Lists are really my favorite way to organize things. so here we go:
1. Saturday we had crab, which we bought live and then had to kill. meaning, my family made me help them kill a whole bunch of crabs - like 40. and then they laughed at me for being squeamish. this from the family who told me they prayed that I wouldn´t be a vegetarian.
2. My sister has these two little turtles - they´re about the size of the palm of my hand. She won´t name them, because if you name things you´re sad when they die. but the other day I did come into her room and find her, her brother, and all of the turtles lying in bed (they´re 17 and 21, but seriously, that´s not the weird part). And today, after our really fancy lunch with guests, the turtles were brought in and walked all around the table. So, to summarize, turtles rank somewhere in between getting to roam all over beds and the place that we eat and deserving names.
3. There´s only one club in Los Chillos, the town I´m staying in. Of course, we could go to Quito, but I think we keep getting lazy and just going to the Red Hot Chili Kingas (I don´t know if there is an explanaition for this name or if they just got the band name wrong. There are also paintings all over the walls of different US bands, but a lot of them have incorrect members in them - like Keith Richards plus the Chili Peppers, etc). After going there Friday night with 21 other people on my program, and dancing on the bar with half of them, my brother and his friends decided they wanted to go there Saturday night. OK, fine. It has booze, it has music, that´s generally good enough for me. However, I did get kind of embarressed when the doorman recognized me as I was scrambling to pull out my ID. Direct (although translated) quote: "Oh, it´s OK. She was here yesterday. And the week before. And the week before...." I guess I don´t look Ecuadoran enough to blend in.
4. Tuesday we went to one of the low-income elementary schools in the area, and in groups of about 3, taught classes for the morning. I had 7th graders (artfully avoiding my fear of children by picking kids that were about as big as I was). I ended up giving them a 40 minute American history lecture (in Spanish), which they listened to incredibly closely, and even asked questions. One of them asked why someone had thrown a shoe at George Bush, another why there was racism in the US (according to the world´s smartest 7th grader, there isn´t any in Ecuador). I was super stoked, and shocked that I managed to get a bunch of 12 year olds to listen that long.
5. Tuesday afternoon I went to the world´s most pathetic theme park with my mom, my 17 year old sister and her 3 friends. They literally would start the ride for just the 4 of them, because there were only about 15 people in the entire park. Anyway, while we were watching them, I asked my mom what she thought about my host brothers´girlfriends. It ended up starting this long conversation about how she thinks that you have to marry within your social class or you will ultimately have problems. Apparently, she doesn´t think my brothers´ girlfriends exactly come from the appropriate families or statuses. Although she also told me that her older son "doesn´t care whether a girl has a pretty face, or a nice body, just what´s in her mind," as if this was a bad thing. She also said that if you´re a darker-skinned person (which she and her kids are, compared to a lot of Ecuadorans), you need to marry a lighter skinned person, presumably so that your kids will be lighter-skinned as well. It´s really interesting because classism is significantly more blatant here. No one would ever say that in the US, although I think it´s something a lot of people think about more than they would like to admit. On the other hand, I think part of her reasoning is that girls from a lower social class wouldn´t know how to run the house as well, maybe because their mothers worked when they were younger (my host mom is "una ama de casa," or housewife). I wondered what she would think of me - sure, in Ecuadoran terms, I have money, and I´m certainly light-skinned, but I don´t know jackshit about taking care of kids, or a house, or cooking for a family, nor would I agree to take that role.
6. We had a lecture today on the cosmology of the Amazon, including a little section on, ahem, "herbal experiences." There´s this ceremony called Awayaska, which involves a mix of several different hallucinogens, which allegedly enables mind-reading, talking to the dead, and future-telling. While we are prohibited from doing this during the program (apparently, a couple years ago, some student decided to try one of the hallucinogenic flowers and went completely blind for 3 minutes), it´s apparently a very amazing experience. The interesting thing is that these ceremonies, at least in the traditional villages, are restricted to men. The traditional indigenous reason for this is that women already have enough power - not only the power to give birth to other humans, but the erotic power over men. This attitude towards women´s power also appears in traditional African feminist thought.
7. I have 3 more days at this homestay, in Los Chillos, then I go to the Amazon for a week, and then I move into a new homestay in Quito. While I´m going to miss my family here - they´re all super friendly, helpful and fun - I´m looking forward to getting out of this town (imagine the Eastside of Lake Washington, without having a car to get to Seattle). I think it´ll be great to move to a more fast-paced, city lifestyle.
OK, that´s certainly enough information for now. I imagine no one´s going to get through that in one go. I´ll update again after the rainforest.
Love,
Alice
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
A weekend in the clouds
Hello all! I just returned yesterday from Intag, which is a cloud forest in the mountains of Ecuador about 3-4 hours North of Quito. We spent 4 days on this amazing farm that grows all its own food and operates without electricity or running water. It was incredibly beautiful - we were a short walk away from two waterfalls and a river, plus amazing hiking trails through the jungle. A few notes on the weekend:
1. (Note: I heard this lecture in Spanish, meaning I´m a little fuzzy on some of the details. My apologies). Intag is an area of incredible biodiversity, home to many species found infrequently or nowhere else in the world. However, it is also an area rich in minerals, which has attracted mining companies from all over the world (predominantly Canada). The most major way in which mining disrupts ecosystems is by contaminating the water supply. Runoff from mines seeps into rivers, lakes, and through the soil, killing plants and animals and putting the local population at extreme risk. Its been found that when a water supply is contaminated, the sector of the population most effected is the children. In areas that have been previously mined, there are incredibly high rates of cancer among the local people, especially young ones.
The Intag community has succeeded in getting much of the land, including the farm on which we stayed, named as a national reserve, meaning it cannot be exploited for its natural resources like minerals and petroleum. But not without an effort. The tactic used to procure land for mining is for a ¨junior company,¨one that is not extremely large or well known, to go into areas rich in minerals and buy up land through bribery, intimidation and force. Then the main mining companies come in to exploit the product. The owner of the farm has been a prominent figure in the anti-mining movement, to the extent that in 2006 a junior mining company hired 15 off-duty and retired policemen and soldiers to come to the farm to arrest him on a sketchy charge made by an employee of the mining company. The ultimate intent was not to have the charge stick, but to hire someone to kill him in jail (apparently very easy and relatively cheap). He ended up hiding in the woods and in friends houses for over a month before the charges were dropped, with no help from either the Ecuadoran or US government (he´s an expat from Wisconsin).
Many of these companies come from Canada for two reasons: one, there are apparently few regulations on the companies that trade in the Toronto Stock Exchange - so these junior companies can be listed on the TSE despite being relatively illegitimate and the perpetrators of bribes, intimidation and assassination. The second is that while Canada is one of the most minerally rich countries in the world, there are laws against contaminating in Canada. Therefore, these companies have to find other countries to contaminate.
2. Onto a lighter topic: now, I have never been much of a coffee drinker. The occasional mocha (with enough chocolate so I can´t taste the coffee) is about as far as I go. However, at the farm we stayed at last weekend, they grew, roasted and brewed their own coffee - and it was completely amazing. Ironically, though Ecuador grows some of the best coffee in the world, people here drink Nestle intant coffee, probably packaged in Charlottesville or something ridiculous like that. I spent the entire weekend totally wired because I was having about 10 times as much coffee as my system is used to at every meal. And today, I feel terrible....coincidence?
3. On the way home, a few friends and I stopped at a restaurant that listed ¨Chocolate con Ron¨(ron = rum) as one of the drink options, which sounded amazing and I obviously had to try. However, we´re not actually sure they even put water inthe chocolate - it tasted more like they heated up a big mug of rum and sprinkled chocolate powder in it. Word to the wise.
4. I ran into a rose bush while playing soccer on Monday night. Slight complication: rose bush was surrounded in barbed wire. Ouch.
5. Even though we did have lectures while we were gone - including a fascinating 2.5 hour history lecture - I got to listen to them while in a hammock. Winner.
And now I´m back in Los Chillos. Unfortunately, I do still have to go to school, which I had completely forgotten about while in Intag. However, we only have 7 more days of Spanish class (which is mind-numbingly boring), and then all our classes are going to be seminars on history, politics, economics, development, social movements, etc. I´m pretty excited for those - so far they´ve all been really interesting. And in about 10 days we head to the Amazon, which is going to be sick. It´s completely ridiculous how quickly time goes here.
Hasta luego,
Alice
1. (Note: I heard this lecture in Spanish, meaning I´m a little fuzzy on some of the details. My apologies). Intag is an area of incredible biodiversity, home to many species found infrequently or nowhere else in the world. However, it is also an area rich in minerals, which has attracted mining companies from all over the world (predominantly Canada). The most major way in which mining disrupts ecosystems is by contaminating the water supply. Runoff from mines seeps into rivers, lakes, and through the soil, killing plants and animals and putting the local population at extreme risk. Its been found that when a water supply is contaminated, the sector of the population most effected is the children. In areas that have been previously mined, there are incredibly high rates of cancer among the local people, especially young ones.
The Intag community has succeeded in getting much of the land, including the farm on which we stayed, named as a national reserve, meaning it cannot be exploited for its natural resources like minerals and petroleum. But not without an effort. The tactic used to procure land for mining is for a ¨junior company,¨one that is not extremely large or well known, to go into areas rich in minerals and buy up land through bribery, intimidation and force. Then the main mining companies come in to exploit the product. The owner of the farm has been a prominent figure in the anti-mining movement, to the extent that in 2006 a junior mining company hired 15 off-duty and retired policemen and soldiers to come to the farm to arrest him on a sketchy charge made by an employee of the mining company. The ultimate intent was not to have the charge stick, but to hire someone to kill him in jail (apparently very easy and relatively cheap). He ended up hiding in the woods and in friends houses for over a month before the charges were dropped, with no help from either the Ecuadoran or US government (he´s an expat from Wisconsin).
Many of these companies come from Canada for two reasons: one, there are apparently few regulations on the companies that trade in the Toronto Stock Exchange - so these junior companies can be listed on the TSE despite being relatively illegitimate and the perpetrators of bribes, intimidation and assassination. The second is that while Canada is one of the most minerally rich countries in the world, there are laws against contaminating in Canada. Therefore, these companies have to find other countries to contaminate.
2. Onto a lighter topic: now, I have never been much of a coffee drinker. The occasional mocha (with enough chocolate so I can´t taste the coffee) is about as far as I go. However, at the farm we stayed at last weekend, they grew, roasted and brewed their own coffee - and it was completely amazing. Ironically, though Ecuador grows some of the best coffee in the world, people here drink Nestle intant coffee, probably packaged in Charlottesville or something ridiculous like that. I spent the entire weekend totally wired because I was having about 10 times as much coffee as my system is used to at every meal. And today, I feel terrible....coincidence?
3. On the way home, a few friends and I stopped at a restaurant that listed ¨Chocolate con Ron¨(ron = rum) as one of the drink options, which sounded amazing and I obviously had to try. However, we´re not actually sure they even put water inthe chocolate - it tasted more like they heated up a big mug of rum and sprinkled chocolate powder in it. Word to the wise.
4. I ran into a rose bush while playing soccer on Monday night. Slight complication: rose bush was surrounded in barbed wire. Ouch.
5. Even though we did have lectures while we were gone - including a fascinating 2.5 hour history lecture - I got to listen to them while in a hammock. Winner.
And now I´m back in Los Chillos. Unfortunately, I do still have to go to school, which I had completely forgotten about while in Intag. However, we only have 7 more days of Spanish class (which is mind-numbingly boring), and then all our classes are going to be seminars on history, politics, economics, development, social movements, etc. I´m pretty excited for those - so far they´ve all been really interesting. And in about 10 days we head to the Amazon, which is going to be sick. It´s completely ridiculous how quickly time goes here.
Hasta luego,
Alice
Sunday, September 13, 2009
English and its inability to adequately express the emotion of love
Few tidbits from the week:
1. My program director had an interesting quote this week. She was talking about how, when people of two different native languages are conversing, if a word in one language doesn´t have a translation in the other, it doesn´t exist in the reality of the conversation. For instance, there is no word for ¨compromise¨in Spanish - or Italian, French, Portuguese, or any other Romance language, for that matter. It´s something of an Anglo-Saxon concept. But in Spanish, there are two words for love - querer (general love) y amor (romantic love). ¨Whereas English is ridiculous - I love my country like I love my shoes like I love my boyfriend like I love my grandmother.¨ What an interesting thing to think about.
2. I watched a hilarious game show on TV the other day. It was called ¨Que dice la gente,¨or ¨What the people say,¨and I guess it´s basically like Family Feud. People are asked general questions (ones without one concrete right answer), and answers that more people have said in the past get greater point totals.
Anyway, one of the questions while I was watching was, I kid you not, ¨What are Chinese people known for?¨ And - to my shock - the number 1 answer given was, ¨Squinty eyes.¨ No joke. The number two answer was, ¨Martial Arts.¨ I told my host sister, who was completely unphased, how incredibly inappropriate that would be in the US, and she didn´t seem to get it.
This is just one example of how much more openly people talk about race here - my host father calls my host mother ¨Negrita¨(which means dark girl, basically) as a term of affection. It´s really interesting to talk to them about the different taboos we have in the States - because they certainly have their lines of appropriateness that we cross, as well.
3. I´ve been playing pick up soccer a couple times a week, and the altitude is so killer. I´m in Los Chillos, which is a valley just outside of Quito, and is ringed on all sides by Andean volcanoes. Not only are we at about 9,000 ft, but because it´s the dry season in the Sierra right now, there are TONS of forest fires. If you go up on any hill on any side of the city, you can see 5-10 different plumes of smoke in various parts of the Valley. Makes breathing that much harder. However, it´s pretty fun - Friday I scored 7 goals in about an hour. All the machistas are super impressed.
4. It´s kind of hard to keep myself from just hanging out with English speakers - obviously I speak Spanish at home with my host family, but as soon as I get with the other people from my program, we start speaking English. It´s just so easy to fall into - in English, I´m witty, intelligent, and interesting. In Spanish, I´m pretty boring. I can´t really express opinions well and I´m definitely not funny. And the people on my program are so awesome - tons of people who are interested in the same things as me, love to go out, and super open to new Ecuadorian things. Trying to find a balance, for sure.
Love,
Alice
1. My program director had an interesting quote this week. She was talking about how, when people of two different native languages are conversing, if a word in one language doesn´t have a translation in the other, it doesn´t exist in the reality of the conversation. For instance, there is no word for ¨compromise¨in Spanish - or Italian, French, Portuguese, or any other Romance language, for that matter. It´s something of an Anglo-Saxon concept. But in Spanish, there are two words for love - querer (general love) y amor (romantic love). ¨Whereas English is ridiculous - I love my country like I love my shoes like I love my boyfriend like I love my grandmother.¨ What an interesting thing to think about.
2. I watched a hilarious game show on TV the other day. It was called ¨Que dice la gente,¨or ¨What the people say,¨and I guess it´s basically like Family Feud. People are asked general questions (ones without one concrete right answer), and answers that more people have said in the past get greater point totals.
Anyway, one of the questions while I was watching was, I kid you not, ¨What are Chinese people known for?¨ And - to my shock - the number 1 answer given was, ¨Squinty eyes.¨ No joke. The number two answer was, ¨Martial Arts.¨ I told my host sister, who was completely unphased, how incredibly inappropriate that would be in the US, and she didn´t seem to get it.
This is just one example of how much more openly people talk about race here - my host father calls my host mother ¨Negrita¨(which means dark girl, basically) as a term of affection. It´s really interesting to talk to them about the different taboos we have in the States - because they certainly have their lines of appropriateness that we cross, as well.
3. I´ve been playing pick up soccer a couple times a week, and the altitude is so killer. I´m in Los Chillos, which is a valley just outside of Quito, and is ringed on all sides by Andean volcanoes. Not only are we at about 9,000 ft, but because it´s the dry season in the Sierra right now, there are TONS of forest fires. If you go up on any hill on any side of the city, you can see 5-10 different plumes of smoke in various parts of the Valley. Makes breathing that much harder. However, it´s pretty fun - Friday I scored 7 goals in about an hour. All the machistas are super impressed.
4. It´s kind of hard to keep myself from just hanging out with English speakers - obviously I speak Spanish at home with my host family, but as soon as I get with the other people from my program, we start speaking English. It´s just so easy to fall into - in English, I´m witty, intelligent, and interesting. In Spanish, I´m pretty boring. I can´t really express opinions well and I´m definitely not funny. And the people on my program are so awesome - tons of people who are interested in the same things as me, love to go out, and super open to new Ecuadorian things. Trying to find a balance, for sure.
Love,
Alice
Monday, September 7, 2009
Alicia en el pais de los maravillas
Back! Two important things since the last post:
1. I´m now with my homestay family! They´re super great - the dad is a really talented artist who´s travelled all over the world selling his art, the mom dotes on me like a mother hen (and also corrects my terrible Spanish, which is really helpful), two older brothers and one 17 year old sister. The brothers spend most of their time playing Halo - the older one´s room is covered in anime posters, and the first time I met the younger one he was wearing an ¨Everything I know I learned from Zelda¨t-shirt. Speaking Spanish all day long is super exhausting, and there were parts of this weekend in which I freaked out a bit. But those times passed, of course. Yesterday we went on a hike to a super awesome waterfall. The most touching times are when you realize how completely similar people of different nationalities really are - like the dad who loves mountain climbing, like my dad, and the mom who packed us a huge, awesome lunch for the end of the hike.
2. Saturday night I went to a bullfight, which was shocking and amazing. First of all, bullfights in Ecuador are not like those in Spain, where the matadores are professional and inflict great harm on the bulls in order to rile them up. Here, the ¨matadores¨are just drunk spectators that climb into this giant ring and run around, alternately taunting and running away from the bull. The event is housed in this three story stadium made of thousands of pieces of wood tied together with cloth at the corners, so it looks like it could fall down at any minute. To get to the second or third floors (where we watched from), one must climb up ladders through trap doors in the floor. On the field, there are easily 100 macho men running around drunkenly, plus maybe 10 horse riders. The only people that I saw get hurt (I don´t think I saw anyone get gored, because all of them got up and walked afterwards) were ones that were so drunk they tripped and fell trying to run away from the bulls. Later, my host mother told me that 20 people die annually in Los Chillos (my town) in these bullfights - a number which is obviously exaggerated, but still shows the community´s perception of how dangerous these spectacles are. How fucking weird.
That´s all for now. I´m trying to keep my interneting down to twice a week, which I have so far been completely incapable of doing. But, it´s good to have goals.
love, Alice
1. I´m now with my homestay family! They´re super great - the dad is a really talented artist who´s travelled all over the world selling his art, the mom dotes on me like a mother hen (and also corrects my terrible Spanish, which is really helpful), two older brothers and one 17 year old sister. The brothers spend most of their time playing Halo - the older one´s room is covered in anime posters, and the first time I met the younger one he was wearing an ¨Everything I know I learned from Zelda¨t-shirt. Speaking Spanish all day long is super exhausting, and there were parts of this weekend in which I freaked out a bit. But those times passed, of course. Yesterday we went on a hike to a super awesome waterfall. The most touching times are when you realize how completely similar people of different nationalities really are - like the dad who loves mountain climbing, like my dad, and the mom who packed us a huge, awesome lunch for the end of the hike.
2. Saturday night I went to a bullfight, which was shocking and amazing. First of all, bullfights in Ecuador are not like those in Spain, where the matadores are professional and inflict great harm on the bulls in order to rile them up. Here, the ¨matadores¨are just drunk spectators that climb into this giant ring and run around, alternately taunting and running away from the bull. The event is housed in this three story stadium made of thousands of pieces of wood tied together with cloth at the corners, so it looks like it could fall down at any minute. To get to the second or third floors (where we watched from), one must climb up ladders through trap doors in the floor. On the field, there are easily 100 macho men running around drunkenly, plus maybe 10 horse riders. The only people that I saw get hurt (I don´t think I saw anyone get gored, because all of them got up and walked afterwards) were ones that were so drunk they tripped and fell trying to run away from the bulls. Later, my host mother told me that 20 people die annually in Los Chillos (my town) in these bullfights - a number which is obviously exaggerated, but still shows the community´s perception of how dangerous these spectacles are. How fucking weird.
That´s all for now. I´m trying to keep my interneting down to twice a week, which I have so far been completely incapable of doing. But, it´s good to have goals.
love, Alice
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