Adventures in Peace: Paseo

Paseo is a great word in Spanish because it has so many meanings. My Spanish-English dictionary says “walk, stroll; drive, ride; promenade, boulevard;” it’s also what you call the aisle on a bus and/or a field trip. This blog will be about the latter (I know, shocking, but I cannot write a whole blog about the aisle of a bus).

Exploring caves

The whole class

Trapped by the tide=fútbol time

A few weeks ago during my first environmental education lesson up at the colegio (it was about living and non-living things, in case you were interested), some of the noveno kids asked me if I wanted to go to the beach with them. Apparently, the following day, just their class had a paseo planned which would be led by the science professor. This was in no way to be educational, just so you know, and so you don’t try to make the educational connection for the remainder of the blog. There won’t be one. So I said sure, I love the beach! And at 8am the following day, I spotted a group walking down the hill toward the beach. A group of boys showed up at my house and called up to my window (which is the best way to get a hold of me, in case you were looking) and soon thereafter, Sarah and I, the professor and her kids, and about 20 novenos headed off. The plan was to walk down the beach to the Cumilinche Club, a small resort/restaurant which is about 10 minutes on the road by car. Well, we made it about half way before we were trapped in by the tide. So typically Ecua, no one checked the time that the tide would be low enough to walk to our destination. Didn’t bother the kids though, they just got to playing some fútbol (obviously they brought a ball!) and blasting music from their phones. These kids don’t have much, but they all have nicer phones than me. Mostly JUST so that they can play music whenever there is a lull… my lil’ Nokia doesn’t do that. So then it was decided that we would head up and around the cliff that was jutting out into the water and making our path unpaseoable (you like that Spanglish? Just made it up). So we walk up and around, through some barbed wire, up a very steep hill with a very narrow path, and back down. At least the boys were little caballeros and helped all the ladies get safely through, offering their hands for the toughest parts. We continued on for a bit before “making camp,” which meant that some of the boys made campfire pits in the sand with rocks and sticks, then immediately put on some…. You guessed it, RICE! Gotta have rice. Even at the beach. So the kids played soccer by setting up some makeshift goal posts, buried each other in sand, and even showed off a little gymnastics skills. Meanwhile, the professor and her daughter made rice, chicken, and verde for everyone. I was pretty impressed at how well-prepared they all were; they had all the food, cookware and utencils, Coke, even lighter fluid ready to go. This was obviously not their first paseo! As time went on, I wondered when we might be leaving. School ends at 12:30, and most kids have to hop the ranchera to get home immediately after (or sometimes before class is over... I should say, class ends at 12:30 OR when the ranchera gets there, whatever comes first) so when it was just past noon and we hadn’t started walking yet, I figured it might be awhile. But no one was concerned with it, of course, so I shut up and took pictures of the kids- they LOVE posing in pictures (see below). So we ate, they swam and played soccer (didn’t wait 30 minutes after they ate, I know you were wondering), and eventually moseyed home, collecting shells and exploring caves as we went. It was a really fun day, I learned everyone’s name (I think?!), and I only got a mild sunburn. Triple win! Hooray for paseos!!

Steps for a successful paseo: