A Regime Change.

In June, right before I left Ibarra, there was an election for Mayor of Ibarra. The two main opponents were Jorge Martinez (a member of Rafael Correa´s political party) and Pablo Jurado (the current Mayor at the time). Martinez won by a large margin and it seemed everyone was happy.

Well, not so many people are happy now. I have to admit, maybe there was corruption in the government with the previous mayor, but things ran so much smoother! For example, parking was regulated. Now it is not, and traffic is horrible (at least this is what I´ve heard from people in Ibarra). And before, our director, who we call Doctora, was solely in charge of CECAMI with our ever wonderful secretary, Martha. Yes, they had lots of free time and did wash their cars, do online shopping, and put on makeup during office hours. Buuuut, CECAMI was organized, coordinated, and ran well! Now, it´s chaos! The Doctora has been put in charge of Human Resources within the City Hall and CECAMI! And Martha is always with her. We have a new secretary, Lupe, who never does her work. This resulted in not even knowing who was signed up for classes nor which classes I would have for the first day of classes. Literally, there were a bunch of students for Intermediate III and Advanced III waiting outside the office and they didn´t do anything! I took them into my room and told them that I didn´t know which levels I was going to teach, so lets just play some games! Absolutely inefficient. I´ve decided now that I will teach Basic I and Advanced III - completely opposite classes, which means twice the amount of work for me. And now I hear we don´t have money to buy a big bottle of water for the office so we will have to buy that ourselves and that we might be paid later. It´s just crazy!

I think that Ecuador is far different than the US in terms of politics. Here, you really feel the changes at an individual level when there is a political party change. In the States, I feel that usually when a new politician comes to power, no one feels a difference. Maybe that´s why people here are so politically active and people in the US are mainly pretty politically apathetic.