(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.
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 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.
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