Settling In

Since my last entry I have been spending a lot of time in Carmen Pampa, settling in and starting to define my work with the university. I will be teaching one English class and working as a tutor as well. Additionally my roommate Sam and I will manage the new language lab on campus. It has about 30 computers and is used primarily by Eco-Tourism students. Eco-Tourism is the academic field that requires the most English from its graduates; unfortunately at this point many UAC-CP grads have very marginal English skills. Sam and I have been instructed to give special focus to students in this “carerra”or educational path.

In my last entry I included a picture of our main street, I thought some of you might be interested to learn more about what my new home looks like. I took a few pictures of the campus and the town. One of the defining characteristics of my school is that it geographically decentralized. The following picture illustrates this. On the right is Campus Leahy where I will be teaching, and on the far left is Campus Manning where I live and where most of the town is located. In between the two are a few homes and university run coffee processing facility.

Traveling between the two campuses isn’t exactly easy. There is a university owned bus that makes three trips a day, one in the morning, one at lunch and one in the evening. If you can’t take the bus waking is your only other option. Going up the mountain takes about 30 min while coming down take about 15. The route is interesting, most of it takes place on winding roads where “falling off a cliff” is a real possibility not just a figure of speech.

There are some shortcuts however, this one runs through a coffee grove.




The town itself is small and disorganized, the mountainous terrain makes the latter especially prevalent. Here is a picture of some of the typical buildings in Carmen Pampa. Some are homes and some are agricultural facilities. Also here is a picture of part of the campus, there is a lot of construction going on.

Last of all is the cancha where there are a lot of fútsal games. fútsal is 5 v. 5 soccer played on a hard court. It’s very popular here. The game is much faster than soccer and much harder for me to pick up. The students seem happy enough to let me play though. Sometimes I even talk them into playing basketball. They know the rules but don’t have a concept of the fundamentals at all. Trying to explain the idea of setting a pick has been too advanced for my Spanish.

Take care and thanks for you interest in my experience.

-andy