I Dressed as a Bus for Halloween

I dressed as a bus for Halloween.

More specifically, I dressed as a blue bus for Halloween. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here.

October 19th was a Sunday, and Sundays have come to mean one thing: the Ciclopaseo. Every Sunday morning, with orange cones, yellow tape, and a healthy amount of trust in public good will, Quito closes a 15-mile stretch of a major artery of the city to all traffic, and bicycles are given free, safe access to hours of road miles. You’ll see the occasional runner or roller skater, but mostly, bikes rule the Ciclopaseo. Every now and again, a car or motorcycle will cross the yellow tape and interfere with the closed route, but typically the mass of bikes is strong enough to force their shameful gigantic wheels off onto the closest side street. Linde and Roy, a kind Dutch couple in the Americano community, were the first to take me on the Ciclopaseo back in early September. (Linde is the reason they’re here—she’s been teaching Diploma Program (DP) science for the past 3 years at school, and Roy, the trailing spouse and full-time scientist, is no slouch himself. They travel often and move through conversations in English, Spanish, and Dutch with confidence and ease. They’re the epitome of the type of cool, worldly people you meet in the international teaching game.) I’ve since made it a habit of going to the Ciclopaseo every Sunday when I’m in town.

Linde, me, Roy on my first Ciclopaseo at the start of September. The little round hill in the background is the “Panecillo,” a hill topped with a famous statue of the Virgin Mary in the historic old part of Quito.

October 19th was also the first Sunday that my neighbor and fellow new foreign hire, Rob, had his bicycle here and assembled. He was eager to explore the city on two wheels, and I was eager to share my knowledge of my Sunday route. We set off from our apartments, zipped down the hill past Atahualpa Stadium, crossed Parque Carolina, and hopped on the Ciclopaseo on Avenida Río Amazonas. We went south, in the direction of Centro Histórico.

We were waiting at a stoplight, almost to Parque El Ejido, when I asked Rob, “Do you have a costume for the Halloween party?”

“Not yet,” he responded. “I don’t really want to, but I think I’ll have to go to one of the pop-up stores and see what’s there.”

The light changed. “Same,” I said as we started rolling. “I just haven’t come up with any decent ideas.”

We did a lap of El Ejido, slowing down to look at the art vendors set up along the north side of the park. As we waited to cross Avenida Patria, Rob commented on how safe the roads felt along the Ciclopaseo. Rob has a car here in Ecuador, and he has made many comparisons between driving in Quito and driving on Toad’s Turnpike in MarioCart; traffic can be very chaotic here, so it really is remarkable how calm the closed roads of the Ciclopaseo feel.

While we were still waiting at the long light, a blue bus whipped past us, mere inches from our front tires. “Imagine competing with them while on your bike,” Rob said. “No chance.”

Another blue bus approached the intersection, this one cutting off a line of taxis to make an absurdly wide turn, then coming to a rolling stop—not nearly a complete stop—to drop some riders from the back doors and scoop up some new riders, the group rushing in step to pull themselves on board by grabbing the metal pole by the front door like a train hijack scene in an old western.

Rob and I watched in wonder, then chuckled. “Maybe that’s what I’ll be for Halloween, one of those buses,” I joked.

“Just run through the party bumping into people and making a mess!” Rob said as the light changed and we started moving back towards safe, bike-only streets.

I’m sure a lightbulb appeared above my bike helmet. “You know, I was joking, but maybe I will.”

“Do it,” he said, and we bobbed through some kids on roller skates, speeding up as we hit the downhill stretch just before the southern part of Parque Carolina.

There is lots to see and do along the Ciclopaseo: above, I am about 8 miles from home, looking back towards the wooded park near my apartment. Below, L-R, we have an old neighborhood in the south of the city, me enjoying a $1.50 fresh coconut pitstop, and the mini bike park inside Parque Carolina.

So I had my idea. The only thing I had to do was figure out exactly how one dresses as a blue bus.

I began by studying the buses. Every morning and afternoon on my bus (school; yellow) commute to work, I took notes about common design features, and I read old news articles and travel websites in Spanish. From my extensive research, I learned a lot, but I was also left with many more questions about how the blue buses work. Here is what I do and do not know about the blue buses:

Things I know:

• The buses are blue.
• They are [almost all] owned by a company called IMETAM, but they are operated by the city of Quito as public transportation.
• Most buses have a list of stops in their front window that indicate where the bus is headed. The majority of routes travel north/south, because Quito is a very long, narrow north/south city.
• Each bus comes equipped with a driver and a “cobrador,” a man who occasionally hangs his entire body outside the open front door to yell at pedestrians about where his bus is headed, or to shoo away cars with his arms when the bus wants to merge.

Things I don’t know:

• The cost of one fare, or how exactly you pay, because people seem to jump on and off indiscriminately and sometimes the cobrador is too distracted yelling at people to make change.
• How it is possible to know where a designated bus stop is or when a bus is likely to arrive at that stop.

Things I don’t know for sure, but I assume to be true:

• If they ever come to a complete stop, the blue buses will explode, so best not to risk it.
• If the blue buses ever have less than 40 people inside, they will explode, so again, why take the risk?

I mostly studied their aesthetic. Even though they are uniformly designed, structurally speaking, any blue bus you encounter has a huge “bus tipo” name on the top of the front window—things like “Reino de Quito” and “Guadalajara” and “Quiteño Libre”—in an absurd script font that is unique to that particular bus. (I’m not sure if these names indicate the line, the final destination, or a blue bus family association.) The entrance and exit signs—entrada y salida—are also in random fonts, sometimes all caps, sometimes lowercase curly script. Inside the doors and windows, drivers decorate the space with their personal bus energy: you’ll often see giant felt dice swaying from the ceiling, neon LED lights blinking like a teenager’s bedroom, and any amount of scarves pledging allegiance to local soccer teams. Almost all buses have the “Quito Metro” logo on the back of the left side of the frame, and they all have their registration card in at least two places, but beyond that, sometimes the outsides are blank, or sometimes they are covered with “PedidosYa” ads. There are usually boxy white arrows pointing at the three different doors, and there are anywhere from 3 to 53 red and white strips of reflective tape lining the bottom edges of all sides of the bus.

I made the early decision that I would not try to look like a bus with my costume; instead, I would try to spiritually embody the terrifying, almost militant chaos that the blue buses bring to the streets.

Bus inspiration photos taken from my school bus and brave moments on bike rides.

On Monday after work, I set out down the hill to try to find some cheap clothes that I could destroy for this costume. I started at the pop-up Halloween store a block from Parque Carolina, about a 15-minute walk from my apartment. I perused for a while and found nothing but a soldier hat that was just the right color blue. I made my way over to Quicentro, the nearby mall. I went in and out of every store that had clothing, checking every blue dress, shirt, and pant, and came up with nothing. After nearly two hours, I found myself in the last corner of the mall—at Old Navy, of all places. 

(It’s a bit strange, the things that give you comfort when you’re living abroad: this was an exhausting evening with very few successes, but as I trudged around the massive Quicentro—my first time ever stepping foot in the mall—I felt waves of recognition and relief seeing the overpriced Patagonia store, the unending H&M, and (well, obviously) the food-court sized Dunkin’ Donuts battling the upscale Starbucks. After all, even if it is gross consumerism, what is comfort but predictability?)

This Old Navy was no Burlington-Mall-circa-2010-Old-Navy, though. Just like every clothing store in the mall, even the simplest, solid color, cotton t-shirts were expensive. Almost all clothes in the city are imported, so the import fees make buying clothes here quite the investment. (There are, of course, cheap places to buy cheap clothes in a city of two million people, and some of those cheaper places are in the old part of the city, where my Sunday bike route takes me. But those are biking distance away, not walking distance, and not necessarily where I’d like to go by myself in the dark on a weeknight.) I was staring at a $25 plain white t-shirt near the entrance of Old Navy when a sales associate approached me and asked if I needed help.

All night, when store employees had asked me if I needed help, I had quickly said, “No, gracias,” and shuffled along. But at this point, I was exhausted from not finding what I needed, and I managed to eke out in sleepy Spanish, “Yes, I actually am looking for any piece of clothing that matches this bright blue color.” I showed her the hat I’d bought hours earlier. A hint of confusion flicked across her eyes, but she smiled. “It’s for…it’s for Halloween,” I added, and she nodded and told me she’d start looking on the right side of the store. I went to the left side and started digging through the clearance racks and men’s shirts.

After a few minutes of searching, we met in the middle of the store again. She presented a pair of blue leggings and I showed her the youth XL t-shirt I’d found. She said that they didn’t have any sizes of leggings that’d fit me, but they’d have more next week. I explained that the costume party was the coming weekend, so next week would be too late. I looked at my measly options after two hours of searching dozens of stores: an overpriced boy’s t-shirt and a pair of pants that don’t fit. I couldn’t rationalize spending a ton of money on something that just wouldn’t work. I thanked the Old Navy woman for her help and promised I’d return if all else failed. I stopped in SuperPaco on my way out of Quicentro and bought some iron-transfer paper, then slowly made my way back up the hill, feeling a bit defeated, but still confident I’d be able to make this costume work.

I spent the next few days designing the details I would iron on to the clothes I still didn’t have. From my studying perch on my school bus commute, I recreated the Quito Metro logo and transportation registration cards, I designed a “bus tipo” sign that merged as many bus clichés as I had seen, and I copied and pasted enough “entrada” and “salida” text boxes to adequately capture how many doors are on these buses. (A standard blue bus has three doors, but as it speeds past you, it always feels like so many more).

   

Some of the pages I needed to print on an inkjet printer.

Thursday rolled around, two days before the teacher Halloween party, and I had all of my designs set. Since I had a planning period first hour that day, right when the bus dropped us off at 7:25, I went down to the print center at school and asked the printer man if, among the many printers all around the entire campus, there was one inkjet printer I could use to print on my iron-transfer paper. “No inkjet printers anywhere on campus,” he said in Spanish, shaking his head. “And it might be hard to find one—laser is much more common here in print shops.” Darn. I knew it’d be too easy if I could just print at school, but since I needed to go out again in the evening to look for blue clothes, I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to check in on a few print shops in my neighborhood.

Walking back to my room, I ran into Libby bringing a cup of coffee to her classroom in the 7th grade block. Libby teaches Individuals and Societies, which is fancy-IB-school-lingo for middle school social studies. Our shared students often accidentally call me and Libby by each other’s names, which everyone finds to be very fair. Libby is from Montana and is a couple years older than me, but she is about the same height and build, has blonde hair and glasses, and just like me, dresses like the prototypical young White American humanities teacher (think: cardigans). To a 12-year-old Ecuadorian child, at first glance, we are pretty interchangeable. Unlike me, though, Libby has been living and working in Quito for a few years, and she has an Ecuadorian fiancé.

“Are you going to the Halloween party on Saturday?” Libby asked, opening her door and waving me into her classroom. Core subject teachers have common planning periods based on when our students have specials like Gym and Art, so when I am free, the other English teacher Alina is also free, and so is Libby, and so is the rest of our block. I followed Libby into her empty room. “I am planning on going to the party, and in fact, I could use some advice,” I said. Within five minutes, we had Google Maps pulled up on her computer and both of our phones, and Libby was showing me the third print shop she knew of in the Carolina area. “By the way, right here, across from Quicentro,” she offhandedly pointed at a block of shops, “there’s a little store, very unassuming, you’ve probably walked past it dozens of times. It has random clothes and shoes imported from China. They’re not great quality, but super cheap. Anyway, go past there, take a right, there’s another place you can print...”

Lorelei the instructional coach poked her head in the room to say hi. Like me, Lorelei has an East Coast confidence and a let’s-get-this-done-efficiently attitude that she sometimes needs to check while working in a culture with a slower, gentler pace than her home of Maryland, and like Libby, she has been living and working here a few years and has an Ecuadorian fiancé. We told her we were talking print shops, and Lorelei confirmed a few places in the neighborhood that Libby had already pointed out. I thanked them both for their help and walked back to my classroom. Later that afternoon, Lorelei stopped me on my way to lunch and gave me the tip that if I was unsuccessful in my hunt downtown, she could call in a favor with a teacher over in the primary side of the school who she knows for certain has a personal inkjet printer.

By the time I made it home from work at 4:30 that afternoon, I felt ready to tackle the city again, this time armed with more knowledge and even an honest-to-goodness backup plan if I failed. I put on my rain jacket and boots and set off down the hill. Libby had told me to head to Avenida República de El Salvador, which is a J-shaped street that juts off of, and then runs parallel to, Parque Carolina. I decided to start in the hook of the J and then work my way north up the street. I went into the first print shop that Libby recommended and said the line I’d practiced all the way there: “Hola, necesito imprimir algo con este papel. Tiene un impresora de inkjet?” (Hi, I need to print something with this paper. Do you have an inkjet printer?) I had “tinta” (ink) in my back pocket as well, but the printer man at school had told me that “inkjet” would be understood. This printer man told me no, and pointed to another store a few doors down. I went there, said my line, and was told no again. I put my hand on the door and was about to say, “Okay, gracias,” and go on my way, but I stopped.

If one of your goals living in this country is to become fluent in Spanish, you have to start talking, I told myself.

Speaking out loud in another language is scary and vulnerable. It’s been five years since my days of speaking Portuguese in Peace Corps, and it’s been nearly ten years since I last consistently spoke Spanish in earnest, when I studied abroad in Madrid. I’m rusty; what Spanish I did retain after switching my brain to Portuguese during training in Mozambique is mostly dormant. I can talk with my Spanish tutor no problem, and when practicing with colleagues I always have the safety net of their bilingualism. But standing alone in that print shop staring at the printer man, a stranger, was very different. I could very well stumble over my words, not be understood, and leave feeling embarrassed. But enough of a little voice in my brain reminded me that that was not a guarantee, just one possible outcome. I took a breath.

If Peter Falk were a small, shy lady living in one of the largest cities in South America, you would have mixed us up as easily as my kids mix up me and Libby: “Just one more thing,” I said, turning back to the printer man.

We went on to have a fruitful conversation: I told him that I was looking to get words and images onto clothing for a Halloween costume, so I needed to find a place that could support the iron-transfer paper. He mentioned “el caracol” (Did he say snail?! I thought) but said that was too far away, and suggested I try a t-shirt design shop around the corner. Maybe they could put the designs for me directly onto the clothes I wanted, or at least they could help with printing. He walked me outside and pointed further north up the road. I thanked him profusely and headed that direction with a new Spanish bounce in my step.

The evening took on a winding turn from there: the t-shirt place used a different printing method, so I couldn’t print there, and though they drove a hard bargain, one complication in having them print directly on my clothes was that I still did not have said clothes. I talked with a few different guys in that shop, and one had me come around the counter to show me on Google Maps where I should go next. He pointed out El Caracol, which does mean snail, but evidently is also a shopping mall on the far side of Parque Carolina, about a 15-minute walk. It looked familiar on the map; I’d passed it many times on the Ciclopaseo. “You’re sure there’s an inkjet printer there?” I said. “Absolutely,” he responded. I put my hood up, because it had started raining, and started crossing the park as the sun set.

The section of Parque Carolina that I crossed that evening. Photo is from, you guessed it, a morning on the Ciclopaseo featuring neighbor Rob.

The t-shirt man told me it was “frente a” the McDonalds, which is an easy enough landmark, so when I got to the golden arches, I looked in front and found the entrance. I spent an interminable amount of time in this mall, going up, down, and all around, asking about printers and print shops, and being pointed in every direction. I was happy that I was being bold with my Spanish, but I was starting to lose hope with the main task of printing. I felt that sweaty, muggy discomfort that reminds me of walking across the Lower East Side to get to work in college: I had been stuffed in my raincoat and walking for hours at this point. I was hungry and my legs were tired. Finally, I found a little shop in the basement floor of the mall near the back stairs with five printers inside and one printer man sitting behind the counter. I walked in, my face and shoulders weary, and I said my line. “Oh, we don’t have inkjet printers here,” the man said. Before I could ask any follow-ups, he then said, “You should try going to El Caracol.”

My eyes narrowed, not to sneer at this innocent printer man, but to double check before I lost my mind.

“El Caracol?”

“El Caracol.”

“Is...is this place,” I gestured broadly with my arms, “is this place not El Caracol?”

“This place is not El Caracol.”

I did the thing that I’m very grateful I’ve learned how to do, which was to take a deep breath and check my East Coast attitude, because this was clearly my error, and curiosity would help me learn more, not anger. The kind printer man and I went back and forth for a few more minutes. I learned a lot this evening, but one of the most helpful lessons was that the phrase “en frente de” means “in front of,” and the phrase “frente a” means “across the street from.” I walked back up to ground level, emerged outside, discovered that it was now nighttime, looked back at the McDonalds, and crossed the street to find the real El Caracol, which was a dizzying, overwhelming, spiraling nightmare collection of electronics stores that had 0 inkjet printers inside.

El Caracol, photo taken a few weeks later when I was emotionally ready to step foot in this place again. This place is terrifying.

I was halfway home, standing across the street from Quicentro, contemplating whether I should return, tail between legs, to my friend at Old Navy, when I froze and thought of Libby’s comment so many hours (years?) earlier. Right across from...I spun around. There it was in all its glory, the little Chinese clothes store. I walked inside and immediately spotted a blue shirt. A young employee walked up to me and asked if I needed help. “Oh, I need so much help,” I said, the Spanish now spilling out of me with ease. I told her about the soldier hat, and the blues, and the printer fiasco. She seemed fascinated by me, yet delighted at the very specific task I was presenting. We got to work going through racks of clothes, and within 20 minutes, I had a full outfit assembled: a long sleeve shirt and shorts that matched the blue of the hat perfectly, and a white short sleeved cotton shirt to do the iron transfers. As I was leaving, the young woman asked me what exactly my costume was going to be. I pointed out the front door at the row of blue buses outside Quicentro. “I’m going to be one of those,” I said. She stared at me blankly, and then we both started laughing. I went back up the hill to my apartment, texted Lorelei that I’d need her to call in that favor, and fell asleep in minutes.

(Many weeks later, fellow new hire Jay was hosting a murder mystery Christmas party where we had to dress as characters from A Christmas Carol. I was assigned Scrooge, and I returned to the Chinese clothes store immediately after I was cast. When I walked in the door, the same young woman’s eyes lit up like she was seeing an old friend. “I’m looking for something kind of specific,” I said, and she smiled, said, “Of course!” and wanted to hear all about my new weird costume. I assume she has invented a very peculiar backstory for me, and I love it.)

The next day, Friday, Lorelei brought me to primary teacher Natalia’s classroom to print my designs, and within minutes, at long last, I had them in my hands. That evening, I video called Steph as I started ironing on all of the images in haphazard, chaotic directions on the white shirt. Steph, of course, had new ideas to add, and she convinced me to get up Saturday morning and walk around the block to the bike shop and ask for an old busted tire so I could “run over” the white shirt with blue tire tread to add to the chaos. Saturday morning, I was video calling with Steph again as I dipped the old tire in blue paint and pressed it into the shirt on my kitchen floor. It felt just right to involve Steph in this project because this is precisely the type of weird art we’d be doing together in her Arizona room had we both still been in Sierra Vista.

The Halloween party itself was a blast. Some people understood my costume. Here’s the thing that I’m sure will be a disappointment to anyone who’s made it this far into the story: I don’t really have a great photo of the final assembled blue bus costume. The best I can offer you is this awkward mirror selfie I sent to Steph to show her when it was done, and then this one photo from early in the party.

The one good thing that El Caracol gave me was a toy store where I bought a little stuffed man who stuck out of my pocket and served as my cobrador.

    

L-R: Neighbor Jabari, blue bus, Christmas host Jay.

***

My third week living in Quito, at the end of our two weeks of pre-service in August before the kids came to school, I was sitting alone in my classroom when my phone rang on my Ecuadorian line. I felt a little nervous, but I answered it. I had no idea what the person on the other end was saying. I did hear them say “Colegio Americano” at one point, so I knew it was not spam and was probably an important phone call. “Can you wait so I can find someone to translate?” I said breathlessly into the phone, then ran out of my room. I made my way down the 7th grade block: Alina was off at lunch, Libby was eating with Alina, and the Spanish teacher Tati was there, but I hadn’t yet heard her say a word of English, so I kept running. I made it all the way to David’s science classroom. David is an alumni of Americano and studied and taught in the States for a while, so he can bounce between conversations with local hires about community-specific politics and conversations with foreign hires about backpacking in Colorado gracefully—he is our 7th grade team lead and reminds me of a mix of my friends Noah and Harrison and if you know either of them you’ll know that is absurdly high praise. I burst in his door and said, “David, can you help me?” He sprung up in his chair and I thrust the phone in front of him. Without asking me any questions, he started talking to the person on the other end and scribbled some notes on a sticky note.

As he talked, I caught my breath, and it occurred to me I might cry. For the first time since arriving in Ecuador, I felt really, really overwhelmed. In that moment, I was simultaneously feeling grateful that this person I’d just met a week earlier was willing to drop everything and get on a random phone call for me with no context, while also feeling embarrassed that I couldn’t do such a simple communication task by myself, and also feeling scared that I might struggle like this forever. David ended the call and explained patiently that it had been the school’s transportation department, and they were just calling to let me know what bus number I’d be riding with the students on Monday and what time I should be outside my apartment for pickup. He handed me the sticky note where he had written the bus number and the time. I thanked him for his help and apologized for bursting in, and he assured me that it was no problem. I quickly left so I didn’t start to cry.

Then, a few weeks after Halloween, I was in the backseat of Rob’s car as we drove with Ry and Gianna, two other new hires, on our way to go hike Imbabura Peak. We were going to spend the night in La Esperanza, a little town with a hostel that mostly serves travelers who come to summit the volcano. “Listen, the guy from the hostel is about to call me,” Rob said, picking up his phone. “I need someone who speaks Spanish to handle this!” All eyes immediately turned to me, and, humbly, I picked up the phone and then took the phone call with ease.

A lot can change in a few months.

After successfully communicating with our hosts, the next day, we successfully hiked Imbabura, whose first peak sits at 15,000 ft.

Books, Notebooks, and Resilience

“Ms. Smith, I think you are resilient,” my student Antonia said, with a lilt in her voice that indicated to me she was just fully realizing the definition of resilience as she put this thought into words. “You just moved to a new country, and you don’t have any family here. That is so scary. But you…you…”

Her eyes darted around the circle. “Parece?” she whispered. “Seem,” a boy across the circle quickly responded.

“You seem fine,” Antonia continued. “I think that means you’re resilient.”

I was quite floored by this. The question on the board was: Think of someone you know who is resilient. How do they show they are resilient?

Up to this point, my A2 class had presented a variety of responses to the question: Joaquin told us about Rafael Nadal, his favorite tennis player, and the story of how he rose to prominence in his sport despite traumatic beginnings with his first coach. Martín described how hard it was for his mother to get her Master’s degree at Harvard, and how she moved across the world with her young family to do it. Agustin talked about his cousin who’d broken his shoulder in a car crash and spent months in physical therapy to be able to ride a mountain bike again. Tomás shared that he himself had had surgery as a young child but was here now, healthy; Maria and Luciana, two best friends, each said that the other is resilient because of how hard they work in school to get good grades.

“Thank you, Antonia. That is so kind of you to say,” I said, taking the talking piece and passing it to the student on my left.

As humble as I want to sound, I must say that I agree with Antonia’s generous assessment. Over the course of August, I had breathed out the grief of the summer, packed up my life, my dog, and my bike, said goodbye to my closest friends and family, and, for the first time in five years, started completely anew. On the day of the “resilience” conversation with my A2 class, I was about four weeks into my new life in Ecuador. In that time, I’d moved into my cozy basement apartment with a backyard for Katembe, met dozens and dozens of new colleagues, started taking weekly Spanish lessons, established myself as a customer of the bike shop around the corner, found a local grain-free dog food, started teaching 7th graders for the first time ever, explored the huge forested park near my home, learned how to pay my electric bill after I came home one evening to a dark basement apartment, and laid the groundwork for how to navigate long distance friendships and heartbreak from afar. And I did seem fine. And I felt pretty fine, too.

I am teaching at Colegio Americano de Quito, a private school made up almost entirely of Ecuadorian families. (It is, technically speaking, an “international school,” but I think “bilingual school with an international curriculum” is more accurate; every single one of my students is Ecuadorian, and the genuinely “international” families make up a very, very small percentage of the school population.) As I write this, we are beginning the fifth week of the school year, and I can still say that I adore my students: they are sharp and organized and respectful, and they impress me every day. A lot of my fellow colleagues—particularly those who have more experience teaching in “genuine” international schools—are entering their fifth week with very different opinions of their classes, but they’ll just have to write their own blogs and you’ll just have to read them, I suppose.

My first impressions of my school and of my students were very superficial, but they were poignant, nonetheless: the library had books, and the kids had notebooks. Stay with me here.

The first day we (“we” meaning me and the nine other new foreign hires, much more on each of them later) visited the Americano campus was on the morning of August 13th, a mere 30 hours after Katembe and I landed in the Quito airport. We went on a tour of the massive campus, and I saw countless elementary classrooms that I knew I would likely never see again in my life, as well as more soccer fields than I think I ever played on myself in the span of 12 years of youth soccer. At one point on the tour, we passed by my classroom in the 7th/8th grade block, and I asked the MYP (Middle Years Program) coordinator David to unlock it for me so I could take a peek. I was astonished to find only 15 desks inside. David reminded me that my classes would be capped at 15 students, and I nodded, and I made some comment about how years of working in American public schools had taught me to be wary of these things called “caps,” and David, a guy whose Midwest accent cuts through in his English and his Spanish despite the fact that he’s been working at Americano for close to 20 years, chuckled and said, “I actually think your classes might only have 12 or 13 kids this year,” and I told him not to get carried away, and we joined back up with the tour. As we walked past the 9th/10th grade block, though, I did allow my mind to wander a bit into what if territory: What if I do only have 12 kids in a class? What if we had the space to sit in a circle and have meaningful class discussions or read stories together? I pulled myself back from getting too carried away. (I teach five classes: two groups of 13, one group of 12, and two groups of 11. I have the space to arrange the desks into most basic shapes.)

One unofficial stop on the tour was taking photos in this picturesque spot. Because the campus felt overwhelmingly huge, I was worried I would not find this spot again, but it turns out this is about 30 yards from my classroom.

The tour ended at the Secondary Library. I was looking forward to seeing this library, because my upstairs neighbor Monica had just started working as Head Librarian, and she’d told me a bit about the library when we’d met the night before. When I walked in, I gasped out loud. There were just so many books. I know that this is an obvious statement, like remarking that there are soccer fields at a school in South America—there are books in the library!—but more than the volume of books, the curation of titles really impressed me. I quickly split from the group and started perusing the shelves: Oh, it’s not just a few Raina Telgemeier books, it’s all of the Raina Telgemeier books, most of them with copies in English and Spanish. And oh, it’s not just One of Us Is Lying, but it’s One of Us Is Next, and over there, there’s the full Matched series, and look, there’s a whole Nicola Yoon block on that shelf. I felt a flood of emotions start to swirl in my head the more I looked at the rows and rows of shelves. I had to pause to breathe. Is this...more grief? Altitude sickness? Why do I want to cry in the library?

After some reflection, my best estimation is that I was feeling something close to healing. I spent five years in Arizona working relentlessly in my campaign to allow my kids to read good books. At the first school I worked at, there was no library. When I decided that I wanted to try independent reading in my classes, I had to go out and find books. My personal classroom library started as a stack of 16 books I bought one weekend when I drove over an hour to Bookmans, an amazing used book store in Tucson. Many weekend trips to Bookmans quickly followed, and after another year, I did my Master’s research thesis on restorative independent reading practices in high school, and a few more months passed, and I got a grant to get more books for my little library. Summers passed, and I sorted through boxes of donations and I picked the brain of every employee I met in the Young Adult section of bookstores wherever I went. I researched modern authors whose stories reflected my students’ vast identities. I poured so much of my heart into finding good books, and reading good books, and sharing good books with my kids. When I announced to my classes at Buena that I was moving, I had a few students come up to me and ask, panicked, what would happen to my library. After five years and many, many hundreds of dollars, I’d amassed a library of just under 400 books. I was able to pass the books on to Catie at Buena, and I entrusted her with the responsibility of making sure kids are allowed to read good books.

Standing in the library at Americano, I realized that I wouldn’t have to fight as hard to put books in front of my kids. In fact, I might not have to fight very much at all. I realized in that moment that my shoulders had been tense for years about kids and books. Giving older students the space, time, and permission to read for fun, and teaching them that they are allowed to read books by authors who look like them, was, frustratingly, ever radical. And as I lived and worked in a conservative county in Arizona, I was always bracing for a book ban, or a meddling decision by the school board, or a sweeping piece of legislation that would target access to books by diverse authors. I realized on the morning of August 13th that I was in a very different place now, and I could drop my shoulders, and I could simply trust that the kids here would be allowed to read good books. Exhaling with that thought in my heart did feel something like healing.

A little part of the Secondary Library. Books are organized by genre first, then alphabetically by author.

Now, to my first impression of my students. On the evening before the first day of school, the evening of August 31st, as I was eating dinner in my basement apartment, it occurred to me that I did not know where I could buy sheets of blank labels, the kind my mom would put in the printer to make return address labels for Christmas cards growing up. I hadn’t found an office supply store yet. I had a stash of blank labels that I’d used for years to have students label their class notebooks, but that stash hadn’t made the move across continents. (Tearing out pages and putting blank labels on top of used labels is also a good way to repurpose an old notebook when a student can’t afford to buy a new one.) I made a mental note to ask someone the next day where I could go for office supplies. It was only the first day of school—I hadn’t even met my kids, let alone told them they’d need a notebook for my class. The labels could wait a few days.

It turns out, the person I could have asked about office supplies was every single one of my students’ moms, because, in the morning, I learned that I actually did not need to find labels, and I did not need to tell my students that they’d need a notebook for my class, because each of them arrived with a notebook and a printed label already on the front cover. Some had fonts I’d never even seen. One student came up to me to say he didn’t have a notebook, and I started to launch into my, “Listen, I know it’s the start of the school year, if the idea of going home and asking your parents to take you to buy one more thing makes you start to feel nervous, just let me know and I’ll find you a notebook…” speech, but before I could explain my labels-on-labels system, the student interrupted me, saying, “Um, no, I just meant it’s in my locker.” I passed by another student’s desk and tapped the cover of his notebook and reminded him he’d need to write his name on there. He looked up at me, and then politely tapped the cover in a different spot, and I realized that both his full name and the name of the course were incorporated into the personalized design printed directly on the glossy cover, as if this kid were raised in a notebook factory and had managed to get into the machines. I nodded and gave him a quick “oh, but of course” thumbs up and kept moving.

That whole first day, whenever someone asked me how I was doing, I couldn’t stop saying, “I’m great! My kids have notebooks!” Most people just laughed in response and changed the subject, but when I encountered an American teacher who’d also gotten their start in public school education, they’d sigh knowingly, and say something to the effect of, “You’ll find…it’s very different here.” Don’t even get me started on pens and pencils.

Again, like soccer fields in South America, and books in libraries, and me hitting 2,000 words in a blog post about minutia, I know we’re not breaking any new ground here. You’re thinking: Shouldn’t...shouldn’t kids in school have notebooks? And my point is, YES, they should. I desperately wish that every student I ever taught had a notebook with their name on it on the first day of school. But this year is the first year of my career where that is the case.

And after one month, I am still acutely aware of how much easier the project of education becomes, from the teacher’s perspective and the students’ perspective, when the kids start with notebooks. When a student walks into my room, and they haven’t eaten breakfast, and they don’t have a pen, and they’re exhausted, and they’re worried about their dad finding a new job, and they’re thinking about when they’ll get to see their younger sister next, and they’re self conscious because their hoodie has a stain, but it’s the only hoodie that fits right now, and they haven’t been in school in a few days, and they can hear their stomach growling from hunger as they sit among the 32 students that are crammed into one room: they are categorically not set up for success. And they might be extraordinarily successful in my class—but the obvious truth is that gaps in basic needs just, plainly, make it harder to learn. I did not discover this; I am merely offering you a very simple explanation of trauma-informed teaching. What is new to me here in Quito, though, is witnessing the flip-side of the concept at the heart of this lens of teaching: when students show up to class everyday, well-fed, well-rested, not worried about their next meal or their parents’ or siblings’ security, pen in hand, notebook with their name on it? Those students are absolutely set up for success. Each day that passes here, I feel deeply lucky that I get to teach students who are so set up.

Notebooks and independent reading books for my five small classes. Unlike my labels, my “rainbow” letters did make the move across continents.

It honestly feels a little strange to shift so dramatically in my teacher identity from someone who mostly taught non-notebook kids to someone who teaches 100% notebook kids. As I reckon with what it means to teach in this school, in this city, and in this part of the world, I take comfort in knowing that this era of my career will probably stave off years of burnout that was headed my way had I stayed in an environment where I had to fight for books and address the unmet basic needs of 30 kids, every hour, every day, before I even thought about teaching grammar or analysis. No matter how much I wish this weren’t true, the fight and the needs will still be there when I get back.

One last thing, to be clear: teenagers are still teenagers, whether they have money for notebooks or not. They still get sad, and get anxious, and struggle with self-esteem, and panic about getting good grades, and worry about being “enough” for everyone in their lives. Everywhere in the world, teenagers face adversity, and everywhere in the world, teenagers need to learn resilience.

And in my little classroom in Ecuador with 15 desks, we have the space to sit in a circle and discuss exactly what that word means.

On Monsoons, and Leaving, and Eventually Arriving

There is nothing easier than waking up early the day after the last day of school.

This year, May 23rd is the day after the last day of school. And, just like every year in my teaching career so far, I wake up way before my alarm that morning, the exhaustion that comes from Teaching Freshmen Boys in May suddenly nowhere to be found in my bones.

On every other morning of the school year, the 5:30am to 6:30am hour blinks by in an instant: I jolt awake, rush to get dressed, grab the yogurt, granola, and lunch I’ve prepared the night before, fill Katembe’s water bowl, brush my teeth, and hop on my bike, my eyes only fully opening once the burst of cool morning air hits my face as I’m pedaling down Snyder Boulevard, racing to beat the cars crawling at 15mph as they drive through the school zone near Pueblo Del Sol Elementary. I only ride for 12 minutes but somehow arrive at Buena seconds before 7am, speed-walk to drop my lunch in the English teacher’s lounge, and make a beeline to my classroom, immediately entering professional mode, answering questions of my early students who are already standing outside my door when I arrive.

But on the day after the last day of school, time slows to an almost unbelievable pace: I stretch in bed until my body is ready to walk down the hallway, I sit with Katembe on the couch for a bit, then return to my room and slowly get dressed. I check my watch—still only 5:45? I make scrambled eggs and eat them over rice. Just barely 6:00? I poke around my closet until I find the perfect sized tote bags to hold the remains of my classroom. Not even 6:30? I make myself some tea and pour it over ice in a mason jar, then spend some time outside with Katembe, tossing his toy with him in the cool desert morning air. STILL not 6:30? Doesn’t hurt to be early on my last contracted day.

On the day after the last day of school, I drive my car instead of riding my bike. As I pull away from my house, the song “How Lucky” by John Prine and Kurt Vile comes through my speakers, and the opening verse, “Today, I walked down the street I used to wander / Yeah, shook my head and made myself a bet / There was all these things that I don't think I remember / Hey, how lucky can one man get?” hits my ears in a particularly poignant way. I become keenly aware of everything around me as I make my last commute: I notice tiny blooms on the prickly pears along the sidewalk, I notice the curves of the tall cypress trees, permanently bent by the relentless wind, and I notice cars driving in the opposite direction of me. I find this quite curious. Usually, it feels like everyone in town is moving towards Buena High School in the morning, with three key exceptions: the elementary school teacher who walks to work with her matching tote bag and water bottle, the older couple with the golden retriever who hold hands and slowly head towards the church at the end of my street, and on Thursdays only, my pickleball friend Nick, who is on the final stretch of his weekly 10-mile run. Today, though, people move in all directions, and even though there are no flashing lights for the school zone by Pueblo Del Sol, everyone still drives slowly, because, after all, this is the day after the last day of school: who is in a rush?

I park and walk towards the back entrance to Buena, where I find Scott and Sheri cleaning up the last of Project Graduation. Sheri says that she’s heard a rumor about me moving to Ecuador, and I confirm it, and she asks the pressing question most of my retired friends have: “Is there pickleball down there?” Scott nods to my mason-jar-tea-situation and says that he respects me for bringing my own bourbon on the last day. Sheri rolls her eyes, Scott winks and says hasta luego, and I keep moving.

The “hasta luego” briefly reminds me that I need to practice more Spanish, but before I can start worrying about my Duolingo score, I run into Manny, Noah’s old partner teacher, who is arranging some of his famous jade plants in the planters near the ramp. We chat for a few minutes, and then I am off to my classroom for a scatterbrained morning. I pack, I toss, and I search for the addresses of lost students so I can mail them the letters they wrote themselves at the beginning of the year. Vinnie stops by and gives me advice about SIM cards and doing two-factor authentication when I move abroad. I find one last thank you card at the bottom of my desk and write out a note to my principal. I choose a tasteful amount of books and papers and office supplies to leave for the next teacher who takes my room. I securely tape down a singular notecard inside my top desk drawer that reads, “The student is not giving you a hard time. The student is having a hard time.” I put my plants in a box, fill my tote bags with the last few trinkets from my desk, turn in my keys and ID, and I make my rounds up and down the English and Social Studies halls, bidding my closest colleagues farewell.

I leave feeling settled, complete, and accomplished. The day after the last day of school slips into a joyful Friday evening.

Just before my last trip out of the building.

*

It is three weeks later, and I cannot feel more distant from the calm bliss that was the day after the last day of school. I am laying on my couch, and I smell sage, and I feel dried tears on my chin, and I hear bells. Clementine is at my house, and she is the one ringing the bells. School ended, Noah and Marley came to visit, we hiked Ramsey Peak, they prepared for the sale of the house, I visited Cat in Flagstaff, I got a tattoo, I returned home, I looked ahead at my last summer in Sierra Vista, and I panicked. I knew I would feel sad about leaving Arizona once summer arrived, but, frustratingly, I was unable to feel sad: I only felt panic. I struggled to eat, I struggled to sleep, and when I did sleep, I woke up the next morning to find my heart still racing from the night before. I went to Bisbee to see Catie, I had an emergency EMDR session with my therapist, I called Emily back home, and still, the panic attacks and catch in my chest would not dissipate. 

So I am on the couch and Clementine is here and she has resorted to the bells.

She assures me that this is grief, and that the only way through is to sit with the chaos of my feelings and do the inner work my body and spirit are requesting. I tell her that I desperately want to feel sad, feel angry, feel afraid—I want to feel anything but panic. She smudges the house and smudges Katembe just in case. I tell her I am afraid that my tattoo is cursed, because all I have done is look at it with disdain since I got it. She places her hand on my ankle and traces the mountains, noting how thin and intentional each line is. She says it holds strong energy, but certainly not cursed energy. We talk about how hot it is outside—the heat of desert summer has reached its peak, but there is still no rain to bring any relief. I just need the rain, I say, and she agrees.

A few minutes later, we pull cards from five different oracle decks. The last one we pull is called “Repetition,” and Clementine flips through the guidebook to read the description. The last piece of it reads:

In the heavens, in the earth, in societies, in relationship, in behaviours...repeating occurrences are everywhere. There are places where hot dry months roll into a build-up that breaks into the monsoon season on a repeating cycle of dry, heat and flood. The monsoons will come again, bringing rain for crops, but maybe also upheaval and disease. For the peoples who live in monsoon climates, this is the way life is. For an outsider, the cycle might seem extreme, but the residents are accustomed to the heat, the humidity and the wet. The relative ease, comfort and stability of more moderate weather cycles may be unknown or unfathomable to them. Cycles exist in our lives in so many ways. Once we fall into their circling reliability, it can be hard to imagine life any other way. (1)

We sit in silence for a few moments to take it in. The rain...she says, and I nod.

Repetition.

*

It is the week after Noah’s wedding, and I am standing in Miller Canyon during a thunderstorm. To be clear: I have not felt any rain, but the thunder has been rolling constantly for about 40 minutes. The creek is dry where we are standing, but I know there will be a little pool for Katembe to dip his paws in once we get closer to the bottom. Miller is part of the Huachuca Mountains, the very mountains that are now tattooed around my left ankle forever. “Huachuca” roughly means “place of thunder,” and I’ve heard this over the years, but I’ve never quite understood its meaning until today (2). Every time there is a new clap of thunder, I notice myself turning to try to see where it comes from. This is silly for two reasons: First, thunder is not visible. Even if there is lightning striking above, the trees are too thick for me to see it. Second, the thunder is bouncing off all sides of the mountains as I stand in the canyon, so as soon as I look to one direction, the sound rolls behind me, and then to the right, and then the left. I cannot pinpoint one origin. Maybe, there is no origin.

This is similar to the monsoons themselves: they are finally here, and they are changing the landscape in subtle ways each day, but it is impossible to pin down individual transformations as they happen. There is more grass here, the trail is a bit more dug out there, the rocks in the creek are darker shades of brown and gray. The change is all around.

Katembe walks ahead and I follow, my face suddenly wet, from the gentle drizzle or my welcome sadness, I do not know. I realize in this moment why the monsoons and their subtle but torrential change are resonating with me so much this summer. This is what my five years in Arizona have been: change all around, subtle but torrential, and impossible to pinpoint one thing about me that is different, because everything about me is different. And, therefore, it is impossible to pinpoint one feeling that encapsulates leaving this place, because it is all a storm, and it is all change.

Katembe did eventually find his favorite pool of water as little drops fell from the sky.

*

It is a hot afternoon in mid-July, and I walk across the dining room to fill Katembe’s water bowl, and it takes my breath away. I have just walked across the center of my dining room for the first time in five years because the dining room table is gone.

The constant panic from the start of summer has finally subsided, and now I get hit with sudden gasps of intense sadness, like this moment with the table. Mere moments ago, I was fine, but now my body feels dizzy and I need to sit down. I breathe in and out, trying to slow my heart rate, trying to lean into the sadness and dodge the panic. Clementine says these moments are indications that my spiritual awareness is becoming more refined, and that I am learning to tune into different energies around me, whether I like it or not.

I walk back over to the empty space where the table used to be. The energy—that is, the remnants of joyful and sorrowful and banal memories that hang in that space—the energy is thick there. I pace in the little four-foot radius, trudging through thousands of moments of my life. The table was one of the first pieces of furniture Noah and I bought for the house five summers earlier: it was a good height, a good size, and had a beautiful mosaic pattern that made us feel sophisticated. It “really tied the room together,” as they say.

That table was where I ate so many bad beans, back in my phase where I couldn’t figure out how to make beans like I did in Mozambique. Relatedly, it is where Noah politely said, “I think we’re getting there,” after each bowl of bad beans.

The table was at the exact height of Katembe’s nose, and it was the site of his Famous Lasagna Theft the weekend our neighbor Hector died.

It was the perfect size for four people to have dinner, and when we first bought it, the idea of making two whole friends seemed ambitious. But after only a few months, the table managed to fit Harvey and Claire and Steph the first time we had friends over our house, when Noah’s college friend Sam was visiting and didn’t realize he had initiated our first ever dinner party. Then a few months later, it fit a slew of homemade pizzas the day we had Joshua and Hermione and Steph and Ibrahim over to celebrate the last weekend before school started back up.

Pizzas, July 2021.

It was also where Noah and I were sitting one January evening after dinner a few years later, discussing our complex individual plans for the next few weekends, when I said to him, “I think we’re going to start doing a lot of growing in different directions,” and we sat in silence for a minute, and then an hour later, when he was ready, he said, “I think I feel sad about us growing in different directions,” and then we cried for a long time, granting ourselves and each other the permission to start that growth.

That table was where I sat with Steph and Alex after Alex and I came back from our first road trip together to Colorado and Utah, when Steph made us pancakes and eagerly asked to see every single photo we’d taken and lay out every single rock we’d brought home with us.

Breakfast, July 2023.

It’s where I admitted, through tears, that I felt kind of upset when Claire got pregnant, because I was going to miss riding bikes with her. It’s where Noah told me that he thought that feeling was probably normal, and that I should talk to her about it. It’s where we had dinner and played Junkart with Claire and Harvey and their baby five days before they moved to Idaho last spring.

Junkart night, May 2024.

Katembe is now laying down on the cool tile where the table used to be. I know if I stay here much longer, the memories will keep flooding and I will get exhausted. Also, the table is not yet gone; it is merely in the garage. But the yard sale is in two days. And I know what’s coming.

*

It is almost the end of July, and I am picking my mom up from the airport, and I am starting to feel a little numb, because I know there are so few checkpoints left in this summer.

*

It is a few days later, and a Carvana truck is pulling away with my car, and I stand in the almost-empty garage with Wesley and my mom, and I say, “I can’t believe they really just took my car,” and we laugh, and we go back to putting everything that’s left in boxes.

*

It is the next day, and Alex and I are at Miller Canyon for the last time, and we decide to ride our bikes to the top only using one gear like we did the day I asked him out, which feels like many lifetimes ago. Full circle, he says.

I am pointing to the single gear we used. I was very proud of this, both times we did it.

*

It is my last night in Arizona, and the house is almost empty, and it is very late, and Steph is leaving, and I am saying goodbye to Steph, and my brain cannot comprehend that I will not see Steph in the morning, or after work on Monday, or at the courts on Wednesday night, and she is pulling away in her Jeep, and I am shattered.

*

It is my last morning in Arizona, and Alex and I are standing where the table used to be, and Katembe is wearing a lei we found in an old pile of Noah’s stuff, and the song “I Went To The Store One Day” comes on my speaker, and neither of us have ever heard the song, but we instinctively know it’s about us, and I look at the long, empty room, and I gasp, and I say, “My house!” and Alex reaches out to me, and I fall into his arms, and we gently rock back and forth, and I say, “I felt so safe here. I felt so loved here,” and he knows, and I know, and the song ends, and we walk hand in hand around the empty house, and he squeezes my hand as I cry, and we make our way outside, and I pull down the broken garage door that we never fixed, and I put Katembe and his lei in the truck, and I drive off.

July 27, 2025.

*

*

*

It is the second day of pre-service at my new school in Quito. I am riding the bus to school, and we are on the last street before the turn towards campus, and it is bumpy. I realize I have been staring at one particular mountain peak for a few minutes, dozing in and out of awareness. Suddenly, my mind springs awake, and I think, What mountain is that? And I realize I have no idea. And I don’t feel overwhelmed, and instead, unimaginably, I feel glad.

Sources:
1. Toni Carmine Salerno & Leela J. Willams, Sacred Earth Oracle, Llewellyn Publications, May 2018.
2. “Fort Huachuca History, 1877 to 1945,” Southwest Association of Buffalo Soldiers, n.d.: https://swabuffalosoldiers.org/history/fort-huachuca-history-1877-to-1945/