Field Trip!

I remember many field trips well from my own school years well. Most involved long bus trips to Seattle for trips to museums, the theater, or the aquarium. Standout days from each grade and they were always something to look forward to. Yet I am sure for my teachers they were a nightmare to plan and stressful to carry out.

Payback time.

This Monday was field trip day for my sixth and seventh graders. A lot of things were the similar to U.S. field trips I took as a kid. Students had to pay ahead of time (13,000, which meant a lot of students couldn’t come), then we loaded a bus and headed to the big city Cartagena. Two mothers of students came along to help supervise as well, though we certainly were not a five-to-one ratio and I am not sure an idea of name tags or permission forms ever crossed anyone’s minds.

The bus ride was probably the least favorite part of my past teachers’ own field trips. Mine was a similar hour and a half long humid bus full of eleven, twelve, and thirteen year-olds. We bumped along the muddy road, then waited for the ferry and sped along Cartagena’s traffic-clogged streets. My students have a continuing problem of being unable to talk in anything less than a shout – a cultural thing, but still annoying. Sometimes they would starting a song-like shout as loud as they could, deafening all those we past.

Our destination was IDER (Recreation and Sports District). For the 2006 Central American and Caribbean Games, Cartagena built a series of stadiums which now hosts an athletic school. We first stopped in an arena which hosted tae kwon do, karate, wrestling and gymnastic leagues, then the softball and baseball stadiums, and the aquatic complex that housed an Olympic-sized pool and multiple diving platforms. Finally we peeked our heads in at Jaime Moron soccer stadium where I had been before for the U-20 World Cup match (more on sports and the world cup in my post from August here). Few of my students had probably been inside any stadium before or even seen a real pool like that so while not a famous museum, theater production or zoo, I think most students enjoyed it.

Jorge Tajan, our P.E. teacher headed up the trip and did a good job explaining about the stadiums and different sports. Telling the students they would have a test on the material, Tajan had the students scribbling notes all along and my co-teacher Pedro and I translated some of the sports to English .

Cash burning in their pockets, my students seemed to buy more snacks every time I turned around. While we waited for the ferry, they screamed out the window for bags of chips. Then in front of the first stadium they chowed down on deditos. We then provided them with cookies and juice. Twenty minutes later they mobbed a vender selling meat kebobs and a man making shaved ice. Back out of a stadium and more of the same snacks. Finally we had lunch, taking over a roasted chicken place where my students bought fried chicken and more soda as me and the other teachers tried to corral them to make sure no one ran across the street. Problematic since even after chicken, most students wanted to buy more snacks (really!?) and water (this I could understand). Santa Ana kids aren’t well-practiced in keeping track of traffic though, so finally I left them go in groups when I looked in all directions to make sure the road was all clear of motocycles, trucks, buses, taxis and horse carts.

We left a little after 8:00 and got back around 2:30. A decent day. Stressful for the teachers of course, but I almost guarantee that even the most bored-looking students will remember more from this day than their average day at school. So bring on the field trips, even if they are with 80 or so middle schoolers.

The City

“A colonial city with a beauty and romance unrivaled anywhere in Colombia.”

One of “the continent’s most enthralling and righteously preserved colonial destinations.”

“One of the greatest cultural treasures in the Americas.”

So my guidebooks loquaciously describe the city of Cartagena de Indias.

It may be only an hour and a half away from the impoverished rural community where I live, but it truly does feel like I am in a different country – and even culture – when I go. (For an idea of the journey between the two via bus, ferry, and moto taxi, read my blog post here.)

I really do like Cartagena. Would I want to live there? I am not sure, but there is no denying its charm and its colonial romance that the guidebooks highlight, a reputation that is now bringing well-traveled backpackers and cruise tours alike. It is the perfect city to just wander with no destination in mind, the perfect city to sit with a juice and just people watch as the bustle of tourists, shoppers and workers walk by.

Most of the ideas about the romantic and historic side of the city stem from the small portion of the town termed “the walled city.” So named because it is surrounded on all sides from the well-preserved remains of the stone wall built to repel pirate attacks in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Las Muralles are not just some old stonework that create a border. You can walk on top of almost all of it, your feet treading on three hundred year-old stonework. It’s a bit hot in the direct sun, but otherwise always a great pleasure to stroll from one end of the historic center to another, on one side the crashing Caribbean Sea, on the other the bright colors of the colonial city.

The historic districts, El Centro (or Calamarí) and San Diego on one end and EL Matuna and Getsemaní on the other, are filled with stone churches, colonial apartments with stone and wooden balconies entangled with vines and flowers and vendors selling coconut water, fresh-cut mangos and fried empanadas in front of two-hundred year-old buildings. (Map of Cartagena here.)

It is also is full of fun twisting streets. I enjoy wandering them, but the problem is that the streets appear to be laid out in a straight grid – while in fact they gradually turn and veer off in different directions and the wall and shoreline is in no way straight. So while you go only one street over and you think you are paralleling, you actually end up in a spot way on the other side of town. Luckily it is easy to find your mistake. Either you run into a) the wall b) Calle Venezuela (on the other end) or c) the wall and the water. Worse comes to worse, you just follow one of these before venturing back into the careening streets. Even Cartagenos have a hard time making a direct path for anything in the Centro, which made me feel better after still getting lost seven months in to my wanderings.

And wander is the best way to see this part of the city, which is, despite the crazy focus on keeping the Centro clean and safe and colonial looking, and the amount of tourists wandering the streets, still neighborhoods and home to regular Colombians.

You walk past tiny shops, peer past carved doors that reveal surprisingly wide open courtyards inside. But it is a special place, and was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1984. All its clichés about being romantic and full of colonial charm (whatever that even means), are true. You can look across the way to see the bright white monastery high on the hill overlooking the city, or the house-sized flag flying over the impressive Castillo de San Felipe de Barajas fortress and have to remind yourself not to take it all for granted (see my post on the Castle here if you want to learn more about Cartagena’s history, and especially the fortress itself).

But Cartagena is not just the Centro. Lonely Planet terms it a tale of three cities. Besides the well-presered historic bits, there is ritzy Bocagrande, and then the rest of ‘real’ Cartagena.

Bocagrande is usually described as Cartagena’s ‘Miami Beach.’ It is a thin peninsula jutting just south of Centro, with beaches on both sides, full of tourist shops, expensive hotels, and tall luxury apartment buildings. It’s where you can find the McDonald’s and the Apple store in Cartagena, but is genuinely a nice place to walk around as well, the bay on one side and the Caribbean on the other. Flying in or driving up, the white high rise buildings stand out against the blue sky, looking like a swanky downtown in a Florida or California city.

The third Cartagena is the rest of it. A few shopping malls dot the landscape, but the rest of the city of more than a million people live in more normal circumstances than right next to three hundred year old fortresses and expensive boutiques. Busy markets, tiny shops, neighborhoods not full of tall apartments or postcard streets stretch out in every direction. It becomes rural more quickly than you think and crowded with honking buses, speeding motorcycles, vendors and the homeless and everything that every city in the world is.

But I do disagree with Lonely Planet’s three-city analysis in some sense. Because a fourth city emerges at night. The Centro – and the other parts for that matter – becomes a different city after the sun goes down. As the temperature drops, out come more street vendors, more tables in front of street cafes, and more people. Bands play, the city is lit up, the clip-clop of horse carriages echo the streets as couples and families alike take tours. Swanky clubs tucked in old stone buildings and blast salsa, reggaeton, and Latin pop while outside the Centro, cafés full of patrons drinking Aguila and Club Colombia beers shout to be heard over thumping vallenato, champeta, and cumbia. If there is ever a part of a city where it is safe to walk around late at night, it is the bustling Centro, full at every hour of the night of party-goers, vendors and policemen.

(Just nearby in Getsemaní, however, it is a different story. While technically safe to walk around at night, you will probably also be accosted by people offering you drugs, and if a man, lines of prostitutes. Again, sadly so are cities everywhere.)

I head to Cartagena every other or every third week, just enough to make me feel like I really know the city (well, the centro at least), and just little enough that every time I go I re-marvel at the sights. I usually have errands and grocery shopping to do, and thanks to family visits, have also hit up the main tourist spots, including the Castle, the City Inquisition Museum, the Gold Museum, and the biggest churches.

But really what I like to do – and what the Centro of Cartagena seems made to do – is to simply to walk and sit and enjoy. A sunset on the Caribbean while sitting on the Wall, wandering the shaded streets, and sitting with a fresh-cut mango or sipping a fruit juice is really what life in Cartagena should be all about. I then get on my stifling bus and say goodbye to the centro, catching a glimpse of the high rise buildings of Bocagrande, and the getting off in the craziness of the busting market and returning to the real world, the part of the city that might not be on as many postcards, but is alive and bustling, even in the tropical heat.

All of those cities are the Cartagena I have gotten to know. And each needs each other. Just asked “Is this the bus to Cartagena?” and come on down.

(Okay, so I couldn’t pass up another Romancing the Stone reference, which was unfortunately filmed in Veracruz, Mexico anyhow. And the Cartagena airport is actually right near downtown and very small and nice – so book your plane ticket, and you’re here.) Cartagena will welcome you will open arms.

The Puddle

Like every teacher in history, I give my students tests: vocab tests, tests on grammar, oral exams, assessments to see if they have learned what we’ve covered and practiced together. Our third of four sets of exams are coming up next week.

And then I leave school and I receive my own daily test: make it to the other side of the pueblo.

Initially, this does not seem to be a difficult task. After all, only one road passes through Santa Ana, connecting our island community in one direction with the ferry and in the other to the popular tourist beach of Playa Blanca, a luxury all-inclusive (read ‘exclusive’) resort, and the rest of the island.

However, while most of the unpaved, rocky beige road poses no problems for trucks, motorcycles, horse carts, donkeys, or gringo pedestrians, through some trick of nature there is without fail one spot where water always sits, stretching across the entire road in amazing defiance of the heat and strong tropical sun. The Puddle. Day in and day out it stays, shifting its shape with every rain.

Every day when I near The Puddle I search for a route around it, jumping over oozing gray-brown mud and wobbling on broken-off slabs of concrete that orbit the water to create a dry(ish) path.

Most days I make it unscathed. Most days I pass the test and pass to the other side without incident.

But I am not the only one that has to navigate the shifting waters.

The particular day back in March was nice and overcast, the clouds leftover from torrential downpours the night before. These rains had made the entire area look like mudslides from Mt. St. Helens had just passed through and a backhoe was working to move in rock and dirt, trying to make the road look like, well, a road. It seemed to be mostly succeeding and soon you could only see disembodied patches of water among the stones and soil.

But The Puddle was still there, lurking.

Up comes one of the Decameron Resort’s largest buses, full of Colombian tourists in sun hats and sunburns returning from their days separated from the usual realities of jobs and lives.

The driver knows the danger of this spot in the road (if the backhoe wasn’t a good enough clue), and the bus pauses at the edge of The Puddle’s domain before hesitantly going in. At first, the bus seems to have the upper hand, continuing forward despite loud sucking sounds from the deep mud.

And then the bus stops continuing forward. Tires spin. The bus lurches a little to one side as it tries to reverse. But it can neither go forward nor backward now and The Puddle is having a good laugh at the charter bus’ expense.

It is not the only one. There is not much in the way of entertainment in Santa Ana and soon dozens of people are watching the driver spin his tires, the looks of the tourists on board a mix of worry and excitement for their adventure, while the looks of the Santanero onlookers are mostly that of mild amusement.

While I sat there, wondering if there was a Spanish word for schadenfreude, I realized that I probably had more in common with that bus than I would like to admit. Part of daily life in Santa Ana is dealing with the usual tropical annoyances of skin-searing sun and frustratingly persistent insects (and, of course deep mazes of mud). But I also have enough food, (semi)reliable electricity, running water, and even a computer and wireless internet – not exactly the daily struggle most people in town face.

And the tourists and I both are not going to be in Santa Ana forever: me with an outgoing plane ticket a year after arriving, and the tourists, after failures with a shovel and a snapped fire hose, pulled free with a chain 40 minutes later. Their little adventure over, documented with their cameras, the tourists left, rumbling down the road until we lost sight of them.

Yes, I actually do live here, and yes, I am here for something more meaningful than getting a tan, but my test is to make sure I am not like those tourists, that I don’t just live in relative luxury until my inevitable departure and own sharing of photos and adventures.

My test is to not let the joys of life here overtake the fact that every day I have great power and obligation to create positive change as a teacher in and guest of this impoverished community.

Luckily for me, it is easy to be reminded of this charge every day -- as I strive to pass my other daily test of finding a mud-free route around The Puddle. It serves as a reminder to utilize my time here to the fullest.

Because while I am only teaching here for a year, at this rate, The Puddle will be here forever.

Why I Have to Actually Know English in a Small, Spanish-speaking Town in Colombia (OR, Wait, What Is a Dangling Modifier Again?)

I love English. I really do. I love its history, how it combines words and ideas from all over the world, how all over the world it is now being adapted back into dozens of languages. But some days I do not love how hard it is to teach or explain.

I should be an expert at English. I’ve heard it for almost 24 years, I’ve spoken it for maybe 22 or 23, been writing it for 19, studied it every year in school for 17 years, and topped it all off with a minor in English writing. Well-qualified to teach it.

Yes and no. I thankfully came armed with some helpful grammar books and spell check.

A first problem I ran into was of course that as a native speaker, I did not learn English in the same way as my students who need a lot more of the rules that I take for granted. Again, thank you grammar books and good think I am a nerd enough to enjoy learning that kind of thing.

Secondly, I’ve run into problems with the differences between British English and U.S. American English. You think this wouldn’t come up too much since differences are fairly minor and Colombia’s location nearer the United States means my manner of speaking is dominant. But my co-teacher learned from a British English teacher, and the set of textbooks in the library to use if we want are British (they aren’t great anyhow and too advanced for my students, no sadly not a loss).

Yes, I read things written in British (and Australian, South African, and other) English – including BBC almost every day - so I know I can spell it color or colour, defense or defence, and that a boot, jumper, and to hump are different things in the two different countries. But there is also the British construction of “I have got” that just sounds wrong to my North American ear (though is technically correct), and I got into a small argument with the teacher of an adult night class on whether you can ever say “I am going to go working,” which he assured me was normal but I still attest is impossible in American English – why I don’t know, but it just sounds wrong to me.

That’s part of the problem. It might “sound wrong” but who am I to actually know the rules and constructions? I can honestly remember doing grammar stuff only once my whole collegiate career and most of what I know about grammar is from my own nerdiness, reading, and Mad Lips on family vacations.

So I still make mistakes. Of course. Usually not a problem. Sentence fragments are not always a bad thing.

But when I am in front of my classes, not only am I supposed to speak perfect grammatical English, but strangely enough know the rules and intricacies of the English language. Occasionally all my years of practice fail me, like when my eighth graders were brainstorming jobs they wanted to be and I completely failed in coming up with the English word, first in remembering what a vetrenaria actually was in English (the –ian ending was throwing me) and then in how to spell it. Luckily here back at my computer with SpellCheck, yes, I am happy to report, for those who are still in suspense, it is veterinarian.

Of course these things that I love about English make it really difficult to learn as well.

I may like the fact that my native language adopts from dozens of languages around the world, but spelling is a bit more difficult when you are unsure if the word is of French origin, old Norse, Arabic or Greek. I may get geekily excited when I start to explain to you that what is cool is that in English we retain the roots of the words and just kept adding more and more words as the British Isles were subsequently conquered by the Romans, Normans, Vikings, and then as the Brits went out to try and conquer the rest of the world. So we have a gazillion words that mean only slightly different things, and also have the ability to easily invent new words (such as gazillion, nerdiness or geekily, of which Microsoft Word only likes the first one, but I almost guarantee you understand all three).

Of course that history is why you have to learn that that word ocular has to do with eyes, literary with books, and hydro with water, instead of the same words for both (such as photography having to do with photos or cloudy describing weather that has a lot of clouds).

But for each thing that drives people crazy about English, there is a bright side to it.

In English I can be very specific in what I want to say, the flow of words is fluid, and I rarely need to repeat words unless I want to (“the large cat sits with the kitten on the big rock” is far from an interesting sentence, but an improvement over the Spanish equivalent, “el gato grande se sienta con el gatito en el pierda grande” with its repetitions).

Lament all you want about why the words “aloud” and “allowed,” “sew” and “sow” and “so,” or “reign,” “rein,” and “rain” sound exactly the same yet are spelled differently. Yet besides the fact their spellings reflect their origins, it also helps distinguish these words from each others’ different definitions in a sentences (plus with all the different pronunciations and accents around the word, who is going to decide how the word actually sounds to write it down ‘correctly’?).

It also might be confusing what the different meaning of a houseboat and a boathouse or a casebook and a bookcase is, but that we don’t have to come up with a whole new word is fairly refreshing.

But for all the seemingly randomness of the English language, I apologize profusely to students of English everywhere.

But if my tangent into random linguistic trivia is not a clue in itself, I want to assure you that I enjoy teaching English. Some days I wish my students were more advanced so we could get more into these intricacies, less basic grammar (yes, I know the fact I like grammar crosses the line between nerd and crazy), and actually doing some creative writing and such. I was excited to finally do some dialogues (that I wrote though) with my eighth graders putting together the future tense and food words to pretend they are ordering at a restaurant.

Yes, writing and having my students present dialogues gets me excited. And though I like teaching in itself, it is much easier for me to get keyed up about my English lessons than it would be if I were teaching algebra or physics.

Why I am teaching English in a community of Spanish speakers, is of course a discussion in its own right, and convincing arguments exist both for and against the spread of English. But as a communication major, I believe that if we all can talk to each other, we can relate to each other, and if we relate to each other, we are much less likely to go start a war with our neighbors. English, through chance, history, and yes, its grammatical construction, has become the global language of choice.

But I don’t personally feel that means it is shaping our world into a monolingual universe. That would be a true loss, not just for cultural identity, and words that you cannot translate to other languages, but through all the knowledge different languages retain, and the fact that different languages have a different way of viewing the world. (Read a bit more on why it is a tragedy to lose a language here.)

I honestly don’t see it happening, English replacing other languages. What if we all learned to put in the time and effort to become bilingual (or trilingual, or quadra lingual…)?

Through the same set of happenstance that made English the foreign language most likely to be on a menu in Budapest, a T-shirt in Beijing or an advertisement in Bujumbura, I randomly learned English as my first language.

So if it is a skill that is desired in this community, I am here for you.

Just don’t fault me when I get overly-excited and then make a mistake. I tell my students almost every day that I know languages are hard (just take a quick listen to my Spanish!). But, I tell, them, it is more important to me that they try, and practice, and communicate, even if they do, like their teacher, occasionally make a mistake.

After all, it is our mistakes, like our ability to speak, that makes us human, no mater what language we’re talking about or talking in.

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If you also love the English language, or think I’m crazy for loving it, I recommend The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson. A concise and easy read of the history and peculiarities of the English language. A lot of my examples are plagiarized from this book, sorry Mr. Bryson (or Mr Bryson, if I use British English…).