Remember how I wrote a blog about not going back to school this August for the first time in forever (if you don’t, read it here)? Well, this month we are in Quito, Ecuador working at a school! I am helping teach English and, my favorite, science! We are working with teachers and students at T.W. Anderson, a Christian school that goes K-12. They gave us a warm greeting and pizza for lunch so obviously I was hooked.
Yesterday was our first day and walking out to where the bus would pick us up, we were laughing and joking about the typical first day of school fears. Would we make friends? Would we get lost? Would we have anyone to sit with at lunch? While we were mostly joking about these things, there was a small amount of validity in these fears. What if we didn’t click well with the teachers? What if the kids couldn’t understand us or vice versa? I knew that God has hand-picked my team to be the ones to work with this school but I couldn’t help but be a tad apprehensive as we got out of the school van.
Fast forward 3 hours and I was on a computer using Blast, the same technology that I used in my horned lizard research at TCU, to compare parts of the human cytochrome oxidase C gene with the same gene in chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. Needless to say, I was in my element. God put me in the right place at the right time and gave me the skills that were needed. It was almost comical how it happened. I was introduced to one of the other science teachers who doesn’t speak English by the teacher I was paired with and we were just talking about my experiences in science. When I mentioned that I had done a decent amount of work with genetics, she quickly showed me the textbook and the section on genetics that she was about to cover. She didn’t really understand how to use Blast and the program is entirely in English so I was able to help her run through the comparative analysis activity in the book (which was a but challenging because the instructions were in Spanish but I figured it out after a few attempts) and to save pictures of this analysis. I’ll be with her tomorrow to help teach/explain it to her class.
I am looking forward to an awesome month teaching at Anderson and getting to bless these kids through my knowledge of English and my passion for science. I also hope to be a resource to the teachers at the school and help them feel valued and loved. Next Tuesday is bring-your-own-invertebrate-to-science-class day and I have to say I am more than a little excited. My team, and basically my entire squad, has already said repeatedly how perfect this position is for me, especially after I excitedly explained what I did using Blast (Most of my team smiled and nodded politely because they could tell I was really excited and then thanked the Lord they weren’t asked about genetic databases). God is good and He can use our talents, no matter how obscure or random they seem (literally ANYTHING we can do), for the kingdom.
