chokecherries on the river: Summer school

This will probably be the last time I teach a summer school class, not because I don't enjoy it when I'm there, but because it's just too difficult to prepare for class, for Ecuador, for summer at home, and to get all the many, many loose ends tied up that need to be (not tied up as in finished off, but as in headed into a design not yet designed in the complex weave of things). We just got an email yesterday from the people who own and run the elementary school below saying that someone broke into their computer room and stole all the newly-refurbished equipment in there. They say the same thing they always do about the neighborhood where the school in located, at the northwest edge of Quito: that there are gangs running around & that there are drugs being sold. The school is private, which means they have to ask for tuition, but it is at a minimal rate because of the poverty in the region. They originally had two classrooms for every grade level, but they have cut back to one each for many of them because they can't compete with the public schools, which have been given more state financial support over the past three years (and into which, they claim, students are crammed like sardines).