Vivir al Pie de los Volcanes
It is the second day of July. I live in Perú. Arequipa, to be more specific. Tomorrow, today really, being after midnight, I will begin my second month of teaching English. For the sake of a semblance of clarity and a good clean beginning, I should amend the first sentence and start this over.
It is the third day of July. I live in Arequipa, Perú. La Ciudad Blanca, al pie de volcán. Misti is the one in all the pictures, the perfectly symmetrical cone, just above the city to the northeast. But my favorite might be Chachani, due north, which is really like four or five volcanoes all jumbled together. She’s messy, chaotic, wild. Doesn’t fit as well into a frame, though she’s more often snow-capped; the older and taller volcano. Nineteen thousand eight hundred seventy two feet, right there when I leave my school and turn on steep Calle Cortaderes to walk home, peak upon peak filling up the whole horizon.
I am up way past my bedtime, sitting on a short wooden stool in the courtyard of the guesthouse where I live. The place is called Soul Guest House and I’ve been here almost a month, as long as anywhere in the year I’ve been migrating. It’s located inside an old casona in Yanahuara, one of the oldest parts of the city, the best parts all stone and sillar. A brisk five minute walk to my school; five minutes to Plaza Yanahuara, with its exquisite mirador looking over the city and the green valley of the Rio Chili, fabulously ornate church facade, carved from volcanic stone.
Except for the two Venezuelan young women who manage the place, Katherine and Karolayn, and Mr. Jorge who comes every other day to clean and maintain the place, we are all gringos here — in the broader sense of the word, white North Americans or Europeans. I speak Spanish with the erudite Mr. Jorge — I’m not sure why he’s not a professor — but the girls’ Venezuelan accents are indecipherable. This is a lot like a hostel, except people stay longer, and everyone has their own room. Before me is a comparatively giant ficus tree which dominates the courtyard, and on the other side are clothes lines bearing the drying laundry of various housemates. There are fifteen of them I think. All fifteen at this moment are either asleep or out.
I have just had the pleasure, exceedingly rare in this day and age, of reading an actual handwritten letter from a friend, by light spilling out of my room’s window behind me. It’s not a particularly good spot for reading, or writing this for that matter, but there is the benefit of the stars overhead, the always-bright stars of the high desert. The letter is from my friend Becky, a lost old flame, written six months ago in North American winter when it was bitingly cold even in New Orleans, a rare occurrence. Incredibly, this was the third actual letter I’ve read through in the last few days, from a package borne and personally delivered to me from my estranged home country far to the north. One of my good old friends, Adam Kronenberg, was just here for five nights.
His visit and the receipt of all these letters is no coincidence. He has a tradition in New Orleans called Pancakes & Letters: friends are invited over, pancakes are cooked, and then everybody writes letters. Sometime last winter, he had one of these gatherings with the express purpose of writing correspondence bound for me. I am humbled, and it is almost overwhelming to read; I am not used to anyone really knowing me, or having friends of any consequence. In my month here in Arequipa, I’ve found people I’m friendly with, to talk to at school or home, but I don’t actually do things with anyone. After a long stint as a lone wolf, Adam’s visit and the letters he left are rocking my boat a little.
But now Adam is off to Cuzco and the Sacred Valley, he has come and gone, and I’m back to teaching. My second month of classes starts tomorrow — every course begins and ends in a month’s time. Back to the grindstone. All day was spent lesson planning, knowing that as a teacher, the only way to have any free time during the week is to plan ahead. Though it ate up my whole day, it was difficult to get anywhere with writing lesson plans after five days not teaching, plus a few before that when I was just giving exams and grading.
The only reason I am able to be awake right now, and my only slight feeling of reprieve going into a new month, is that my schedule has drastically changed. Last month I was teaching classes at 7 am. Seven to eleven, then six hours off, and an evening class from 5–7. Those six hours off were usually occupied by lunch, a nap, and preparing for night classes. Now I won’t have my first class until 1 pm, followed by two from 5–9. Seven am in my opinion is not a good time to teach or learn a foreign language, and now I can stay up late again like the inveterate night owl I am.
I came into this journey with the idea that teaching English in South America was going to be both fairly laid back and not something I would like very much. I was wrong on both counts. My month of TEFL training in Guatemala disabused me of the notion that it would be easy, but the reality is shocking. This is an incredibly time consuming job, but part of that is my level of commitment. When I walk into class and see students who have paid money and taken time out of their lives to come here five days a week to learn English — from me — I feel a real sense of responsibility. In theory they come five days a week — attendance is pretty poor — but that’s beside the point. I need to be prepared, to have a solid grasp of the material, have the right questions to ask, beforehand, written down.
The teaching methodology I’m using, a universal concept in the TEFL world, is all about Elicitation. You want the material to be generated by the students. Not simply feeding them information, you require them to be actively involved in the process. The best and easiest way to elicit is with questions. Another important concept is what they call Teacher Talk Time, or TTT — you want to limit the time you’re talking, because it deprives them of the chance to use the language themselves. Again, questions are the ticket.
If I say a sentence to my students, nothing happens. I will just have to say another sentence. But if I ask a question, they will say something, and I’ve stopped talking. When we hear a question, we listen in a different way, because we think something might be required of us. The discussion method I use a lot, is where I’ll ask a student a question, and after their answer, they ask another student, and so on. In this scenario I’ve stopped speaking entirely, simply listen and keep the thing going. Even better is to write the question up on the board and call on a student to “please read” — which is even shorter than a question.
This is what was so challenging for me during my TEFL course in Guatemala. I am a talker, and my previous teaching style was very verbal. That method, anything resembling lecture, simply doesn’t work in foreign language teaching. It’s almost a year since I did my one month intensive with Claudia “Mama Clau Clau”; I have forgotten much of the terminology and details. I’m having to relearn the grammar we covered for every topic I teach. But the counterintuitive way of teaching stuck with me: to teach language without talking. I hadn’t come close to mastering it, but by the end of a brutal series of practicum classes, I had seen the light. And after a month of doing it six hours a day, I consider myself a decent teacher. My mantras are: 1. Make everything a question. 2. Give them nothing. It’s just that it takes me a lot of time to prepare.
During the week, other than eating and sleeping and the bare essentials of life maintenance, I essentially do nothing but work. Thirty hours in the classroom, plus fifteen or so lesson planning. But this doesn’t account for grading, mundane daily tasks like making copies, or the administrative things that come with the job. Keeping track of absences and tardies, managing a flow of paper materials meant to be given to the students, keeping up with all the changing requirements from the school.
There are the physical demands of standing, speaking, gesticulating six hours a day, plus the emotional weight: the expectations, disappointments, frustrations. All these people that you develop relationships with, expect things from, then grade, maybe fail, castigate.
Imagine accusing a student — you like — with plagiarism. I had a student turn in two papers she clearly hadn’t written, and it was incumbent upon me to confront this twenty two year old woman. I chickened out for two days, then finally asked her to stay after class, and said “Mayra, I think you got these papers from the internet.” I fully expected her to deny it, probably cry, but she just said “Yes,” and that was that. She wrote them over, and they were terrible, but at least they were her own words.
Last week I didn’t let five students in one class take the final exam, because they hadn’t completed their makeup work from the class. I had three options: let it slide despite having repeatedly warned them; give them zeros on the assignments and let them take the exam; or what I did, which felt like the slightly tough but fair option. Once they completed the work, they could take it. These people in their mid-twenties, who felt like my friends, protested, got visibly angry with me, then went over my head to the secretaries and the manager of the school. Thankfully, the manager got my back and held the line. But I felt disrespected and was emotionally charged all day.
It’s very challenging in a good way, often fulfilling. But it’s also exhausting, and I am at serious risk of burnout, which is very common. Most people don’t last more than three months, as the pay isn’t much to speak of. It’s almost exactly what I need to live here — on a frugal budget. I make about $500 a month, almost 40% of which goes straight to rent at the Soul Guest House.
All complaining aside, I genuinely like the teaching part of teaching. When they start to get it, when sometimes they get drawn in and are participating enough that they forget they’re in a class or speaking a foreign language, in those fleeting moments when you can tell they’re actually learning — this is very satisfying. A good feeling inside. And this is an excellent job for someone passionate about language. There is so much built-in meaning that we never think about, and I have had to take it apart and sit with things like “nevertheless”; all the meanings of “so”; the proper order of parts of speech in a sentence and why. “She drove usually the car blue” vs. “She usually drove the blue car”. To live in the world of words and ideas.
My favorite class is called Speaking & Writing. It’s a conversation-based class where the students choose several topics, and then we spend a week discussing, writing about and debating each one. Our topics were Technology, Animal Rights, and Aliens. At first, getting them to talk was like squeezing water from a stone, but once we got going, as soon as they’d get hooked on something, it was a lot of fun. There were times during Animal Rights week that the conversation was so passionate and heartfelt that they didn’t want to leave at the end of class. They just wanted to keep on talking; I had to actually kick them out of the room.
For a month, everything else has fallen by the wayside. During the week, I don’t write, don’t exercise, don’t cook more than heating things up or frying eggs or a quesadilla, don’t reply to emails. Saturdays I have off, which is when life maintenance happens, and recovery, maybe a walk down to the river. Sundays I lesson plan and cook up a big mess of food I can eat all week. It’s not sustainable, working this hard for this little pay, but it’s what I’ve gotten myself into. My fellow teachers do tell me that it gets easier, and it already has. At first I was spending two hours to lesson plan a two hour class; typically now that’s down to one.
But today I was flagging. Part of the difficulty getting back in the mind frame was how far I departed from my routine over this break. Aside from the physical distance we traveled, the most significant change was the aforementioned Adam, visiting from New Orleans. Having been away so long, it was wild to be in the presence of someone who knows me. An old friend can be like a mirror, giving you perspective, having seen you in many other momentary states. In this case Adam, along with my friends Andrew and Allison, took me to the night Megabus that started this whole migration. A kind mirror. I see how far I’ve come, and am reminded of who I am and have been.
It was my last day of classes — after the whole row with the students who I wouldn’t let take their final exam, after a staff meeting where well-meaning teachers complain about issues that the well-meaning academic directors say really aren’t that way, or are out of their hands — that I walked out of my school building and across Calle Bolognesi to find my old friend Adam sitting on a bench. In this moment I was just thrilled to see him, still charged from the confrontation with my students, and very eager to share everything about teaching with a fellow teacher, to tell him everything about Arequipa and Perú.
I had my friend Adam to talk to, and it was a beautiful crisp day in this green ribbon of a park above the floral grounds of the Club Internacional, with a deep blue sky and the volcanoes looking their best. He had just come through one of the most brutal flight itineraries I’ve heard of, New Orleans to Houston to Miami to Lima to Arequipa, some thirty three hours all told. It was under some credit card mile deal, so he had to accept all that routing, and had arrived this morning at 6:30 am. He said he was feeling good, and seemed invigorated to be in Perú. How could you not be? Some birds were squawking, which he was sure he recognized as green parrots, just like in Mid-City New Orleans. We couldn’t see them, but it seemed unlikely to me — what would parrots be doing up here in the desert at over seven thousand feet? Once you leave this valley, it’s all brown out there. I had told him twenty things, mostly having to do with those damn students who complained about me to the management, and had twenty more, but it was time for lunch.
We walked towards downtown, but on this side of the Rio Chili, through La Recoleta neighborhood, all stone streets. The main way to the Plaza de Armas is down Avenida Ejercito and across Puente Grau, but the beautiful view of the river and old colonial approach is marred by thick-clogged traffic, mostly old buses spewing out exhaust. So I prefer to take the roundabout way. We crossed over on the old stone bridge Puente Bolognesi and up past all the music shops to a restaurant I’d found the day I bought my guitar. Cafe Ratatouille is set in a lovely old courtyard and serves good relatively cheap food that is trying not that hard to combine French and Peruvian cuisines.
The food was more than good enough, the best part being the rough-chopped vibrant gazpacho soup, and we had a nice long lunch and I finally got the morning’s incident out of my system. This was still a workday — I had to give an exam to my evening class, and grade all my students’ exams by the next morning, so we couldn’t stay too long. I took him up to the Plaza de Armas, the very impressive center of the city, and lingered there for awhile admiring the scene. One of the grander plazas around, the elegant cathedral and austere collonnades all cut from white volcanic stone, the central park lush tropical green.
We took the long way back home, and I started in on reading incoherent essays. The next day I had free, and after breakfast we stopped by my school so I could turn in all the graded exams, my books, lesson plans for the month. I felt much lighter with all of it done and out of my hands. We walked across Puente Grau this time, past the Plaza a long way to the Mercado San Camilo, the main city market which I had heard a lot about but never been to. While there are stands almost every kind of foodstuff, and an area with prepared cooked foods, what really grabbed my attention was the grand aisle of fruits. Bright-colored pyramids of exotic fruits, some sellers enthusiastically beckoning to us, some indifferent. We got roped in by a woman offering us samples, and everything she offered was fabulous, and she’d ask if we wanted some and we’d say yes, and soon we had a great bounty, perhaps a gratuitous amount of fruit. Apple bananas and papaya and mango; granadilla and ground cherries; cucumber melon and chirimoya and lúcuma. All these tropical fruits that I‘d never even heard of before. She gives us a great price on everything, but our twenty pounds of fruit add up.
In the food court we shared a plate of Ceviche and another of Rocoto Relleno with Pastel de Papa. These last two make up the typical plate of Arequipa. A Rocoto is a chili pepper, a wide squat red one that looks like a small bell pepper, except it’s tremendously hot. This is roasted and then stuffed with minced meat, onions and garlic, topped with melted cheese and served with a red sauce. It is almost always accompanied by a Pastel de Papa, a lasagna-layered stack of sliced potatoes, cheese and cream. When done well, the combination of these two make a rich and striking plate, the spice of the rocoto balanced by the papas. Arequipeños have reason to be proud of their cuisine.
We then walked a good ways further south and west to find the Puente de Fierro, the sixth bridge down from where I live, a long narrow iron bridge across the Rio Chili floodplain. Everyone here insists that it was designed by Gustave Eiffel, though I found out later he probably had nothing to do with it. Each of the iron supports below are branded “Phoenix Iron Co. Philada”, which would seem to indicate that they were fabricated in the US. People also say that he designed the Mercado we’d been to earlier, an even more tenuous claim. Whosoever was this bridge’s designer, it’s a dramatic span, more than fifteen hundred feet across, and open to the air except for thin latticework metal railings. We admired the bridge from several angles and then walked up a few blocks to cross it.
Standing up there looking out at this fertile green river valley, snow-capped volcanos towering above, seeing it through Adam’s eyes, I am struck by how beautiful it is. This place I picked to live in, sight unseen, is worthy of six months of my life, and maybe more. It is one of the better large cities that I found on my journey, certainly in the top five, though the cities between here and Mexico aren’t so great. The smaller cities, towns and villages are generally better. But all comparisons aside, this valley is a special corner of the world, and I feel very blessed to have landed here.
Adam and I parted on the far side of the bridge, he to go practice some dental tourism, me to walk back across, farther into the city several miles to the bus station, to buy tickets for our adventure in the morn. We were heading for Colca Canyon, one of the deepest canyons in the world. Our plan was to descend to the bottom on foot and sleep at one of the hostels in the village of Sangalle, also called the Oasis.
A few hours later, we convened back at Soul for a simple dinner of spaghetti aglio e oleo. Afterwards, over a couple Pisco and sodas in the living room Adam connected his laptop to the TV and we watched my first baseball game of the season. Our beloved San Francisco Giants were playing the Colorado Rockies and Madison Bumgarner was pitching. It seemed a million miles away. I settled in at a reasonable hour, expecting a solid night of sleep before a fairly extreme undertaking the next day. It was not to be, but that, and the tale of our trip to Colca, are a story for another writing session. Even though my first class isn’t until 1 tomorrow (today), it is well past 3 am, an unreasonable hour, and bedtime for Frances.
