the beginning
we moved in with our family- fabiola and paul and andres. in a little town of la esperanza, barely a town. houses surrounding a park and a church (we would soon learn that every town was houses, surrounding a park and a church.) our “mother” was more urban than the others. she had no cows for us to milk, no eggs to collect from chickens. we watched television at night and she let me wash my clothes in her machine. they weren’t poor, not rich either. paul was immediately taken with a. he wanted to know everything about him. wanted to wear his watch and sunglasses and wanted to talk to us all day, though our spanish left much to be desired.
my ECUADOR
la familiaeveryday for two months we got up, ate a boiled egg, bread, cheese, boiled milk and fresh juice. the fresh juice was always my favorite part. the boiled milk the least. towards the end of the two months, it became a game between a and me. i’d eat the yolk out of his egg if he’d eat the cheese. one would be on the lookout while the other dumped half the milk down the drain. i should have felt horrible about wasting the milk, but i drank as much as i could. we took hot showers under an electric faucet, and we threw our toilet paper in the trash. we met with our group of three others and tried to learn spanish, tried to keep warm, tried to take it all in.
it's electric- boogie woogiela esperanza was cold and windy, but the sun was warm and when you stepped out of our front door, there were two volcanoes and the city of quito staring back at us from across the valley. it was beautiful.
everyday at lunch time we went to Dona Rosita’s house. She cooked us chicken, rice, beans, potatoes, soup. Everything she made was delicious and warm. She may have been the best cook in town. On a special occasion, she made us jello (to drink!) and fried potato patties with tuna and beets and carrots and aji and it tasted wonderful. everyday the food was different, but with rosita it was always good. once, we cooked for her and anyone else who would come to eat. we made black bean burgers, potato salad, brownies. it was our first taste of home and it was fantastic and we ate until we couldn’t move.
the fiestas came and went. it was mostly noisy parades, filled with pickpockets and men relieving themselves in the street. there was people selling food everywhere and as usual, animals everywhere. we watched a bullfight and shared drinks with strangers and did our best not to seem like tourists, like somehow we belonged. one night our mother and paul set down their coffee and grabbed us and ran out the door. we heard fireworks and walked down the block. there was loud music and dancing and the stale smell of alcohol. we hadn’t known that the whole day our mother had been working with the rest of the neighborhood to cook and prepare for the local fiesta. we danced, a. drank trago and chicha and we tried to balance ourselves in the commotion. two small drunken indigenous women crowned me with their fedora and held onto us to dance.
moving to our home
one day, we moved. onto the real adventure, i suppose. a friend of ours convinced us he had a “bus” that could take us all back to quito to prepare to move. 10 of us piled into a small van that morning, 10 of us and at least three times that many suitcases. into about 6 seats. better than a real bus i suppose.
the “real” buses in ecuador were a familiar mode of transportation. little did we know how much we would be riding them. in most towns they were 17 cents, or not more than a quarter. and worth every penny of that. buses were not limited to people, nor were they limited by the amount of passengers they would take. the windows were always closed tight because of the mistaken belief that outside air was dangerous. the buses were always filled children, animals, drunks, and vendors. ah, the vendors. every bus had at least one. at least one man selling food, or miracle cures, toothbrushes, de-worming medicines, how-to books, books to teach you english, AIDS information. one of my favorites was two guys who got on the subway with a boombox on one shoulder and rapped about all the good things in ecuador and then passed a tray around.
our home in mariano acosta was beautiful. indescribable. but i’ll try. we lived at 10,000 ft up in the andes mountains. it was a tiny little village nestled into a valley there, with lush green mountains, a river and a waterfall that was at least two hundred feet. there were cows, and chickens and horses and pigs everywhere. sometimes i would look around and feel as though i was in a dream. surrounded by such beauty. mountains, rolling hills and fields, waterfalls, rivers. every view was picturesque. if the earth can be this beautiful, this awe-inspiring, it makes me wonder what God has done with the heavens,
a. and i grew a fondness for pigs. we had our favorite cinnamon pigs, which were rare. they were a pretty brown color, and one of them was enormous. most of the pigs were black, with babies and big floppy ears. one we like in particular was black and white, which we nicknamed oreo. he was short and stubby. there was always two pigs in our yard, which we named clyde and earl. they did nothing but wallow in the mud, but they were good company and we fed them our scraps and leftovers. despite our love for the pigs in our town, we knew where they would all end up one day. at one of two fritadas in town, where at least once a week the fattest pig would be hung from a hook, its hair blow torched away, and all but the head stripped down to be fried. describing this now is horrifying, but at the time it was somehow a source of comic relief. none of the children in town ever seemed bothered by the sight of a bloated pig, legs in the air, being blow torched. and the dogs all waited to lap up the blood. in order to understand our town, these details are important.
other details about where we lived: our house was moldy. it was damp and cold, like a basement. we had a small space heater and an old electric blanket left to us by a former volunteer. the most incorrect thing everybody assumes about living on the equator, is that it was extremely hot. 10,000 feet up, nothing is hot. most days were damp and cold, and so cloudy that the clouds rolled in right up to our front porch. everyone in town wore big wool ponchos, rubber boots, hats and warm sweatpants. nobody dressed like they “lived on the equator.” but there were those days, they came at least once a week, when the sun would shine and the breeze would stop and it would be hot.
on those days, i ran outside to do all of our laundry and then lay in the hammock while it dried. after a soaking morning with my arms in laundry buckets, the sun would shine so strong that it rarely took more than an hour or two for the laundry to completely dry on the line. and i would dry in minutes. i loved those days. i would be reminded of the sun’s distance and strength on those days, and the reason that i had brought so many bottles of sunblock.
most days were cold, though, and unfortunately our house stayed cold too. there was always the presence of flies, which i could convince the neighborhood kids to run after with a fly swatter. hardly any other bugs, much to my relief, save a giant centipede i once found marching toward my pillow. which i promptly sprayed with hair spray and threw a brick at while screaming at the children in my house “help me! find me something heavy!! kill it kill it!!”
outside of our house was an overgrown yard, well fertilized by all the animals that grazed there. we had a fence that went around our house and the clinic next to it where i was supposed to work.
across the street from us were several families that lived in large houses. i could never keep it all straight- who was related to whom, and what all of their names were. it is not uncommon to meet someone in ecuador several times without them ever revealing their name. as is human nature i suppose, a. and i tried to remember people based on where they lived, what they wore (this didn’t change often), what they brought us, or what animals they were usually seen with.
the majority of people in our town were indigenous, more than would like to admit spoke quechua, or kichwa the indigenous language. they were such warm people, but not in a carefree smiling way. they lived a very closed culture, but were so generous and sincere that although we did not know many of them closely, we bonded with them in simple ways. it was the kind of warmth that demanded you sit down in their kitchen while they fry you an egg because you are too skinny. i don’t know if i made great success in ecuador, but i know that my neighbors appreciated us being there. every week we were showered with peas, milk, potatoes, cheese, boysenberries, lima beans, potatoes, potatoes, potatoes. being in an agricultural community, i think they may have feared we’d starve without their generous offerings. we accepted graciously, and ate as much as we could, or shared it with others. i learned to return the favor and whenever i would spend a day at home baking, i would rush out to share what i had made with anybody that i ran into “downtown”. in this way, my neighbors tried cinnamon rolls, beer bread, lemon cake, pancakes and muffins. and of course, cookies.
food
the majority of the diet of people in our town was potatoes, beans, rice and meat. fresh vegetables and fruit were hard to come by so far up (and oh, how i delighted in every kind of fruit and vegetable when i was down from the mountain!). but tomatoes were always fresh and potatoes were always plentiful. our neighbors ate chicken and pork on occasion, though our main source of meat was canned tuna in oil, which we came to not mind the oil so much since it added an extra bit of protein, and we both were losing weight. we also ate fried eggs, which was common in the community as well, though it would be a long time before either of us could stomach another hard boiled egg after having eaten them everyday in training. our one big treat is that every so often we would sneak down to the supermaxi in the city and bring back nice, cleanly packaged chicken breast from the grocery store. supermaxi was a very americanized grocery store with brightly lit aisles and pre-packaged food and treats that were unaffordable on our seven dollar a day salary. although i often drooled over the entenmanns donuts, flown in from the states, i couldn’t part with the 6.99 that they wanted for them. but we went to supermaxi for the things we felt we “couldn’t live without”: pickles, wheat bread, tortillas, spices, boxed skim milk, real coffee and tea, liquid hand soap. it was overpriced, and unnecessary and looking back on it now, i probably wouldn’t have gone so much. but it was one of those indulgences we couldn’t help to enjoy, especially when we had to go to the city anyway for mail, money and a little sanity and time away from livestock.
being in a country like ecuador in this time, it is difficult to completely distance yourself from the rest of the world. we were in one of the most isolated sites, and yet, two and a half hours away by bus and truck, we could find ourselves at a payless shoes store and kentucky fried chicken. we had cell phones, and i won’t say we refused to use them. at times i wished it was rougher. felt somehow better when our electricity and water would go out, like that’s how it should be. we were spoiled by our electric shower, indoor bathroom and thick mattress. but we also woke up everyday to live in a completely spanish speaking community to faced gastrointestinal woes and we dealt with poverty, frustration, cultural differences.
work and vacation.
work began in the schools neither of us having any training in formal education didn’t really know where to start. But about a month after being in town, we decided it was time to stop fixing up the house, (there was only so much that could be done). A. went to the elementary school to start teaching english classes and art classes. Both which proved to be exercises in patience, and the lessons learned were less permanent than the memories created. the children adored him, they shouted his name in the street and followed him on his afternoon jogs. They wanted to be all around him, touching him, talking to him, be acknowledged by this virtual gringo celebrity.
The high school was completely different. I barged into classrooms filled with awkward quiet teenagers who would rather just be left alone. at least, it seemed that way for awhile. the younger classes stared at me, mouthed off a little, mostly tried to ignore me. the older classes i warmed to, maybe because there were less students. i had two girls in my 5th and 6th (equivalent to 11th and 12th) who were pregnant, which made it a little more challenging as i tried with a straight face to convince my students of abstinence, protection and their constitutional sexual rights. my older students listened to me, wanted to know about me, even came to my house on occasion to ask me questions (though never on the subjects i taught). as the months went on, i saw the older students less and less, which made the job more challenging, to work with the middle grades.
side work consisted of trying my best to attend women's groups that had already formed. they were community banks, groups of women who pooled together their money to help each other out with small business projects. we learned about this in training, how to manage these groups, but i was merely an observer, as they had been meeting long before i arrived in town. they always asked me to contribute ideas, they wanted to know what my next projects would be. i never had an easy time with these groups. i was full of ideas, but tended to fall back on the easiest offering, which was cooking classes. come to my house and i will teach you to make banana bread!
cooking classes became a regular ritual in my home, and for as many times as i tried to turn it into a health class, more often then not, i was the student as they taught me the correct way to mix batter or grease a pan. they however were wowed with my cupcake tins and aluminum foil, both creations none of these women had seen. i baked in a giant pot on top of my stove. with one brick on the inside to put pans on, and a brick over the lid to keep it air-tight, there was hardly anything i couldn’t bake in my “country oven.” eventually the kids wanted in on the cooking too, and so i started cookie day every wednesday, which mostly consisted of 5-10 kids fighting over ingredients to mix and pour, and then they played outside while i waited for the batches to bake, and then called them to choose one or two cookies at a time.
other work, was lots of ideas. the high school wanted more computers, the elementary school wanted any time we had to offer. we were sort of like handymen in a strange country, seemingly able to try anything. fix a computer, draw a poster, read a bottle with instructions in english, show the best way to do something, or at least our version of it. people always wanted to know about america, and we were always eager to understand why they did what they did in ecuador, so in that way, i think some of our goals were accomplished.
my work at the high school dwindled toward the end. they were often busy with school programs and such, and i couldn’t think of any more topics i could handle in spanish beyond what i had already done: english, sex ed, health, alcohol, nutrition, cleanliness, america, cooking. i tried to offer mini classes in my home, but seldom had takers. towards the end i concentrated on three things. i took over a.’s classes at the elementary school, which consisted of buying lots of art supplies and xeroxing 150x lots of different activities. i also started a youth group in my last few months, with the hope that they could join onto a network of youth groups that were starting up in northern imbabura. (they did! after i left) once again, the main aspect of my youth group was coking classes, but we met every tuesday and Wednesday and i talked to them about their visions and ideas for the community. i met with these 10 kids in a way i hadn’t been able to reach my classrooms of teenagers. in addition to cooking, we learned financial responsibility (pooling together our money to buy ingredients!), i taught them aerobics and dance steps, and anything they wanted to know about my culture. they taught me about themselves, their families, pop culture and what they wanted to do with their lives. my third and final project (which literally continued until the day after i had left my site) was tutoring jesus. jesus was a shy 18 year old who’s mother asked if i would help him learn english. he was earnest and independent. he had gone to high school in another town to get a better education and had lived by himself since he was 15 in order to do so. so he actually wanted to learn and go away to college, more motivated than the majority of my students. he came over every day for about 6 weeks and we went all the way through an english workbook. the day after i said goodbye to everybody, he met me in the city to go over one last lesson in the park.
vacation
we took a few vacations while in ecuador, to the beach, to the amazon jungle, to the city. the beach was my favorite because it was hot and fun and touristy, all the things a beach should be. we ate seafood till we busted and drank tropical cocktails on the beach. it was what i consider our one real vacation while we were down there, a much needed break from the cold.
my favorite people:
in my town, i got to know many faces, but few that i interacted with regularly. angelica, who was my neighbor across the street is still the person that to this day i hold dearly in my heart and hope to visit her one day. she was married at 15, had two kids shortly there after, was completely illiterate (couldn’t recognize letters or numbers) and was completely gracious. we first met when she had come begging at my house, and offering to do laundry. i was determined not to give away money, and to do my own laundry, so it was quite awhile before we became close friends. But later on, she was taking a reading class and wanted my help. i tried as best i could but she eventually quit. but then she started coming over every day, or i would go to her house. we were both alone most of the time, just two women needing each other’s company. sometimes we did laundry together, and sometimes she did my dishes, even though i told her not to. her sons, bryan and darwin were always in my house anyways, so it was almost natural that she began to follow them over. her husband was very nice too, a considerate man, who always had questions like, “what does pizza taste like?” (so i made him a pizza one day). one of my favorite memories from this time is when their whole family asked me to go mora picking with them, and so we spent the afternoon in the fields, and around the waterfall picking bags full of moras (similar to boysenberries). this was a rare moment that i just felt like part of a family, no longer a worker, or a tourist, but a neighbor.
my other favorite people in town, include Susanna who was Angelica’s older sister who owned the fruit shop in town. She was generous and always shared fruit with me, especially if it was something i’d never seen before. she taught me how to crochet properly and when i began my youth group, her motivated 14-year old Johanna was my number one go-to person. we held our meetings in the fruit store and susanna let us use her stove to cook on in the back room. This family was also very generous and kind to us, though not afraid to ask us what we would give them when we left.
Rosario, who was outcast from one of the groups of women i attended, was like a grandmother to me. she was one of the few people i had lengthy conversations with about life and family. I would help her with embroidery designs and we made shampoo together. she always smiled with her crooked and missing teeth, beneath her hat. she was a lovely person to have come over, though terrible as it to say, she always smelled terribly of the pigs which she tended to.
Ines was another woman who treated me like family. She always wanted me to come visit and she would feed me from her shop and show me around her house. she was comforting to me, always seemed to know when i needed taking care of with a cup of hot coffee, sprite for my stomach or a local remedy for my sore throat. she also seemed at times to have ulterior motives for our friendship, as she was one of the richer women in our town, and not only asked prying questions but seemed as though she wanted something from me. i didn’t mind though, as i tried to ignore that i knew she feuded with others in town, and probably ripped them off. in the end, i wanted to buy embroidery work from her, and bartered with the most expensive thing i had, and the thing she wanted the most : my bed. i gave it to her in secret, slipping her the keys to my house on my way out of town so that nobody knew she was taking it.
one of my other favorite memories was easter in my village. The easter holiday was a strange one, unlike a way i had ever celebrated before, but i loved it. hundreds of us clamored for an hour to get into the church until the doors were opened and the mob rushed in. holy water spilled on my legs and people shoved and yelled, but eventually we all made our way in. there was nothing sacred about the way things were done in a mass in ecuador. receiving ashes, or any type of procession or holiday included people barging their way to the front. some people reached out to touch the priest to receive a blessing, others brought him guests. on this particular easter, there were at least 4 baptisms and a wedding included in the service. afterwards, we marched around town, singing and praying and listening to the stations of the cross until finally at the top of a hill, they made three statues and three men climbed onto them. all the way through the crowd, a man whipped himself and anyone else who got to close, as penance. On the way back to the church, all of the children were holding torches, which led to some dangerous fireplay. After all of the ceremonies there were three parties in town. My neighbor angelica and i walked arm in arm, going from one dance to another in the dark, but not really dancing at any of them, only watching. it was a beautiful night.
One of the last things that was a favorite indulgence of mine was the markets. our town was too small to have a market of its own, but traveling down the mountain to a nearby town, i was greeted with meat markets, flower markets, dry goods, fish markets, and most of all: produce markets. I loved the markets. Even the meat market with its unidentifiable piles of animal parts, cows heads lying on benches, animals strung up everywhere, it was gross and fantastic all at the same time. The flower market was ironically under the same roof as the meat market (maybe to counteract the smell?) and was mountains and mountains of roses and sunflowers and bouquets, none of them costing more than a couple dollars. dozen roses: $1. Often I would buy myself one big sunflower or roses just because i could. they were beautiful and fresh. in the flower markets there would also be baskets collecting all the loose rose petals, to be placed at the feet of the virgin.
cow head in a bag outside the market
produce markets were an endless source of delight for me. all of the freshest fruits and vegetables, so many i could never carry everything i wanted. i had to be selective in what i carried back up my mountain, knowing things that pineapples and watermelons were too cumbersome, something that could only be purchased if the fruit truck drove by my house that wednesday. all of the colors and smells, they blended together and made everything enticing. not to mention the prices. i wanted to eat some many avocados for 15 cents apiece until i no longer liked avocados. 1 dollar on the street could buy you two pounds of strawberries, more than i ever knew what to do with. tomatoes would fill a bag for fifty cents.
i also really enjoyed the clothing and jewelry markets, though this was much more of a tourist atmosphere, where some of the vendors even spoke english. every kind of beaded jewelry, colorful skirts and handbags and clothing. the fedoras worn by men and women could be found here,. as well as the shoes and traditional clothing that i loved.
my Ecuador was a colorful one. it was noisy and filled with unique smells and tastes and frustrations and small joys. while in ecuador, i learned to knit, to crochet, to share food with my neighbors. i learned to share a truck ride with sheep, a bus ride with roosters. i grew accustomed to wide eyed children with dark faces and missing teeth who would stare at me inches from my face or yell gringa gringa, while pulling on my clothes. My ecuador was an ecuador i had set out to help, but it became more a lesson in learning. it's cliche to say that i found myself in ecuador. or that i learned so much about myself. I didn't find myself. I found a culture, a people who are generous, who love life and will drink wine with you to forget their sorrows. My neighbor angelica used to say something along the lines of, "we got a bum deal, but this is our life." I found anxiety and frustration, but I also found beautiful smiles on my neighbors' faces, that invited me in for coffee. Or children, coming into my house every day to ask me what I'm doing. My Ecuador was confusion, at the communication that would fall in the cracks in the floor when nobody understood each other, or delight in conversations that would occur completely in spanish without missing a beat. Ecuador is diverse, and beautiful. There is ugliness there, there is racism and women who run the household and businesses but cannot earn equal respect as men. There is hypocrisy and crime and a collectivistic culture that seems to be drenched in half-truths in order to save face. But there is music, and there is dancing, and there is the comfort of a warm poncho and a friendly greeting with every stranger on the street. My Ecuador boasted a rainbow of different families, different foods and traditions. The Ecuador that I fell in love with, that stayed in my heart, is the stillness of the mountains, the quiet Saturday mornings in the city, the fresh fruit and hot, bitter coffee. It is the people that I cherished most. I know to my community they probably saw me as loud or impatient, wondering why I would come all that way to teach a few classes. Throughout all the craziness, all the long days and spanish lessons, all the goals, with failures and successes, when I think about my time, my year on the equator, I am happy. Happy knowing that there are places in this world like that, and that one can find such joy in learning about the lives of others. my ECUADOR
