Carnaval Locura

I’m in! I’d been waiting for the response for some time, and it came in just over a week ago. The UW School of Medicine has accepted me, and I am ever-so gladly going to accept. Unfortunately, now begins a new process of paperwork…. Nonetheless, this is good news for Mark.

The last thing I left off with was Mid-service, which happened over a week ago by now. I had an awesome weekend. It was fantastic to see all of the other volunteers again. We had the chance to hang out on the beach and catch up with each other about all of the great (and not so great) experiences we’ve been having. I also got a whole bunch of new ideas for teaching, which was really nice because sometimes it’s tough to keep things from getting a little dry in the old classroom. I’m already using a whole bunch of the ideas I gathered during Mid-service, some of which I’ll discuss a little later on.

The only truly sad thing about Mid-service was learning that one of the volunteers will be headed home early. Without disavowing too much personal information, let’s just say that a sickness in the family can cut your year short in a hurry. No one doubts that this volunteer is making the right decision in returning home. I hope everything goes well for her in making the transition back to life in the U.S. She left for home yesterday.

This volunteer is, in fact, the second out of our original group of 37 to have no choice in going home. The first happened much earlier on (sometime during autumn), and I can’t rightly recall if I even mentioned her or not. The first volunteer to leave became pretty violently ill—digestive problems (not necessarily related to a bug or something she caught here in Ecuador)—and had to go back to the states for medical reasons.

The Sunday after Mid-service, a whole bunch of volunteers swarmed to Montañita to say another sad goodbye. One of my field directors, Therese, has arrived at the end of her service time here in Ecuador. Not only was Mid-service a chance to catch up with friends and take away some new (or reiterated) teaching advice, it was also our introduction to Katie, Therese’s replacement. Katie seems great, by the way, but she’s got some big shoes to fill. It’s all right, though, she’s definitely up to the challenge.

I laugh now because Therese, for her part, has seamlessly been demoted back to the position of volunteer. That is to say, before she was a field director, Therese was a volunteer here in Ecuador just like me (almost every field director was a volunteer before applying for the leadership role). Now that her time is up, Therese is going to start volunteering again. She’ll be spending time in Chile, Bolivia or Argentina until the end of May, during which she’s lined up a bunch of different temporary volunteer positions, the coolest of which was working at an animal refuge, where she’ll be in charge of walking the jaguars. (I think she said jaguars. Whatever she said, think big cats!) Right now, she’s hanging out with another volunteer in Colombia. (I guess it’s become significantly safer to travel there than it used to be. If nothing else, I’m sure they can claim to be Canadian!) I might, however, have the chance to see Therese again in the not-so-distant future. She’s considering going to grad school in Chicago once she’s through with her travels here in South America.

Before I went to say my fond “see you later” to Therese, Isaac and a few other volunteers decided to check out Machililla National Park, located just about half an hour north from where we’d attended the Mid-service meeting. I won’t say too much about Machililla other than a little bit about Los Frailes. Los Frailes, literally translated as “The Friars,” was the most picturesque beach I’ve ever seen in my life. When you imagine the perfect beach in your mind, you’re drawing a mental portrait of Los Frailes. Imagine wind sand, palm trees and clear blue-green water. Imagine no one around, other than a few Guayacos (aka Guayaquileños) clustered somewhere in the distance (you can just ignore them if you want) and a lone fishing boat somewhere just beyond the surf. The place was pretty breathtaking. All this for only a $2 entrance fee. That is, if you’re an Ecuadorian resident like me.

After the other volunteers and I had completed the short hike to arrive at Los Frailes, we chanced upon a bus that would take us back to the main road where we could catch a bus or hitch a ride back along the Ruta del Sol to Montañita. (Just to put my mother’s mind at ease, hitching a ride in this country is almost exactly the same as catching a taxi is. I would never consider trying to do it alone for safety reasons, but when you’re with a group over five strong, even our field directors don’t disagree it might be a better idea than waiting for a cab to roll along. We’d actually hitched a ride from a couple of cheese farmers, who originally took us to the park entrance.) When we had first asked the bus driver if we could hop on, he said the bus was too full and he couldn’t offer us a ride. As we begun the long walk back to the park entrance, however, the same bus pulled to the side of the road behind us and the come-and-go boy waved us on. Inside the bus, I found myself literally surrounded by a busload of teenage Ecuadorian girls. At first, a few of the brave ones merely waved at me timidly. But, by the end of the short ride, they’d become more aggressive and we yelling things at me in Spanish. We finally came to our destination at the park entrance and I quickly retreated off the bus before they had enough time to dig out their cameras and snap a few quick photos of the “guapo” gringo. As the bus rolled onto the Ruta del Sol, a bunch of the girls were hanging out the windows and cheering for me. I’d forgotten that sometimes I’m elevated to celebrity status in Ecuador, just because I have blue eyes and am taller and paler than everyone else. I’m quite positive, however, that if Peter had been on the bus where I had been standing, the reaction that he received would have been at least twice what mine was.

This last weekend was even crazier than the one before. Carnaval is celebrated all over South America on the days preceding Ash Wednesday. I had plans to travel to Guaranda, a city in the Sierra known for its nearly obscene enthusiasm for Carnaval celebrations (all of which are true, as I will gladly relate). Supposedly, I’d heard, this was the first city in Ecuador to celebrate Carnaval the way that Ecuadorians (in some places) now do. For better or worse, however, the weather was playing its role in preventing me from getting to Guaranda.

This is a good time to talk again about the weather. Things here on the peninsula, and throughout the rest of Ecuador, have been anything but normal lately. If you remember my posts from some time ago, I talked about the approaching onslaught of the temporada, or Ecuadorian summer. I talked about how the sun was going to come out permanently and the temperatures were going to be nothing but hot, hot, hot! I’m pointing out that this just isn’t the case. Yes, the summer is here, but it’s not everything I had been told it would be. While it’s been sunny the last couple of days, this hasn’t been the general trend. During any given week, I’d say only 2-3 of them are truly sunny. What’s more is that the temperatures aren’t nearly as high as they usually are. Highs in the 80s and 90s have been replaced by milder temperatures in 70s and 80s; only on the brightest days do the temperatures push into the 90s. I’ve been asking any and everyone about this, and the general consensus is that the weird climate changes are occurring as a result of La Niña, which is a less severe cooling trend opposite El Niño. I haven’t done as much research on La Niña as I should, but the climatic trend goes about in a cyclical manner as well. Exactly how La Niña is playing out on the coast and elsewhere is where all the recent weather weirdness is coming from.

Rain doesn’t fall over the peninsula frequently. Rain doesn’t strike my neck of the woods without any type of intensity… except for last week. On Monday and Tuesday, it rained cats and dogs. It rained, in my estimation, for around 36 hours. And not just that soft sort of spitting rain, I’m talking about a fairly full out downpour. While the additional precipitation didn’t have any huge effects here, Guayaquil, a city lying between two rivers and surrounded by mangrove, suffered. Many homes are now under water. (I have a few pictures I hope to upload soon.) The government has declared a national state of emergency. When I asked Tom exactly what this means, he replied probably not all that much, other than the government can readily dip into some savings to (hopefully) help out its citizens.

I’d woken up early this last Saturday to begin the bus ride into the mountains, and it was pretty incredible to see how the rain had transformed the landscape. I’ve previously mentioned just how dry the climate is here on the peninsula. The highway between here and Guayaquil runs through a veritable desert, but not after the rain. Anywhere along the route was completely transformed. Photosynthesis! Green everywhere! Unfortunately, moving through the regions just outside of Guayaquil, trees in fields were suspended underwater in the sudden swamp.

The rain had other effects in different parts of the country. I’ll contend that the best way to learn Spanish—surely new vocabulary—is derived out of necessity. The miniature deluge forced me to appreciate the words “deslave” and “derrumbe,” both of which mean landslide. Where parts of the coast were held underwater, a few of the mountain roads were covered in layers of mud. Apparently, it was still possible to get beyond the landslides in certain places. Basically, it was feasible that a bus would drop you off in front of the landslide, where you had the chance to get your feet a little dirty. After trudging through the “lodo,” another bus would pick you up on the other side. I read an article about the landslides in a local newspaper, much to be amused by one partygoer who said that he was willing to risk getting a little dirty, so long as it meant that he wouldn’t miss Carnaval! His quote was directly below the headline that two people had been lost in the mountains since the rain had begun.

Needless to say, Mark wasn’t willing to risk “getting a little dirty” for Carnaval. I talked to Sarah, one of the two Guayaquil volunteers who I’ve mentioned a bunch before (my Cuenca buddy for those who remember), and we heartily agreed to take a different route. We knew the road to Ambato was safe, so we hopped on a six-hour bus that would take us there.

In Ambato we met up with the volunteers living there, who showed us around town a little bit. The place was aglow with Carnaval celebrations. Where, on the coast, Carnaval is little more than a good excuse to get drunk and hang out on the beach in Salinas, the celebrations in the Sierra are much culturally pleasing. (Don’t be mistaken, though, the coast is still an extremely popular place to travel to. The line to catch a bus going to Salinas literally worked its way beyond the food court it was so long.) Between the crowds, street vendors and music stages, for instance, the city’s main church had, with some mysterious adhesive, attached a giant mural of Jesus to its façade. The odd thing, the mural was made of nothing but fruit and flowers! Sweet shit, I know.

After a modest night of dancing in downtown Ambato, I crashed at one of the volunteer’s places. We woke up early the next morning to check out the parade passing through the city. It was scheduled to begin at 9:00, and we thought we were going to be late, but we hadn’t accurately accounted for the Ecuadorian sense of timeliness, which is a nice way for me to say that the parade would have been considered “on time” if it had started anytime within two hours of its scheduled start. This, however, gave us time to find a location to actually watch the parade. Side streets that fed into the road along which the actual parade was going to take place were blocked with cars and tiers of revelers. It was incredibly difficult to move anywhere with all those people! We just wanted to move onto the main road so that we could meet up with some friends a little further down. Unfortunately, the simple task of maintaining passageways through the crowds which would allow foot traffic to reach the main road wasn’t even close to a concern for the national police. They seemed more concerned with standing there and looking pretty with their golden epaulets.

It wasn’t until a friend of the girls’, a March volunteer named Dan (coincidently also from Wisconsin) who’s staying on with my program for another six months, called to let us know that we could watch the parade from a dump truck, if only we could find our way to him. After some creative interpretation of the landscape, we found our way to the dump truck. Inside the dumping part, we could finally see over the tiers of people, and not a moment too soon. The parade had finally advanced to our location.

Now, before I go any further, this might be a good opportunity to describe Ecuador’s obsession with reinas, or beauty queens. While a large part of the parade was composed of traditional dancers, traditional dress and other cultural-friendly stuff, an even bigger part of the parade was devoted to each reina’s individualized and highly exotic float, followed by her troupe of individualized and highly exotic dancers. (I think it might be more effective for me to describe what I’d experienced once I have a picture available.) In the parade I saw on Monday night, just minutes before leaving on a night bus back to the coast, another volunteer, Eva, counted no less than 45 reinas. Wow!

After the parade on Sunday morning, we took off for Guaranda, a two-hour ride to another mountain location. We rolled down into a valley and began to see the first signs of the Carnaval war parties taking place there. Basically, the rules of revelry are no holds barred here in Ecuador. We’d been hearing the stories for some time, but now we actually had to prepare to experience the festivities for ourselves.

Perhaps an armament listing is in order: During Carnaval, the weapon of choice is espuma, or cans of laundry detergent-scented foam, that everyone sprays all over each other (most notably, however, men are more aggressive than women and choose their targets accordingly). If you elect for the colder and, in my opinion, more effective route of getting people wet, your choices are water balloons, or, if you have a faucet readily available, you can fill up pales of water and launch the water at people. If messiness is your goal, you’ll throw flour (which doesn’t bode well for Sarah, who has Celiac Disease and can’t ingest wheat products without becoming ill). Finally, as a last-ditch weapon of desperation, you can throw eggs, but, in both Guaranda and Ambato, it was very difficult to find any eggs for sale during Carnaval. Apparently, people were tired of getting egged. I don’t blame them. I can’t see how that wouldn’t bruise.

We’d been slightly prepped in Ambato from the night before, and the normally peaceful bus ride to Guaranda had involved a series of surprise water balloon attacks while passing through some of the small towns, but nothing would compare to the excess of mess in Guaranda. Arriving in Guaranda, the first sign we saw was a man, his head and shoulders covered in flour. Then we saw children chasing the bus with water balloons gripped in their palms. We got off the bus and prepared for the worst. For the time being, all of us gringos were just concerned with protecting our valuables. Ipods and cell phones aren’t made to take on large quantities of water. Some other volunteers were already in Guaranda and they were expecting us that afternoon. We called them up, discussed how to arrive where they were and caught a cab to take us there, hoping that the cab’s interior would doubly serve to protect us.

The funniest part of the entire weekend was pulling up near the Plaza Rosa, Guaranda’s main square, where we ran into a roadblock as a result of too many cars packing themselves along the narrow cobblestone roads. A group of young girls were waiting in the alley where we’d come to a halt, having filled a number of small pales of water from a spigot outside their homes. Their faces turned upward out of pure joy when they realized four completely dry, completely helpless gringos had pulled up and were now utterly trapped. We all started to laugh hesitantly inside the cab. The taxi driver wagged his finger at them, which did little but turned the girls’ eyes away from him. Thankfully for me, most of them went after Aubrey, the blondest of our bunch.

We dodged in and out of the streets, electing to jog through the ones that appeared the least wet (it wasn’t uncommon for a bucket of tap water to coming raining down from the rooftops), and finally arrived safely at the green gate of the two resident volunteers’ host grandparents’ home. There, we sang the official Carnaval song with Danita and Raleigh’s rather inebriated grandfather, ate some fried pork and drank some chicha, a traditional drink made with rice and fruit. I quickly changed into my “war” gear, and Katie, Sarah and I tucked ourselves away in the bathroom to begin filling bombas, or water balloons.

When we hit the streets the second time, I was ready! I carried a plastic bag filled with water balloons like I was John Wayne. Water fights were going on everywhere, and you really couldn’t turn your back for more than a while before someone else would nail you with something, usually foam. (For anyone who’s gone paintballing before, the 360 degree sense of danger is exactly the same.) In the streets around the Plaza Rosa, people were dancing to music bumping out of gigantic black speakers. Another funny thing that happened was watching a group of teenage boys standing some distance away from the crowd, almost callously lobbing an occasional water balloon in amongst all the dancing people. This, in itself, wasn’t the funny part. The irony comes in when, after tossing a balloon into the air, one small boy standing on nearby realized what they were doing. He positioned himself behind the teenagers and the splash from his water balloon nailed all three of them because of his wise decision to aim for the middle one. Sweet, sweet justice.

The three of us played in the streets until night became too apparent to ignore. The other thing to be said about Guaranda is that, unlike the coast, it’s not too warm there. I wouldn’t doubt if the temperatures were only in the low 50s, and yet, here’s everyone throwing ice cold tap water all over the place! I knew it was time to quit when my hands began to ache from the chill. We headed back to the hostel confident we’d scored some small victory for the gringos.

There, by some miracle of communication from earlier in the day, the attendant working at the hostel brought up a TV to our room (it’s not too likely that any hostel will have a TV in Ecuador). We’d been asking around all day how we were going to watch the Superbowl, and the solution to our problem just sort of appeared out of nowhere. Previously during the day, the cable at the hostel hadn’t been working, and I still have no idea why it began to, but it’s okay by me that I never find out. Sure enough, after warming up a little, we were watching football. I can’t remember the last time I ate so many potato chips in one sitting. Eva brought back a trash bag full of small bags and we feasted.

After a long night’s rest, we got up on Monday morning and caught a cab to the bus terminal in Guaranda. A quick dash back to Ambato and we relaxed pretty much the entire day before going to another parade that was scheduled to begin at 7:00 that night. Sarah and I wanted to catch a night bus back to Guayaquil, so we had to duck out early on the parade, which was fine by me. Without the bucket of a dump truck to protect us, it’s difficult to watch a parade here without feeling like a canned piece of tuna. I did, however, find it amusing that the Guayaca girls who kept calling me muñeco, or doll, beside me instantly made the assumption that I spoke no Spanish. It was kind of fun to listen to them talking about me and then revealing halfway through the parade that I could understand them.

Without making this post too much longer, I just wanted to mention a few other things.

Teaching has been going well… I guess. I had an awful night last night. My module 8 class has been requesting that we try out some more interesting and practical speaking exercises, which is fine by me. I’m all about creativity in the classroom! In honor of Super Tuesday, I went through this whole spiel of explaining to them about our political parties and why 2008 is such an important year in the U.S., at least politically speaking. I split the class into Democrats and Republicans and presented them with relevant topics to debate. I understood a group of teenagers might not want to answer questions like, what should we about Ecuador’s poor, or how can we prevent destruction of the rainforest? So, I tried to spice things up a bit and ask a few questions that, if not more interesting, were at least more entertaining. My favorite question I gave them to debate was, what should we do about Lourdes always texting on her cell phone? Lourdes texting during a grammar point is as much of a staple of my classroom as making fun of me is. Getting her to hand over her phone for the remainder of class is like extracting teeth (and she has two phones she carries with her!). Unfortunately, none of the questions I asked went anywhere. My class just sort of sat there, half speaking in English, half in Spanish, and definitely not too concerned with what I’d planned out. Not good. I’m glad this is a shorter week. Yesterday drained me.

Other than that, things have been all right. Tom and Carla are headed down tonight, and we’re probably going to be heading up the coast for the weekend. I want a chance to hang out with Tom before the end of the month, because he’s going to back to England until May to go through some advanced job training.

As far as other news goes, Peter’s friend, also named Tom, is going to be staying here for just under a month. He’ll be here by this coming Monday. Peter keeps telling me about how much of a “legend” he is. Peter’s girlfriend will be visiting from Germany before the end of the month as well. This is going to sound slightly random (Ecuador is never lacking in the random stuff category), but I met a Peace Corps volunteer from Wisconsin just the other day. She’s living and working in Palmar, a beach village just 20 km south of Montañita, and her name is Hannah. She comes to La Libertad to go shopping and, when it’s needed, avoid Palmar. Hannah’s from Appleton and her sustainable project involves running a small bakery and organizing women’s and children’s health groups. Hannah was just happy to have the chance to speak in English for a while. Her Spanish, however, is pretty stellar.

I know I’ve said something like this before, but I’ve been meaning to get this posting online for some time. This week has been pretty crazy for me between teaching, filling out forms for medical school and meeting all sorts of interesting people from Wisconsin who just so happen to find themselves in Ecuador (I’m consistently amazed by all the Midwesterners who come here to volunteer). It will be nice to relax a little this weekend and hopefully not have to feel as if someone is going to antique me (when someone throws a handful of flour in your face) out of the blue.

Everyone should know, too, as compared to the last post, I’m feeling much better emotionally. One of the things they warned us about during orientation was the highs and lows you’ll go through in adapting to a new culture. I even remember them mentioning that right around month five or six almost everyone in the program will take an emotional dive (which is one of the reasons they have the Mid-service meeting when they do). A week ago, that was definitely true for me, but I’ve since improved.

I think one of the biggest problems for me personally is that I have so much to look forward to when I return to the states. Quite frequently, I feel as if I’m split between here and home. It’s really tough to enjoy the here and now when you’re concerned with what’s going to happen in the future. Right now, I’m searching for ways to continue to make the most of the rest of my time here in Ecuador.