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
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