I made this blog. It's called Quito Fever because I am going to Ecuador for 6 months, and at some point I will probably get sick. Its also called fever because that makes people think of hot things, which is true about Ecuador, a country named after the equator, but also other hot things, like classy clubs where people are dancing. Not that I'll be in clubs all the time, mom, but that things will be awesome and smokin'. But not that kind of smokin, mom.
So I'm not leaving for Quito for three weeks, but I do have a pretty boring internship where I have nothing to do all day, so I thought I'd start this now and get into the swing of things. Hopefully, if I get into a pattern of updating this often, I won't abandon it three weeks and four and a half posts in, how it usually happens. If it does, forgive me, if I keep this going, sing my praises.
So my work is at an organization for latino and immigrant rights. Its a very good NGO, very active and successful, its just that my personal job is not so interesting. It involves talking to people on the phone a lot. This is horrible because as soon as i pick up a phone, I can no longer speak spanish. Yesterday, I forgot the words for "to ask" and "to need," which is a little more than pathetic. Because I get so nervous and clam up, the people I am taking to get confused, and say thigns to me like "do you speak English or Spanish better? You are pretty bad at both." This does not improve morale in an office where the majority of the clients are at risk of deportation.
Luckily, I find things to do. One of my favorites is researching medical anomalies on wikipedia. Did you know that if you have spina bifida, the really bad kind, that your vertebrae actually protrude from your back? like, outside of the skin? sometimes, they are in a cyst/sac thing filled with cerebro-spinal fluid. I am going to be the best nurse ever.
Another part of my job, one I actually get paid for, is working on a telemarketing campaign, calling people in Kansas, Florida, and Utah and asking to connect them to their senators, asking them to ask him to co-sponsor the
DREAM Act. This can be really stressful and people yell at you alot, but the people are nice, and I make good money. Because we are connecting people to their politicians, I do a lot of wikipedia research on Republican Senators. Actually, that's where the genetic anomalies stuff came from. Florida Senator Brownback --> Terri Schivo Case--> Comas --> Cerebro Spinal Fluid Dynamics --> Cerebral Shunts --> Hydrocephalus --> Spina Bifida. Man, i am sort of sick when it comes to these things. But did you know Florida Senator
Le Mieux ...
Nevermind, I thought there was some scandal about him and his wife, but I couldn't find it. Whoops.
Another thing I do while I sit at work is freak out about Ecuador. Its nice because most of the people here are either immigrants themselves, or have dedicated their careers to helping immigrants, so everybody knows stuff about living in other countries and can give me tips like "don't do illegal things," "go to Baños" and "get a lot of sleep." Sounds good to me. I've also started planning my classes. So far I have signed up to take a Spanish Conversation class, Rural Sociology, an acting class called Voice and Movement, Ethnography, a public health seminar, and Arabic. I'm into all this stuff, but I just have this feeling that its all going to change and I'm going to end up in advanced french and econometrics or something like that. Or maybe an art class. That would be good.
Not much else is happening here. I hang out a lot with Zak and that's nice. Emily and I make fun of everyone we see. My mom goes to work, then comes home and turns on the air conditioner. My sister went to Mexico. She is also all fashionable. Just a shoutout to my gurl.
I hope the intelligence level of this post was acceptable. I'm not sure I'll be able to rise above this point on the bell curve, especially while I spend 4 hours a day repeating myself to red-state citizens on badly connected phonelines.
Well, see you later,
Dita
(Oh! that's an important point. Dita. I am calling myself Dita in Ecuador, because Spanish doesn't really have the long "aaaay" that makes the first a in Dana, and being called "Danna," with the "ahh" sound for the first a really annoys me for some reason. So it's going to be Dita, which I think is cute.)