Sanctuary

The church atop a hill near Montañita houses a Virgin Mary that was recorded to have cried one day in 1990. Scientific studies have provided further support to the idea that this statue acted as a conduit for a modern miracle. It´s enough to make one wonder what he or she truly believes.

Home for Christmas

Well, my mother’s birthday yesterday marked my having spent just over three months in this country. I find it difficult to believe and yet completely understandable all at the same time. When I think about how my Spanish has improved, for instance, I realize I’ve advanced by leaps and bounds. When I think about how far my Spanish still needs to go, however, the story is slightly different. It’s the same way when I consider my progress in learning to surf. Everything takes more time than I want it to, but that’s just the way life is, I suppose.
All in all, I’m incredibly happy with my experience so far. I’ve already done a lot of the things I set out to do in Ecuador, but I must admit that I didn’t have much of a list other than improving my language skills, spending some time on the beach and attempting to prove myself as an effective educator.
Let’s just say that I will be missing Ecuador while I’m back home, even though I’m extremely excited to be seeing my friends and family. This land and the people who live here are really amazing. I probably have more stories and memories from these least three months than I have from any other three-month period in my life. And to think I still haven’t seen the rainforest!
I returned to Montañita this past weekend to visit Lisa and chill out. I don’t have a lot to say about the weekend. Peter and I traveled there together early Saturday morning and were on the water by 8:30. We got pounded by some of the biggest waves I’ve tried to surf before Lisa had to take off. I met up with a friend, Jonathon, along the main drag in town, and we ended up sitting on the beach and talking about a bunch of stuff, watching Peter get pummeled not too far away and running our feet through the sand. Unfortunately, it was another cloudy weekend on the coast. Temporada still hasn’t come to stay. I’m quite sure I’m going to miss the final transition while I’m away. Too bad.
That afternoon, Peter and I took a little hike down the beach and up a trail. The trail leads to an absolutely breathtaking church located on top of a hill overlooking both Montañita and Olón, another pueblito a little further to the north. The view from outside the church is spectacular enough, but you should see this church too. It’s built on multiple levels with all of these staircases winding through the different sections. Everything is made of this whitish sandy-colored sort of stone, set off by dark wooden benches and other woodwork. At the end of the main aisle is a rather sizable Virgin Mary, immaculately white.
But the architecture and church’s surrounding area aren’t even the best parts about the church. In the basement—almost hidden away (Lisa didn’t even know it was there until we told her about it)—is a small sanctuary to another small Virgin Mary statue, and this is the main reason most people come to this church. The Virgin in that chapel is recognized as one of a small collection of statues to have cried blood. Yes, this statue is seen as a modern miracle. You can still see the bloodstains running down Mary’s face.
Peter and I had to take off our sandals outside of the sanctuary before we entered. Inside was a kind-looking woman standing beside the statue of the Virgin, which lay behind glass. Very politely, she asked if we understood Spanish. We said yes, my confidence not quite matching Peter’s.
The woman started into a short history about the statue and the miracles surrounding it. 1990 was the last time when it was known to have cried blood. The statue has been in existence since around 1900; I don’t quite remember the exact date. In addition, I found it interesting that much of this woman’s little talk to us concerned the more scientific aspects of the Virgin’s miracles. She said that, after it had cried blood, the statue was taken to three different laboratories in the United States and somewhere else in South America, and all of the labs agreed on two things: First, that the “blood” was indeed human blood and, second, that the statue contained no structural infelicities, such as holes near the eyes or reservoirs for any type of liquids. The woman ended her talk by telling us what she believes the statue means to humanity. She believes that the Virgin Mary is crying for all of us, for humanity’s sake, like a mother would for her children. I was incredibly touched.
Outside the chapel, there is a display of other Virgin Mary statues that have cried tears or blood. There’s another in Colombia, one is Brazil, one in Guatemala and, surprisingly enough, there’s one in Chicago. I had no idea. Another larger picture, just inside the sanctuary, shows what the statue looked while it wept during 1990. I´ve included a photograph of the picture above. Supposedly, the statue cried for precisely 24 hours.
Going a little further back in time, I spent the weekend before last in Cuenca, for Thanksgiving. I don’t have too much to say about that trip either, perhaps because I’m kind of tired right now. A bunch of volunteers flocked there (not as many as my first trip to the city) and we pigged out big time. I must have eaten about two pies by myself, which was awesome. It’s extremely difficult to find that canned pumpkin goodness that’s so easy to find back home, but Peter and Ella, two of the Cuencan volunteers, went so far as to buy a pumpkin and make a pie from scratch. For that reason, I had to take advantage. Plus, Jon, one of the volunteers I lived with in Quito, baked a ridiculously delicious apple pie. He had to balance that one on one knee and the blackberry one he made on the other knee for over five hours on the bus ride to Cuenca—no easy task on an Ecuadorian bus. So, I couldn’t say no to that one either. And there was key lime too, which is a pretty solid pie. Basically, my second Thanksgiving consisted of convincing myself not to eat more pie, and then deciding to screw it and eating a ton.
That night we all gathered into the small living room to watch The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Whenever everyone else would jump, I laughed. It wasn’t fair because I watched the movie with my class on Halloween and I knew when all the scary parts were coming. The best part was that it was gently raining outside and the Cuencan family’s wiener dog would push against the thin metal door, creating a sudden racket, at precisely the worst times. It seemed as if the dog was timing its complaints to properly scare the shit out of us.
I woke up the next morning and took a monster run around Cuenca, which is one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever been in. Besides that, it’s nice because the people in the mountains are less confrontational than people here on the coast. What this directly translates into is that taxis here in La Libertad will constantly honk their horns at me, trying to convince me that I want to get a ride instead of walking. In Cuenca, however, no one does that. It’s nice to walk down the street and not to have an endless parade of cars all beeping at you, one after another after another. Some days I’m a pro at ignoring it, and other days I want to pop their tires with eyes that shoot laser beams I one day hope to have.
Just over an hour ago, I finished up my last dance lesson for 2007. A Swiss girl magically appeared this morning. I had forgotten to put on deodorant, though, so I was glad I wasn’t asked to dance with her. That’s just not right…
My class has their final today and we taped the infamous movie on Sunday. For those of you who don’t know or don’t remember, I assigned my class a project, which was to create a movie. We had two groups, five students to a group.
The first group chose to create their own sort of playoff of an episode of Friends. One of the girls in the movie befriends a rat living in the shared apartment, and she’s unwilling to kill it for the sake of her roommates. Eventually, the rat has babies and the four of them are stuck with a box full of baby rats until one of their friends unknowingly arrives with her kitten (for which a student actually brought her kitten to Casa Leon). The movie ends with the kitten positioned next to the box of “rats.” You’re left to put the pieces together.
The second group did a kind of spin-off of an episode of Jerry Springer. The movie begins when one of my students announces, “Today’s topic is cheaters.” Two more of my students come out and the host goes on to explain that their marriage isn’t as ideal as they believe it to be. The man’s mother comes out next and announces to the crowd that she caught her son cheating on his wife with a woman named Rose. Rose comes out next and, after the photograph evidence is brought forward from Ernest’s mother, the three women combine their efforts in beating up on Ernest, the cheater. He, meanwhile, continues to proclaim his innocence—everything is nothing but “filthy lies.”
I couldn’t have been happier with the movies. Sometimes convincing a group of ten teenagers to do anything is next to impossible, but they really did a great job with preparing for and shooting the movies. The second group even brought some materials for costumes. I came walking outside at one point to see that they’d drawn facial hair on Santiago with a black marker. Seeing him brought back extremely fond memories of my movie-making days in grade and high school. I was always the one we drew on (and still am from time to time).
I have little else to say for now. I’ve got things lined up for getting to the airport tonight. I’ll be ducking out of my class a little bit early (how many times will I thank my lucky stars for Humberto?) to catch a ride to Guayaquil by nine or ten o’clock. My flight doesn’t depart until 2 A.M., so I’m actually considering seeing if one of the volunteers there, Sarah, wants to hang out for a little while with me before I have to catch my flight.
The flight travels into Houston early in the morning, and then it’s a four-hour trip or so to O’Hare. I had explicit instructions to meet my dad in the baggage claims area. Among others, I’m looking forward to that moment very, very much.

Journal Contest Entry

As promised, here is my entry to my volunteer organization´s journaling contest. I´ll try to include one more normal post sometime next week before I take off for home. Can´t wait!

The Come-and-Go Boys

Nowhere is it written in stone, but the tacit rule is that every bus employs two men. The first, by the very nature of the machine, is the driver. The second, as must be determined by the terrifically limited range of his vocabulary, is almost invariably a younger male whom I call the come-and-go boy. He’s the one yelling at me now. Rather, he’s yelling in my general direction, casting his incessant barrage of commands down this dusty city road, irrigated in a seemingly synthetic moonlight from the line of orange streetlamps stretching away from me—¡Venga, venga, Salinas, venga! If this man were a gun, than this word would be his limitless source of ammunition.
Santiago ahead of me, I sidle past the man and step onto the bus. I might claim McDonald’s had some inspiration in the exterior paintjob—those overly-joyous shades of red and yellow only candy factories are willing to achieve—if I wasn’t aware the empire’s closest satellite was nearly two hours to the east in Guayaquil, and, here on the peninsula, ceviche made faster food than any hamburger joint.
The wide-eyed stares that await me on the bus make me believe I’ve discovered something I shouldn’t have. For the men, I count to two before their gazes turn away. This must be the time required to categorize me a gringo, and thusly remove me from scrutiny. The women’s eyes, however, remain only so long to make me self-conscious. I’m suddenly glad I’m not a blond; this makes it much worse, I’ve heard. All the seats are full, so Santiago invites me to sit on the raised outcropping that isolates the driver from the aisle.
“That’s not the only difference between the costeños and the Sierrans,” Santiago starts up again. “Have you tried verde yet?”
Verde is an immature variety of banana, which is—unexpectedly enough—amazingly versatile. I list all the verde-containing foods I’ve had since arriving just yesterday.
“Don’t worry. There are lots of other foods they make with it.”
The come-and-go boy hustles an elderly man down the aisle. The man wheels around and reaches for the bar above his head that I will surely crack my head against upon exiting.
For every come-and-go boy I’ve come across, there are only two speeds at which he operates: slow and hyper-speed. Determining which of the two is more advantageous is a brainless calculation: empty seats must be filled. But, since this responsibility largely lies outside a come-and-go boy’s area of expertise and relies instead upon the consumer, while the bus fills is the come-and-go boy’s time of relative rest. The stunning reversal comes when all available seats are occupied, at which point a burning immediacy of life is impressed upon him. The come-and-go boy’s influence is translated upon the driver, who is always as emotionally expressive as a tortoise even as new time records are established in the sprint from here to the UPSE.
Seeing that we’ve exceeded capacity is enough to flip the come-and-go boy’s command. The bus’ inner workings scream into motion beneath his voice—¡Vaya, vaya! Santiago’s voice struggles to find its place between the temperamental beat of the engine and the reggaeton pumping over us. “People here are much different than people elsewhere in the country.”
“How’s that?”
“They’ll ask you anything—politics, religion, sex.”
Santiago was the only student to arrive on my first day of class today. My director assured me first days were sometimes like that. Making the most of the situation, Santiago and I have been talking for the last two hours and, even though there are a million more experiences we could exchange, we’re both exhausted and the cordiality between us is becoming strained. To see the desert-like landscape streaking by in the background, and Santiago blink hard enough to crush a mosquito in the fore, turns the world into a stark contrast between opposites.
The come-and-go boy hangs recklessly out the door as the bus jerks to a stop just beyond a white bridge spanning the road. Once the bus slows to the pace of a fast run, the come-and-go boy releases his grip and stomps in long strides alongside the braking bus. His command switches again like snapping a fresh clip into a pistol—¡Venga, venga! Almost half of the passengers on the bus trade positions with the crowd milling about beneath us.The engines rev and I’m stupid enough to believe we’ve accidentally left the come-and-go boy behind when I hear a metallic compression at the base of the stairs. Even the come-and-go boy’s intelligence is all-or-nothing as he goes mute in the process of collecting the passengers’ quarter fare. How did he memorize who paid and who didn’t when he was hanging in the wind like a dog’s tongue?

Thomas the Turkey

The three main elements of Mark Kaeppler´s English class´ Thanksgiving feast. At the top left is green bean casserole, to the right of that is baked bread crumbs and corn, and at the bottom is the 15-pound turkey that we had completely demolished by the end of the night. I was so proud of them! Isn´t that what Thanksgiving´s really all about, eating massive quantities of meat?

Real Beer´s Better

I’m making coffee right now. The small propane stove I have in my room is noisily hissing away, and the faint smell of gas reminds me that I’m tired. I haven’t been sleeping so well lately. I’m not exactly sure why. The problem’s only been going on for about a week now, and I got around seven hours of sleep last night, so I’m just going to pretend it’s going to go away on its own.
I spent last weekend in Quito. I wanted to see my old host family, the Pazmiños, one last time before heading home for the holidays. For those of you who don’t know yet, I’m going to be headed home earlier than expected. Because of some unexpected changes, I had to change my flight from December 16th to early in the morning on December 5th (avoid changing flights whenever possible; it’s not cheap to change things around!). As such, I’ll be home for nearly the entire month of December, from the 5th to the 30th. (If anyone would like to get a hold of me for whatever reason, that will be the best time to do it.) I have three medical school interviews scheduled during that time, so wish me luck.
I’ll return to the Pazmiños now. Peter, my new English mate living here, came with me to Quito (he called me a “legend” today, which isn’t just funny, it really made me feel good). We took the night bus out of La Libertad at 9:30 P.M. and arrived in Quito early on last Saturday. After meeting up with Katie, a volunteer from Ambato who decided to join us for the weekend, in the Mariscal, we ran a couple of errands and hopped on a city bus to the north side of the city. Two clowns (not you, Du and Tyler) performed an act on the bus and even went so far as to crack some jokes at Peter in English. This made me very happy. I gave them a little extra than the normal amount I donate to people who showcase their talents on the public transportation systems.
Returning to the Pazmiños was a little like returning home (no offense intended, Mom). Everyone was very, very happy. We ate a big meal and decided to head to Otovalo, the marketplace I’d been to once previously, now over a month ago. The man who had originally found Peter his job here in Ecuador lives near there, so Peter wanted to go and say thanks; Miguel’s, my old host father, parents live in the small town, so he’s always up for going; and Katie and I wanted to go to see Anita, an Australian volunteer we’d met earlier on during our exploits in Quito. We made the two-hour trek starting around 4:00, and by the time we got there, the market was starting to close. The biggest day is always Saturday, though, so even when I say that it was closing, you could still have gotten a lot of shopping done. And, yes, I did end up buying more stuff.
Everyone completed his or her respective objectives and we all met back by Miguel’s parent’s home, where we watched Ecuador get stomped by Paraguay in another World Cup qualifying game. By halftime, even Miguel, who loves soccer, had seen enough to recommend we all start back for home. That was before we hit the traffic jam….
This won’t take too much explaining. Near Quito there’s a small village with a Virgin Mary that’s been cited for a number of miracles. It’s a local tradition to travel to the Virgin on a specific Wednesday in November (this year that Wednesday was yesterday). Most people, however, have a conflict—as you might imagine—with traveling to see the Virgin on a Wednesday, so they elect to make the little pilgrimage over the weekend. Coincidentally, 30,000-40,000 had traveled to this small village on Saturday, and the roads were completely plugged by Saturday night.
The bus we’d gotten onto tried to find a way onto the main road, but there wasn’t a chance we were going to make it. We then tried to find a way around the mess, thinking we could find a different way into Quito. Let’s just say that the Ecuadorian idea of a highway system is much different than the American one. As in, only about two main roads travel into Quito from the north, both of which were clogged to the point that a motorcycle couldn’t even get by.
We actually ended up having a slumber party over by grandma and grandpa Pazmiños’ for the night back in Otovalo. The four of us got up early on Sunday morning, walked to the terminal and returned to Quito on clear roads before 9:00. We ate a monster breakfast with the rest of the Pazmiños before Katie took off for Ambato and Peter and I headed downtown.
Later that afternoon, I met up with two other volunteers working in Quito, and the four of us went to an Irish pub that Trinity, one of the Quito volunteers, had heard about. There, I finally had the chance to drink a “proper” beer again—something other than this Pilsener crap. It was everything I remember good beer to be. Wonderful. The bar itself was on par with a good Irish pub back home. I was incredibly impressed with it.
Peter and I then stopped off at SuperMaxi where we loaded up on ingredients for lasagna. We cooked a (huge!) late almuerzo for the Pazmiños before Peter and I had to get a cab to the airport in order to catch our 6:30 flight to Guayaquil. The way our butts felt after the original ride to Quito was enough motivation to make us buy the tickets once we’d arrived to the city early on that Saturday morning. It only cost us $47 a piece, which was money well spent seeing as we hardly slept a wink over the course of Friday night.
The flight put us into Guayaquil at around 8:30 or 9:00—I’m not too sure—and we were back home on the peninsula before 11:00. I watched a little bit of Sunday Night Football (which is sometimes aired on ESPN) and passed out.
Changing the subject, classes are going as well as ever. I’ve had to significantly alter my schedule to accommodate my plans for the month of December, but everyone has been phenomenal in seeing me through this. My directors in Quito, Humberto at the school in Santa Elena, my students and even Tom and Carla have been nothing but incredibly supportive. I’m extremely grateful to all of them. I don’t know that things would be happening the way they are without the positive attitudes everyone has had towards me.
In the light of these developments, I’m preparing a fairly sizable Thanksgiving dinner for my class. It’s 4:07 now and a bunch of my students were supposed to show up seven minutes ago to help me with the preparations, but I doubt anyone will get here before 4:30 or 5:00. I wanted to keep things modest and prepare an eight or ten pound turkey, but when I went into SuperMaxi, nothing was smaller than seven kilograms (over fifteen pounds), so I knew I had to go big or go home. I’ve enlisted the help of Elsi to help me prepare this thing, and it’s cooking in the oven as we speak. If things turn out well, I’ll post a picture of the bird. If they don’t, you’ll probably never hear a word about the Thanksgiving meal unless you ask me. I went on a second SuperMaxi run this morning to get everything for mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, a special corn dish and cranberry sauce too. I was going to do stuffing but I forgot all about it, and I meant to do pumpkin pie too but SuperMaxi didn’t have any of that canned pumpkin goodness.
What else? I went to a teacher’s meeting in Playas, another beach town located a few hours to the south, yesterday. The morning was boring, but the afternoon was fun. We played a bunch of these games meant to inspire teamwork, which was actually more fun than it sounds. The sun was out too, which was great. Plus, the resort where the meeting was scheduled was uber-nice. Upon seeing it, I joked to Humberto, “I’m not this good of a teacher.” I can’t wait until we get some rain around here, though. The entire coast (at least as far as north and south as I’ve seen) is incredibly dry; everything is brown and somewhat dismal. I can’t get over all the vultures I see from the bus whenever I travel.
Peter and I have started taking dance lessons this week. I’m pretty terrible, but Peter’s not much better, so I don’t feel too bad. The funniest (and sometimes slightly annoying part) is that we draw a crowd of Ecuadorians every time we have a lesson with Mariuxy. Some people laugh, but most people just watch us from the street like we were caged animals at the zoo. Today, one guy even went so far as to press his face up against the dance hall’s glass door positioned beside us, not realizing that we could see his every move in the wall of mirrors in front of us. Besides him, small children are especially enthralled with the dancing gringos. I know I’d be laughing at us.
That’s about all I’ve got for now. I’m almost finished with that submission for the writing contest, so I’ll post that within a week or so. I’m going back to Cuenca this weekend to hang out with the volunteers there and get in on another Thanksgiving meal (one I’m sure will top mine). It should be more relaxing than the last, not that I’d take a second back.
I’m super-excited to be returning home so soon and having the chance to see so many of you. We’re under two weeks away! I won’t be so stupid as to write Happy Thanksgiving to all of you, knowing that I plan on posting this entry tomorrow, but just know that I’m thinking it. Hopefully the Packers have successfully manhandled the Lions by this point. I can’t wait to catch a game in English!

Peter and the Chancho Express

I’m quite positive I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s something worth repeating: One of the absolutely greatest parts about Ecuador is the food. Variety is a matter separate from taste, but this country has them both. A plate loaded with chancho (pork) from Cuenca immediately entered the top five things I’ve eaten since coming here. (I know how good food is by how well it’s advertised in Salinas. Because a bunch of the restaurants lining the main road into the city all proclaim Cuencan-style food, I know there’s got to be something to it.) I ate my chancho on the lawn of a wide median between a major road separating east and westbound traffic, which was—fortunately—closed for the festivals and packed with Ecuadorian revelers instead of cars and interprovincial buses.
A single plate of food cost me two dollars. An indigenous woman was stationed beneath a tent, a very cooked, very shiny golden brown pig lay motionless between us, exuding an odor that was at first offensive, but became increasingly delicious as I stood in it. I “waited in line,” which was really more like a shouting contest against my Ecuadorian neighbors, until I was able to weasel my way into a position where the woman controlling the pig meat distribution could no longer hope to see forward without seeing a part of my chest. This was the position from I told her I wanted two plates, por favor, and no skimping on the hardened piece of cooked skin you could have heard her cracking with her fingers fifty feet away and through a crowd (this turned out to be the only part of the dish I couldn’t stomach).
First, the indigenous woman packed down a layer of mote, which is a species of corn with huge white kernels (I simply call it super-corn). She used her bare hands to rip off a hunk of the pig’s back, and threw this deliciousness into a deep layer of oil in a small pan to heat it up. When it was hot, she stacked the shredded meat on top of the mote. Two yapingachos—basically, you pack mashed potatoes into the form of a hamburger and deep-fry the potato patty—were placed along the perimeter of either plate. Then strips of carrots, lettuce and red onion were placed on top like a spoonful of whipped cream. I carried the two plates to our dirty little table where Rob and Josh were patiently waiting. After loading mine with ají, better than hot sauce but the same general idea, it was time to dig in. What a terrific caloric investment.
The main draw to Cuenca two weekends ago was to check out its festivals. I’d heard the Cuencan Indepedence Day (from the Spanish, of course) meant good times, and good times are always worth checking out at least once. What meant more was that nearly twenty of my fellow volunteers were all planning on arriving in the mountainous city at some point throughout the weekend, and I thought it’d be nice to see them again after a month apart since the end of orientation in Quito. Really, these people are the closest people I have to a physical family during my stay south of the equator (in the super-south).
Half of the battle was getting there. I had off from school on Friday due to a national holiday, Day of the Dead, so I’d planned an early start to Cuenca with all intentions of beating the crowds. A very early start. The bus company that takes me to Guayaquil begins running buses at 4:00 A.M. (they advertise they begin at 3:00 A.M., but I’m not willing to trust that sign), but I didn’t get to bed until midnight, so was up at 4:00 and on my way by about 5:00. That put me into Guayaquil by 7:00 and—get this—on my way to Cuenca at noon! What? Yeah, five hours in the Guayaquileño bus stop.
Why the disjunct? Easy. Because it’s Ecuador!
Don’t begin to think that I was alone. Immediately after getting off the bus to Guayaquil, I got into a long line to buy two bus tickets to Cuenca. I called up Sarah, one of the volunteers living and working in the big city, and told her to get her butt up and down to the bus stop, I’d have the tickets by the time she’d arrive. The tickets had printed that our bus was leaving at 10:30. I asked a man, who Sarah and I have named Oscar for reasons I’ll explain in a little while, who’d been waiting in line in front of me, if that time was serious. He assured me that it wasn’t. Certainly we wouldn’t have to wait three hours for a bus to Cuenca. Oscar was right, of course. 10:30 was the incorrect departure time. Oh, how wrong I was to think that our bus would be arriving before then.
So the waiting began. Sarah and I had tucked ourselves in amongst the massive crowd waiting for the plethora of buses that went to God-knows-where, Ecuador. A small girl was seated on a suitcase a short distance from me, aggressively petting a complacent white bunny with healthy pink eyes. At first, I was impatient. After waiting an hour and a half, my mind began to race and I started wishing the bus would come more and more. We hung near Oscar. He had the same ticket as us and seemed to know what the hell was going on, even as a competing member in a scene of commotion. A couple of hours in, Oscar approached the backdoor of the ticket booth where I’d purchased our tickets and began screaming in Spanish at the attendants inside. He was not happy his bus wasn’t showing up. Oscar is pleasantly named after that adored green puppet, living in a highly mobile trashcan anywhere on Sesame Street.
Sarah and I talked about any and everything to pass the time. The crowds thickened. No buses headed to Cuenca were appearing anywhere down the line. Mark was getting frustrated. Mark’s brain was beginning to hurt him.
But, after a certain point, the frustration simply vanished. I put myself at the mercy of this country and just thought, if I wait all day in this bus station and the bus never arrives, at least I’ll have another story to tell. Noon came quickly after that. Passing life well requires a well-chosen frame of mind.
A man in a purple shirt announced our bus number and Sarah and I cheered until we realized how obnoxious we were. He began shouting out names as a sort of role call. I saw him mouthing one name written on the clipboard he held. This was him practicing the German name Kaeppler. It came out more like Kibble. I couldn’t have been happier. I held my ticket high in the air and smiled like the dope that I am. Sarah and I were two shamelessly happy gringos in a wily Ecuadorian sea. Somewhere on an island, I saw a fellow gringo. She had bent her face into an expression of utter annoyance. I considered approaching her and confidently telling her in English, “You’d do much better to chill out and buy a newspaper,” but something written in her expression told me she needed to learn this little lesson on her own.
Standing with these fellow passengers who had similarly possessed the magic tickets, I realized then why we weren’t seeing any buses headed to Cuenca. The man in the purple shirt began to lead us out of the bus terminal. Oscar was ahead of us and I continually told Sarah, “Don’t let him out of your site! Whatever you do, keep Oscar in clear view.” Amidst the throngs of people banked against the platform, my hand slid into my pocket and pinched the ticket. I wouldn’t dare lose it now! The man in the purple shirt took us to the main highway adjacent to the bus terminal where we waited a short while for our bright pink Super Taxi Cuenca bus to pull up. Oscar nodded to us gravely after the five-hour super-wait, we hopped on the bus, and four hours later, we arrived in Cuenca. Getting from the bus terminal there to our friends’ home where we were staying the weekend felt like a real letdown compared to what we’d been through earlier in the day. A primal illusion suggested I’d have I’d have pin a jungle creature to earn our rights to a cab ride.
The success of Sarah and my journey was emphasized when we appeared in the doorway of the Colombian restaurant where all of the volunteers were getting dinner. We ordered a gigantic plate of food, guacamole and what we thought was two regionally flavored drinks. They turned out to be two shots of caña, a potent liquor distilled from sugarcane. Like I said, good times.
Other than all the catching up and story-swapping I did in Cuenca, I spent this last weekend in Puerto Viejo, a smaller city located five hours by bus up the coast. The city itself, however, is about half an hour inland, and it’s damn hot. I went there to visit BobbiLe, who I haven’t seen since my weekend in Guayaquil two weeks ago. I guess Puerto Viejo isn’t the greatest place to go in Ecuador because the people there tend to be pretty rude. It’s not uncommon for someone to push you out of the way without so much as saying excuse me, in which case it’s acceptable to simply push them right back (not a practice I’m willing to try myself). For my part, I didn’t really see this rude side of the people there, but that didn’t stop us from trying to sum the city up with an analogy. BobbiLe, Josh and I decided that Puerto Viejo is like that weird friend you have that you don’t really like to admit that you like. He’s kind of dirty and really quite smelly and you don’t like the way he acts in public because he’s too forthcoming and a little obscene; but, despite an appearance’s best attempt, he’s a good guy at heart and there’s a certain charm about him that keeps you coming back, if only infrequently.
The coolest part about Puerto Viejo was BobbiLe’s host family. Upon entering their home on Saturday afternoon, I was greeted by BobbiLe’s host mother and a room filled with a bunch of giggling teenage girls, two of which were BobbiLe’s host sisters. They were making cakes for a school fundraiser scheduled for Sunday. Furthermore, they agreed the gringo that had just walked through the door was kind of cute, or at least worth laughing at (I’d bet on the later). Later on, I met Joselito, riding around his brakeless tricycle outside. This is BobbiLe’s three-year-old host brother. He went from an emotional high on Saturday when Josh, the other Puerto Viejo volunteer from our group (the same one who ate chancho with me the Saturday before), showed him the Mentos in a 2-Liter bottle of Diet Coke trick, to an emotional low on Sunday when I left and he started crying. Joselito really, really likes having other males around to play with. His father is a lawyer who deals with the type of guys who are caught with enough bricks of cocaine or marijuana to construct a small home, and you can imagine it’s a somewhat time consuming profession. Joselo was along long enough to eat a meal with me on Saturday night, which was just enough time for him to describe to me that food from the Manabi province, land lying along the coast, is the best food in Ecuador. His face was as hard as a rock when he told me this, and I didn’t have the guts to tell him my family from the Sierra would argue otherwise. This was Joselo’s way of explaining to my why, in Salinas, besides the Cuencan-style barbeque restaurants, all the other ones proclaim comida Manabita (Manabi-style cuisine). I’ll go to great lengths to describe all the wonderful foods made of verde (green bananas) in another post. The post will be extensive.
Highlights from Puerto Viejo included catching an inning of the national women’s sub-20-years-old softball championship in a stadium near BobbiLe’s house—Ecuador versus Brazil. Brazil was crushing them. What made it that much worse was that the Brazilian team had about a million different cheers, and they were allowed to stand right next to the actual field, so it was as if they were mocking you—in Portuguese—while they hit shot after shot into deep right field. As a Brazilian player, even if you’re sitting the bench, you’re as much of a player as the girls on the field. With no rules against this sort of excess, I shudder to think what a man like Terrell Owens would invent in a country like this.
Another highlight was going to the Catholic school’s fundraiser on Sunday. I bought some of the cake that BobbiLe’s host sisters and their friends had been making from the day before as well as a mandingo. A mandingo is a hotdog on steroids. It had three different sauces on it and so much other crap—none of which I have very little idea about the actual ingredients—that I don’t even want to try to explain it. Suffice to say it’s delicious. The fundraiser also involved an obstacle course on the school’s basketball court. Things became fairly amusing when four of the schoolgirls’ fathers were asked to complete the course. They’re all a bunch of cheaters. All in all, I felt like more of a draw than most of the booths set up to raise money for the school. I don’t think a lot of gringos come through Puerto Viejo.
The last highlight was Pila. Pila is a small town about twenty minutes outside of Puerto Viejo that I’d come through on the way there. I’m not willing to say what I saw there out of fear of ruining the Christmas surprise for three very lucky individuals, but let’s just say that it was worth going to Pila. It was two o’clock and the three of us hopped in a cab that dropped us off at the bus terminal (it’s a little strange, but all cab rides, no matter the distance, cost only a dollar in Puerto Viejo). We waited on one of the buses for forty-five minutes before it was full enough for the bus driver to decide it was worth taking off. Half an hour later and I had what I needed in hand.
The plan was to flag down a bus going back into Puerto Viejo so I could make it back to the peninsula where I live at a reasonable hour. We succeeded in getting one bus to stop, but had barely taken the road out of Pila when the bus driver’s attendant kicked us off the bus.
“There aren’t enough seats,” he said.
“It’s all right if we stand,” we responded.
He kept telling us we had to get off.
We kept asking why.
Eventually, the bus attendant won. Josh was furious. I was eating a tub of cookies I’d bought in Pila, which did a lot to diffuse any negative emotions I was experiencing at the time. Cookies will do that.
We walked back into town and bought a round of waters. We’d just sat down outside a little bodega, a kind of general store that are about as common here as the freckles on my arm (yes, I am looking at my arm) and had just started the debate of how next to proceed when the solution presented itself to us. Besides the owner of the bodega, a man was seated at the table beside us.
“That van parked there is going to Puerto Viejo,” he said.
“When?”
“Soon. We’re waiting for a woman coming on a bus from Guayaquil.”
“How much?”
“A dollar a person.”
I had to relearn that “soon” is an extremely loose term here in Ecuador. If I were to draw a timeline, “soon” would stretch from the absolute present to infinity. Soon means nothing. Right now means nothing. Action is all that matters.
We’d polished off our waters and the bodega owner was explaining to BobbiLe that, in his spare time, he’s an artesian. Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out how I was going to get home. I wasn’t concerned with catching a bus out of Puerto Viejo. I was concerned that once the bus out of Puerto Viejo arrived in Guayaquil there wouldn’t be a transfer bus that would take me home. In short, I had no idea how long the buses in Guayaquil ran to the peninsula. The bodega owner emerged out of a backroom with a small cylindrical machine and a coconut husk. He plugged the machine into an outlet and began to sand the husk off the coconut. I would find out sooner how to made a bead out of a coconut husk than I would find my way back to Puerto Viejo.
After three successive sandings and a fair amount of time observing this demonstration, I insisted to the bodega owner that we had to go. We’d just failed to flag down another passing bus when the man who’d offered us a ride finally returned. In this case, “soon” meant exactly when we’d refused to wait any longer; this will always serve as the best definition of the word.
Where had he gone? He’d run off to buy some calling time on his cell phone, which was necessary for him to discover that the woman we’d been waiting for from Guayaquil wasn’t coming after all. We hopped into the van and had returned to Puerto Viejo, loot in hand (including a free bracelet from the bodega owner/coco artesian), by 4:30.
After a quick farwell to BobbiLe’s host family and the sunken expression that would give way to a delicate flow of tears on Joselito’s behalf, I got on a bus at 5:00. I’d returned to Guayaquil by 8:45 and—yes! —I on my way back to the coast by 9:00 P.M. Even though I must have looked panicked approaching the ticket booth in Guayaquil, the bus station hadn’t the look of a place on the verge of closing for the night. A few of the ticket booths to some of the exotic locations throughout the country were closed, but, all in all, the place was still bustling with activity, however reduced in sheer volume. I was so glad to step up to my front door by around 11:00 Sunday night. By that point, I’m not sure if I was more relieved that I wasn’t going to have to call up Sarah or Shelby for a surprise slumber party, or if I was more relieved that I wasn’t going to be subjected to another American action film that will forever seem to me like the most fantastic waste of money known to man. Every bus in this country that travels more than twenty minutes between destinations (and some that do) is equipped with a single TV towards the front of the cabin, and the only movies that play over these screens are the ones that bomb out of theatres in less than a week back in the states. Yes, I’ve finally discovered where these movies are watched, even if we can’t call them popular outside of these missiles that shoot me between cities. Never—ever—see The Punisher unless you have another English speaker with you, someone with a sense of humor who appreciates the only-slightly-painful transitions between scenes as much as you do.
Onto more important matters, however. I mentioned at the very end of my last lengthy post that an English man, Peter, is living at the Casa Leon now. Peter is a way cool, super-polite dude, and I couldn’t be more glad that he’s here (and I won’t exaggerate this any more, because I know he’s going to read this at some point). My first impression of him went a little something like this:
I got a call on Thursday, November 1st sometime in the late afternoon.
(Imagine the British accent.) “Hello, Mark, I’m not exactly sure how to get to the house.”
I provided him with as descript instructions as I could.
Sure enough, within half an hour, someone was walking through the door. This was Pedro, my host cousin (Slightly confusing, I know, a Peter and a Pedro. Just remember, British and Ecuadorian, two very distinct nationalities for two very distinct people.) “Peter is here,” he said.
I walked onto the street and there he was, all smiles in the middle of the triangle of things he’d packed along. He’d brought a small piece of luggage with wheels, a midsize backpack and a surfboard. We exchanged greetings and I offered to take the black piece of luggage from his hand.
“Did you bring the surfboard from home?” I asked.
“No. I’ve just been through Montañita. I bought it off a guy this weekend.”
I showed him to his room. I joked about him barely having any luggage, but still finding a way to stow a surfboard onto a bus.
“How did you pack so little?” I asked.
“Oh, the backpack doesn’t contain my things either. You ever been kiteboarding, mate?”
I noticed then the backpack wasn’t exactly normal. It was covered in flashy designs and it was stitched together in an unusual way and there were bundles of string packed into mesh pockets on its exterior.
“So you bring a kite instead of the things you need to live?”
“Yeah, mate.”
So I haven’t been kiteboarding with Peter yet, but I’m sure we’ll make it out soon. It’s difficult to find a day when the winds are just right. It’s going to be sweet.
Peter’s been absolutely phenomenal since he’s arrived. He’s twenty-two as well, is extremely adventuresome and is one of the most considerate people I’ve ever met. We’re constantly laughing at the expressions either one of us uses: It’s a kind of game between us. He likes to use the word “proper” a lot (for example, “my plate of chancho was a proper meal”) and a day has yet to pass when he hasn’t called me “mate.” I prefer to stick to “dude” or “man,” which is half the fun, isn’t it?
Peter’s teaching schedule is more rigorous than mine, which is good for him because he’s actually getting paid to teach. Much of his time this week has been devoted to lesson planning, but we’re going to try to take a salsa lesson tomorrow (that reminds me, I need to make a phone call). He teaches two hours each night at the same technical school that I’m teaching at in addition to two other classes. Fortunately, he’s managed to free up his weekends, which means I’ll have a new traveling buddy from time to time. He speaks Spanish better than I do too, which is a definite plus considering that I’d first heard his Spanish was next to zero. It’s nice having Peter around because thinking in Spanish all the time (although it helps me improve) is quite exhausting, so it’s nice to have a break. Plus we get along really well. Between my college neurobiology professor, Tom and now Peter, I’m getting an absolutely stellar impression of Brits. Peter keeps assuring me what I’ve seen isn’t always the case, but, being the hopeless optimist that I am, I’m choosing to go on believing it’s an island full of friendly, courteous and engaging people until I’m given a reason to believe otherwise.
Other news. Kane, my program director, came out here on a site visit last week. Kane and Therese are our two in-country field directors, and it’s their jobs to travel all over the place this time of year to make sure that, after a month of living and working abroad, everything is going all right with all their fledging slightly bird-like volunteers. I was nervous for the site visit not because I have a lot of complaints about my site (I had, in fact, next to none), but because Kane was going to be observing me while I taught one of my classes. I wanted to impress him.
Of course, I’d worked myself up for no reason. With Kane in the room, my students were more quiet and well-behaved than I’ve ever seen them. Because most of my students are teenagers, I struggle with all of the things that teenagers try to get away with during class: falling asleep, texting their significant others, drawing on the desks and—worst of all—insisting on speaking in Spanish! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve breathed the word “English” into my students’ faces in the attempts to impress on them the importance of speaking the language they’re trying to learn (yes, I’ve tried the lecture strategy too, not to much avail). I’m going to start to enforce consequences for speaking Spanish beginning with the next module I’m teaching, which kicks off this Thursday. Kane’s presence, however, had some sort of transforming grace, and turned my students into the angel-like examples I once had in Quito. He laughed when I told him they’ve never acted like that before. (Kane is not an intimidating person, so I’m left wondering what he did that I haven’t been doing.) To be honest, I prefer the challenge of making my students pay attention to English. My students in Quito felt unreal to me. These kids on the coast are what I imagine most students in the public education system back in the states are like. Well, from what I’ve heard, I think my students are a bit more manageable than that.
The rest of the site visit went well. We actually had enough time to go surfing last Friday afternoon before Kane had to take off for Guayaquil to catch his flight. That was my second time at Punta Carneo (my surfing birthplace so to speak) and the first time I’ve ever used a short board. I prefer a short board to a long one. It’s so much easier to get around and duck under waves. After an hour and a half, Kane emerged out of the water with a sliced toe and a big bruise beside his shinbone. This was when he taught me the Spanish equivalent of to get one’s ass kicked, as used in the expression directed to our surfing instructors, “The ocean kicked my ass.” Thank you, Kane. Your teachings have already come in handy.
Emotionally, Mark is holding up well. I’m doing better now than I was a few weeks ago, which isn’t saying all that much because I wasn’t doing too poorly two weeks ago. I guess I just bring that up to say that I’ve been on an upward trend lately; it’s getting easier for me to be living in this country. I’m becoming increasingly more comfortable here.
I had a bit of excitement yesterday. Steadily, the peninsula has been seeing more and more sunshine. During Kane’s site visit, in fact, we saw the sun two days in a row, an occurrence I’d yet to see. Yesterday was exciting because I’d permitted in myself the false hope that temporada had begun.
I was sitting at my computer, typing up lesson plans, when I perceived some sort of change occurring about me. Sure enough, when I turned around, the yellow light bathing the concrete walkway outside my door informed me that the sun had come out. I went outside and turned my head towards heaven. Not a cloud was in the sky and the light was beating down on my like an epiphany. I jogged into the house and hunted down Elsi.
“Is this it? Is this the beginning of temporada?” I asked in as many words.
She said yes.
I hustled through the remainder of my lesson planning and celebrated by going for a run into Salinas. It was hot. It was wonderful. The sun stayed out for the rest of the day. I became convinced that was it, that was the beginning of the Ecuadorian coast’s seasonal eternity of sunshine.
I was wrong. It’s cloudy today. And not the type of cloudy where you can look at the sky and will it to break through by sometime early this afternoon. It’s hopelessly cloudy, those smoky types of clouds that fill up the sky in layer upon layer upon layer, all varying shades of gray, seeping past one another out of hidden reservoirs in the some whatever-sphere.
Oh well. This affords me the joy of witnessing the dawning of la temporada another day. The middle of November is the earliest it can come; the latest is the beginning of December. I’ve reached the two-week mark.
Where classes are concerned, I’ve nearly reached the end of teaching module 6. Yesterday was a review day, today is a review today and tomorrow is the test. From the looks of it, this test is easier than the last, but I could be wrong. Either way, don’t tell my students. I was supposed to get a couple of days off before starting module 7 (I’ll have the same students from module 6, and possibly a few additions), but I’m opting to use those to teach. My main worry lately has been trying to schedule a sufficient amount of time to return home for medical school interviews.
Without saying too much about it to jinx myself, I have interviews scheduled for early in December, which means—obviously enough—I have to book a flight home to make it to them. I’ve tried every bit of begging and negotiation to see if the admissions offices were willing to schedule me on dates closer to Christmas, but imagine trying to convince an office of people to work more in the days leading up to America’s favorite holiday. I think I have things tentatively worked out (I say this now knowing that another school will contact me with an earlier interview date just to spite me) both here and back home, so we’ll just go on hoping for the best. My director here, Humberto, has been really great with helping me through this, as have been my students. I will be putting in just as many hours to accommodate the schedule shift, but packed into a shorter amount of time. This is a very happy compromise for me. These interviews are a huge deal to me. With that said, the changes also mean that I’ll be seeing many of you earlier than I originally thought and for a longer period of time. Cool beans.
Moving on, my volunteer organization is sponsoring a small contest. There are two categories: one for photographs and one for writing—journaling, as they call it. I’ve set my sights on the writing one. The contest is open to all returned and current volunteers. We’re supposed to write a piece about some of our experiences abroad. Top prize is $150. I’m going to win. I already know what I’m going to write about, and it’s going to be fantastic. I’ll make sure to post my submission once I get around to actually writing it. It needs to be in by December 14th, so don’t hold your breath.
I’m going back to Quito this weekend with Peter and Pedro to visit my old host family, the Pazmiños. I called up Vivi, my former host sister, this morning and everything’s all squared away, so I’ll be hopping on a night bus this Friday to arrive in Quito early Saturday morning. I plan on hanging out, catching up with them as much as possible and making an effort to see as many of the Quito volunteers as possible in our old meeting place, the Mariscal. I’m hoping the buses will be slightly less nerve-wracking than last weekend’s excursion to (or should I say from) Puerto Viejo. I’m sure, only by saying that, I’m setting myself up for something bad. Vamos a ver.
I think I’ve written enough for one day. As always, this chewed up significantly more time than I wanted it to. Maybe I need to get a little smarter and schedule more time for this stuff.

Gquil Visuals

The top picture is my new favorite turtle in the world. He´s a little tough to see, but he's in the middle of the picture. The stupid crabs that he's chasing are towards the lower left hand side of the photo. Look hard! They blend in well. Good thing the turtle can see them.

Lisa and I on the mac attack. One of the best three dollar purchases I´ve made in a long time (expensive by Ecuadorian standards, but still well worth it). I would highly recommend going on the attack for those of you with clear blood vessels. How much is a Big Mac back home anyhow?

The bottom photograph is an old silo associated with the Pilsener factory beside the Guayas River in Guayaquil. I don´t know what the silo once held, but that doesn´t really matter now, because it´s not a silo anymore! We asked a security guard if we could get a tour of one of the apartments, and he said sure, but then we realized we had to be on our way to drop off Lisa and Bobbile at the bus stop. Perhaps another time....

Gquil & Day of the Dead

Not as much to say this week in comparison to others.

My weekend in Guayaquil was pretty sweet. I stayed by Carla and Tom’s place. They live towards the southern end of the city. On Friday night we all went to Guayaquil’s malécon, which literally means breakwater, but it’s more like hanging out on the boardwalk. Later on we met up with Lisa from Montañita and BobbiLe from Puerto Viejo who had also decided to spend the weekend in Guayaquil. We all ended up at this cool little place called The Dog’s Blue Eyes, which was this kind of hipster jazz bar. A small band was playing and I learned that the lead person was a really popular musician; his name is Napoleon, but everyone calls him just Napo.

On Saturday we did a whole bunch of really touristy things in Guayaquil. Around 10:30 we picked up Lisa and BobbiLe and went to Parque de las Iguanas, which is this park downtown that’s absolutely teeming with iguanas. Big ones, baby ones, whatever you want. They’re all over the place. You have to be careful walking under trees or you’ll get crapped on. They must have been feed around the time we arrived, because most of the iguanas were snarfing down cabbage on the grass, all clustered together with big hunks of the leafy vegetables hanging out of their mouths. Over a ways some children were feeding nuts to an animal I’ve come to call the “super-squirrel.” The super-squirrel is a black, brown and gray squirrel—mostly black—with the most interesting tail I’ve ever seen. It seems to have taken on another dimension that other squirrels back home can’t achieve. The coolest thing about the super-squirrel, however, is how gently it took the nuts out of the children’s hands. It’s a nice super-squirrel.

After that we all loaded up the Tiara and headed to El Parque Histórico, which is a sort of nature preserve in the middle of the city. It was way cool. Besides all of the interesting Ecuadorian animals I got to see, the park runs through a mangrove, which is a type of landscape I’ve never seen before. Because so many rivers touch the Pacific in the same location that Guayaquil’s at, much of the city is near mangrove. There’s actually a ferryboat that will take you across the main river running past the city, El Río Guayas, and into some thicker mangrove. I really want to take that ferry next time I’m in Guayaquil.

I would describe mangrove as a raised root system above a muddy plain. Species of trees spread their roots out above ground instead of below it, which creates a complicated wooden puzzle at ground level. As you might be able to imagine, this provides a lot of protection and cover for smaller animals. The most common animal I saw in the mangroves was crabs. They dig little holes in the mud and hide in them. Their little holes are absolutely everywhere. None of the ones I saw—and I saw a lot of crabs—was bigger my thumb.

The highlight of the day was watching a smaller-sized snapping turtle hunt down these crabs. It was hilarious because crabs are so stupid! Imagine me on top of a bridge hanging over the water, screaming at the stupid crabs because they won’t run away from the comparatively gigantic snapping turtle that’s chasing them into their holes. Now imagine the snapping turtle in the shallow water gaining enough steam to make a go at the comparatively faster crabs. A wave of crabs sidles sideways away from the turtle, attempting to keep the distance between them and dark-tongued death. Three feet later the turtle stops, and all the crabs stop too. Stupid crabs! Keep running! The turtle is only resting long enough to chase after you again! It won’t quit coming after you if it’s still hungry! I couldn’t have been happier when the turtle finally got one. I must have been watching for ten minutes. It opened its mouth up wide and chomped down on one of the little crabs, two gigantic bites, before swallowing. The chase continued until the turtle and the wave of crabs had disappeared beneath the bridge I was standing on. I was slightly disappointed until I’d walked fifty yards down to the monkey island.

We were all pretty tired and hungry after El Parque Histórico, so we took a little drive and Tom dropped Lisa, BobbiLe and me off to get some grub. Lisa had left me a somewhat confusing text message sometime on Friday that said something along the lines of, “I’m in Gquil now, Mark. I’m having mac attacks so we have to get our eats on today.” What was this “mac attacks?” I’d never heard that before. It turns out Lisa was talking about gorging ourselves on Big Macs at McDonalds. Places like Montañita and Santa Elena just aren’t big enough to have a McDonalds so you’ve got to get your mac on in a city. Let’s just say I was less than enthused about eating a Big Mac. I haven’t had one since I was like twelve. But Lisa was pretty convincing between all the mac attack talk and just being so damn excited about it.

Even if I doubted it at first, going for a Big Mac was the best thing ever! Besides the raw deliciousness and having the opportunity to say “mac attack” about half a million times throughout the process of actually eating it, going into McDonalds in Ecuador is like teleporting back to the United States. There’s ketchup everywhere (including over the advertisements of th wall), the menu is more English than Spanish and they even play North American music over the restaurant speakers. All the Ecuadorians that come into McDonalds dress like North Americans too. I was home again! It only took a Big Mac to bring me back.

We spent the rest of the afternoon checking out the colonial part of Guayaquil. Much of the city’s original colonial structures have burned down since those times, so this part of the city isn’t exactly what it used to be as far as sheer size is concerned. But the great news is that the city has gone through a serious renovation effort to beautify what does remain. Framed pictures hang on colonial buildings, showing what each of the structures used to look like only a short time ago. Each of the pictures seems to scream, “Look what I’ve done with myself!” The entire colonial center is like one of those wonderfully optimistic Weight Watchers commercials. My favorite part is the beer factory turned trendy apartment complex. Check out the picture above.

My class’s first midterm was this Monday. I’m quite pleased with the results. Minus some problems with some of the grammar points we’ve touched on, my students did a fantastic job. The test asked them to write a paragraph on a specific topic, and I was especially impressed with how each of them was able to write. Prior to taking the test, this was the section my students were most concerned with, but this section turned out to be their shining achievement. The final is scheduled for November 14^th, so I’ve got to power through another four chapters with them before beginning the next module.

We’re taking a little break today in class. They wouldn’t be able to concentrate today anyways, given that it’s Halloween and they just got finished taking the test. Once I’m done here I’m going to bake a boxed cake for them. We’re going to eat cake and watch The Exorcism of Emily Rose in English—only a buck twenty-five from my local movie store. I know they’re going to beg me to turn on the subtitles, but I think I’m going to be a hardass about it. We’ll see. Maybe I’ll crack. They did so well!

More importantly, I’m going to dress up. Since I don’t exactly have all the clothes I have back home, or the wardrobe choice that Madison has presented in past years, I’ve decided to take the lazy—yet cost effective—route. I’m going to wear a bunch of goofy beach stuff, put on sunglasses and swimming goggles, throw my camera case over my shoulder and smear a little sunscreen on my face. There’s no better costume that I can pull off here than being a gringo. All I’m really doing is making it more obvious. My students are going to love it. I bet my director and all the secretaries are going to love it even more than they do.

As far as how I’m doing personally, now that I’m almost exactly two months into this experience, things are going fairly well. I feel confident teaching and even if I do attract a lot of attention, I’m getting used to it. I do miss home a lot, but the good news is that I have a medical school interview at UW-Madison scheduled for December 21^st, so I will be home for Christmas. They’re the only school to get back to me so far, but I’m hoping I’ll get some more takers before all is said and done. Christmas is definitely I’m looking forward to.

The only thing getting me down lately besides life’s usual little tricks is the weather. I can’t remember how much I’ve discussed this, but where I’m located on the coast it’s pretty much eternally cloudy this time of year. In all the time that I’ve been here, I can only remember one day of consistent sunshine and one day where it was off and on, peaking out from behind sheets of cloud. I joke that I have to travel to see the sun. It kind of sucks, though, knowing that I’m going to have to wait another month before the clouds recede. And, even once they’re gone, the sun is going to be relentless. I can’t say that I’m going to appreciate this new climatic extreme. Oh well. For the time being, I’m patiently awaiting the sun’s grand unveiling. The way everyone’s explained it to me is that, on whichever day Mother Nature deems best, the clouds part and that’s it. The sun is out to stay until the beginning of July. This is going to be a good day for Mark.

My host mother is currently in the United States with her sister. I mentioned a number of posts ago that Sarah’s sister, Paula, is pregnant. I don’t know how they’ve done it or which state they’re in, but the two of them are somewhere in the U.S. now, so the child will be born a citizen. According to Elsi, Paula has reached the fifteen-day mark. We’ll see how close she actually comes to the doctors’ prediction.

What’s more, I’m going to have a new neighbor! An English twenty-two-year-old is going to be living here as of tomorrow. I have no idea what program he’s with, but he’s going to be doing the exact same thing that I’m doing now; he’s even teaching at the same school. I just got a call from Tom telling me to hang around tomorrow morning because he’s pretty sure the new guy speaks close to zero Spanish. Guess who gets to be his translator. I hope I don’t mess anything up for this guy! I’m excited not to have to think in Spanish all the time.

This weekend I’m headed to Cuenca, a city in the mountains about five hours east of here. It’s supposed to be a beautiful city—something like four rivers run through it. I’ll actually be able to take off for Cuenca on Friday morning because it’s a national holiday, Day of the Dead. I’ve talked to my students about it and the people that choose to celebrate the holiday bring flowers and food to the graves of their relatives and family members. But, beside the three-day weekend, Day of the Dead isn’t the real reason I’m headed to Cuenca. The city is celebrating their Independence Day on November 3^rd, and I’ve heard it’s supposed to be a pretty culturally cool thing to check out. I’ll find out.

The Making of Province 24

The top photo was taken along 9th of October street in La Libertad. Notice the yellow and green flag to the left in the picture; these are the new provincial colors I was talking about in the last post.

The middle picture is the wedding we went to. A little dark, but you get the idea.

Finally, the third picture is BobbiLe and me in a lookout tower near Puerto Lopez. Even though the sun never shines in my part of the country, I swear I´m getting tanner.

Another Little Mountain Weekend

Last night was only the second bad night of sleep I’ve had since arriving in Ecuador. I woke up this morning with little picaduras (insect bites) all over my right ankle and foot. I still don’t know what crawled up in bed, but my suspicion is that it was one of those little biting spiders. I found one in my room today and smashed it into a fine pulp. This was revenge, but it’s just as likely it wasn’t even one of his kind.

I’ve been sleeping with a mosquito net over my bed for the last week or so. It will remain this way for the rest of my experience. Elsy put it up for me after the first bad night of sleep. I showed her my arm the morning thereafter and that was when I became acquainted with the word “picaduras.” Then she told me she was going to dig out the net.

Stupid mosquitoes. I swear they are quieter here than they are back in Wisconsin, because I never hear them buzzing around my head. Even when I am lying awake in bed, fully aware that they are hovering invisibly in the darkness above me, I can’t seem to make out the sound of their wings. Only when I wake up do I find that my right elbow is bumpy from being repeatedly stabbed over the course of the night.

Don’t worry, though, because, besides the netting, I’ve taken other preventative action. Permethrin is a chemical that “repels and kills ticks, chiggers and mosquitoes”—whatever the hell a chigger is. I’ve sprayed some around the borders of my bed, so we’ll see if that works. I’m confident it will help. I want to sleep; I will win this war.

Moving onto larger matters, a lot has happened in the last week. I mentioned in the last few posts that Santa Elena was vying to become its own province, the same general idea of this area turning into a state. This was the reason for all the strikes that I talked about last time—democracy in action. Well, guess what. It worked! Last week Tuesday, Santa Elena became the 24^th province in Ecuador. The protests must’ve helped!

It was pretty cool to watch the celebrations commence in Santa Elena that day. Everyone had been waiting for Congress to reach a decision on Tuesday morning, but the nothing happened until later that afternoon. I had gone outside at around 3:00 and was waiting to catch a bus into Santa Elena. That’s when I heard some noise gathering from ahead of me, past the church and down the hill that runs into the main street that runs through La Libertad’s commercial center. First only one motorcyclist came buzzing over the hill. Then came another three. Soon a long procession had begun and all of the riders were whooping and hollering. After the motorcyclists came the trucks filled with screaming Santa Elenans. You couldn’t hope to see fifty feet down the road without catching a glimpse of about a hundred regional flags.

The streets became so crowded the bus had to turn down a side road so that we could continue towards Santa Elena. I hung out the window and snapped a few pictures. When the bus finally arrived in Santa Elena, whoever wasn’t riding around waving flags was gathered near the town’s square. They’d pieced together a rally. A few people were drinking in the streets, but not as many as I expected. Some people were dancing, but most were just watching the people up on stage dance. One man on the stage was dressed like a dark yellow and green bird. I can’t say I know what type of bird he was supposed to be, but these two colors have become the new provincial ones. I’ve seen a million dark yellow and green flags since that time.

I’ve been trying to figure out for weeks now what the advantages are to having earned provincial independence, and I still haven’t figured them out. From what I’ve gathered, most of the reasons are financial. This will mean more governmental money is doled out to the area. Furthermore, people won’t have to go all the way to Guayaquil to secure a loan. On the other hand, much of what has happened—from what I understand—is purely bureaucratic. Provincial independence means that someone must govern the new province, so many of the local leaders who have been enticing citizens to protest and make “their” voices known are in a prime position to be in charge down here. Job creation comes about by creating committee after committee after committee, which is where the dollars flowing out of Guayaquilanos hands are probably ending up. Many of these city folks are refusing to travel to the beaches in Salinas because they’re so bitter about what’s happened. They’d rather not support Province 24 and will instead spend their summers in Playas, a not-as-pretty beach that’s further down the Ecuadorian coast, but, more importantly, outside the new province’s boundaries. I’ll let you know if the beach is any less packed once temporada comes. I can’t say I would mind a few less people.

Classes have been going much better lately than compared to the first week. I missed a day last week Wednesday because of the celebrations in Santa Elena, but who’s going to argue with that? The fact is that my students have been showing up consistently and, for the most part, are willing to learn. I try to keep things as interesting as possible by thinking up a variety of semi-creative activities, and they seem to recognize the effort. Our mid-term exam is coming up next week Monday, so we’re going to spend today and Thursday doing some review. Many of my students have secondary (or high) school during the day, so my English class is added on top of that. I know they won’t spend a lot of time studying for my class, so I thought it was smart to schedule a few days where I helped them through the review. Learning is the ultimate objective here, and I know I’m not the highest priority for some of my students.

Last weekend was another one worth talking about. I went back to Montañita; this time getting there was much easier. Because I teach until 9:00 P.M. on Friday nights and the last buses leaving up the coast are gone by 5:00, I had to wait until Saturday morning to get going. Lisa, the Montañita volunteer, had been calling me earlier in week, telling me to come because she was house-sitting for some friends, so whoever could make it there would have a free place to stay the weekend. Some wealthy Americans owned the beachside home she was staying at, but, for whatever reason, they weren’t able to use it as much as they wanted to and are currently looking to sell it (anyone interested?). I’m not sure how Lisa met the owners of the house, but they asked if Lisa would be willing to watch the place on weekends, and she most certainly agreed. A bunch of other volunteers, four currently working in the mountains and one working further up the coast, were planning on meeting Lisa and going surfing. They had gotten together on Friday night and traveled up the coast Saturday morning to a place called Las Tunas. Unfortunately, the bus I had taken out of La Libertad only took me as far as Olon, an hour south of Las Tunas. When I had asked the bus driver if the bus would take me to Las Tunas, he told me my best bet was to get off the bus and find a “carrito.” I didn’t know what this meant. I later found out he wanted me to hitch a ride to Las Tunas—the bus I was on wasn’t going that far north.

After following the driver’s advice, I soon found myself stuck in Olon. I called one of the girls’ phones in Las Tunas and was able to get in touch with Lisa. Our conversation went a little something like this:

“Lisa, I think I’m in Olon. How do I get to Tunas?”

“Oh, you took a blue bus, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, I did.”

“You need to find a green bus.”

“A green bus?”

“Yeah. Wait for a green bus. You’re about forty-five minutes away. Get off near the soccer field.”

So after learning about how Ecuadorians color code their transportation routes, I went across the street, bought a bottle of water, positioned myself along the side of the road and waited, all the while staring down the road from the direction I’d come.

Sure enough, not more than twenty minutes had gone by before a green bus came rolling toward me. I asked the bus attendant (every single bus has two people working on it: the driver and another guy who collects passengers’ fares) if the bus went as far north as Las Tunas, and he eagerly waved me on board—in order to secure this job, you must know only two words: venga and vaya, or come and go.

The ride beyond Montañita is much prettier than it is further to the south. There must be more precipitation, because everything is green and lush instead of gray or brown and desert-like. When I finally arrived in Las Tunas, I asked the driver to let me off near a soccer field, and—sure enough—I was eating cerviche with Lisa and the rest within minutes.

Later that day we took a general tour of the coast north of Montañita. Some Ecuadorian friends Lisa had made owned a van and offered to drive us around if we each chipped in a dollar for gas (what are gas prices back home like now?). We traveled as far as Puerto Lopez, which is a beautiful city about halfway up the Ecuadorian coast. The place was a little different because the general building theme was red brick as opposed to bare gray concrete, which is a construction staple of seemingly everywhere else in the country.

By the time we got back to the home Lisa was house-sitting, everyone was pretty beat. BobbiLe, a volunteer from Minnesota, and I decided to play Frisbee on the beach while everyone else rested in the house.

That night, another one of Lisa’s friends gave us a ride into Montañita, which is only about ten minutes north of the village itself. The thing about Montañita is that it’s so small everyone knows your name. As such, Lisa can’t walk down the street without having at least three children yelling out, “Teacher, teacher, teacher!” This is, in fact, Lisa’s nickname. We all call Lisa “the teacher” now. Another of Lisa’s friends and students had invited us to his bar—he’s a twenty-something-year-old surf instructor/entrepreneur. This guy had a DVD of some of his surfing highlights, so we all started telling him that he should play it over the television above the bar. It took me a while to realize that this guy was a member of the national Ecuadorian surf team. In fact, a bunch of Lisa’s friends who slowly but surely made their ways into the bar were members of the team. Before I knew it, about a quarter of the members of the group of people framed in the picture on the wall were right in front of me. Waiting for the green bus to appear over the hill in Olon, I had no idea I’d be drinking with the national surf team that same night.

I would have been willing to call it a night after that, but everyone else had different plans. We’d been invited to a wedding reception! Ecuadorian weddings are different from ones back in the states in that (forgetting what we’ve learned from Wedding Crashers) you don’t need an invitation to attend. I should say, in a place as small as Montañita, you don’t need one.

The surfers, all the other volunteers and I headed towards Montañita’s residential area, that is, where the non-tourists live. Down the dirt road I heard loud music playing and saw a line of neon lights held high beneath a huge tent. This was the wedding celebration in progress. If I was tired from running around all day and stressing over getting to Las Tunas, I wasn’t tired anymore. When we got closer, I realized how loud the music was actually playing. Imagine standing next to the speakers during a concert at Summerfest. No one asked any questions as us seven gringos walked into the tent. We did, however, attract quite a few looks, but I’m getting quite used to that.

The setup underneath the tent was something like a simple sandwich. To either side, comprising the “bread” of the wedding sandwich, the guests were seated. Round, plastic tables were arranged in a more-or-less orderly fashion and people were sitting in plastic chairs or on tiny wooden stools. We were able to find our spot in a semi-circle of these tiny wooden circles, somewhere near the entrance of the tent. The “meat” was then the dancing couples in the middle, moving beneath the colorful neon lights. At the far end of the tent, opposite the entrance, was a stage, and on top of the stage was the MC. It was his job to make announcements between songs and dance goofily by himself where no one else could come near him. I don’t know where they controlled the music from, but only about two or three songs would play at a time before everyone would clear out of the center aisle and the MC would say some things, none of which I could have hoped to understand because of a thousand different distractions. When the dancers cleared out, the only people moving about throughout the tent were the food servers. Teams of two ran back and forth, carrying an enormous wooden tray covered with plates of food between them. The bride must have been directing them. She was located at the entrance to the tent, speaking to guests and family members from behind a table off to the right side. She was partially hidden behind a tree holding white cakes that I was really, really hoping they would be cutting into shortly. For as long as we were there, they never touched the cakes. I searched and searched throughout the entire evening for the groom, but I never once saw him (or, if I did, he wasn’t wearing anything to set himself off from anyone else).

I danced a few time with the other volunteers, but, for those of you who know me well, dancing isn’t exactly my most favorite event in the world (not to mention I really suck at it—thank you, Steph). Instead of dancing, I spent most of my time taking in my surroundings and drinking with my new surfer buddies. A lot of drinking goes on at an Ecuadorian wedding, and everyone drinks out of these very small plastic cups (which is really no different than any other occasion). As soon as I’d entered, in fact, the man who welcomed us to sit next to his table offered me one of these plastic cups filled with a shot of whiskey and top off with water. It’s customary for one person to take a drink and then pass it on to the next person. When the cup is emptied, it’s given back to the person controlling the bottle of whiskey, who then fills it back up with however much whiskey he deems prudent and the little round robin starts again. When the bottle of Johnnie Walker was finally gone, I thought the game was over. That’s when the man pulled out a bottle of Scotch from his secret hiding spot beneath the table.

For the most part, I was able to avoid excessive amounts of hard liquor by keeping near the surfer guys. They stuck to beer, which makes more sense for someone from Milwaukee. Where at social gatherings back home, we usually go for twelve ounce bottles or cans of beer, they do things slightly differently here. First, everything is metric, but, besides that, they drink it slightly differently too. One person will get a twenty-ounce bottle of beer and he’ll pour it into these small plastic cups for everyone to drink from. At the wedding we drank beer almost the same way other people around us drank the whiskey. One person controlled the bottle and would fill the cup up usually about a quarter of the way, or about two healthy gulps of beer. He or she would then pass the cup to whomever he wanted, and that person was expected to drink it. I learned quickly that being in control of the beer was a very wise idea. This way, I could make all of the surfers drink as much as I wanted and they couldn’t make me drink in return.

We sat in our semi-circle, doling out beer for one another and destroying our cochlear hair cells until around four in the morning. The bus that would take us back north to the house Lisa was looking after started running again at five. Some of the other volunteers went to a club to dance, but knowing what we’ve learned about Mark, I decided to pass out at Lisa’s house in Montañita.

We woke up around 11:00 the next morning, paid our quarters to get back to Montañita and I was surfing by noon. I’m getting better, but, overall, I still suck. After getting pummeled for long enough by the ocean, I walked back ashore and started back towards town when I ran into a couple of my new surfer friends from the night before. They were seated at a table, apparently watching the high tide diminish. “¿Estás chuchaqui?” I asked one of them (Are you hungover? “Chuchaqui” is a Quichan word; it’s derived from the indigenous dialect). “Sí,” he said, and I continued down the beach, laughing to myself.

This weekend is going to be much different than the last. I’m heading into Guayaquil on Friday with Pedro, my host mother’s nephew. We’re going to stay by Tom and Carla’s place. If I came, they promised to show me a little of the city. I don’t know that I’m going to be able to top the wedding last weekend in Montañita, but we’ve got to try!