Homestay Updates!

Catazacon

Hannah and Elena have been having a wonderful time in Catazacon getting to know and love our families, our school, and our community. This week we began to teach additional English classes that are open to anyone in the community, which have been going quite well!

The students are rapidly absorbing English with extreme enthusiasm (sometimes a little too much)! So far they have mastered the colors, the numbers, the greetings, and some key phrases such as: “Sit down!”, “Can I use the bathroom?”, and “Silence!”

In addition to our English classes, we will be having a town meeting this Saturday to start the plans for building a playground.

In short, we are thoroughly loving Ecuador and Catazacon and are looking forward to another 8 weeks full of wonderful people, food, and experiences!

 Maria Aurora

 After a weekend with the group, it was back to the grind here in Maria Aurora. Ben’s school change went off without a hitch and he is now teaching the enviable ages of 11 to 18. Amelia joins him Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays in the mornings to help teach, and then goes back to town to instruct at the elementary school in the afternoons. She keeps Rani, who is working full-time at the elementary school, company during her shifts there. Together, they teach art on some mornings to the littlest munchkins, and then English to the older buggers. Ben has assumed a teaching position for the youngest three grades at the high school (8^th, 9^th, and 10^th) and is also assisting the one English teacher at the school in her pronunciation and vocabulary. All three of us spend our evenings eating copious amounts of rice, soup, and plantains, and watching various soap operas (telenovelas to those Spanish speakers among you) and other fantastic Ecuadorian programming. We are also looking forward to starting our independent projects, one of which includes creating a few murals around the elementary school We’ll keep you posted on further excitement! Don’t wait up :-).