Weekend in review

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