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)

Idiot Grin

here are some nicely stupid things I have said recently.


papanicolau is not the word for "Papa Nicholas," even though they sound the same. It means
pap smear. whoops.

The word for a snobby rich person isn't peluquero, its pelucon. Peluquero means
barber. so I was calling kids at my school hairdressers. What an insult.


And then everyday for class we make up sentences with our vocabulary and verb lists. Some of the funnier results.

"She abused our friendship when she gave my money"

"The closet took advantage of World War II"

"The all fled from the happiness of the restroom"

"When I went to touch the rat I looked for a package that was not dead."

"He really worries about the criminal system while resting at night."

"Your BMW tastes good always"


"facebook was discovered in one thousand, two hundred and four"

As I'm sure you all understand, we do it for the lolz

Yo Soy Una Mujer Sincera

"More and more I realize feminism will save the world. Feminism is for everybody. You can’t start with a fundamental, crazy imbalance like patriarchy. Until we have gender equality we will have crazy social ills. Feminism is a tool for men as well to escape violence and inequality."

Go Ani DeFranco.


Some pictures I like





alt="some_text"/>

Enough political thinking, its the weekend!

Things that are going to happen this weekend:
-Clean room/do laundry
-take a nap
-do all my drawing homework
-do all my biology homework
-do all my sociology homework
-cry
-talk to Eustace
-Have Dia De los Defuntos, which is like the Day of the Dead, where you eat ¨Colada Morada¨which is this purple syrup that symbolizes blood, and ¨guaguas de pan¨(bread babies) to symbolize the babies that died.
-watch (not participate in!) a pro-Correa demonstration
-floss
-take malaria meds

The fun never stops here in the interandean valley.

Thats all for now folks

Talky Talky

Here are two interesting/funny anecdotes relating to linguistics from the last two days.

1. I read one of those comic-book style textbooks about linguistics. It was really interesting, but then I caught myself applying Chomsky´s rules of language acquisation to my life! BF Skinner said that childrne learn language through correction and positive and negative reinforcement through their parents. Chomsky said that this isn´t true, that kids don´t just make random guesses at words, they create rules. Today, I felt myself create a rule. In spanish, coverings for things often have the prefix ¨sobre¨and then the word. I was looking for the word ¨Pillowcase¨ (and a pillowcase itself), and I called it a ¨sobrealmohada.¨ Even though that´s not the word (its almohadón), I felt my logic-brain think of how Spanish views coverings for things and what they call them. I´m learning!

2. This one is funny. We were in improv class, and we had a reading to do in English. the teacher was explaining some words in English that people might not know.
Teacher: (Spanish) Ok, so one word is ¨Joker.¨ Who knows what joker means?
Student 1:(English)Batman´s enemy
Student 2: (English)¨WHY SO SERIOUS¨
Student 3: (English) The late Heath Ledger won an Oscar for his preformance in The Dark Knight
Student 4: (Spanish) Heath Ledger died, you idiot!
Student 3: I know! That´s why I said the late
Student 2: He passed away!
Student 4: So ¨Joker¨means ¨dead¨?
Teacher: (Spanish) Ok, let´s move on. Theater of the Oppressed was founded by a Brazillian, Agusto Boal, who actually died about a year and a half ago.
Student 2: What a joker

An Interesting Weekend (Long but hopefully worth it)

(All the photos in this entry are Aracely's. Thanks!)
This weekend, we went to the northern coastal province of Esmeraldas. Specifically, we went to the small island of Musine in the Canton of the same name. I’m going to go over the main points of what happened, expanding in the Analyze, Describe, Interpret, and Evaluate format that this assignment calls for.

FRIDAY
Our trip started early. I was out of the house by ten to six on Friday morning, looking for a taxi. I finally found one, driven by an ancient man drinking a Pilsner out of a can in the passenger seat. Drinking and driving here is totally a non-issue. I said to him, “so you are drinking beer?” and he responded “claro que si” and took a sip. I got to Quicentro mall safely, though, and he charged me fifty cents less than I had expected. We all met on the steps of El Español, cranky and half asleep. Most people didn’t have rubber boots, so we freaked out about that for a while. We met our guides, Giovanni and Andre.
The drive was long but we all were sleeping for the first few hours, getting out of suburban Quito, the desert by the Mitad del Mundo, and the cloud forests. We started waking up around Mindo, and stopped for snacks and bathroom. The bus drive passes slowly. We slowly lost altitude, it got wetter, the roads less well paved, and the houses got poorer, the people sitting on the porches waved more intently, the children wore less clothes, the men wore rubber boots. We saw palmacultura, farms that grow African Palms in long, crooked, furry rows for the little red berries that make cheap cooking oil.
We stopped for lunch in Atacames, a nice-ish beach town about an hour from our destination. We ate at the restaurant Oh! Mar! Aracely and I ordered a civeche and a seafood pasta to share. The civeche was great, I’d never had it before. The pasta was a different story. Let’s go to the DAIE format to work over lunch. Describe: a mixing bowl full of pasta, surrounded by lettuce and lemon slices. On top of the pound of pasta lie several prawns larger than my hand, unidentified pieces of muscle tissue, creatures that can only be described as “mini squids” (bright purple), normal sized shrimps, cloves of garlic, and chunks of tomato. I’ll admit it; I shuddered when I saw the eyes, arms, and heads of the prawns, and the baby squids. Aracely and I locked eyes, and she bravely took the prawns off, and started sawing away.
Now let’s analyze. The easy point: I’m afraid of seafood. I’ve been a vegetarian for five years or so, but I started eating meat in Ecuador so I wouldn’t be a hassle, and also so I could learn about parts of the food culture, like seco de gallina and ceviche. Overall, its gone pretty well, except for my cholesterol levels, I suppose, but this was the exception. I was shocked to have to eat something so recently alive. Most of the meat I’ve eaten here has come pre-cut, cooked, and served. I haven’t bought my own meat from the supermarket, haven’t cooked it up myself. I’ve been enjoying the tasty parts of being an omnivore, but not the mammalian truth; I’m killing something most times I eat lunch. It was hard to face that, and embarrassing to have to do so in a restaurant in front of friends all happily chomping away on shrimps. My behavior wasn’t appropriate, it’s not good to dissect your food, form a discard pile full of mini shrimps and things with identifiable eyeballs, but its what happened. My behavior was in line with my morals, my ethics, and my conundrum about eating meat. I just wish I hadn’t left Aracely having to eat three enormous prawns, when their faces freaked her out too.
Time to interpret. I wonder why the restaurant gave us such a preposterous amount of food. It was too much for two people; we barely got through half of it. Were we supposed to order just one item for our family of five? Lunch is the biggest meal of the day in Ecuador, but we'd barely eaten anything that day and we still barely made a dent in the pasta. The restaurant was clearly catering to tourists, so maybe they were fat hungry tourists who wanted to sample the bounty of the sea. Also, it did cost 11 dollars, which is huge for Ecuador (thought not huge for seafood), so maybe the goal was to get your money’s worth. I really don’t know.
Finally, I’m going to Evaluate. I’m glad, overall, that I didn’t just slurp down shrimp eyes with my linguini. I’ve been feeling pretty unsure about how to approach the eating-meat situation, and this incident really made it clear that I need to put more thought into it.
Enough of that, back to the story. After lunch, we wandered around the town, mostly on a side street filled with small stores selling bathing suits, and leering men. We bought ice cream and walked on a small stone bridge over a dirty green river-channel of the sea. I watched a woman watching us on the bridge out of her house by the river. The house was made of cement, stilts holding up the back. She was wearing a slip with holes in it. It fully filled my image of a backwater brothel. She was so sad and observant, just sitting by her window.
After we started driving again, the sadness didn’t stop. By the time we got to the Congal research station, I couldn’t stop looking out of the window. The houses were all wooden, small or larger, on the ground or with porches, or on stilts. Wide windows to let in ventilation, so you can fully see into family life. Women cooking, kids playing with dogs, a man drinking a beer, clothes drying, spanking babies, the minutia of daily life that you can keep private when you have curtains.
I really liked the station at Congal. It was down a very muddy track, 4 k off the main road (glad I brought my boots!). We stayed in simple rooms with bunk beds and cold-water showers. We immediately found a giant spider on our door, which we were very brave about. There were hammocks, a dining room, and a tree house like place for permanent volunteers

We took a walk to the nearby town, Bunche. It was very, very poor. Very very. Part of the problem is that the town is very close to the ocean, which has very strong tides. So the streets flood twice a day, covering the town in silt, mud, and salt. The people were extremely friendly, several people just came up and introduced themselves, but it was hard to see a town in such a desolate location. After Bunche, we walked to the beach.

It was raining a little, but the water and air were warm, and we had mud fights and played tag. It was very fun, very group bonding.
We walked back to the station and had dinner (shrimp rice! My favorite!) with the other volunteers, mostly gap-year kids from Australia, USA, or Germany. They were very friendly and eager to speak English to people they hadn’t spent every day with for the past two months.
After dinner, we went to Freddy’s houses. Freddy lives between Bunche and Congal, in a house whose bottom story is empty except for a motorcycle and several dogs. Once you climb the ladder to the second floor, you find five or six hammocks, a table and chairs, and a television. The whole thing looks like a porch and is covered in graffiti. We watched the soccer game for a while, and then walked to the beach to have a bonfire. It was great, to watch Freddy build a fire that was protected from the wind with coconut husks, to talk with other motivated kids about Ecuador, to just sit on the beach in the dark and watch the fire. We went back around ten, scared by some pigs and horses on the road, and fell asleep instantly.

SATURDAY
We woke up at 530 to go see some monkeys. That was unpleasant but do-able. We rode the bus to the harbor of Muisne, and then got onto a large motorboat.

We rode through manglares channels, squinting in the morning, dozing off, eating the fruit salad we brought. After about 40 minutes of travel deep into the manglares, we stopped and walked along these banks by large shrimp ponds into the forest. We walked a long ways into the forest (a rainforest, not like a pine tree forest). Then we found some monkeys!

There were five or six very high up in a tree, some with babies on their backs. We watched them for a long time, and then they started to get mad that we were there, and started peeing on us. So we left the forest. To leave the forest-shrimp pond area, we had to retrace our steps, but the tide had gone out, so instead we walked through this man’s house that was nearby, walking messily on his porch, climbing up a ladder to the giant generator which pumps water to the shrimp pond, and back down another ladder to the boat.

We traveled back out of the manglares and onto a big sand bar/beach, where we had breakfast round two: wonder bread and cheese and cold cuts. This was seriously one of the best meals I have ever had. Unfortunately, we ran out of sandwich fillings, so I had a mayonnaise sandwich, and everyone made fun of me. We just played around on the sand for a while, jumping across tide pools and playing in the quicksand we found by accident.
We got back on the boat and went to a shrimp farm. Shrimping used to be the second biggest industry in Ecuador, after petroleum, and people could get rich overnight harvesting shrimp. However, in 1998, there was “the great shrimp bust of ‘98” which sounds funny but isn’t. People tried to import tiger prawns from Asia, and the tiger prawns were immune to this disease that South American shrimp are not. Almost all the shrimp in this area died. People lost their lively hood overnight, the price of shrimp dropped, and all these expensive, manglar-destroying, and complex shrimp farms were abandoned. It was a really bad time. As the shrimp are starting to gain immunity, there are larger crops, but the price of shrimp is still at half of pre-bust levels.
We also tried some hot peppers growing by the shrimp pond, which literally made me cry and sneeze for ten minutes. We walked into the manglares (mangroves) and learned all about the different types of trees and the lifecycle of a mangrove. Some of the trees there have roots that stick up above ground to get more oxygen because the soil is so dense.
We took the boat back to the bus, and that’s when things started to get weird. We needed to change into our swimsuits, but only the girls, so we asked the men to get of the bus. Everyone did so, except the bus driver. We asked him to get off of the bus, in very polite Spanish, but he remained sitting in the front seat. He said “no lo veo,” but it was clear that he could veo, because we could see his eyes in the rearview mirror. It was uncomfortable, but we dealt with it. After we got off the bus, we took a boat across the river, and then rickshaw-motorcycle-tricycles across the island, grinning at how absurd it all was. We ate excellent lunch at a restaurant by the beach, drinking Inca Cola, the king of drinks. We played in the water, found sand dollars, built a sand castle, and watched a soccer game. We lacked a few hours before we had to go, so we sat back at the restaurant and played with a very cute little kid who wanted to play. Sometimes kids who are by themselves can be just so social and goofy that you can’t help but play along.
We started walking to the town, away from the beach part of town. The little kid followed us, but Andre told us that everyone in the town knows each other and that the kid would be well taken care of. Muisne was like Bunche in that everything was covered in mud. There are about 8000 people in the town. The main island is coverd in cement buildngs, none with glass. Many people in our group had to go to the bathroom, so Giovanni lead them away, and Andre talked to us about the water situation in Muinse. Currently, people mainly buy and refill large bottles on the mainland, or they drink the contaminated brackish water and get diarreaheal diseases. A student from Yale who worked at Congal tried to work on setting up a reverse-osmosis system, but the local government was so corrupt that all the funds went missing. I thought about this for a long time, analyzing how this could have happened. Maybe he didn’t outline the program properly; maybe the student didn’t plan properly. Or maybe you can interpret this as a lack of respect for government, a lack of respect for foreigners, or just plain desperation and need for money. Whatever the reason, it can be seen as a waste of resources to try to help Muisne if any external funds are just going to get doled out individually. Unless individual economic assistance is the goal.
After a long time, we decided to find the people who went to the bathroom, and found them playing pool. So we played pool for a while and ate candy. I played with some little kids. Little kids are the same everywhere, except they asked me for my cigarette, even though they couldn’t have been more than six at the very oldest.
We stood on a corner of the town, eating ice cream and watching the people pass by. It was very depressing. It’s hard to describe it, but I just felt like there was this air of total desperation and repression going on. I imagined if I lived here, and honestly I thought about how I would probably move away or kill myself as soon as I could. I thought about how I didn’t see a single book for sale on the island, no bookshelves in the houses, only a church and it’s bible. How hard would it be to learn about the outside world if you literally lived on an island made of mud?
At six, we walked to the marimba presentation. The landscape of Musine changed as we walked away from the center. The original houses are built on solid ground, but the outskirts of the town are not actually on the island. The houses are on stilts with ramps or ladders leading down to the ground. When the tide is low, you can walk across the mud to your house, but when it rises, you are stuck either in or out. There was a sidewalk constructed the same way, and we walked along that to Muisne’s most hopping dance club: a cement room filled with 50 children and a marimba band. Some kids did a marimba dance, and then asked us to do the dance. That was fun. But then things turned bad. So you know how slavery inspired dancing can be really sexual? Well, this was. The boys laid down on the ground, and the girls thrust themselves at their faces. Then the girls laid down on the ground, and then the boys assumed the push-up position over them and thrust wildly. Young kids, too, no older than twelve. They were laughing, but it was definitely sexual. But then, they asked us to the dance too. So I lay on the ground while a seven-year-old boy thrust at me, and my 6 foot six friend had to get on top of a twelve-year-old girl. Most of my other girl friends said that they put their hands in front of their faces or closed their eyes, but with my dance partner, we made eye contact and laughed the whole time.
What happened here? It’s hard to analyze this part. What happened was kids were using adult traditions to impress foreigners? Was shock part of the goal? It certainly was accomplished, but were they going for it? Was it just a normal part of culture, or was it meant to be extreme. It makes me uncomfortable that young children were doing sexual things. I know, especially as anthropology major, that all cultures have value and that little is definitively good or bad, but this just seemed wrong. Part of safety is some freedom, at least as far as I know, and children deserve some freedom from adult pressures. One of these is freedom from acting sexual before they want to. Maybe these kids were ready, maybe they wanted to, but I doubt it. And we gringos certainly didn’t want to. It was a situation of sexual pressure, which is never helpful or empowering. Why was that there? Why didn’t we say no? Why did they set it up like that? I don't know.
After the dance, Andre said to us, “now you know why they have such high teen pregnancy in Muisne.” I think it was supposed to be a joke, but it wasn’t for me. If there is no other option besides marriage and reproduction, if you know are valued for nothing besides your sexuality, if there is no option to use your brain or strength in useful ways (and there aren’t, on an island with no jobs), it makes sense to turn to sexuality, even at a ridiculously young age. Maybe the teenage girls that talked to the boys in our group weren’t prostitutes. Maybe they were looking for a way out.
We took the bus home in silence, grateful and shocked. I read for a while in a hammock, Mike and Stewart and I reading passages of our books that we liked to each other. I slept and had scary dreams.

SUNDAY
We woke up later, ate many many empanadas for breakfast, and then rode on the bus for ten hours. Lots of singing, yelling, picture taking, studying, game playing and general bonding. A good time. Got home at 830, took a taxi home. No beer this time.

Today was a Good Day

Today was a good day! Lots of good stuff happened. Right now I´m really stressed out packing for my trip tomorrow, and I´m eating trail mix, and vaguely afraid that a serial rapist is going to get me ( I just read The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) and pretty cranky. But it was still a great day.

The day started early, at like 6 am. My mom made me grilled cheese and this really excellent juice. Sometimes I hate papaya juice, but today it was papaya-maracuya-orito juice and that was so good! I took a shower and felt really clean. I put on my favorite shirt and shoes. I got on the bus to Cumbayá, and then I got on another bus to a further suburb called Puembo. I went there to get my volunteering project figured out. The bus ride was about an hour, very relaxing. Got to the sub-centro de salud, met my mentor, Dra. Veronica Espinoza, who is about 30 and really friendly and overworked. She was organizing a mission of volunteer doctors who were going door to door asking all the people of Puembo if they had disabilities and what care they were getting.

I watched her orient about 50 doctors for an hour or so, and I chatted with this awesome lady named Dina who may have been a prostitute. She was dressed like one, at any rate. Anyway, she was showing the doctors around, and being like the local guide. She was just really nice and chatty when I didn´t know anyone, and she said she´ll bring me some avacados next week because its avacado season. Cool! Dina left to go lead people around her neighborhood, and I talked to the head nurse in the sub-center. I do not know her name, but she is determined, proud, capable, and excellent. She is going to teach me alot. There is another nurse, and they both showed me around, the file room, the vaccine center, the baby room, the doctor´s room, the kicthen/pharmaceutical storage area. Its very very bare bones, their main job is distributing birth control, vaccines, and preventing malnutricion. Perfect. That´s what I´m looking for. I´m going to work there on Thursdays from 830- 11, and all of January. So excited to learn how a poor rural clinic functions!

Around 1130 I took the bus back to Cumbayá. I ate some mediocre pasta with Jamie and Aracely, and Jamie (look at me with my friends and their blogs) and talked about our rap album. We are both so jazzed, its so fun to be with someone so enthusiastic. Then I went to Improv class. Improv class just rules. We aren´t producing anything to sneeze at, but we are all learning a ton of theory, games, cooperacion, all that good stuff. The class is really starting to bond and work to gether well. We are all comfortable, like, rolling on to each other. We worked our way up to Freeze! today, and that was a thrill. I celebrated by using the phrase ¨give me dome¨immeditely. Classay. My class is having a preformance on Saturday in the Plaza del Teatro Sucre, the main theater in Old Town, and I really wish I could go, but I have to go to Esmeraldas! boo!

On Tuesdays after Improv I have my Exchange student/ICRP class, but I dont on thursdays, so I hung out with some people from my improv class. Really. All by myself. Without Hannah or my brother or anybody. Granted, two of them were gringos, and we spoke english a lot of the time, but I´m pretty aspergers-ly proud about this. Its been so hard to make friends and put yourself out there, but here I was talking honestly, being goofy, telling about the time I got drunk at Passover when I was nine. (but let´s face it, who hasn´t?). We even went to the burger restaurant near school and I got a milkshake, and Maria Jose gave me half of her sanduche (that´´s how you spell sandwich in Ecuador), and I didn´t even care that the main ingredients were American Cheese, ground beef, and potatoes. I was hanging with friends!

But then, I had to go to class. Its art class at4. At 420, the teacher hadn´t show up, so I went home. He might have shown up just as I was leaving campus, but we´ll never know. Took the bus to abuela´s house. Chatted with the approx. 17 people that were there, including: Abuela, the guard Javier, my madre, the guard dog, some new turtles they just got, two gardener people, Diego my uncle, the two kids Diego was toutoring in calculus, my uncle Carlos, my uncle Carlos´patient, Jimmy´s three friends waiting outside for Jimmy to finish working on another friend, Malcolm, and my cousin Moni-Pati. Then I read an article about high schoolers´perception of thier racial identity in Brazil. Yeah.

Malcolm and I had ¨sopito¨which refers to any food you eat after 5 pm. It can also be refered to as ¨cafecito¨or ¨merienda¨which means snack. sopito today was a large bowl of vegetable soup, some cold mashed potatoes with pieces of scrambled egg in them (bad), pieces of chicken, and some cake. Ok, whatever. I had my sopito, and my papaito, and my polloito and my tortito. I went to Jimmy´s office, and he worked on my neck/ jaw for a while. Feels better, he´s good at what he does. He put this adhesive tape on my jaw that is supposed to de-stress my muscle. Its on my face and bright blue and I´m supposed to leave it on for a week. We´ll see.

After that, Madre and I walked a few blocks to this GIANT slightly stalinist church to see the symphony. Admittedly, they are not fantastic, but its the Quito Symphony Orchestra no matter what. We got there early and chatted with my madre´s friend, her exchange student, and the exchange student´s friends, who all spoke horrible spanish, were extremely nice, and probably much much smarter than me. I had a 25 minute crush on the overly aryan boy, we discussed our favorite vegetables. The music was nice, but went on too long as it always does. I fell asleep for a while, even on the uncomfortable church pews. I gave up trying to look cool in front of mr. blond hair.

Took a taxi home and that jerk tried to charge me 2 dollars when it was clearly a 125 ride and he drove badly. I gave him 150 and got out. Yeah.

Now I´m here in my pjs, ready to sleep, but needing to pack some long sleeves and deet first. Excited to see some manglares in real life, not excited to get covered in black fly bites, which itch and hurt and give you malaria. Whoops. Have a good weekend everyone!

Un Ratito

So, my buddy Daedal is studying in Greece, and he wrote

dana, in my ethnography class today we got to talking about ecuador and how they used to have the same sense of time as the greeks in that it is event-based rather than time-based. apparently a few years ago the government decided that they were going to change this and make it so that meetings and other various things always started right when they said they'd start. i'm wondering if this was actually successful and if it's changed or if you find that the culture is still event-based instead of time-based like the US? let me know :-). blockquote>

I wrote back,

its really a mix. I also learned about the event based thing, but not in relation to the greeks. I learned about it as a ¨polychronic¨vs ¨monochronic¨which are such totally greek terms. Anyway, so most of western culture is monochronic, but Ecuador +Latin America + ancient greece were polychronic, so they are really into multitasking and not worring about time things, partially due to the fact that there are no seasons, so there´s no real rush to make it through the hard part of the year like there is when you have a winter.

Acutal manifestation of this: the word ¨un ratito¨ is super common. it means ¨in a little bit¨and its totally appropriate to say it to anyone, in a business meeting, on the phone, whatever, and just ignore the other person to do something else. So un ratito is still in effect, but classes, meetings, importatnt stuff starts on time, and my teachers get mad if you arrive late. However, dinners, going out, casual stuff is usually late. Usually things start on time, but end up running over so the second parts start late. Like my friend George came over when he said he would, at nine, but we didn´´t actually go bikining until 945. Its just less stress about time.

Doing Fine

Hi guys,
That last update was pretty scary, right? Well, I´m glad to report that everything is going fine here. The police are still off duty, and there´s an increce in crime, but nothing really chaotic is going on. Yesterday, I went an hour outside of the city to some hot springs called Papallacta, and that was AWESOME. we just lay around in these thermal pools and relaxed. We ate cheap food and looked at the beautiful mountain scenery. It was very relaxing and restful, a nice break from school-grind and hearing automatic weapons.

Details of coup: police threw a tear gas canister at Correa, then took him to the police hospital to get treated, where they held him hostage for a few hours. The military is back on the Correa side, and attacked the hospital. 88 people were wounded and two or three were killed. Correa escaped and was recovering at an actually legitimate hospital. There might be more activity later, but its going ok now.

Civilian life is pretty normal. Alot of stores are closed or close early, so that´s sort of a hassle. When stores are open, they often have thier metal gate-doors up, so they ask you what you want and get it for you. This takes a long time but isn´t bad. Today I´m going bike riding down Amazona Avenue, a normal Sunday traditon. Just wanted to tell everybody that I´m doing ok and things are fine