TEFL in Ecuador

Top two things not to do your first day in Ecuador: 1. Lose your passport. 2. Lose your wallet. I picked the smarter of the two. So, my first lesson for travel around the world is to trust in the goodness of people. Not muggers or strangers walking down the street, but normal people who will help you when you get into that inevitable scrape, people with big smiles who open their arms and say “bienvenidos!”

I arrived in Riobamba, Ecuador with a sense of accomplishment. It was 3pm and I had spent the previous 13 hours submerged in a completely different world–the Latino World, where no one speaks my language but a lot of people are trying very hard to. I sneaked onto the LAN-Chile flight to Quito wearing my Puma soccer jersey, being careful to distance myself from the obviously American tourists very likely on group trip to see the Galapogos, for which Quito is a necessary pit stop not worthy of a visit in its own merit. They don’t care about submersion in the Latin world, and they will completely avoid it. I can tell that much from my window seat, fila 22, seat 10A. I get through most of the flight without any attendants speaking a word of English to me. Their first reaction is obviously that I could be a part of this Latin world. But I am just pretending. When I am forced to say too much, my cover is blown, and the lovely young Latina is forced to stumble with pizzicato English. I try to blame my misunderstanding of her native tongue on the pressure differential in my ears due to the altitude, but I am unable to translate this with my pocket English-Spanish dictionary gracefully enough to pass it off. Thankfully the airport attendants know enough English to get the job done, although I seem to understand more of what the pilot is saying in Spanish rather than his rushed and spotty English.
Miami is an appropriate place to begin the transition to the Latin World as the American manifestation of a Latin country in exile, and as my flight connection to Quito. The Latin World is prevalent in Miami and is acutely aware of the Gringo World, but a gringo can never be a part of the Latin world without speaking Spanish and dancing salsa at least twice. But a gringo can brush up against the Latin World by taking a shuttle or a taxi cab and sitting in the front. Ralphe, my shuttle driver, came from Cuba, and he and I were on a first name basis right away. “The Spanish peoples built this place completely,” he says with pride at all the building progress occurring in one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country. It sounds as if he is talking about all of America, and he carries on with a sense of patriotism I rarely encounter in the Gringo World, probably because he has a lot more work invested in it than your average gringo.

The next person I liked was also a member of the Latin World. I met her on the shuttle ride back to the airport. She was flying to Bogota and also a dual citizen of both Latin and Gringo worlds, so we conversed fairly easily. My first two encounters with card-carrying Latinos—let’s call them warm-ups—led me to believe that Latin peoples are peoples to be trusted. But the events of the rest of the day, which is today, tested my hypothesis.
When I was told to fill out a card for Ecuador’s customs and immigration, somehow I was not prepared for what awaited me at the airport in Quito. I was given the Spanish versions of the immigration forms, so I filled them out with my best effort, imagining a customs official shaking her head at me and handing me a new form made for stupid gringos.
I arrive at the airport, the first official asks for my first form, puts it into a pile without looking at it, takes a gander at my passport and stamps it with a visa. Twenty feet after that, I pick up my bag at baggage claim within five minutes. Forty feet later, I walk through a scanner and send my bags through the x-ray. After clearance, I hand another official the other form, which he manages to file with even less scrupulousness than the first. Five feet later, I walk through some double doors into a gringo-frightening room with hoards of drivers holding signs and people waiting for loved ones, a money changing counter, and an exit. I can’t believe that is the exit. That was way too easy. Spoke too soon. I see another official approaching me, asking for my bag. I give it to him and bend over for the rectal search. He removes the flight tag and returns it with a smile. Que servicio! Then I am pushed through the funnel of people into the daunting world beyond the doors, where almost no one speaks a word of my language. Luckily, there is a woman just before the doors who asks me where I want to go in English and in Spanish. “Riobamba? It will cost you seven dollars. Okay? Right this way.” The cabbie directs me to his cab with welcoming arms, saying “bienvenidos!” and I am whisked away with astonishing expediency to my final destination. Something about all this haste in a place that is supposed to be laid back smells fishy to a gringo. I remember I forgot to put the lock on my bag, but luckily I have stashed away my extra cash in a hidden pocket in my cargo shorts, which already have an abundance of pockets, besides the money belt which houses my passport. It would take a pick pocket with eight arms to make off with what I have.

Although the cabbie does not speak a word of English, we converse in patches. He tells me to put on my sunscreen because he has already had skin cancer and the sun is very strong. I make a few comments about Ecuadorian driving, he talks about a church and we’re on our way to the countryside for the three-hour drive. Suddenly, he stops and tells me to get out and to hurry. He has stopped a bus which he says is going to Riobamba and tells me to hurry or else I will miss it. I am caught unawares and this man, who appeared so friendly on the outside, hands my duffel bag with everything in it I need for eight months to some strange Latino who ran out to the taxi. I am so distracted reaching into my shorts to access the hidden pocket that I don’t see where my bag goes, and I look pretty weird unzipping my pants and reaching down over my crotch to smuggle out a couple bills. I only have fives, so I hand him two, a gross overpayment that I justify as assurance the cabbie won’t tell anyone the way I handled my pants. So, although I thought I was going to Latin World without an excess of gringo paranoia, it is my precautions with a hidden pocket and cargo shorts which makes me look like I am patting myself down every time I look for spare change and has me running across a highway in Quito with my shorts falling down in front of a waiting passenger bus. The fare for the rest of the trip is $3.75, which adds up with my previous overpayment to make a still relatively great travel bargain. If my bag isn’t stolen, anyhow. I don’t see it anywhere. The experience gives me an opportunity to brush up on my Spanish phrases, such as, “Did you see that guy who took my bag?” and “Could someone give me a lift back to my mommy?” But I recognize the guy who took my bag as the same guy who collected the fares. He seems like a real nice guy.

During the course of my trip, efforts to pay my fare discreetly and buy a bottle of water from one of the many hitchhiking vendors lead me to completely disorganize the contents of my pockets in my confusion. My remaining cash is in my left pocket with my wallet and my passport. Various asundry other items, such as Spanish phrasebook, litter the remaining space of my pockets in a way that obscures my knowledge where to find anything I have. To make a long story short, I get off the bus and claim my bag, and a moment later spend a minute or two in vain looking for my wallet. If it was stolen, it must have been a real sneaky maneuver. But at that moment, I wouldn’t have put it past myself to have left the thing on my seat, being more concerned with the whereabouts of my luggage, especially since the cash and passport were still with me. The bus was long gone now, and I didn’t even get a good glimpse of it. I know it was blue. This world seems to move a bit faster than my cognition.

My contact’s telephone number was in that wallet, I have $10 remaining to buy lunch, and no way to procure more without help. I push my way through the vulture-like cabbies waiting at the terminal to cross the street to the internet café. If it was not for a last-minute e-mail from my contact which happened to have his number, even though I already told him I had it, I would have been in what we gringos call “a tight spot.” But as it happened, I called him up, he came right out to pick me up, I quickly phoned my parents to tell them to cancel my credit card, he took me out to dinner, showed me to my hot el, took me to meet his lovely wife and daughters, who later took me out for coffee and meat pies. At our return, I am able to meet some very interesting grandparents. Staring blankly into the grandfather’s eyes as he ensues in his Spanish discourse, only able to pick up the fact that he is now calling me deaf and dumb, everyone laughs as the mother explains to him I don’t know any Spanish. He is very graceful about the misunderstanding and comes within two feet of me to go over everything again much slower and with very animated gestures. More laughs before I am driven back to my hotel where everything has turned out well, my host and I exchange various expressions of friendship, and I can crash for the night. Then I realize I have lost the key to my security lock on my baggage, although I thought I put the key in the most secure place I could think of—my money belt—but probably it only fell through my shorts and out the leg hole somewhere indefinite, and now I have to break into my own luggage, which wasn’t all that hard as it turned out. So, again, more pains stemming from a gringoistic need for a false sense of security. Not long after, I hit my head squarely on the solid steel TV mount after setting my alarm clock, and fall to the floor, my head spinning as I break out into laughter at myself. “Soy un gringo tonto!” I am a stupid gringo!

More gringo misadventures to come, surely.

Tags: bus travel, Ecuador, Latin America, TEFL, Travel

This entry was posted on Monday, October 2nd, 2006 at 6:21 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.