it's the rainy season

I’m studying abroad in Ecuador for the semester and have already been here two weeks! I can’t believe it. I just moved into my homestay Sunday and will be with them on and off until April, when I will leave to go do an independent research project on something… probably bird conservation. And I missed out on the last two weeks, so I’ll do a recap of all the crazy adventures. And feel free to email me with questions or whatnot!

I got into Quito along with the other kids in the program (there are 19 my group as well as about 25 in a culture and development group (aka not as cool as mine!)) and we met our directors at the airport. (P.S. they served “vino tinto” as well as other liquors on the flight… no charge!) The airport was crazy and filled with people looking for their loved ones, and then a bunch of us gringos showed up and I bet they were thrown for a loop. The catcalls and stares began there…

We got bused back to a hostel where we spent the week during orientation. The two directors—Sylvia and Javier—are really awesome and really know ecology, Ecuador, and how to run the program. On our first full day in Quito, the adventures really started. They told us to grab a buddy, walk until we reached a bus, take the bus for 10 minutes in a direction, find lunch and talk to people about the “medio ambiente de Quito” and come back to report. Without a map. Needless to say, my friend and I got lost. But, we made it back safely.The rest of the week passed without incidence, taking a salsa class at our school and traveling to a nearby “bosque nublado” (cloud forest) for a hike. My Spanish is already majorly improving! We also learned about how incredibly messed up the politics in Ecuador are. There have been about 18 different constitutions in the past 20 years, and almost as many presidents! The current president, Rafael Correa, is in a bit of a pickle. He’s done some great things for education and health care here, but has been banking on money from oil exports to finance his work. Unfortunately, the price of oil is dropping and he’s looking to other ways to finance, such as increasing oil and mining exploration and damaging the environment. Hmm… I also made friends at the hostel with an old German man and he gave me half a bottle of wine because he couldn’t finish it and his family was leaving to go zip lining in the south. Sweet!

On Saturday, we took a bus to Intag, which is a cloud forest north of Quito. It was about 5 hours by bus, plus a hike through very muddy trails to La Florida, where we stayed. This preserve, I guess you would call it, is run by an activist in the mining dispute taking place in the Intag region. He is a very vocal opponent of mining (there’s copper in the region) and has had numerous death threats against him, etc. His family runs a small, organic farm and grow most of their food on their property. They make their own coffee (!), grow pineapple, yucca, choclo (corn), zanahorias (carrots), etc. and made us delicious vegetarian food. Everything is composted, including human wastes in composting toilets, and even the chickens are fed compost! For the first half of the week, we hung around the farm and hiked in the forest. So gorgeous! We learned about botany, birds, insects, and the mining dispute (from protestors that had tear gas thrown at them by paramilitary!). The first morning we saw a lek of cock-of-the-rocks which were so incredibly amazing. I don’t have pictures, but they were so crazy. They made so much noise that you could hear them from about half a kilometer away!

We did mist netting on 2 of the mornings as well. That was awesome to be able to hold birds in the hand! I was holding onto a very feisty blue-winged mountain tanager that very much liked to bite my hands. The first day we caught about 13 birds in about 30 minutes. Very intense. Unfortunately, a booted racket tail hummingbird was trapped and ended up dying after about 30 minutes of attempted resuscitation with sugar water. I’m not quite sure how I feel about mist netting because it causes so much stress to the birds, but on the other hand, it is a very good way to study bird populations and allows researchers to obtain measurements that are oftentimes necessary in assessing population stability.

We got to spend some of our own time hiking around and I skinny-dipped in a little pond, which counted as my showering for the week. It was okay, because no one else really showered.

I spent three nights at a homestay about an hour away from La Florida, staying in Plaza Gutierrez, a little teeny tiny pueblo of about 5 very extended families. One of the daughters, Adriana, picked me up from La Florida and we hiked along mud-filled trails through the cloud forest to their town. Adriana lives with her family at one end of the town. She lives with her mom (Ulbia), dad (Sylvio), younger sister (Johana), and two younger brothers (Willy and Anderson). Her twin sister (Elizabeth (age 18) has a 9 month old baby (Jennifer) and her older sister (Sandra) (age 21) was visiting with her husband (Jose) from Otavalo. They brought along their 2 year old son (Brian) (it was his birthday) and he had fun playing with his uncle (Anderson), also age 2. (Ulbia and Sylvio’s youngest son is 2; Ulbia is 43). I stayed in Adriana’s room, which consisted of a bed, a piece of cardboard by a little chair so I wouldn’t get dirt on my feet (the floor was intensely compacted dirt). Decorating her walls were pictures from cologne ads and old newspaper clippings. The corrugated metal ceiling was covered with old grain sacks for insulation, I suppose. I spent the rest of the afternoon with Adriana and we played “futbol” in the middle of the plaza, along with some other kids in my program that were also doing their homestays in Plaza Gutierrez. Once we were done, we met up with the rest of the family to watch a game of “volley.” Men and boys in the pueblo were playing 3 on 3. After a while, we went back to the house to celebrate Brian’s 2nd birthday. I felt very awkward to be there to celebrate, but the family was very nice and welcoming.

Once it came time for dinner, I told them I was a vegetarian, but they looked so down-hearted that I said I would eat meat if I needed to. So, after cake and “gelatina” (something I normally don’t consume because it has gelatin in it), I was served a large portion of chicken soup (Ulbia herself had killed one of her chickens for the meal) and a drumstick. It was part of the experience, I suppose. But honestly, I could not have asked for a nicer family.

I wrote in my journal about this experience: “Imagine. You live in a town with a bunch of different families, but you’re all related to each other, mas o menos. You wake up in our house to hear roosters crowing outside, and when you swing your legs out of bed, there’s dirt. You look up to see empty bags of grain covering the corrugated roof ceiling and see the rest of your family sleeping in beds only slightly obscured by sheets hanging from the ceiling. You walk outside to the bathroom and to flush, a bucket of water is thrown in the toilet. To wash your hands (as well as your clothes, dishes, and tonight’s chicken), there’s an outdoor washboard and a huge tub of water. To cook tonight’s dinner, you will have to build a wood-fired stove. All food scraps are collected during the day and fed to the pig, who lives in the communal pigsty, next to church, where everyone goes for misa on Sunday mornings. Your kids run around dirty and play futbol on blood-stained fields. For most of the day, when you are not cooking the next meal, you sit on the front porch and watch life go by. Your kids go off to the fields to weed out the patch of zanahorias blancas. You think nothing of sending your 12-year-old daughter to work as a nanny in Otavalo, 3 hours away (at least) by bus. You wield a machete to cut sugarcane as a treat and occasionally will hit your unspayed perro with it for no reason. You grew up your whole life in Plaza Gutierrez and will die here as well. You husband works in the campo on the fields and comes home for meals, not saying much. You have no idea anything going on outside the immediate bubble in which you reside. The only electrical appliances in your house, spare some lightbulbs, are an oven, CD player, and blender.” Crazy, huh? It’s amazing to realize how much we all take for granted. When sharing our experiences, another person said that their homestay mom had said, “Eso es la vida del pobre. Es muy dura.” (This is the life of the poor. It is very difficult/hard.) But I was asking Adriana about it and she could very easily leave the campo and go to the city, but she wants to live in Plaza Gutierrez her whole life.

I spent some time here just watching life go by, talking, playing cards, hiking to Palo Seco to visit an aunt, and working in the campo. We hiked back to La Florida on Friday morning and quickly changed into dirty clothes (almost all my clothes were dirty by this point...) and a rain jacket to go work on a minga—a kind of community help day. We’re going to be doing a lot of them this semester. That day, we went to another part of the preserve and helped plant trees, move rocks to make the bridge wider, and transported plywood that would be later used to make benches under the roundhouse, so classes could take in the beauties of nature while relaxing. Doing all this, we got soaking wet because it was pouring…

The following day, it was time to leave the cloud forest, so after packing up and waiting about an hour for our bus to arrive, we decided it would be better to hitch hike out of Intag rather than wait for a bus of which we had no idea its location. We climbed, like “vacas,” into the back of a van we had bribed and held on for dear life as the truck curved around the mountainside on tiny dirt roads. As we neared Cotopaxi, we had to all duck down, since the driver could have gotten in serious trouble for transporting a bunch of gringos in the back of his truck, especially because he was not a certified driver. Good times, eh? In Cotopaxi, we met up with our bus (long complicated story) and made it back to the hostel in Quito safely. After showering and grabbing some dinner (falafel and Brahma—cerveza), we all went out for drinks in the hip new town. I made it back safely with some friends, but some others got mugged on their way back—they took a watch and fortunately no one was hurt.

Early Sunday morning, my host family (I’ll be with them for the next 2 months) picked me up. I live with Cristina (mom), Rigoberto (dad), and the youngest daughter Anita (age 23), as well as a perro loco named Rosquita. Cristina works at a school, Rigoberto does something with chickens, and Anita works as a freelance travel agent. They’ve had many other foreign exchange students live with them—the most recent left about a month ago! They live in a very nice region of town in an apartment. I haven’t done much today except move into my cute room, take the dog for a walk, and type this long essay! Chao!