As you've probably already read I had a bad experience with the Atahualpa Spanish School. So bad infact they have:

• threatened to block my girlfriend and I from leaving Ecuador
• made reports to the local police
• chased us around the streets of Quito
• have made crazy threats about sueing us in Ecuador and back home in Europe.

The question I'm sure your asking is what happened to start all this? Where do we start?

After arriving in Quito we were transported to the Schools main office in Quito. We went through the programme with the Director Martha, albeit difficulty owing to their lack of English and our lack of Spanish. At the end of the meeting Martha asked for all the money up-front, fortunately we neither had the money on us or wanted to give this substantial sum without first checking the whole thing out so we told them we would pay later when we had seen everything was OK.

Unfortunatley things weren't OK. The guest house they had for us was nothing like the one pictured online. It was dirty, extremly noisy and was so bare even a London estate agent would of been embarresed to describe it as modest. The worst thing was the toilet however - with dirty leaking pipes and an infamous Suicide Shower going to the toilet or for a shower was always eventful.

What they advertise

Looks like a pleasant little country bungalow to me.

What you get

A concrete box complete with noisy shop, neighbours, dogs, pigs and a main bus route just meters from your door

Perhaps one of the worst aspects of the school though was the location of the project. We always believed we would have been near Quito. Its turns out we were in an incredibly poor district of the Los Chilos Valley about 40 minutes away by car. Being on our own and not speaking Spanish at that stage left us vulnerable and isolated in what we believed to be a dangerous neighbourhood. Infact even when things did go wrong later we didn't even have anyone to contact in the event of an emergency.

Organisation

One of the big problems with the Atahualpa School was its set-up. We came to volunteer and help teach English in a School but the most important reason we came was to learn Spanish. That being the case the school completely failed to realise what volunteering and studying entails and the programme they designed was devoid of logic. For example the accomodation was totally unsuitable for study never mind sleep - due to the noise and lack of furniture. The hours they required of students to volunteer meant it was almost impossible to do simple things like prepare food or wash clothes. I really believe they didn't have the first idea of what volunteering entailed.

Before we arrived we were assured that our lack of Spanish wouldn't be a problem, but it turned out to be a huge problem. In the volunteering for example we had no way of communicating with the the other teachers let alone the students. Indeed in my school I was supposed to teach english to Nursery School children. This was almost impossible as the children hardly had Spanish let alone English so I was made to waste time drawing toothbrushes.

While the organisational problems are hardly the end of the world I think that if I am asked to pay over $1000 I should be able to expect a reasonable level of service. Unfortunately with Atahualpa Spanish School they proved time and again that they did not only fail to understand the needs of their clients but worse they didn't care.

Teaching

At Atahualpa we were told all of their teachers were experienced and professional. Admittadly my teacher was fine however my girlfriend got a teacher who by his own admission had little experience. Infact he was so unprofessional that apart from displaying a complete lack of interest in the job he was constantly checking his mobile phone. Needless to say the lessons where a waste of time.

Electrocution

Remember the Suicide Shower I talked about above? Well during a visit by them on the third day I told them about the shower, the exposed live wiring and how at the very least they need to insulate the wiring to prevent an Electric Shock. I tried to point out the urgency of this but the Directors Husband Vicente seemed unimpressed and explained it was fine. I disagreed and demanded they insulate the wiring as quickly as possible. Two days later they hadn't bothered to do anything and unsurprizingly my girlfriend received a bad shock in the shower.

Leaving

After what we experienced above and a few other incidents after 6 days and no signs of improvement we decided that no amount of talking could resolve the difficulties we had with the school and therefore decided the only thing for us to do was to pack our bags and go. As we had no contact details we emailed the school of our plans and left promptly the next morning. Considering what had happened we really felt that we should be compensated for what had happened but this being Ecuador we decided to offer a goodwill gesture of $150 if they would let us go on unhindered. Unfortunatley they refused our offer and wanted substantially more. Normally something like this could be solved amacably but given their lack of English, our fear of the Directors Husband and their threats of police action we simply weren't prepared to meet face to face. They have repeatadly refused to accept our offer and have continued to threaten us with police and legal action.