asked to hang out in the store with Marta. It didn’t turn out to be an extremely busy day, probably because of the ridiculous amount of rain (even for Quito right now). So Marta put me to work, measuring out 2- and 5-pound bags of rice and sugar, pricing, sorting, and shelving them. While we worked, she talked about the upcoming holidays and asked me about my family and about living in Quito, correcting my Spanish and always remembering exactly where I’d left off every time a customer interrupted our conversation.

Tomorrow will possibly be a soccer day, and I know the big Sunday meal is going to be pescado and I’m pretty stoked about it. Otherwise, I haven’t the faintest idea what the rest of the long weekend is going to hold2. Tomorrow is All Saints’ Day, Monday is Día de Los Difuntos, and Tuesday is Cuenca Independence Day3.

1Though we didn’t play, rain doesn’t necessarily stop anyone else. Cigarette Boy (see Oct 27 post) came in a little early today in his soccer shorts and jersey, totally drenched, and got some crackers in addition to his usual purchase.

2See Dana Artinger’s latest blog entry for the descriptions of the holidays that I’m too lazy to write myself.

3There are roughly a billion Independence Days over the course of the year in Ecuador. Because this isn’t the one for our city, it’s pretty much just a day off here in Quito.

Students

Since starting at Emaús and Carmen Bajo, this has been the first time I’ve ever taught guitar. I’ve shown some people a chord or two before, and given instructions on how to hold or tune or play a little bit to people who bought instruments from me at Albemarle Music. But sitting down and having consistent lessons every week and being the teacher is something new for me. It’s been a fun experience, and doing it in Spanish is just an added bonus.

In the South, I have six students for one-hour blocks all day Wednesday, and a couple more on Monday evenings. They range in age from ten years old to one of the priests, and several of them I’ve known since I first came to Ecuador in 2007. At Carmen Bajo, I theoretically have five students on Friday afternoon, all around eleven years old, but the schedule has been a little wacky the last couple weeks, and any time I don’t have a student, one of the other kids that’s there for the compassion program just jumps in, so I’ve had three pretty consistent ones and then a slightly rotating mix.

I’m teaching them all to read music, and my goal is to get them to learn the first couple of positions on the fretboard and then move into chords. Sounds easy enough, but I’ve had to relearn a lot of my music theory in Spanish. In Ecuador, as in most of Latin America, notes and chords are not named by letters, but with a “fixed Do” system. (E.g. C= Do, D=Re, E=Mi, F=Fa, ect.) The good thing for me is that by the time any of the kids work up any speed on any of their exercises, I’ve been through them all with 10 other students, so I’ve gotten quite a bit of practice playing “Mi, Fa, y Sol” on the first string and thinking those names instead of “E, F and G.”

It’s also fun on the student side of things. I have one student just flying through exercises, and she’ll be playing on all six strings before I know it. I’ve got one who’s having a little trouble with knowing the notes on the staff, a couple who just need to work on coordination between left and right hands, and one who started with absolutely no concept of musical rhythm. I’ve played so many instruments for so long that reading music is as easy to me as reading the words on this page. So it’s sometimes difficult to figure out how to explain something in a different way so that they get it. I guess that’s the whole concept of being the teacher. I’ve gone through a whole lot of blank staff paper writing out exercises, and a couple of times I’ve covered my students’ eyes and called out notes for them to play to get them to see that they don’t need to watch the fretboard, but the music.

One of the reasons that I finally switched my major from music was that I decided my goal wasn’t to teach little kids how to play instruments for the rest of my life. And customers who came in to Albemarle Music used to ask me quite frequently if I taught guitar. I’d tell them I just ran the store while everyone else was teaching because I didn’t think I had the patience for it. Turns out I do, and I enjoy it quite a bit. Some of my students will get frustrated if they get hung up on something and can’t get it right, and I know quite well the feeling of wanting to nail it when you’re in front of your teacher.  But I keep reminding them that making mistakes is part of learning, and that five years ago I knew absolutely nothing about the guitar. I hope that gives them confidence that they will know how to play music in a very short amount of time, and I’m looking forward to seeing them take off.

Life With Lourdes

Last Monday afternoon I moved in with Lourdes and her family. Lourdes is an Episcopal priest who was the priest of Emaús and still very much acts as the leader of that community. I have known her since I came to Ecuador for the first time in 2007, but I didn’t get to see her very much last summer, as I was out of the city so much.

She and her husband José have recently become the owners of a tienda (store) a couple blocks away from the Emaús church building. On the second floor above the store is an apartment which is really large by Ecuadorian standards. Lourdes, José, and their son Adrian moved in over last weekend and I moved in on Monday. Everyone told me that it would take about two hours to go from Parada La “Y,” the Tole station near the office, to Estacion Moran Valverde, the big Trole station down the street from the tienda, but it turns out I can do it in just under an hour at certain times of the day and if I catch a certain circuit of the Trole just right at the station.

That’s still a lot of travelling, and two days of the week I leave in the morning from the tienda in the south for the office in the north and then go back in the evening. Fridays are really fun because at the end of the day I go from Iglesia Carmen Bajo in the extreme north all the way back to the south with a couple of pit stops in between. Standing on the Trole for an hour or so isn’t exactly the most relaxing experience, but for 25 cents, you can’t beat it.

Lourdes’ mother and sister Marta both work in the store, and they get here sometime around 7:30 each day. I definitely can’t complain thinking about them, because they come from the Carmen Bajo area every day. Somewhere around 8:00 is breakfast. One of the three of Lourdes, José, or Marta stays down in the tienda while everyone else goes upstairs to eat together. We generally have coffee and pancitos (bread) for breakfast, and Lourdes puts out the peanut butter and jelly just for me. Sometimes there are surprises though. A couple mornings we have had what looked like plain warm milk but was flavored with cinnamon, and as it got more solid towards the bottom, I finally identified it as Ecuadorian oatmeal, one of the foods (like yogurt) that you drink out of a mug rather than eat out of a bowl here.

Because almuerzo (lunch) is the big meal here, dinner tends to be the same as breakfast. Lately (because of the season of the year, approaching the Day of the Dead) we’ve had Colada Morada instead of coffee at night (thick, warm, mora-flavored drink similar to wassail with pieces of fruit in it). Also, especially if it’s a day that I wasn’t here for almuerzo, Lourdes usually has saved some of lunch for me, appreciating the fact that I’m still not accustomed to eating a gigantic meal during the middle of the day (then trying not to want a nap). This is also a good thing because if I’m not here for lunch, it tends to mean that I have had a gringo-sized lunch in the north and would probably be starving by breakfast otherwise.

Wednesday is the only full weekday that I spend here in the south. But on the three weekdays where I return here in the afternoon, I’m usually hanging around in the store for a few hours before and after dinner. It’s fun to listen and try to understand the Spanish conversations going on around me, and I’ve started to get a feel for who some of the regular customers are. There’s a little girl that lives nearby who runs over three or four times some nights while her mother is cooking dinner and apparently realizes one item at a time what ingredients she is out of. Sometimes by the fourth trip of the night, this little girl is in her pajamas. Then there’s the probably 15-year-old boy who stops by around seven every evening to buy two cigarettes (yes, I really think he’s about 15, and yes, cigarettes are really sold individually).

You also never know what friends are going to come by. Almost everyone from the church lives just a short walk away, and many times Rodrigo, Magi, and their family come by and have dinner/coffee with us. As business trickles off towards the end of the night I’ll help clean or stock shelves or count the drawer. It’s also always fun to see the customers obviously wondering why the gringo is working in the tienda.

This weekend I was asked where “home” was for me. In a missionary community, that question always gets interesting responses. Mine began with “wherever my family is.” Then yesterday Lourdes asked me if this has begun to feel like home to me. It has.

Emaus Mission Team

This weekend I had the opportunity to go to Shell with a group from Emaus to work at La Casa De Fe. I won’t give the history I could on either group, I’ll just skip to the part about what we did this weekend.

It was pretty amazing to see the “Promised Land” after having been absent from the property for two years. When I was last there, it was a patch of tall grass, a stream, and a backhoe. Now there’s a completed water tower and bodega, and a significantly constructed multi-purpose building. The entire concrete framework of the building is done, to the point that we were able to camp out under tents and misquito nets on the top floor as we worked on the first floor.

I’ve been saying today that this weekend was probably the most work I’ve ever done in my life. I’m trying to think of a time that could beat it, and I haven’t come up with one yet. We shoveled out and leveled the dirt under the first floor, dumped in bigger rocks that won’t hold water, covered it with a layer of plastic and rebar-like metal grate material, then mixed and poured concrete for the real floor of the ground level. Part of that involved carrying around 50-kilogram bags of cement to mix concrete.

Now, being your typical kid from the United States, the only metric conversion I know how to do in my head is miles to and from kilometers, and I only know that because of a minor road trip I took to Canada with my grandpa during which I sometimes drove. It wasn’t until after I’d staggered around carrying three or four of those bags that I discovered that it’s more than a 2:1 ratio of kilograms to pounds. I don’t even weigh very much more than 50 kilograms.

Needless to say, between that and the shoveling and pushing wheelbarrows of concrete and sleeping on a constantly deflating air mattress on more concrete, I’m more than a little sore right now. But since I don’t plan an exercise regimen of shoveling concrete and rocks every weekend to keep up these muscles that I didn’t know I had, I’m glad about some other things with which I came away from this weekend.

At certain points it was hard being out at the new property basically all the time and trying to think of it as a ministry site and not just a work site. But when we did finally have the chance to go over to the orphanage, and then to have a bunch of the kids come out to the property to have a worship service with us this morning, it drove home one of those things that I did come away with. Twice now, after having seen the property when it was a piece of land indistinguishable from the rest of the jungle around it, I’ve gotten to be a part of building a place that’s there only because of people acting out God’s love, and which will soon be not just a building, but a home full of that love.

Great Success

I’ll just go ahead and apologize for that title right now.

I’ve known since last November that I was going to be coming back to Ecuador to teach guitar. In Spanish. Since the last time I was here I’ve had two more semesters of college Spanish and I’ve taken everything English off my iPod. The main (and almost only) goal of my first three weeks here was to do intensive language classes, and then there’s just trying to function normally in a Spanish-speaking country, so I’ve had a lot of practice.

The thing is, I’m still a worrier. I even know exactly where I get that from, and that most of the time it’s totally unfounded. It’s still really hard for me to keep up with normal conversations in Spanish, even though when people slow down and treat me like a little kid (which I actually totally appreciate) I’m totally trackin’ and for the most part I can express my ideas.

So this morning I was awake at the crack of dawn because I was both totally excited at my first “real” day back at a ministry site and because I was completely nervous about having to function all day in Spanish and communicate some pretty specific ideas. It did, at least, give me a chance to study (for the bazillionth time) my music theory terms in Spanish. It’s funny the other things you have to learn as well. Even planning out how I was going to explain and demonstrate things, I realized I needed to know more than just how to say “Treble Clef” in Spanish. For instance the names of specific fingers (Dedo pulgar, índice, corazón, anular, y meñique, thumb to pinky, in case you were wondering).

I headed down to the office pretty early, studied a little more, discovered Cameron was going to be late, and got a pancito con leche from Gusta Pan next door (yeah. Gusta Pan. Be jealous, Beechwood). Eventually Cameron got to the office and I threw two guitars into Demo (their car) and we headed off on a bit of an adventure. We basically followed the Trole route so I’d have some sense of where I was headed.

Where I was headed was Lourdes’ store. There’s some minor drama going on with some of the Episcopal churches in South Quito which I won’t get into, so for now, at least, the Tienda is our ministry site. When Cameron and I got there, we hung out for a little bit with Lourdes, her husband and Nancy, another Episcopal priest. Turns out Nancy was my first student.

It was a little weird that my first official guitar student ever was older than me, but I got over it pretty fast. Probably mostly because it was also a little weird that my first official guitar student ever doesn’t speak my native language, and now we’re back to what I was originally worried about. But even though I’d been thinking for weeks that I was going to crash and burn (no matter what I’ve been telling everyone else, that’s what I was thinking) it turned out to be an absolute blast.

I went from Nancy (who blew through exercises like a machine) to Omar (who already plays a lot of guitar, but with whom I think I’ll be doing a lot of music theory) to lunch to Maria José (who’s been my buddy since the first time I came to Ecuador and who never seems to get discouraged with anything I throw at her). I’m definitely going to have to get better about staying within my scheduled time, but with only three students (I didn’t realize at that point that Lourdes was going to give it a go as well) each one went well over an hour.

Turns out I apparently had the ability to have some conversations with each one of them, and to explain some music theory at least to the point of playing E, F, and G (or Mi, Fa, and Sol in Spanish fixed-Do Solfeo music theory) on the primera cuerda. That whole thing about using Spanish you didn’t know you had? Been doing it all day. And somehow I was still smiling and not totally shot at the end of the day. There are definitely some detail words I need to look up for the guitar-playing aspect of it, but for the teaching and fellowship and ministry aspect, I had a blast and I feel like I accomplished something today, and enjoyed being with really cool people and seeing my students really get to learn something.

Other adventures from the day include bad country music (which is, por supuesto, any country music), hanging out with Roberto y Miguel at the mall, dinner and book study with the other interns (we’re up to 3!) at Matt and Marlo’s, and watching hilarious YouTube videos. It’s been a busy day, but what I can’t stop happily thinking about is being out teaching guitar, and that’s a really huge relief.

First Office Days

Yesterday was my first official day doing one of my real jobs, now that my continuous chunk of language school is over. I’ll be splitting my time between doing PR in the form of writing for and about the different ministries of Youth World, and teaching guitar at some of the ministry sites, and yesterday I spent the day at the office doing a lot of reading and talking to people.

Even by the time I met with Brad last week to go over my black-and-white job description for the first time last week, I had two projects in the works. So yesterday morning I came down to Mundo Juvenil to make some notes and put together some semblance of an idea for a couple of interviews. While I was here planning for my conversation with Ivet about La Red, Casey came in and I got to set up a tentative interview time with Miguel and Boris, two of the guys from Casa Gabriel.

This morning we have a Short-Term Department meeting, and afterward I’ll be heading out to Iglesia Carmen Bajo with Laura so I can get a feel for where I’ll be (not that I’ve had any shortage of time at Carmen Bajo before) and check out the guitars that they have out there. It’ll also be nice to actually know how to get there, since I’ve always been on a bus full of gringos with a driver who knew where he was going for my previous visits.

So basically, this week I’m in the deep end.

Weird Skill Set

One of the coolest things to me about Youth World is how open the organization is as a whole to new and different ministries. Some of the first new branches of Youth World seem completely logical for any Youth training-oriented organization: Hacienda El Refugio, a training and retreat center; Casa Gabriel, a discipleship program and home for former street kids; Ingles Student Ministries, formerly Expat, which mostly consists of the Chaplains’ office at the local English-speaking school.

But recently, some even more unique ministries have come up here: a soccer ministry, art classes, and even a skateboard ministry. Each of these were started because someone had a passion and ability for it, and saw a need and/or an opportunity to reach out to people.

I’ve talked and written before about how I don’t feel like I have a skill set that’s particularly tailored to the traditional idea of a missionary. And yet here I am in Ecuador working with International Teams, getting ready for ministry in the form of writing, working on a website, and playing guitar.

Another skill that I basically take for granted at home is my experience with sound equipment. After eight or so years as the sound guy/radio tech at my home church and three years working in a music store, I’d like to think I’m decently versed in sound equipment. And for the first three out of three weekends of this stay in Ecuador, I have run sound for a Spanish Christian Rock band, Gedeón.

I have been friends with Roberto, the guitarist/leader of Gedeón since I first came to Ecuador in 2007, and met singer Christy Stumbo last year. The first week I got here, the two of them were both “super-duper” excited that I was around because (aside from my good looks, irresistible charm, and general awesomeness) they were totally lacking in the sound operator department and had a bunch of concerts scheduled. I was pretty immediately enlisted, and have gotten to go to some sweet places because of it (even Otavalo and Esmeraldas so far).

Until I got back here, Gedeón has had to just grab whoever was around to watch the sound board. If you do a sound check beforehand, and don’t run into any major problems, this is doable, but not in any way ideal. And while I’ve pretty much sat and stared at the sound board, increasing the monitor volume, cutting out feedback every once in a blue moon, I’ve realized just by everyone’s gratitude how useful it is to have someone around who at least has some idea what they’re doing. Even if all it does is save Roberto from running to the back of the room in the middle of a song, that makes a pretty big difference.

It’s been a slightly strange experience to run into people here at the office or around the neighborhood and have them say “Oh, I we have this need at such-and-such a ministry site and it’s exactly one of the things that you do.” Especially since I still feel like I have a weird skill set. It’s been fun. It’s been enlightening. But it’s still slightly strange. Some days I get the feeling that God is saying “I told you so.”