In Guayaquil, Full of Angst

Written Wednesday Night

Its the first time I've been under an air conditioner in months, and its the very end of December. I'm here in Guayaquil in Stefano's grandmother's house, on a fold out couch bed with my backpack next to me on the floor. There's 71% battery, I have stiff legs and a headache. Yesterday morning my mother and my sister left, cought a taxi to the airport, leaving me to lie in the still-paid-for hotel room watching three consecutive episodes of The Big Bang Theory and eating wafer cookies from christmas that had somehow already gone stale.

Hannah's parents took us all out to lunch and I had a chicken salad sandwhich because all I seem to want to do these days is eat various forms of chicken between types of breads. Usually, mayonase should be involved. Aracely came over and immedietley conked out for a two hour nap on my bed, only waking to ask if she could get under the covers.

I lay with the sweet centimeters below my knees in the sun and read Mary Karr's Lit, one of those books that pricks your consciousness, makes you think the way she does, see things with her crossed eyes. I can't wait for some dialogue to come up soon so that I can leave out quotation marks just as she does.

Its wonderful to have somone so smart and well spoken take up temporary residence in your skull, but it can get awkward when her values start sitting down on your own. Anecdote? Of course, so glad you asked.

Much of Karr's memoirs deal with her own and her family's struggles with alcoholism, and Lit is no exception. In The Lair's Club, pages and chapters are sobbed about her mother's heavy drinking coupled with knife-weilding mental illness, as well as her father's reclusive constant alcoholism. There's also aquaintence rape, bigamy, and cancer people get from oil wells. Not a cheerful set of essay prompts. So I read The Liar's Club and I thought, Well damn, my life is a piece of peach pie. She's bareley got a can of cool whip.

I was so stressed out from The Liar's Club, and just from seeing the cover of Viper Rum, her book of poetry, that I decided to skip her second memoir, Cherry and stick to the backs of cerael boxes for my reading. But for christmas in Baños, sitting on a hammock with my sister, my mom passed me Lit with its accolade-slobbered cover and those neat looking fake cuts down the front. There's a lot going on on the cover of that book, it took me a while to recognize Mary Karr, our lady of Perpetual Suffering/Southern Texas. What the heck, nightmares can make you stronger or hold Feudian clues to what's wrong with you.

It's a great book, once you start reading. Each chapter is as strong as an essay and very presentable or discussable, but the book hangs to gether as a story. Of course it does: Its her life. Her marriage and its failure, her child and his raising, her spiritual life and literary success. And her drinking and how she stopped.

So when a person who does have a drinking problem sneaks into your head, a 20 year old having a beer with dinner, and she starts muttering and throwing down adverbs that you haven't heard in months, due mostly having your main conversation partner being a hispanohablante dentist who prefers to watch TV, its easy to get distracted from outside and fold yourself into your ears ad fall into the anxiety hole. And no matter if you're on vacation, no matter if there's eggplant lasagna coming, no matter if you're with your friend you haven't seen for a while, no matter if you've been taking your medicine more constant than you check your facebook, Mary Karr can talk really, really loud.

You're drunk she says. You're drunk and your making a fool of yourself.

I'm not drunk I say. I'm tired. Did you spent 4 hours today in the Quito airport? I think not. I bet you were eating fondue in Maine or something. Or spelling every word correctly. Or praying. Whatever, something cool.

You are a fool, an Immature fool. She says. You should stick to your own language and begin attending self help groups immedietley.

Could you shut up, Mary? I ask as my lasagna arrives. Stefano is approximately 1/2 through his small beer and i judge myself to be at 5/8. Oh shoot, she's right. Out drinking a boy who'se been at college? This could be a bad sign. Or maybe I just have a bigger mouth-capacity than he does. How would that be calculated? Would it make my face look fatter?

Look at this anxiety Says Mary, her hair perfectly stright, bangs that will never happen for me. Why aren't your working on this? You should be in meetings every night!

But I haven't done anything wrong! I jab my fork into my food, which turns out to be at least two thirds cheese. Should I feel guilty for eating such a large amount of cheese? Should I quit while I'm ahead and just give up all dairy, or should I eat this hulk of mozerella, get gas, feel fat, and then learn my lesson later to never ask for lasagna in Ecuador?

Mary doesn't know, and I don't either. But I know that beer, cheese, and fear are a filling but bad-tasting dinner.

She moves, oh she moves (who remembers that little kid singing that song it was so hilarious)

No blog entry for a week, tisk tisk. But it´s not like I´ve just been lying on my back listening to Phoenix or reading Stranger articles about this huge cocaine contamination problem in the eastern United States. I´ve been damn busy, what with my family coming, worring about the Reina del Camino accident, reading Mary Karr, hugging mom and sister, watching celeste get odd looks for her blue hair, eating excellent food and lots of other stuff. I´m just putting my facebook stati up here from the last week because I´m not filled with ganas to write. But I´m off to Guayaquil soon (1 hr) so maybe there there will be time for fun writing, helpful writing, SIP planning writing, that sort of stuff

accidentally was on the ecuator at noon on the winter solstice with Ellen Iscoe andCeleste Here'stoyouMrs Robinson . That´s cosmic, yo

LOTS OF STUFF HAS HAPPENED: Baños, bike rides, a salad shaped like a volcano, almost getting secuestered expressed, seeing Hannah, seeing Pilar, seeing 150 Salazars I never met before, excellent cebiche, horrible hot chocolate, run away attempts, too much Trole, love from my family, Dr. Bronners and happy holidays

"""""""""""

"After months of placing it accidentally," she said, "I have finally realized the location of the quotation mark on the Ecuadorian keyboard."

"Oh, yes indeed. Instead of using the ümlat sign placed ¨awkwardly¨around phrases and sometime ïnterfearing¨when words start with vowels, I can instead press ´Shift´and then ´2,´" she crowed.

"And how did you encounter this epiphany?" asked the lady waxing the floors.

"As all brilliant scientists do, by accident! Looking to form the ´at´symbol, I pressed simple Shift instead of the mysterious ´Alt G.´Of course, when I pressed 2, no @ came out, rather the glorious and long saught-after "! What glory! Praises be!"

She muttered herself to sleep.

And Just One More

To celebrate the end of school, its time for one more session of precious spanish class memories.

Sample sentances showing our brilliance in Spanish

I fell in love with that girl because she has a car

You look grated

We had some heavy use of a word meaning "dead body":

You look like a dead person because you are skinny

I got happy because I don't have to see a dead person

It's going to be great when the dead person in my mom

To sleep means to shut your eyes and dream of someone sexy

I became poor after I hunted my life

Michael Jackson turned himself into a ghost

When I arrived in Ecuador, I turned into a drunken woman (said by a man)

While in the forest, they stumbled upon, accidentally, some people from the FARC

Finally, I found a naked bar!

And my personal favorite:

The situation turned serious after the pregnancy test turned red

Because I've been such a bad blogger, I thought I'd play catch up a little and go over some fun/cool/important stuff that has happened since I last updated about my scintillating life. Surprise surpirse, I'm going to make a list, because I am very bad at transititon sentances.

December 2. Went to a poetry reading with Ecuamadre. It was very beautiful, excellent poets from Ecuador, Peru and Colombia. I was proud I could understand everything. Favorite line: "Escribir cambia equilibrio/ dame con mi ultima respiro balance" "Writing changes eqilibrium/ give me, with my last breath, balance." Of course, I tried to write brilliant poetry in Spanish, and of course, it didn't turn out very well. Not like STEFANO here, who wins prizes in his second language. But then I wrote about that, and it turned out ok:

Agredecido

Sometimes

I forget Spanish is beautiful

But when I listen to the consenants

sound out slowly

I can remember

I tell myself

Interpret the night

not as a metaphor

between your slippery

poet paws

Follow the sine wave

with the grip of logic

some day, you'll find your zero

I promise myself

I will trust my fingers

I will memorize my face.

So yeah, that doesn't really come togehter right, but its soemting. Its the first non-essay non-journal non-rap I've written in a few months, so that feels nice.

December 3-5- Fiestas de Quito! This was so fun! There were lots of things I didn't go to, but I'm happy with what I did. I didn't go to a bull fight because Ecuamadre is really against them, and learning more, it does sound pretty gorey and inhumane. They kill the bull really slowly and agonizingly, and I just don't want to be a part of that. Even eating meat here is getting to me. However on the positive side, I did go to the El Disfile de Fraternidad which means The Brotherhood Parade. It was held on Ave Shyris, a huge street at the bottom of Parque Carolina, where the citizens march when (not if) they want to overthrow the government. The parade was huge, probably three or more hours long. People were packed along the street. I was with Aracely, and she bought a tiny stool one of the many stool-vendors was selling so that she could see. There were lots of different dance troupes ranging from special-ed schools to dozens of indigenous cultral groups to giant puppets dancing with each other. At least 15 high school and college marching bands, all heavily featuring cheerleaders in unbelievably short skirts and many xylophone players.

I almost got my camera stolen for like the fourth time- It was in Aracely's pocket, a lady started reaching in. Cely started yelling at her in Spanish, and the lady got all mad that we had caught her. What? We were sort of spooked, so we went into a Pollo Campero, which is very different than in the States. There are only maybe five menu items and it is very expensive. Its not fast food at all really, its like a place your parents take you out to dinner.

After that, we went home and took a nap so that we could go to Ferria Quitumbe. Quitumbe is at the very far south of the city, about an hour and a half by trole. Cely, Melba and I went and the trole was PACKED. Luckily, we hadn't brought anything of value to get stolen, but it was still nuts. Eventually we got to Quitumbe which had been turned into a giant fairground. We wandered around for an hour or so, looking for food, people watching, and enjoying the rarness of being outside at night. I ate cebiche from a food stall and I didn't get diarreah or food poisioning or throw up or even feel sick which is a huge accomplishment. And i can drink the tap water now too!

Anyway, we were waiting around for our favorite band, Calle 13 to come on, but the current band played these horrible Disney-esque songs, so we wandered around, looking at crafts, people playing, just enjoying being in a new place. By 10, Called 13 was playing and it was PACKED. I am not kidding. There were at least 5.000 people there, maybe 10.000. Lots. The show itsef was amazng even if we had to depend on the Jumbo TV Screen things and Cely wished she still had her stool. I've only started listening to Calle 13 here through ñaño, but they really are amazing, very powerful and positive music and a very powerful show. The main guy, the rapper was like "I want all the guys here to give themselves a round of applause, and to respect women and themselves. I want all the women here to give them selves a round of applause, to remember to stick up for yourselves, to never let any one push them around. I want all the homosexuals, the bisexuals, the transexuals, the people who don't even know what they are to give themselves a round of applause because you are fighitng a good fight, to know your self, and to stay strong against society." That's pretty sharp contrast from a country that was iffy about showing Modern Family because there are gay guys in it.

So that was amazing, and then at midnight it was Aracely's birthday. The show was over by 1, and we were thinking of taking a taxi back north, but knew it would cost like 20$. Luckily, the trole was packed and seemed safe, so we spend 50 cents each instead. The trole was packed again, but everyone was jazzed from the show and friendly and cheerful. We went straight to south station and instead of stopping at the stops every kilometer or so, the driver would just ask if anyone wanted to stop there. The stations themselves were closed, so he just opened the doors the the curb, and people jumped out at will. It was one of those times were everyone is working together, feeling united and laughing. We kept yelling "Que vive Quito! Qui vive Calle 13! Que vive el Trole!" and stuff like that. I told a group of high schoolers that it was my friends birthday, and the whole bus sang to Aracely as we shot through Quito at 2 am.

Eventually, we clambered off the bus and fell asleeeeeep. Que Vive Fiestas de Quito!

Domingo 12 de Deciembre- Went to Ibarra with Sarvie, IGGY, Ecuamadre and another exchange student and his mom. That was fun, we went to a lot of the places we went in Otavalo. Additionally, we also took the Ecuador naked picture for the SusHouse 2011 calender! If you don't know what I am talking about, just ignore that last sentance. If you do know what I am talking about, tell me if you want one. Once I upload my pictures, I'll put those up there.

Martes 14- Improv Class preformance! Superfun, pictures to come as well. Additionally, I wrote a rant, we all did, a sort of slam poetry thing.

Here it is:

Si, que cueraso eres. En tu bikini, tus tacos, piernas flacas, uñas con manicure. Esto no me moletsa. Estoy feliz que discubriste tu moda y te sientes bella. Lo que me molesta es como oscilas entre passiva y agression y blandes los dos como bistrui. Eres passiva cuando dejes tu pelado a empujarte, ignorar tu mente, valorar tu cola mas que tu car. Eres passiva cuando pierdas la independencia y sueños para que trabajaste cuando eramos niñas. Y eres competitivo tambien, con cosas que no son partidos: tu cuerpo, tus habitos, tu vida intima, tu novio, tus jenes deseãdor, tu perfume, tu carro, tu pelo, tus vacaciones, tus vacilas, tu cellular......

Quiero ser tu amiga, pero es dificil a no caerme en celos cuando no me dejas espacio a ser quien son. Y quien soy? Con mis muslos gorditos y my voz alta y ni un par de tacones y my closet? Soy mujer, como tu. Tal vez te da verguenza a llamarte una mujer y no una chica o una dama. Pero, para mi, me da fuerza.

Here's the rough English version

Yup, you sure look good in a bikini, your heels, your skinny thighs, your manicure. That doesn't bother me. I'm glad you found your style and you feel pretty. What really gets undermy skin is how you swich from passive to competive and you weild them both with alarming clarity. You're passive when you let guys push you around, push up your body (you know what part I'm talking about) and push down your mind. Passive when you forget the goals and the independance that you worked for when we were kids. And your'e competitive too, with things that aren't games: your body, your habits, your sex life, your boyfriend, your designer jeans, your perfume, your car, your vacations, your phone..

I want to be your friend, but its hard not to fall into jealosy when you don't give me space to be who I am. and who am I? With my thick thighs and loud voice and not a pair of heels in my closet? I'm a woman, just like you. Maybe its shame ful for you to call yourself a woman, and not a lady or a girl. But for me, it gives me strenght.

So the feminism and fun continues in Quito, soon to be augmented by family! I'm so excited!

500 Years of Solitude

You probably could have read that entire book since I last updated this blog in any meaningful way. I weep for you, dear blog readers, without the antics of your dear dita and her long stories about linguistics, just as you must have wept for me as I took my finals. Actually, several of my classes were truly able to be classified as "a joke," but still, it was a lot of work.

I'm done now, and I have been since friday, actually. Its christmas time now (just like in the northern hemispere!) so thing's have been pretty busy. We decorated the house for christmas, which entailed setting out 5 different tableaux of things vaguely relating to christmas and closer relating to dolls. Ecuamadre has named each little scene. Here are thier names: The Rich People's Town, The Poor People's Town, The People Dancing Around The May Pole With A Clown, The Animals Going to Jesus, The Nativity Scene of Indigenous People, The Indigenous People, The Chirstmas Tree, and All The Left Over Figurines That Are On The Coffee Table. The cat has already broken four little figures and we all hate her now.

My host family also does something called a Novena for each of the days of advent (is it called Advent? I'm not so good with my religious terms). There are many (9?) siblings in the family, so each day they go to a different sibling's house, sing songs, prey, eat dessert and talk about Christmas. It's a really lovely tradition, everyone seems so happy. And I've learned Our Father and Hail Mary in Spañol.

The other really exciting news is that my family is coming today! Originally, until about 6 last night, I thouth they were coming on Tuesday, but no, it is today. I am going to get them at the airport at 7! I'm so excited to see my ma and Lester again, to show them all the wonderful places I have met, to watch them struggle with the altitude and bus routs just like I did, to hug them and eat good food and go to Baños!

Funny and Vulgar

I love this! Its totally not PG-13, but it fully describes how messy languages are.

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/efee7/what_are_your_favorite_culturally_untranslateable

10th Week, Quito Style, Side of Fries

Well, its exam week here in Ecuador, which means I look forward to going to sleep at 9 pm, have huge carbohyrdate cravings and only want to wear soft pants. And the work, oh yeah, the work. Can all the people currently sitting in the Kalamazoo College library take a second and raise your hands the the ceiling, look towards the nearest computer and mutter "hallelulah"? That would make me really happy. Additionally, as you walk down Academy at 145 am and you have no fear of being mugged, can you say "praise be"? And as you only have THREE classes to do final projects for, can you say "damn, I have it good."? Also, you should really take advantage of the caf salad bar, you are gonna miss it when its not close by.

But enough W curve bullsnap, its time to actually write a blog entry...Oh wait. It's actually time to do 5 drawings of feet, 5 of hands, and a science project based heavily on the movie Avatar. I kid you not, Avatar.

So I'll get back to this woefully negelected blog once my bedtime moves past sunset. My b, peeps. My b also for that terrible slang I just used.

So Much Fun!!!

Despite some fireworks in the lower brain (aka anxiety), the past three days or so have been amazingly fun! Fiestas de Quito is so awesome! I've got to write an essay and make some cauliflower, but I just wanted to put that out there!

Also my ma and sister are coming in less than three weeks!!!

Home Stretch!

I´m so close to being done with the semester! A semester is so much longer than a 10 week quarter. Here´s what I have left (not that you are interested=
-sociology paper (english)
-Sociology exam
-Spanish dramatization
-ICRP Report
-Drawings of ten hands and five feet for art
-Unknown other art assignments
-Unknown Flora y Fauna del Ecuador assignments
-Improv Presentation
-Critical Essay on Sweeney Todd (Spanish)

I can do all this. Heck Yes.

Thanks, sometimes the internet is a space to vent/ organize your thoughts

Going to the Baños

Hey, maybe its time to tell you about my trip to Baños! I went to Baños the weekend before last and had a ton of fun. Its about three hours south east of Quito, they call it The Gateway to the Orient. Madre and I woke up really early to get to the bus station in the very south in the city. We both got groped on the bus by this same creepy man and then we gave him such angry looks that he got off. Woman power. Once we got to the station, we promptly waited around for an hour for our friend Jorge. We got on the bus and within minutes the scenery was amazing. I'm normally a watching sort of person and this just made my jaw drop. Green fields with vertical agriculture, tiny stone towns, clean sky and edgy mountains. Sheep! Kids! Old people! Bridges! A very very good bus ride to sit by the window.

And the vendors. It's almost like in Harry Potter on the Hogwarts Express, there's this endless stream of people hopping on the bus selling things. Sometimes they are gross/unwanted (warm coconut milk in a plastic bag, thise mysterious inflatable donut-shaped pillows) but often its tempting and cheap. Madre says she likes supporting la gente but I know she really just wants a snack. The highlights: tiny butterly cookies in that come in plastic re-used from other food products. It's not noodles, its shortbread. More exciting: Ice cream from saucedo, made in a dixie cup with three layers: majority coconut, then thin stripes of mora, naranjilla and taxo. Pale pastel, bumps of seed and flakes, almost unmelting after days in a freezer.

We made it to Baños by 11 or so. We went to the friend we knew, who works at an ice cream parlor. This was a good friend to have, one because she is extremley nice and two because she gave us free ice cream. Welcome to down, Dita, Jorge and Pilar. We decided on our hotel, named unsurprisingly "BACKPACKER HOSTEL." It was about a 15 minute walk through town. The main building was paja (sort of grass/straw) roof, really really dark inside with about five or six stoned hippies lying on the floor and hammocks. Ok, cool. My madre asked for a lighter for her cigarette, and the owner pulled out an onze bag of "Mary Jane" (If you get my drift) and dug a lighter out of the middle of some nugs. Ok, so it's that kinda hotel.

Climbing into my top bunk to look at the slanted ceiling painted with an acid-trip storm at sea, I scraped my leg on this screw. I got this weird three pointed cut and probably an advanced case of tetnus. Luckily, there was no time to enferm because Jorge had a bike ride in mind. We rented bikes, he and I at five dollars a day. Pilar stayed behind because she is afriad of being hit by a car. So we started on these bikes with poor breaks, no helmets, the regular. We go about 10 kilometers downhill. Its gorgeous and plesent, theres mountains all around, we are crossing bridges and the sun is shining and without the helmet the wind is in my hair.

But its straight down hill and Jorge doesn't stop. Not when I plead scared, tired, lost, a girl, weak, young, a pulmonary disease, dehyrdation. Jorge is like "nah nah its cool, lets just keep going."

Finally, after we go through these industrial-revolution era tunnels and end up in front of a powerpoint, I put my foot down. I'm going back. he can follow me. I start walking my bike up this mountain. Jorge seems really happy in first gear. he shows his happiness by constantly lapping me. I see other happy tourists with thier bikes in the back of pickup-truck taxis, on buses. I ask Jorge if we can do that. "That" he say "is bad. It is weak. We went down, we can do up." I cry a little bit. I buy some water. People stare at the sweating gringa. Two hours later, we make it back to town. Pilar is irate at the lack of pick up truck use (perhaps because we were not supporting the local economy enough? She has bought several bags of local taffy, some men's shorts, and a pair of sandals). We search for a restaurant with salad to make me happy. Pilar understands that salads can sooth me at my worst. We go to a restaurant and I order asparagus salas. They are out of asparagus. We got to another restaurant with no vegetable dishes on the menu. She and I spilit a lunch because we don't have enough money and I eat aproximately 2/3 of a chicken. I also eat all of Jorges rice because we though we each got a dish and it turns out we had to share. Tooooooo bad.

A while later, we go to the waterfall that is fed by the springs that Baños is named after. Its very pretty, very slippery, very trecherous. Pilar and I huddle in the only dry spot which also happens to be occupied by a couple deep in making out. We all politely ignore each other.

At 5, we get in line for the baths. The baths close between 4 and 6 and its apparently very important to be the first ones in. Ecuadorians are almost always late, except when a line is to be formed. And line behavior is very orderly. there is no butting. While waiting in line, we meet the other people who have come to Baños for this birthday party. Three of them are Pfizer employees, mostly accountant. This sounds lame but they are funny and awesome. One is a metal head with two tattoos and a shirt containing the word "Dismemberment." It's cool to be an accountant and live with your mother in Ecuador.

Six comes and we get in the baths themselves, which are eyebrow-raising hot and apparently clean. There are alot of obese people and old people that move very slowly down the stairs. Jorge insists I stand for 30 seconds in the ice-cold pool. Sure thing Jorge, you never led me wrong before. We paddle around in the pools, melting slowly. We jump in the cold pool and yell and writhe. At nine we leave, go back to the hotel and shower and go eat pizza at a local chain called "Garfield The Cat." Guess what their logo is! We are joined by another person, N, who's 20 like me, studying art, and extremley stupid. She didn;t understand how antibiotics work, what natural selection was, or what a relay race was. She also didn't know the differnece between automatic and manual cars. Not transmission. Cars. So we eat pizza, and we go back to the ice cream shop to start the party. We are supposed to get in a chiva, which I've already described, at around 10. At 11:30, after a lot of dorito eating, the Chiva shows up.

For the rest of the story, you will have to stay tuned until I write it! But I gaurentee that it's going to involve trecherous roads, public urination, more things that that dumb girl doesn't know, lots of potatoes, and a city called Ambato. This sounds like book 14 of A Series of Unfortunate Events

Monday morn

I have a ton of homework to do, so of course I´m writing a blog. Right now, I´m interested in anything besides 1000 words reacting to the Planet Earth videos we watched in my Flora y Fauna de Ecuador Class.

Things that are more interesting:
-Fleetwood Mac
-Cheddar Cheese
-How my ma and sister are coming in less than a month!!!!!
-alternative bus routs home
-swimming
-finding a way to make my hair grow really, really fast
-SIP options
-This amazing video about teaching queer issues in schools
-queer issues
-my feminist blogs
-my vegan blogs
-funny stuff
-Fiestas de Quito which is gonna be so cool!
-where I am going to eat lunch
-The Bill O´Rilley falafel incident. Not adding a link on purpose.
-amazing plans for spring quarter.

Oh, look, its time to go. Nice 1000 words, Dana

Last Week in Puembo

Note: In case you haven't picked it up already, my ICRP/ internship is at a rural clinic in a sort-of-suburb (the type of suburb with cows in the road) of Quito. I go there on Thursday mornings and help out the nurse (who I refer to as Lcda (Licenciada) ) there. We write reflections for our programs, so this is written pretty formally. Expect one each week and more in January.

. Last week at the clinic, I did a lot of different thing. I got better at weighing and measuring, taking blood pressure, and filling out forms. I learned a great deal about the vaccination process, the schema of vaccines and how they are administered.

Discription: The most important moment, the one I’m choosing to write about came in the from of a 2 year old Quechua boy with a broncheal infection. His mother came in in typical dress with a baby tied in a scarf to her back. Her son was 25 mounths old and had a bad infection in his lungs. His mother had been told to go to the pharmacy and buy an inhaler mask, and was given three ampuoules of serum for the inhaler. The SubCentro de Salud has a portable nebulizar on hand, and they give you the medicine, but you have to buy your own mask and bring it and the medicine to the clinic. So it was this little guy’s first day of three with the nebulizar, and the whole family was at a loss of how to do it. Lcda broke open the glass vial and poured the liquid into the nebulizar chamber. It smelled very strongly of rotting eggs, sulfur, old foods. We tried to bend the nebulizar mask so that it would fit his small face, but it was really ment for an adult. The mask went over his face like they show you on airplanes, and he was having none of it. He started writhing and screaming, but he couldn;t really cry because he was weezing so bad.

His mother became pretty upset, having to watch her kid suffer. Also, he was thrashing around so that the baby on her back was pressed up against the back of her chair, so they handed the baby to me. I held him for the ten minutes the treatment lasted. He never stopped fighting. He traed to grab at the mask, thrash his head around, push the mask off, constalty yelling and crying. Also, the mask smelled like methane and made the whole room stink. When ten minutes were up, alter multiple yanks and mask removals, I handed him crying back to his mother who hurried out of the clinic as fast as she could.

Interpretation: How to interpret this? It was pretty clear that the mother handed her son to me because she didn;t want to be seen as the “bad guy,” she didn’t want her son to fear or dislike her because she was the one holding the dreaded mask to his face. Better to have a nameless volunteer doing the dirty work.

The buying/free things dyamic is also interesting. The clinic gives you medicine and treatment free, but you have to go to the pharmacy, about a kilometer away, to get your mask, a critical part of the curative process. This means three trips in total- first to the SCS, then to the pharmacy, then back to the SCS. And you have to return three consecutive days for the full treatment. Its probably the only way, but still I wonder if its the most efficient.

Evaluation: First of all, I don’t think that it is efficient, now that I’m free to say it in my Evaluation section. Why doesn;t the clinic sell masks on site and keep them there along with the medicine ampules for the patients? If the patients knew that the medicine was there, along with the mask which cost money, they would probably have more motivation to return and less motivation to, say, have the baby drink the medicine instead of inhale it. It would mean no trip to the pharamacy, which is a journey with no car, a sick kid, and a baby on your back. Actually, I don’t really understand the scheme of the medicine distribution. You can get some medicine free, but others you have to take your perscription to the pharmacy. I understand that some medicines are subsidezed by the government, but why not sell the other medicines in the clinic, deliver better adminstration instructions and generate revinue?

Happy Thanksgiving!

Spañol Class

Here are some more gems from our Advanced Conversation class.

¨I began the growing of my infant¨

¨She drank a lot of coffee and now she has jackets¨

¨My grandpa got false teeth as of yesterday.¨

¨As I ran from the police, I thought, ´Aye, Carumba.´¨

¨I had to be a good grandson and help my grandfather find his fake arm!¨

¨She was raised by two potatoes.¨

¨We will go to the game so that we can have a good climate.¨

¨The more you speak, the more I hate you.¨

¨In the long run, I will convert myself into a very genteel man.¨

¨Our plan to visit grandpa has failed because she has skills.....I mean dead.¨

¨I have been taxed these papers upon the copy machine.¨

¨I wish I could stop my own personal vices!¨

¨We lack food so we will have to eat these ten brawny athletes¨

¨I didn´t get along with him well because he is a violent attack.¨

¨This weekend I dealt with guinea pigs.¨

¨This Gucci looks great on my muscular body!¨

and just one from my sociology teacher

¨They say that you can´t mix apples and oranges. Well, you can, and you get a delicious fruit salad of statistics.¨ Any K kids want to pass that one on to Dr. Nordmoe for me?

Braggy Braggy

Hey, guess what? I'm now officially a Kalamazoo College Study Abroad Blogger!

I'm on the Center for International Program's website and officially linked to the college. This means that I'm going to try to keep my post's a little more PC but still their usual zesty. It also means more people will read this (hopefully but possibly not) and that'll make me happier and more famous, my two main aims in life.

In case you want to send the link to your friends or grandma or the managing editor of The New Yorker, it's http://reason.kzoo.edu/cip/blogs/

xoxo Gossip Girl

Sick Nasty

WARNING: I throw up in this post and I tell you about it.

So, I got home from Tingo and everything was fine. Went to school monday, swimming, ate some grapes, etc. Three hours later, I wake up and go vomit in the toilet. I go to Madre's room, all sick kid scared. I'm shivering so I lay on my stomach on her floor. And start voming again. Prone on the floor. I thought you had to be in a crouching position to toss cookies, but I am constantly surprising my self. So I;m vomiting on the hardwood floor, inching slowly backwards with little flipper hands, leaving this bright yellow trail puddle. Madre comes back with some tea and literally shrieks. Whoops.

Made it back to sleep. Wake up in the morning to find Madre has hired a lady to wax our floors. I feel so bad!

I spent the day sleeping, watching Will and Grace and gagging down saltines.

I'm totally better now, but that was a food poisioning momement that I'm gonna keep with me forever.

Thoughts and What I Did Last Monday

Its so nice to write stuff down, to have a conversation with yourself. To pick out the right words and even the right letter, so easy to find on my clean keyboard and just set them down. and letters are tiny, just dits and dahs, its fine to but down thousands and be able to summarize it in a sentance. its not about brevity, its about process and accurate fingers.

What did I do today? I woke up so early, so sleepy to go to class. I ate oat meal with raisins and bits of nuts and i cut a banana into it and there is nothing more holy, more filling, more safe than oatmeal with spoot-cut curves of banana swimming. And acrid coffee and far too sweet melon juice which i poured down the drain. Bus to school, only wanted to listen to David Bowie's Modern Love and Fleetwood Mac's Monday Morning. Good choices. Class was interesting. I'm unable to think on my feet in spañol but I'm still firey.

Spanish class was overload. We just covered so many topics, mostly Jamie and I asking questions. We had a big discussion about the census and I was clear about my ideas, and Andres kept smiling at me and after class he told me he liked argueing with me, that he liked the way I talked. And then he pulled a bottle of maracuya zhumir out of his pants and started drinking walking down the stairs to the bathroom. Ok, cool. Still no teacher for FyF whcih is good because we worked on our project. Then I took the bus home for a million hours and this failed shrimp farmer from Venice who talked to himself also talked to me.

Went to the San Gabriel pool. Paid 3 dollars to get in, traded my censo for a locker key, put on my borrowed bathing cap and started swimming. I am hediously out of shape, lungs and muscles, but I still love swimming. Its so long and easy and soft. Unfortunately, the swim team was practicing in all the lanes but one, so I had to share a lane with an 8 year old boy who couldnt swim more than 10 meters, and a couple that alternated between hugging each other on the walls and arguing about bills. When they did occasionally decide to swim a lenght, they seemed to view swimming as a communal activity, somewhat akin to a stroll in a park, and sidestroked next to each other, taking up the whole lane, chatting quietly. After I literally (accidentally) kicked the woman on the ear, and the next time asked the man to only use one side after kicking his feet, they got the message and stuck to the walls.

I swam slow 50s, a lap each of freestyle, backstroke and breaststroke. I didn't push myself at all, as slow as I wanted. I rested 10 seconds at the wall and hopped back in. 1000 meters in 45 minutes of strokes that have been muscle memory for years. Thats one think I will always have, my fingers cupped and my feet kicking.

Walked literally accross the street to abuelitas house, ate some excellent pizza, got in a taxi and went home. Ate some grapes and finished Desolation Angels. It was an amazing book. I can't wait to type up all my favorite quotes so I can remember them.

Ok, is it ok with you if I go watch TV with my madre? I'm already falling asleep.

Tingo Pucará Trip

Last Sunday, I went to visit Tingo Pucará with my Rural Sociology Class. We met by Parque Carolina at 7 am and drove straigt up for three hours. A little exaduration, but we did gain about 1000 meters in altitude by the time all was said and done. We left the province of Pichincha and entered Cotopaxi. We stopped by the side of the road and looked around the Páramo. That translates akwardly to "alpine meadow," those long grasses you see way up in the mountains. It's too cold and nutrient-poor for farming but its perfect for grazing cows, sheep, and goats. The grass, paja, is also really useful for building roofs. You can even burn it if you want to. Its also really humid up there because it is literally in the clouds, so there is alot of condensation which eventually flows down the mountain and forms the rivers of the Andes. How cool!

Our second stop was Guangaje, the capital of the Paroquia (thats sort of like a county). It was market day and there were little tent stands set up all over the central square selling candy, produce, dry goods, clothes, and even llamas and sheep in one corner. Almost everyone there was wearing indigenous clothing witch is very distinctive and beautiful. We went into the church during the children's service, stood in the back, got stared at continuously until we left. The priest spoke in Spanish but all the songs were in Quechua.

Oh yeah Quechua. Its slightly differnt from the Peruvian Quichua, same origin, but the languages developed differently. Sierra Quechua is more standardized than the quite similar Oriental Quechua. Its the largest indigenous language in Ecuador, but there are at least five other major ones. Every day I smack my self on the head for not taking Quechua at USFQ. Future USFQ Anso students! Take Quechua! The grammar is completley foreign, its a slightly tonal language, closer to Chinese than Spanish, but its a huge skill to have here in Ecuador. Or Peru or Colombia, they will understand you there too.

We drove a few more kilometers to the community of Tingo Pucará which means Lookout on the Mountain. The Incas, when they were still around, used the spot for something, but nobody is sure what. There are some foundations and rubble of houses right on the point of the mountain, so they think they used it as a point for lookout or communication with people on equally high mountains or something.

Commnication would sure be hard, beause Tingo Pucará is almost always surrounded by clouds. Serious, freezing, opaque clouds. The visibilty is around ten meters, pretty unsafe to drive. The town has 25 families, and you can't see from one side of town to the other. Really, really cloudy. We sat in the one room school house, in the same style desks we have in our sociology class in Quito and listened to presentations from leaders in the community, the mayor, the leader of the women's group, the facebook page manager (look them up. I'm for serious) They were formal, following a written itinerary, clapping after each presentation. Speakers used a mixture of Spanish and untranslated Quechua. Kids chattered in the echo-y room, sitting on their parent's laps, and no one shushed them. A cell phone rung, silenced. Men are wearing ponchos in dark red, women in bright shawls, several pairs of socks and peticoats, but always with that thin line just above the knee uncovered and windburned.

We got divided into two groups and took a tour of the town. My group went first to the Pucará where it was even colder and even windier. We leared that the paja retains heat and that you can sleep in it if you are stuck outside. Our group of four was accompanied by four very enthusiastic little boys. We were all gasping at the altitude, but they were used to it and went leaping and running around.

After that we went to the community garden. You can grow some things in the paramo, but it takes alot of care and you can't do it on a large scale. The community used to use agrochemicals (is that even a word in english?), but the learned about organic farming and never went back. Our leader, George, said "queremos mejorar la agricultora, nuestra vida, nuestros campos, y nuestros niños...es nuestra trabajo, vengamos de tierra madre y nos da alimentación." Shoot, George. He said "We want to improve our agriculture, our lives, our fields, and our children...This is our work, we come form the mother earth and she gives us food."

We ate lunch in the community room. They town built a stone building to try to start a tourist industry. There isn't really much of that yet, its still getting off the ground, but I bet they will be successful because they are so insanely hard working and dedicated. lunch was tiny potatoes, thin soup, boiling water, and morocho which is like rice pudding with barley that you drink. It was good but would be my downfall (see next post, after I finish vomiting)

After lunch, we took some pictures, said a few things, including singing Jingle Bells (Why? They wanted the norteamericanos to show our culture) and got back on the bus for the rainy ride back.

An amazing experience. Just amazing. How beautiful culture is, the natural world, how people relate to each other and thier environment. How lucky I am to visit a place like that.

Sabaday!

Saturday was so fun, probably one of the best days I have had in Ecuador. I slept nice and late and by the time I had really roused myself, Madre was back from work at the Consultorio and she had brought Tio Malcolm with her. we were all in a great mood and went to the Centro Historico. Its so nice to take the Trole there, to walk up the streets with narrow sidewalks. We stopped in the Indian store again, and this time I had enough money to buy the green dress I wanted last time. But then I spent my money. as you will see. We stopped at a little electronics store, one of a thousand, and bought a memory card reader for me and a new phone shell for Malcolm (its somehting that sounds like "carcass.") So that means there are now photos for me, for facebook, and for the wide world of blogging! if I had known it would cost 7$ for a card reader and not 35$ for a cable, i would have done this alot sooner.

We ate lunch at this Vegan Hare Krishna place, 1.50$ for a huge bowl of bland soup, brown rice, a celery-sort of vegetable, guacamole with corn, spicy lentils, bizarre juice, and apgar-mora-jello stuff. Vale la pena. My madre has already picked out my future husband among the Hare Krishnas present.

My madre bought me lunch, so she told me I should buy her coffee. We went to this old plaza that the Catholic (obviously) church owns but rents out to business to make money. The coffee shop was called "Cafe Fraile." (Friar). Yes. this place is owned by the church. Malcolm got Chocolate con queso which is very rich hot chocolate with heavy wipped cream and pieces of fresh cheese that you drop in and they melt but keep thier sweekyness and flavor....totally not vegan but insanely good.

We went home and my madre went to "un bebay eshowur" and Malcolm and I made about a cubic meter of popcorn in a pressure cooker and watched MTV for a few hours. We do this periodically, its very theraputic. Madre came back and we ate ravioli (weekend pasta) and we took the bus to Malcolm's and a taxi to Nick's and a Taxi to the Fosh.

I've got to say, I'm getting a little sick of going out to the same place over and over again. I like my friends and all but in alot of ways the thrill is gone. Usually going out for me is a way to find that socialy contact that overwhelms and thrills a part of me that doesn't want to be paid attention to during the week. Pati Smith says "I went to the protest to rub against people." This isn't sexual the way I see it, its desiring the random contact that crowds provide. You can get that at protests, always, and K parties often, and I used to be able to get it here, but I'm too surrounded by people and places I know. I never get asked to dance, I get tired early, the people there to bump against are too flimsy or hit back hard. Its an existential crisis when I dont want one. If I want to freak out about my place in the world, there better be a keyboard at my fingertips or a paper and pen in my pocket, not a beer in my hand.

So we got out of that club pretty fast, took those same taxi's home, those same fumbelings for the keyes, the same glasses of water before the same sleep.

Seems Like Years Since

I wrote a blog entry. It's only been since Friday, that semi-lucid post from the library, but so much has happened. Friday was mostly spent at the physical therapists, which took two and a half hours. Here's how the time was spent:

2 pm. Arrive. Dra is not there, I take a nap on the couch in the waiting room. Receptionist looks at me like I am crazy.

2:45. Dra arrives, puts me in a different room with a wet towel/compress on my back. Says she'll be back in 10 minutes.

3:15. Towel is freezing cold. Dita goes to look for Dra, only to find her working on an other patient. Smooth move, Dra.

3:40. Dra comes in, gives Dita a blanket, tells her to take a nap. Nap time.

4:00. The actual 30 minutes of PT I came there for. Whatever, its cool.

I went home and napped and chilled out, went out with Celly and Alana and my cousin Monica. We ate schwarma and told lies to this guy that was trying to get with us. My name is Franchesca, I am 27, and I have a kid. My friend's names are Doris, Maria, and Something Else (Helga?).

Sabado,

One of the best days so far. My tio Malcolm (fellow K kid) came over, and he and I and Pilar went to this Hare Krishna vegan restaurant in the Centro Historico

whoops! my madre wants to use the internet! I'll finish this later!

A Little Chatty

Hoy es viernes
que feliz estoy
la fin de semana
empieza hoy

That was a little poetry for yall fans of my last album, Rapping Her Way Though Statistics. My rhyme career is still goin strong. Yall know.

But anyway, enough frontin, its friday and I couldn´t be happier. This week and the one before it have been quite a struggle. There was just so much homework, so many bus rides, so many cravings for chocolate, so many vocabulary words attempted and mispronounced. We are resting comfortably in the bottom of the W curve. The probably-genius Stewart described a bus ride as ´ being cradled by the bottom of the W-curve, lulled to sleep by pleasantly bleak lullabies of alienation and homesickness, and there have been some times like that. Both my mother and brother have been out of the house alot, so I{m alone in the evenings, which i´m not used to. I´ve really caught up on my Ugly Betty and Scrubs, thank the lord above us. It was really a huge hole in my life, not watching America Ferrera make odd fashion choices.

One thing that´s kept me going, though, is the misery of others. Best example: yesterday, I had about an hour of free time before horrible art class began at 4. I was sort of hungry, craving salt and fat, so I went to this little restaurant near school and ordered some french fries. I ate them alone. Not all of them, but a lot of them. I was swimming slow in the lagoon of Thursday self pity. When I got back on campus, I saw some friends from K. I told them that I had just eaten an entire plate of french fries alone. All three of them said they had the urge to do that today. Got home, talking to a home-friend in Virginia. He had also eaten french fries alone. Ok, maybe its just part of being 20.

And 20 I am. 20, between the fury of adolescence and the sluggishness of adulthood and the struggle of responsibility. The center of this marvelous trifecta of needing sleep but waking up naturally at 7 am because there´s things to get done.

like eating lunch. talk to you later! Dear Kitty!

(not normally this weird)

Strawberry Fields Forever -OR- Dana Gets Angry

El Oriente!

From Saturday to Tuesday we went to the eastern part of the country, el oriente. At first, this sounds like I went to Laos and Thailand, and actually the climate was pretty similar: tropical, low-lying, humid rainforest. It was an amazing experience and I’m completely glad I went.

We started our trip early, meeting at the mall at 7 am. My cab driver did not drink a beer this time. We mostly slept on the bus until we got to the hot springs of Papallacta. I’d been there before, but it was just as nice to relax in the pools, trying to emerse yourself in the really hot ones and jumping in the ice pool and feeling your heart race. We played the name game, too, and it was nice and awkward, the way getting to know people usually is.

We got back on the bus and kept going, watching the paramo turn into wetter vegetation. Speaking of vegetation, my first cultural incident I want to analyze is about plants, specifically strawberries. I was sitting in the back of the bus when I overheard some people in the front of the bus talking about picking fruit with their families, going to an orchard in the summer. Someone commented that picking strawberries was very hard and labor intensive. Another person responded, “when you pick strawberries you are basically doing Mexican’s work for them.” I believe my jaw dropped when I heard this. There’s a lot going on in this quote, and my inner anthropologist just might have to wait in line behind my inner furious person.

There are a bunch of ways you could analyze what this person said. You can look at it from a racial standpoint, assigning a cultural group with perceived biological characteristics to a set of skills and social caracteristics. Following that logic, people with brown skin who can’t say their Hs are good at picking berries.

There’s the economic perspective, that the United States’ economy should depend on labor by foreigners, picking plants their parents would never have been able to grow, living in rented spaces in a country that rejects them as human beings but desparately needs their never-tiring hands

There’s a lot of classism in here too, the idea that picking strawberries is a leisure activity for those wealthy enough to go to college, with enough capital to afford a trip to a place remarkably similar in social landscape to where those very Mexicans were born. However, it's the god given gift of Mexicans (who are very clearly pictured as poor, frumpy, and diabetically overweight) to pick these strawberries. Strawberry fields forever are probably the highest thing a Mexican could aspire to. A Mexican would certainly never dream of relaxing in a hot spring or riding on an air conditioned bus with his friends.

So this analysis is clearly scathing. I haven’t really given fair space to the person who said this. However, there is so much assumed in this quote, that I’ve got to interpret this as an idea what was given to her, not self made. When you think something up yourself, you want to explain the details, you don’t just drop the thesis sentence out there and then keep quiet. So I interpret this as a statement by someone who doesn’t quite understand the economic implications of the high levels of Mexican immigration to the United States, has probably had little contact with said immigrants or large scale agriculture, and is unaware of her own economic privalage. And she probably likes the taste of strawberries.

HOW ON EARTH

can I have so many commitments, journals, drawings and papers to get done? How can I have so many classes to attend? How can I have so many things to copy and turn in? How am I going to do this and manage to keep everyone happy?

Hello Dear Kitty,
(guess who just bought The Diary of Anne Frank in Español? This guy)

My neck is feeling way better so I thought I’d update you guys on my fascinating life. Actually, its been pretty lively. I’ve still managed to sleep like fourteen hours a day, but get a lot done in the small time I’m awake.

Last Wednesday, we had the English Improv workshop. I actually have to write three pages in Spanish about this experience, but I’ll spare you the minutea that I’m going to get into, and just do an overview. The first part, where we did warm-up like games in the middle of the quad-like-place on campus went really well. People were watching and staring, we really caught the attention of the kids just laying around. It was also really good to work with my partner, Maria Jose. She looks like a typical USFQ student, with a blackberry that never leaves her hand, designer clothes and a perfect body. But she was actually really proactive and responsible in planning. She was a little embarrassed to play the games, but she totally got into it, and didn't seem to mind that her partner for all of this was a gawky gringa with bad hair.

The second part of the program, well, it wasn;t a failure. We were expecting some sort of audience, but no one sat down to watch and all my gringo friends left after five minutes to go eat lunch. So our audience was Sharon, our program coordinator, two professors, Maria Jose’s cousin and my friend Danny. Only Danny speaks English. Whoops. Additionally, we had The Drumming Guy join us. The Drumming Guy exists on every college campus, but seems particularly out of place at USFQ with his dreadlocks, tie-died linen pants, giant djembe drum, and belief that he, personally, was brought from Mars. So The Drumming Guy decided he wanted to be part of the games, which we totally supported, but he only wanted to participate through drumming. Which is not very helpful in non-musical games, or in musical games where The Drumming Guy does not know the song and keeps playing the same stoned rhythm over and over. So yeah, that was The Drumming Guy.

The English didn’t really stick, and that was fine. It was pretty comical, actually, to see people start sentances in English and then burst out in Spanish, “I want to…viajar el mundo contigo en un moto solo los dos de nostoros, amantes pro siempre.” Lord knows I wish I could use English when I get excited, so I was just happy to see people get excited.

Thursday was pirate day. In some sort of spirit week/homecoming/Halloween conglomeration, USFQ decided that Oct 24 to 26 was Pirate week. This didn’t seem to include anything except a film festival called “Non Pirated Movies about Pirates” (A pretty clever name, I’ll give them that) and some posters about the upcoming census. But Thursday was pirate day, and all the girls wore too large blouses and stripes. There was a fake ship mast in the lake at school (yes, there is a lake at school) and a hunt for treasure in the afternoon. Teachers were either irate at the festivities or joined in and cancelled class. Students were either apathetic, enthusiastic, or just used the day as an excuse to drink rum out of water bottles.

Thursday night, the school had a Halloween party. R Kelly (my pseudonym, not her’s) and I dressed up like 80’s babes and went down town, where we found fourty of our classmates drinking in an alley. After a while we got on a chiva, which is like a flatbed truck with a roof and railings but no walls. Its decorated and has a bar and a stereo system and its incredibly dangerous and the coolest way to party in Quito, apparently. We were divided into two chivas and drove around downtown at ten miles an hour for fourty five minutes, singing along to US pop songs, smashing into each other at stop lights, waving at people on the sidewalk, and being offered canelazo (think apple cider with moonshine) out of waterbottles by a guy in a bear suit. It was pretty fun and completely ridiculous. It was fun to ride around Quito at night, but I felt totally ashamed to be part of this drunken mass being driven around the streets and throwing their cigarette butts in the gutter.

On the chiva, the most ridiculous thing happened. I’m going to talk about it even though its embarrassing because I want to get it out there. So, you know at parties, how you sort of just meet random people and introduce yourself and start dancing and stuff like that? Well that was the case on the chiva. There was a guy who joined our little circle of dancing, a guy from Jaimito’s class, and we started dancing and that was fun. While we were dancing, he was like “oh yeah, you want this, you want me,” stuff like that. I figure other people like to talk as much as I do, so I just sort of let that slide. But then! I asked him what his name was, and he told me that he would tell me after we had sex. Smooth move, Sinatra. That’s really going to get me to leap into bed with you. I feel like names are personal but they are also completely public, you have a right to know the name of everyone you interact with. Especially people “con quien tienes relaciones.” Ehem. I’m embarrassed I didn't slap him and walk away then and there, but staying gave me the second best quote of the night, “Wait here, I’ll come back for you, my goal is to make out with five people tonight.” From my observations, and its hard not to keep tabs on someone when you are both on the same flatbed truck, he got to at least three.

I hope he was unsuccessful. I hope someone finally pushed him away. I hope she learned his name.

Ouch

Hi Everybody,

I really want to update the blog with a really lush entry about the weekend, but I´m sort of in some pain right now.

Reasons for pain:
1. While swinging on a vine in the jungle, hit a tree with my chest. bruised ribs
2. While climbing in a cave in the jungle, hit my head on a rock. way messed up back.
3. went to physical therapy for above problems. Was put into traction by a machine that looked like it was invented by the nazi´s/ in the nazi era, and got my head pulled on for half an hour.
4. My stomach is, as we say, flujo.
5. Deep wells of self pity. Malcolm and Nick have started referring to me as ¨Sad.¨
6. For some reason needing to sleep for like 13 hours a day
7. oh yeah, I´m wearing a foam orthopaedic collar and thats making me sweat alot and leaving red marks on my chest.
8. did i mention my high levels of self pity?
9. did I mention the painkillers the PT gave me?

so not doing so good right now. but I´ll get better and then i´ll update. And sleep on my side and be able to nod. stuff like that.

PS. Here´s me looking fly. My hair is not actually the shape of the computer behind me, they are just the same color

The First of Many Gross Updates

WARNING: this post contains pretty frank descriptions of pap smears, how they are done, what the results of them look like, and sexual health in general. Don´t read it if you are squeamish, do not already know what a pap smear is, or are 7 years old or so and somehow found my blog.

If you don´t want to keep reading, here´s a hilarious video that also deals with women. but isn´t quite as gross.

Today at the clinic it was really slow. Normally, there is a huge line of patients waiting to be seen as I walk in at 830, but today there were maybe three or four. Dra. Espinoza is on vacation like everyone else is or wants to be, so its basically impossible to get any procedures done with out her. Apparently, though, she had committed to doing all these pap smears, so she showed up around 930 to get them done and leave.

It was odd to be in the empty clinic. I´m used to having to step over kids, people in constant states of undress and injury in the waiting room, loudness and lines. But today the lawn chairs in the stone room were empty, no one was watching the TV blaring a documentary about Princess Diana. Even the neighborhood dog that we have to shoo out a couple times an hour was missing. It was just me, grumpy older nurse, and cheerful younger nurse.

We called each woman in before the doctor got there to fill out the form required to do a pap smear. This was to be efficient, and also to avoid having to fill out the form while the pap smear is done, which can lead to awkward back and forth questioning from the doctor and nurse, like, ¨what´s your cell phone number?¨followed close by ¨how long have you had this discharge?¨

Most of this time, I sat around watching cheerful younger nurse (CYN) fill out this form with the patients. I really wanted to help, but I felt shy infringing on her job, and also I was really worried I would make a mistake. Making a mistake is a huge to-do when it happens. All the forms are in duplicate or triplicate, so you either have to start the whole form over or go fine a white out pen and go over each sheet. I´m still pretty bad with numbers over two digits, so the 11 digit cedula is tricky and so is the phone number unless they say just like ¨eight seven two four¨ instead of ¨eighty seven twenty four¨ which I almost always mess up.

Dra. Calle came in, grumpy but still her usual enthusiastic. She´s so young and idealistic, she could be on ER. We started with the pap smears, asking each woman to come in, go into the attached bathroom to put on the cloth robe, then lay down on the OB GYN table. Dra Calle and CYN crouch between her scared legs and adjust a large floor lamp with some Winnie The Pooh stickers on the base. I´ll spare you the details of the actual procedure. Mostly, I make eye contact with the woman while she grimaces. After we get the two samples on the slide to send to the library, the woman gets up and gets dressed, and CYN and Dra. Calle exchange looks about how bad the sample was.

And the samples are bad. For the majority of the first world, except for those horrible visits when your stomach drops and every thing changes, going to the doctor means not much is wrong. Just checking on it, catching it early, just making sure its nothing. Women should get pap smears about once a year, and the vast majority of those are going to come back normal. But for these women in Puembo, this is their first or second pap smear, after two or three children and years of sexual activity. And these women don´t take the morning off work to get checked out if nothing is wrong. They come in for a pap smear with discharge or stomach pain or bleeding that won´t stop. And its not like I have a microscope or anything, its not like I look at the samples that closely, but blood is pretty easy to spot. And of the 20 or so pap smears I´ve seen, only one or two haven´t been bloody.

I know this is really gross and graphic, but its my job and it’s the lives and health of these women. At least they are getting screened, even if we have to use the Winnie the Pooh lamp, even if the results take three weeks to come back, even if it might be too late. There are free pap smears every Thursday, and the doctor will come back from vacation to make sure they get done. And another happy point: we ask on the form about births and abortions (that’s the Spanish terms for miscarriages). And of these twenty women, only one has reported a miscarriage. And we know its true, because for many of the patients, their prenatal care was done at the center in Puembo. Low infant mortality? Clinical relationship with a single health care location? Those are huge steps in public health.


Unfortunately, tuberculosis is making a come back in Puembo. Whoops!

Guess What?!?!

I ate pasta for lunch again on Monday!

This Weekend I Ate Alot

This was the fin de semana of pasta. Or food in general. But a lot of that food was pasta. I’ll go by anecdotes, but its going to end up just describing meals because that’s what mainly happened this weekend.




On Friday afternoon, I had spaghetti on the brain. I stopped at a store on the way home from the bus stop to see if they had tomatoes to make a sauce. They were out, and I was all sad walking home until I went into the kitchen and found….marinara sauce! Just what I was hoping for. Jimmy and I both took naps, and when I got up there was a nun in the living room. I felt like Ke$ha, “wake up in the morning and there’s a nun at the table, grab my glasses Im out the door I’m gonna hit this…stable….” OK maybe not Ke$ha. I’d never actually met a nun before, so I was sort of scared but she was mostly very deaf and silent. She had been a nun since the month before my Ecuamadre was born, more than 53 years. Wow. She is my madre’s great aunt, she’s not just some random nun.



Anyway, so we ate spaghetti, my host mom, my metal head brother, our maid, this nun and I, and drank tea and ate canned peaches. That’s just how things go sometimes.



Wario and Vampira, my girlies, came over, and we went shopping at the cheap import stores near my house, lay around and chatted. We drank mocha and coffee and I discovered yet again that I really can’t drink milk. It really hurts me. We went downtown and sat around at this bar that actually serves those giant fishbowl drinks they warn you about before you go on Spring Break in Miami Beach or something. Instead of paying lots of money to get into clubs, I ate the best hamburger I have eaten in my life. Granted, that number is probably about a dozen, but this was so damnably good. It wasn’t a meat thing at all, it was the fried onions and mustard and perfectly toasted bun. A culinary experience, that burger. And even better given that it was 11:45, I was sitting on a lawn chair in downtown Quito and the fishbowls were going swimmingly.



That night ended late, but I managed to get myself up by 9 and have some fruit and granola and horrifically sweet yoghurt. I drink a lot of yoghurt here, and some of it is good and some of it is bad and bright pink. I went running in Parque El Ejido, which actually meant jogging fast for like 12 minutes and then powerwalking to the playground. They have the best playground in Parque El Ejido! There is a slide that is like two stories high and a zip line and this giant round swing. Everyone should go. I got home and watched some Sex in the City. For some inexplicable reason, we have disc two of season six, so I watched all of that. I didn’t understand the plot lines when I started and now I’m left in suspense. I need to find discs one and three!



At that point, it was time for lunch. My mom has a friend that makes pasta, so we boiled up some of her spinach raviolis and made pesto: basil, spinach, olive oil, garlic, and nuts in the blender. Bright green. We also made a salad with some ancient lettuce, red onions and a whole perfect avacado. Balsamic vinegar and sesemae oil dressing. Perfect. Ate a ton with my ma, chilled out and watched Jimmy and his girlfirned eat a ton. Raviolis are just perfect to pick out of the bowl.



A couple of hours later, I went over to my buddy Mike’s house for dinner. Mike is a big guy, a big Italian guy, and he misses good cooking and big meals, so he had about ten of us over and made pasta. When I got there, they were pouring in the third cup of heavy cream into the pot, and were glad I had brought the vodka. For vodka sauce. Let me tell you, it is really classy going to ask your local bodega owner for the “cheapest, smallest vodka.” You tell them its for cooking, and they don't believe you.



But it was for cooking, and the sauce was excellent. Rediculously rich and excellent. We had salad with dressing Hannah brought from Michigan and this amazing pasta and ridiculously created cookies a la Scott and Dita. We just threw ingedientes that we recalled are in cookies in a bowl and baked little lumps. We also almost added a cup of salt, because Mike’s family likes to keep salt in a jar labled “sugar.” They turned out really tasty, if texturally bizarre.



We sat around for a while, then decided to take a walk. We made it about ten blocks away to near Malcolm’s house, to a giant fluorescent panederia that would make the Beat Generation blush with nostalgia. Madre is sure it is a money laundering place, and I sort of believe her, and sort of just think she is judging the owners for being Colombian. We ordered cookies and coffee and sat there till they closed the place down at ten. We all went home to sleep off all that heavy cream.



The next morning, I watched I Heart Huckabees, which isn’t as good as the first time. Oh well. I ate a pretty bad omlette. Oh well. My madre and I walked near abuela’s house to the big weekend market. The last time I went there, it was my second or third day or something and I was so completely overwhelmed that I think I blocked the memory or something. This time, my Spanish was better, my propreoception less acute, and I was in an overall better mood. We bought fruit for juice, and that was awesome because I got to pick, so no diaretic-papaya juice this week, oranges, bok choi, beets, and eggplants. Ecuadorians have no idea what to do with eggplants, my madre couldn’t even think of the name for it. The lady selling was like “good thing your gringa knows what to do with these, its hard to sell them.” Anytime, old indigenous lady. Another old indigenous lady gave me a fruit so acidic and stringy I knew it wasn´t meant for human consumption. You got me there, second old indigenous lady.



We went to a baby clothes store and bought some really cute little romper things for Madre’s friend who is having a baby in like 3 days. I bought some underwear that say “100% intelegente” on them. Sometimes, its worth the 1.50$.



We went home and started making lunch. Madre gave me detailed instructions on how to make cibeche and I wrote them down in my notebook. Maybe if you are lucky, I’ll make it for you. She worked on the soup, boiling a whole chicken, feet and head included, although she strained those out so that you can put them in when you want them. She claimed the stomach and a food, and left Jimmy the head. Her very very pregnant friend came over and claimed the other foot. I was glad to be left out.



Soup and civeche isn’t really a meal, so my madre was like “COOK THESE EGGPLANT please.” I did some quick internetting and made eggplant parmesian, fried in a skillet in palm oil. Madre, pregnancy Doris and my evil neighbor Parilla were fascinated by it. They were aquainted with the bread crumbs-egg dipping process, but the idea of brining the eggplant, the idea of the eggplant in general was totally foreign. They were like “what could we eat this with?” “what culture does this come from?” “Is this healthy?” At one point, Parilla was like “This would be so good with cheese! And catchup!” She was close.



Malcolm and another friend of Madre came over, and we had lunch. The cibeche was the best I’ve had, the fish tender and flakey, the onions really crunchy, the broth perfect. Of course, we put popcorn and banana chips in it. Two months ago, if you told me I'd be eating blanched fish in orange juice with pop corn in it, I’d have gagged. Today, I just wished for more.



Then we had soup, fresh chicken broth with pieces of ginger, parsnip, and bok choi. Wow. So simple and safe tasting. There’s more of that, and I’m having it for breakfast.



Then we had the eggplants. They were pretty greasy but I got the proper crumb consistency without too many burnt spots or hard middles. It was so funny to see them eat it. My madre refused to eat the skin. Her other friend scraped off all the breading to eat after the eggplant, and the third friend tried to eat it with guacamole.



After that, we just sat around eating the guacamole with banana chips, which is, in my humble opinon, a better guacamole-carrying apparatus thatn the tortilla chip. I know that's pretty sacreligious, but stay with me on this one. We sat around the table and talked about, among other things, urine therapy (that's where you drink your own pee) and how madre’s one friend put her grandson’s urine on his face to cure some sort of white marks he had on his face. She would get him to pee in a cup, and then like wait fifteen minutes until “he’d half forgotten that he’d gone pee” and then “go up to him with the cloth already wet to wash is face.” It made the white marks go away, though. Apparently, the gunk the baby it covered in when it gets born is really good for wrinkles, and both madre and friend are mad they didn’t get it from their kids. Pregnant Doris had no comment.



Then I watched like three hours of MTV and did my homework. Madre and her friend the urine obsessed went for a walk, and when they came back, they were Hari Krishna crazy. Apparenty there are Krishnas in the Old Town on Sundays, and they gave them all this information about healthy vegetarian eating. I’m down for that, so we talked about ghee and baba ganoosh and how to get protein from legumes for a while. Then we had coffee and a some horrible chocolate cake. The weekend was coming to an end. But the cherry on the sundae? From some hippies selling them in Old Town, my madre brought Jimmy and I some aphrodesiacial choclate cookies. I think I’ll save that till later.

Happy Wednesday

Aw yeah, its the end of the day. Well, the end of the school day. The end of a test and an early class and a study session and a mediocre salad. After this, I´m going to take my buses home, lie on my bed for a while, go eat Indian food with my ma and bro, and study some school something with HanHan. I used all that alliteration because I have six classes and there is no way to keep up with all of them. None of them are particularly hard, but its two times the amount of homework I´m used to and I´m constantly forgetting things. I´m also keeping two journals for different classes, drawing daily, and keeping up THIS WONDERFUL BLOG. and taking pictures, though I have no cord to connect my camera to the computer. ´But I´m not a quejumbrosa, which means ¨whiney.¨ I´m cool with the level of record keeping that is going on. It helps me remember, it gives structure to my day.

Stuff that has happened lately...
1. Did an excellent skit in Spanish class that was about wizards and magic queens and used forty vocabulary words and ended with a rap. We got videotaped. Jamie and I are that good.

2. Drew alot in drawing class. My drawing teacher continues to think I am an idiot because I don´t know words for ¨crosshatch¨and ¨non-acidadted drawing paper¨and also becasuse I don´t spend lots of money on art supplies. But I can now draw strait lines, put shadows under drawings of vases, draw Bacardi bottles, etc.

3. Got my pants´zipper fixed and made friends with my local tailor

4. Got sick, accidentally fell asleep at the breakfast table. Watched Grey´s Anatomy and drank some witchy tea my Ecuamama made me and got better

5. I´m planning an Improv in English workshop! This is gonna be great!

6. Went to a horrible Oktoberfest theamed bar. It was Thursday and I was just going to have a glass of beer, but then if we got unlimited Pilsner for an hour, we got 75 cents off! what a deal!!!!!! so I watched my friend win a drinking contest while beer was litterly puddling in his clothes, and then I left. Ok, there is a reason I did not go on study abroad in Germany. No offence.

7. Ate at a restaurant called Menestra de Negro. This is their logo. Not sure how to process this.

8. Watched Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Watched it again. Wow.

9. Found a cheap vegetarian Indian restaurant. This was critical to my health.

10. Celebrated Dia de los Defuntos at abuela´s house with colada morada which kind of is like syrupy koolaid with chunks of peach and ¨babaco¨in it. We also had ¨guaguas de pan¨which looked like more like larvea or fetuses than babies, and had eyes made of green raisins. Ok, cool. Hung out with my 7 year old cousins. Retreated to Malcolm´s room to read sociology when I got overwhelmed.

11. Found out how awesome Google Voice is. ¿How awesome? Really awesome. You can call any number in the US for free awesome. You can talk to your ma and sister awesome. You can activate your bank card awesome. Awesome.

12. Ate empenadas for lunch three days in a row. You can get an empenada and a juice for 2.20. you can share an empenada with your friend! you can bring french fries over from next door! you can get ceviche and popcorn! you can buy beer the size of a baby bottle or the size of a carton of milk! You can buy milkshakes! There are no salads or soup or really any vegetables, but you can get two pork empenadas for the price of one! (still haven´t gotten there)

13. It was my ¨tio¨ Malcolm´s birthday! Happy birthday!

14. Wrote alot of emails.

15. Suddently got really good at Spanish grammar and spelling. I can actually correct my own work now, I don´t have to sit with my Ecuamami like a 3rd grader

16. Learned I am not supposed to be putting my toilet paper in the toilet. Whoops.

17. Loved Ecuador! (also learned the word cursis, which means cheeeeesy)