A Review, An Overview, A Preview, and A Worldview

Well everyone, after 36 hours of travel and far too many disgruntled airport employees and pampered Houstonian princesses, I've arrived safely in South Dakota. Thanks again to everyone for reading my blog, as a final send-off I've made some lists of, well, various things.

Things I will miss from Ecuador: warmth, $1 beers, llapingachos, my family, fresh fruit, the language, cheap travel, real mountains, my kids, historic buildings, sunshine, beaches, vanilla Konitos, Pingüino ice cream, plazas, fresh bread, music, my friends, Martha, Sarita, María, and Adriana (professors/program assistants), 25 cent public transportation, chochos, smells, futbol-mania, balconies, Pingüino ice cream (it deserves two), bus adventures, newness, soup, the G-Spot, Rafael Correa, indigenous remedies, open-air markets, the black market, tarantulas, year-round flowers, flexible schedules, Juan Car´s movies, South American Coca-Cola, protests, hope, familiarity, $3 movie theaters, flexible due dates, fresh juice, humitas, dozens of banana varieties, city life, chocolate milk

Things I won´t miss from Ecuador: bus exhaust, rain, child street workers, staring, creepy taxi drivers, Nestle instant coffee, racism/homophobia, buses packed to over-capacity, low doorways, barking dogs on roofs, El Jardín, reggeaton, sunburns, my electricuting shower, too-short blankets, dog poop on the sidewalks

Things I still want to do in Ecuador: learn Quichua, visit the Galápagos Islands, canoe in the Amazon, learn to cook, drive somewhere, bungee jump, see an erupting volcano (with lava, Tungarahua doesn´t count), scuba dive,

Things I´m looking forward to at home: peanut butter, space, exercise, real coffee, the language, my family, driving, Christmas, friends, my pets, coffee shops, consistently warm showers, reliable postal service, independence, extra-long twin size beds, snow, stars, good Indian food, Carleton, sharp cheddar cheese, the ability to use the bills the ATM gives you, skiing, macaroni and cheese

Foods I like (as in actually crave and search for on menus) now (mostly for Paula Ensz and Susan Langlee): tofu, tomatoes, avacado, hot salsa, onions, cucumbers, peppers, pineapple, spicy things, figs, shwarma (I know, who comes to Ecuador and eats shwarma?), cuy (guinea pig),

Foods I still really don´t like: mushrooms and mayonnaise

New names I go by: Nath (how Charo spells "Nate"), Nata (everyone), Natan (my boss), Net (Myriam and the kids in the street), Leche (Gabby), Milk (Gabby), Natita (Elizabeth when she wants something and Eli´s mom), and, as spelled phonetically in Spanish by my neighbor, Neith

Things I lost in Ecuador: timidity, weight, inhibitions, two scarves, idealism, direction

Words I might start using in English: chévere (cool, but better), chuchaqui (hangover), bacán (cool, again), chao (ciao, but how we spell it here), sigue no más (like, "go ahead" or "move along" or really anything you could possibly need to express verbally), a ver (used like, "look here")

Things I care less about now: my appearance, what other people think of me , personal comfort, promptness

Things I care more about now: education, Spanish fluency, GLBT rights, personal awareness, good ice cream (you laugh, but Pingüino´s up there twice), South American politics, economics, philosophy (Juan Car talks about it all the time), tranquility, and if possible, travel

My Last Day

Yesterday was the last day of my internship and although I was anticipating difficult goodbyes, the day completely surpassed my expectations. All day I was waiting and hoping for one of my kids to act completely immature, preferrably starting a fight or disrespecting me in any way, to make the departure a little bit easier. Instead I got 80 kids on their best behavior, hundreds of questions of when I will be coming back, requests to stay, and an afternoon-long party...the moral of which being that if you were interested in seeing a grown man cry last Friday around 4:30, Venezuela Street in Quito would have been a good place to look.

When I got to my internship, Julio was in a really really awful mood. When I asked him about it he wouldn´t talk to me and just said that he hadn´t slept well and was worried about his exams that day. When he was standing alone later that morning, my co-worker Elena told me to talk with him. Julio paused for a second before he looked up with teary eyes and said, "Por qué no puedes quedar con nosotros? (Why can´t you stay with us?)." This interaction was repeated several times throughout the day, most notably with Narcisa, Gaby, Gustavo, and Jesica. The difficult day culminated in a party for Dario´s, one of my co-workers, birthday and my departure. We had a three big cakes and treats of all kinds in addition to music performed by my boss and his music class and speeches by some of the kids. When they gave me some of their cards, I read the first one to find, "We wanted to give you a universe of stars but since we can´t, we gave you our smiles." After that I just stared firmly at the wall, waiting for it to be done. When I thought I´d escaped it all with a more or less dry face, I said goodbye to Myriam, my closest co-worker. We hugged and as we were both starting to tear up she whispered in my ear, "No nos olvides Net (Don´t forget us)." And thus commenced the falling apart of Nate.

Without care or fear of sounding cliché, these 4 months in Sol de Primavera have really been a life-changing experience for me. Working day after day with such inspiring kids and co-workers has had an enormous impact on me and today I felt completely lost (even though it was Saturday and I wouldn´t have been there anyway) knowing that quite possibly, but by no means for sure, I will never see them again.

Also, as I near the end of my blog (for this adventure anyway), I want to thank everyone from the US, Czech Republic, India, Ecuador, Egypt, Indonesia, Argentina, Poland, Great Britain, Hong Kong, Afghanistan, France, Jordan, Portugal, and Singapore who has been reading. Just to creep you out with the wonders of Google Analytics (a program that tracks from where people have visited the blog) a little bit more, thanks also to readers from South Dakota, Minnesota, Nevada, Missouri, Iowa, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Washington, Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas, Oklahoma, Illinois, Wisconsin, Alabama, Florida, and NewHampshire.

Coming on Tuesday: Tena and the last goodbyes

Fiestas, Baños, Zapatos

Alright everyone, the goal is to not go to bed until I have brought this blog into the present. I would give myself 15 minutes until I decide to abandon that goal and go to bed, but we´ll see...

Alright, so after our return from Cotocachi, we entered into the week of the fiestas de Quito. For the majority of the city, the week means bullfights, concerts, and drunken debauchery in the streets and the prospect of a week-long party went more or less the same for me in the months leading up to it. The only problem was that Dec. 6, the official date of the fiesta, celebrates the day the Spanish arrived in Quito. What isn´t usually discussed is that following their arrival, they proceeded to rape, plunder, and murder the already established Incan empire in the area. For that reason I´d been hearing from my family and from meetings with our kids in my internship that really, the fiestas de Quito weren´t something to be celebrated in the usual way. In that spirit, I spent most of my fiestas de Quito finishing my independent study project (which is entirely finished and turned in at this point, more later) and attending rock concerts at Quitu Raymi and Quitofest, both huge rock festivals fighting against the Spanish-centric history of the holiday. In one tiny aside, we also decided to get our shoes shined for the first time by the kids who have been asked us for 4 months. Rebecca´s shoes turned out really well, so when the girl told me that, yes, in fact she did know how to polish the suede on my shoes, I accepted the offer. After the very first stroke of her brush and the sight of my already stained shoes, she quickly beckoned over 4 of her shoe-shining comrades. Within seconds I had an army of shoe-shiners, all equally willing to water-stain and incorrectly color my shoes. They look awful right now, but don´t worry, I had to pay the most for them because it took so much powder and oil to ruin them.

The week passed more or less normally, with more activity, noise, and visitors in the city before we left for Baños on Friday. Baños is one of the places in Ecuador that people always ask, "Have you visited it yet?", so we´ve all felt pretty obligated to visit. Baños sits more or less on the transition between the Andes and the Amazon, with some famous thermal baths thrown in. Baños is also right next to the volcano Tungarahua which has destroyed the city several times in the past. Tungarahua is actually erupting right now, as we could see from the bus as we approached the town, but it was too cloudy while we were actually in Baños to see eruption or the lava during the night. We (Anna, Kristen, Danielle (a friend from Carleton volunteering in Ecuador for a month), and myself (Marge and her, our, friend Rebecca got there later that night)) got to Baños on Friday afternoon, checked into our hostel, and explored the city a bit. By some strange coincidence Friday night was fiestas de Baños (my 4th city fiesta) and we enjoyed some street dancing and canelazo drinking. The next morning Kristen, Danielle, and I left for a bike ride through the mountains with a very tentative goal of reaching Puyo, a town officially in the rainforest, out of the mountains, and 60 km away. The entire bike ride was fantastically beautiful and at one point I just had to decide that I´d taken enough pictures of picturesque waterfalls. When we´d reached the end of our bike renter-provided map much earlier than we were supposed to have arrived, we just decided to keep going until Puyo. Afterall, how sweet is it to be able to say you biked out of the Andes mountains into the Amazon rainforest. The trek was longer and much, much more uphill than we´d been told, but we arrived in Puyo around sunset, just in time to see the Andes looming above us far in the distance. Needless to say, we caught a bus back to Baños...60 km was definitely enough for me.

The next morning, while Anna, Margaret, and Rebecca got massages, Danielle, Kristen, and I decided to go bridge jumping. It was more or less like bungee jumping, only the cord didn´t bounce us back, we just fell for 150 feet (from the 300 ft bridge) until the rope caught us and we swung under the bridge. It was a really fantastic experience and I can´t wait to try real bungee jumping. I may or may not have punched myself in the face during the fall and blacked out, but unfortunately, the difference between blacking out and falling 150 feet is very minute, and I can´t really decide what happened. Nevertheless, we all enjoyed our falls and I got a full body massage as a reward afterward.

This week I not only finished my 24-page independent study project paper in Spanish along with an 8 page final in Spanish, but was actually content with both of them upon their completion. The completion of those looming projects was kind of a shock, leading to a "well, what do I do now?" crisis. Tonight we also cooked dinner for all of our families and had a great time. We made chili, enchiladas, salad, guacamole, various appetizers, and wine (the most crucial part of the dinner as it turns out) and everything was met with great success. We cooked/shopped all afternoon and despite some unnecessary stress for the last week, I had a great time drinking and cooking with everyone. After the dinner we received the shirts we designed to represent our term (you´ll see me wearing it plenty) and watched a quick CD of pictures from the program. Although the beginning of the end has been an ongoing process for a while now, tonight I actually had to say goodbye to important people from the program and my friends´families...I don´t think I like this "goodbye probably for forever" thing.

On a concluding note, and to be continued later, tomorrow is the last day of my internship. I´m more than a little worried about leaving my kids, even though this entire week has been something of an emotional rollercoaster as they alternate between hair-wrenchingly bad behavior and tear-inducing moments of incredible interactions. The low point definitely came today when, as I was saying goodbye to Julio for the day (I really need to describe Julio and his situation one-on-one, just because I can´t quite write it out yet) and he apparently had missed the memo that "Nata" was leaving tomorrow. Julio and I have become very much like brothers and when he asked if we were doing zancos next Monday and I had to explain that I wouldn´t be there next Monday, his surprise that I would be in the US on Monday absolutely broke my heart. If the walk home today was as difficult as it was, maybe tomorrow I´ll just take the bus.

I also put a ton of pictures on the site, so check that out. Juan Car was in charge of my camera tonight at the dinner so I´ll be posting all of those great pictures after I get back from Tena next Tuesday. See everyone soon!

Coming soon: Last day of the internship, Tena, and closing remarks

Cotocachi+Fiestas de Quito+Baños=you might want to take a seat

Alright, pay attention everyone, a blog post of this magnitude is what happens when you neglect to update during times of frenzy...

Last Thursday, the 29th, we left for our last class trip to Otavalo and Cotocachi. Otavalo is one of the top tourist testinations in Ecuador because of its huge artesanal market but Cotocachi is the name of the Cantón (county) and community around Otavalo. Although these communities embraced tourism earlier and now have a larger tourism infrastructure than most Ecuadorian towns, all of the tourism was extraordinarily-well integrated into the normal, daily life.

The first thing we did upon our arrival in Otavalo was to visit Jambi Huasi, a medical clinic that offers both traditional forms of medicine and the more modern, occidental medical practices. We talked with some of the healers, watched Martha, our program director, receive a medical diagnosis involving an egg and about a gallon of oil, and was spiritually cleaned by the "shaman" of the clinic. After that we visited an Andean instrument workshop and an alpaca workshop. Everyone in this community spoke Quichua, usually as a first language, and the incredibly ancient couple who ran the alpaca workshop told us in their best Spanish that they had been working on the same sides of their yarn-making machine for over 50 years...50 years working on the exact same side of the exact same machine, wow.

That afternoon we met our host families for the weekend. I stayed with Anna and Emma since there weren´t enough houses for each of us to stay independently. Our family was fantastic, María (the mother), Carlos (our dad), and Isabel (the 10-year-old daughter) were all very welcoming and tried to include us in the family as much as possible. Our first activity was to help with dinner, where María laughed in a very endearing way at every single thing we did. Cutting the tomatos? Not right. Making juice? Definitely wrong. We had a really fun time talking and learning some Quichua (most of which I´ve forgotten at this point).

The next day we visited la Asamblea de Unidad Cantonal de Cotacachi (Assembly for "County" Unity), a really important citizen-directed body in Cotacachi. We were only there for the opening ceremony, but it was interesting to see so much citizen participation. It was also cool that the entire proceedings were carried out in both Spanish and Quichua, something very rare even in Quichua-heavy areas like Cotacachi. After the assembly we headed to el Lago Cuicocha, a huge lake in the caldera of an ancient volcano. When the volcano exploded thousands of years ago, the mountain collapsed upon itself, created the lake. The volcano then erupted again, giving rise to the two islands in the middle. We took some pictures and took a boat ride around the islands before lunch...definitely the most important part of this day.

Although I´d eaten cuy (guinea pig) prior to this visit, I´d only ever eaten it as left-overs heated up in our microwave, never fresh and it´s it complete form. That all changed the day at Cuicocha when several of us ordered cuy for lunch. Cuy is actually a really good, really unique tasting meat. It was hard to eat because it´s served like chicken, so we had to peal the meat off the little guinea pig legs. Because the brain is traditionally eaten, I tried a little hoping there isn´t a guinea pig strain of mad-cow disease. Unfortunately, the restaurant was out of roasted cockroaches for dessert...

That night we had a dinner and dance/music performance with our families. The next morning we left the family (and Cuchari, the family dog) for the famous Otavalo market. Even after 4 months of Ecuadorian artesanal markets, Otavalo was an impressive/overwhelming experience. I think I managed to finish most of my Christmas shopping but it really was a little too much. When a town of 20,000 hosts the largest market in the country every Saturday, you know you´re in for something big. We shopped until we literally dropped and headed home to rest for fiestas de Quito.

Sorry I´m not doing very well on updating, with one week left here things are getting a little hectic and I just haven´t been able to find the time or interest to keep the blog updated. Right now I´m just too tired to catch up, so I´ll try very hard to bring you up to date with the fiestas de Quito and Baños tomorrow. Ciao!

Coming very, very soon: Fiestas de Quito, the inherent evil of fiestas de Quito, Baños, and the continuied ruination of my shoes

Rock concerts with Mom

Alright everyone, sorry I haven´t posted in several geological ages, but for the first time I´m going to use that famous study abroad excuse that I´ve just been too busy. With that in mind, I´m posted a couple quick stories before I leave for Baños in a half hour and then I´ll have a monstrous update on Sunday when I get back.

I´ll start with last Sunday when Charo and I went to what she described as "an indigenous women´s market in the park." This week is the fiesta de Quito and I was pretty sure that there was a large rock festival in the park she was talking about, but I also figured that she probably knew what was going on. So we climbed up to Parque Itchimbia and as we crested the hill, an field of thousands of moshing, black-clad Ecuadorian youth appeared before us. I started to think, "Uh oh Charo, what are you going to do now?" but before the thought could even form in my mind she was squealing, "¡Que lindo!" How could I have forgotten that Charo loves seeing anyone under 30 doing anything other than committing a crime? Not only did she love the amount of youth participation at the event but claimed to honestly enjoy the screaming metal...who is this woman?

That night when we got home we talked about Ecuadorian politics, as we often do, and both got a little teary as we talked about her hope for her country and the future of the Ecuadorian people. As I´ve mentioned, Ecuador is in a process of rewriting the constitution right now and the Asamblea Constituyente (the body charged with writing said constitution) was inaugarated last week. The assembly will be held in Montechristi, a small town in Manabí where one of the country´s greatest heroes, Eloy Alfaro, was born. Besides this pretty sweet symbolism, the placement also follows through on Correa´s promises of decentralization and political inclusion. So, Sunday was the inagauration and Correa gave his speech in front of Alfaro´s newly constructed tomb. He based his speech off a letter from one of Alfaro´s captains, telling his general, "don´t worry, everything is ok, we´re upholding everything you worked for." Imagine the power of that! Charo and I both agreed that the US could use a leader as charismatic and uplifting as Correa.

One final little story from the week, Juan Carlos called me son...which affected me much more than I would have thought. "Hijo" is kind of a general term of endearment but he never uses it like that and called me the other night saying, "son, we´re meeting in the house in 30 minutes." Nothing big or special, but I definitely feel as though this was like, my last step to being accepted and integrated into my family.

And with that I leave you to head to Baños. I´ll catch everyone up on everything when I get back on Sunday. Hope you´re all doing well, I´ll be back in a week and a half!

Coming soon: Cotocachi, Baños, more stories from fiestas de Quito, the impending termination of my program, and the ruination of my shoes