Daily Lifes

p>Some people (my grandparents) might be confused about what my daily life is like here in EcuadorSIPWorld. Here's how it happens most days. 

5:40am. Alarm goes off. Snooze

5:50. Alarm goes again. Hate life, worry about how I always end up sleeping on my belly, that can't be good for neck.

6am. actually get up this time. Put on one of two pairs of jeans and one of three shirts. Same shoes every day.

6:15. make breakfast. I boil water for tea, make myself some kind of banana-based smoothie, and some kind of carbohydrate. My host dad drinks oatmeal and eats saltines and watches me in silence. We listen to the Christian radio. 

6:30. get ready for work: fill up my 2 liter bottle with filtered water, get my two little-snack packs of crackers, get my notebook, pens, voice recorder, and money for the bus and lunch

7. leave the house and walk half an hour down the giant hill I live on.

7:30. get to the bottom, wait for the bus.

7:30-7:45. Approximately 17 buses pass and none of them are going to Puembo. Some of them have cool signs on them like this one:

that shows all the laborious tasks the people of Tumbaco can do. but it also makes me think of those images that are actually people having sex. No judgement, plz.

7:45. Get on the Puembo bus. I used to just look the scenery but I just got some headphones so I mostly listen to the Mountain Goats ( Heretic Pride is my Mountain Goats album of the year) and sleep. 

8:15. Get to Puembo. Theres a line out to the corner, about 50 people, mostly Mas and Babies waiting for appoitnment. I battle through and make it to the door on the basis of my scrubs, admire how clean it is in there.

8:45. after I stand around for 30 minutes or so watching stuff that is way too complicated to take fieldnotes on, I go into one of the Drs offices to watch them do their family planning appointments. 

9:40. Those appointments are done, I leave the office to find the nurse swamped in preparing people. Each day, there are like 30 people that come to get the appointment you need to attend school. People do lots of things wrong like not bring the exams we need for the certificate, not bring the 1$ needed for the certificate, not bring the children the certificate is for, or have children that are out of the Puembo district. I spend a lot of time being like "you need an exam of urine AND feces AND blood. Yes. Blood. it's possible to get an exam of blood, its very safe." and "if your child is not going to school, you do not need to get the exams or the certificate." I can say this stuff on the phone too. 

We weigh and measure and take the temparature and blood pressure of so many people. Each day a baby pees on the scale when we take thier daipers off. 

10:30. I watch more appointments with the other Dr. 

11:30. I wait until now or 10 to eat my crackers. It's an obsession. It's a lifestyle. 

here's me and my double chin that has nothing to do with eating crackers.

1pm. Lunchtime with Doña Marcy. We eat chicken, rice, potatoes, and onion salad and gossip. 

1:20. Back to work. I look for files in the hideously disorganized archive room, prepare patients and watch more appointments. 

2:45. The patients are done, Dr. V slaps the giant pile of the clinic histories of the patients she's seen that day, Dr. J pulls out her phone to text in celebration

2:50. Four people come in: one want birth control but is actually already pregnant, one is a screaming child who needs stitches, and one is an over protective mom who wants to vaccinate her 7 year child with vaccines we do not carry and is mad about it. The other is a 27 year old man with some kind of vague ache ("my knee hurts." "I have a rash." "I was just wondering if this bleeding from my ear is normal." "Can you guys remove warts? Because I have a ton of warts and I'd like them removed today if you can.") We help all four of them in the three-quarters way that everyone seems satisfied with. There are a lot of recommendations to just go to the hospital

4:30. We pile into Dr. J's car and drive to Quito. We listen to radio disney very loud, even during the commercials. The Drs talk to very quietly to each or in English to the Georgetown medical student while the Nurse and I sit in back and ask each other simple, repetetive questions like "What is your favorite food? "What is your favorite flavor of ice cream?" "Have you seen The Green Lantern?" "What size shoe do you wear?" 

4:50. The Doc drops me off at the same spot every day and almost forgets every day. I walk up the hill being afraid of getting mugged even though nothing is scary on that walk, ever.

5:15. Make it home, remove horribly sweaty clothes. Eat more crackers. Waste my life on the internet.

8. host parents come home, give me weird foods for dinner. We do not speak but every 45 seconds or so my "mom" catches my eye and gives me a look like  tthat might symbolize love or something.

830pm. I start feeling really bad about not being able to type up the 25 hand scrawled pages into perfect fieldnotes each night. Instead of dealing with this productively, I mostly complain about it to people on Skype. Luckily, my excellent mother was just like "do those in maryland dummy and get enough sleep and don't beat yourself up over it." So I'm going to do that from now on.

This might also be because my desk is so durn messy:

contents include: external hard drive, Ipod, camera, voice recorder and all thier respective cords, two types of candy, my unused planner, notecards, "South America on a Shoe String" "The Dharma Bums in Spanish," a note entitled "Thing to Look Forward to in the US", Spanish-English Dictionary, a lone earring made of dried glue, broken headphones, reciepts, academic articles, my computer case, and a needle and thread. 

10: there is no context of fieldnotes now, I'm just really sitting around and reading and eating candy that I should have given to other people as gifts or candy that I just bought for myself

11: i go to sleep. Blah. 

Isn't like life in a foreign country fascinating and exotic?!?!?

 

Weekday Update

This is the warmup to my field notes. It is 640 pm on Friday and I just rolled around in the yard with the dogs for a while. There really is no better way to feel loved while getting covered in spit. Besides, like, making out or something. It's been really awesome here! Actually I've been pretty lonely and eating a lot, but the activities themselves have been awesome!

Recap

Saturday, July 2

Had a lot of fun with Hannah in Quito, going shopping at the fruit market, chilling with her family, having the most awkward cake-making experience ever, making fun of Hannah because she forgot the end of the 50 states song, etc. It's so awesome having another gringa here, especially one as great as Hanner. She's doing an awesome internship with a micro-finance organization and her and her host mom have all these brilliant conversations about anti-machismo action. It's very inspirational. Also, she does things like feed me twizzlers and endlessly quote 30 rock, so its a pretty wonderful relationship.

Sunday I went to Quito and saw Jimmy and Abuelita and Abuelo. Jimmy and I watched family guy and A&A were old and talked about that. Abuelo is so old he is just a husk, full of complaints and gas and chocolate cravings. I talked to abuela a lot about how it means to keep loving someone even after they can't love you back.

I went back to Cumbaya on the bus. I love knowing the bus system. I kinda organized my life and wrote a lot, went running, cleaned my room, talked to my lovely mom.

Monday...I went to work, then came home and did some field notes and slept

Tuesday, I went to work as well! At 6 or so I met my friend Carlos in Cumbaya and we had dinner and an awesome conversation. Carlos is one of those people that is so excited about the tremendous possiblities of the internet, really love it, feels himself in code, but is ok with the fact that he's also terrified of Steve Jobs dying and the next generation what are thier inner lives like!??! We have really similar opinons, are both really good with words, but approach things in completely different ways. It's so interesting to get that perspective. He's such a focused conversation-partner. I could talk about how great these three hours of talking were for quite some time.

Wendesday, I went to work as well. Then, after work, I went to Quito again to see Pilar. I took my old buses, my old route through the neighborhood. That place will always stick with me. I bought popcorn and ice cream, then went into the hosue to find no one there and no food. So i turned back around and went to the store to make pasta. While examining the tomato paste, Charito my arch nemisis ran into me. She was up to her ususal tricks: "oh your famous noodle dishes" she crows "They disgust me. Everyone else seems to like pasta, but to me it is disgusting. It looks like worms." "I will wait for you, its not like I have anyhting to do besides watch tv alone. We need to talk to gether. This neighborhood is so dangerous, you're likely to get stabbed walking up the stairs" (that simply isn't true. not awesome, sure, but no one dies).

climbing the stairs to the house. "is Pilar home?"

"no, not yet"

"let me use your phone then, mine got cut off. Just a few calls"

"its not my house, I can't do that"

"ok I guess you are right."

We part ways and I listen to socialist fight songs on the radio for three minutes unitl she knocks on the door:

"I was thinking about it and I know how pilar gets girls to pay to live in her house and i want to do that too"

"ok, I'll tell Kalamazoo about you"

"no, because pilar only gets girls because she is friends with the teachers becasuse its such a bad neighborhood. no one would live with me because its a bad neighborhood. So we could do it under the table, I would only ask for 300 and pilar asks for 350. Tell all the girls to come to my house."

"Ok, i will, but kalamazoo won't just let people come to your house for free. Besides only ten students are coming this year, so you won't get one"

"Alright, but when your girl firends come to quito, they stay with me"

"ok charito, they stay with you."

Telling pilar, she responds, "I don't think I would want anyone to stay with Charito."

Amen.

We watch Death At A Funeral, the recent one with the rich black family, a movie that didn't irritate me about portrayals of race for once. We start "Friends With Benefits" which is horrible and we talk about our lives instead. I go to sleep at 11 and wake up at 530 and ride three long buses to get to work.

Thursday and Friday, you'll have to wait for. Make your audience drool for more, as the Writing Handbook for Vampires says.

not super interesting, just summer life

I almost hit a woman in the crosswalk today.

I cut fruit for sangria, I boiled beets for salad, I made peanut sauce and a yogurt dressing. I cut cucumbers into crudites. I watched Anis Mogjani endlessly (until it ended). LINK.

I ate at elevation burger and spent time with my neighbors, realizing I've lived my life paraleell, next to, so damn close, to thiers for years. And that people have always done that, lived close to people they have no real connection to before the cloesness started and they started understanding and forming opinons about each others lives. That's something really interesting.

Nap in the sun burnt airconditioning of ma's room. I fell asleep 45 seconds after I lay down and snored. According to reliable sources.

I saw Terry (link to shark blog) today, we ate caloric pot pie and watched TV. I bet its totally #trending but that show Wilfred is really weird. It's the first show to feature weed so prominantly, I think this means that it will soon be legalized.

As I was walking with him back from the house he was house sitting to the house were he lives, we heard this woman scream and yell "oh, please don't hurt me!" It's a nice residential neighborhood in Takoma Park, so it was quiet and abnormal. We listend, my keys between my fingers, his phone out to call 911. Two teenagers walked by, holding hands, smoking a j cooly. We talked about how we had heard someone yell soon, but they couldn;t do anything, doing drugs in public and all. And so we walked, and when a cop stopped us and asked if we had seen someone running with a purse we exhaled. Purses are worth less than the Girl-With-The-Dragon-Tattoo Sex-den-rapist-killer stuff we were both thinking.

As I got home, I slammed my knee into the coffee table and I'm pretty sure I'm out for the count. Thank you for ice packs and healing.

To look into further:

-jerrymandering in Florida

-what if you asked people to draw thier own district maps? What would that show you about people's understanding of geography? of neighborhoods?

-slam poetry

-me writing slam poetry

-Digital Voice Recorders (really look into this one, you need one for Ecuador)

-The TV show "Louie"