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?!?!?