Schools and playgrounds in Ecuador

     Imagine that you are in a fancy palace and the Queen of England and Barack Obama are eating a feast with you.  It's a lot different than where you live.  You live in a small, poor, town with a little bit to eat each day.  Then imagine switching places.  You are used to eating big feasts with important people.  But you live in a small town with little to eat. I am in Cuenca, Ecuador right now, and the way that the kids live aren't exactly what someone from the U.S would be used to. The way kids live in different places can differ a lot sometimes.

     The schools that children go to in Cuenca, Ecuador are different than the ones in New York.  Cuenca is a small city where education might not be the top priority.  New York is a place where a lot of schools have important resources. For instance, when I went to visit a school in Cuenca with my Spanish tutor, the school was nothing like Berkeley Carroll.  The school was a building with a giant courtyard and classrooms surrounding it.  The kids were all milling around or hanging out on the bleachers with their friends.  Some kids were buying treats from the school junk food shop with chips, candy and other snacks.  Some kids were running around and playing tag.  Some of the kids were learning, though.  But, the downside to that is that there are 40 to 50 kids in a classroom.  With that many people, no one ends up learning much at all.  Another thing that I noticed about this school was that it was not a very nice building.  The courtyard was covered with old wrappers and junk.  The classrooms had metal bars on the windows to keep the thieves out. Inside the classrooms, there were a bunch of desks and a dirty stone floor.  It seemed like the school classrooms were very run down.  In Berkeley Carroll and PS 321,the schools I have gone to, have nicer facilities.  The classrooms aren't as run down or as dirty. I wasn't sure if this was true in most schools, but later I asked my tutor, who used to be a teacher in Cuenca, and she told me that most schools looked that way.  This is because New York City spends more money on education than Cuenca.

     In Cuenca and Quito, the playgrounds I have been to are different than ones in New York.  In Ecuador, what kids might find interesting in a playground might be different than what a kid might think in the United States.  For example, in all the playgrounds that I have been to in Ecuador, there is a swing attached to a zip line.  I have never seen this in New York.  Most of the parks in Cuenca have seesaws.  They do have them in New York but not at most playgrounds I go to.  One isn't better than the other, but they are very different.

     In various places around the world, kids live in variety of ways.  Think about places you have gone in the world.  Do you think people's everyday lives are different?