This week I started to settle into my routine of life in Quito. I have class Monday and Wednesday afternoons and have my internship every morning and all day on Tuesday. I eat lunch at home with Charo or our cook, Myriam, who chastises me if I eat too much/too little and talks for the entire meal (maids and cooks are much more common in Ecuador than in the US, most middle class families have someone who comes a couple times a week). After class I usually take a nap or do something athletic and do homework and hang out with my family/friends at night.
This week marked the beginning of my internship here and it has been a week of drastic highs and lows. Because after leaving Friday afternoon the lows are the most readily available memories, I´ll start there. The lows have included taking broken glass away from babies (long story), breaking up the fights between Edison, Julio, and Ricky, and generally not knowing what I´m supposed to be doing or what I have to contribute to the organization. The highs include taking the older kids for a bike ride, the hugs I get from Narcissa and Gustavo every morning, and the hiking invitation I got from my co-workers for next weekend. I work with 2 Swiss and 1 French volunteer along with the amazing Ecuadorian employees. My organization works with kids in the poorest barrios to get them off the street and into a safe space. We provide tutoring for their homework and also work on art projects and just play games with the kids. I spent most of this week playing chess with Ernesto and memory with Narcissa while occasionally helping kids with their homework. For the older kids the foundation offers classes in baking, sewing, woodworking, and jewelry design with the idea that when they are old enough to leave, they go with employable skills. I also am going to be teaching the kids how to juggle and walk on stilts because they can make more money on the street with a talent than they can through simple begging. Although I´ve never walked on stilts, my director assured me that since I practically already do I shouldn´t have a problem...we´ll see about that. The internship is going to be a very trying and educational experience, so far I´m still really excited on my walk to work every morning.
This week my family has been pretty busy: my brother has been finishing up a commerical for Mazda, my host dad has been driving 3 days to return from Bolivia, and my mom just got back from 2 days in Tulcán, on the border between Ecuador and Columbia. She brought back these traditional corn cookies which are so delicious, I ate about 7 the night she got back. To those of you who are laughing and saying, "He didn´t eat 7"...stop laughing. I continue to love the family situation: Charo and I talk politics and human rights at every meal and JuanCar has a great movie selection (being a film-maker probably helps) that we´ve been working through. My host dad, Juan Carlos, was supposed to return on Wednesday but took a detour through Cuzco, Peru and will get back tonight around 1. Everyday my host mom tells me, ¨He´ll be here tomorrow¨but my friends and I have started to suspect he´s been photoshopped into the family pictures...I´m excited to meet him.
This week in between classes and my internship I went rock climbing (which I´m trying to do a couple times a week) and have been checking out the various markets and neighborhoods around the city. For the moment I´ve abandoned my running goal, rationalizing that since everywhere I go I´m walking up hill...I don´t actually need to. This week I´ve also taken the time with friends on the program (Anna, Emma, Eli, and Kristin for Erik) to find our favorite bar and hamburger place. This weekend we went to Mitad del Mundo (the middle of the world) an hour north of Quito. It´s really just the equator but it has turned into a full-scale, circus-style, Disney World-esque tourist attraction. The highlight is a huge tower with a globe on top and the line of the equator running through the whole complex. We took our requisite ¨straddling the hemispheres¨pictures and took the bus back home. Last night I went to a ridiculous modern dance performance with Anna and later checked out a cool tapas bar. Today we took a bicycle tour of colonial Quito which was originally scheduled for the first week but had to be postponed until today. It was fun but by now all of us had visited the churches and plazas so we didn´t really feel like being tourists. I also walk past most of the sites on my way to my internship every morning so it was a little redundant, but it was fun to do it on bikes.
I added some pictures on the picture site, there aren´t very many so I need to get in the habit of taking more. I´ll work on it. Thanks for the comments and I hope everyone is doing well!
Coming soon: host dad (if he really exists), hiking with co-workers or Peguche, and Quito Sur (southern Quito)
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2 comments:
Your pictures are great; hope Quito is everything you were expecting (in terms of it being a not-Carleton).
I read Blindness per your recommendation while sitting on the beach this past weekend. It wasn't particularly "beach reading," in fact, I've never been so close to vomiting based on something I've exclusively read. But it was meaningful nonetheless (or maybe allthemore).
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