An Education

by Cristy Duce (Canada)

I didn't expect to find Ecuador

This isn’t an inspirational story. I don’t want you to read smile and laughter and think this is one of those stories where you get off a plane and hang out with people with shades of brown skin and discover that people can be grateful in destitution and laugh in response to jokes you don’t understand and have hearts and cultures wide enough to welcome you for the moment you’re with them and pretend to forget that sooner or later you’ll return to an embarrassingly comfortable life and that really under all the layers of possession and consumption and centuries of colonialism, we’re really all the same. No. This isn’t a story like that. My second day there, they built a volleyball court. Cleared brush with machetes, one fifteen year old girl with her baby strapped to her back. They marked out boundary lines and pegged twine to the earth, trimmed and planted balsa poles to anchor the new net. I wanted to help, but nobody trusted me to swing a machete around. They took turns teaching me and my masters degree how to prepare plantains, staying near me as we picked our way through the jungle to make sure I didn’t grab onto something poisonous to break another slip and fall. I brought a headful of theoretical knowledge, unable to translate it into a language I couldn’t really speak, unable to translate it to any contextual life skills. We spent months deep in la selva, twelve of the best and brightest from five hours in each direction. Hours a day in English, math, science, agriculture. They gathered early mornings and late evenings to study. We fished and swam in Amazonian tributaries and changed plans based on anaconda sightings and I told them to get off their flip phones during class. There was a range of initiative, buy in, focus, giftedness. A smaller sample but similar distribution to an advanced class I might have taught just months before in a Canadian high school. There are always a couple of kids in those kinds of classes that you want to tell to lighten up—their university acceptance isn’t going to be jeopardized by two percentage points on one test, that missing an answer on a quiz is no cause for a breakdown, that they’ve got that doctor/lawyer/engineer/mid-level executive thing locked down and that a teenager Friday night could do more good than harm. I used to lean toward the Dead Poets’ Society side of the teacher spectrum. A lot of carpe diem and passion and travel and dreams and creativity thrown around my classroom, even if we didn’t stand on desks. But here I was, with students just as brilliant, just as driven, just as hungry to learn anything, everything. Here I was editing my usual practice, and not just because of my hobbling Spanish. What do you say to the brilliant kid that wants to be a doctor but whose only education has been a decade of pieced together workbooks? What do you say when you know his family couldn’t afford the tangle of rancheras and buses for him to see a university, let alone apply to and attend one. The kid that wants to see the world, but even if he did rally the money for a passport application, he’d never be approved for a visa because of his indigenous features and the assumption he was just trying to dissolve into the work force somewhere. How do you come back to your students of the global and literal north and tell them they must go, tell them what you did, tell them they must see, tell them they must be part of systemic change without them thinking they have a shiny calling to rescue jungles and everyone of color and that building a school a long flight from home is both great and terrible and nobody quite knows how to pull those apart. How do you listen to conversations of bootstraps and grit and maintain your faith in the capability of the human spirit to transcend all limitations and think of a serious, studious boy in the jungle who will never be a doctor.