By Ryan Wilson, Assistant Editor
Canoa, Ecuador: the home of 70-80 degree weather year-long, a beach with nobody in sight for miles and 100 bananas for only $3.
“This place is like the wild west, except they are not packing the guns. The horses are 100cc motorcycles — carrying four people and groceries — the stagecoaches are buses, and it has an amazing beach. They even have a pony express: a guy jumps off the bus — while it’s moving — and delivers mail to the gas station,” said Matt Zimmerman.
Zimmerman is a learning accommodations consultant at Lincoln Land Community College who developed a computer program LLCC’s Learning Lab used for over 15 years. He has been to Canoa twice to teach children at La Escuela los Algarrobos, a school founded six years ago by James Dean Byrd. Byrd started the James Dean Byrd Foundation for which Zimmerman volunteers.
The school houses kindergarten through sixth grade, placing children one grade level higher than the United States’ school system. For example, the second graders in La Escuela los Algarrobos would normally be in the first grade in the U.S. because of their age.
‘Mr. Z’ (as Zimmerman is commonly referred to by students) taught the students in Canoa the importance of being healthy and recycling. He said he and the other teachers take the students to the beach to recycle.
“Much like here, unfortunately — we should be smarter than that — the tendency is to open something up and throw the trash on the ground. … They have (a) beautiful beach, and we are trying to teach them that they need to take care of it,” said Zimmerman who is in his lower 50s. “The kids made different outfits out of materials, such as old potato chip –– Doritos bags — grocery sacks, thrown away paper made into a wedding dress; these were very intricate and well done.”
One of the students made a wedding dress out of paper, while another student used potato chip bags to design a shirt.
Zimmerman, a substitute teacher for several local school districts, said the 75 children attending this Ecuadorian school are bilingual and come from a variety of countries and continents with Spanish as their primary language and English second. There are two twin girls in the first grade who are both from Australia and have blonde hair. Other kids like to rub it. In Canoa, it is believed to bring good luck by rubbing a blonde person’s hair.
“I love these kids, and they know it, and I know they love me; therefore, we get along, better than with a teacher with the (same) language, but not the love,” he wrote in is log. “As Paul says in the Corinthians, ‘faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love. It is not a common language that we need to make the kingdom of heaven on earth, it’s love.’
He said he is teaching himself Spanish, so he can better understand and communicate with the kids. He uses Uno and go-fish cards and creates origami to interact with them.
Some families in the fishing village of Canoa may live on $85 a month, while they must pay $35 a month to send their children to school.
“These people are poorer than you can imagine,” he wrote in his log. “They live in hovels made of concrete, wood, bamboo and sheet metal. Yet they are happier than those living in palaces with mountains of gold.”
Zimmerman said some of the teachers at La Escuela los Algarrobos lack teaching experience and may not have proper certification. The school, a two-sided bamboo hut with concrete flooring, is split into halves: one side to teach Spanish and the other to teach English.
“It’s sort of like the Old West days where your teacher’s someone who got through the sixth or seventh grade and actually most of them got through high school, but not teachers from college,” he said. “The other side is English, which, to this point, (is) any kind of English-speaking person we could grab off the beach to come to teach English. Unfortunately, most of them are there to vacation, so we’ve had some problems with partying all night long and then coming in the next morning to teach kids.”
Zimmerman, who has made two six-weeklong trips to Canoa, said some of the teachers stay for a limited time span. There have been instances in which people have left in the middle of the school year, which lasts from May through February, leaving the children with inexperienced substitute teachers who cannot control the students.
He said parties (called a “carnival”) are held in March and April that includes overnight parties and parades in the dirt streets during the day.
“My concentration is the school. Even though it’s on a weekend, I still don’t listen to the music (going) ‘boom, boom, boom’ all night,” he said. “It’s fun if you’re up for it. There’s dancing in the street, eating food, drinking — quite a party. There’s parades, usually. I usually go for the parades then I’ll walk around a little bit, get something to eat, but then I can’t stay up that late.”
A resident of Harvel, IL., a village around 40 miles south of Springfield, Zimmerman said he found it difficult adjusting to the Ecuadorian culture not only because of the language barrier, but because Ecuadorians do not wait in lines. Instead of waiting patiently, most people will barge in front of another to grab a person’s attention.
“I taught them (the children) ‘Open close, open close, give a little a little clap, open close, open close, hands behind your back, grab a bubble’ [pretends to put an air bubble in his mouth] — they’d say its ‘brabuja,’ which is bubble in Spanish” said Zimmerman, who has an associate degree in Electronic Engineering Technology. “I would take these kids around the courtyard and zigzag back to (the school), and I’ve got all of these kids following me, and if they got out of line, … [I would say] end of the line in Spanish. If they got their hands out (from behind their backs) or started talking in the line, which was almost always, so they had to go to the end of the line.
“I got them really well trained. I had all 16 kids behind me — following me — and two or three more from other grades that wanted to join in. … They’re all following me and I’m like, ‘They’re doing pretty good, I’ll try something different,’ so I’ll say ‘stop,’ then they’ll stop, so (then) I’d say, ‘no mas burbujas,’ which is no more bubbles, ‘quack, quack,’ so they took off and (they would go) ‘quack, quack.’ I got all these little kids following me going ‘quack, quack, quack, quack,’ like a whole bunch of baby ducks … following the papa duck.”
The school’s courtyard used to have playground equipment for the children, but it was torn down after the kids fought over which item to play with, said Zimmerman. So, he lets the kids play with him. He will throw the kids up in the air and catch them.
“I gave the kindergarten kids horsy rides — ‘caballo’ in Spanish — on my shoulders today and galloped around the courtyard making horse noises,” he wrote in his log from his trip. “Their gleeful giggles and squeals of joy were music to my ears. I am one tired caballo now.”
There is some playground equipment in a park a block or two away from the school. From his second-story apartment room, Zimmerman can see the Pacific Ocean and the children playing in the muddy park.
The sounds of the children playing, cheerful voices calling ‘hola’ to each other, happy conversations in Spanish, the sun setting over the Pacific Ocean beyond their ramshackle homes and dirt streets,” he wrote in his log. “I could feel that Jesus was looking down on them as well.”
Zimmerman said the kids are challenging to control, because they have not been properly disciplined. Instead of using a more modern approach, local teachers discipline these students by yelling at them. “I don’t think that’s right. We need another way to do it.”
“I designed a positive behavior plan for things like, when you have a kid misbehaving and you have a kid sitting down doing what they’re supposed to do, you praise the one that’s being good and the other one will snap to it, because they want the praise, too,” he said. He said he applies a positive reinforcement teaching method, in which he uses clips to represent each student on a color-coded ladder. Each time a student behaves correctly, his or her own clip is raised higher up the ladder that could merit prizes.
“The Ecuadorian teachers would watch me, and they’d see it work and where it worked,” said Zimmerman. “They saw me praise the kids being good and the kids that were bad started being good. They saw it happen but they thought it was some sort of magic that only I could do. They don’t realize it’s just a technique that anybody could do.”
Zimmerman said he is looking for four teachers to help him teach the next time he goes to Canoa.
“I don’t really want everybody to go down there,” he said. I would like the materialistic, selfish, self-centered, you know, people to go somewhere else. I would like the caring, loving people that will blend with the culture who will understand and appreciate the local population. …
“I want four kind, caring, enthusiastic teachers that want an awesome experience in a bilingual, multicultural environment. … That will change their lives forever.”
In the following excerpt from his last log entry, he summarizes his experiences:
“I have witnessed so many miracles since I started my trip to Ecuador. … Thank you God for this opportunity, and if it is your will, please help me come back and do more. I love these people, and I know you do, too. All glory belongs to God. Amen.”
Ryan Wilson can be reached at [email protected] or 217-786-2311.
Note: This article was originally published in The Lamp’s April 30, 2014, edition.