Monsters

I am spending my final month in a rural elementary school with lovely monsters know as my students. Every morning begins with a prayer, a plea for strength. I am up by 6am and getting ready until my 7am bus leaves for La Balza where I am teaching.

Once on my bus I lose any sense of ‘personal space’ so I try to be clever and find women to stand with, there are never open seats. The women tend to build a barrier amongst ourselves of purses and hand bags against the other, the men. Men are like shadows and I have come to fear dusk. I am rarely around men and when I am, I am afraid. I’ve noticed that the women in Ecuador, when in public if alone never ever smile, let alone laugh but that does not mean they do not have joy. Women survive here by blending in—into the scenery as backgrounds and backdrops, only within their kitchen and safety of their homes do they come alive with laughter and sarcasm. I have come to love there smiles and laughter the way one would love diamonds and jewels, they have become that precious to me. These women carry brave faces like warriors especially on the bus— tight jaw, eyes down cast, hands tight around your body, focused and tense. They do this to protect themselves.

 Once on the bus I let my brave face slip, I was day dreaming about Canada and smiled. I was caught in my error as the man next to/behind me saw my vulnerability. He moved in closer and my jaw hardened, my eyes expected the dirt on the floor, and I felt my hair rise on the back of my neck. Nothing terrible happened except that he smelled me hair. I know that sounds trite but it felt intimate and there was nothing I could to but shrivel into myself.

Formation for my school is at 7:30. There are six levels with nine teachers one for each grade, a computer teacher, a physical education teacher, and an English teacher. I am smart enough to know that I am being taken advantage of in La Balza. I teach classes and talk to the kids but with my presence in the classroom the teachers leave and do not return for the day, so I am left with monsters.

My lovely monsters make campers look like saints. My monsters fight, yell, and destroy everything. Within one hour block I spend 37 minutes breaking up fights, 13 minutes telling them to sit down, two minutes trying not to cry, and eight minutes teaching. I admit that this is my fault because the favored form of discipline here is an open hand to the face or a quick stick to the bum. I simply refuse. I tower over them and know my strength, they are small and I will not hit them. Period. The monsters caught on to this quickly and run around my classroom taunting me, they want to see me break and snap into the violence that they know.

Today I was beat up by a five year old. He bit, kicked, punched me with all the strength he could muster. I hugged him and let him beat me up while I quietly put him outside my classroom. I could feel hatred in his entire body and clenched within his fists my heart. His name is Jesus. At five you shouldn’t know how to be a fighter and the only you learn that is by being someone else’s punching bag. I fear that he learned to form fists before he learned to tie his shoes.

Every day after class I visit I get to spend time in the kitchen and home of some lovely women. There are three sisters—Carolina, Merlyn, and Rosalisa and their mom. They are refreshing after my morning at the school. We eat lunch and flirt with the idea a days when they could live without abuse and fear. After spending some time with them which includes jokes and stories about their hearts that will break yours I catch the bus and head back to El Rodeo—I don’t want to call it home because it’s not my home but where I rest. I kind of think of it as a womb. I go there and hide trying to recover from the assault of yelling on my ears and heart.  I try and keep my sanity by reading East of Eden but I just finished it and I feel betrayed by Steinbeck and Abra. My womb is occupied by two sisters and their children. I dance on the outskirts of their lives keeping my distance but at the same time I fit nicely into their family.  There is no running water here so each night with a quick bucket to the face I am magically clean. I also wash my clothes by hand so I just rub the dirt off with some water and pretend to know what I’m doing. Also, there about over a hundred gigantic frogs hopping around each night that always find their way into our house. I have developed a very strong hatred for the amphibian. Because I am in a malaria zone I sleep with this lacey pink mosquito net that makes me feel like a princess. I spend half the night fighting against it though; I know one night it’s going to suffocate me.

Truthfully, I am tiered of passing through lives; I have been a nomad for the past three months in Ecuador. In total I have spent seven months abroad the year of 2010 and I am ready for something to call my own. I can’t help but daydream with 24 more days until December 11^th about burritos, coffee with cream, and worship on Sunday mornings.