Who dares to teach must never cease to learn. ~John Cotton Dana

Que tal?
That means what´s up in Spanish. Look at me learning another language!
I´m currently in Banos, Ecuador, living with a host family and taking classes at a Spanish language school. Every day I wake up, eat breakfast with my family, and head to school to teach English for four hours. Then I head home for lunch, a siesta, and then back to school for four hours of tutoring in Spanish.
In highschool, I always dreaded Spanish class... I was the worst one in the class, the slowest to understand lessons, and the least likely to be able to answer the teacher´s questions. Here, I litterally get excited for class. My teacher is awesome, and while I´m definitely still in the lowest level, I´m only in class with one other person, Tucker, and we´re learning SO much every day. It´s all coming back to me, and being able to practice with my host family and all the people around me every day helps a lot. I feel like I improve every day, even though I´m slow to be able to come up with sentances still. And I have those awkward moments when I forget that embarasado is ¨pregnant¨, not embarassed (embarasoso)... My host mom luckily got it and after laughing with her momentarily, I learned the error of my ways and now know the difference. Oops.
Teaching is way harder than I expected. My teaching partners and I were under the impression we´d be teaching kids and brought a guitar and a print out of the lyrics to ¨head, shoulders, knees and toes¨ to help kids learn to read and speak English through music. When we got to our classroom we were met with... five 16 year olds all ready and waiting to learn the past tense of verbs and all the irregular verbs of English (does anyone know how many irregulars we have? SO MANY). We had to improvise during the lesson and came up with a pictionary game competition- I drew fruits, objects, other foods, etc. and whoever could say the English word first got a point. Tomorrow I have to bring a chocolate bar to our star pupil, Eduardo, for his extensive knowledge of the English words for fruits and zoo animals, as well as for his outstanding capability to interpret my pathetic drawings (you should have seen my elephant... the first guess was butterfly). It gives me a whole new appreciation for my Spanish teacher, that´s for sure.
Now in addition to my 30 Spanish sentances I have to write per night I now get to create a whole lot of lesson plans for the rest of the week though! Kai, Eli, and myself bought big sheets of paper to create flashcards tonight for commonly used verbs and nouns and I get to test my drawing abilities once again to make the flashcards more interesting.
Living with a host family is also a bit weird. I was very apprhensive prior to meeting them, and now that I know how nice and excited they are to have us stay with them, it´s much easier than expected. But when halfway through my shower the scalding hot shower turned ice cold (you pick one or the other at the beginging), I didn´t know if this was normal or weird so I didn´t say anything. For the past few days it´s been Carnival in Ecuador, so the whole city has been partying late into the night. Fun fact- on the last day of Carnival people dump water over balconies on the heads of unsuspecting passerbys. (Ladies- don´t wear a white shirt you´ll be a target if you ever get to enjoy this celebration). Carnival also means a ton of extra family has been staying with my host family. Yesterday, Kai and I walked in (Kai is my roommate) to the house and literally did not recognize a soul of the twenty people sitting around looking at us, and I thought we´d walked into the wrong house! We both just bubled ¨buenos noches!¨ and ran. I almost peed myself I was laughing so hard when we got up to our room, it was something out of a movie. Our host dad is really into taking us on tours of the city, wants to take us on a hike this weekend with his 16 year old daughter, Jessica, who´s a total sweetheart and has been trying very hard to speak slowly to me so I can understand and communicate (we had a great conversation with her and her mom about our favorite actors and which we´d want to have as our ¨novios¨ (boyfriends)). Other kids in my group are not so lucky and are kind of just coexisting with their families, whereas Kai and I feel a part of the family. It´s certainly been an experience to remember so far, and we´re only 3 days into a 2 week stay!
I can´t wait to see how much Spanish I know by the end of these two weeks. And then after full day lessons in Cusco!
As the second week of my trip closes, I realize there have been some ups and downs (a second round of sickness RIGHT before getting on an overnight bus while leaning into the gutter in the pouring rain... I´d warn people away from eating a whole lot of rice and then dancing on the beach in the rain during Carnival in Canoa the first day you eat three full meals after an illness... although if you haven´t been sick DEFINITELY dance with friends in the rain on the beach it was the most fun I´ve ever had on a rainy day)- but what is really important is to acknowledge it may not be the best minute/hour/day of your life and you may really be feeling homesick, and then try and think of all the reasons you should enjoy life right then. My friends in the group (which really is everyone) have been helping me learn to do this and live in the moment.
I hope I can keep it up throughout the next two and a half months!
To everyone back home- I miss you all but I´m having a great time, as I hope you all are too.
-Emily