( Adapted from personal blog, http://jackdubreuil.blogspot.com/ )
It´s almost a challenge to describe the Ecuadorian town of Baños without sounding like a travel brochure. The place has everything a tourist (or a roving band of student-volunteers) could wish for: a friendly atmosphere, fantastic food, plenty of nightlife, and a picturesque mountain range, which rises up majestically on every side and boasts something like 65 waterfalls. The outdoor scene, as you might imagine, is off the charts – but the biggest draw of all is probably the series of volcanic hot springs for which the town is named. This week we´ve encountered other non-locals – mostly European backpackers, actually – for pretty much the first time since Quito, and it´s not too tough to understand why they´re here.
I spent the week living with my buddy Peter – Pedro, I mean – under the roof of a friendly and welcoming host family. The first of several homestay families on the trip, the Iglesiases set a pretty hard-to-match precedent: They showed us around town when we arrived, cooked us amazing meals all week, and washed our clothes at the laundromat that they run on the roof (an extremely helpful service after a week on a banana farm). They were remarkably accommodating, and we were blown away by their willingness to take us into their day-to-day lives.
When we weren´t sleeping, eating, or retrieving laundry, though, we were usually out taking advantage of our time in Baños. Our full schedule was comprised of almost equal parts learning, volunteering, and exploring.
We spent our mornings at a small Spanish school down the street, sharpening our Spanish with a dedicated group of teachers – including, but not limited to, some of our Las Delicias hosts from last week. Our Spanish skills are improving in leaps and bounds. For me, basic strings of words are starting to become more intuitive, and I´m starting to understand what it means to think in another language.
We would head home each day at lunchtime to eat with the Iglesias clan, and then return to school afterward for more classes – but, this time around, WE were the teachers. Levi and I were tasked with teaching elementary English to a small class of 13-16 year olds, none of whom had more than a year´s worth of English instruction under their belts. It was a lot more difficult than I had anticipated. Our Spanish skills and creativity were taxed to the extreme, but by the end of the week we had made a pretty successful foray into the ins and outs of present tense verbs. On the last day, our students bought us a cake and asked for our email addresses. Incredibly gratifying.
We were extremely productive during the days, and exremely active during evenings and on the weekend. Additional accomplishments of the week include, but are not limited to: Rafting through a jungle, summiting a mountain, climbing a waterfall, salsa-ing in a nightclub, filming a music video (more on this later), running to the hot springs, and stumbling upon a good American-style burger joint. Overall, the week couldn´t have been better.
