HA. You all thought I had finally fallen prey to blog enertia and given up. BUT NO. I was just in a coastal village with no internet access. Suckers. Sit tight, this is gonna be a long one.
Let´s see. We left Wednesday, spent a day in Guayaquil, the biggest city in Ecuador, which looks hoppin and awesome. Thursday, we drove up the coast and our directors dropped us off in pairs in little tiny pueblos, with only the name of the person we were staying with. The idea is that the pueblos are small enough that you can ask pretty much anyone where "Bella Lainez" lives and they can tell you. Theory proven. Onto the bulletpoints:
- My partner was a senior from George Washington named Margaret, which has a dry, goofy sense of humor to rival mine, so we had a pretty rockin good time. A veces, all we could do was laugh at the ridiculous shit that was going on around us. So I lucked out, partner-wise.
- Marge and I stayed with a family in their apartment above the shops they owned downstairs - a pharmacy, a tienda (little convenience store) and a bar. Upstairs, there were 5 bedrooms, a kitchen and a living room for 10 people, including a family of 5 in one bedroom. Only two of the 10 family members had steady jobs - one of the sisters owns the pharmacy, and one of the brothers owns the tienda and the bar. Neither of the abuelos (grandparents) worked, nor the oldest sister. The father of the family of 5 sometimes helped his brother out in the bar, and his wife made hats. This is very representative of the situation of most people in the town - there just isn´t very much work. 70% of the money earned in the town comes from tourism, which really only exists between December and April. Most of the rest is artesanía, or handicrafts, which it seems that everyone makes.
- The unemployment was especially evident living above a bar. About half the time, the only way we could get to the stairs to the apartment was by going through the bar. In the daytime, this involved ignoring the 2-5 drunk men that were always there, at any time of the day. At night, it meant we had to walk through a crowd of about 15 drunken jeering men. Ecuadoran men love blondes. I ended up leaving the town with a really profound respect for the women and a pretty intense disgust for the men. I was hit on by married men, men while their kids were standing there watching, men who would hold my wrists and not let me go until the bar owner kicked them out. Almost all of the worst of it happened before noon. Obviously, this is all a result of a really devastating lack of opportunities.
- About 10 years ago, something happened, and it stopped raining. As my family told me, "Ahora no hay invierno," or, "there´s no winter anymore." so crops can only be grown a couple months out of the year, and almost none of the food comes from there. While the abuelo supported his whole family on agriculture for his whole working life, that just isn´t possible anymore.
- Like I said, artesanía is the really big thing going on in the town. There are dozens of little stands selling hammocks, straw hats, knick-knacks, furniture. We stopped and talked to a lot of the people, and we ended up spending a lot of time at La Casa de las Hamackas, or the Hammock House. It´s a family business that sells gorgeous hammocks (one of which will be proudly on display in my room next year), jewelry, hats, etc. Basically all the places sell the same stuff. Anyway, we hung out with the girls that worked there and they taught us how to make hats. It takes about 3 days to make a hat, when you´re really fast, and so we made a little piece of it about the size of my palm, and they finished them into little mini hats for poodles when we came back to say goodbye the next day. Neither of these girls had attended high school, and they spend every day making handicrafts.
- We made friends with a Peace Corps Volunteer in the town. She only arrived about 2 months ago, so she was still getting to know the place a little bit. It gave me a much better idea of what doing the Peace Corps would really be like - basically what Marge and I did, execpt we got to leave after 5 days and she´s going to stay for 2 years. At first, 5 days even seemed to be pushing it, and I couldn´t imagine having to stay there for 2 years. However, as the end of the weekend neared, I started to see things a little more positively. No matter how small the town is, there´s always a million relationships and stories and events to understand and learn about. I think the isolation would be hard, as would the lack of direction - they send you somewhere, with a general theme (Brooke´s in the Health program), and then you spend 2 years coming up with projects. A little daunting.
- Because we were obviously the most exciting thing in town, we got invited to events that we had absolutely no business being at, such as a wedding and an Evangelical quinceañera. The wedding ceremony was interesting - it was a little special section of a regular Mass, and there were two couples getting married at the same time. Then the priest continued with the rest of Mass. So we went to Mass, waited about an hour, and showed up at the reception, thinking we´d be a little fashionably late or at least on time. WRONG. If there´s one thing wrong with gringos, it´s their punctuality. So we were literally the only ones not in the wedding party there for about 2 hours. Downside, very awkward. Upside, we are now the only ones with pictures of their first dance or toast, and they continually served us beer for the entire 2 hours. The wedding was on the beach, and during the first dance of the couple and each of their parents, there was a little boy clad in an Oshkosh fireman raincoat standing in the middle of everyone, crying, and throwing sand at the nicely dressed people, who completely ignored him. That alone was worth the entire trip. However, once all the Ecuadorans got there, we realized that we were LITERALLY the only women besides the bride drinking at the entire wedding, and were therefore not surprised when the town jóvenes (youngins) approached us an hit us with what I´m sure is their magic pick-up line: "So, which do you like better: tequila, or beer?"
- Our "host mother," or at least the lady we were paying to feed us, didn´t actually live in the house we were staying at. She was their sister, but she lived across the street. Anyway, I´m almost positive that she was mentally disabled. She made pretty good food, but gave us about 3 times too much. The title of the entry is a direct quote from my director about what to expect of coastal food. 4 of the 10 people living in the house with us had no teeth, including our host mother, which had a significantly greater effect on our ability to understand them than the coastal accent we had been warned so greatly about.
- We left our homestays Monday afternoon and went to meet back up with the group at an ecologically friendly lodge on the coast. Yes, after our challenging and eye-opening immersion into abject poverty, we went and played on the beach at a resort for 2 days. I literally spent all of Tuesday either in the ocean, running in the sand, playing beach soccer/volleyball, and collecting rocks. It´s a really rough life. Not to mention moonlit ocean skinnydipping...
Oy. Sorry. That´s not quite as funny as most are. It was a really amazing experience, and I can´t believe I´m now back in Quito with a laptop and an iPod and everything. And I wrote two essays today, which was jarring since I haven´t really done much major work here.
For the last month of the program, we all split up and go to different places throughout the country to work on projects of our choosing. I decided that I´m going to Ibarra, a city in Northern Ecuador, to work with an NGO assisting Colombian refugees. I´m really excited about it. None of my program buddies are going to be around me, so I´ll be speaking a lot more Spanish and be a lot more isolated than I have been so far. I think it´s going to be a great experience.
love!!
Alice
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Sunday, October 18, 2009
In the heart of the city
Just finished my first week in Quito, which is a really great city. We´re not here for very long - 10 days, then we´re on the coast for a week, then 10 more days, and we´re done - so I´m trying to cram everything in. Highlights:
1. Tuesday we went to La Basilica, which is a beautiful, old stone church that took 163 years to build. You can climb up into these giant towers, probably doing something like 800 stairs, some with questionable safety precautions.
2. The weather here has been surprisingly Seattle-like. It´s usually fairly sunny in the morning, and then around 2 pm (right when everyone leaves work to go home for lunch) it pours down rain for about 30 minutes. This week has been rainier than usual, which I appreciate. It helps me miss the Northwest fall a little less.
3. Wednesday Ecuador lost to Chile, which was the end of any World Cup aspirations. It was pretty heartbreaking, although the loss to Uruguay last Saturday was really the crucial nail in the coffin. Then Friday night we went to a Liga game, which is the most popular team in Quito. I love how much soccer there is here.
4. When we were in Los Chillos, we were taking Spanish classes for 5 hours a day, which were basically the biggest waste of time I´ve ever experienced. In Quito we start with our "Culture and Development" seminar, in which we have 1-2 lectures a day on different topics central to Ecuador from important people in the field. The subjects have included Development, Women, Human Rights, the Indigenous Movement, and Migration. It´s super interesting, but we really only have a week and a half of these lectures.
5. Friday night we found a bar that had relatively cheap shots, including some that they light on fire. You have to sip them through a straw in order not to burn yourself. Baller.
This is a short one. We leave for the coast for a week on Wednesday, so I´ll update after that.
1. Tuesday we went to La Basilica, which is a beautiful, old stone church that took 163 years to build. You can climb up into these giant towers, probably doing something like 800 stairs, some with questionable safety precautions.
2. The weather here has been surprisingly Seattle-like. It´s usually fairly sunny in the morning, and then around 2 pm (right when everyone leaves work to go home for lunch) it pours down rain for about 30 minutes. This week has been rainier than usual, which I appreciate. It helps me miss the Northwest fall a little less.
3. Wednesday Ecuador lost to Chile, which was the end of any World Cup aspirations. It was pretty heartbreaking, although the loss to Uruguay last Saturday was really the crucial nail in the coffin. Then Friday night we went to a Liga game, which is the most popular team in Quito. I love how much soccer there is here.
4. When we were in Los Chillos, we were taking Spanish classes for 5 hours a day, which were basically the biggest waste of time I´ve ever experienced. In Quito we start with our "Culture and Development" seminar, in which we have 1-2 lectures a day on different topics central to Ecuador from important people in the field. The subjects have included Development, Women, Human Rights, the Indigenous Movement, and Migration. It´s super interesting, but we really only have a week and a half of these lectures.
5. Friday night we found a bar that had relatively cheap shots, including some that they light on fire. You have to sip them through a straw in order not to burn yourself. Baller.
This is a short one. We leave for the coast for a week on Wednesday, so I´ll update after that.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Amazonía
OK, I´m back, and I can no longer put off writing this post. Well, actually I could, but that would involve going and watching Ecuadoran news with my mom and host sister, and I´d rather do this. Shit, I´m such a bad exchange student....
The Amazon was great. Here they call it the Oriente, which means East, because it´s on the East side of the country (not because it´s closer to the Orient). We were only gone for 5 days, 2 of those pretty full of traveling, so overall we were only in the jungle for about 3 days, which was not enough. Fortunately, I´m going back with my parents, aunt and uncle when they come down in December.
Highlights:
1. We spent part of a day in an indigenous village along the Río Napo. In the morning we did art projects and played tag with the kids, ranging from about first to sixth grade (they have to go to a different village for higher education). We got to see them go through their daily routine of songs, including the national anthem and some song that goes "Somos soldaditos/de chocolate" (we are the little chocolate soldiers). In return, they asked us to sing them our national anthem - probably the first time in quite a while that most of us had sang the whole thing out loud (fortunately we remembered the words).
Then we did a minga (a community project), in which we planted a bunch of different fruit trees along the edge of the river that borders the community. In reality, the kids did it for us, because gringos obviously don´t know how to plant jack. But it´s the effort that counts, right?
In the afternoon we played a game of soccer against what seemed like the whole town. If you were to actually count everyone that was on the field (which was easily bigger than Whitman´s, which is about the biggest legally allowed by FIFA), it was probably about 10 of us against 20 of them. The fact that their average age was probably 11 doesn´t matter. The average 11-year-old here probably has skill equivalent to a high school varsity player in the US. (Boys, that is - women here generally do not play soccer. In fact, I absolutely SHOCKED one of my friend´s host cousins when I told him that there are, *gasp*, girls in the US that are better at soccer than me. I think he had the idea I was about national team caliber. Maybe I should´ve let him keep thinking that...)
2. I´m sure most of you have now seen the pictures of me and Mona. However, don´t be fooled by her wooly, charming outer shell. In reality, she´s a sexist little bitch. She wouldn´t go anywhere near any of the women for the first day we were there, but was all over the guys constantly. When she finally "warmed up" to me, she actually just latched herself onto my face and tried to chew my eyebrow off. But it was totally worth it.
3. I´m now with my new host family in Quito. It´s just the mom, her 20-year-old daugher, and (drumroll....) their miniature dachshund! No, seriously, I´m not kidding. Her name is Chupeta (which I think means popsicle, but don´t quote me on that), and she looks exactly like Chestnut. She´s just about as spoiled, too.
I´m super stoked to be in Quito. As a general rule, the Quito families are less affluent, so my host mom works all day and my host sister takes classes and works. Ergo, I will have a lot of free time to roam the city and not feel guilty about not being home socializing with my host family. Host families are probably the most enriching part of the study abroad experience - I think they´re indispensible, especially when you´re trying to learn a language. However, they´re also exhausting and can be boring. I might learn Spanish by idly chatting and watching anime dubbed en Español, but that doesn´t mean I enjoy it. Also, it´s a huge adjustment to go from the freedom of US universities to a house in which you have to ask permission to go out at night. We all felt like we had been wisked back to high school. And again, I don´t mean this to sound negative. In a lot of ways, I really like the heavy emphasis on family in Ecuadoran (and broader Latin American) society. Young people have more respect for their parents, and in exchange the parents take care of them for a long time, which has certain monetary benefits. ´
That´s all. Love!
Alice
The Amazon was great. Here they call it the Oriente, which means East, because it´s on the East side of the country (not because it´s closer to the Orient). We were only gone for 5 days, 2 of those pretty full of traveling, so overall we were only in the jungle for about 3 days, which was not enough. Fortunately, I´m going back with my parents, aunt and uncle when they come down in December.
Highlights:
1. We spent part of a day in an indigenous village along the Río Napo. In the morning we did art projects and played tag with the kids, ranging from about first to sixth grade (they have to go to a different village for higher education). We got to see them go through their daily routine of songs, including the national anthem and some song that goes "Somos soldaditos/de chocolate" (we are the little chocolate soldiers). In return, they asked us to sing them our national anthem - probably the first time in quite a while that most of us had sang the whole thing out loud (fortunately we remembered the words).
Then we did a minga (a community project), in which we planted a bunch of different fruit trees along the edge of the river that borders the community. In reality, the kids did it for us, because gringos obviously don´t know how to plant jack. But it´s the effort that counts, right?
In the afternoon we played a game of soccer against what seemed like the whole town. If you were to actually count everyone that was on the field (which was easily bigger than Whitman´s, which is about the biggest legally allowed by FIFA), it was probably about 10 of us against 20 of them. The fact that their average age was probably 11 doesn´t matter. The average 11-year-old here probably has skill equivalent to a high school varsity player in the US. (Boys, that is - women here generally do not play soccer. In fact, I absolutely SHOCKED one of my friend´s host cousins when I told him that there are, *gasp*, girls in the US that are better at soccer than me. I think he had the idea I was about national team caliber. Maybe I should´ve let him keep thinking that...)
2. I´m sure most of you have now seen the pictures of me and Mona. However, don´t be fooled by her wooly, charming outer shell. In reality, she´s a sexist little bitch. She wouldn´t go anywhere near any of the women for the first day we were there, but was all over the guys constantly. When she finally "warmed up" to me, she actually just latched herself onto my face and tried to chew my eyebrow off. But it was totally worth it.
3. I´m now with my new host family in Quito. It´s just the mom, her 20-year-old daugher, and (drumroll....) their miniature dachshund! No, seriously, I´m not kidding. Her name is Chupeta (which I think means popsicle, but don´t quote me on that), and she looks exactly like Chestnut. She´s just about as spoiled, too.
I´m super stoked to be in Quito. As a general rule, the Quito families are less affluent, so my host mom works all day and my host sister takes classes and works. Ergo, I will have a lot of free time to roam the city and not feel guilty about not being home socializing with my host family. Host families are probably the most enriching part of the study abroad experience - I think they´re indispensible, especially when you´re trying to learn a language. However, they´re also exhausting and can be boring. I might learn Spanish by idly chatting and watching anime dubbed en Español, but that doesn´t mean I enjoy it. Also, it´s a huge adjustment to go from the freedom of US universities to a house in which you have to ask permission to go out at night. We all felt like we had been wisked back to high school. And again, I don´t mean this to sound negative. In a lot of ways, I really like the heavy emphasis on family in Ecuadoran (and broader Latin American) society. Young people have more respect for their parents, and in exchange the parents take care of them for a long time, which has certain monetary benefits. ´
That´s all. Love!
Alice
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