Last night was only the second bad night of sleep I’ve had since arriving in
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
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 24th province in
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
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
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