Otovalan Marketplace

The group bus wound its way up the side of a mountain for over an hour before we reached Papallacta. We traveled over the top of that mountain before the thermal springs were revealed on the other side. I thought the best part about Papallacta was going to be the thermal pools, but it turned out to be the hike. A bunch of us decided to go walking into the mountains along these trails marked mostly by cattle fences and muddy hoof prints. We wound our way up the mountain, ducking under trees and crossing thin bridges. I’m not sure if this was a cloud forest, but judging from the distance between us and the white wisps overhead, I’d say it must have been. Eventually, we came to a trail that seemed to go straight into the forest, mercilessly up the mountainside. So—naturally—we decided this was a good trail to take. The trail was extremely thin and very muddy (which made it really exciting getting back down) and lead us to a pretty spectacular waterfall. After descending, only enough light remained in the sky for us to make it home. Then, we relaxed.

This week was my first week of practice teaching by myself. That is to say, even though I’ve been practice teaching for over a week now, Thursday was the first day I ever had to practice teach without any other volunteers to teach with me. Teaching on my own went really well. Between Friday and Saturday, I taught my students how to tell time, numbers 0-1000, days of the week and months of the year. They are extremely eager to learn. They are also extremely gracious. On Friday, in fact, I ended class half an hour early because my students had planned a surprise for us teachers. One student had brought in a cake and all the others had teamed up to buy a buffet of Doritos and packaged candy. After only seven days of practice teaching, this was my students’ way of saying thanks to us. I was blown away when one of my students, Gustavo, stood up to deliver a heartfelt thanks to all of us before we dug into the snacks. Another student actually shed a tear. Incredible, hey? I didn’t quite believe it myself. Maybe she just had something in her eye. I really don’t deserve that kind of appreciation.

I’m continually amazed by the diversity of people in this country. Essentially, Ecuador is split into three main regions: the Oriente (jungle), the Sierra (mountains) and La Costa (coast). The people living in each region are as varied as the region itself. This past weekend, I got my best taste of the indigenous people living in the Sierra by traveling to Otovalo, a small town located north of Quito. Otovalo is known for its market; in fact, the indigenous people operating there are actually the most profitable of any indigenous group in all of South America. My host father, Miguel, grew up in Otovalo, so we had the perfect guide to show us around the market. A long street runs from the base of a hill in the south and up this hill to the north. Along this street are the vendors. The must arrive sometime in the morning and set up shop, because by the time we arrived sometime in the early afternoon, the place was hopping with all manner of locals, Ecua-folk, gringos and gringo-wannabes. The selection of indigenous crafts you can buy is extensive: chess sets, blankets, panchos, backpacks, wallets and a bunch of different foods you’ve probably never dreamed up.

One of the most fun parts was watching Miguel and Marcia haggle over prices on my behalf. I’d see something I wanted to buy and I’d basically whisper to Marcia that I liked it, which was enough to set the wheels of commerce into motion. Before I knew any better, the vendor had brought about fifty different colors of the same style of item. We’d make a game out of unfolding the blankets even though they all looked the same; this was customer service at its finest. Getting the price reduced from $12 to $10 was fairly simple for the Pazmiños. Getting the price reduced from $10 to $9, however, was a different story. Miguel and Marcia’s strategy was toughness, “We’re not paying more than $9,” or Marcia would simply repeat “$9, no more” with a scowl on her face. The vendor, on the other hand, elected to use the Ecua-whine. I’d been educated about the Ecua-whine in orientation and I’d seen it used sparingly in the past, but never to the extent that I saw it used in the Otovalan marketplace. Basically, what it means is that the vendor whined to encourage the price she wanted. She would say things like, “Oh please, miss, $10, the blanket took so long to make,” or “Only one more dollar—please—the blanket is so big and required so much material.” Where assertiveness (and occasionally anger) work in the United States, humbly belittling oneself works here. In the end, I have no idea whether I paid a fair price or not, but I’m inclined to say that I did, because we must have been bargaining for about half an hour to get the price down a dollar. At a number of points I considered stepping in and saying that I didn’t care about an extra dollar, but, to be completely truthful, I really wanted to see how things would going to play out without my interference. (Maybe I ought to put that extra dollar in the bank.)

I took a long run this morning, which was painful because my lungs haven’t quite acclimated to the altitude yet. I carry a rock with me, so when dogs start to run after me (two dogs came after me today) I’m prepared with a threat they understand. Just pretending to throw a rock is enough to scare most dogs away, but I’m not willing to shoot blanks in a pinch. Seriously, though, I’m less scared of these dogs than when I first began. I think we’re beginning to understand one another. Many of these dogs are territorial, so once I’ve crossed a certain point, they could care less about what I do. I’ll either get very good at sprinting or become a very good aim with a rock before the end of the year.

After the run, we went to the park. Today we had a picnic organized by my volunteer organization at Parque Carolinas, which is this huge public park in the middle of Quito. I ate a ton of rice and beans and guacamole while chatting it up with all the other host families. In general, all of us volunteers are very happy with our host families—and we should be because they’re the coolest. We played some soccer and then a bunch of people went to climb Pichincha, a nearby mountain that has one of those carts that can carry you halfway up for a small price. I chose to catch up with my family and friends instead (well, as much as I was able to—international phone call charges stack up pretty quickly). Don’t worry, though, I plan to make the climb on my own sometime later this week. With that said, the most important thing I did today was to see that Brett Favre threw three touchdown passes and had over three hundred passing yards against the Chargers. I immediately sent a text message to Josh, a volunteer from North Carolina, because whenever we don’t have anything else to talk about, we argue whether Brett should retire or not. I’m going to give him so much shit tomorrow….

The Inevitable Question of Movistar vs. Porta

I’m really quite amazed by this country. I just put $35 into my wallet—two tens and three fives—with the intention of this amount lasting me all week. I’ll buy a lunch everyday with this money, any toiletries or any other general stuff I’ll need from Supermaxi, which is the Ecuadorian equivalent of Wal-Mart (but a poor excuse at that) and another round of saldo, or a recharge of the money on my cell phone account. Instead of cell phone plans like we have in the states, people here purchase a card worth a certain amount of money, and once this amount is used up, the cell phone won’t connect the calls. It’s actually ridiculously expensive to make calls within the country, twenty-five cents a minute if you’re calling Movistar to Movistar and forty cents a minute if you’re calling Movistar to Porta. I’ve chosen to buy a Movistar phone, which puts me at a particular disadvantage because everyone in the mountainous regions of the country buys Movistar phones, but everyone located on the coast buys Porta phones. So, once I start making Ecuadorian friends on the coast, it’ll be really expensive to stay in touch with them. The good part about having a Movistar phone, however, is that almost all the other volunteers have them too. I guess I’ve chosen to make myself more available to the volunteers in my program than to the new friends I’ll make on the coast.

It seems to me that there are two main jobs that the people of this country work. The first is as police officers or city guards. I mentioned this profession in the post that I attached the first set of photos to. The second job is more general than the first: people working as small business owners. Ecuadorians don’t believe in the one-stop shop like Americans do. No, they prefer to decorate their streets with a plethora of these small businesses that fall into a few main categories: tiny restaurants, hardware stores, internet cafes and movie and liquor stores. I think at some point, some high-ranking city official created a stamp that included these places and marked out a plan for Quito using it as his only tool. Maybe you’re reading this and thinking that this is really no different than any other city, but I can assure you someone wouldn’t get lost in an American city like he could in Quito.

Other people resort to other, less lucrative, forms of entrepreneurship. There’s really no sort of regulation or sanitation here, so they can get away with it quite easily. An Ecuadorian and an American’s sense of security (and responsibility for that matter) and two very different concepts. Let’s make a small comparison quickly. If a big, dumb guy was walking down the street and fell into a sewer in America, you could count on about fifteen separate lawsuits and the amassing of a small army of injury and special interest lawyers. If, however, that same big, dumb guy fell down a sewer in Ecuador (which is hardly out of the realm of possibility—sticks no thicker than a person’s wrists are used in place of manhole covers in certain places), there would be nothing more than a pair of broken legs, a lot of useless whining and a very stinky pair of khakis. Here, I’ve heard the mantra is así es la vida, which—loosely translated—means shit happens. I think something like 10-12% of the country is insured. Since something like 80% of the people here are living below the poverty line, I’m ultimately surprised the figure is that high.

For many others, the very notion of owning a place to conduct business is out of the question. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wondered about these street vendors, asking myself how it’s really possible that they’re able to eek out a living, making sales that are invisible to me no matter how many times I pass them by. When Isaac, John and I walk out the door at about 6:15 in the morning, the first thing that we’re greeted by is the gasman, honking his horn down the hill, reminding the neighbors to change out their blue tanks of propane. If I can hear him honking his horn before I leave the Pazmiño home, I know I’m running late. Down the hill we reach the main street that leads south into the heat of Quito—this is la calle Occidental. The traffic itself is a phenomenon of this country. Taxis might buzz by at eighty miles an hour—traffic regulation enforcement is the lowest priority of the police here. (Walking home today, for instance, one officer was having a bit of fun with his authority by half on the street and half on the sidewalk.) Before we climb up the overpass that lifts us over la calle Occidental—a bridge my host father jokingly calls the gringo detector, because all of the locals have turned the Occidental’s median into a shortcut—there’s always a man or a woman with his or her cart, the same size and shape of a hot dog vendor. The cart carries an assortment of square-based bottles, the liquids inside various shades of brown and yellow. The liquid they combine is claimed and advertised to be medicinal, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it put a gringo like me on his back for a week. I might compare what they make to tea, which is what it looks like, but even the boiling of water implies a very rudimentary, albeit effective, sanitation. Any vendor will only remain in the same spot for nine days. I asked Miguel why nine days; what was special about nine days? He just said it’s nine days because that’s what it is. I suppose a new face has a better chance of making a sale every now and then. Apparently nine days is all it takes to get sick of seeing the same person. I’m going to test Miguel’s prediction as soon as I can. Right or wrong, now I’m left wondering how many years it takes for a vendor to sell from every available spot along the streets of Quito.

A lot of the things I mention in these blog posts are very critical of Quito and of Ecuador in general; I especially attack the city for its incredible lack of infrastructure, which I see as one of the main aspects this city needs to improve upon in the near future. (There’s so much to be said about this topic, especially when the country is in the process of rewriting its constitution and electing a new president at the end of the month.) But I remain so positive because of all the great things this city has to offer too. Practice teaching has introduced me to a diverse group of Ecuadorian students. The two youngest are two sisters, ages 11 and 14, and the oldest is a man who must be 60 years or older and can’t bring himself to speak more loudly than a whisper no matter how much I cajole him. Most of the students, however, are in their twenties. Some have taken English lessons before, in high school or elsewhere, but no one can read, write, speak or listen beyond a basic level.

The first official day of practice teaching was Wednesday. All the volunteers in my program teach at SECAP, which I don’t know too much about other than they provide each of us with a modest classroom in a rather large teaching complex. I teach in the evening, from 6:00-8:00 P.M., so many of these students work jobs during the day and come to English class for two hours at night. The class will meet ten times altogether and students were charged $1 for their instruction (the dollar charge is actually only a formality—we wouldn’t charge them a cent if it didn’t motivate them to show up for the class). Despite the hours they put in at other jobs and what not, all of the students are extremely enthusiastic to learn English. At least in the classroom, Ecuadorians are perfectionists. We performed a series of skits to acquaint students with certain English vocabulary, and not a single group was prepared to present before making sure everyone had his or her lines written down on paper, recited and a quick sketch was drawn on the dry erase board to provide their specific scene’s background. One group’s skit took place on a lake, for instance. No one in the group was ready to perform the skit until a group member had drawn a number of red fish in the water. The rest of the class watched on in anticipation as she drew, and one student near the front of the classroom yelled she should draw a shark too.

I’m so excited that my students actually want to learn this language. Coming from a family in which many of the members have chosen to teach for a profession, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that one of the greatest struggles many teachers face is motivating students to want to learn. I hope this part of my teaching experience remains the same in Santa Elena.

With regard to how practice teaching goes, we’ve been split by my volunteer organization into groups of three, so the first day consisted of me and two other volunteers making our way through a bunch of introductory games and some common questions in English. When we asked the students to write as many words that they could list about work or school or family or vacation, I was amazed to see how much they knew. I’m really blown away by how much American (or better put, North American) culture has pervaded this part of the world. For as much as we Salsa and down Latino-inspired drinks in quasi-American bars back home, there are just as many Nike outlet stores and KFCs dotted throughout this city. The Colonel is very, very popular here. He’s a symbol to me of the power of the American dollar and the advantages of a trans fatty acid free diet. I laugh too when I hear more Kurt Cobain in the bars here than I do back home.

Straight from the Ecua-streets

The top photo is near the bus stop we have to take to the Mariscal, which is the section of the city where orientation takes place, every morning. A pipe or something must have broken that morning and a stream of water was shooting out onto the sidewalk and street. Nobody cared. All the pedestrians simply moved around it. It´s been this way for days now.

The second one is a picture of the DVDs I bought for David for his birthday. $4.50 for 3, believe that! The papers and cutup magazine pictures below them are some teaching materials from Friday´s class. We´re teaching the students clothes and the verb to wear. The troublemaker in our class, Christian, insisted that we teach him the word ¨thong.¨ We´re going to have a fashion show on Monday. Don´t worry, no thongs will be present.

More on OR

How can I describe orientation over the last two weeks without describing the paper? Pretty much it works the same way everyday. We meet in the morning after Spanish classes, which go from 7:00-9:00, and Therese and Kane start handing out lots and lots of printed information. One packet for how to deal with insurance if we get sick or find a way to get roundworm; one packet explaining the best way to use audio materials in an English classroom; one packet explaining where to go and when, but never really why. It´s amazing how we travel here. They write an address on the board and we´re expected to get to it. I´m glad I know how to use a map.

Orientation goes all day. Last week it went from 7 A.M. to 8 P.M., Monday-Friday. We´ve gotten a bit of a break this week because we´ve started practice teaching, which is a whole new barrel of monkeys. We have guest speakers too, like past volunteers and people who really know what´s going on in this country. On Wednesday this week, for instance, a woman originally from Slinger came to talk to the group about the history and political situation in Ecuador. Mary was one of these truly inspiring individuals. She´s been living in northern Ecuador since the 70s. She´s written one of the most complete historical accounts for this country and has been fighting the copper miners and oil companies that insist on raping Ecuadorian land to the north. At least from the figures she presented, the oil drillers have done nothing but hurt the economy here. Without knowing more about it, the only people to benefit from oil interests are an elite few; anyone lower on the ladder of prosperity gets screwed. Without the English-speaking skills Mary has imparted, it´s difficult to imagine how the indigenous people would have had a chance of defeating Big Oil in a modern court.

I´m running short on time because I have to be around for practice teaching in half and hour, so I thought I might end on some happy highlights. Earlier this week, it was Viviana´s, my host sister, birthday--I can´t remember what I´d called her in the previous post, but her name is definitely Viviana. I hate to betray how poorly I can really understand my family, but I am improving very quickly. Today is actually David´s, my host brother´s birthday. I picked him up a few DVDs as a present: 300, Pirates of the Caribbean and Back to the Future. I got Viviana a bouquet of roses for $4.00. Roses grow in the Sierra (mountainous region) of the country and are extremely cheap. I bought them from a small floral shop, but was disappointed to see an indigenous woman from the mountains later on, propped against the side of a building. The roses she was trimming were absolutely gorgeous, and I´m quite sure they would have been even more inexpensive than in the flower store.

Speaking of local businesses, for whatever reason, Ecuador mass produces DVDs as well. It only costs $1.50 for a modern movie dubbed in Spanish. Really, any viable business is worth pursuing here. I´m quite sure it´s not legal for people to be copying and distributing these DVDs by American copyright standards, but that´s exactly what they are--American standards. Many of the concepts we take for granted fall apart here. I´m not sure an Ecuadorian would even understand producing these DVDs as stealing like we do; I´d suspect they´d justify it using other arguments. Stores that sell these DVDs are absolutely everywhere, and almost every store has a different DVD collection to choose from. I´ve been asking around to see if anyone has Season 3 of The Office (many of the movies and series they sell are actually ones that still aren´t available for purchase in the U.S.; The Simpsons Movie, for instance, is already for sale here), but I haven´t had any luck with my request yet. I´m not sure anyone will ever have what I want. I have a feeling the Ecuadorians don´t have the same sense of humor we do. The most popular movies here are actually the action/adventure ones. Jackie Chan movies seem extremely popular, for example.

I had my first Salsa lesson today too. It was more laughing than dancing, but I did manage to figure out a couple of sweet spins before my hour was up. I´ll make you proud, Gee! The volunteer group is traveling to the mountains tomorrow to go hiking and take a dip in the thermal hot springs, so that should be pretty nice.

Some Shots

The first picture is the view from my home in Quito. I live in the northern part of the city, at the base of one of the Andean mountains. My room is one the second floor of the house. Marcia, my host mother, insisted that I take the one I´m in because it has the highest ceiling. Marcia is consistently impressed with my height; I´m consistently impressed with her cooking. As I´ve mentioned before, Miguel, my host father, is an architect, and the house itself is extremely interesting. He is also a painter, which is somewhat unlikely, because in Santa Elena my host mother´s husband was also an artist. I´ve gained the impression that all artists must have beautiful homes. I´ll include other pictures of the home once I´ve taken them this weekend.

The second picture is one of the many policia stationed throughout the city. If you´re eighteen years or old, a male and in need of a job in Quito, chances are you´re either a part of the national police or a security guard. These guys are absolutely everywhere you go--you can´t walk a block without running into a man dressed in black or green. Many of them wear pistols on their chests or have semi-automatic rifles in their hands, but it´s against federal law for any of these firearms to be loaded at any time unless there´s an absolute emergency. I wonder how much this law is really enforced.... Even so, I guess the Colombian version of these guards is much more imposing. They wear a pair of bandeliers over their chests with bullets that have the same diameter of your eyeballs. I particularly liked this guy because of his cool shades. I hope he didn´t notice me taking the picture, but, as my friends know, I´m not a very discrete person.

The last picture is me on my way to Guayaquil last weekend. As you can all see, I´m very thoughtful, trying to determine how to avoid my passport from being jacked. I actually didn´t carry it with me that weekend, which could have ended poorly because I was stopped at a checkpoint by the policia on the way home to Quito. One of the officers scrutinized the hell out of the copy of my passport, but eventually let me back onto the bus. That was at about 3:30 in the morning.

To keep things rolling...

...while I still have internet access, I have to talk a bit about Quito and the rest of orientation up until now.

Quito is beautiful and dirty at the same time. The standard home is little more than concrete walls with squares cut out for windows. White paint is applied directly to this concrete unevenly. Less frequent versions of these homes are bright green, yellow, red, blue or orange. I´m not quite sure why it´s worked out the way it has, but when viewed from afar, it´s as if the city is a predominantly white canvas, splattered in places with loud splotches of these colors and propped against a mountainside. Up close, the city is filthy. Sanitation is nothing when the government doesn´t have the infrastructure to support it. I knew I was in a third world country when I was allowed to smell its streets, and everyone reading this knows what that smell is without my having to write another letter. I´m still trying to decide how much I enjoy being in Quito.

Moving right along, I´ll mention that I´m actually writing these first three posts from the teacher´s workroom of the school I´ll be working at in Santa Elena. Starting on Thursday, the orientation schedule called for all the WorldTeach volunteers to visit their respective sites, which meant 37 people moving all over the country and a hundred headaches for Kane and Therese, who are as supportive, laid back and perfect for this type of work as anyone could ask for. For me, the site visit has meant a ten-hour bus ride to Guayaquil, Ecuador´s largest and significantly wealthier city, a two hour transfer to Santa Elena and a short ride to La Libertad, the neighboring town only 4 km down the road from the streets of Santa Elena. That is... in principle. One of the first cultural lessons you have to learn in Ecuador is the people´s perception (or misperception, from my point of view) of time. Very little here happens when it was originally scheduled for. In other words, timeliness and this whole concept that ¨time is money¨is a purely American value. What this means in practice is that a supposed ten-hour bus ride turns into a thirteen-hour one, and a simple bus transfer turns into a night spent at Chelby´s host family´s home in downtown Guayaquil when the terminal closes early. So far, the host families have easily been the most delightful parts of this whole experience. If some nation´s average citizen were based on a prototype of one of these people, I´m convinced we´d have a successfully Socialist nation on our hands.

While this is a near truth to me, it goes without saying that Ecuador too has its share of bad apples. My host family back in Quito went to great lengths to spell it out for me that I needed to have a tight grip ¨con los manos¨on my luggage as I sniffed out the bus to the southern beaches in Guayaquil´s massive bus terminal. While I have absolutely no fear of violent crime in neither a small town like Santa Elena nor a big city like Quito, I´m constantly fingering the outline of my wallet through my khakis to make sure it´s still there. Petty theft here is more than a statistic; for some it´s a livelihood. After riding this country from top to bottom and seeing some of the poverty that exists here, I can´t say I blame all of them.

Even so, I wonder why the Ecuadorian thieves don´t get a little more creative. Just the other day, we were given the afternoon to explore Quito a bit. Traveling south from the Mariskal, the neighborhood where all of our orientation events take place, brings you to the vieja, or old, sector of Quito. In perhaps Quito´s most famous Catholic church (this is going to make you shutter, Aunt Mary), a man walked up from behind and squirted mustard down one of the volunteer´s back. Having been warned in our survival guide of this little scam, she quickly sidled away from him. If she hadn´t possessed the knowledge that she did, the scam was to be completed when another thief (perhaps more) approached her saying, ¨Oh, no, no, no. Let me clean that off for you,¨an action that would have provided enough of a distraction for one of them to slip away a camera or a wallet or, if you´re really going for the balls, a passport. I´m at somewhat of an advantage being 6´2¨, which I really do believe is intimidating to many of the people here, with a pro receiver type build (he he), but I´m going to have to use public transportation a lot in my year in Ecuador. When boarding the bus from Quito to Guayaquil, for instance, it´s important to make sure that´s a PanAmericana employee who´s storing your lugguage, and you have to make sure no one ¨mistakes¨his or her bag for yours at one of the many stops along the way. I´ve already thought up one scam myself: For those buses with a storage compartment that can be accessed from either of the bus´flanks, simply provide a distraction on one side and steal from the other (please don´t tell the Ecuadorians!). It gets even trickier when you´re forced to stand on the bus and every Ecuadorian in Quito needs to get to work on time, and so squishes you so tightly together being 6´2¨gives you a whole new sense of appreciation. If you wear your backpack the way it´s meant to be worn, someone can pick right through it without your having the slightest idea. Other ladrones prefer to do things a bit less inconspicuously and will slash a hole in your purse or pack and treat your personal belongings like the candy inside a piñata (a Mexican tradition, not an Ecuadorian one). Just to keep this in perspective, however, that knife is only turned against an actual person with the same relative frequency that it is in good, old Wisconsin.

So, after spending the night in Guayaquil and meeting Chelby´s host parents and her three lovely daughters (and hell yes, guys, the Latina women look as good as they´re all cracked up to be) I finally made it to the coast by ten o´clock this morning. Of course nothing could go as planned. Because none of the streets here are well-marked and I was overly anxious, I got off the bus at the wrong stop, which gave Umberto, the director at my school, the chance to relish in a little treasure hunt throughout the streets of Santa Elena. I still say he lost because it took the clerk behind the counter of a street-shop pharmacy to get him to find me sitting there like a big, dumb gringo, which, by the way, can spread the gamut from a cultural slur to a term of endearment here. I´ve forgotten who told me that the term was originally developed by the Mexicans, combining ¨green¨and ¨go¨to tell greedy Americans to get the hell off their land at some point in history. But just last night Chelby´s host mom called me a ¨gringito,¨or little gringo, and I really didn´t mind it at all.

I have a million other things I could say but won´t because I´ve already been typing for way too long when I should be observing Jenny´s English class instead. I´ll be one of the only native English speakers here, which makes me feel pretty good because even if I turn out to be a crummy teacher, at least each class I teach can be two hours of my students listening to a crummy teacher without the linguistic infelicities of native Spanish speaker whose also developed a tongue for English.

What can I say about Santa Elena without knowing anything about it yet? Like I mentioned before, La Libertad is 4 km to the west and traveling further out onto the tip of the southern beach´s peninsula will bring you to Salinas, which is definitely worth talking about. The guidebooks say that the main stretch of road running through Salinas looks like Miami, and even though I haven´t really seen Miami except for what I´ve seen on TV, I´d have to agree. During the ride from Quito to Guayaquil, I wondered if it was going to be worth it for my friends and family to come out to visit me for anything more than a taste of Ecuador. Salinas has put that fear to rest. It´s the off-season now (December to April is the Ecuadorian summer, which doesn´t mean what it does to a Wisconsinite because the climate here is so steady. Summer means the sun comes out, which means so do the people). When some of you come to visit me (Steve, Jesse, Cody, I know I can count on you guys if no one else) you will be able to sense the average household income increase as the bus travels west from Santa Elena to La Libertad and finally to Salinas. We will surf, we will eat seafood and we will be happy, unlike so many people who lack the opportunity to do so in their own backyard. Did I not mention that you won´t have to worry about exchanging your dollars? They´re good here, my friends. Sometime in the 80s or early 90s the government switched over because the economy was crashing. The dollarization has done wonders for this country other than skyrocket the price on certain goods the poor demand. Even so, the economy has been making consistent gains for years. I´ll talk money and politics another time. There´s so much to be said and not least among it all... the beach is beautiful, and I love where I´ll be teaching come October!

Desde Domingo (Since Sunday)

There are too many things to say to make this post complete, so I´ll try to stick to the highlights.

I flew into Miami on Sunday, September 2nd, at around noon. There are 37 other volunteers in the 2007 Fall Ecuador WorldTeach program, and almost all of us had a chance to meet one another and prepare for the flight to Quito (which is surprisingly only about 4 hours from Florida). The flight was a story in and of itself: It was then that it truly hit me that after all these months of fees and paperwork, after all of the mental preparation and repacking and see-you-laters, that this was finally going to happen to me. Only 12 hours before then I had been partying with my friends for the Badgers´ first home game, and now I was going to a third world country half a world away. We arrived in Quito, Ecuador´s capital, I passed through customs without a problem, and, before I knew it, we were headed for our hotel, all 37 members´ luggage contained like marbles in the back of a huge pickup truck as we gazed back from the bus that drove us to our hotel. A quarter for the driver from each of us was considered a generous tip. To tip a worker for any service-based profession--waiters, taxi drivers, etc.--isn´t at all expected here.

I was put into a room with three other volunteers, Chris from Hawaii, John from Seattle and Charlie from Mississippi. If I shot a paintball at a map of the United States, one at each of the WorldTeach volunteers´home states, no part of the country would be dry. Even though the WorldTeach office is located out east, the Midwest has (I think) the largest representation out of any other region. I´m very pleased, however, to be the only individual from Wisconsin. I´ve done everything in my power to toss as many Bucky references into normal conversation as possible (and for all those UW alums, pretty much everyone in the program has something great to say about either Madtown or the university--I´m really amazed by the weight that name carries). I slept as much as Kane and Therese, our in-country program coordinators, allowed before getting up in time for my first Ecuadorian meal, a sort of pastry bread, some sort of fruit jam and a glass of pineapple juice--none of that canned crap. As you can imagine, fruit juice here is a staple. Bebida de mora is blackberry juice and I wish I could ship it to the states by the boat load.

The rest of the week has been orientation and teacher training. So far we´ve only covered the basics. Safety concerns are probably the most interesting thing I can talk about here (without saying too much because I know my mom´s already a nervous wreck). The site I´ve been assigned to in Ecuador, Santa Elena or Saint Helen in English, lies along the Pacific Ocean, and below 1500 meters of elevation, you´re in a malaria zone. I´ll have to start taking mefloquine, an anti-malarial medication, two weeks prior to living in Santa Elena, which doesn´t seem like too bad of a deal until I tell you that the adverse side effect of mefloquine is extremely vivid dreams and, more commonly, extremely vivid nightmares. So now I have the choice between susceptibility to malaria and seeing some crazy-ass stuff that will probably feel like it actually happened to me when my body shocks itself awake in the early morning hours. I´ve also learned there´s nothing anyone can do if I come down with Dengue Fever, which will lay me out for about two weeks as I try to manage the disease´s pain the Peace Corps nurse described as coming from deep within my bones, that is until my body can build its immunity. Don´t worry though, mom, we also started Spanish classes!

On the subject of Spanish, I can´t even begin to thank Señora Clark and Señnor Scharpf enough. From buying Q-tips in una tienda to speaking for the first time with my host family, I can´t stress how appreciative I am that they were good (and by that I mean tough) teachers. I definitely did not spend enough time studying this summer, which doesn´t say much anyway because no tape or CD can replace true immersion, even if the CIA does permit its sticker of approval to be pasted on the jacket. Slowly but surely, all those little acronyms and rhymes that illustrate a grammar point or allow me to conjugate a verb are coming back to me. I will forever hate por versus para.

By the second night I met my new host family, who I´ll be staying with for the next month during orientation. Miguel is my new ¨father¨ and I couldn´t understand enough of the first night´s conversation to know what he does for a living. Marcia is my new ¨mother¨and does all the cooking and cleaning for the family (sorry, Steph, Ecuador and much of South America is so sexist they don´t even know that they are). Miguel and David are their sons: Miguel is around thirty years old and is an architect currently working on some of the roads in Quito; David is nineteen and studies math in the Ecuadorian equivalent of college. David also speaks very broken English, but his vocabulary is fantastic. Anita is Miguel and Marcia´s daughter; she is turning twenty-seven by the middle of this month, is married to another man who also lives in my new home and whose name I´ve forgotten in the midst of this barrage of information. He is quiet, she is not. Together, they have a six-month-old child, whose name I´m going to spell Stephanie because it´s pronounced the same in Spanish expect for the -f sound. The whole family is a strict group of Evangelical Christians and the house itself is a renovated church. It´s beautiful and much more homey than one might imagine. The ground level floors are all shards of tile grouted together and there is a sweet tomato tree outside with a lone, sad little tomato. I also live with Issac from California and John from Seattle (the same as before). They are both very well-traveled and, as such, their Spanish comprehensions are much greater than mine. They are not the exception, but the rule. Everyone else in the program has traveled, lived or studied abroad in another country at some point in their lives... except for me. I´d like to think that I´m no less adaptable than they are, even if I was, prior to now, a virgin in that respect. I speak and understand, however, more than half of them. Even so, I´ve had to leech onto Isaac for the last three nights to say what I´ve had to say to Miguel and the rest. Don´t worry, though, he does things the right way. He gives me enough time to stumble through what I want to say before inventing a new way to say it himself. This allows me the practice I´m going to need to improve, and I´ve already made huge gains still with under a week in the country. You´d all laugh if you could see me play charades with these Ecuadorians....

Introduction: Plugging my Organization

So, for those of you are taking the time to read this and aren´t too familiar with what I´m doing this year, this is the post you´ll want to read.

This experience I´m starting is supported through a non-profit, non-governmental organization devoted to improving international education by placing volunteer teachers in developing countries. Some volunteers, like me, commit themselves to a year of service, and others only three months. I´ve found out since getting here that a good portion of volunteers who complete a year of service actually choose to extend their stay for another year. A bit of background: my volunteer organization was begun in 1986 by a group of students from Harvard, and it´s main headquarters is still located at the university. Since the original post, I´ve found out I can´t include the organization´s name, but if you have any questions and want to know more, contact me directly.

On a more personal note, my decision to volunteer through the organization through which I am came about over many months. Before I had even heard of the organization, I applied to and was nominated to serve in Africa as a volunteer for the Peace Corps. By Christmas time of last year, however, I started to have serious doubts about working for 27 months with the Peace Corps, so I decided to review my options. I performed an extensive search of all the other service-related programs available to me and came across the my volunteer organization´s website almost immediately. For anyone who has gone through the process of narrowing one´s application choices from a large-scale search such as this one, it was no easy task deciding what I wanted to do with the next year of my life. I actually decided upon my organization because of the cleanliness of its website. As I had moved so far forward with the Peace Corps application, governmental secretaries continued to nag me for blood tests and medical evaluations, but I knew by spring break that I would be traveling to Ecuador instead of Africa the following fall.

And what do you know? Here I am!