Despedida

Avoiding a Real Introduction

I’m having a hell of a time starting this one; I’ve started, stopped and erased the whole works about three times now. Usually the words just sort of fall into place, but this time is different. I think it’s because—subconsciously—I realize I still have a ton to say, and yet this will be my final blog entry.

That’s good, though, isn’t it? That there’s still so much to say? Ecuador and it’s culture are complicated and intricate topics, but it’s that very complexity, the sums of our similarities and differences with this place and its people, that makes what I’ve been doing for the last ten months so cool and exciting. If there weren’t so much to say, if there was a final destination when I might be able to say, “Well, now I understand Ecuador,” if the place and its people weren’t constantly changing and redefining themselves just as we are in the United States, what fun would that be?

A Recap of the Last Few Weeks

To make a long story short, I’ve been traveling quite a bit. I took a day off after my last day of teaching to say my goodbyes to the peninsula. My students, despite all of the problems I was having with them, were surprising distressed to see me go. I really didn’t believe that it bothered them that I was leaving. On a Wednesday night, I hopped a night bus after a fond farewell from Adam and Sarah and made my way here, to Quito, for the last official meeting we were required to attend for my volunteer organization. I said a lot of my goodbyes at End of Service. Our directors also did a wonderful job of mentally preparing us for some of the expectations we could bet on for readjusting to life back home. I can’t say it’s going to go as smoothly as I originally thought it might….

After tugging on all those heartstrings, I only had an afternoon to blow before my dad and brother were arriving for our trip to the Galapagos. They had a wonderful time here and almost everything went extremely smoothly (surprisingly enough). Steve even knew a hell of a lot more Spanish than I thought he would. Go, Steves! After eight days on a cruise ship in the Galapagos—which are absolutely stunning, by the way—we were able to get in a little mountain biking down Ecuador’s second largest volcano (correction from a previous post, Chimborazo claims Ecuador’s highest elevation) and a quick trip to the cloud forest. Even now, we’re still cracking jokes over Pato, our lovable and infectiously comical tour guide in the Galapagos Islands. (And so…!)

Since then, I’ve secretly been counting down the days until the 1st of July and try instead to convince myself I should be living in the present. Again, I’ve been filling the time with travel. The day after my dad and brother left, I took off for the northern coast, to a place called Atacames, with Sarah (from Guayaquil) and her friend Liz, who’d come to visit from Massachusetts. It was nice to catch some rays and see the Pacific Ocean one last time. I returned to Quito only a day later so that I could begin my journey to the Oriente, or rainforest, with another friend and volunteer, Ava. We had an awesome time dodging bats while canyoneering, lazily tubing down the ice-cold Napo River and otherwise exploring what the selva just outside of Tena had to offer. Although, of all the cool stuff we got to do and all the neato medicinal (and hallucinogenic…) plants we had the chance to learn about, my favorite activity was the hike we took to visit an indigenous Quichuan community. I’m still awed by how closely they live to nature, how remarkably they’ve been preserving their less complicated form of living for generations. You want to toss around the word “eco-friendly”, try mimicking the practices of a one of those interior jungle families.

After all that, though, I find myself back here in Quito, waiting out the next three days by passing the time with my beloved Sierran host family, the Pazmiños. I was thinking of traveling this final weekend back to Cuenca, but I’m either too lazy or, in an effort to simplify my own life, just want to sit back and let life come to me. Just so that I can feel good about my decision, we’ll go with the later. Either way, I can’t think of a better way to say goodbye to Ecuador than to be back here with these people who’ve helped me along so much throughout this experience.

An Important Realization

It’s a frequent game I like to play with myself: I try to think back on the way I used to perceive a topic and weigh it against how I perceive that same topic in the present. I like to believe that the difference between how I felt about something and how I feel about it now is something like mental progress, that after challenging my old precepts, gaining some new information or going through some new experiences, and re-filtering all those inputs through that sieve of a brain of mine, I might arrive at a better place—at least, mentally speaking—than I was at in the past.

Right now I’m considering some of the ways I used to believe Ecuador would change me. I thought seeing a more prevalent form of poverty would humble me. That was true. I thought I’d be nearly fluent in Spanish. That one wasn’t. I thought I might to learn to live better than I had been in the past. For this, my truth lies somewhere in between.

I’ve come to understand that neither the way that people live here or back in the United States is strictly “better.” More accurately, the ways we choose to live are different—incomparable in certain instances, the proverbial apples to oranges. Perhaps it’s possible to look at very small practices and think to oneself that what either of us—here or there—is doing is more advantageous. For instance, I’ve really fallen in love with the ways families here operate like small communities, coming together to help each other out, maybe even more than we typically do in the U.S. But anything I might claim is subject to individual interpretation. Yes, there are some facets of family life that I prefer here, but at what cost to the system we’ve elected back home? What’s to be preferred: more extensive support networks or individualism? What’s “better”: having one’s family help you through a situation, or learning to cope through that situation on one’s own. It’s not that one style of living should be considered superior to the other, it’s just that either one more directly promotes certain core values.

Having said this, though, I’ve got to mention that it’s crucial for all of us to realize that there’s a ton we can learn from a place like Ecuador. My general belief is that it’s impossibly easy for us as “Americans” to get trapped. After all, we’re the best, aren’t we? We’ve got the biggest economy, the most innovative sectors of science and technology and the most world influence. (Hell, we’ve got the bombs!) But that doesn’t mean that we’ve got it all. It surely doesn’t mean our ideals are the best, or that our purposes are the purest, most ethical or in closest agreement with some supreme being’s ultimate direction. Furthermore, especially as the superpower that we currently are, it’s simple (maybe even fun!) to write off a place like Ecuador. “Oh, the people there need to get a stronger work ethic,” or “They’re government’s just too corrupt,” are things we might say without knowing more about this place. But maybe that’s all wrong. Maybe we can learn just as much from this place as they can learn from us (maybe more…). Money, influence and power might go on and continue to make all of the world news headlines, but far be it for me to believe that controlling those things makes one more knowledgeable about a truly wiser form of living.

Goals Set, Goals Met?

Truly, I came to South America with a lot of semi-admirable purposes. I wanted to learn Spanish, which I hope will make me a more marketable physician and invested citizen in the future. I wanted to increase my self-sufficiency and independence by proving to myself that I could handle such a significant life transition in a new and foreign environment. I wanted to travel and see places and people I’ve never seen before. I wanted to have the opportunity to give something back (however small and indirect) to all of you who have supported me and been so generous in uncountable ways over the years. And, perhaps greatest of all, I wanted to achieve a newfound sense of worldliness. I’d made it my goal to better understand this world we’re living in (and the United States, specifically) by doing something I’ve never done before, by doing something I thought would be significant. And, to me, this has been a very significant event in my life.

To varying degrees, I’ve achieved everything I sought out to do. (Add in the surf lessons as a bonus.) No, I’m no a fluent Spanish speaker, and no, I’m not perfectly adapted to life here, but I’ve surely come a long way in so short a time (relatively speaking…). If there’s one thing I’m truly proud of, it’s the gains I’ve made in that last purpose I mentioned above: toward my sense of worldliness. I can only imagine how Ecuador will continue to help me as I move forward.

Have I just written all of this to pat myself on the back…?

Top Fives

I thought it might be a fun and kind of a cool way to bring a little closure to my experience here by predicting the top five things I will and won’t miss about Ecuador. Surely, these lists will be ongoing for me (because I probably won’t realize the things I really miss until I’m gone—yes, the heart grows fonder), but why not share them with you guys back home first? I’ll start with the positive, but I think it’s understandable enough for me to mention that not everything about this country has been a cakewalk:

The Top 5 Things I Think I’ll Miss About Ecuador

Greatly reduced cost of living (eating out, transportation, etc.).
A more communal family lifestyle.
Extreme geographic diversity within relatively close borders.
Relaxed schedules and shorter workdays.
Rico coastal food!

The Top 5 Things I Think I Won’t Miss About Ecuador

1. Having to think too hard to speak.
2. The average Ecuadorian’s idea of timeliness.
3. All the nasty litter and pollution.
4. Blatant machismoism (being pressured to drink a lot, hissing at women, etc.).
5. The gringo tax.

A Fond See You Later

While, in the strictest sense, this isn’t my last goodbye to Ecuador, this is goodbye to writing this blog. It’s been incredible for me to write it and thereby help myself organize, think over and catalogue all of these experiences I’ve been going through in my ten months here. It’s important to reflect on life. But these reasons aren’t the main ones explaining why I started this blog. Since I started, I’ve wanted a means to share with all of you the things I’ve been doing, to maybe shed a sliver of light on another part of this Earth and the ways we might go about considering it in our minds. More than my own reflection, I hope I’ve offered an avenue for all of you to reflect upon your own lives.

The experience doesn’t end here, though. In a hundred different ways, I plan to carry these last ten months with me, in both who I am and what I do. One small example, I’ve saved a whole bunch of Sarah’s recipes, and I want to continue cooking some of the dishes I’ve been eating from the coast. One much larger example, I’ve made it a personal goal to avoid purchasing a car once I get back to the states for as long as I’m able. While it could become an absolute necessity for medical school, given the slew of detrimental effects our oil consumption costs us (as well as the personal costs of car insurance, repairs and the $5/gallon cost of gas), I want to put off getting a car as long as possible. Simplify! Right?

I’ve said it before, but it’s appropriate again here: Ecuador has changed me. I’ll be very truthful in saying that I used to be scared of re-immersing myself in American culture. I was afraid that life would be too fast-paced, that I’d be surrounded by a million examples of the things I’d decided I didn’t want to be doing with my life, and that I’d be helpless to resist the pressures to conform to the rest of society. I’ve come to understand, however, that this isn’t a process that’s out of my control; in fact, it’s just the opposite. My choices in living are informed by a wider breadth of knowledge now, a greater sense of worldliness, as I called it before. Really, I’m the decider of who I am and what I want to do with myself, and I don’t plan on reverting to who I used to be in certain aspects.

So… after all the lengthy descriptions and half-digested internal dialogues, it comes to this. I’m particularly shitty at goodbyes and I’ve grown tired of my own wordiness, so why don’t we keep this little bit to an absolute minimum.

You know what? Screw it. Goodbyes are too permanent, and neither I nor Ecuador will be anywhere out of reach:

Gracias por todo. Nos vemos pronto! (Thanks for everything. We’ll see you soon!)