Quito, Ecuador

Hello friends! I am currently traveling with some 30 other language teachers to explore Ecuador and the Galápagos Islands. I'm super pumped and it's been really cool so far. My Spanish is a tad rusty, pero es lo que es ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

After 20 long hours of travel and far too few hours of sleep, we got off to our first adventure in Quito this morning. We drove through Ecuador's capital, carefully navigating the narrow streets in our huge tour bus. Our first stop of the day was a K-12 school, where we got to sit down with a handful of teachers and hear about their school and plans for its future. This year, they are implementing English immersion programs in which they will teach the lower levels science and the higher levels history entirely in English. They also have a computer competency course so that their students will be proficient upon graduation. Many of their students graduate to the best universities in Ecuador, as well as the US and Europe, and many come back to talk with the parents of current and prospective students about how the school helped shape them. We then got to collaborate with the teachers and discuss ways that we could do cross-cultural engagement in our respective classrooms. Even though I'm no longer teaching, it was a really cool experience.

We then drove through the winding roads through the Andes, watching the environment change from urban, to desert, to one of the world's 1% of cloud forest. We came to a town called Yunguilla whose main focus is on conservation of their small community in their beautiful home. They are a community of about 200 people and 80 families, and their intention is to bring people in to see the incredible landscape, experience their community with homestays, and to learn more about it. They showed us their organic gardens that supply their restaurants (as well as the amazing meal of soup, quinoa, and veggies) and we got to see how they make marmelade, cheese, and recycled paper for sale in their artisanal shops. We hiked through the forest as the clouds descended, so much so that there appeared to be absolutely nothing beyond the edge of the mountain. It was amazing to see.