The Ecua-journal

Despedida

2008-06-28T17:12:00.000-07:00

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!)

Dust in the Wind

2008-05-29T14:20:00.000-07:00

White Shoes

Nothing here stays white for long. Before I left from home this most recent time, I bought myself a new pair of Asics running shoes. They have orange trim and dark gray interiors, but the outsides of the shoes are mostly white. I justified buying white because I had only two months left in Ecuador at the time, and I thought to myself, how dirty can a pair of shoes get in two months?

The answer is… very dirty. The topsides of the laces are saturated by dirt in places, the white entirely replaced by brown. They might have been brown to begin with, if I didn’t know better. In other places on the shoes, the dirt is choosier in where it’s decided to accumulate most. Over the toes, for instance, and along the bottoms are particularly coated. I run only three or four times a week, usually for around an hour, but I never run more than two and a half hours in a row. As such, that means I’m outside with these shoes for under eight hours a week, but this is how they look now. I have an older pair of white shoes to compare them to, and they were over a year old by the time I quit using them as my running shoes. My new ones went from sparkling white to looking like they’re older than the Nikes in a matter of weeks.

That’s how dusty it is here. I wonder how many pounds of the stuff I’ve obliged my nasal passages into dealing with in all this time. I wonder how many times worse it is than the air back in Wisconsin. I wonder all of the problems the stuff causes other than making my pretty, new running shoes less pretty in a terrible hurry.

New Blue

In the last post, I’d written that I thought Sarah’s worries about the empleadas working here—what I’ve come to call the Elsi Situation—had come to an end, but that didn’t really paint a complete picture. I said that Justina (who’s real name actually turned out to be Faustina, a mistake on all of our behalves) was going to be Elsi’s permanent replacement in my last big post, but she quit showing up after a certain date for reasons that I’ll never know. So then we were back to Mariella for a while. But that was only for a few days. Now Anita, who’s totally new, is here, and I’m hoping—for Sarah’s sake—that she’s going to stay. In the end, Elsi might even ask for her old job back. There were rumors flying around during lunch today. I just don’t know what to believe anymore. I’ll have to email Adam a few weeks from now to see how the Elsi Situation has evolved.

Adam and I have been getting along really well since he got here. We make fun of each other all the time now, which probably means our friendship has grown. Adam’s a pretty talented musician and he’s brought his guitar up to play on the patio a number of times. I always like to hear the stuff he has to say about music and how it’s influenced him.

Maybe Adam gave me this thought, but I think a lot of people learn about the world through sports when they’re young. At least, I should say, I learned a lot from sports. I learned about what it means to be a part of a team, about self-confidence and a little bit about discipline. Furthermore, I had a great time with sports and it connected me to other young people and their parents. But where I had sports as a younger kid, Adam had music. We took a little trip to Montañita a few weeks back, and it was really interesting to hear about his path of self-discovery through learning to play different musical instruments. All those Saturday mornings when I was running around after a soccer or football, he was jamming out with other kids somewhere near Atlanta, Georgia, experimenting with a lick of some song they all liked.

Before then, I didn’t know that the two were comparable—playing the guitar versus playing soccer. To me, it seemed a bit like comparing apples to oranges. But now I think I see it slightly differently. They’re both ways of approaching the world, of learning something about yourself by learning about something from the world around you and by trying to master a skill. I find that to be an incredible thought….

Peter is doing well in France but he’s bored. He works in the office of a French school there, a school for tourists, but he says it’s just not the same as teaching and is somewhat jealous of the teachers there. He misses Ecuador a lot and spends a good deal of time sending me stupid messages on Facebook to avoid working. Admit it, Peter, it’s true!

Tom got back on the 10^th of May. To be honest, I really haven’t gotten to talk to him that much, seeing as he’s been super-busy and I’ve been running around so much on weekends. My best chance to catch up with him will be this coming weekend, so maybe I’ll have more to say about Tom next time.

Teaching

This is absolutely crazy to think about, but I’m actually down to under a week left of teaching. I plan to submit this post by tomorrow, Thursday, in which case, I have till only next week Tuesday before I’m totally done—one more day this week and two days next week. I really can’t believe it. I’ve been counting down the days for some time now, but I can’t seem to come to grips with the fact that I’ve finally come to the end.

Now is both a wonderful and a terrible time to be leaving.

I’ll start with the good. I’m having a real tough time with a number of my students. Since my teaching assignment’s change in the last month, teaching’s been more difficult than it ever was in all the months prior to now. I’m constantly dealing with discipline issues, and even though I know I can handle my classes and could continue to handle them for some time, that doesn’t escape the fact that teaching has been pretty damn draining lately. On most of the days, I hightail it to an Internet café after work for a while, and then I crash on my bed for at least a few minutes before eating lunch with Sarah and Adam. If no one wakes me up, I’ll usually sleep for half an hour.

I’ve had to find ways to understand my students’ apparent lack of motivation to learn English from the beginning, but now it’s been worse than ever. When I was teaching private lessons through CELEX, it was easier because they’d paid a small sum of money to be learning from me, so at least they had that financial motivation pushing them. The classes were also smaller, so it was a more inviting place to learn for most students. Now, however, students only pay to be in school at Nuestro Mundo and have a whole schedule of other subjects to worry about, in which case, English is frequently low man on the totem pole. Whereas I used to think that motivating my former students was a challenge that had a tendency to leave me feeling disappointed, I failed to realize that things can almost always be slightly worse.

The upside of this is that I’m only required to tough out teaching for less than another week. My time is almost up. And yet I still feel some remorse for cutting and running. Even though my students do get on my nerves and don’t seem to pay attention a lot of the time, I enjoy the challenge of teaching them. A good deal of my students are learning from me and enjoy speaking English. I feel bad about starting up as their teacher and now stopping all of a sudden. I’ve been steadily improving in the whole classroom management realm, and I was finally figuring out each class’ dynamic and how to make things as good as they could get for everyone.

Perhaps more than anything, though, I just need to continue reminding myself that teaching isn’t what I want to do for the rest of my life. I went in knowing this was a temporary sort of position I was taking on. I haven’t exactly been hiding it, but a number of students have caught wind that I’m not going to be around after next week. A few of them have approached me after class, and always with the same question, why do you leave? I always respond the same way (and in English because the only way to really get someone to listen is by telling a secret, a joke, an insult or something interesting about yourself). I tell them that it’s not my dream to be a teacher, and that I’m going to be a doctor instead. Really, being in Ecuador has done a lot to strengthen my resolve in wanting to go to become a physician (which is good because medical school is expensive as… yeah, it’s expensive). And in order to take that next step toward reaching that goal, I need to come back to the U.S. and buckle down as a student for another few years. I’m definitely ready for that, even though being a teacher has been an incredible experience in the here and now.

Travel

Between my last post and today, I’ve done quite a bit of traveling, but most of it is stuff I’ve done before, so I’ll try to keep this short.

Three weekends ago, I went to Vilcabamba, the town way to the south (almost at the Peruvian border, in fact) where Isaac lives. We took another run into the mountains on Saturday, where one of the funniest things that’s happened to me in Ecuador occurred. I won’t go into too many details (for the sake of both of our dignities), but suffice to say that the simple act of running has the tendency to get things moving in your digestive tract. As such, Isaac and I had just gotten into the meat of our run when Mark was in need of some relief. We were atop a bridge spanning a river when Isaac pointed me in the direction of the trail ahead of us. He said that I could probably hide myself somewhere up ahead and not be seen by anyone while I was going to the bathroom.

It was fairly improbable that someone would chance by. After all, we weren’t exactly in stark wilderness, but there aren’t all that many people who need to head into mountains when the town of Vilcabamba was located in the opposite direction. For God’s sake, we were running along a horse trail! Anyway, I did what I could to conceal myself before my body started to make demands of me. However, I didn’t get as far back as I should have because it hurt and because the surrounding vegetation directly off the trail was so thick. The worst of it was over when an Ecuadorian couple rounded the corner a short distance away from me. I didn’t even hear them coming, so here I was with about thirty feet quickly closing between us trying to decide which was more polite, standing and apologizing or staying stock still and pretending nothing was going on. I decided on the later.

They passed my half-naked self without the slightest hint of embarrassment. This was nothing for these people. In fact, even though they passed so close to me they might have touched me, I’m not even sure the lady behind the man noticed me. There was no hesitation, no indecision and no recognition in their faces or in their actions. I might have been a cow and the end result would’ve been the same. I shamefully walked back down to the bridge, possibly laughing harder than Isaac was. We chalked it up as another cultural experience. The Ecuadorians’ reaction wouldn’t have been the same in most places in the U.S.

The weekend after that, two weekends ago, Adam and I went to Montañita to celebrate his birthday. Lisa was putting on a barbeque for all the students at the Spanish school she’s the director for, so she put Adam and I to work on grilling detail. The grill was big and I grilled a lot of meat. We learned that more charcoal, which means more heat, is not always the best choice. Yes, some of the chicken was burned, but we still mowed it down.

Sarah from Guayaquil spent the night here on Saturday. The three of us got up early on Sunday to make bolón, another common food from the long list of things you can make from verde. A little later on, Sarah (host mother Sarah) gave the three of us a ride into Salinas for some early afternoon wakeboarding. We managed to convince her to come on the boat with us. Sarah (Guayaquil Sarah) and Adam did really, really well for beginners. Mark was extremely impressed. What was perhaps even more impressive, however, was watching the boat owner’s teenage nephew, who’s currently training to be a professional wakeboarder, do his thing when the three of us had finished riding. I got kind of freaked out when the driver gunned it through a bunch of other boats putting around outside one of the swim areas off the beach, though. It’s been said before, but they are crazy drivers down here—boats being no exception.

Last weekend I traveled back to the Sierra to a place called Baños. Baños is basically the mountain version of Montañita in that vacationers from a larger city (Quito instead of Guayaquil) feed into it during high times, there’s a lot of really touristy stuff to do and, most noticeably, the place is packed full of gringos! Baños is particularly well known for the scenic bike ride you can take from there to a nearby town called Puyos along the main stretch of highway. The group of us who’d come to Baños rented a bunch of bikes for $5 a piece and started on our way.

As part of all of the mountain scenery along the way, you can also see all of these really spectacular cascades. We hiked down a ways to see a particularly amazing one and eat some sandwiches we’d packed along. After that, our group split into two: one group carried on to Puyos and the other went to check out one last waterfall, and then call it quits on the day. I was part of the later group; I really hadn’t been feeling well all weekend. Our group biked a bit further along to another trailhead that lead down to another waterfall. The best time I had all weekend was sitting in the ice-cold river that ran below this waterfall. I must have just sat there, staring into space with the sound of all that crashing water around me, for over an hour.

I’ve spent too many hours the last few weekends on buses. It was twelve to fourteen total hours, for instance, for either the ida or the vuelta to Loja. To and from Baños was closer to eight, which is still too damn much for a single weekend’s travel. Not fun. I’m fed up with traveling on buses here. They’re uncomfortable, stinky and I can never sleep on them. Furthermore, I couldn’t hate Jason Stratham more. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen The Transporter movies now, but I now that my life could’ve been a little bit happier had I never seen more than the first five minutes of either of them. I’m considering fighting the man myself, even though the movies should’ve made it all too clear that doing so was the same as suicide.

How’s It?

I talked to my parents on Memorial Day and I couldn’t even deny it anymore. I’m anxious to get home. I’ve done so much great stuff here, and I’ll probably always remember Ecuador with a lot of fond memories, but I’m looking forward to being back in Wisconsin.

Having said that—and I realize I’m still just over a month out from my final return date—this is likely to be one of my last posts. I teach until Tuesday next week, Wednesday I have off to organize myself and say goodbye to the peninsula and by Thursday I’ll be back in Quito for my End of Service meeting, which is my last official act of service through my volunteer organization. The End of Service meeting goes for three days, after which I have a little over three weeks in June to do a bit of traveling and say my final goodbyes to the Pazmiños, my old host family in Quito, all the other volunteers and the rest of Ecuador. I don’t know how much I’ll contribute to this blog beyond next week, but I doubt it will be much. If anyone has any questions or would like to contact me for whatever reason, please shoot me an email.

This has all gone so fast, and yet what a wonderful experience it’s been. I can remember writing my first entry into this blog from my room at the Pazmiños in Quito, and now here we are almost a year later….

Don’t worry, though. I’ll be sure to include at least one more post. I’m not ready to be done just yet.

Views from Above

2008-05-08T14:21:00.000-07:00

The top photo is a view from the refuge on Cotopaxi looking down the mountain. Notice all the happy Quitoan hikers discovering the wonders of snow.

The middle photo is a bunch of people from our group latching on crampons once we’d reached Cotopaxi’s glacier. I was worried the metal spikes were going to add on a lot of weight to each step, but they certainly weren’t as bad as I’d imagined them to be. None of my predetermined worries panned out as the ones with any real substance over the course of this adventure.

The bottom photo was one of the last pictures I took during the hike, a landscape shot from over 5500 meters in the air. It didn’t turn out exactly as I’d hoped it would, but not much can take away from a sunrise like that. Now I chuckle to myself to think of Isaac and Josh watching the same scene, then a deep rumbling growing in the ground beneath them. The noise increased along with their worry, their minds racing to think up a course of action, until their guide yelled, “Avalanche!” That’s when the commercial jet appeared over the ridge.

Volcán Cotopaxi

2008-05-08T14:20:00.000-07:00

New Blue

Looking back now, I’m trying to think of what in Ecuador reminds me the most of. The honest answer is slightly unusual in that, unless you’ve traveled here, you probably wouldn’t expect it as my answer.

It’s passing landscapes that bring back memories of Wisconsin most frequently. It’s the way an open road unfolds between wide-open fields between the peninsula and Guayaquil. It’s the way cows look drinking from a natural welling of water in the soil. It’s the way miles and miles of uninterrupted fencing—barbwire attached to sawed off wooden poles—moves with you as you pass through the world behind a pane of glass. Sometimes the reminder strikes me because the trees look so similar. Sometimes it’s because of a certain plant or shrub, or even a swing set, clothesline or some other inanimate object that brings to life the right connections in my mind. Sometimes it’s none of these things. But I’m quite certain, the vast majority of the time, it’s because I’m searching for an excuse to think of home. It’s hard not to miss it knowing that the weather is improving by you guys day by day. Late spring and early summer in Wisconsin are really special times of year.

So what the hell is new here? I’ll tell you… as I always find myself doing.

Tom’s going to be back again on the 10th. In case you need a little reminder, he’s been receiving additional teacher’s training at home in England. Carla has been keeping me updatesd on what he was up to all this time, and it always seemed to involve a lot of “deberes,” or homework. I’m sure he’ll be happy to be back in Ecuador and far, far away from the time-consuming demands of furthering his education. No worries, though, Tom! I’ll have some ice cold Clubs waiting for you when you make it back.

I get a message every once in a while from Peter. We mainly stay in contact through Facebook, and it’s always nice to hear from the kid (Hopefully he doesn’t read this. I’ve gone to great lengths to let him know he’s a total jerk for leaving.). I believe at this very moment he’s home in England, enjoying a little downtime with the padres. He’s managed to track down a job for himself in Bordeaux, France, which he’ll be starting up shortly. Although I’m not quite sure what he’s going to be doing. We haven’t managed to get around making fun of each other for long enough to talk about anything substantial.

One reason I get such a kick out of talking to Peter is because the kid is in a hundred places at once. After he’d first left, I got a message from him saying that he’d had a good time in Buenos Aires but was currently home in England. Sometime later I got another one out of the blue saying that he was having a blast skiing in France. A week later I got a message saying he was going to visit his girlfriend in Germany. Sometime after that I got one saying that he was headed back to France to find work. Now he’s in England for a while. Once he’s done there (for the second time), he’s going back to France. What’s the most incredible, though, is that the kid had the audacity to write in the last message, “I’m going to be happy to be in one place for a while,” referring to spending some time at home in England. But you’re going to be living and working in France before you know it, Peter! Crazy kid. He’s a traveler through and through. He knows it just as well as I do.

Now… despite all the attention I pay to the happy goings-on here, something absolutely terrible has occurred since the last time I wrote. Elsi quit! Oh God, the humanity! No more Elsi!

Elsi was the empleada, or maid, that worked for Sarah here at CasaLeon. You might not remember me saying much about her, but I’m pretty sure I described at some length her enthusiasm for local politics and, more selfishly, her incredible cooking. I can say with absolute certainty now that there was not a single thing that she cooked that I didn’t enjoy. In the eternal words of Peter, the woman was a legend.

Elsi’s resignation came about rather abruptly. Her children were still off from school and she decided to take a bit of time off before their school year started up again. Elsi has four children, the oldest of whom is eighteen and the youngest of whom is around twelve—this is the only one of her kids that I’ve met in person. Elsi had book a couple of weeks for vacation, but this free time continued to grow as the two-week mark came and past. Sarah was at the beach and Adam and I were headed into the centro for whatever reason when we ran into Elsi just outside the main gate. We were the first ones to find out that she wouldn’t be coming back.

Elsi attributes the reason to her children, specifically mentioning that she wants to be around after her youngest daughter has a minor surgery done. Where I still don’t know about how difficult it is to recover from the type of surgery she’s getting done, Sarah questions whether Elsi was just tired of working. Having children who can make an independent living on their own means that the tables might have finally turned and now they’re supporting her instead of her supporting them.

Sarah is a little bummed with the whole situation, and understandably so. Elsi had been working here for over six years and replacing her means teaching someone else the ins and outs of this place. We’ve already gone through one temporary empleada who was filling in for Elsi for a while. Even though the replacement knew her time here was short because of her own children she’d committed herself to taking care of, she recommended Justina, who is—at least seemingly so—the new permanent worker. I like her. She’s nice and she smiles a lot. Even though training her has put an additional strain on Sarah, I have confidence the new arrangement will work out for the best. One thing is certain… Justina makes good chicken!

Weather

I make this a section only to make it all very apparent that la temporada, or Ecuadorian summer, has officially come and gone. While the sun stills peaks out from time to time, the best of the weather is gone. I’ve finally reached that terrible nexus where, once again, Wisconsin weather is probably more pleasant than it is here. Sarah went into detail a few days ago to tell me about how cold the water had become and how cloudy the sky was going to be from here on out. I thought about mentioning that the water would never get cold enough along an Ecuadorian coast to prevent a Wisconsinite from swimming, but it didn’t seem prudent at the time. I certainly don’t fear the temperatures, but it’s nice to see the sun (and why would I ever want to lose my tan?).

So, at this juncture, I’d just like to take a moment to publicly declare: NOOOOO! Damn it… it’s over. Chaocito, la temporada. It was good while it lasted. I’ll miss you, sol, and all of the underdressed Latin women you brought to the playa….

Teaching

My English teaching career can be summarized with one word as of late: compromise. In the last post, I talked about “reviewing” with my new class at Nuestro Mundo (as I’m now a fixture of private high school education in Salinas), which was a nice way of saying that my classes hadn’t been properly organized. I had a class but I didn’t have my class.

Well, now I have my classes, but I don’t have my materials. I’ve been teaching the last week or so without the benefit of a textbook. We were given a pair of copies of the first three unit’s workbook exercises to act as a general guide, but even so, these are simply a collection of questions and answers that don’t act as a comprehensive learning guide for students. The resource problems I’m having really haven’t caused too much of a problem for me because I’ve taught beginner speakers before, so I have a fair amount of experience with the target language, how to teach it and, perhaps most inconspicuously, the grammar rules I should be emphasizing. I suppose who I now feel the worst for are the new teachers who still lack a lot of experience, namely Adam and Daniela. Before me, they’d been “reviewing” with students for an additional two weeks, and now they have to continue with new classes but next to nothing for accompanying texts.

I hope I don’t sound too harsh on the administration. I don’t mean to blame someone like Humberto for this. I know it’s not his fault when he’s traveling to Guayaquil at least twice a week to secure our payments and the teaching materials we need. This is a problem that comes from a higher source than him, although I really blame anyone outright. Without having more information to base my decision off of, I believe this all goes back to the person in charge of CELEX and his ultimate decision (or should I say indecision?) to neglect programming here on the peninsula. Humberto’s fought really, really hard to keep things going for students and teachers such as myself, but that doesn’t mean that, short of being cut off, our programs still aren’t being ignored.

My classes changed two weeks ago. Logistically, I can hardly complain with my new schedule. I now teach in the early mornings, classes starting at 7:30 A.M. The schedule just underwent another minor shift yesterday (I pray this will be the last), which gives me an hour break between the two one-and-a-half hour classes—one class full of middle schoolers, the other with high schoolers—depending on the day of the week which of the two groups gets taught first. Therefore, I’m done teaching on any given day by 11:25, leaving the rest of the day open to my usual shenanigans.

Since things have changed, I’ve been given two new groups of students to work with. Even though each class’s average age is rather close in a relative spectrum—however incomparable when it really gets down to the core of it—I can’t decide whether the middle or the high schoolers are more savvy English speakers/learners. Depending on the day, I might say that either group responded more intelligently or would have scored better on a test. Whatever the case, it’s nice to only have to prepare one lesson plan (he he). I was skeptical at first, believing that teaching the same material back to back would be remarkably boring. But it turns out it’s not boring at all. Each class has different questions, different obstacles to learning and different things that happen during class (a lazy, looping hornet flew into the room to terrorize my high schoolers earlier this week) to remind you that life can be a total crapshoot.

In getting used to these new students, I wouldn’t say that the ones I have now are any less crazy than the ones I had before (the ones I struggled with during the “review” week), just that they’re crazy in different ways. My latest and greatest teaching problem has been dealing with random English swear words that seem to pop out from nowhere when my back is turned. The first f-bomb was thrown last week and we had another one this week, this time from the high school-aged kids. I do my best not to get pissed off, explain to them why it’s an offensive word and why it would offend me, but these little talks always end with my students discussing some random topic between themselves in Spanish more often than they end up achieving anything resembling a newfound understanding. I need to continually remind myself that these are high school kids, and they just don’t think the same way I do.

Still, I hope I’m not becoming more of a lax teacher as I near the end of my (at least foreseeable) teaching career. More frequently now than ever, my classes are distracted when regional conversations throughout the classroom repeatedly emerge. Telling my students to shut up (A habit of mine they most definitely find more enjoyable than threatening: Some of them have even taken to telling each other to shut up when they sense the times that I’m going to first.) is like playing the game at Chuck E. Cheese where you pound the purple gophers that peak up with the leather mallet. There comes a point when I just don’t care anymore, that I either can’t or don’t want to find a way to quiet my students down enough to continue teaching all of them. At these points I take a short break, usually reclining in a chair at the front of the classroom, before continuing to teach those few students who continue to pay attention to English despite their surroundings. These are the students who are the easiest to love.

Discipline is certainly not my strong point. I’m of the mindset that if you don’t want to learn, you don’t have to, and it’s not my job to make you. However, maybe this is precisely the mindset that enables me to avoid becoming a stronger disciplinarian. Greater still, I have to wonder if a middle/high school is really the ideal environment for me to be teaching in. I highly doubt it….

Volcán Cotopaxi

While I could probably go on quite a bit about Sarah’s host grandfather’s 80th birthday party in Guayaquil the weekend after last, this blog entry is already too long and it’s going to be significantly more interesting (however much longer) for me to stick to this one topic: the Cotopaxi climb.

I’m not quite sure whose idea was the original inspiration for the Cotopaxi climb, but I know I heard the first real push to do it from my buddy Isaac. Even before Easter, he’d been hyping the idea to me, even though I remained skeptical that I would do it until I put my final payment down. Whatever the case, I’d known about the climb since before I left for home. A flurry of emails started to fly in every which direction around that time, preparations being made and commentary issuing from different corners of Ecuador, but I remained strategically silent in telling others that I would be one of the participating climbers. Not only had I not researched the climb enough on my own, I didn’t want to do anything to encourage my mom to conduct any research of her own, thereby feeding any of the worries she might have been experiencing (Sorry, Mom. I hope you’ll accept it if I say I had your best interests in mind.).

Sometime during my two weeks back home, Peter, a volunteer who took the lion’s share of the initiative in organizing the hike, put down $50 in my name. Knowledgeable or dumb, now I felt compelled to do the thing.

The timing of the hike was planned when it was with good reason. Last week Thursday, May 1, was the equivalent holiday here as our Labor Day. In an almost whimsical show of generosity (after all, the same guy essentially removed a holiday previously in the year for all governmental employees), President Rafael Correa declared that Friday a national holiday as well, extending the weekend and giving all of us English teachers the necessary time to do something like this.

Anyway, I bolted from the coast last week Wednesday after teaching classes in the morning. I hopped a flight Carla and her friend miraculously helped me to book the previous day in spite of the holiday crowds. AeroGal got me into Quito around 4:00 that afternoon, after I went through a bit of the run around in the Guayaquil airport on account of my Swiss Army knife pen drive. I met up with a couple of other volunteers at the climbing company in Quito, finished paying up what I owed and sympathized a while with Morgan, the gregarious (and questionably sane) Swedish climbing aficionado at Moggley. I slept by a volunteer couple’s pad that night and a group of us got on our way toward Moggley’s climbing hostal, Valhalla, near Cotopaxi semi-early Thursday morning.

To give you an idea of the challenge we were pitting ourselves against, Cotopaxi is dormant volcano rising over 19,500 feet into the sky; it’s also the highest peak in Ecuador. The volcano is located about two hours south of Quito and many of the guides, like the ones who work for Moggley, climb it more than once a week. The nice thing about climbing Cotopaxi is that it isn’t a technical climb at all. You don’t need any “classic” climbing experience in the sense of having the proficiency to work pulleys and belays or being able to Sylvester Stalone your way up the sheer face of a cliff. You do, however, need to have the physical capacity to walk, step after arduous step, up slopes as steep as black diamond ski runs. The crummy thing about climbing Cotopaxi is that: one, 19,500 feet is no piece of cake even for experienced climbers; and, two, a body’s adaptation to the altitude and all it has—or lacks—to offer is potentially more essential to completing the climb than one’s physical capabilities at a lower elevation. As such, those among us living on the coast (raise your hand, Mark) certainly had our doubts close in mind. I will mention, however, that the Moggley guides were confident we’d allocated enough time to acclimate by arriving in the mountains by Wednesday afternoon.

As a couple of go-getters, Isaac and Charlie, who’d arrived at Valhalla a night earlier than us went on a test hike of a nearby mountain called Illiniza, the rest of us allowed our lungs the benefit of relaxation as we sat back and watched Casino Royale, all the while drinking mate de coca, a sort of herbal tea drink made from the leaves of the same plant that can be methodically manufactured into cocaine. (Supposedly, it’s good for altitude adjustment.) By that night, our entire group was assembled, minus a rather significant number of our group’s original signers. Due to some untimely sickness, Peter and his girlfriend Ella had been forced to drop out. Another volunteer couldn’t make it for a similar reason. Even among those who’d shown up at Valhalla, two of us weren’t doing so hot: digestive problems here as opposed to respiratory infections elsewhere.

The next day the guides appeared in a bus as Isaac, Josh and I were taking a little hike, being barked at by a different pair of country dogs for every fifty steps we took. After we’d returned, everyone got his or her equipment, the lot of us loaded up the bus and we got on our way to Cotopaxi.

Driving up the base of the mountain was like stepping through the Wardrobe and into a winter wonderland at the wrong time of year. Powering up switchback after switchback, the misting rain became a steadier downpour, which was eventually turned into a free falling snow shower. I’d been to Cotopaxi once before, but the number of people who were out last Friday made it seem like a whole new place altogether. As the hoods of cars and tops of buses were increasingly blotted out, Ecuadorians reveled in the snow, mashing gravel-laden groundcover into snowballs that they appeared fearful of throwing at their siblings. The guides informed us in Spanish to hold tight, that we’d make our way to the mountain refuge, our lodging for the night, as soon as the snow let up. My head felt funny; a number of others among our group were feeling the same way. I was thankful, however, that at least my bowels weren’t overactive, as they were for Kane’s friend who’d come to visit for a week from California. Poor guy.

Eventually, the snow did relent a bit. We emerged off the bus, threw on our water repellent clothes and tossed our gear over our shoulders as an Ecuadorian raced down the mountainside seated on a makeshift sled, a piece of plastic or glazed wood about the size of a paper plate. At the base of the refuge, only about a half an inch of snow had fallen, just enough so that when you stepped, enough of the surface was scraped back by your heels and toes to reveal the black rock beneath. Isaac compared it to walking over a trail of crushed Oreo cookies, which I found apt, delicious and salutary to the Brothers Grimm all at once. Needless to say, I was quite encouraged when the three of us from the coast were among the top four to arrive first at the refuge. If climbing 300 meters was this easy, we’d only have to do ten times that to take us to the summit!

Friday night involved a lot of eating, hydrating and resting. We familiarized ourselves with our surrounding, the guides climbing philosophies and as much hot cocoa as we could get our hands on well into the afternoon. After a few hands of cuarenta, a sizable spaghetti and vegetable dinner and the safety pep talk that I was so damn proud I didn’t need to ask to have translated, we were told to hit the sack. By then the refuge had all but been emptied of the Quito folk milling about before the descents to their cars, and all that was left was us “serious” climbers.

The plan was to begin our adventure at 1:00 that morning. It’s important to get this early of a start so as not to be caught in the snow later in the day. Weather conditions are fairly constant on Cotopaxi, and the snow rolls in—just as it had that day—in the early afternoon. If we were going to make the summit, we’d be hiking all night and would arrive there a few hours after sunrise. This would allow us enough time to make it back before things got sticky. The guides informed us that if we weren’t able to make it all the way up Cotopaxi by 8:30 A.M., we’d be forced to turn back, so as to arrive at the refuge by noon.

I don’t think a single person among us slept more than an hour Friday night. Between the nerves, the 700-meter elevation jump since the night before and Isaac’s incessant farting, sleeping conditions were just not what they’d been at Valhalla. I was feeling claustrophobic as hell in the army style bunks, made worse by having squished into a sleeping bag that was much too small for me somewhere in the pitch-dark refuge loft. I was a happy camper when one of the guides woke us up to get things underway. One of Kane’s friends who’d been feeling under the weather made the last minute decision to try the hike. This brought the total number who would attempt the summit from our group to eleven. Things were looking up!

Changing into our gear was fast but chomping through a breakfast of bread and cheese was even faster. I goofed around and shot a few photos (with the new Olympus FE-340 camera I picked up while home—yeah!) before getting in line to take our mostly ineffective turns at trying to go to the bathroom. I was the last one to step outside the refuge doors, thereby the last to be stunned by the dazzling star field dangling overhead.

The first part of the hike was the easiest. Immediately outside the refuge, the landscape was—on the scale we were about to encounter—relatively flat and walking was easy. The guides stressed that we take things slowly. That, in fact, would be the key to our success. I began to think of myself as the Turtle in that beloved fable of ours.

We soon arrived at the glacier on Cotopaxi. Had three or four inches not been covering the ground, the hike to here wouldn’t have involved any snow at all. The glacier itself, however, was the beginning a thick, crusty sheet of ice that doesn’t disappear seasonally. I wouldn’t have necessarily known that had I not been to Cotopaxi in the past. This was where we put on our crampons, the spiked attachments worn on the bottom of our rented boots, and ran ropes through our harnesses. Each guide had been charged with a team of two climbers. Charlie, a fellow coastal volunteer, and I decided to team up. A quick sip of water and the real hike began.

The next part of the climb turned out to be the hardest of all. The hiking route can be broken into sections, and the section that began next was little more than a super-steep, super-long asskicker of a mountainside. Charlie and I took it slower than most of the other teams of three and, before long, I found myself with my head turned up, watching the headlamps disappearing over the ridge far above me. Seeing them fading away with the white sheet of snow laid at my feet and the vast array of stars piercing through like the gaping acne of infinity’s dimensionless face, impacted footprints carving my vision in triangular segments, I felt more on a Martian landscape than I did on Earth.

Charlie had to drop out before too long. He was feeling weak and wisely chose to cut his adventure short. Chris, another volunteer, and his guide were nearby, so I tied on with them. We continued a long ways up the mountain, but I knew Chris wasn’t going to make it either when my toes began to get cold from stopping too often. The last group behind ours was another guide and a Japanese man about our age who’d come to Ecuador to sightsee. I tied on with them, which would turn out to be the last change that I’d do.

As night gave way into morning, more and more parts of me began to ache. The first part of me that felt it was my calves. They burned like a mother in no time. The next part was my shoulders, a result of the daypack that carried some food, water and a few extra articles of clothing. I always made sure to keep my breathing in check. That was the most important thing to me: to make sure I was getting the oxygen my body required. Only for a little while did I begin to feel dizzy, a sure sign that the altitude is getting to you. But, then again, there are varying degrees of dizziness, and some just have to be endured.

By the time morning broke and the sun had risen, our guide, the Japanese man and I had made it to 5500 meters. Cotopaxi’s summit still loomed in the distance; it would’ve been laughing if it had the vocal elements to do so. I’m not sure what time it was then, but our guide regrettably informed us that we’d have to turn back—a Gatorade break first. Even though it was still early, the summit was still a three-hour hike away by normal standards and a five-hour hike by the pace we’d set. Two other groups had already past us on their ways back down the mountainside. The early morning light like a new hope chiding me forward, I asked myself to understand it was the prudent decision to get down now. Still, a part of me wanted to see exactly how far my body could’ve withstood….

Getting down was a workout for the quads instead of the calves, so we were all-round exhausted by the time we made it back to the refuge. I climbed back into my sleeping bag and tried to convince myself this pounding headache was simply a product of dehydration. The Motrin would work, I told myself.

Hours later and the only one group remained on the mountain. To make a long story short, Isaac, Josh and, not surprisingly, their guide made the summit. Isn’t that great? Despite Isaac and all of the preparation he’d put in before the Cotopaxi climb (putting many of us to shame really), Josh, I think, deserves even greater applause. He was one of the three of us coastal volunteers and managed the climb without much specialized training at all; he is, however, a pretty well exercised dude. We joked at the tables inside the refuge as they went through their stories at the cumbre. The most remarkable part to me (besides their sheer endurance) was how they came back down. Apparently, by then the snow over the mountainside was partially melted and clung to their crampons whenever they took a step. Each time they had to use their ice picks to hit the sides of their boots and dislodge the snow. What a frickin’ pain! I’m so proud (and kind of jealous) of them.

What an intense experience. I can’t seem to quit saying that word in relation to this past weekend.

How’s It?

I’m pretty much in the exact same emotional state as I mentioned the last time I posted. I’m doing well but I’m split between enjoying the rest of my time here and feeling a yearning to be back home for good. I don’t know whether or not that will change until I’m too close to coming home anyhow.
What I should mention, though, is that my plane ticket home has been finalized. Unless plans change (which I doubt they will unless the unexpected occurs… always a definite possibility), I’m coming home for good on July 1st. My journey starts from Quito this time around and instead of heading through Houston, I have to return home through Miami (another minor stipulation I have to abide by). I’ll be in the air or hanging around an airport for nearly twelve hours, which will put me into Milwaukee at 6:20 P.M—we’ll see is the airlines keep to that. Come by to welcome me back. Sí, sí, sí. ¡Hazlo!

CrazyFace, not CrazyLegs

2008-04-29T10:17:00.000-07:00

Coming Back

Well, it wouldn’t take much to realize I’ve since returned to Ecuador. The first time I returned home over Christmas, it was the sheer size of things in the United States the surprised me: roads were wider, the cars on them bigger, buildings were taller and even everyday American citizens were larger and more imposing than I could remember prior to living here. This time the big surprise came when I returned to Ecuador: I was amazed with how colorful the place was. Had it always been this way, or did something change for the two weeks I’d left? Ha. That’s a dumb question (which probably explains why I asked it…).

Maybe it was because after two weeks of watching a Wisconsin spring advance, anything is colorful. Maybe I’d gotten so used to brown grass, leafless trees and barren cornfields that anything other than brown would have been a welcome sight. Whatever the case, the morning after arriving back in Guayaquil was like stepping into a painting. Even the people dress more vibrantly here (which may or may not go against a slew of fashion don’ts that I would know nothing about).

In and Around Salinas

I don’t have all that much to say as far as traveling goes (with good reason), so I thought I might write about some other stuff.

On Wednesday, I played beach volleyball with a group of Ecuadorians, Adam and Daniela, a half-British, half-Ecuadorian twenty-one-year-old I met through a friend of Sarah’s a few weeks back (Daniela is the newest edition to our English teaching family at CELEX—yeah!). It was the first time I played volleyball since getting out here. I really don’t think it’s that interesting of a topic, however, other than I met a guy who they all called “Cara de Loca,” which means Crazy Face. He did have kind of a messed up face.

I went surfing for the first time in a while on Thursday with Carla and Adam. Carla’s been practicing up now that she’s on vacation and has the time to devote to the sport that she didn’t have before. She had a board propped in the corner of her room for a number of years that didn’t see all that much action. When she took it out a few weeks back, it turns out the thing wasn’t quite watertight, as in, the foam core of the board was actually absorbing water. Not good.

On Thursday, we rented three boards from Surf Paradise, the small surfing company I’ve been rocking out with in Salinas, and Carla was pretty damn good. I definitely think she’s made progress faster than I did at the onset of my surfing education. Better yet, she was all smiles; even at Punta Carnero where the ocean was rough and all three of us got absolutely hammered by the waves (lots went up my nose!). Adam, for his part, had a great time too. Your first time out is always a hit or miss sort of experience; you can’t know exactly what to expect—surfing is deceptively different from the shore. We had a good laugh, though, because he was wearing one of his many Georgia Bulldogs T-shirts (it won’t be white for long), so he could always be proud that he was “representing” even if surfing can be frustrating as hell for beginners.

I had some success out there. They’d given me shorter board than I’m used to using, so I felt pretty good that I could still catch a wave and stand up on it (the shorter the board, the tougher it can be to surf). There’s a difference too between riding an actual wave and riding a wave after it’s broken. Riding a wave before it’s broken is much harder because the wave itself creates an incline down which a surfer accelerates. If you’re not good enough to handle the speed or the fact that your body and board are accelerating toward the ocean floor, you’re not going to be able to ride the wave. Riding the foam (“espuma,” as they’ll tell you here), or after the wave has broken, is significantly easier, especially because it really only involves acceleration in one direction—forward! I’m saying all this because I’ve never really surfed any waves worth talking about before Thursday. But I got one that day, which was pretty frickin’ awesome. Even Victor, my surf instructor, was impressed, which must say something because the guy doesn’t get excited for much of anything on the water.

To be honest, though, sometimes it’s the stuff that doesn’t even require a board that’s the best stuff about going surfing. For instance, on Thursday, there were these schools of black fish that swelled up into the incoming waves. I don’t know if they were searching for food or what, but all of a sudden, the top of these waves were loaded with little black bodies darting every which way. A bunch of flying fish were out too. It was so cool to be fighting against the waves when three or four of them would go flying past you. Sometimes they’d suddenly appear out of a giant wave coming at me, and sometimes they’d fly from the tiny swells between the bigger ones. Even just watching the ocean come at you is an incredible sight, the sun low over the water. I’ve mentioned it before, but the ocean at Punta Carnero is particularly rough, which, if you ask me, only adds to its beauty.

Teaching

Well, now that I’m starting a new series of teaching, I should have expected that my schedule would be as drastically different as it has been in the past. This may seem unusual, but I taught the majority of this last week and I still don’t have a class. Why’s that? Oh God, another explanation….

I’m a teacher for CELEX, a language program arising out of Guayaquil, but the actual school I teach at is Nuestro Mundo. Nuestro Mundo is a private school, having class options for middle and high school students all at one place, even though it’s a relatively small building we’re in. So CELEX provides English teachers to Nuestro Mundo, which is where people like Adam, Daniela and I come in. However, the reason I don’t have a set class right now is that a placement exam had to be administered first. While we’re waiting on the results of the test, none of the teachers have the class he or she is going to be teaching over the next few weeks. As such, we’ve been instructed to review and play games with different classes until the administrative underpinnings are sorted out. You see, the difference is that before I was working only for CELEX—I was teaching CELEX students at Nuestro Mundo. Now I’m working for Nuestro Mundo kids through CELEX, so the only thing that’s remained constant is the location.

On Tuesday, I was assigned as the teacher to a high school-aged group and to a middle school-aged group. The high school group has been a dream. They’re super smart, they listen well and they seem at least mildly interested in learning English. Working with them this last week has been an absolute cinch. The middle school group, however, is a different story. I’d estimate that I spend at least a third of the class trying to convince them not to punch one another. They’re insane! And even though they’re draining, I can’t say that I don’t like the challenge of trying to hold their attentions long enough to teach them something. (Mom, I have a newfound respect for the work you do).

I made it my goal to impress on them the differences between nouns, adjectives and verbs. Talking before them, however, did little. The only activities that seem to work well with them are physical ones. Captain Says (Simon Says for all of us), for instance, went over well, as did Telephone, the game where a sentence is whispered in a circle and the final student must repeat back as close to the original sentence as possible. Bingo, on the other hand, was speedily rejected, as was Twenty Questions. I’d know when an activity was failing by how many of them had resorted to begging me if they could go outside and play soccer in the courtyard instead of having English class. They just don’t seem to get it when I tell them, “We have English class now. You’ll have gym a little later,” (I must sound like such a dweeb! No wonder I don’t get very far). Anyway, I doubt many of them enjoy a single class other than gym.

I did my best with an age group I’ve never taught before, but a spirit of self-rule seems to dominate my classroom. I’m convinced it occurs as a result of not having a regular teacher and the fact that their classroom might be abandoned for an hour at a time depending on which day of the week it is. Sometimes the only person checking in on them is the director of the school, who surely isn’t the disciplinary type I recall from my middle school years. Leave a bunch of twelve and thirteen year olds to themselves and someone’s going to get hit… repeatedly hit. Maybe I ought to screw the English and teach them how to box….

But while they may be loud and obnoxious and so antsy you begin to wonder if there’s enough Ritalin in all of Latin America to solve your problems, they’re a nice group of kids. They participate well and ask more questions than any group of students I’ve ever taught before. They’re hungry to learn, if only I can find a way to get through to them. At this point I’m tempted to say kids will be kids, but I believe that’s dismissive thinking and distracts people from placing on them the responsibility they’re all capable of dealing with.

Ha. Then again, there are always those moments when it amazes me to think that these middle school students have the potential of one day becoming the calm and collective bunch my high school group is. Maybe that’s assuming too much. I have to keep them from killing each other on my watch first….

How's It?

I’ve reached an interesting point now, and one that I feel entirely ambivalent about. Having recently submitted my request to return for good on June 29^th, a date still not set in stone, I have just over two months left in the country.

I’m split because I like it here a lot, and Ecuador has helped me to learn a ton of stuff about myself and what I want to do with my life. Just Friday morning I was reminiscing with Adam about how my introduction to the peninsula and the beginning of my teaching career differed from his. Specifically, we talked about how I didn’t get off to quite the running start that he has. My Spanish was fairly pathetic, I was teaching a class I didn’t have any experience teaching and, worst of all, I had only a handful of contacts in the immediate area, none of which I then considered as anything more than mere acquaintances. I struggled with loneliness, and I feel as if that struggle has strengthened me, even if it didn’t seem like that at the time. Furthermore, I’ve gained a newfound confidence in myself and the things I do. After all, if I can succeed at doing a new job in a foreign country for this duration of time, what can’t I do? (Don’t answer that question… it’s supposed to be rhetorical.) Really, Ecuador has helped me to realize what I want the next step of my life to be.

But I’m also somewhat anxious to get home. Like I just said, I’m excited about where my life is going. Believe it or not, I’m really looking forward to starting medical school and buckling down on my education. This may sound weird, but I want to return to a time when my schedule is more established than it is here, when what is going to happen in my life is (at least marginally) more predictable than it has been over the past year of my life. I’ll explain. For at least some of my senior year, I’d gained the impression that I was headed out the door. I knew before Christmas that the Peace Corps would accept me (even though I wouldn’t end up accepting the Peace Corps); I knew by early spring that I was headed to Ecuador instead of Africa; I graduated in May and shot up to Shawano, Wisconsin, to start an internship by the beginning of June; by the time that finished, I had a month left before beginning my commitment in Ecuador. I want that sense of normalcy, of being able to define myself in a certain place, in my life again. More than anything, I want my life to contain the dedicated focus on one broad area of expertise (guess what that might be) that it’s lacked in recent years.

There are other reasons I seek to find myself in one place again for a more substantial length of time. Without being too mean about it, it’s kind of discouraging when people begin to write you off because they know you’re only going to be around for a little while longer. When I first came out here, my students would ask me how long I planned to stay in Ecuador, and I always told them around a year. Saying this was always greeted with approval, sometimes even surprise that I’d made such a lengthy commitment. Now I’ve reached a point when I tell them until the end of June. The reaction now is something closer to mild indifference; perhaps one of them offers up a grave nod of understanding as if to say, “This is what you have to do if you want to be a doctor.”

To a lesser degree, I miss the comforts of home. I say this because my views on what comprises comfort have changed. While I don’t live with a coffee machine, frequent air conditioning or plumbing capable of flushing toilet paper, my capacity to adapt to a living situation allows me to feel comfortable, even if I don’t have all of the gadgets and commodities that we commonly associate with comfort. At the onset of this experience, a lot of people raised objections about me living here: Wouldn’t I get sick too often? Wouldn’t there be too many bugs? Wouldn’t there be too much crime? Wouldn’t it be too damn hot (think of Robin Williams in Good Morning Vietnam)? I feel as if many of these concerns (and perhaps even more frequently, my own concerns—that ill-conceived phobia of rabies suddenly comes to mind) were exaggerated or founded on nothing substantial—maybe a vague impression, a pair of tidbits from a Wikipedia page and a Food Network special or a handed down story from a friend of a friend of a friend who, at one point of another, had something to do with one of those countries in that general region of the world. I had to get here to know Ecuador; the details just fell into place as I carried on with my life from day to day. (As a few words of encouragement to some of you reading this, I don’t believe what I’ve done in adapting here is anything special. The difference is that I’ve willfully embraced a change whereas many times life forces us into it. Nothing I’ve done to adapt here is out of anyone’s reach. I always find it crucial to remember it’s infinitely more difficult to get started than it is to keep going.)

When I refer to the comforts of home, I’m referring to some of those things I’ve sorely been missing since coming here that are anything but material (Minus my bike. Good God, I miss my bike). I’m talking about knowing what’s going on around me and having a greater insight into why things unfold the way they do. I’m talking about being able to call my friends for mere cents any time I want. I’m talking about a tiny, tumor-ridden Labrador that’s impossibly happy to see me when I come through the door. I’m talking about that all-important support network of my family and being that much closer to the love they give me. It doesn’t make a lick of difference if you’re drinking Miller or Pilsener, if you’re wearing Abercrombie or some offshoot of Quiksilver sewn together in Peru, if you get from place to place in a Land Rover or a candy cane colored Trancisa bus that sounds more like a Continental airliner with a terrible fever. Those things I’ve said above are what you really miss when you leave home.

But the solution to the way I’m feeling is a simple one. While part of me wishes I could’ve just stayed home for good when I was there, the truth is that now I’m here, and I’m going to keep making the most of this experience while I have the opportunity to do so.

In the end, two months is neither long nor short. Time moves along at exactly the same rate as it always has, as it always will. I used to think of time as my enemy, that I was competing against time to fit the most “worth” into my life. Now I think that’s a silly way to look at it. Not only is it a battle no one short of (insert protagonist’s name from The Time TravelerI—what’s with all the movie references?) can win, why even try? I shouldn’t have to maximum my time, and I certainly shouldn’t have to maximize my life. Maybe a better way to see things is that I’ll do what I can with the time that’s given to me. And, in the light of that, two months is the perfect amount of time to finish the important things I’ve set out to do here in Ecuador.

Los Simpson

2008-04-01T11:48:00.000-07:00

New Blue

I don’t believe I’ve ever brought this up before, but I find it amusing that I can track how much Spanish I’ve learned by watching The Simpsons—the show itself is very popular here. Of course some parts (even individual characters) are easier to understand than others, but still. It’s kind of fun to flip on an episode sometime around 8 or 9 o’clock and see if I recognize any verbs I’d learned that week. That’s what I was doing earlier tonight. That was, before Carla came back and we ate some choclo and drank a few Clubs.

I have very little to say that’s new, which might be for the best as I have a tendency to get really longwinded with the whole blog thing.

Adam, the new volunteer, still isn’t down here. He’s finished orientation, yes, but he’s doing a bit of traveling before coming here to stay. I don’t know too much about it as we haven’t been texting each other as much as we might, but it’s all good. He’ll be here soon enough.

Peter’s been gone for over two weeks. Saying see you later was tougher than I thought it was going to be. We lived here together for five months, and I didn’t really realize how much I’d confided in the guy. We had a pretty happening send-off in Guayaquil before I went with him to the airport the day after. Maybe too good of a send-off….

Tom is still in England and is doing well, I hear. Carla is working her ass off on a project for the tourism she’s involved with. She’s on vacation from her normal job right now, but what she’s doing now might be even more time consuming than her normal job. Sarah, as always, is doing well. She’s been really busy with preparations for the re-opening of the museum. Allow me to explain:

As well as being a hospedaje (equivalent to like a bed and breakfast) and a really, really cool house, the place I live at actually houses the skeletal remains of one of the original habitants of the peninsula. Way back, when they were still building this home, the builders chanced upon a skeleton. Instead of moving it or selling the land, Sarah and her husband decided to make an exhibit of it. Along with a bunch of other artifacts and really old tools and stuff, it’s a cool little two-room museum. I’m not too sure why it was ever closed in the first place, but this coming Monday is the grand re-opening. Maybe I’ll get to meet the mayor! I understand he’s been invited.

Easter

I had a nice, relaxing Easter here in Ecuador. The highlight of last weekend was definitely fanesca. While Latin America doesn’t seem to be as big on Easter traditions as we are in the U.S. (no Easter egg hunts, for instance), around here, they do have only little thing they like to do—and that’s to eat fanesca.

I should mention that eating fanesca certainly isn’t as big of a deal as making fanesca is. The dish is a fish and bean soup, but it definitely leans more heavily on the beans than it does on the fish. There are twelve—count ‘em!—twelve different kinds of beans in fanesca, one for each of Jesus’ disciples. (Side note: I did my best to find out which one was the Judas bean, but no one seems to know or care.) Two of Sarah’s brother-in-laws had come down with their wives to celebrate the holiday, and even with the four of them, Sarah and one cooking-incompetent gringo, it still took all morning to make the stuff. But make the stuff we did! You should’ve seen the size of the pot we ended up using. Sarah’s been hawking the leftovers all week, and we only finished eating it on Thursday night. It was pretty good, but not that good. The soup had a lot of different consistencies, depending on which random bean constitution you spooned up for a mouthful.

Teaching

Now that I’m almost done with Basico A, it’s safe to say I’m familiar with the intensive course teaching style. Four hours a day is not to be taken lightly, and I only say that because of the last hour, not the first three. Getting through three hours of teaching is, at least for me, a piece of cake. Getting through that last hour, though, is a different story. It gets damn tough to keep a bunch of eighteen and nineteen-year-olds attentions! I’ve declared war on cell phones. I’ll never win, but that won’t stop me from fighting. My students think they’re so sneaky, but they’re not! I know all the tricks by now. I feel undeservingly powerful when I steal one of their phones for the remainder of a class.

Really, though, I still maintain that the group I have now is the best bunch I’ve yet had. A lot of them are really dedicated and student hard for the class. That’s nice to see.

Besides for a few untimely power outages and a lot of temporada heat (it’s been damn hot lately!), I really don’t have all that much to say here either. It really cooks in that little room (my classroom is fairly cramped; that’s a lie, it’s extremely cramped) when the air conditioner goes on the fritz. It seems to have taken a liking to doing just that, but I should expect as such in a new building when they’re doing electrical work.

Travel

I went up to Puerto Lopez this weekend to meet up with a few others volunteers who are on vacation right now. We went to Machililla National Park, just a little further to the north from Puerto Lopez, and did some hiking and swimming at the awesome beaches they have there. After that, we hopped a bus back to Puerto Lopez, and then another bus from there to Montañita.

The best part about Montañita was seeing Lisa again. She was gone for the month of March to visit her family back in California, but now she’s back. We went surfing on Sunday morning, and even though I haven’t been surfing in three or four weeks, I did surprisingly well. I even managed to turn the board so I was riding on the actually wave, instead of in front of it. This is something I haven’t been able to do before. I’m getting there!

What about Mark?

Feelin’ fine. I’ve been running a ton to keep the stress levels low and take in some pretty beach scenery near sunset. Slowly but surely, I’ve been improvising my running routes. Kind of exciting for old Mark here. I’d write more about it, but I don’t think it’d mean a lot for anyone other than me.

Really, I’m totally focused on having a few weeks off at home. I’ve been waiting pretty patiently for this, and I only have to wait a week longer.

Hopefully most of the snow is gone when I get back to Wisconsin. I don’t feel like trudging through all that slush. I despise you, spring slush. I’m sure a bunch of you are wishing for the same as me. C’mon, sun, do your job!

The only thing left to say is… happy birthday, Karin!

Feelin' Fine

2008-03-10T18:15:00.000-07:00

Updates

Another lesson Ecuador has taught me—or at least has made that much more pronounced—is how transient relationships can be in this country. I mean, I had months to tell people and prepare for my original departure here. Everyone (well, for those of you who read this) knows when I’m coming home in April and when I’ll most likely be back for good. But here—perhaps it’s because people don’t always have the same amount of time to prepare—it’s different. Plans change on a whim. Nothing is “for sure,” not that it is anywhere, but I believe it’s much less so in Ecuador.

Peter will be gone in less than a week. We were going to hang out in the mountains over our last weekend together in the country, but seeing as he’s had to change his flight, that’s not going to be possible anymore. We’ve decided to spend the weekend in Guayaquil. I guess we’re going sometime this next Saturday morning. It’s so sad for me because the kid’s formed so much of my social and support network since November. I’m afraid I’m going to have to cope with loneliness all over again once he’s gone. Luckily, I do have a break from Ecuador coming up in April.

And yet, there’s always someone new too. The March volunteer, Adam, is a pretty cool dude. I might’ve mentioned this before, but he’s from Georgia and—yes, ma’am—he’s got a Southern drawl (some of the expressions he says are pretty ridiculously awesome too). He’ll be here for good before the end of the month, so that’s something to look forward to.

Teaching

Basic A, the class I’ve been teaching since the beginning of this month, is an awesome class. While I started off slightly terrified to be teaching four hours straight each day, it’s been going really well. They don’t even seem all that bored… for the most part. (I can tell because when things really start to drag, a bunch of them pull out their phones, hide them in their laps and begin to text their friends.) We have our first test scheduled for next week Monday, so we’ll see how well their doing academically at that point; but, judging from the quiz I gave them on Friday, they’re learning a lot. I think it makes a big difference having basic versus advanced students. Because everything is still knew to them and because so many core principles are being taught in basic, these students tend to be hungrier learners, which means that they also tend to pay more attention.

Teaching, however, has been hot! My room’s air conditioner has been broke since the very beginning. But, coincidentally enough, it just got fixed today. I couldn’t be happier about this. I’ve been sweating like crazy. And, to make matters worse, I forgot to put on deodorant before class one day last week. I had to jump past the fan in front of the room to keep my waves of stench from being blown right in my students’ faces. Ha! Not a good situation for them.

Anyway, all in all, Basic A is a great bunch of kids and I’m really happy with them. I’ve even adjusted to teaching in the morning. Can’t complain here!

Travel

Not much to report here seeing as I really haven’t gone anywhere since the last time I posted.

Adam came down this weekend, so I stuck around here. We ran a 10k race together in Salinas on Saturday morning. It went really well for me, other than the heat. Even at 7:30 in the morning, it must have been close to 80 degrees out. I don’t fare too well in the heat. Luckily, there were a lot of aid stations handing out water, which I almost invariably splashed on my head instead of drinking. It started off sunny, but eventually got cloudier while we were actually running the race. That was a big help too.

I wasn’t expecting quite the turnout for the run that actually came. Even in a pretty touristy place like Salinas, it doesn’t seem like that popular of a sport. For instance, I hardly ever see anybody out when I’m running. However, a lot of the people there (I think most of them drove in from Guayaquil) were very serious runners. Apparently, you weren’t anything special unless you were wearing a cool running jersey. Following this line of reasoning, Adam and I were nobodies.

Sarah, a close friend and volunteer living in Guayaquil, came to stay Saturday night as well. Peter, Adam, Sarah and I tried to have a night out in Salinas Saturday night, but after the club we were going to go asked us for $20 a head just to get in the damn place, we decided to hang out on the boardwalk and just have a couple beers. I was absolutely exhausted after having woken up early and run the race, so I made a quick night of it before retreating home.

On Sunday, Adam, Sarah and I hung out at the beach in Salinas. We played some soccer, swam a little and then just sat there for a really long time, discussing any and everything. After that, we went to a little restaurant and introduced Adam to ceviche (perhaps previously spelled cerviche, they are still exactly the same food). He liked it, which is good because you really can’t avoid it entirely on the costa.

Really, not too much to say at all. Just trying to relax and get some sleep.

Other News

Things are going fine. As always, Ecuador is a distinct set of ups and downs. I feel okay about most of the stuff in my life.

Shoot me an email if you get the chance! I could use it.

A Week's Vacation

2008-03-03T15:51:00.000-08:00

Frog Birds

There are these birds that hang out outside my window from time to time, and I swear to God, they sound more like bloated frogs when they chirp than they do like birds. They seem to like playing around in this weird fruit tree. I think they’re great. Sometimes the noise they make even sounds mechanical, like a metallic croak or something. To top it off, they are these pudgy, little gray birds with bright orange beaks, so they’re uber-cute as well. I can’t decide whether my new favorite bird is the pelicans that steal all the fish from the fisherman or these guys. I think I’d have to go with these guys. Tough decision.

Updates

I have a million bagillion small updates on people that I might get out of the way now. As far as people who live here, I’m down to just Peter once again. Both Tom, Peter’s friend, and Joanna, his girlfriend, have gone since I last wrote. Joanna is a medical student in Germany, and she had to be back in time to start another shift at the hospital immediately after completing the arduous journey of arriving back home. Tom is actually in the U.S. right now, visiting his girlfriend who’s studying in Florida.

Worse still, March is Peter’s last month here in Ecuador. He’s going to Argentina on March 21st for a few days, after which he’ll be flying directly back to England. He’ll be spending only a few days in England before pursuing another teaching position (or some other Peter-approved job) in France. Peter speaks French as a foreign language in addition to Spanish. So sad that he’s going. Can you believe I’ve known him since November?

Speaking of England, that’s where Tom (Carla’s Tom) is now, having made good on his promise to make his first official purchase back home a healthy portion of “real” bacon. (Go, Tom! We already miss you here on the peninsula.) He starts his advanced teacher’s training tomorrow. How quickly one goes from being the teacher to being the student. Unfortunately, I won’t be seeing Tom for two and a half months.

The new volunteer who’s coming here, Adam, is officially in Ecuador. He flew in with the rest of the March volunteer group three days ago. I’ll be meeting him for the first time next weekend. He’s coming here for his site visit. We’ve been in contact via email, and I’ve managed to convince him to run a 10k race in Salinas taking place next week Sunday. It should be fun. I’m really pumped to meet the guy.

Teaching

I have, surprisingly enough, a lot of things to say about teaching, despite the fact that I haven’t been teaching at all for the last week.

As the final major requirement in module 8, the oral presentations my students had spent so much time preparing went exceptionally well. I was slightly worried that a few of my students weren’t going to be able to finish their projects in time, but everything seemed to come together in the final days. A number of them chose really interesting topics as well, ones that I certainly wasn’t expecting. One student talked about the origins of Christianity and the early Christian church, one student talked about the Glass Ceiling, a book highlighting the challenges women face in advancing in the workplace (big ups to the Ecua-feminism!) and another student talked about the historical, as opposed to theatrical, Emily Rose (who, coincidentally enough, is actually named Analiese Rose). I was extremely impressed with how professional my students spoke and the amount of effort many of them put into research and pronunciation. I almost shed a tear… not really, but we can always pretend.

I found out only about a week before the actual date, but my school has moved from Santa Elena to Salinas. I remember walking into school one day just about two weeks ago and Humberto telling me, “Remember not to come in next week because nothing will be here.” Funny how quickly they’ll pull something like that on you in Ecuador. One day you’re here, one day you’re gone.

The reason is that the lease ran out on the building in Santa Elena. The building is now going to be a sort of municipal headquarters for provincia 24. Unfortunately, I have no idea in what capacity. Maybe I’ll try to find out from Humberto in the coming days here. He’s a bit stressed out as it is, though. He’s really taken charge in keeping CELEX running out of Salinas instead of Santa Elena. I don’t know too much behind the politics of it all, but the owner of CELEX, the specific language institution I work for, isn’t as into the Santa Elena location as he used to be. As such, there was a time when it looked as if the whole organization would have to shut down at my location (which would have effectively liberated me off my volunteer position). But, because of people like Tom and Humberto, things are still off and running. In the meantime, however, Humberto’s been working his ass off in trying to move all of the necessary materials, furniture, etc. from point A to point B. While I was off romping around all over Ecuador, Humberto was not having quite the vacation I was back here.

I went with Humberto today, however, to check out the new school and find out as much information on my new class as I could, and this did afford me the opportunity to help with the moving, even if my contribution was rather small. I helped him move a bunch of cleaning chemicals, brooms and other boxed things from the new school back to his apartment. Nuestro Mundo, which is—get this—also a grade and high school, doesn’t exactly have the same storage space that the old school used to have. Fortunately, Humberto’s got a little extra space back home. As we moved things in from the cab, Tarjelia, the office secretary, was busy printing things out in Humberto’s computer room. Once we’d finished, he showed me his satellite TV. Humberto was quite proud of the two hundred channels that he receives. I didn’t dare tell him that two hundred is just a drop in the bucket compared to the average household in U.S. Shh!

What else can I tell you? I’ll be teaching absolute beginners this time around, which kind of scares me because—besides for teaching training five months ago—I haven’t ever worked with this level of beginners. I teach the same class for four hours a day, five days a week. Apparently (and I didn’t know this before today), I’m going to be teaching in the mornings instead of at night. I’ll be teaching from 9 A.M. to 1 P.M. each day, which I’m kind of split about. I’ve gotten used to the night class thing. Oh well, maybe this will be better. Keeping positive, that’s what I’m doing. At least this will allow me to take advantage of running just before it gets dark. Besides very early in the morning (it’s too tough to wake up that early), this is when it’s the coolest.

Travel

While I could probably write a short novel with all of the travel stuff I’ve been doing over the last week, I’ll try to streamline things as much as I can.

I rushed to get my grades in two weeks ago Friday, but there wasn’t any point to this. Originally, I was going to spend some time in the jungle, but because of some planning miscommunications with a couple of other volunteers, it turned out that plan wasn’t going to work. I called up a whole bunch of people on Saturday morning to see if anyone else had off and, yes, some of them did, but they had other plans. Finally, I got a hold of BobbiLe, the volunteer from Minnesota who lives and works in Portoviejo, and she said, “Well, my host family is going to the beach tomorrow. I’ll ask if it’d be all right if you come too.” Later that afternoon, I took off up the coast to Portoviejo.

BobbiLe’s host family, Josh, the other Porto volunteer, and I all loaded into their family truck and, after a quick stop for a delicious bowl of encebollado, we were off to San Jacinto. The beach at San Jacinto is much more gradual than at a place like Montañita, which gives it its own sorts of ups and downs. The really fun part about San Jacinto is that the tide is really, really powerful in certain locations. Josh and I had a blast swimming with the waves as hard as we could, having them lift us into the air and then feeling the power of the waves crash us down into the swells beneath us. Most times the force of the water was so much that it literally rolled us along the ocean floor. On a completely unrelated topic, it was funny as hell when BobbiLe fell asleep on the beach and the tide began to push its way up the beach. Of all people, it was BobbiLe’s host mother who urged us not to wake her up. She was also the one laughing the hardest when the tide startled BobbiLe awake.

After a couple of days in Portoviejo, I decided to press onward with the vacation. Since I was already halfway there (more or less), I thought I would hop a bus to Quito to visit my beloved, old host family, the Pazmiños. I didn’t initially realize that Isaac, my good friend who lives in Vilcabamba, was also visiting the Pazmiños with his mom, who’d come from Berkeley to see her son. The reunion I shared with everyone on Monday morning was all too homely.

On Monday afternoon, I tagged along with Isaac and his mom, Anita, in the colonial part of Quito. We hiked around, checking out the sites, and stopped at this pretty hipster Ecuadorian restaurant to grub it up. That night, we ate a big meal with the Pazmiños, and I hit the sack early; dumb night buses wear me down big time. However, they’re extremely convenient.

On Tuesday, I woke up early and went for a short run, only to be reminded of the atrocious amount of transportation-related air pollution in Quito. My dad would have been proud, though, of my response to Anita’s question upon my return to the Pazmiño household. When she asked me if I was tired after running, I responded, “Yeah, I’m exhausted.” Really good, right? Yesch.

Later on, I met up with Ava, a Quito volunteer, and did some touristy type things in the city. We went to a reptile exhibit, a place called the Vivarium located in a huge park in the middle of Quito, and saw a bunch of poisonous snakes, turtles and stuff. Apparently, you can hold a boa constrictor or something for $3. It’s located in this weird backroom, and you have to ask to be able to do it. Unfortunately (maybe not so much), I didn’t know about this at the time. After the Vivarium, Ava and I went to check out this really impressive garden that’s also a part of Parque Carolina. The best part about the garden is the orchid exhibit. I had no idea so many different types of orchids existed! How pretty.

That afternoon, I took a hike into the Mariscal, my volunteer organization’s stomping grounds during orientation, and did some important shopping. After that, I met up with Kane, one of my field directors, and we ate some big sandwiches and caught up with all the goings-on we hadn’t had the chance to discuss since the Mid-service meeting that had happened over a month ago. Kane has so much happening in his life it’s almost ridiculous. I won’t get into all the details, but just as soon as he finishes up with WorldTeach, he’s going to be getting married, after which graduate school starts. Lots of planning for the Kane Dogg.

The day before, I’d whipped out a little “los invitamos” action to invite the Pazmiños out for dinner on Tuesday night. We loaded up into two cabs, soon finding ourselves at a little place called Toronto. Toronto is one of these big buffet places, only Ecua-style this time around. I always laugh because Marci, my former host mother, eats meat like no other (and she’s a small woman, which makes it that much funnier). I can’t exactly guess how much meat she ate at Toronto, but it was a lot! Ha! I get such a kick out of Marci. She certainly plowed through a lot of chuleta.

On Wednesday, after a lunch of guacamole, choclo (white corn), papas (potatoes), ensalada (salad) and fritada de pavo (fried turkey, of which I ate its fried, little heart) to rival the night before, Isaac, Anita and I took of for a mountain city about two hours south of Quito. Latacunga almost instantly entered into my top 10 coolest places in Ecuador. Immediately after getting off the bus, Isaac, who had been to the place previously during his travels, popped into a bakery and emerged with a hunk of cheese and a special type of roll called an allulla. Together, the queso de hoja and the roll fried in pork fat, compose a sort of regional food combination that must work to clog every artery in your body. There were, however, as good as they sound. Another cool thing about Latacunga, besides that it’s really clean, is that the volcanoes Iliniza and the monster Cotopaxi are very close to the city. In fact, they call the region that Latacunga lies in “volcano alley,” because of these two and other nearby volcanoes. Too bad we weren’t in Latacunga on a clearer day. A smaller, but still appreciable, aspect of Latacunga I also really liked was that Isaac and I found an internet café with the fastest connection I’ve yet had in Ecuador. It was even fast enough that we could watch a video that Steph had sent me and some other choice clips off YouTube (if any of my friends read this, I was sure to introduce Issac to our good friend Jack Rebney). After some quality interneting, we headed back to the pretty nice—and surprisingly inexpensive—room that we’d booked. We watched a bit of Underworld with Spanish subtitles before the vampire vs. werewolf conflict bored me to sleep. I’m usually so into fantasy!

The next morning, the three of us woke up at 5:15 to do one of the coolest things I’ve done in Ecuador. We hopped onto a bus that took us to a town twenty minutes down the road, to a place called Saquisili. Saquisili hosts a market every Thursday morning. And while this may not sound all that great alone, you must consider two things: who attends this market, and what is sold there. First, the primary people who partake in this market are all Quechuan, that is, they are the indigenous mountain people of the Andes, direct descendants of the Incans. So where my Spanish has been improving all the months, I went back to ground zero in Saquisili. Quechuan people have their own language, and it ain’t Español! Second, while food—of course—is sold in the marketplace, the areas we chose to focus on were the animal markets.

Thursday morning in Saquisili started off innocuously enough. Isaac acting as our tour guide, we got a bit lost upon getting off the bus and took a rather lengthy hike around the town before wising up and asking for directions to the animal markets. It should have been no mystery for us to get there: just follow the trucks with all the farm creatures jammed together in their beds! You hear the Saquisili markets before you see them. Some woman was talking into a loudspeaker, advertising some wonder drug that cures everything from hypertension to prostate cancer, I’m sure. When you get a little closer, you can see all the animals.

We went to the pig market first. The pig market was a wide open—and quite stinky—piece of land littered with either black or white pigs, something like polka dots over a blanket of mud. Each pig had an owner who held a rope tied to some part of each pig, usually one of its legs. Every once in a while, a pig would go absolutely bonkers, either because of another pig or because of some unknown dispute it conjured up with its owner. Suddenly a pig would produce a great racket and try to take off. This was when the strength and will of its owner was tested. This was also the time when Mark got particularly frightened, because here is an irritated and snorting two hundred pound animal trying to break free of its comparatively meek-looking master. Quechuans, in general, are not big people. Quechuans, in general, are significantly stronger than they appear. Still, even when a reasonably large pig did manage to tear the rope out of its owners hands, the pig never made it very far before it would either decide to stop running or another Quechuan would step on the loose animal’s rope.

Isaac and I (Anita, perhaps wisely, decided to remain a safe distance back) also had a great time listening to everyone barter. The half Spanish, half Quechuan hybrid was in full force! This isn’t even to mention the customary dress that everyone was decked out in—invariably including a really cool traditional style hat (that I really need to include a photo of… stupid camera). Isaac and I tried to determine how much an average pig went for, and the best I could figure out was that two relatively young piglets went for around forty dollars. It definitely wasn’t what I was used to, seeing indigenous people holding big wads of dirty, dirty American dollars. In general, Quechuans are an extremely frugal people. Watching them flip through a small stack of twenties was one of the last sights I might have expected to come away from this experience having seen. Apparently, you can make some money being a farmer.

After that, we hit up the cow market, which just wasn’t as exciting. The best part about the cow market was watching some of the helpers feed the calves. If nothing else, the calves were that much cuter than the big smelly pigs.

We spent a good deal of time looking at all of the different foods in the market as well. The most striking food you could buy was the guinea pigs. Merchants kept hordes of guinea pigs inside big tan wicker baskets. They’d arranged these baskets in a sort of semi-circle, which acted as a kind of guinea pig warehouse, so to speak. The actual sales took place in the middle of the semi-circle. There, merchants picked fresh guinea pigs out of plastic sacks. Buyers then had their choice of any merchant’s stock. If they decided they liked a certain guinea pig, it was put inside the buyer’s plastic sack. A few dollars were exchanged, thus completing the transaction. In general, I think a full-grown guinea pig goes for around $2. For better or for worse, these little guys aren’t destined to become Nutters, Butterscotch or any other cherished third grade classroom pet. No sir, these guinea pigs live out a much less promising existence.

Later on Thursday afternoon, we checked out of our hostal and hopped on a bus that would take us closer to the Quilotoa Crater, a really famous land feature here in Ecuador. Quilotoa is an inactive volcano crater that, over the years, has filled in with water. I’d heard about the place before from other volunteers, but I had no idea how immense or beautiful the crater really is.

The bus ride to get from Latacunga to Zumbahua, the closest settlement that allows you access to the crater, is absolutely incredible. The whole way there, you’re above 3800 m, so you’re not that incredibly high up, but it’s still quite a distance to be in the sky. Before you even get too far outside of Latacunga, the mountainsides turn into a black, brown and green patchwork of farm fields and animal pastures. You can see Quechuan shepherds leading their sheep to water or some other destination along the mountainsides. Much of the road here is still paved, but once you get beyond Zumbahua, much of it is gravel and dirt (this really, however, doesn’t affect how fast the bus drivers are still willing to go).

After twisting and turning through this dream landscape for a couple of hours, Isaac and Anita arrived at their destination, Tigua, where they had plans of spending the night at one of the nicer hostals in the area. The two of them had plans of hiking south into the mountains, and I just couldn’t spare that much time myself. They wouldn’t see the Quilotoa crater until Sunday, and I taught on Monday, so I’d known for a little while that we’d have to make the split eventually. I waved to them as the bus pulled away and they confusedly began their search for the hostal they’d being trying to get in touch with by cell phone for the last few days. I carried on for about another twenty or thirty minutes inside the bus until arriving at Zumbahua.

I was pretty hungry by the time I’d arrived, and Isaac had recommended a place near where the bus leaves you off, so I thought I’d give it a try. The place I went inside advertised that it was a restaurant, but in a town of that size, that really doesn’t mean there will be food. I inquired inside, a guy went back to the kitchen, and after opening a big stainless steel pot, responded that, yes, he could serve me scrambled eggs and rice. I said perfect. After I’d eaten a bit, I spent some time chatting up the locals and one of them mentioned that he could take me to Quilotoa in his truck. I might have mentioned this before, but any and everyone in Ecuador doubles as a taxista. It doesn’t matter if their vehicle isn’t properly marked or it isn’t registered with some organization, almost every car on the road will give you a ride somewhere. While this might sound slightly scary, you don’t have much of a choice when you’re in a town this small. A bus only goes from Zumbahua to Quilotoa once or twice a day, and I definitely didn’t have the patience or the knowledge to time that up correctly. This guy told it’d be $5 for the thirty-minute ride. What a rate! And in the mountains, no less. This was the price that Lonely Planet mentioned as well, so don’t think I was getting any sort of special treatment (or that I was overpaying the infernal gringo tax).

Edwardo (yes, Jesse) drove me in his red truck from the restaurant to the tiny town of Quilotoa, which has really only come into existence in the last few years as a result of tourism. Before long, Edwardo had filled the bed of his truck with a number of locals as well. We talked a lot about tourism and what it’s meant for the area, and also some of the differences between people living in the mountains and people living on the coast or elsewhere in Ecuador. Edwardo had a lot of questions for me about how much I’ve been enjoying Ecuador and why. I, of course, cited the food. Edwardo, as well as anyone else I’ve ever talked to it about, was extremely pleased with my reply. I’m not sure that I’ve encountered the same sort of pride that people have in how beautiful Ecaudor is, or how good the food is here. The road finally leveled off at a small gate. I paid the $1 entrance fee to Quilotoa and Edwardo dropped me off at a hostal he insisted a friend of his owned. The place was pretty nice, but if I had to do it all over again, I would have stayed at the community-owned hostal that’s just up the road from the one I stayed at. I like trying to support the little guy as much as I can.

Humberto, the owner of the hostal I stayed at, showed me to my room. There were three individual rooms connected together, of which I was paying for one. Pairs of people were staying in the rooms above and beside me, but no one was in at the moment. A small stove beside my bed kept the small complex warm. Quilotoa was freakin’ cold (actually, so was Quito) and I was damn happy that stove was where it was. I spent a little time chatting to Humberto about the place before asking him how to arrive at the crater. Basically, he pointed up the street—the street that defines the town—and told me to walk.

One of the really cool things about the Quilotoa crater, besides that it’s crazy beautiful and pretty ridiculously cheap to go see, is that it doesn’t look like anything from a distance. That is to say, the way that the feature was geographically formed, it’s fairly hidden within the surrounding mountains. When you arrive to Quilotoa and actually have the chance to see it up close, the whole immense landform seems to emerge out of nowhere. There’s a big sign up the road from the hostal that points you in the right direction. Originally, I thought I might have to walk for some time, but about five minutes into it, I found myself ducking down a short trail, and then—BOOM!—I was looking at one of the most incredible sites I’ve ever seen stretched out before me. It was five or six o’clock by that time, and it was drizzling slightly, so between the fog and the failing light, I didn’t have much time to explore on Friday.

Eventually, I retreated to the hostal, where I found my other roommates had since returned. I struck up a conversation (“Where are you guys from anyways?) with the two guys in the room beside mine after I’d heard them speaking in English. They happened to be from Michigan. One of them goes to school in Ann Arbor (shout out to the Cheese!) and he was the one who’s studying in Quito for a while. The other guy had come to visit his friend during his Spring Break (how early is that Spring Break?). We talked about this and that until dinner—that and breakfast included in the cost of the room—at 7:30. After dinner entertainment included trying to relight the fire, which just wasn’t going my way. I took the bull by the horns in getting the helper boy, Humberto’s nephew, to cut us some kindling and gathering some cardboard and matches. I put all of my Eagle Scout experience to work in building a small teepee inside the stove and lighting a delicious, little fire. Unfortunately, my badass Boy Scout skills just weren’t enough to compete with how wet everything had become during the day. Eventually, I conceded and asked Humberto’s nephew to help us out, if he could. He kind of waved me off, but came back after a little while with a cup of what I thought was his Pepsi. Nope, this was, I should have guessed,the cup of kerosene. Pretty soon, we had a roaring fire inside the stove. I was glad he didn’t just come into the room and rearrange a few sticks to get the damn thing going. That would have made me feel like a complete idiot. At least with the kerosene, I only feel like 80% idiotic. The Michigan guys and I had a good laugh about once the helper boy had gone.

I woke up nice and early Saturday morning (Quilotoa doesn’t have much of a nightlife…), and caught as much of the sunrise that remained. I was lucky. The sky had cleared quite a bit from the day before. After eating a little breakfast with the Michigan guys and the rest of the hostal’s guests, I started my hike into the belly of the crater. The lake, or laguna as everyone calls it in Spanish, only takes about half an hour to get to by foot. I made the descent early enough that there still weren’t all that many other tourists out. I liked it better this way. Too bad that meant that I hadn’t given the kayak guys enough time to get to the bottom either. You can actually rent kayaks from people and tool around in the laguna for like $3, that is, if anyone is around to rent them to you. Of course, just as soon as I was halfway back up, that’s when I saw that they’d found their way to the water. No matter. The laguna was crazy beautiful even regulated to its shore. It’s filled with this green sort of water that makes it look like a gigantic mirror from a distance. It’s extremely alkaline as well, so no drinking! I spent a pretty long time just sitting there beside the water and watching the Quechuan shepherds taking urging their flock God knows where. I spotted a small hovel in the side of one the closer mountains and devoted a good deal of time trying to understand how life would be different in a place like this. Being at Quilotoa crater by myself was one of the first times in a very, very long time that I’ve truly felt alone. It was really quite nice.

I bid my farewell to the Michigan guys who were headed on their way down as I was headed back up. It didn’t take me long to get back to the top of the crater, despite what Lonely Planet recommends for travel time. Near the crater head, a local artisan waved me into his home to look at his paintings, which I thought would be cool to see. This guy also rented out horses to take you up and down the trail to the lake. Isaac had mentioned that he’d seen pairs of local boys running horses back and forth along the steep mountain trail, taking horses to and from and tourists for a few cents from the horses’ owners. The boys made a race of it, so Isaac mentioned that it was pretty cool to see all of these kids doing this amazing physically feat as if it was nothing. I wondered then how many of this artist/business owner’s kids who’d followed us inside to get a look at the gringo who could speak some Spanish, did that kind stuff. After that, I took an absolutely freezing cold shower and called up Edwardo, who’d promised me the day before that he’d be willing to drive up and take me back to Zumbahua. On the way back down, Edwardo pointed out all of the fields of plants, which I’m pretty sure was hops, that gets shipped out to make Pilsener beer. Who would have thought that’s where they grow it?

Back in Zumbahua, I flagged down a bus headed to another city called Quevedo. The ride from Zumbahua to Quevedo is supposed to have some of the nicest vistas of any bus ride in the whole country, and it really was quite impressive. I watched the mountain scenery give way to the cocoa and banana plantations below. I began to see just how it’s possible that something like 70% of the world’s banana supply comes from Ecuador. You can drive for miles and see nothing but endless rows of banana trees.

In Quevedo, we took a roundabout way of finding the bus terminal. Once we’d gotten there, I bought a ticket to Guayaquil and grabbed a quick bite to eat. I don’t have much to say about the bus ride back to Guayaquil, other than that one of the coolest parts about my entire vacation was getting to witness the effects the rain has had on some of the towns outside of Guayaquil. When I mentioned in the last post that it’s been raining a lot, I don’t think that was an accurate enough telling for a place like Babahoyo, where children were making the most of the rain, swimming in an area that was once their yard, using 7up bottles for water wings. In some places, I doubt even I could have stood up and still been breathing. Really, many of the homes were well equipped to deal with the deluge. They’d been built on bamboo stilts and could even handle another foot or two before the floorboards would be underwater. These were the homes that men and women were traveling back and forth between in thin wooden canoes. Other homes, however, were not so prepared. These were the homes whose windows peaked out of the water like a hippo’s eyes. I wonder if, even after the rainy season, they can ever be salvaged. Seeing this area made me realize just why Rafael Correa had declared a national state of emergency. In a place like Babahoyo, something like 75 or 80% of its residents are swamping out their homes.

I gained a sudden appreciation for why civil engineers build the roads the way they do—high and dry. Only in one place had the rainwater washed over the road. The bus easily chugged through about three inches of water, the only thing slowing us down were the somewhat more hesitant vehicles and motorcycles in front of us. The banana plantations outside either set of windows were helplessly flooded. In some places, it seemed as if we were driving upon an island between lakes. I imagined a miles long bridge; the other passengers and I moving along a strip of land surrounded by nothing but trees and crops with their roots submerged. Tall swatches of grass like many-fingered hands struggled to keep themselves above water. I must admit that the bus ride home from Quevedo was visually on par with the Quilotoa crater, but with a much different sort of sentiment attached to it.

Back in Guayaquil, I was a big moron and got onto a bus headed in the opposite direction from the terminal. It took me about forty-five minutes out of my way before I was able to get on a bus headed back where I needed to be. Lesson learned: always ask before you get on! Suddenly the taxistas in the Trans Esmeraldas station demanding $3 for a five-minute cab ride didn’t seem so evil. I made it back to the peninsula by around 11:00 at night.

I spent Saturday and Sunday just resting up and taking it somewhat easy. Peter and I caught up on the adventures we’d been having over the last week on Saturday. We spent today, Sunday, at the beach with Hannah, the Peace Corps volunteer who lives in Palmar that I mentioned in the last post. Carla is somewhere in the house right now, making vanilla ice cream. I can’t be writing this all night if it means she’ll eat it all without me!

Other News

This may be somewhat difficult to believe, but today is my six-month anniversary in Ecuador. Crazy, I know. I can hardly believe I’ve been here this long. Yeah, me! I’ll drink a Pilsener tonight with Peter to celebrate.

Other than that, I bought my plane ticket home while I was at the internet café in Latacunga. So it’s official now: I’ll be home from the 6th to the 21st of April. While it’s always awesome to see the family, I’m most excited to see my girlfriend, Steph. It’s hard to describe how much emotional support she’s given me throughout my being here. “One more month, just one more month,” I keep telling her now that we’re edging along that border. (I think I probably remind her too much….) March is going to be a drag when I’m looking forward this much to April.

God, waiting is hard work! I need to do something to distract myself.

The Rain Keeps Coming

2008-02-18T12:24:00.000-08:00

A few of the pictures left before my camera broke this past weekend.

The top picture is my module 5 class at a beach called Costa Oro in La Libertad. The entire class wasn't able to come, but you get the idea. I look pretty happy to be their teacher.

The bottom photo shows some of the effects of the rain here on the coast. I guess this is what's bound to happen when you don't build a roof over the hallways. It seems like every week, we get more and more rain.

Can Never Get Too Mmmad in Ecuador

2008-02-18T12:14:00.000-08:00

Break Stuff

I’m not quite sure if everything is breaking in this country because I’m rough on it or because Ecuador is. As if frequently the case, I’m sure we can safely blame a combination of these factors. Whatever it is, my camera broke yesterday. Now, when I turn it on, the only thing that appears on the display screen is a bunch of horizontal stripes, something like a grocery store barcode. This was after (as my Uncle Jim will attest) the keyboard on my laptop had broken a few weeks before. The M key on my laptop’s internal keyboard began to act as if I was holding it down. I’d be trying to type up lesson plans or the latest blog posts and a trail of Ms began running along the screen as if the letter was afraid of something (mmmmmmmmmm... pretty annoying stuff). I got email instructions from my Uncle Jim and performed the vital surgery that involved disconnecting an internal cable. I know what you’re all thinking and—no!—my computer is not permanently broken. The surgery was a complete success! Unfortunately, I don’t think the camera will have such an easy fix. Either way, I’m just praying this computer will last the duration….

Peter’s Tom

I feel like, once again, a ton has happened since I last wrote. Peter’s friend, Tom, is here now, having arrived just a week ago. Tom is, to use their word, a real legend. He’s one of the most genuinely optimistic people I’ve ever met. I really can’t see that there’s a way to get this guy down. Tom had hardly arrived home here before he was singing Ecuador’s praises. This was after completing the lengthy and sleepless journey all the way from England. To make a few bucks, Tom’s been set up with a small tutoring position that he does for a few hours everyday. He’ll be around well into March.

An Update on Correa

Happenings in Provincia 24 have been at an all time high this last week since the new “state” was born. Rafael Correa came to Santa Elena to dub in the new prefecto, a government title the president hands down to the person meant to be in charge of God-knows-what. I walked out of school on Friday night around 8:30 to see that the town square was absolutely packed with people, national police officers having lined every street corner within sight. People here take local government very seriously. I, for one, didn’t feel the need to hang around to see Correa speak. From my understanding, the guy isn’t a real great president. He is, in fact, kind of a dunce.

I read an article about Correa recently and the general consensus is not good. Having just past his landmark first year in office, a local newspaper published the polls inquiring about the president’s perceived popularity. Something like 37% of people here approve of the job that he’s doing. Yesch! Numbers like that begin to remind me of another president’s approval rating.

Correa isn’t doing a lot to help himself. Even a gringo like myself knows that some moves aren’t going to engender a lot of fanfare. The first of his bonehead moves was to reform the process by which governmental employees are paid. While the changes to the system might be beneficial in the long-term, the transition was anything but seamless. What this meant for a number of volunteers from my program working for state-run institutions was that their pay was “temporarily” delayed. In fact, some of these volunteers (my heart goes out to Sarah and Shelby in Guayaquil) haven’t been paid since November. The Guayaquil girls were organizing to go on strike before their directors paid them for a month’s worth of work out of their own pockets. I should think that, generally, it’s a good idea for people to receive pay in a timely fashion. The second of Correa’s bonehead moves was to punish governmental employees for Caranval. If you remember from the last post, Carnaval is a countrywide celebration in Ecuador (and Latin America as a whole) extending from the weekend preceding Ash Wednesday up until Fat Tuesday. But since this holiday knocks out two viable workdays, Correa took it upon himself to make up for the lost working hours. Only a few days after Carnaval happened, he—almost whimsically—sent out a presidential decree instructing that all governmental employees would have to work the following two Saturdays. Time was served last weekend and this one (I can understand why Pedro, who works for the oil refinery, wouldn’t have been a happy camper). I should also think that, generally, it’s not a good idea to screw your employees on account of a national holiday. All in all, it’s not looking like too much fun to work for Correa right now. Thank goodness I work at a private institution. A number of volunteers in Quito were having the same problems as the Guayaquil girls.

Teaching

Teaching has been going really well lately. It’s tough for me to motivate myself sometimes, to think that my ultimate goal is to become a doctor; but also to think that, in the here and now, I’m an English teacher. But then I remember that this is a temporary opportunity for me. I can be a doctor for the rest of my life, but I might only be an English teacher for the next four months. That thought certainly helps me when I begin to feel some of the pressures inherent in being a teacher. I’m sure the work variety will, in the end, serve me well.

This week will actually be my final week of teaching both module 5 and 8. After Friday, I’ll have off until March 3rd, when I’ll be teaching an intensive course for beginners. I don’t know all there is to know about this class yet, but I do know that it will meet four hours everyday, for four weeks, for a total of 80-90 teaching hours and a very challenging month of March. I’m scarred about having to motivate a group of teenagers to learn English for four hours day in and day out, but I’m excited about being down to only one class again. Sometimes I feel as if I’m spreading myself thin in teaching two classes. It’s a lot of extra prep work, not to mention the teaching hours themselves.

I do my best to keep things interesting for my students, which might seem all fun and great, but there are definitely those times when things don’t turn out precisely how I envision them. Last week, however, went very well considering the planning I’d put in. In my module 5 class, I assigned them an unusual speaking assignment. I told them I’d be splitting the class in three groups and that each group would be in charge of planning a St. Valentine’s Day party for the class. Each group would present their plan to the class, and then the class would vote on which party they’d like to have most. We’d chosen the winning group by last week Tuesday, so I had two days to get things ready for the event on Thursday. I think things went so well, though, not because of my commitment, but because I did a good job of doling out responsibility to my students.

Perhaps the best idea I had was the formation of my “game committee,” a group of students in charge of—yes, you guessed it—coming up with a few games for the class to play during our party. We had a treasure hunt on the beach with instructions on how to find the treasure written and announced in English. After that, we played a game of keep away with a soccer ball, boys versus girls, where the first team to pass the ball twenty-one consecutive times without having it dropped or stolen away, counting along the way, were the winners (yeah, guess which team won that one?). My favorite part, however, was the “secret name” gift exchange. It was pretty hilarious to watch my students blush before the rest of the group asked them to reveal which name they’d drawn from the hat earlier in the week. Blancha gave me a pack of chocolates that my module 8 students ravenously ate up, but don’t tell her that.

Travel

As far as traveling goes, I’ve been staying closer to home lately. Last weekend I went a few hours up the Ruta del Sol to a place called Salango. We’ve been trying to hang out with Tom (not Peter’s Tomb; Carla’s Tom) as much as possible lately because he’s headed back to England at the end of the month for a few months of training. He was the one to suggest that we head north to keep up with the tradition that they’d started a year earlier. After meeting up with a bunch of Tom and Carla’s friends, we buzzed up the coast. In Salango, their Ecuadorian friends took charge of renting a boat so that we might avoid the “gringo tax,” which is a nice way of saying that many tour operators will do their best to charge those of us paler-skinned individuals as much extra as they can get away with. We all hopped on our chartered boat and took a fifteen-minute ride to an island off the coast that bears the same name as the town. There we jumped into the water. I can’t remember the last time I’d gone snorkeling. A little later, the charter boat took us to a small beach on the island. Coincidentally, I met a bunch of U.S. Air Force officers on leave from the base to the north in Manta. Countrymen!

I spent this weekend back in Montañita, which would make it an even two for two over the last two weekends after a quick sunset surf after the Salango snorkeling adventure. On Saturday, Montañita was hosting a Reef surfing competition. The surfers had come in from all over South America to catch some of the beach town’s legendary waves. Anita, an Australian friend I’d made during my time in Quito, was coincidentally in town, so we headed to the point sometime in the early afternoon. Pretty much, if you’re a tough shit surfer in Montañita, you surf near the point; that’s where the waves are the biggest. It was sweet to see what some of these surfers could do. The really good ones actually used the wave like a ramp that they’d jump into the air off. The surfing competition wasn’t that great of a spectator sport, however, because the waves broke so far off shore, which made it hard to see. Heats of four surfers would head out to compete at any given time, and there was a lot of down time while the surfers set themselves up in the water. I must admit that the announcer was pretty entertaining, though. He seemed to have a fascination with varying his voice as much as he possibly could… and screaming when we least expected it.

I didn’t head out to surf this last weekend, however, because Lisa was finally back in town. Her time with my volunteer organization has actually expired, but she’s going to be living in Montañita indefinitely. She’s been hired as the director of a Spanish (no, not English) school located in view of the beach. The school itself is really nice—wood floors, white walls and lots of windows—and she really fits perfectly into the community there. I’d missed her the last two weekends because she’d been traveling in Peru and working out stuff with renewing her work visa. It’s good to have the Teach back.

The three of us, Peter, Tom and I, had to be out of Montañita by Saturday night because we’d chartered a deep-sea fishing boat for Sunday, and thus, we had to be up early at the break of dawn the next day. We said our fond farewells to Anita (she’s headed back to Australia this coming Friday) and caught a bus back to La Libertad. We all hit the sack early that night.

Deep-sea fishing yesterday was great! The five of us, having added Tom and Carla to our little pose, only caught a couple of Dorado, but it was still well worth it. I couldn’t have been more excited when something hit one of the lines. For those of you who haven’t been out that far in the ocean (this was actually my first time), it’s cool to go just to see how the ocean moves. I found it incredible to watch the incoming swells of water. One second your in a valley and the next you’re on top of the world (it almost seems like one of those metaphors for life). Seeing the Dorado running alongside the boat was really cool as well. I couldn’t believe how amazingly blue the fish were underwater. I was glad not to have gotten seasick either. For a while I thought the sea was going to get the best of me, but then that sickly sort of queasiness left me.

Sleep, or the Lack Thereof

I can’t complain about too much out of the ordinary lately, except for the amount of sleep I’ve been getting lately. I’ve told a couple friends that I feel like a scene from The Exorcism of Emily Rose when I wake up every night between 2:30 and 3:00 A.M. and can’t fall asleep again until 4:00 or 5:00. I really can’t say why’s it’s happening either. And, no, it’s not the mosquitoes. While the mosquitoes here are ridiculous in that (I truly believe) they are not only faster and more agile than the mosquitoes in Wisconsin, they’re also better at choosing where to bite me (invariably just above the square of my back or around my ankles) and where to hide after having stolen a meal out of me. But it’s not them because I’ve become a fiend for keeping my door closed at all times except when I’m passing through it. When mosquitoes are to blame, they also have a tendency to wake me up during the course of the night just to let me know that they’re winning.

Despite this, I know the heat has something to do with it. After a really hot day, for instance, I’ll wake up covered in sweat. Not a good sign. I’ve bought a cute blue and white box fan to combat this aspect. But still, there's something more to it. Steph has suggested that's it's probably stress. She must be on to something, but, then again, maybe losing sleep and feeling additionally stressed out is one of those self-fulfilling prophecies. If this continues for much longer, I'm going to elect the route of self-medication.

Other News

Peter’s girlfriend, Joanna, will be here before the end of tomorrow night. She’s patiently waiting to catch her flight somewhere in Madrid as I type this. Getting to Ecuador from Europe sounds pretty terrible. Peter’s excited, though. He talks about her quite a bit.

I wanted to mention, too, that I’m going to be headed back home for a while in early April, so I’ll be seeing some of you for a little while earlier than expected. I need to find a place to live for next year and square up some other crap (including a bunch of blood work I really don’t want to have done in Ecuador if I don’t have to) before medical school starts up in the fall. Not to mention, of course, that I'm really excited to be seeing my girlfriend, Steph, and having a chance to spend some time with her. I’ll be home for two weeks sometime right after finishing the intensive course I mentioned earlier. Most likely, I’ll be back in Wisconsin by the 5th or 6th of April. Humberto, my director at ESPOL, has—once again—been absolutely incredible in helping me through these scheduling adjustments. I’m already looking forward to it!

Carnaval Locura

2008-02-08T12:32:00.001-08:00

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.

Mid-year

2008-01-23T12:36:00.000-08:00

Back again! Back again and trying to find a state of normalcy. The time leading up to and after Christmas is a complete blur. I don’t know that I’ll feel “back to normal” until the middle of February, though.

Things, of course, were wonderful at home. I managed to get through customs with a boatload of gifts and souvenirs from Ecuador without any problems at all. The beefy security guard scrutinized me for about two seconds before asking me, “Where did you travel?” Ecuador, I said. “And how long were you there for?” Three months. “What were you doing there?” I was a volunteer. “Okay, go ahead.” Thanks.

I attended three medical school interviews. The first took place two days after my arrival home, at the Medical College of Wisconsin. They’ve already gotten back to me, and the news is good. I’m in at one school, so I will be attending medical school next year somewhere! The other two interviews were at Rosalind Franklin University located just north of Chicago and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, which is where I really, really, really want to end up. Each day I bite my nails when I open my Gmail account because I’m expecting my parents to relay the message that some a very ominous letter has appeared in the mailbox. It could be any day now, or I could be holding my breath until March. The application acceptance process isn’t easily explained.

I returned to Ecuador just in time for New Years. I went to meet a bunch of other volunteers in Montañita, which is that gringofied beach community an hour and a half to the north. The highlight of the night happened just before midnight, when all of the hardcore surfers appeared out of the darkness with their surfboards raised. Everyone had filtered down to the water to ring in the New Year and a giant bonfire was burning in the middle of the beach. The surfers began circling around the fire, holding their boards in the air with one hand and beating them with the other. The other volunteers joked that they were paying homage to the surf gods, thanking them for a good year and asking for another, and it wouldn’t be surprised if some of the travelers visiting Montañita really did believe that. Soon a number of the surfers were jumping over the fire. This inspired a number of the drunks who had been watching on nearby, but their audience had soon turned to the sea when all the surfers dashed into the water to catch the first waves of the New Year. It’s supposed to be a competition to see who can catch the first wave of the year, but I can’t possibly understand whom they decide actually wins. Maybe winning isn’t everything after all…

I took off on New Years Day and returned here to La Libertad. I hung around and rested up for the night before taking a ten-hour bus ride to the southern tip of Ecuador, to Loja and Vilcabamba, two cities well known because of how tranquilo, or peaceful, they are. I spent an afternoon hanging out with Katie and Megan, two of the three Loja volunteers. After squatting on one of Megan’s classes to catch a showing of Mean Girls, I hopped the $1 bus that took me to Vilcabamba. For those of you who need a little refresher, Vilcabamba is the place Isaac, one of my favorite volunteers from orientation, calls home.

I hung out in Vilcabamba for three days, during which there were a number of highlights worth summarizing. I did a whole bunch of hiking in the mountains with Isaac when he wasn’t too busy teaching, and Megan when he was. The morning before I took off, Isaac and I actually went running along this trail leading into the mountains, and for those of you who know how much I enjoy running, this was pretty much one of the coolest things I’ve done in Ecuador. Too bad I could hardly breathe because I’m not acclimatized to the elevation. Whenever we weren’t in the mountains we hung out at Isaac’s host family’s restaurant, Natural Yogurt. The name definitely appeals to a certain market, yes, but for a very apparent reason. You’d be amazed with the gringo presence in Vilcabamba. Retired Europeans, especially, are attracted to this place because of its beauty and its reputation as a place where a lot of people will live past 100 years of age. I, for one, didn’t see a lot of extremely old people, but it’s possible that they just look that damn good. Isaac and I had a lengthy conversation as to whether or not all the rich Europeans are better or worse for Vilcabamba, and Ecuador as a whole. We’re still undecided.

The other interesting occurrence that happened during my trip to Vilcabamba was that a fire nearly burned down of the city’s homes! A bunch of kids were shooting off fireworks in the city’s central square and one must’ve taken an unusual trajectory. The firework went through the window of the house and fell in among a couch. The couch started up and pretty soon the whole town could see the plume of smoke rising into the night air. Isaac and I had been eating dinner before we decided to head downtown (if you can call it that, Vilca is pretty small). Even from a distance, we could see a long line of men starting from the decorative fountain in the middle of the square. They formed a fire line to extinguish the flames! The fire line must’ve worked pretty well because the plume of smoke was almost entirely subdued by the time the Loja Fire Department arrived an hour after the blaze had begun. I thought it was really great to see how fast the Vilcabambans had banded together to help out one of their fellow citizens. Everyone seemed extremely cooperative.

Another ten-hour bus ride back to Guayaquil put me in the airport by about 10:00 P.M. I had some time to kill before my girlfriend, Steph, flew in from Atlanta. Her plane was supposed to arrive right around midnight, but I didn’t begin to get a little worried until 1:00 rolled by. Her plane had been delayed in Quito. This was early in the morning on January 7th.

We got out of Guayaquil the next morning. Steph was there for my first day back to teaching and throughout the next two weeks. I think it goes without saying that some of my lesson plans were slightly rushed during Steph’s time here. I’d do my planning early in the morning or late at night so that we could hang at the beach in Salinas or Punta Carnero. Over the weekend, we went to Montañita and checked into an upper end hostel (which isn’t necessarily saying all that much). At night, we met a bunch of Guayaquileños on the beach who formally invited us to come hang around their bonfire.

The next day we were chilling out on the beach when a small black dog we now call Diggy came up to us. Diggy smelled the sand near our towels and, sensing something that must have triggered his canine instinct, he begun to dig furiously (using both front paws at once!) into the sand. Before long, his hole was pretty deep, and by the nature that Diggy dug, it was growing closer and closer to where we were laying in the sand. Eventually, Diggy found what he had originally sensed: a small pink crab that had burrowed itself into some crab-fashioned subterranean tunnel system. The crab emerged and pinched its claws whenever Diggy brought his mouth down. It was quite the battle that was going on before us!

Diggy had just unearthed the crab when a man approached Steph and me from behind. As Diggy went to work trying to find a way to eat the crab without having a piece of his lip destroyed, this guy, in English, started giving us his life’s story and telling us all about how Diggy, the crab and, of course, all of us are connected. Apparently, he was a biochemistry major from Germany who also happened to be a world traveler and a Buddhist. Interesting, to say the least. Steph and I were primarily concerned with tracking Diggy’s progress, and the guy soon buggered off (Peter must be having some unconscious effect on me) when we didn’t give him the same attention we were giving the dog. Only in Montañita…

On the teaching front, things are going well, but things are a little different now. First of all, I’m teaching two classes instead of just one. ESPOL, the school I work at, sees a larger number of students during la temporada, which means that some of them become mine (so to speak). I’m now teaching module 5 and module 8, an intermediate and an advanced course respectively. My module 5 class has fourteen students in all, and, after a few late additions, the module 8 class is now thirteen strong. This is the class full of students who I originally started off teaching in module 6, my very first class. They’ve moved forward along with me, and, for better or worse, this is the end of the line. There is no module 9, so once they get their proficiency certificates upon completion of this final class, I won’t be seeing much of them anymore. This depresses Mark greatly. I’ve gotten to know a number of my students pretty well, and this is kind of the end of the line. I don’t know how much I can hope to keep contact with them. Aww.

Fortunately, the module 5 kids are finally starting to warm up to me. They’re really shy, and the class is a bit larger than what I’m used to, so it’s taking them a while to speak up. Don’t worry, though, if there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s forcing (or tricking) my students into speaking. Once they’re willing to do that, a lot of barriers begin to break down (and they learn more!).

I teach earlier in the afternoon too. I teach five days a week, from 4:00 to 8:00; each class is two hours long. Other than the printer not working, however, things at ESPOL are fairly average.

Now that I get done saying all that, today isn’t a normal day and neither is this week. I had off today because everyone in Santa Elena is celebrating the cantonización of the area, which is basically the same as celebrating the area having—once upon a time—become a county. There were a bunch of parades this morning that I managed to catch a glimpse of while I caught up with some Internet stuff at school. It was pretty obvious when the fire trucks came chugging through. Concerning scheduling, what’s even worse is that I don’t have class on Thursday or Friday either. Gosh, I’m a slacker lately… but with good reason! My volunteer organization has scheduled a mid-service meeting where everyone (all of the volunteers, field directors… everyone) will be getting back together just up the coast. We’ll be talking about our experiences so far and some strategies we can employ to improve our teaching and continue on with all of the things we’ve been doing for the last few months here in Ecuador.

So, that’s it. I’m already halfway there. I’m already halfway done. Gosh, half my year has come and gone.

And how do I feel about all of this? Okay, I guess. Good and bad, really. I’ve accomplished so many of the things I set out to do. I’ve learned a ton about teaching, about living abroad, about Ecuador and about myself. I don’t feel as if I need to sit here and reminisce about the things I’ve done. I understand them just by living day in and day out. Really, the hang-up comes when I think about home. I miss being in Madison (even in January). I miss my friends and family a lot. I miss my girlfriend a ton. By no means are the coming months simply going to fly by. I’m still going to struggle because I feel extremely connected to home. That scares me, but I realize that I may never have an opportunity like this again, so I have to take advantage of it now. I need to find a way to make the most of my last months in Ecuador.

I suppose that ought to do for now. Pedro is actually celebrating his 31st birthday outside with a few friends from the area. Peter is here after a day full of windsurfing and, believe it or not, Isaac is staying the night on his way up the coast for mid-service. At least for tonight, I’ll be distracted. Tomorrow should be all right too; I have a lot of lost ground to cover in my classes. Plus high tide is at 6:30 A.M. and I promised Isaac we’d go surfing!

Sanctuary

2007-12-04T13:21:00.001-08:00

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

Home for Christmas

2007-12-04T13:08:00.000-08:00

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

Journal Contest Entry

2007-11-28T13:47:00.000-08:00

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

The Come-and-Go Boys

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

Thomas the Turkey

2007-11-23T13:39:00.001-08:00

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

Real Beer´s Better

2007-11-23T13:35:00.000-08:00

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

Peter and the Chancho Express

2007-11-13T14:20:00.000-08:00

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

Gquil Visuals

2007-10-31T15:09:00.002-07:00

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

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

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

Gquil & Day of the Dead

2007-10-31T15:02:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Making of Province 24

2007-10-24T19:26:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

Another Little Mountain Weekend

2007-10-24T18:44:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah, I did.”

“You need to find a green bus.”

“A green bus?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There and Back Again

2007-10-13T19:01:00.000-07:00

After a thirty-minute nap, I feel ready enough to write about what’s been going on this last week in Ecuador. This was a big week for me because it was my first week of teaching at my host site in Santa Elena. Let’s just suffice to say that the week did not meet up to my expectations.
Last Monday, I was all pumped up and ready to go. I’d worked on Sunday to create my lessons plans and had everything all lined up for a great start. I went into ESPOL, my new school, two hours ahead of time and made sure, once again, that I had all of my ducks lined up. My class begins at 6:00, and by 6:15, when no one had showed, I just blamed it on my students’ general tardiness (people here aren’t nearly as timely as we are in the states). By 6:25, my director, Humberto, began to check on me. “This happens sometimes,” he said. “Don’t worry.” I promised him I would try not to.
Then, finally, sometime around 6:30, one student did arrive, Santiago. Santiago is my new favorite person in the world, because Santiago was the only one to show on my first day of classes. I waited another hour, chatting with him in English about Santa Elena and Ecuador in general, before Humberto returned to tell me we’d have to try again tomorrow. Needless to say, I was slightly disappointed. If my students weren’t willing to learn (or even show up for that matter), what exactly was I doing in Ecuador? I still don’t know if it was an administerial problem at the school (schedules are whipped together pretty quickly there) or whether it was that Guayaquil’s Independence Day (which is a holiday that people celebrate pretty much all week) had something to do with it. I’m going to go on believing it was a combination of these reasons, just so I don’t have to believe that no one was purposefully skipping out on my class (I’m such a fool…).
Tuesday, on the other hand, went much better. Seven of my ten students showed. I kept things pretty simple. We did some semi-fun icebreakers and a bunch of simple English review before I introduced our first topic: acquiring services in English-speaking countries. My class is an intermediate one, and everyone is already pretty skilled at speaking, writing, reading and listening to English. That is to say, as an inaccurate measure of their comprehension, anyone back home could—for the most part—understand what they’re talking about. You could easily carry on a lengthy conversation with any of my students. There are, of course, a lot of pronunciation problems, which is probably the biggest issue we have to face in these six-week courses, but it’s not bad enough that they can’t get their points across. One of the things I’m really going to be able to help my students out with is their pronunciation. A big problem with learning English from a non-native speaker is that the non-native speaker may say many words incorrectly as well. These infelicities are then translated to his or her students. I’m providing my students with a real opportunity just by having them hear me speak (which is kind of a scary thought in itself). A lot of the people who trained me insisted that you have to enjoy listening to yourself talk to be a good teacher, a roundabout way of saying that, if I do nothing else correctly as a teacher, I just need to keep talking.
Wednesday went well too. My second normal class. This made me believe that things were going to be fine from then on out. I—as I so frequently am—was wrong.
Thursday’s class was cancelled because of huelgas, or strikes. Whoa! Hold on, Mom! Don’t panic. Strikes in Latin America are actually a pretty routine thing. Basically what happens is that, when people are upset about something, they get a bunch of dump trucks together and pour sand, stones or piles of concrete or other junk into the middle of the major roads, and then proceed to guard the roads at those points. This is what happened on the roads from Guayaquil to Santa Elena, and in a number of other locations near the coast or the big city. Where I’m located, I could have pretty easily gotten to school on Thursday, but transportation had been cut off from many of my student. Therefore, a call from Humberto early on Thursday while I was readying lesson plans to tell me that class was called off. This is why I’m now enjoying an unplanned four-day weekend. School was called on Friday because the Independence Day of Guayaquil is a national holiday.
It’s slightly more complicated than I’m willing to admit I know (because it’s still tough for me to translate all the details the newspapers have added to their accounts), but the strikes started because Santa Elena badly wants to become a province, and Ralph Correa, the president of this country, and the Congress his party largely dominates have consistently denied their request. So what does that mean that Santa Elena wants to become a province? Basically, what states are to the US, provinces are to Ecuador. Right now, Santa Elena is part of the Guayas province, which is the same province that contains the city of Guayaquil. It’s a big province with lots of people. But Santa Elena and a bunch of the other coastal cities near here want to be on their own. I’m not totally certain why, but through my discussions with Elsy, the maid that works for my host mother, one word stuck out—recursos, or resources. Santa Elena is a pretty important industrial center for Ecuador. One of the more lucrative products that come out of the sea in this part of the country is oil, and Santa Elena is home to a big refinery that—not surprisingly—draws a lot of dollars. People here want the split because becoming a separate province will translate into more money for people in Santa Elena, La Libertad, Salinas and all the other little places in the general area (and who doesn’t want more money, eh?).
What makes matters worse is that Santa Elena has been asking this request of their government for quite a number of years now, and they continually get rejected. (I’m quite sure more money here means less money for somebody somewhere else.) Just recently, another area of the country was granted its provinceship ahead of Santa Elena, even though Santa Elena has been pulling for the change for a longer period of time and has an arguably stronger claim. Imagine how that makes everyone here feel. So the bottom line is that now is a fantastic time to put the pressure on Mr. Correa and his Congress by rising up and blocking the hell out of some major roads. From my point of view, this couldn’t have come at a worse time. Not only did the strikes ruin one of the days in my first week of classes, but it also ruined my travel plans. Aargh! I was going to head to Guayaquil to hang with a couple of volunteers there and check out the Independence Day celebrations, but that’s kind of difficult when the buses that take you there can’t tread over giant mounds of red Earth.
I was beginning to feel hopeless until Tom and Carla showed up late Thursday morning. It took them three hours (about double the time it normally takes) to arrive, but they’d managed to avoid the blocks by opting for some back road action. Despite the flags arising in my mind, they suggested we check out Montañita this weekend. I wasn’t sure how they intended to do that, but I wasn’t in the mood for Ney saying.
We got up Friday morning and loaded up everything we needed for the beach. Not only were Tom, Carla and I going, but also Pedro, my host mother’s nephew, who happens to live in a small home very, very close to mine. We packed into Tom and Carla’s Chevy Vitara, which is basically an insect compared to the big honking SUVs we fly around in on our super highways back home, and hit the open road… at least for a while. We made it only about 50-60 kilometers north along the coast (the Ruta del Sol is a beautiful and extremely popular course hugging the length of the Ecuadorian coast) before we ran into our first roadblock. I was convinced this was the end of the journey, and other than learning that ballenita is the Spanish word for whale, it hadn’t amounted to much of a weekend adventure. Fortunately, the four of us loaded in that Vitara weren’t quite ready to call it quits.
Where we were the ocean was to the north, the main road ran to the east, the way back home was west and a small village lay to the south. The roadblock to the east was really nothing more than a few dump trucks stretched across the asphalt. A few people were hanging out around the trucks, eating or talking or listening to the radio. Probably the main source of communication about the strikes comes from the radio. A Democratic talk show host who works for the station that broadcasts out of either Santa Elena or Salinas does a lot to incite the people in this pursuit for provinceship. I’ve listened to him for a number of hours myself because Elsy really enjoys local politics and always has the radio on as she does chores around the house. I can’t understand much of what the radio personality is saying because he speaks so quickly, but listening to him reminds me very much of listening to old sound clips of Hitler or Mussolini inciting the masses around the World War II era. He’s so loud and authoritative sounding, I’m sometimes frightened. I’ve commented on this to Elsy, but she assures me this is just how the way he speaks. For accuracy’s sake, I should really put my fear into perspective. I don’t know that this man is any worse than, say, Russ Limbaugh when he really gets going. I guess the part that really scares me is that he offers incentives—food packages and other commodities—for the people who make a commitment to travel to Quito to protest. (It was a good day when a woman called in to give this man a mouthful for having the audacity to encourage their fellow citizens to travel to Quito when he himself was locked away comfortably in the studio office.) Half of his program is chewed up in the time it takes to record callers’ cedula, or voter registration card, numbers into some sort of lottery. I can’t think of a political parallel in the US, but maybe someone who reads this can help me out.
So, returning to the story at hand, we couldn’t get passed these trucks without getting creative. We were busy turning around, in search of a different avenue around the roadblock, when a pickup truck filled with surfers and surfboards pulled around us, charged over a sandy lot and rolled up to the dirt roads cutting through this small village. The pickup stopped, three young guys popped out and, before I knew any better, they’d moved aside the logs blocking the roads into town. Pedro helped them keep one log out of the way as the pickup pushed through the sand; Tom followed closely behind in the Vitara. We continued east through the town with a number of very suspicious looks from the locals and then cut back to the main road. At first, I was under the impression that we were doing something quite sneaky and we were the only ones in the country clever enough to figure out this strategy. By the time we hit the next roadblock, a line of trucks parked sideways across a bridge, I realized from the off-road tracks spanning away into the surrounding fields, that we weren’t the only people out there dodging these blocks. The protesters aren’t concerned with closing down the entire region of the country; they are more concerned with making a powerful statement to their government. That these other roads existed around the roadblocks without protesters traveling to block them too just shows what they’re really meant to accomplish.
The second roadblock we hit was a bit more challenging to find a way around than the first. After finding our way onto the beach near the main road, we were stopped after traveling only so far because the tide was quickly approaching and a rock shelf pinched the gap of land between dry sand and water too deep to drive through. After a time, we were forced to take the Vitara off-road and into the scrub desert that lies to the east of the beach. We passed cows with huge horns, green cactuses and a million of these dry bushes that looked like they’d been scorched by fire years prior until we saw a few cars ducking away under the brush and into the distance. We soon discovered the impacted dirt road blazed through the desert landscape they were moving along and continued following their tracks. We drove first through a garbage dump, which was little more than old, gray piles of garbage long since flattened by the wind, then passed a lone home out in the middle of nowhere, around which roamed five or six gigantic turkeys, and finally came to a closed fence guarded by two local boys. The fence was made of wire and one boy held what was the door, a log around which two stretches of wire was wrapped, as the other older boy approached the vehicle. Pedro and Carla knew what needed to happen miles before we’d encountered a soul along the country road. A dollar was handed up to Tom, he rolled down the window, exchanged a few friendly words with the boys and the younger one peeled back the gate. We joked about the exchange as we continued forward, dipping into a dried up riverbed that snaked it’s way into another town nearby where we had to pay another dollar, what Tom told the Ecuadorians blocking the road there would pay the price for the colas.
After some wrong turns and a lot of questioning of the locals in the tiny place we’d arrived at (we even crossed the Dead Donkey bridge on our quest into nothingness), we finally made it to a small coastal town very near Montañita (the same place where Tom and Carla had met years before at a party along the beach) before we ran into the third and final roadblock we would encounter that day. This time, electing to use the beach as our road worked. Again, we turned left down the dirt streets that divide seemingly every Ecuadorian village into geometrical units and watched the ocean grow in the windshield. I was again under the impression that we were doing something covert, illegal or at least worth remembering until I saw the tire tracks ranging down beach’s horizon. Apparently, vehicles are allowed to drive on the beach here. The Vitara was going 90 kilometers per hour and the waves were lapping at the sand fifty feet to the left of us before I had the chance to voice the tinge of concern pulsing in the back of my mind. Even the people jogging or biking over the sand hardly took notice of us. Even as we zoomed by, the shore was wide enough that we didn’t bother them and they didn’t bother us.
Tom had to throw the Vitara into 4-wheel drive again to gain the oomph necessary to power through the shoulder of sand that stood between us and the dirt road cutting into another small Ecuadorian village. We eventually emerged on a main road, backtracked a bit and finally came out on the road that took us north into Montañita. It took us about twice the time it would have normally, but we finally made it.
Making the trek was worth every bit of effort we put into the drive. Given the opportunity, Montañita is one of these places you’ve got to see before you die. It’s incredibly small, but its reputation is huge. You really can’t talk to someone who’s been here before or look through an Ecuadorian guidebook without failing catch some mention of Montañita. The place itself is one of these stunning contradictions of space. Only two blocks down from the hostels and bars is the residential sector. Moving just these two blocks down the road, you’d never have the impression that the little village is what it is. Not to exaggerate it too much, but the place is essentially the Ecuadorian equivalent to Amsterdam—minus the prostitution. The hippie culture thrives in Montañita (the word hippie actually translates over as is into Spanish). I’m not quite sure how they’ve established it, but the police just sort of dar a vuelta (literally, give a turn) and bypass the two main drags that travel through the town. I’ve been told by a number of sources that Montañita is the perfect place to party as hard (or as serenely) as you want to. The people there embrace either lifestyle choice.
The other huge draw to Montañita is surfing. The beach there is great, and if you travel far enough to the northeast, you’ll learn why the place is called Little Mountain. Over the ages, the ocean has worn a patch of rock away from the shore, like a stone pocket carved out of the beach. On the top of this raised earthen pocket is a large, naturally created stone formation, chestnut brown, about the height of a rich person’s home. Out near this point, the waves are supposed to be bigger and faster, which explains why a huge surfing competition is held there every February. Surfers from all over the world come to compete, and, as if Quiksilver, Billabong and Reef didn’t have enough of a presence in the youth clothing trends anywhere along the Ecuadorian coast, sponsors from these huge companies are on hand for the competition too. My ears perked when Pedro told me that a bikini contest takes place around the same time of year. Montañita’s carnival at this time during the temporada (warm season) is supposed to be legendary. I guess, when the time is right, I’ll have to find out for myself.
Down the two roads that go through the little surfer village are a plethora of hostels, the bottom floor of which has almost invariably been converted into a bar. Between these are the convenient stores, restaurants and surf shops. In the muddy streets are the souvenir tables and the street vendors. From what I understand, it’s usually much more difficult to get a room (especially during temporada), but the four of us checked out a bunch of rooms at a hostel called Montezuma, picked out two—$7 a night for each person, an extra dollar to have them fill the hot tub with water—and headed for the beach. Tom, Carla and Pedro all agreed this was as empty as they’d ever seen Montañita, and it had everything to do with the strikes and nothing to do with the cloudy weather.
On the beach Tom and I tossed around a Frisbee I’d brought from home for about five minutes before I ran down to meet Lisa, a thirty-year-old volunteer from California who’s been living in Montañita since last March. She was stretching on the beach with a friend, limbering up before taking on the ocean with her surfboard. I’d talked to her for about two minutes before I got impatient and told her I wanted in too. She pointed a few hundred yards down the beach to a group of people. “Go talk to Carlos,” she said. Four dollars later and a longboard was mine for an hour.
This would have been my first time surfing had I not taken an hour-long lesson on Wednesday of this week. Last weekend, Tom and Carla had driven me into Salinas, and we stopped into a small place, a glorified garage turned surf shop, where you could pay for surfing lessons at Punto Carneo, a beach near my home, for $12 an hour, $2 of which pays for transportation there and back. To make a long story short, my experience with surfing lessons consisted of two main elements. First, imagine a short, well-built and extremely tan Ecuadorian man putting a surfboard into your hands and leading you out to get repeatedly slapped in the face by the ocean. Next, imagine your eyes burning from saltwater (I hardly realized how spoiled I’ve been by the Great Lakes and their delicious non-saltiness) and your shoulder muscles aching from paddling, all the while behind you is the constant insistence upon one thing and one thing only—rema! This is the Spanish command to paddle, and my instructor repeated the word so much that I will not forget the word’s meaning even if I become senile in old age. For me, this is the hardest part of surfing: paddling hard and often enough to catch the momentum of an incoming wave. Otherwise, in my opinion, the standing part is simple. Turning the board, however, is still beyond me. Another battle for another day.
Jesse, Du or whoever else is interested, don’t be discouraged by my somewhat pessimistic description of surfing. I’m only exaggerating for comic effect. Surfing is the most fun activity I’ve done since coming down here. I’m slightly obsessed with it. It’s a pretty incredible feeling to actually catch a wave and feel it driving you forward.
In Montañita, however, catching a wave without a push from the surf instructor was one of those things that’s easier said than done. I’d say I caught about a wave and a half (and by half I mean I stood up for about half a second before slipping off the board) before I got tired of battling to get far enough away from shore and had to stop to take a rest. I went to talk strategy with Lisa and her friend before Lisa agreed to come back out with me. She stood in the water and gave me some tips that helped me to catch another wave or two on my own. Lisa’s been surfing for five months now, and she’s a pretty damn good teacher too.
That night, I hung out with a couple of other volunteers from my program whose bus had been stopped where protestors blocked the road, but managed to make it to Montañita by hitching a ride the rest of the way. We drank mojitos during happy hour at a bar decorated with tropical flare, and then Tom, Carla, Pedro and I went to eat these huge vegetarian pizzas we bought for $5 at a little restaurant. Later that night, we met back up with Lisa, who owns a two-seater bike an Ecuadorian friend converted for her. We used it to dar some vueltas around Montañita through the drizzle. Around midnight or one o’clock, all of us went to this really cool bar. The bar itself was completely sheltered, but the bar walls also enclosed an open section of beach, where a band played on a stage and a stick fire burned in the sand a step below. People slowly began to meander into the bar as the band continued playing, so, before long, the sandy area was packed with all manner of surfers, locals and almost every nationality of gringos you can throw out there.
The band itself is worth talking about. The same group went through three changes in the lead singer. First, a thin, modern-looking Ecuadorian sang a bunch of popular Latin American songs. Then the band played some songs that are more popular in the Northern Hemisphere—Maroon 5 and Counting Crows, for instance. After that, they changed lead singers, and a chubbier Ecuadorian with long, nappy hair began playing North American rock favorites. I was jamming pretty hard when he busted into Toxicity. Soon, the bar was packed. The stick fire was little more than a hidden stash of neon embers dusted over by the sand kicked in from its edges by the time a short man who—without my knowing any better—I can only assume came from Esmeraldas (Ecuador’s northern beaches contain a significantly greater population of people of African American descent) or somewhere in the Caribbean. The reggae music that they played was definitely the best received by the people in the bar. The other really popular music in Montañita is electronic music, which is a lot like techno, but not nearly as cool (but that’s just me talking). By the time the band had decided to call it a night and the electronic music started pumping over the speakers, Mark decided to call it a night. I think I made it to bed sometime around 3:00 in the morning. This was the first time I’d been out since arriving in La Libertad.
The four of us woke up this morning, ate a breakfast loaded to the gills for around $3 a head and hit the road by noon. Tom elected to keep to the beach road, which was fun as hell to watch stretches of beach fly by, and we even drove passed a group of fishermen hauling in their morning catch. At least a hundred pelicans were flying in the air high above us, and as a young man carried a crate of fish in from the sea over his shoulder, a few of the birds would swoop down and gently lift one of the silver fish from the top of the crate. Tom, meanwhile, kept his eyes on the “road,” driving the Vitara between the fishermen and their boats. I almost wished we had stayed to watch, but I’m quite sure Tom, Carla and Pedro had witnessed this scene a million times before.
We paid the same two boys guarding the gate in the middle of nowhere another dollar to return the way we came, and asked a motorcyclist and a man in a truck to point us in the right direction at a crossroad where a new set of tire tracks had sprung from the soil. I crashed into bed upon our return to La Libertad, and slept for a bit until gaining the motivation to write this.
I stopped once since this afternoon to run to a convenience store with Tom. We picked up some things to eat for the soccer game that’s on tonight. The last World Cup was played in 2006, which means the next championship game will be played sometime in 2010, but that doesn’t exclude the preliminary matches leading up to the main event. Ten Latin American teams are vying for five spots in the actual World Cup tournament. Before any team officially enters the tournament, the players will have played something like seventeen or eighteen games. As I punch away at my keyboard, the Ecuadorian national team is playing against Venezuela. The game is taking place in Quito, which is a huge advantage for the Ecuadorian players because the city is located at such a high elevation that players from other countries who aren’t acclimated to the mountains have real trouble breathing. And, not to mention, that Venezuela isn’t supposed to have a very good team. As far as the rest of the country is concerned, this is a pretty huge deal. Many things that usually take place here have come to a screeching halt. Coming home, many of the businesses in La Libertad were already closed—hours in anticipation of the game—and that wasn’t any effect the strikes were having.
Listening for about the last forty-five minutes, I haven’t heard a ton of cheering from the house or cars beeping their horns as they pass, which makes me think that the score is still probably zero to zero. Maybe I ought to check things out for myself instead of hiding myself away like this.
Chuta! Wrong again. Ecuador already lost.

Homes in Passing

2007-10-09T13:12:00.001-07:00

The top one is a photograph of a bunch of Miguel's paintings in the entry room of my former home in Quito. A number of them are depictions of matadors, but Miguel always makes sure to emphasize that there are rodeo alternatives where the ¨killers¨will merely rope the animal to the ground.

The middle picture is my new home in La Libertad. It is very nice, to say the least. Carla and Tom are in the doorway, but you can't really see them.

I've included this last picture for Brandon. Sana Sana is a pharmaceutical chain in Ecuador and they are more ever-present here than Walgreen's is in the United States. Incredible. I always joke that whoever owns all the Sana Sana´s owns Ecuador, which is only partially true. I don´t know why it´s called Sana Sana, though, because the chain´s mascot is clearly a frog, and the word for frog is rana. I´m thinking sana is some hybrid of salud (health) and frog (rana), but I could just be making things up to appease myself.

Pilsener Beer & Crabs

2007-10-09T13:10:00.000-07:00

Well, my time in the mountains has come to an end for a while. I’m in Santa Elena now (for good) which is located about 120 kilometers to the west of Guayaquil on a small peninsula that forms the westernmost part of the entire continent. I’ve been here since Thursday morning, having taken the Trans Esmeraldas night bus out of Quito at 9:30 P.M. (we’re actually on Central Time in Ecuador too). I wished someone had been able to get a picture of me on that bus. When you purchase your ticket, you get to choose which seat you want on the bus. Our directors continually recommended that you choose one about a third of the way towards the back and on the right side of the bus so that you can watch what’s going on with the luggage whenever the bus stops. So, in line with this recommendation, I chose seat number 16. Unfortunately, Ecuadorian buses aren’t built to exactly the same specifications as buses in the United States—let’s just say there isn’t as much legroom in the Ecuadorian counterparts. I was packed into seat number 16 like a sardine, and, to make matters worse, the mother and father sitting in the seats directly in front of me had reclined their seats to the maximum (I can’t exactly blame them because they had a rather lively young child with them). For my part, I couldn’t recline my seat because when you hold down the lever and push the back support backwards, your knees come forward. And when you’re as tall as I am, your knees can only come so far forward before they’re jammed into the seat in front of you. I was able to improvise, however, and slept as much of the way as I could by leaning forward and using the seat in front of me as a sort of forehead pillow—that was how tight it was. The man sitting beside me was kind of grimy too, and he had a habit of spreading his legs out as far as he could in his sleep.

I find it amazing, though, how well Ecuadorians are able to sleep on these buses. As soon as the lights had gone out and the “in-flight” movie (I can’t even remember what movie it was) was over, I turned back and looked down the length of the bus. Everyone was pressed against a window or had propped a hand to support his or her face.

I arrived in the bus station in La Libertad early on Thursday morning and called up Sara, my new host mother, for instructions. She told me to just hang out in front of the station while she drove to pick me up. I had to fend off the taxistas with about a million no thank yous before Sara pulled up. Before the end of the afternoon, I had organized my room and ate some breakfast.

People in the Sierra and people living on the coast—where they are very different in certain ways—can at least agree upon some things. Jugo, or juice, is one of those things. Juice in Ecuador is fantastic, way better than anything you can buy in a store back home. My personal favorite comes from a regional type of tomato, tomate de árbol. You peel a few of the fruits, throw them in a blender, add some sugar (and you thought people down from down south added a lot of sugar to things!) and strain the mixture.

On the other hand, as far as food is concerned, the people living on the coast disagree with the people living in the mountains in some respects. Potatoes are eaten much more commonly in the Sierra, for instance, where seafood (and you just might be able to figure out why) is eaten much more here. (We drove into Salinas just yesterday and had to slow down as we reached the city’s main stretch. There, a man held out a pair of lobsters, displaying them for sale.) It’s easier to get yucca in the mountains too. Yuca is a type of root that has a bit more flavor than a potato; it’s good, but very filling. I’ve also heard people in the Sierra eat more hamburgers and pizza. The hamburger trend I can confirm, but I really can’t when it comes to pizza. There are little hamburger places all over Quito. Don’t get your hopes up too much though, these hamburgers are nothing like we’re used to. All the hamburgers I’ve had are much smaller, much thinner and don’t come with all the classic hamburger compliments—no bun, no ketchup, no mustard and no cheese. Just straight up fried cow. Kind of boring by comparison, but you take what you can get. Like I said, Ecuador definitely has us trumped when it comes to juices. As for pizza, the only time I ate it with my host family was when I bought a bunch of ingredients and suggested we all make it together (thanks, Steph). I was happy Miguel knew more about yeast than I did, otherwise things would not have turned out well. He ended up spelling an M with the pepperoni, which was supposed to be for Marco Polo, my nickname in Quito.

I’m amazed, however, at the unavailability of Ecuadorian coffee in this country. Ecuador does grow quite a bit of coffee, but keeps very little of it for its own people—it all goes right out the door. All of the coffee I’ve drunk here is of the instant variety, and it invariably comes from Colombia. No one cares about coffee here the way we do in the states. I was explaining to my host family in Quito that every business on State Street is either a bar or a coffee shop. He looked rather surprised. In the overall scheme of things, the Pazmiños definitely prefer tea.

The differences between the costeños and the Sierrans go much deeper than just foods, however. I’ve been trying to learn as much as I can about these personality differences to prepare myself for what the next ten months are going to be like. Costeños, for instance, tend to be more outgoing, more direct in the way they speak (to the point of being offensive), much friendlier and generally more liberal. They also speak ridiculously quickly compared to Sierrans (which is as fun as you might imagine for someone who has enough trouble picking up just bits and pieces of the conversations he hears). Sierrans tend to be a bit more sheltered and private, but extremely genuine and very kind. I haven’t had much of a chance to talk to that many Ecuadorians from the coast, but I did meet one man, Kleber, who immediately fit all of these stereotypes. He had a lot of very interesting questions about the United States and seemed extremely preoccupied with proving to me how much American history he was familiar with. I’m not sure how I feel about Kleber yet.

Being in La Libertad, (who would have thought I’d live in a city called Liberty outside of the US) I live between where I work and where I’ll play. About 5 kilometers to the east is my school in Santa Elena, and then about 8-9 kilometers to the west is Salinas, which is this really touristy beach city. During the high season, which starts sometime in November and lasts until the end of May, Salinas is crazy. Now, it’s just a pretty average place. Not too many people are out, and not all that many tourists can be found. Santa Elena, on the other hand. is a pretty run-of-the-mill Ecuadorian town. La Libertad is somewhere between (though much closer to Santa Elena than to Salinas) these two extremes. I actually live in the one tourist attraction in La Libertad, el Museo León Ricaurte: it’s both an archaeological and an artistic museum. My host mother’s husband was a pretty incredible artist during his life and their home reflects this. I’m not going to lie, I have it pretty damn good here. The place is gorgeous. I’ll include a couple pictures in a future post (if they decide to load this time… arrgh). I live in what I’d compare to a pool house (where there’s no pool, the Pacific Ocean is only a stone’s throw from the edge of the property) that’s not connected to the main building, but is still very close.

The only crummy thing about my living situation is that Sara is taking off next week to visit her pregnant sister in Mexico for a couple of months. Sara’s sister is scheduled to be having the baby soon and Sara wants to be there for as much of the child’s birth as she can. (For a gift, we picked up a bunch of children’s DVDs yesterday. Who likes Disney movies?) Luckily, Sara’s nephew lives here too, so I’ll be hanging out with him a bunch next week. I only met Pedro for a second, but he’s a really nice guy. He’s letting me use his mountain bike for the year, which might not seem like the best idea right off the bat because I’m so much bigger than everyone else in this country, but Pedro is actually taller than I am, so the bike fits me well. Kind of depressing that Sara won’t be around though….

So I’ve spent the last couple of days acquainting myself with the area. I’ve gone out running the last couple of days, and not a single dog chased me either time. I’m beginning to see that it’s just a matter of never challenging an animal with your eyes. Furthermore, Sara drove me around to a bunch of different places in Santa Elena and Salinas. She showed me all of the different beaches that are within driving distance and where I can go for this or that.

By Friday night Sara’s daughter, Carla, and her husband, Tom, had showed up to stay for the weekend. Carla and Tom are awesome. Tom is actually English and came down here to teach English something like seven or eight years ago. He fell in love with Carla and he’s been living here since. He’s in charge of an English school in Guayaquil, where they live permanently, but he’s actually also in charge of the school where I’ll be teaching. So, in a way, Tom’s my boss (it really doesn’t seem like that, however). Carla works in the tourism industry, so when whale-watching season comes around, guess where I’ll find out about the cool spots to go. Tom’s English is perfect and Carla’s is pretty damn good, but they’re both happy to speak Spanish with me, which I really appreciate. Little by little, I’m getting better at communicating.

Tom had brought along a string of crabs from a market in Guayaquil, which he started to prepare upon his arrival Friday night. In addition, he drove to show me where I can get my family’s Pilsener bottles filled near a local beer distributor. It’s eight dollars for twelve grande beers (which are each 16 oz., I think) served cold out of a couple refrigerators at a local store. You can get your bottles filled across the street from the actual factory for seven dollars, but they give them to you warm as hell.

Once they’d turned a deep red, we hung around Friday night eating crab and talking Ecuadorian politics. It turns out that eating crab is actually more about drinking beer than it is about the seafood because it’s such a time-consuming process to pick a crab apart with nothing but a small wooden hammer and your fingers. The four of us had gone through all of the grandes and probably about 12-15 crabs before we started to argue about the US presidential candidates. The Ecuadorians and English alike are skeptical about an African American and a woman having a realistic shot at the presidential office. They wonder if the American people are ready for that.

Democratic Elections

2007-10-01T09:30:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a big day for Ecuador—Election Day! The country is going through a ton of political reform and this was just the start of it. The ultimate goal—at least for the time being—is the creation of a new constitution that better suits Ecuador’s needs. To begin this process, Ecuadorians had to vote in around 130 new asemblaístas, or assembly members, who will be in charge of drafting the constitution in the upcoming months. What’s different about the vote here is that it’s obligatory. If you don’t vote, you don’t get your voter’s registration card, which essentially means that you lose all of your basic human rights in this country. As you can imagine, that card is kind of a big deal.

Obligatory voting presents a whole new set of problems that voluntary voting doesn’t have. For instance, for the people who don’t care who’s in office, which is probably a pretty significant portion of the population, how do they vote? The answer is, of course, that they just fill in whatever, or that they just leave the ballet empty. The other problem is transportation. Everyone has to vote in a certain area, and Ecuador is not as flexible as the United States in that sense. Where you vote all depends on your last name. So, even though all of my host family does everything else together, they don’t vote together because everyone has a different last name (naming rules/choices are fairly complicated here). In line with Ecuadorian law, Marcia, my host mother, went to vote yesterday afternoon, and she invited me to come along. We hopped onto a bus off la calle Occidental, the biggest street near the Pazmiño’s home, and fought our way past the people blocking the door. Because everyone in the country has to vote where they reside, public transportation was as packed yesterday as I’ve ever seen it. And that’s saying something, because every single morning of orientation was a fight to stake out a spot on the Ecovía.

At length, we arrived at a children’s school, where the classrooms had been turned into makeshift polling stations. People voted at card tables, the ballots hidden by large sheets of cardboard proclaiming “la vota es secreto,” or the vote is secret. As the Ecuadorians flooded into the school grounds, Marcia and I were eventually able to spot the classroom she was supposed to vote in. She got in line with the other women (A separate line had formed for men, which was significantly longer. It was nice to see that whenever a pregnant woman, or a woman with a child would come to vote, she didn’t have to wait in line and got to go inside to vote immediately.) and was off to the races in a matter of minutes. I hung outside the second story classroom and tried not to look too much like a gringo, which is completely impossible for me. I think about thirty Ecuadorians would’ve asked me what the hell I was doing there if they felt I would have actually been able to respond.

Voting itself is no easy task in this country. When I think back to the 2000 election and all that confusion the people of our country faced in filling out relatively simple ballots, I realize none of these elderly or confused individuals would’ve been able to cast a single correct vote with on an Ecuadorian ballot. Where, in the United States, it’s basically a choice between two parties, here there are literally hundreds. In the election of 130 assembly members, guess how many candidates there were. Over 3000. The ballot was bigger than a map. Each candidate’s photo was smaller than a dime. Completed ballots were dropped into boxes through slots that could fit some laptop computers. Even though the vote was supposed to be secret, I was able to watch one man fill out his ballot through the window. I imagined he was trying to navigate his way to Mars instead of voting for Correa.

The country should be handed the final results in about three days, which is when the reform begins. As a big gap has formed between the rich and the poor in this country, there are some definite competing interests motivating how the new constitution will be written. From what I understand, however, the people are relatively content with their current president, Raphael Correa, (and I should adjust this to the people in the Sierra) so no major power swings are probably going to take place as a result of this vote. I was watching the news this morning, in fact, and Correa’s party has been very effectively kicking butt. Where things might start to get sticky is when, months from now, the people are handed their newly drafted constitution and must vote to approve it. I’m probably definitely going to see some demonstrations, but demonstrations—in general—are extremely common in Latin America and they don’t tend to be violent. They do, however, tend to muck up transit.

All in all, besides the buses, yesterday was very peaceful. It’s really encouraging to watch the democratic process operate so smoothly outside of the United States. Yeah, democracy!

The other big news, which is bigger for me than the country, is that my month of orientation is now over, which means I’m as qualified as I’m going to be as an English teacher in Ecuador. The group of volunteers and I finished up Wednesday last week and many people have already shipped out to their various sites within the country. It was kind of sad to watch a lot of the people I’ve become fairly close to leave. I really won’t see most of them until we reconvene at the coast for our mid-service meeting sometime in January.

Wednesday night the entire group ate at a Cuban restaurant here in Quito. It was kind of a cool place because of the décor (and because my meal was something like glorified sloppy joes, which all of my old roommates will be happy to hear because I used to go through sloppy joes like nothing else). The walls were wood, flat like particleboard, but without being made from a million individual pieces. Everything was covered in graffiti: the walls, the supports, the tables, you name it. Someone had brought a Sharpie along and I choose to write “que ricas arepas” in a spot that only someone as tall as me could reach. What delicious arepas was a tribute to Isaac—a volunteer that I’d gotten pretty close to not only because we lived together, but also because we hung out a lot—who will be more difficult to see than most because of his site placement. We’d been out twice for arepas, which are pretty much the most delicious things on the face of the Earth. Basically, they are deep-friend pancakes, wrapped around the meat of your choice and topped with an avocado sauce and a super-spicy red one. You feel like a total Ecuadorian when you buy them too, because no one but people in the know go to the little street stand where you can get them. The place is kind of out of the way too. Isaac and I had turned getting these arepas into a huge joke between us, so whenever we talk now, we can’t get through more than five sentences without saying ¡que ricas (fill in the blank)!

The day after orientation, we went hiking up the Teleférico, which is this gondola that takes you to the top of this mountain. From the height you reach, you have access to the Ruca of Pichincha, which is a ¨two and a half¨ hour hike to the top of beautiful mount Pichincha. I put two and a half in quotes because that must be by Ecuadorian standards. I think it took Rob, a super-chill volunteer from Minnesota, and I about four hours altogether, and he’s something like 6´5¨and in pretty good shape. I’m going to attach a photo from the Ruca to the next post.

Other than that, there’s not so much to say about what I’ve done so much as what I’m going to be doing. I’m going to hang out in Quito for the next couple days and then I’m taking the night bus from Quito to Santa Elena Wednesday night. I just bought my bus ticket—only $9 to cross half the country. The night bus is my only choice for a direct route to Santa Elena; otherwise I have to dink around in the Guayaquil bus terminal, which is pretty much an invitation to get my stuff jacked when I look the way I do. The night bus is much safer, even if it does travel through the darkness. Fortunately, it makes very few stops along the way. My teaching position starts up next week Monday, the 8^th, so I’m going to have only a few days to open a bank account (which I’ve heard is going to be a bitch and a half) and get my lesson plans together before things get hectic again. I tried to call my host mother, Sara, just a little while ago, but I can’t reach her. I’m very excited to reach a point of stability in Santa Elena. And I can’t wait for more cerviche!

Thinking just about today, I’m going to relax a little with a couple of Quito volunteers. One of the girls is a big time mountain climber and she wants me to come with her to this climbing gym. I’ve never done any climbing before, but it should be fun. After that, Marcia is going to take me to a suburb of Quito where a bunch of vendors sell traditional Ecua-gifts. It’s kind of touristy, which I don’t really like a ton, but Marcia is so cool I’ll pretty much go anywhere she wants. Out of everyone in my host family, she understands me the least, so she’s really great for me to practice my Spanish with. If Marcia can understand it, anyone can!

Otovalan Marketplace

2007-09-24T13:03:00.001-07:00

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

2007-09-15T12:07:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-15T11:49:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-14T15:23:00.001-07:00

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

2007-09-14T07:10:00.000-07:00

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...

2007-09-07T13:33:00.000-07:00

...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)

2007-09-07T11:57:00.001-07:00

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

2007-09-07T10:39:00.000-07:00

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!