Life lessons from Ecuador

As weird as it sounds to say it, I'm flying home later today. After four months in Ecuador, I have barely begun to process how I've changed and all the things I've learned this semester. At some point in the future, I'll be updating with more serious insights, but for now, it's time for a list of the important life lessons I've gotten out of this experience.

1) You haven't truly been on a motorcycle until you're hitchhiking up a cobblestoned and gravel road going up a mountain with three people on the back.
2) Real cheddar cheese is a sorely underappreciated thing. Especially on nachos. Relatedly, nachos should never involve eggplant.
3) Wearing an alpaca poncho may make you look like the world's biggest gringo, but it will also be the softest, warmest and most comfortable thing you've ever put on. Totally worth it when you're living in a wooden shack in the cloud forest.
4) When they tell you during orientation that the altitude will affect your body's ability to process alcohol, they are not kidding. Chupa con cuidado.
5) Every male in Quito between the ages of 15 and 30 knows exactly one English phrase: ¨Hey baby¨. The best way to deal with this situation involves your middle finger.
6) It doesn't matter how high-wasted your pants are, how much you tucked your shirt in or how much bug spray you're wearing. The wasps that live in the canopy tower will still find a way to sting you on the ass.
7) The best response to the overwhelming beauty of sunset in the Galapagos Islands involves warrior pose.
8) What happens on the chiva stays on the chiva. What happens on a park bench next to the chiva also stays on the chiva.
9) Harvesting oats for 25 hours by hand is exhausting, and working on a farm with Ecuadorian farmers will make you feel like the laziest person in the entire world.
10) When in the course of your journalism project to tour gold mines you get stranded in a town three hours from home and have to spend the night at a crazy old Russian man's house, you may want to make sure that he hasn't fathered a child with his own daughter first. Fortunately, nothing bad happened.
11) Just because someone is your host dad doesn't mean he won't charge you $80 to drive you to two interviews.
12) As much as American TV news seems to have embraced the ¨if it bleeds, it leads¨ philosophy of journalism, at least they generally don't go to the scene of a recent car crash to show graphic footage of bodies being removed from the wreckage and then interview the sobbing parents or siblings of the dead person on site and air all of this live at 7am while you're eating breakfast.
13) There's something about spending a month commuting on harrowing mountain roads mostly by sitting in the back of pickup trucks or standing in the aisle of Greyhound buses that makes you appreciate life a lot.
14) Ecuadorian clubs play a combined total of 7 songs. All of them are by Pitbull.
15) Spending two and a half hours going around a circle with your friends and telling everyone how awesome they are is one of the best ways to spend an evening.

Friendship in a post-civilization world

For the next three weeks, I’m living in the Intag cloud forest region of Ecuador. The area is dotted with tiny pueblos which are tucked into valleys and nestled on top of ridges. The roads here are dirt and cobblestone, and they wind up and down hills through a green mosaic of forest and small agricultural plantations. I’m living with a family in Peñaherrera (population about 150 families) and commuting 20 minutes each day by overcrowded bus or motorcycle to Apuela, another small town where the regional newspaper I’m working for is based.

This year, I’ve spent a lot of time in places where life runs a lot slower than my usual mile-a-minute pace. When left to my own devices, I will triple-book myself from 8am-10pm, schedule conversations with friends to make sure I have time to see them, have sixteen windows open on my browser and spend the bulk of my day trying to get as much out of every second as I possibly can (that or watching stuff on Netflix). In Ghana, I got used to waiting for hours for people to show up for interviews in their villages because they were out farming or couldn’t catch a ride or just didn’t feel like showing up on time. Every night, I went home to a house with no TV, no internet and nothing much to do except talk to my dad, attempt to cook, or read. My first two weeks in Ecuador I was on a farm in the middle of nowhere—no Internet, no TV, no radio, no cell reception and nothing to do after work except read and talk to the other volunteers. Now, I’m in a similar situation. It looks like I’ll be getting home around 4pm everyday, and while there are ample TVs here and internet cafés close by, there’s still not really anything to do in the Western sense of the term (no movie theaters, bowling alleys, bars, cultural attractions, etc.) Mostly, it seems like people play volleyball, watch TV and sit around and talk to each other.

Spending time in places like this has made me think about the nature of my friendships. With casual friends, I do many of the same things people seem to do in rural Ecuador. We watch movies together, sit around chatting about what we did today, maybe go shopping or grab a meal. With my closest friends, though, I mostly share ideas with them. Sure, we hang out and waste time together, but my closest friendships are the ones where we stay up until all hours of the night discussing Occupy Wall Street, the border and the socioeconomic factors which create food deserts. Mostly, we talk about the world—what’s going on, what’s wrong with everything and how we might go about fixing it.

In my ideal world, communities would be a lot more local than they are now. People would spend a lot more time interacting with their neighbors, a lot more time doing things like taking care of community gardens and a lot less time online. In some versions of the future, there is no internet—post-gridcrash, we all go back to being people living in the rural Third World, with no power, little connection to the outside world and a radically local lifestyle. This is how humans have lived for thousands of years, for the majority of human history. And it’s occurred to me that in this world, I have no idea what a friendship looks like. If the world were such that there weren’t absurd problems to try and solve, or if I was living so locally and off-grid that I had no idea what was going on on other continents, I have no idea what I would do with my friends.

In many ways, the Ghanaian villages I visited this summer and the Ecuadorian cloud forest where I’m living now seem like a window into this world. Here, people seem to form relationships based more on proximity than anything else. You know the people you grow up near, because they’re close to you. Obviously, there are people you get along with better than others, and you gravitate towards them. People aren’t disconnected from the outside world by any means—Intag is a hotbed of environmental activism on issues ranging from deforestation to water pollution caused by mining. But most people here don’t seem to spend their free time discussing the philisophical implications of Occupy Wall Street imbracing an explicitly nonviolent strategy, for example. They mostly spend it being normal people.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what the end of civilization (or at least a transition to a radically localized economy) would look like in economic, political and environmental terms. I’ve thought a lot about big picture things, how we would get food and energy, how democracies would function. But it’s interesting to think about the more personal—not just that my friends might be very different people, but that the entire nature of friendship might change too. I always think of things like types of food or manners of greeting people when asked to describe cultural differences. It’s kind of an exciting notion that something as basic as friendship isn’t a constant either. 

The gay conversation

My host brother, Nico, had one of his friends over last week (they play in a band together), and I was chatting with them about music. My brother’s friend studied in the US for a while and has a gringa girlfriend, so his English is even better than Nico’s (he’s more or less fluent, but you can tell English isn’t his first language). He always wants to speak English with me, so we usually talk in a mixture of the two languages. The boys were discussing songs for their band, and Nico mentioned loving some song by John Mayer. His friend agreed, and I shook my head.

“What?” the friend asked me.

“Nothing, he’s just an asshole and a womanizer,” I responded. We discussed this for a little while—they wanted to know how I knew this (“Have reasons, Rachel,” said Nico). I said I saw stuff about him on supermarket tabloid covers. Eventually, we agreed that his music was one thing, but as a person, he was probably an asshole.

And then Nico’s friend says, “Well, at least he’s not gay.”

Quito as a city looks pretty developed. The more rural areas of Ecuador seem more classically “third world”, but Quito might as well be a major city in the US, at least in many regards. So sometimes I forget how different cultures can be here. But this is one of the most striking differences between the US and the Third World that I’ve noticed. Say what you will about the US’s policies towards gay people, but at least among our urban, well-educated population, being gay has become almost completely normal. Not to say that there isn’t discrimination, but being gay is not the awful, secret thing it was fifty years ago. A friend coming out to me wouldn’t elicit anything more than, “Oh, ok, cool.” I’ve almost gotten to the point where I stop assuming gender when someone mentions having a significant other.

So here I am, radical feminist/ally Rachel, sitting across the table from two nice, well-educated guys who happen to believe that about half of my friends are disgusting. Cultural sensitivity is one thing, but I wasn’t letting that one slide.

“What does that mean?” I asked. Nico’s friend said something I don’t remember about gay people being gross. I said, “You know, like half of my friends at school are gay.”

He countered with, “That’s ok because you’re a girl, though. It’s not weird if they’re lesbian.”

This sentiment, that somehow lesbians are ok, or aren’t really gay, is something I also noticed in Ghana. While I was there, homosexuality was causing quite the controversy in the local papers (this all started when the main government-owned daily paper ran as a front page headline: 8000 HOMOS FOUND IN TWO REGIONS. The deck was, “majority infected with HIV/AIDS”. The actual story was that the UN AIDS program was trying to get people to come forward and get tested for HIV as a public health measure, and some of them happened to be gay.) So the whole time I was there, there were opinion columns and articles debating the ethics of tolerating homosexuals, one of which defined bisexuality as “when someone is married but maintains sexual relations with the same sex.” And yet invariably, every single article would spend paragraphs bashing gay people and then say something to the effect of, “Lesbians are totally cool, though.” I think it’s a pretty common attitude in general. For people threatened by gay-ness, lesbians are much safer. First of all, girls don’t have sex (because we’re all proper and don’t have any libido and are just waiting to be seduced by nice guys). So if someone says they’re lesbian, no one pictures two girls going at it. Also, lesbians come with the possibility of girls making out with each other! Which many straight guys seem to think is the most exciting thing in the world.

Anyway, back in Ecuador, I was shaking my head and trying to figure out what I could say to these guys. I said, “No, they’re not all lesbian, I have guy friends who are gay too.”

And then, Nico’s friend says, “Oh, that’s scary though…” He motions cutting himself and blood dripping, and says, “…and then you’ll get HIV.”

At that point, I just got mad. I said, no, that’s absurd, most gay people do not have HIV. He said, yes they do, because they all have anal sex. I said that not all gay people have anal sex, and anyway, that’s why condoms were invented. He said, no, condoms were invented for guys and girls to use, not for gay people. Clearly, I was not getting anywhere here.

And so he kept talking with Nico, and I thought about straight privilege. It hurts me to hear people talk this way about people I know and love. Two of my best friends from high school are gay. Another one is trans. My roommate freshman year was queer. About half of my friends at Whitman are not straight in some capacity. And yet, as a straight person, I can travel to countries where the prevailing attitude towards gayness is one of disgust and judgment, and I can feel safe. My relationships will never be questioned. I am normal. I fit the mold.

As I’m sitting here, thinking, he asks me what I’m thinking about. I shook my head, not sure how to explain. He says, “You’re thinking about them having sex, aren’t you?” I said no, I was thinking about all the people I know and care about who happen to be gay, but also happen to be people with characteristics other than their sexuality. He laughed and said, “But now you’re thinking about sex.” I said yes, since he brought it up. He said it would just be weird to have gay friends, because they might start liking you. I said, so what, I’ve had guy friends who liked me when I didn’t feel the same way, and it’s weird, but it wouldn’t  be any weirder if it was a girl. He shook his head and employed the standard Latino guy defense. “It’s just because we have a machista culture”, he said. That’s why we’re not ok with the gays.

Machista culture is obviously something I have a hard time with. It’s employed during orientation to tell women that we shouldn’t drink much and need to be extra careful (not that this isn’t true, but I would rather live in a world where we educate men not to rape women, rather than educating women about how not to get raped). It’s the excuse given for the men who whistle at you on the bus and creep on you when you’re walking home. It’s the go-to explanation for behavior that I would label as obsessive, bordering on stalking, when dealing with men my age in Latin America. I’m just worried about you. That’s why I’ve texted you every ten minutes for the past two hours to ask you why you weren’t responding to my first message. It’s probably the reason that when I left the club I was at on Friday night at 2am, a random strange man asked me where I was going, and when I said home, he asked if he could come with me and got offended when I said absolutely not. I can get on board with cultural sensitivity when it’s about the fact that Ecuadorians will tell you a time for something and mean an hour later. Or when it’s about the fact that food=love, so you have to finish everything on your plate lest you gravely offend your host mom. But the machista thing, I don’t buy. Cultural differences are great, but some things need to evolve. Sexism is one of them. Homophobia is another.

And yet, during this conversation with Nico and his friend, I asked them if homosexuality was illegal here. Both of them said no, absolutely not. How could that even be illegal, they asked? I said that gay sex had been illegal in many states in the US until 2003, that it was absolutely illegal in many other countries, especially in Africa, and that in Uganda, it was punishable by death. They looked at me incredulously and said no, we don’t do that here. And both of them seemed to think that the notion of making anyone’s sexual orientation illegal was absurd. I suppose that’s progress of a kind. And given how far the US has come on LGBT issues in the past fifty years, I’m optimistic that the rest of the world will soon follow.

Fútbol in Ecuador

Mostly, I write about ideas and politics on here, but I thought I’d take a break and describe some of the things I’ve actually been doing in Ecuador. Last Friday afternoon, the Ecuadorian national soccer team played the Venezuelan team in the first round of eliminator games for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Naturally, our whole group decided to go. Fútbol is almost more of a religion here than Catholicism is. The stadium was surrounded by people selling team jerseys (which we all bought), people doing face painting, and perhaps most comically, people filling giant bottles (we’re talking gallons) of beer to take into the stadium. Apparently Ecuador hasn’t caught up with the US in terms of concessions monopolies, so you’re absolutely allowed to bring beverages into the stadium. My group elected to buy a bunch of rum, three liters of Coke and some limes before we went in, so we had a great time mixing Cuba Libres on the sidewalk outside of the stadium while trying to look nonchalant when the police walked by. In the end, we were able to walk into the stadium with three liters of rum and Coke without incident.

Seats are not assigned at the stadium, and by the time we got there (an hour before the game started), every single seat was full. I use the term “seat” loosely, since they’re really concrete benches, and everyone’s goal is to squeeze as many people as possible onto them. Somehow, I talked a nice guy into giving me and a friend seats that he’d been saving, so we were able to actually sit down for most of the game.

One of the things about going to a national sporting event (as opposed to say, a baseball game in the US), is that supporting the team boils down to a thinly-disguised fanatic sort of nationalism. It’s like how everyone in the US gets during the Olympics, except when you’re actually watching the game, it’s right next to you and much, much louder. Ecuadorians have a fútbol song, which I’m convinced every single person in the country knows the words to, and people just started singing it all the time before and during the game. The words are, “Vamos, Ecuatorianos, esta noche, tenemos que ganar,”

 which translates to, “Let’s go, Ecuadorians, tonight, we have to win.” (It sounds a lot better when it’s being sung in Spanish). My favorite part of the game was when they announced the Venezuelan team. I didn’t even realize they were announcing anything—the sound system wasn’t much of a match for the noise made by a full stadium of fútbol fans—but as soon as they called the first player’s name, the entire stadium raised their fists in the air and chanted, “¡Hijo de puta!” (son of a whore). All of this, perfectly coordinated, for every single player on the team. I was impressed.

Ecuador won the game (thank god), 2-0. The whole experience made me wish soccer was more of a thing in the US. I’ve always been a baseball girl, though I stopped watching pros when the Mariners started sucking so much. But soccer is so energetic and fast-paced, and it’s so easy to appreciate the athleticism of someone who can head a ball into the goal. Plus, I love the rowdiness of soccer fans, though I think a lot of that has to do with the extremely lax rules about alcohol consumption in the stadium. (The section next to ours had a guy who was repeatedly chugging beers, which prompted the entire crowd to form a circle around him and cheer him on, breaking into applause when he finished.) There were a few minor fights, but nothing serious, probably because almost everyone in attendance was supporting the same team.

I’m always amazed by the unity of sports fans, and sometimes I find myself wondering what would happen if we could get so many people to come together so clearly for something that actually mattered, or if even a fraction of the money and time and energy spent on professional sports franchises were spent on health care or improving education or something socially beneficial. And yet, sports seem to be the great unifier in the world—regardless of country, race, class and increasingly gender, most people can appreciate watching a team, feeling part of something bigger, having common ground with strangers. Marx may have thought religion is the opiate of the masses, but I’m starting to think that it’s soccer. And maybe that’s not a bad thing.

Family, Western and non

Every time I travel to a non-Western country, I’m always warned (by the guidebook, program orientation, etc.) that notions of family will be very different in the place where I’m going. Typical notes for Latin America include the following: your family will eat meals all together. People will spend a few hours after dinner sitting around at the table, talking, playing games, or just watching TV together (this is called sobremesa). Children live at home until they’re married. Families are much bigger. There may be relatives stopping by constantly. Family members are more connected and aware of what’s going on in each other’s lives.

Of course, these notions vary family-to-family. Some of them have been very accurate for my Quito family, while others haven’t really been applicable. My family often doesn’t eat together, and my brother seems to spend most of his time in his room watching TV or practicing guitar. Not that he’s antisocial or anything—he just seems like a typical global teenager, not quite American, but not “traditionally” Ecuadorian either.

This past weekend, I got a little taste of my family’s size. My host mom has two older daughters who don’t live at home, but stop buy all the time. She’s also from a very large family (one of eleven, if I remember correctly), and almost all of her siblings live in Quito. We went out for ice cream with an uncle and his wife and two kids. Then we stopped at grandma’s house, where another uncle and aunt also live (the uncle is a little off, mentally, and the aunt just never married, so she still lives with her mom). We had coffee and the relatives asked me a bunch of questions so I could practice my Spanish—what I want to do with my life, what the hell my dad is doing trying to start a business in Ghana, etc. Mom, grandma and aunt all talked about my mom’s daughter, the problems she’s having with her husband, how they’re fighting a lot at home.

This is probably one of those situations that cultural briefings are designed to prepare you for. The extended-family gatherings and gossip aren’t typical in a lot of American families. But for me, it felt like I was right back at home. The only real difference was that everyone was speaking Spanish and no one was actually related to me.

My family back in the US is really close. Mom has three sisters who all live in the greater Seattle area, and between the four of them, there are seven cousins, of which I’m the oldest (my brother is 19, I have four female cousins who are 18, 14, 12 and 11, and Lucas, the youngest, is 7). My grandparents are an easy two hour drive away, so they come into town a lot for family gatherings. And I have another grandpa in Eugene, Oregon, which isn’t too far away. Due to a lot of divorce in my grandparents’ generation, I have tons of relatives who aren’t even technically related to me, but all of them are family. Our Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners are often 25 people, and we have smaller gatherings for things like high school graduations and birthdays. All in all, it seems like at least ten of us get together once or twice a month, and I’ve hardly ever gone a week without seeing someone from my extended family while I’m home.

When I describe this arrangement to my friends, it sounds weird to most of them. Not bad weird—a lot of people have told me that it sounds nice to have relatives around all the time, exhausting as it can sometimes be. So it’s refreshing to travel to places where extended family is normal, where you’re weird if you don’t go visit your sisters and aunts and uncles and parents over the weekend. I’ve learned so much more about Ecuador from talking to my extended host family, especially the grandma. And I’m grateful that globalization and modernity haven’t managed to completely eradicate this aspect of non-American culture.

Two-tiered pricing

If you’d asked me at the beginning of this summer whether things would be more expensive in Ghana or Ecuador, I would have said Ghana without much hesitation. It seems natural to assume that in countries which are poorer (smaller GDPs, smaller average income, worse indicators on the human development index, etc.), prices would also be lower. As it turns out, though, it’s not quite that simple.

There are some things in Ghana that are absurdly cheap. You can get more than enough street food to fill you up for next to nothing. A bowl of rice, spaghetti noodles and beef in sauce set me back 60 pesewa—about 40 cents. Fruit in the market is so cheap compared to home that it seems free. One cedi (66 cents) will get you a pile of four or five delicious oranges or two ripe mangoes. My dad’s house is a concrete walled compound which could easily be a B-movie drug lord’s hideout. It has three bathrooms, a kitchen, dining and living rooms and five bedrooms, plus a garage. His rent for this is something like $100 a month (though, to be fair, the city water supply randomly turns off for weeks at a time, and often comes out in interesting shades of grey, white and brown when it is on). Transportation also seems practically free—a 30 minute ride in a shared taxi from a rural village back into town cost me something like 30 cents.

However, some things in Ghana are fairly expensive given the income of average Ghanaians, and occasionally even for visiting Americans. Going to a movie in the Accra Mall cost me 15 cedis ($10)—comparable to a ticket back home. Meals in sit-down restaurants are cheaper than their American counterparts, but still a fortune compared to street food. A decent-sized entrée will set you back $5-10, sometimes a bit more if the restaurant is really nice. Groceries in the supermarket (Shoprite, a South African chain which seems to only exist in the Accra Mall) are often more expensive than they would be in the US. Boxes of cereal can run up to $6 for a normal sized package of cornflakes. Butter is at least $4, and that’s only if you buy the cheap stuff that smells weird. The lentils I insisted on buying cost about $7 for a package that was maybe twice as big as the ones I see back in the States. Services are also on the expensive side—a manicure is $10, and a haircut can be twice that in the city, especially if you’re a white person.

Ecuadorian prices seem more uniform. Grocery store items are fairly cheap across the board—good chocolate bars with fruit added can be purchased for 90 cents, bananas are usually less than 50 cents for a kilogram (2.2 pounds) and basic staples are usually at or below the cost of similar items in the US (though as with Ghana, cereal is a notable exception—I tried to buy Honey Bunches of Oats today, but was dissuaded by the $6.35 price tag). A movie ticket is a little less than $5. Public transportation over long distances is hardly more than in Ghana—usually about $1 per hour of travel, made possible by the state-owned petroleum companies, and government policies which heavily subsidize gasoline (it’s been $1.03 per gallon for diesel and $1.72 for premium gas since I got here a month ago). Quito is covered in restaurants serving a fixed almuerzo (lunch)—usually juice, soup, a plate of rice and meat and occasionally dessert for $1.50-$2. Dinner will set you back a bit more, but it’s easy to find good meals for under $5. I’ve seen salons advertising $2 haircuts and manicures for even less.

I have a theory to explain the pricing differences I’ve encountered. In Ghana, people do not have money. There are definitely rich people living in cities (mostly Accra, the capital), and there’s some kind of emerging middle class, but by and large, people struggle to pay for necessities. I think this has created a two-tier pricing system. The poor masses need to buy basic staples of life. They buy their food in markets and from street vendors. They need to travel sometimes, and they can mostly afford to do so because shared taxis and trotros abound. The things that you need to survive are all widely available, mostly for next to nothing (at least by my American standards). However, because of the overall poverty, things like movies and manicures are well out of reach of most people. The city I was living in, a regional capital city with a population of about 50,000, doesn’t even have a movie theater. There’s no supermarket either—everyone goes to the outdoor public market which is filled with produce and pungent-smelling fish. I had to make weekend trips into Accra (2.5 hours, give or take) to buy things like cheese, yogurt, lentils and cereal. These items are really only available to the elites, and because of that, they’re much more expensive. I’m sure there are a lot of other reasons on the supply side as well, but from a demand perspective, the pricing gap makes sense, because it’s reflective of a wealth gap.

Ecuador seems to be better off. The overall standard of living is much higher than in Ghana (and almost all other sub-Saharan African countries, I would imagine). There are absolutely poor people here, in Quito and especially in more rural areas. But even the poor seem to have a little more money for luxury and non-essential items. My host mom in Plaza Gutierrez had never traveled further than Otavalo (a city 2 hours away)—she hadn’t even been to Quito, much less outside of the Andean region of Ecuador. But while I was staying with her, she took the whole family to a pool that was about half an hour away, with an entry fee of $2 per person. Not a fortune by my standards, but not exactly small change for a family of five. There also seems to be a much more well-defined urban middle class. My host family in Quito, for example, survives on the income of my dad, who’s a petroleum engineer in the Amazon. This is enough to allow them occasional trips to the US and private school for their three children, but not so much that my host mom doesn’t remark about how expensive textbooks for high school are. I’m not sure what the typical income and lifestyle in Quito looks like, but my family doesn’t seem at all like an anomaly. Quito seems to have more middle ground in its income demographics than Accra, which has shacks and slums with no water or electricity, giant walled compounds where the super-rich live, and not much in between.

So in Ecuador, people buy produce at indoor markets, but the average Quito family also shops at the supermarket. Smaller cities have supermarkets too, and they’re common in Quito (contrasting with Ghana, which seems to literally have two supermarkets in the entire country, both of which are located in the Accra Mall). This means that prices need to be affordable for the masses, not just the super-elites and gringos. Government policies and subsidies help keep prices down in stores (a really interesting system that I’ll write more about later). The average urban family can afford at least occasional luxuries like movies, and their prices reflect that fact.

I’m curious about the supply-side factors that have made this all come into being, but from a demand perspective, the pricing differences I’ve seen between here and Ghana make a fair amount of sense. Interestingly, the net result of these differences is that it’s cheaper for me to maintain my lifestyle in Ecuador than in Ghana. If you just need a place to stay and not starve to death, Ghana wins hands down. But if you want supermarket cereals, the occasional movie, books, manicures and recreation on the weekend, Ecuador would probably end up coming out on top. Who would have thought?

Observations about Ecuadorian culture

I’ve had a lot of little encounters and observations in Ecuador which don’t quite merit a whole blog post, but are still interesting and/or illuminating (at least for me). So I’m just going to list them off. Here’s a little crash course in culture and politics here at the center of the world:

1) While talking to my host dad about Rafael Correa’s administration, which he was highly critical of, he tells me, “I’m not a capitalist or anything. It’s not like I’m far right.” I love so much that in his mind, being center-of-the-road means not being a capitalist, like that’s a common sense thing that people take for granted.

2) In Intag, we stayed on a nature reserve which has nice but rustic accommodations, including composting pit toilets outside. This led me to reflect on the fact that in most countries in the world, people lack access to clean drinking water, whereas in the US, we shit in clean drinking water. At the very least, it seems like we should design homes to have greywater recycling, so your sinks/showers drain into your toilet.

3) My host family would be considered middle or upper middle class by American standards, and certainly upper class by Ecuadorian standards. However, they don’t have a dishwasher or washing machine. According to my academic directors, people often don’t trust that washing machines actually clean clothes better than hand washing (though my family takes their clothes to a laundromat). I wonder if those appliances aren’t available, are too expensive to be practical, or simply aren’t viewed as even remotely necessary (or some combination).

4) Most of my extended host family has gone to private school, and thus speaks English fluently or close. Today, I met my mom’s niece, who’s already being taught English in school (she’s 6). Even in public schools, English instruction is part of the official curriculum, though it’s often not taught or not taught well, depending on the school. Still, it seems that here, one of the functions of an elite education is learning a foreign language well. In the US, this hardly seems prioritized. I’m sure more affluent people are more likely to learn a second language in school, but it seems like “elite” American schools are more likely to focus on business things, economics or maybe good science education. To me, this is a shame, though it’s also reflective of the fact that English is increasingly becoming the lingua franca of the world, particularly for science and technology.

5) I was showing my host mom pictures of me and my family, including some from my high school graduation. She looked at the pictures, looked at me and said, “Oh, you’re fatter now.” I love that in this culture, fat is just a trait like any other—your hair is brown, you have green eyes, and you’re gordita. Having some extra fat on your body isn’t a national emergency like it is in the States.

6) The Ecuadorian constitution (re-written in 2008) is one of the coolest governing documents in the world. It states that people have a right to food sovereignty, nature has rights, people have the right to a “good life” (this is stated in Kichwa, one of the indigenous languages of Ecuador), and that Ecuador is a GMO-free country. In practice, however, very little of this is enforced and Correa’s government is extremely pro-extraction.

7) Quito has its share of beggars and people hawking various food items in the street, but it also has a more enterprising sector which makes its living by performing circus arts at major intersections. I’ve seen fire twirlers, jugglers and acrobats making human pyramids in the middle of the street while traffic is stopped.