And Now, More Thoughts from the Equator

1. Does anyone remember pogs (anyone who went to middle school between 1995 and 2000 should be nodding their heads)? Because for whatever reason, they´re huge here right now. Most of my kids bring them out at least once throughout the day and I always see kids playing them in the street. I remember having a vague notion that they were ridiculous when I cared about them, but watching it now from the other side all I can do is scratch my head that the phenomenon continues.

2. As any of my female friends here can tell you, Ecuador is still more or less a bastion of machismo despite improvements in recent years. Men shout and whistle from windows, the sidewalk, and passing vehicles regardless of whether women have male companions or not (not that they should need them). I´ve been amazed at how quickly and passively these traits are picked up by boys too. I´m constantly scolding my boys (ages 10-16) for whistling at passing girls or smacking their lips disgustingly. So far none of them seem to understand why this is a problem but more than any other lesson, this is the one I want to get through to them.

3. Quito is unofficially divided into distinct economic districts. This applies to food markets, the touristy center, business center, and usual divisions that might immediately come to mind but extends to much more specific areas of the city. For example, every day on my walk to my internship I walk up a street completely lined with shoe stores, including an enormous open-air market entirely devoted to the sale of footwear. I also live in the middle of the construction/home improvement area (oddly located around the Basílica), there is also a string of personal hygeine product stores on my way to work, and a couple weeks ago as I was leaving the bus station I stumbled upon three extremely militant army surplus stores, all in a row. The funny thing about all of these similar stores sharing such a small space is that it doesn´t really seem to affect how prices are set. You would think that increased competition would result in lower prices or at least an equalizing of prices (or so my highly developed, largely intuitive knowledge of economics tells me) but prices very widely for the same products in stores right next to each other...very curious...

4. If you´re waiting for a bus in the 4-6 in the afternoon range, especially going south, you´d better be prepared for a very close encounter with approximately 100 of your Ecuadorian comrades. When the bus rumbles up, you can tell immediately how full it is by the amount of bulge in the doors. Regardless of the density of the crowd, everyone on the bus stop pushes in, resulting in this ridiculous situation in which everyone is absolutely mashed together, like potatoes. The buses to the south are more crowded because (I think) the south is the traditionally poorer part of the city and I´m sure that there are more workers from the south in the commercial part of the city who don´t own cars. As a result, when you´re waiting for your hot, smelly, and crowded southbound bus you have to watch almost empty buses pass by heading north.

5. For my independent study project, as I´ve mentioned, I´m looking at how the process of mestization in indigenous youth is reinforced by their experience in school. I thought it might be helpful to visit some of the parents and see what they thought about their childrens´schools and their participation in them. I tried to organize some visits through Sol and some other schools and nothing really would work out, so I just decided to right to the source: the markets. Last Saturday I visited two big markets in Quito where I was planning on interviewing some of the indigenous women about their feelings on education. I´d already been told by Martha, the program director, to clearly and quickly explain myself to anyone I might interview just because they would assume that I´m there on behalf of the government or something else that could be trying to get them in trouble. So I approached three different women and explained who I was, what I was doing, and that by all means, anything they told me would only be used for my paper. The first women started out speaking to me in perfect Spanish, but after the first question of the interview switched to Quichua and pretended like she didn´t understand. The next woman told me that "yes, she had children in the school system here," but when I asked if I could ask a couple quick questions, she corrected herself and said, "Oh, well actually, I don´t have kids." The next woman did the exact same thing. So maybe parents visits aren´t really necessary for this paper after all...

Translating is Hard

So tonight instead of spending the evening doing my homework, which I really should have done, I stayed up and talked with Juan Car instead. He was asking me to translate some words of his favorite Ben Harper song, "Just Another Lonely Day" because he wants to use it for a short movie he has in mind. I only needed to translate a few of the words because he speaks pretty good English and it´s a simple song, but we went through several of our favorite lyrical songs. We brainstormed about the movie (about a retired American couple visiting Ecuador and just going through their touristic motions, listen to the song and image it...fantastic) while listening to the song and actually acted out in the living room how we thought it should be and what scenes should be included.

The song changed to a live Ben Harper song in which fans were screaming enthusiastically and so we started imitating them instead. We were yelling (in a whisper because Juan Carlos is sleeping) about how much we loved Ben Harper and the usual things rowdy fans yell at concerts, when Juan Car imitates taking off his bra and yells "I´m throwing you my breasts!"

Now although I know for a fact that I make very similar mistranslations every day, I fell on the floor laughing. I explained that he probably meant "bra" instead of "breast" and after a little more laughter we continued with our movie planning. Next on our list, finding out how to get movie rights for a Ben Harper song...

Cultural Immerson #1298: The Mullet

So although my hair´s been longer than I usually like it for a couple weeks now, I´ve been assured by JuanCar and Juan Carlos (both of whom have hair past their shoulders) that my hair has been a perfectly acceptable, almost too short length. I finally decided this past weekend that enough was enough and that regardless of the outcome, I needed a haircut. I went to a place recommended by a friend and $2, 15 minutes, and several questionable sighs from the barber later I was mullet-clad. I haven´t decided yet whether to cut it off or just embrace my new style as a cultural adaptation...probably the former...

I´ve felt my time quickly slipping away here for a couple weeks now, but today it really hit. Although my kids were kind of punks today for some reason, they are all starting to ask, "When are you going back to the United States?" and I don´t think in a "Can´t you just leave already?" way. I´m usually pretty skeptical when people come back from study abroad or a summer experience gushing about their fantastic kids and their amazing time but I´m afraid I´m in danger of becoming one of those people myself. I´m not going to pretend that my kids are angels or that I´ve enjoyed every minute of my internship, but several of my kids have quickly worked their ways into my heart. I´m getting ready to leave my internship and several aspects are starting to wear on me, but at the same time, I´m going to miss Narsisa´s hug in the morning, Julio´s beaming smile, Sergio´s chess challenges, Gustavo´s gripping handshakes, Ricky´s swearing, Jesica´s questions, Jaqueline´s criticisms, Gabriela´s nicknames and English, and maybe even Hector´s constant nagging about stilts.

Today was also a difficult day in that I ran into Paúl, a kid from Sol who had to leave because he was too direspectful and got in too many fights. I was walking up to the park with my boys on stilts (they can climb stairs now) when we saw Paúl and his brothers playing. When Paúl was in Sol he was my biggest problem and left me frustrated with his disrespect and violence every day. Today when I saw him I was with his group of zancos and it was a real shock to see what exactly it´s like for these kids outside of our foundation. In Sol the kids get 2 meals a day, plenty of activities and always have to practice good hygeine. When I saw Paúl today, he was just playing on the street on a Tuesday morning and obviously hadn´t washed his face or hands in days. Even though he was my biggest problem a few weeks ago, today he ran up to me and asked about things in Sol and if people had been asking about him. I was really taken aback by his eagerness, especially since he was my "llorón" (whiner) when he was actually attending Sol. Seeing him again really made me appreciate, if not what I´m doing here, the pretty incredible work of which I´m a tiny part.

This weekend is probably my last "free" weekend in Quito and I´ll probably spend most of it writing my independent study project. I haven´t really had the motivation I might have hoped for in the project, but I´ve become really interested and am excited to write the paper. So little time for everything...but what else is new?

Still coming soon: Sumo, Thanksgiving, and Quitu Raymi

Some Guano

OK everyone, sorry I haven´t posted in quite some time...lately I have been overtaken by a wave of blog lethargy, this changes now (after some prodding from 4 continents).

I now impart to you another segment of the eternal battle over my eating habits with my host mom...in dialogue...

Charo: So do you want me to make you something for dinner?
Nate: No, that´s ok, I´m just going to make a ham sandwich, I´m not very hungry.
Charo: No omelette? I could heat up some soup?
Nate: No, I´m really ok.
Charo: Ok, I´ll just make you some fried bananas and heat up some rice...
Oh well, I guess it´s nice that someone´s looking out for me...I guess.

Does anyone know that Jerry Seinfeld stand-up routine about New York cab drivers (this serves a purpose, I promise)? In said routine he talks about how cab drivers can be driving 50 mph backwards the wrong way up a one-way bridge and instead of feeling fear you just laugh and think, "Well, I wouldn´t do that in my car." Although this sketch comes to my mind often here, never was it more pertinent than this weekend when (after realizing the road had been washed out) we were part of a huge line of vehicles snaking up a windy side road from Juan Carlos´university to return to Riobamba (I´ll explain later). The woman driving had a splitting headache and we couldn´t stop to change drivers but she was still passing semi-trucks on jack-knife turns with a hundred meter ravine on the inside of the curve. I´m sure that at several points (probably the ones where we were 3 abreast on a road built for 1) we had a tire over the edge but we were laughing the whole time and at no point did I even clench my fists (which I do in the US riding with anyone in the calmest conditions).

Alright, back to the beginning. On Sunday night I got back from a whirlwind weekend in which I travelled four hours north of Quito for Thursday and Friday and four hours south Saturday and today (four hours doesn´t sound very substantial by US measurement but I easily traversed half the length of the country and visited three distinct climate/culture zones). Thursday morning we left early for our second program outing to Mascarilla in Chota Valley. These visits are for a class called "Democracy and Social Change" and we´ve been spending a lot of time talking about the roles and experiences of minorities in Ecuador. We visited Mascarilla to look at an Afro-Ecuadorian community and specifically a women´s cooperative that has culturally and economically revitalized the town. It was an interesting visit and I think everyone had a good time, but the trip left everyone a little uncomfortable with the concept of ethnotourism.

Immediately when we arrived in Mascarilla we headed to a preschool where we served as living, breathing jungle gym equipment for a couple of hours. When we got there the kids sang a few songs for us and then came our turn to entertain them. We sang a few songs and then played Duck, Duck, Goose (or Pato, Pato, Ganzo), which was met with huge success. I´m used to working with older kids here so I´d kind of forgotten all of the songs and games...now if they´d started punching each other in the face or had wanted to learn to walk on stilts, that would have been a different story. After the preschool we took an afternoon-long tour of the cooperative and visited various workshops, including those of shampoo/lotion, jewelry, pottery, and card-making. It seemed like a pretty cool organization but again, I´m not quite sure what I think about the commercialization of culture, which I´ve experienced a lot here.

That night before dinner we were treated to a dance performance and tried to learn a little bit ourselves. Anyone who knows me won´t be surprised to know that within 5 minutes I was dancing with a bottle balanced on my head with the best of them...most of the town turned out to watch us struggle (what better way to pass an evening?) and it was almost refreshing to have the oggling-tables turned. The next morning we made clay masks (mine was an angry Frenchman, but not really purposefully) and visited the town store where the cooperative sells their various products.

We then drove back to Quito, went out, got home late, and I left for Riobamba at 7:00 the next morning. The Riobamba trip really reminded me how much I love travelling alone. I was going to meet Juan Carlos but it was fun to get lost and ask around and only have to worry about myself, I really enjoyed it. Anyway, when I got there I hopped on another bus to la Laguna de Colta and Santiago de Quito. Santiago de Quito was the original capital of Ecuador (it´s seriously about 15 houses now) and is home to La Balbanera, the first Catholic church in Ecuador. Juan Carlos teaches at Jatun Yachai Wasi ("wasi" is one of three Quichua words I know...ahem, "wasi"=house, "yaku"=water, and "sisa"=flower), a university next to Laguna de Colta that teaches traditional Andean knowledge in areas such as agriculture, medicine, and construction. I visited with some of the students for a while, chatted with the llamas, and sat in the cold and read while Juan Carlos held class.

The next day I walked around Riobamba looking for the party celebrating the city´s independence day (I told you, every day you can find a different one) but only encountered closed museums, full churches, and quiet parks it being Sunday and all. It was a really pretty though and from anywhere in the city you can see snow-capped volcanoes and the volcano Chimborazo (the point farthest from the center of the earth because the planet bulges a little at the middle). I then found another bus to visit the town of Guano, touted by many as the friendliest town in Ecuador. Guano is also known for a long history of rug-making. I found the store recommended by my guidebook and talked with the owner for about an hour. He´s a fourth-generation rug maker (he emphasized several times that everything is made by hand) but none of his sons are interested in taking over the business. As with many industries in Ecuador, when the country underwent dollarization, the process by which Ecuador adopted the American dollar, rug-makers couldn´t afford to stay open. Guano, which was once home to more than 80 different rug-making workshops, now only supports about 15. Needless to say, I bought a rug.

That night we drove back to Quito in time to start another week. This week I really have to start my independent study project and start organizing interviews and school visits. It´s also really hit me lately how little time I have left here. Two more normal weeks, a half week before another class trip, a week vacation, and my last week...my kids are already starting to ask when I´m leaving (and not in a "can you just leave already?" kind of way) and although some things are starting to wear on me or frustrate me here, it will definitely be hard to leave. With that, I´ll try to post again within a sooner time frame! I hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving and I´ll see most of you in less than 5 weeks!

Coming Soon: Sumo (a friend from Carleton) comes to visit, and taking into account my lack of blogging expediency, Thanksgiving

How I Became a Sea Cucumber Poacher

Well devoted readers, after a third of Ecuador, 10 buses, 2 beaches, a resemblance of a tan (or more appropriately, a migration of tan lines), a full-body suit of mosquito bites, tidal pool fishing, hiking, fiestaing, eating/drinking/sleeping in general, and a little baby puke, I have returned to Quito and an internet connection capable of accomodating blog updates. Today I concluded a 10 day vacation with a 10 hour bus ride (love the symmetry) from Cuenca back to Quito. The whole day on the bus I felt really excited to be returning to Quito, even though the vacation was great and I could have stayed longer. I´ve been referring to Quito as ¨home¨for months but after my longest stint away from the city, I really started to miss my family, apartment, bed, internship, kids, and familiarity. It was a nice realization to stumble upon.

I also just realized that I began my blog-hiatus about a week before I actually left for vacation...woops. The only real event worth notice during that week was a trip with my co-workers back to Mindo. Originally I thought we were going with a group of our kids but when I got there I realized it was just a volunteer/employee outing. It was pretty fun (it´s hard to make a natural waterslide with a 10 foot drop at the end unfun) but it was definitely different than I was expecting. For starters, I spent the whole day with my bosses, who I adore, but who grilled me on what I thought of the foundation and what suggestions I had. It was fun to hang out with the other volunteers without the kids but they spoke in French a lot of the time. All in all it was a worthwhile trip but not as exciting as I´d hoped. I posted some pictures of the trip (and the vacation) along with some pictures from stilts 2 Wednesdays ago.

Now back to the vacation...last Friday night I left Quito again for the beach town of Canoa with five other people on my program (Anna, Kristin, Emma, Jon, and Kiersten). The stay was more or less the same as last time only with better weather. We ate our breakfasts at the same little restaurant (which had the best pancakes I´ve ever eaten) and actually stayed in the same hostel (although the cornucopia of hammocks had been removed, grumbles all around). Other than that, Canoa consisted entirely of beach time, shrimp ceviche (a cold, seafood soup/my favorite Ecuadorian food), and more Pilsener (Ecuadorian beer). On the topic of Ecuadorian beer, there are two main labels, Brahma and Pilsener. Pilsener is more common but Brahma is better and the last time we visited Canoa Brahma was practically flowing in the streets. This visit however there was no Brahma to be found. When I asked for Brahma from a vender on the beach, she actually went to far as to say, "What do you think we are, Quito?"...quite baffling. After a beach bonfire and an extremely enjoyable time, leaving Canoa ended up a little more complicated than intended or was necessary...

We had bus tickets for 8:00 in the morning, which shouldn´t have been too difficult to make, but we had trouble finding our bus/boat to the bus station in Bahía a half hour away and arrived 10 minutes late. We then bought our second ticket for an hour later and as we were eating breakfast by the road a bus pulled by and the man yelled at us, "Jipijapa?! Ven, rapido, rapido!" It wasn´t quite the time on our tickets yet but we were going to Jipijapa (pronounced "hippy hoppa," the name is really the only fun thing about the town) and having suffered under a sporadic Ecuadorian bus schedule before, we didn´t question. When we showed the man our tickets a good hour into the trip, he told us we had tickets for a different bus company. Although I yelled at him for a good 10 minutes that he was the one who told us to get on the bus, he insisted it wasn´t his fault (which it wasn´t, not entirely anyway) and we bought our 3rd round of tickets to Jipijapa.

The trip went smoothly after that and we arrived in Montañita that afternoon. Montañita is one of the best beaches in Ecuador (it´s actually home to an international surfing competition in March) but also one of the more touristy. Unfortunately, neither of these descriptions ended up affecting us much because it rained the two days we were there. This didn´t entirely stop us from having a good time and we enjoyed the rainy beach and the cool tidal pools. One morning Anna and I were walking down the beach and ran into a bunch of people walking around in the tidal pools. After inquiring we learned they were hunting for oysters, squid, octupi, and most interestingly, sea cucumbers. I have a vague notion that sea cucumber hunting is illegal, but the two men assured us that it´s legal one day a month (this being that day) so we joined in. We spent about a half hour lifting up mossy rocks to reveal the fat sea cucumbers (or, pepinos del mar) underneath. They were really disgusting and enthusiastically employed their only means of self-defense: squirting water out of both ends. The sea cucumber trade is actually really interesting. They aren´t really eaten in South America, but are caught in Ecuador, shipped to Peru for processing, and finally sent to China and Southeast Asia where they are considered a delicacy. I´m pretty sure I learned this in a documentary about the awful/incredibly illegal trade in shark fins (also caught off Ecuador and sent to China for shark fin soup) and I seem to recall the sea cucumber trade being portrayed in the same light...oh well...

The big waves of Montañita come from a rocky point that juts out at the end of the beach. I was feeling adventurous and started around the point to see what was on the other side. The tide was coming up and I felt a little like that guy in every Baywatch episode who ventures out onto the rocks only to be swept into the sea (there is no Ecuadorian David Hasselhoff by the way) but when I got around the point I found that the entire rock was covered in fresh flower petals and little candle altars. I´m not sure who put them there or why and didn´t take my camera because I was fairly certain I would fall into the ocean, but it was an impressive sight.

After two days of rainy lounging in Montañita, we left for the last leg of the trip in Cuenca. Cuenca is the third largest city in Ecuador (we stopped at the bus station in Guayaquil, the largest city, and live in Quito, #2) and the hometown of our director and professor, Martha.

An update on what´s happening RIGHT NOW: We´re watching a ridiculous Latin American reality dance competition (they play the couples´national anthem before they dance so we´ve been laughing for about a half hour now) and Juan Carlos is salsaing around the living room. He´s been really sick for a week and everytime he wants to eat something, Charo takes it away and scolds him. He responds by sneaking food from my plate and moping. Today´s the first day he´s felt better so we´re all cheering on the dancing. Back to the trip...

Every Ecuadorian city has their own Independence Day fiesta (you could probably hit a different 4th of July-style party every week, pretty cool) and we made sure to be in Cuenca for their fiesta. We´d been to a town fiesta in a smaller town before and the big city version was much more subdued and cosmopolitan. In Guapalo we lit things on fire, drank in the streets, and danced in the plaza. In Cuenca, professionals lit things on fire, business types went to clubs, and we went to bed. Cuenca was a really beautiful city though, we spent one day just visiting churches and napping on the bank of the river that bisects the city. Cuenca seemed much more cosmopolitan to us than Quito and at several points it felt more like Europe than South America. There were trees blooming purple flowers all over the city and the weather was more or less perfect.

The second day in Cuenca we went to a national park an hour away called Parque Nacional Cajas. The park was full of enormous rock formations and glacial lakes. It was really beautiful and it was fun to be away from civilization for a while. We hiked around for about 4 hours and headed back to Cuenca.

Yesterday morning we boarded our tenth and last bus and returned to Quito. Prior to this bus we´d been taking night buses to save time but a day bus was a great way to see the country. After this trip I can tell you with complete confidence that every inch of Ecuador is amazingly beautiful. Our 10 hour ride flew by as we passed indigenous villages, colonial cities, mountains covered in farming terraces, and more snow-capped volcanoes (including Cotopaxi, the world´s tallest active volcano) than you could hope for. I´ll definitely be returning to several of the places we passed. One downside of the trip was when the little girl I was holding on my lap (buses are always filled to overcapacity) threw up. Luckily she aimed for the aisle and we had a bag ready but monitoring the possibility of future throwup helped keep me awake for a few hours.

I posted some more pictures, I was kind of picture lazy on this trip but I think other people took some good ones. My friend who I´ve been counting on for a CD of really good pictures later had her camera stolen in the bus station (huge bummer, but the first theft on the program). Sorry I hadn´t written in so long, I feel pretty rejuvinated after my vacation so hopefully I´ll get back in the groove of things. Hope everyone´s well!

Coming soon: Chota