A Taste of America

Thanksgiving in Ecuador, which I thought might make me feel a bit lonely and homesick, turned out to be one of the happiest nights I´ve spent in this country. Almost all of the volunteers got together with Byron and Monica--UBECI´s founders and leaders--at their house for an elaborate dinner prepared in part by all of us. Before digging into a feast of pumpkin soup, two types of meat, an incredible homemade stuffing, fresh mashed potatoes, bowls of cooked veggies, delicious pasta and fruit salads, the ever-popular panadería bread of Ecuador, two different kinds of pies, and even cranberry sauce, we all went around the table and talked about things we´re thankful for. Even the Ecuadorians, English and Austrian at the table took part. Although many of us said a lot of the same things, usually some modified version of "I´m so thankful to be here experiencing the Ecuadorian culture and for all of us being together," the time felt so special and it was really the closest I had ever felt to the rest of the volunteers. It is such a wonderful thing to listen to people 100% and to recieve that genuine attention in return when it´s your turn to speak. As yesterday was the first day of warm weather after what feels like weeks of rain, my Austrian friend said "I am so thankful for the sun."

This picture definitely doesn´t do our meal justice--worthy of royalty, in my opinion--but here we are before the first course :). (About an hour later, I would literally feel more full than I ever had in my entire life....)


On a somewhat bittersweet note, I offically have one work week left with UBECI--after that, it´s about a week and a half of traveling and then boarding the plane. I´m so torn right now--it´s almost impossible for me to imagine leaving the kids and the staff of UBECI and most especially my host family. I love practicing Spanish, I love traveling and I have learned and experienced so many new things in this country that I couldn´t even begin to explain how much I feel like I´ve been changed for the better. On the other hand, I truly cannot wait to be home on December 16th. Any sounds or decorations or activities that are in any way Christmas related make me long so much for my extended family get-togethers, caroling in my neighborhood, maybe seeing snow, and most definitely seeing my best friends again. I´ve been subconciously counting down the days for a while.

It hasn´t quite hit me yet how soon I won´t be here anymore, but I am trying to mentally prepare myself for some of the craziest transitions and hardest goodbyes of my life so far in the next few weeks. I do remember how jumbled and emotional I felt last summer when I came home from Paraguay...and I guess there´s no true preparation for that. But, as much as I´ll miss Ecuador, I really can´t express how excited I am to see Arlington again.

So that´s that....

PS. I will FINALLY have some pictures of the incredible kids of UBECI next week--I can take my camera to the markets my last few days! I am so excited to share with everyone the most IMPORTANT thing I´ve been doing for the last 3 1/2 months. Stay tuned ;).

Fútbol, Music and So Much Rain

I thought it was worth mentioning that on Wednesday I went to my first ever soccer game: Quito´s LIGA vs. some dumb team from Argentina in the quarterfinals of the South American Cup! Let me tell you, these people are CRAZY about their fútbol. When LIGA came out onto the field, random people in the stands were setting off fireworks. There were guard dogs between the tiny section designated for the opposing team and Quiteño LIGA fans. The other team got rolls and rolls and rolls of toilet paper (THAT´S why there´s never any in the bathrooms, I thought). Also, I can´t quite imagine how I´d feel if tens of thousands of people screamed "HIJO DE PUTA" (that´d be "son of a bitch") in unison at the sound of my name. Sorry, fútbol players of Argentina. Anyway, with our gringo blessing, LIGA dominated, so we´ll also be seeing the semifinals live in a few days!



My (relatively new) friend Alex, another gap year kid from Maryland, and I have been getting together to sing and play guitar a lot recently-- we´re covering a few boy-girl duets, and I actually can feel my mood improving because before a few weeks ago, I hadn´t really sung at all. We managed to pull ourselves together for a "concert" for Alex´s host mom´s birthday on Thursday...and even though some of the songs were pretty rough, I had the best time! It was so liberating to really sing. I´m really exciting for these jam sessions to continue, hopefully until I leave. Alex has even taught me three chords on the guitar-- that´s three more than I knew two weeks ago...!

In other news, rain has been a virtually constant presence in my life since around 3 pm Saturday afternoon. I have never felt the need to use the phrase "soaked to the bone" in a literal sense, but this week just might tip me over the edge. I really don´t think I´ve ever experienced anything like it! But the weather hasn´t stopped us-- I and my friend Anna took a trip to the Otavalo artisan market on Saturday (my final touristy souvenir shopping opportunity, I think) and a bunch of us went to QuitoFest, an annual free music concert, on Sunday. We became totally drenched both days but had good times anyway. Still hoping this rain will not continue for the rest of my time in the Quito (only 2 weeks and 5 days, if my plans stay as they are now! WHOA.)....

November Nonsense

A rundown of all of the exciting things that have happened so far this month:

On the 5th, our superiors threw a Halloween party, although the holiday is not actually celebrated in this country. My host mom was kind enough to provide me with a costume. I have no idea what I was, but I liked it! Here I am...dressed up as something...with my friend Natasha:


On November 6th and 7th, my friends Karl and Alex and I stayed in the town of Mindo, famous for its butterfly gardens and ziplining!

Here I am, being the scaredest I have ever been in my entire life....


Alex, me, and some ginormous butterflies.


There were also hummingbirds everywhere! Lots of bird feeders all around town for tourists´ viewing pleasure. They are so tiny and move SO quickly! I don´t think I had ever seen a hummingbird in real life before!


As for work, I have basically assumed the job of resident market homework support girl for the rest of my time here. It is probably the most frustrating task I have taken on in my entire life-- it is hard to break the culture barrier in terms of the education system, sometimes the language, the sheer absurdity of most assignments, that I don´t know a lot of these kids very well, and also that they just don´t know where to begin most of the time. I am learning to possess an incredible patience, which is a very welcomed lesson, and I feel more prepared for the challenge every day.

¡Feriado!

After a seriously not-so-stellar week (several days of silence due to illness, 3 trips to the immigraton office, a new Visa that I STILL have to fix, working in the markets very little, some seriously ridiculous UBECI drama...et cetera?), I was super excited to celebrate the Ecuadorian holiday this weekend with one of my many families. Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead--kind of the Latin American equivalent of Halloween, but a little more symbolic in some countries) is this Tuesday, and basically the entire country had been in feriado mode since Friday night and will be until Wednesday.

My host mom, Diego (my older host brother) and I went down to the valley Tumbaco, where my host mom´s parents live, for a big family reunion on Saturday morning. The Ecuadorian tradition on Dia de los Muertos is to eat guaguas de pan, or bread in the shape of babies, with colada morada, a hot drink made of blueberries, strawberries, pineapple, and other fruits. In some areas of the country (indigenous-populated places, I imagine), locals take these foods to the grave to eat with their deceased family members. However, my family is not that into the soulsy part of the holiday and prefers to just take part in the commercial aspect :). So, after an extremely hearty lunch on Saturday afternoon, all of the cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents took a trip to the grocery store to buy an ungodly amount of flour, sugar, leavening, salt, fruit, etc. to make enough guaguas de pan and colada morada for a small army.

After many hours of labor--and a couple mess-ups along the way--we had approximately 2348579346 pieces of bread (though not all babies) and a giant cauldron of delicious fruit juice.

My "host aunt" and me kneading dough....


So...I had been told that the specialty of the house was empanadas. I had not been told that they had never actually made bread in the oven before. It took a while to perfect. But the seemingly burnt pieces were still delicious on the inside!


It got better and better every time!


My very own authentic guagua (okay, so it´s slightly burnt...and the eyes and buttons fell off in the baking process) and colada morada.


We spent the night in Tumbaco, and filled up (again) the next morning on the treats we had made the night before. I didn´t eat again until 8 pm that evening.

I had a super great time with everyone this weekend. But being with "my" entire extended Ecuadorian family made me really miss my actual extended family. It´s the "familial" feeling in general, I guess...being comfortable with friends, being in my own house, whatever. I have a while left here, but I really am looking forward to going home at this point. I don´t think that´s a good thing...and I´m hoping it´s just because I´ve had a lot of time to myself in the past several days. I guess I need to keep busy.

Volcanoes and Visas and Voices...or Not...

This Sunday, 6 of us gringos took a really fantastic trip to Quilotoa, a former volcano about 2 hours south of Quito. Although I have been with many of the volunteers for weeks now, it was still a super exciting and necessary bonding experience. We climbed (really, slid) down into the crater, stopping about every minute to look at the breathtaking view below us and kicking up clouds of dust all the way (my shirt, pants and face were about the color of the ground by the time we arrived). We kayaked in the crater´s lake, where the weather and water were perfect, and then reluctantly climbed back up (to 12,000 feet!). Opting to walk instead of ride a mule up the mountain may not have been the greatest decision at that altitude, but I was certainly proud when we finally got back to the top! We were all completely pooped by the end of the day, and I went right to sleep when I got home.

Here we are, halfway down the crater! (Photo by Ricardo Robledo.)


I then woke up at the butt crack of dawn on Monday morning to work on extending my Visa...so that I´m not deported before the end of my Ecua-adventure. After collecting everything I needed this weekend (a copy of my passport and my visa, a bank statement, proof of my flight out of the country, passport pictures, a written request to the ministry, an extension application, $30, AND the very specifically requested manila folder) I arrived at the immigration office at 8 am and was not set free until after 11:30! I have also been asked to come back again this week to pay the rest of the small fortune required for a 45-day extension (about 7x more than the $30 down payment, in case you were curious). Pretty sure that I will always plan around this Visa situation when I leave the United States in the future...either by staying less time or hopping from country to country. I really can´t even begin to imagine how the US might be about these things if countries in South America are this difficult!

I spent the rest of the day with other volunteers, and we all went up to the Panecillo where it poured and hailed on us, per usual in Quito, around 3 pm. My voice had been getting progressively raspier througout the day, which I probably should have seen as a hint to go home and not be outside in the rain. By the time I saw my host family at about 8 pm last night, I was a mute. Literally. My host mom created an Ecua-remedy for my illness, consisting of lime, cinnamon, a spoonful of honey, and boiled Coca-Cola. I may as well have been drinking opaque bile, but I had to oblige my host mother who said that I would wake up cured in the morning. Not so--I can´t make a sound! Therefore, I have taken my first sick day from work. Luckily, my friend Alex and I bought a bunch of movies last night just before going home ($1.25 each...and they actually function!), so I watched "Out of Africa" and will probably finish "El Secreto de sus Ojos" before the day is over. It´s so depressing to be such a bum! This has never really happened to me before, so I have no idea how long it will take for me to talk like a normal person again. Hopefully I will be a functioning human being again very soon!

We Cannot Direct the Wind....

Each day, the UBECI staff, my fellow volunteers and I work at a market in morning, take a break for a leisurely lunch, and then return to the markets in the afternoon. Today was obviously no different--but after we finished eating, I and my friends found ourselves exceptionally bored. It was a little before 1 pm and we weren´t due to start work again until 2, so we decided to walk through the streets of the city--pretty quickly, seemingly with purpose, I noticed--but we really had no idea where we were going. At about 1:30, we decided to head up to the market a little early, without the staff. Danny, our "boss," was working in an internet cafe, so we stopped in and told him where we were going. He smiled and just told us to be careful, so we made our way back up the hill to our work area.

Every day, we put up a tent in the area where we work. It is supposed to simulate a classroom, more or less, and is a tiny part of the scholarization process that children that come to UBECI activities undergo. Focus. Calm down. You are in a learning space, it subconciously tells these superbly energetic youth. Putting up the tent is actually a surprisingly arduous task...so my friends and I decided that we would surprise Danny and the rest of the staff by having everything ready to go when they arrived!

Somehow, with kids climbing all over us and putting tent pieces wherever they thought correct, we managed to get this ghetto thing standing. We were stupidly proud, really, that we had gotten everything ready for the kids earlier than usual and that Danny wouldn´t have to do any preparation when he arrived. Lisa and I went to the other side of the market to fill a jug with water for the kids to wash their hands--yet another daily chore that the staff wouldn´t have to do! We returned and got the hand washing station ready.

Just as I bent down to help Lisa pour our hand-washing water, I heard dozens of children--and volunteers--screaming behind me. I turned around quickly--the tent was nowhere in my line of vision, but everyone was pointing upwards....

And there it was--literally 30 feet in the air, if not higher--half of a tent, flying through the sky! Looking at it, I felt like I was in the middle of a tornado. One of the legs caught on to a wire and dangled there for a few long seconds, probably some of the scariest of my life. I knew it would inevitably come crashing down, 28 metal tubes and all--but where? On who?! Could we possibly be responsible for some serious injury today? My heart was literally doing somersaults. It was totally our fault, too, if not mine alone, as I was the volunteer with the most seniority. It really hadn´t been windy, so I had completly forgotten to tie the tent to anything!

The tent did come down from the sky very soon after. The metal rods of the tent crashed against the tin rooves of the marketplace. Pieces of the tent went EVERYWHERE. It was one of the most awkward and embarrassing experiences of my life, but none of us could stop laughing. We stood there, with all of the kids, in complete shock. Once we snapped out of it and realized no one had been hurt, we ran down to where the tent had landed to try to get the pieces together, still giggling out of complete embarrassment. We managed to find 27 of the 28 metal rods, rendering the tent completely useless in 10 seconds.

None of the staff was openly upset or angry, but it was certainly embarrassing for all of us! We explained to Danny and the others how proud we were to have had everything done before 2, and they just laughed. We are probably going to pool our money and buy a new tent for UBECI. But I´m just glad that it´s all over, and that the only damage done at the scene was to one market roof made of tarp-- one that costs $4.85 to replace.

Give `em a Break

As much as I adore our Ecuadorian kids--it really makes me happy to play, sing, talk, and paint with them at the markets every day--I am always so pleased when the weekend comes, excited for a chance to get away from all the dirt and grime, the little noses dripping with snot, the blasting reggaeton that makes your ears bleed, the vendors (adults and children alike) giving you sad looks that make it impossible not to pity them with every ounce of your being, the hour-long rides on stuffy busses to get where we need to go. I always think, phew, I´m so ready to not have to wake up at 7:30 am, to not have children hanging on my limbs...and to be CLEAN for a change! It´s not like I feel like I "deserve" it after a week of hard work or anything. I don´t. Nonetheless, it feels good.

I can escape from the little things in Quito that make me uncomfortable. From work, I can escape on the weekends. I can even leave the city if I want to and go somewhere I can actually breathe in without inhaling...opaqueness. I depart from this country in less than two months and return to one of the most well-off places on the planet where I will experience virtually complete comfort again. There will always be toilet paper and soap in the bathroom, and there will always be clean drinking water when I´m thirsty. I can wake up in the morning and put on a clean shirt that doesn´t have any holes. I never had to do my homework outside, on the floor, amongst rotten fruit or peels. Little luxuries that I usually take for granted--even here, I guess, with my own host family--are things that these 3-to-12-year-olds, evidently, rarely have access to. It seems like they never have even a short break from this unfortunate situation into which they were born. I´ve never had to do anything to make sure my family´s ends meet.

I wish I could do more than I do now. I always try remind myself that grassroots movements like this take decades and decades to truly make change ("It isn´t a sprint, it´s a marathon!"), but it´s these specific little children that I have come to love and care about. My heart aches for them. If someone were to tell me that last year, 20% of kids in Quito worked and this year it´s only 18%, that wouldn´t mean anything to me at this moment. Despite whatever development work that organizations like UBECI do, these kids--Camila, Evelyn, Oscar, Edwin, Erika, Lesly, Anahi, Melany, Viviana, and dozens more--are growing up right now with windburned faces and stuffy noses and untreated injuries...and selling crap alone in the markets, on busses, or in the streets. They don´t stop for weekends and can´t leave on December 16th. I think about that and really feel powerless.