On the benefits of inefficiency: an ode to Greyhound

I spent the past two days travelling on the Greyhound, from Walla Walla, Washington to Tucson, Arizona. When I told my friends that I was planning to travel to Arizona by bus, a lot of them gave me a sideways glance before saying, “Have fun…” It’s true that after 46 hours hanging out on busses and in Greyhound stations, I was exhausted and pretty hungry. And yeah, riding the bus sucks a lot sometimes. But I want to spend a minute defending our nation’s slow, inefficient bus system.

Two main things put me on a bus. The first is that I was trying to minimize expenditures on this trip. I’m spending three and a half weeks in Tucson and Agua Prieta, Mexico doing research for my senior thesis and volunteering with No More Deaths, a humanitarian aid group. While a roundtrip plane ticket to Tucson from Seattle would have cost me something like $400 (and probably more, given how last-minute I planned this), my bus ticket was about $240 roundtrip (Walla Walla to Tucson and Tucson to Portland, where I’m visiting a few friends).

The second is that over the last two years, I’ve become somewhat terrified of flying for totally irrational reasons. I know statistically you’re way, way more likely to die in a car crash than a plane crash. You’re probably more likely to be injured or killed by a fellow Greyhound passenger than die in a plane crash. You can tell my brain these things all day and it will still make me stop being an atheist briefly during take-off and hyperventilate every time there’s bad turbulence.

Greyhound gets a bad rep. A lot of people say it’s slow, but so are trains, and I never hear people whining about Amtrak as much. Really, I think a lot of it boils down to the type of people who ride the bus. Because it’s cheap, you’re way more likely to get ex-cons, people with mental illnesses, drug addicts and all kinds of other interesting characters on the bus. It’s precisely because of this that I find it enjoyable, though. Planes are largely full of businesspeople who keep to themselves and read magazines, sprinkled with the occasional family going on vacation. Busses, on the other hand, have a way more diverse slice of life in the U.S. There are families traveling together, people making pilgrimages home after months or years away, people who just got out of prison, vets travelling to VA hospitals, veteran travelers who have crossed the country 30 times by bus, teenagers with skateboards and an encyclopediactic knowledge of bongs, and single men going home to Mexico. (That wasn’t some literary pretentiousness; those are all actual people I’ve met on the bus.)

I always love hearing people’s stories. It’s what draws me to journalism too. I love being the quiet girl with headphones half in writing down the best snippets of conversation I overhear and drawing roadmaps in my head, outlining the childhoods these people had and what their futures might hold. I love hearing people say things I would never in a million years overhear at Whitman, things like, “Somebody call 9 goddamn 11. I need a fucking cigarette.” Or, “I tried breaking someone out of jail in my car, so guess who don’t have a license no more…” (Sadly, she didn’t elaborate.)

I love hearing people’s life stories, like the woman who sat next to me for an hour going into Salt Lake City. She was an ex-Marine with a 16-year old daughter at Harvard. (“She has to ask me and her brother before she can go to a frat party. Guess how many frat parties she’s been to?” “Zero?” “Two. You have to learn to trust ‘em or they'll rebel.”)

She’s also a world-ranked Overlord in some Facebook-related dragon game and was travelling to meet up with fellow players in Australia. She mostly talked at me for the whole time she was on the bus, and she had one of the most interesting lives I’d ever heard. She told me about running her house with discipline, like in the Marines, and how she’d had to give up some of her authority when she went to visit her (now married) son, who’s also at Harvard.

“He said, ‘Mama, this is my house, I’m married, I’m going to do what I want.’ You can’t argue with that logic. What am I going to do, send him to his room? I can’t send him to his to his room, I don’t need any more grandbabies!”

Stories like that just make you want to interview people all day.

Beyond just the people, I like the physical nature of the bus. I like that you interact with landscapes instead of just flying over them. I like driving past cement plants and Wal-Mart distribution centers and wheat fields and thinking about those spaces and what they mean. I love geeking out by combining my political ecology course with my in-the-field knowledge from Semester in the West and trying to work out how we might solve some of the problems facing the world in the spaces where they actually are. I like moving from Walla Walla wheatfields to Wallowa forest, Utah mountains, Nevada’s basin and range hills covered with shrubs to the cactus-dotted deserts of Southern Arizona. I like seeing the transitions, the highway signs, the way you can tell you’ve crossed a state line because the quality of the pavement changes.

Plus, on the bus, you’re still you. You can leave your electronic devices on and text your friends every time you see a funny road sign. You can stop at gas stations and buy food. You can stretch out across two seats and sleep in a position that's somewhat comfortable. (I actually had quite perceptive dreams all night on the bus. On planes, on the rare occasion I fall asleep for long enough to dream, I only ever dream about plane crashes.) You can bring whatever you want with you, including liquids. The TSA’s security theater has left the Greyhound relatively unscathed, possibly because no one would be stupid enough to try to orchestrate a major terrorist plot on a bus. Perhaps in shared acknowledgement of how much Greyhound kind of sucks, people talk to strangers more readily. There’s a sense of we’re all in this together that I often find lacking on planes.

So yes, busses are slow and sometime uncomfortable. Yes, you might have it sit next to people who smell weird or won’t stop talking, and yes, it takes you two days to get somewhere you could fly to in six hours. There are definitely times in life when it makes sense to take a plane, assuming you have the ability to afford it. But I’m 21 and in no particular hurry to get anywhere, and as long as that’s the case, I’d rather stick it out on the Greyhound.

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. 

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.

Best of the Oriente

I just got back from a week in the Oriente, which is what Ecuadorians call the Amazonian region of the country (basically, everything east of the Andes). I’ll update later with some thoughts on ecology, oil and all the rest, but for now, I’m just going to list the coolest things I did.

1) Saw an anaconda eating a caiman. We were out on a night boat ride to see wildlife, and we’re apparently one of only two SIT groups to have ever seen an anaconda, much less one strangling its prey. This was, naturally, the same river we were all swimming in every day. It also has piranhas and little fish that can swim up your urethra or vagina and stick there (they’re fish parasites that live in fish gills, but sometimes they get confused).

2) Got up at 4:45 to hike up to the canopy tower in the rainforest and watch dawn break over the tops of the trees, with a soundtrack of scarlet macaws, thousands of insects, and howler monkeys.

3) In response to a severe rainstorm, we all put on our bathing suits, covered ourselves in mud and formed a tribe called the Goops. It was kind of a lot like Avatar, and involved running around mostly naked, making up a nature song, finding our plant souls and sliding down a muddy hill into the anaconda-infested river to rinse off.

4) Spending a few hours in the canopy tower in the dark, on a half-moon night with stars, getting completely naked 120 feet above the forest and watching the heat lightning in the distance before hiking back to camp wearing nothing but my rain boots.

5) Teaching several of my fellow program participants how to navigate using a compass, take bearings on a map and triangulate. And then, for the first time in my life, getting lost in a forest and actually using a compass successfully to get unlost! I knew all that high school outdoor program stuff would come in handy sometime.

6) Explaining to a group of woolly monkeys in a tree that if the land across the river opens for oil exploration, they should try to sabotage company operations by throwing feces at oil company workers and destroying their machinery. Not sure they understood me; they kept eating and throwing leaves at me instead. Maybe they don’t speak English.

7) The moment when Taylor accidentally let a snake loose in the classroom and I had to go outside (other than flying/takeoff, snakes are the only thing I’m really afraid of, though in a pretty rational fashion). And then I got to watch through the window while four people attempted to find and recapture the snake (which they eventually succeeded in doing).

8) Leaving the hotel where we were waiting for our bus to take us to the Coca airport and wandering around town by myself for ten minutes. Probably the most interesting ten minutes of my week that didn’t include wildlife. I was the only gringa on the street and got a lot of whistles, catcalls and greetings from men. The stores and general smell reminded me of Ghana—a hot, humid place where most of life takes place outside and there are giant cuts of raw meat dangling from awnings on the street. It also underscored how coddled we are on this program—I wasn’t supposed to leave the hotel, supposedly because of “safety”, which I understand is important to an institution, but still struck me as a bit odd. After all, it was broad daylight, anyone trying to hurt me would have had to do so in plain view of about three dozen other people, and the only thing I had on me other than my clothes was fifteen dollars tucked in my bra.

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.

On nomadism

The other day, I spent an hour and a half talking to my friend Henry, who’s doing a direct-enroll study abroad program in Mendoza, Argentina. Unlike me, he’ll be staying in the same city for five or six months. He’s gotten to know other Argentinian university students, made friends, and feels at home where he is.

As we were discussing our respective programs, we started talking about travel. Henry told me that his desire to travel is mostly gone—he’s happy to stay in place, interacting with the same people, getting to know them well. He’s getting more out of meaningful relationships built over time than he would have being a tourist all over the world.

I’ve often said that I love travel, but I realized this summer in Greece that that’s not really true. I love seeing new places, but I hate feeling like an American, stupid for not knowing the language, guilty because so many economies around the world depend on being able to put up with obnoxious Westerners. Really, I want to know places well, meet people, have interesting conversations. Yet every time I’m given the opportunity to travel, I go for it.

I was thinking about this after we got off the phone. I’ve been all over the world—Ghana, Greece, England, France, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Mexico, and now Ecuador. I’ve driven all over the United States. And yet I still have such a hard time deciding where my heart is. There’s a powerfully nomadic streak inside of me, half restlessness and half the simple fact that I just haven’t found anywhere in the world where I’d want to settle down.

When I was younger, I often thought that Seattle was it. It’s my favorite city, to be sure, but even living there, I don’t feel whole. When I’m surrounded by mountains shrouded in clouds, I long for the desert west, for sagebrush and cactus, for mile after mile of flat, dusty ground. Camping out in the canyonlands of Utah, half of me feels deeply at peace, and the other half cries out for evergreens, for spruce and hemlock. In my city, I miss Walla Walla, miss the knowledge that I can walk or bike anywhere I might need to go, miss knowing that if I need a release, I can sprint across the highway in the dark, run to the wheat fields and stand alone with nothing between me and the stars, staring the universe in the face. In Walla Walla, I long for pan-Asian food, for better grocery stores, for like-minded radicals. Coming home from Ghana, I miss the vibrancy of the street, the smell of dried fish mixed with diesel and warm rain that permeates the air in the morning. While I’m there, I want good yogurt, more than one kind of cheese, water that’s reliable and faster Internet.

Imagining my future, I picture myself simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. I envision myself as an expatriate living in Latin America, finally speaking Spanish with the authority I’ve always wanted, befriending revolutionaries and activists and laughing with them about the arrogance of American politics. I see myself in Utah, disappearing for weeks at a time on sojourns through slickrock and sandstone, writing to my heart’s content. In Seattle, I work for grocery co-ops, have my urban farm and actually finish my book that I’ve been talking about writing for years. And I move to the middle of nowhere, practically wilderness, and have a homestead with a wood-burning oven and a kitchen littered with fermentation projects. Or perhaps I end up drawn permanently to the border, in that space that is at once American, Mexican and nationless, documenting what I see, writing because I feel compelled, fighting for change, talking with communities and learning how to make real posole, pork leg included.

All of these are my future, and I’m so far from being able to choose. Almost every time I move, I envision a new life for myself. I construct a story, a career, a family for my future self. I am happy nowhere and everywhere. I long for the open road if I find myself settled in place for too long, and after so much traveling over the past year and a half, I almost feel as if I’ve forgotten how to settle down. Yet give me a house and a stable life, and after a week, I’m daydreaming of overflowing backpacks and cursing Ted Bundy for ruining hitchhiking for everyone else. Maybe it’s the serial monogamist in me. Maybe I just haven’t found The One, that place where the restlessness inside me can finally settle down. But I suspect it’s really my natural inclination towards polyamory coming out. I want a little bit of everything. I’m completely in love with desert and forest, with canyons and mountains, with cities and towns, with the US and Latin America and Ghana. Maybe one day I’ll settle down. Or maybe I’ll keep changing places, slow enough that I won’t have to call it “traveling”. Five years here, a decade there. There are, I suppose, worse ways to live.

Culture shock

The weirdest things about the US after a month in Ghana:

1) Driving home from the airport on a road that's completely paved with no potholes, no tro-tros, no signs proclaiming the benefits of a relationship with Jesus Christ and nobody trying to sell me phone cards, water sachets or plantain chips.

2) Saying "Good morning" to someone and getting a curt nod in reply as opposed to a smile and reply of "Good morning, how are you?"

3) White people. Everywhere. In very excessive numbers.

4) Going outside and having the air smell vaguely like spring or car exhaust, as opposed to the pungent combination of street food, sewage, warm rain, diesel fumes and humidity (which I love, by the way).

5) Being able to pay for things with a credit card.

6) The lack of color, on people's clothes, storefronts, signs and vehicles.

7) Brushing teeth with tap water. Also drinking tap water.

8) Paying 2-3 times as much for non-local produce that barely tastes like whatever it's supposed to.

9) The quantity (less) and type (non-tropical) of vegetation.

10) The realization that I didn't clean my room at all before I left, since I had less than 24 hours between getting home from school and leaving for 7 weeks of international travel.

Ghana: day 1 and 2

I’m back in Ghana! Specifically, I’m going to be spending the next five weeks in Koforidua, which is the capital of Eastern Region. I’m working with Isaac Bruce, a student at Ashesi University, to research the agricultural inputs market in Ghana and develop a plan for how Burro (my dad’s company) can enter the market.

Since arriving on Sunday night, I’ve had a number of exciting and unique experiences, including, but not limited to:

1) A woman in the market grabbing my boob, squeezing it and nodding approvingly before telling me that I was “very beautiful”.

2) Having a mango, banana, orange and pineapple smoothie for breakfast, and having zero foodie-guilt, because all the fruits were produced well within 100 miles of our house.

3) Our neighbor’s chickens flying into our yard, which resulted in a chick falling into our sewer (it’s a concrete trench that goes around the house; the sinks and showers, but not toilets, drain directly into it). The chick was running around and squeaking in a panicked fashion, which caused its mother to run around the corner of our house, almost crash into me, chase me away and then cluck frantically trying to find its chick. Which it did not succeed in doing.

4) Our water almost running out. Dad has installed a 1500 liter tank at the house, which fills when the municipal water is running. Unfortunately, the water has not been running for the past few weeks, and our tank is down to about one day’s worth of water. We’re contemplating getting a water truck to come refill it, but in the meantime, we’ve set out two giant laundry tubs in the hopes that the rainy season will come through and give us enough to bathe with (and in the hopes that the chickens won’t use our water backup as a toilet). I’m beginning to understand the reasons people suggest that municipal systems in developing countries get privatized, because apparently this happens all the time.

5) Attempting to get information from the Ministry of Food and Agriculture in Ghana. Isaac and I went to their regional office and found three men sitting at desks covered in stacks of papers, without computers. All three men were reading the newspaper. We were told that they could maybe fill out a questionnaire for us, but that they probably couldn’t give us any specific information. The guy we talked to also said that we should pay him a consultant fee, because we were trying to make money off of our research.

6) Seeing the motorcade for President John Atta-Mills, who was visiting Koforidua today. Dad got way more excited about this than any of the Ghanaians.

7) NOT GETTING SICK! I’ve had two restaurant meals and eaten a bunch of fruit from the market, and my stomach is as happy as it ever is when I’m home. So fingers crossed J

Observations from Greece

I’ve spent the past week and a half in Greece, mostly on the islands of Mykonos and Santorini. I’m off to Ghana tomorrow, and I don’t have any single insight from this trip that would warrant an entire post. So, in no specific order, here are some of the observations and thoughts I’ve had over the past week.

1. Seeing giant slabs of pork in the window of every café serving gyros (which is most of them), as well as a skinned lamb roasting on a spit, has reawakened some of my visceral revulsion at the idea of eating meat. That said, stuffed vine leaves filled with rice and ground beef are quite delicious (quasi-vegetarian exception #1—travel).

2. Europe always impresses me with the sheer number of languages that coexist within it. Case in point: in the main square of Santorini, there’s a shop that has issues of Cosmopolitan in English, French and German.

3. English is the lingua franca of the world. (My theory is that you learn your native language first, then the official language of your country (eg. if you’re Mayan and grow up speaking Quiche, you learn Spanish second), and then you learn English. If you’re American, this means you only need to learn one language to communicate with much of the world.) I’m torn, because I feel like I’m experiencing less authentic culture than if I spoke Greek. However, I know it’s unrealistic to learn every language in the world, or even of places I travel to, and given that, it’s nice to be able to ask for directions and order food in a restaurant.

4. Related to the last point, every time I go to Europe (I’ve been to France/Spain in 2003 and the UK in 2007), I always rekindle my desire to learn French, and more languages in general. Because my parents exposed me to French at such a young age, I can still understand basic conversations well, and I’m pretty sure I could pick it up fluently after a few months of living in a French speaking country. I also realized that my Spanish enables me to understand Italian tours well enough to grasp the main points of sentences. Conversely, I have an incredibly hard time understanding Spaniards because their accents are so completely different from Latin American Spanish. My language goals are, in order of priority: fluency in Spanish, conversationality in Twi (Ghana’s lingua franca, though English is the official language), and competency in French.

5. Every time I come home from school and interact with my parents, I go through a transition process. This is the process where the radical leftist/anarchist/ecoterrorist ideas I’ve been filled with at Whitman are filtered through my dad’s fervent belief that regulated markets are the best way to address most of the world’s problems, via a process of discussion and (mostly) debate. Based on my latest round of this transition, which has been a particularly harsh one, I’ve come up with an economic theory. I think capitalism might make more sense for Africa, and I think socialism/communism might make more sense for Latin America. I can’t back this theory up with any evidence, but thinking about my interactions with Ghanaians, Guatemalans, Mexicans and Costa Ricas, plus the readings I’ve done about history and politics, it makes sense in my head. I realize this is a gross generalization, and I’m going to think about it a lot more when I’m in Ghana and Ecuador. Stay tuned.

6. If you take a herd of donkeys and make them carry tourists up over a thousand feet of switchbacking stairs in direct sun all day, two things will happen. One: they will poop everywhere on the stairs, and the poop will not get cleaned up, and it will ferment in the sun and create fumes that are almost enough to induce fainting. And, more importantly: the donkeys will be extremely unhappy and, in some cases, unwell. And tourists will apparently not care, because they’re unique and part of Santorini’s historic culture (every shop on Santorini sells donkey-related paraphernalia). So the donkeys will continue to be exploited by capitalism (as will the people who own them, probably), and they will keep looking sad. And donkeys can look damn sad when they try, let me tell you.

7. There are stray dogs and cats all over Greece (or at least the places we went). Apparently, the strays in Athens are due to an animal welfare group exposing the conditions at a pound, where animals were being abused. The resulting scandal forced the mayor of the town to resign, and other towns took note and ordered shelters and pounds closed, because they were afraid of meeting the same fate. Consequently, there are roaming hordes of strays all over the city (and on Santorini and Mykonos).

8. I don’t like traveling to non-English speaking countries. I always feel like language barriers and cultural differences prevent me from connecting with locals in the short time I’m there, and without connections, I feel exploitative and obnoxious, especially when I speak English to locals. I love foreign countries, and I love learning and meeting people, but I’ve realized that to really do that, I probably just need to live abroad for a while. However, I might feel differently if I was doing a low-budget, youth hostel trip in the Spanish-speaking world, or going somewhere completely random where obnoxious Western tourists aren’t a huge problem.

9. Most produce in Greece is grown in Spain. I’m not sure how the food miles there compare to your typical tomato in an American supermarket, but I’m always impressed by our economy’s ability to move everything everywhere any time of year. Also, produce is cheaper than in the US, at least in both supermarkets we went to. Olive oil is also dirt-cheap. However, most stuff costs about the same in euros as the US equivalent would in dollars, which is unfortunate for us, given that 1 euro=$1.43ish right now.

10. It’s weird being in a country knowing that their economy has collapsed and that there’s been massive social unrest recently. The graffiti in Athens seemed like a whisper of young people gathering in protest and revolt, and the desperation of some of the people selling trinkets on the street hints at less-than-good times. But you wouldn’t know any of this hanging out at a beach club on Mykonos or watching the sun set off of Santorini. I wonder how bad it is for the people we saw and interacted with. I wonder if there are always young children selling flowers on the street and getting shooed out of restaurants by the waiters. I wonder how much more of this I would know if I spoke Greek or paid attention.

Awkwardness and beach parties

Growing up, I always told myself that someday, I’d be less awkward. In middle and high school, I never quite figured out how to do many of the things my peers were into. I went to dances in middle school knowing that I’d spend the afternoon sitting with friends outside absorbed in some boy-related drama. This was partially because seventh-grade me was a complete drama magnet, but also because I was terrified to venture onto the dance floor, lest I be compared to the popular kids who seemed to know what they were doing. I could never figure out clothes—my uniform by high school was pretty much jeans and a t-shirt, and I was baffled by the idea of dressing up and trying to coordinate shoes with an outfit. My hair didn’t go into a ponytail easily, and even when up, it never looked as effortlessly pulled together as so many other girls’ cross country practice hairstyles.

I’d always assumed that by a certain age, I’d figure this all out. Not that I’d be popular or trendy, but that I would be able to dress myself and make my hair look decent on a regular basis. To a certain extent, I’ve been able to do this. I’m proud to report that less than half of my wardrobe is made of t-shirts with writing on them, and I have enough pairs of shoes and boots that I can usually scrape together a respectable outfit. I can drink, something high school me thought I’d never be able to say. I feel ok in most social situations.

I thought about this all while we were en route to Greece. We’re staying on Mykonos and Santorini—two incredibly touristy Greek Islands. On Mykonos, our guidebook informs us, the bar scene picks up around 4am, and bars don’t close until 9am. I realized that I’m finally old enough to go out drinking and dancing (Greece has no drinking age, and the purchase age is sixteen).

We went to a bunch of beaches on Mykonos yesterday. All of them had bars and were mostly populated by twenty-somethings , and one (called Super Paradise) was particularly lively, with eardrum-shattering techno playing. It looked like what I’ve always imagined Cancun to be over spring break. And I realized that probably the last thing on earth I wanted to do was hang out and drink on the beach. Granted, this probably would have been different if I’d had friends with me. But I spent most of the day reading (Collapse, by Jared Diamond), and I had a great day.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I’ve always been like this. Last spring break, I took a road trip with Clive, and we ended up in Las Vegas for a few nights because we were climbing at Red Rocks. We drove around the strip, got out and walked it for a bit and contemplated going into casinos and checking out some of the famous Vegas attractions. But we were a little creeped out by all the neon and got bored, so we ended up hanging out in our youth hostel eating Mexican sweet bread and watching Spy Kids 2. As a kid, I spent hours and hours reading whenever I had free time, oblivious to or not caring about the fact that friends were swimming or hanging out in the sun. In high school, I read McSweeneys Lists and played Scattergories with friends on Friday nights. I’ve done the nerdy, random thing for my entire life.

Hanging out on Greek beaches, I realized I’m not over all of my old insecurities. I don’t want to walk around in a bikini in Europe, because everyone here is tan and skinny and has a tummy that isn’t covered in weird red bumps. I don’t want to go out drinking, because I’m pretty sure I’d end up by myself in the corner, half-nodding my head along with the techno. But that’s ok. I don’t have to be the kind of person aspiring to someday be cool enough to go to beach parties. I don’t have to do what everyone else appears to be doing to have fun. In the four days I’ve been in Greece, I’ve read three books, re-learned the alphabet and eaten some damn good food. I know I could go out dancing or drinking with friends, but I also know I don’t have to. Mostly, I know it’s ok to feel awkward (particularly in the face of European genetic superiority). And anyway, all those attractive, bronzed young people can suck it, because they probably don’t have a wildly successful blog.

Touchdown: Athens

I am officially in Athens and running on about twelve hours of sleep over the past three nights combined. My body has no idea where it is, what time it is or what's going on. And Greece is completely different than I expected. There's really awesome graffiti art everywhere, there are children begging for money who come up to you when you're eating, and the whole city looks, sounds and smells more like Accra than Paris or London. Pedestrian right of way does not exist, and there are guys hawking copy watches and other random trinkets everywhere. The Acropolis just sits on top of a hill, with lights on all around it, glowing in its beautiful state of disrepair. Tomorrow, I'll probably be better able to process this all, but right now, it just feels a bit surreal.

Microbe vs. human: the battle begins

Well, I'm off tomorrow. I'll be spending ten days in Greece with my family before heading over to Ghana to intern with Dad. I could say a bunch of insightful stuff right now about carbon emissions or changing the world, but I don't really feel like it. So instead, I'm going to detail my plan to decisively defeat all the Ghanaian microbes that are conspiring to get me sick as we speak.

Last time I was in Ghana was in the summer of 2008. I spent three weeks traveling around with Dad and my friend Carol, and I got decently sick. Not death-defyingly so, but by the end of that trip, I was eating about 400 calories a day and had lost 10-15 pounds.

This time, I'm ready. I've been training for this all semester by consuming as much bacteria as I can: raw milk, expired yogurt, homemade kombucha, expired raw milk...I should have at least three trillion good happy bacteria in my intestines, ready to fight. But just in case, I have the most comprehensive, no-nonsense med kit ever, and I am going to outsmart and outlast anything that tries to get me in less-than-perfect physical condition, microbe or otherwise. Here's what I'm hauling with me *possible TMI warning for people who get weirded out by indirect references to vaginas*:

-Ibuprofen, for good old-fashioned cramps and other assorted aches and pains
-Pepto-Bismol, to calm my tummy dragon down (his name is Chester, and he gets really excited in developing countries)
-Immodium, in case Chester does not listen to the Pepto-Bismol
-Two courses of cipro (an antibiotic), in case the tummy issues are actually Chester being attacked by unhappy bacteria that the raw milk bacteria are unable to subdue
-Anti-yeast infection medication, in case taking said antibiotics messes up my delicate bacteria-yeast balance
-Sunscreen, because I am a devoted fan of Cosmo's Practice Safe Sun Campaign (srsly guys, it's the most important issue ever)
-Triple antibiotic ointment, in case the whole giant-trenches-full-of-trash-on-the-side-of-the-road thing results in an injury
-Anti-itch cream, for when those pesky disease-carrying mosquitoes decide I taste good
-Malarone, for when said mosquitoes end up being female and members of genes Anopheles (aka malaria-transmitting ones)
-Plan B, in case some non-consensual shit goes down. Told you I was ready for everything.

In addition, I am vaccinated against yellow fever, typhoid and hepatitis A and B. And I just got a tetanus booster in January. So suck it, microbes. The only way you're getting me sick is with rabies (please no).

Epic summer countdown

Now that I've laid out my life plans, it's time to lay out my summer plans. For quick and easy reference, I am referring to this summer as Operation Acquire an Intestinal Parasite and Huge Carbon Footprint While Changing the World and Learning How to Milk Cows (OAIPHCFWCWLHMC, for short).

First stop: Greece. I'm chilling with my family for about ten days in Athens and on two Greek islands. This will not accomplish any of the world-changing or cow-milking alluded to in my operation, but it will make a dent in the carbon footprint. Also, I will probably get a nice tan.

Second stop: Ghana. I'm interning with my dad's company, Burro, which sells things designed to allow people with almost no money to be more productive. Right now, they rent rechargeable batteries and sell battery-powered LED lights (which replace kerosene lanterns) and battery-powered cell phone chargers. (Many/most Ghanaian villages have no electricity, so cell phones usually get rounded up by an enterprising person and taken to an on-grid location to charge. This is very inconvenient and costs people a decent amount of money.)

After doing some market research with existing clients, Dad is looking at expanding into agricultural inputs, so I will be researching options for this with a Ghanaian university student. I have really mixed feelings about offering people in developing countries (or anywhere, really) agricultural chemicals. On the one hand, ag chemicals are demonstrably pretty not-good for life. On the other hand, Ghanaian farmers are going to use pesticides whether we supply them or not (probably), and it's so completely not my place or job to go around lecturing actual farmers about how to feed their families. So I will try not to worry too much about the macro effects and focus on learning cool stuff about micro-level agricultural policy and marketing and telling people's stories on the Burro website.

I'm really excited for this, though. For one, I've never had a proper full-time internship with a large degree of autonomy. Much less one in Ghana where I'll be working with a Ghanaian student. I'm hoping to learn as much as possible about the lives of Burro customers, agriculture-related or otherwise. I'm also looking forward to driving the official Burro pickup truck, which is painted bright lime green and has a donkey's head on it (painted, that is. Not a real donkey's head.) Also, I plan to acquire at least one intestinal parasite in Ghana. Maybe I can even break my weight-loss-due-to-violent-illness record (last trip, I was there for 2.5 weeks and lost about 15 pounds).

After Ghana, I'll be home for about a month. Most likely working for my corporate overlords and spending the rest of my time reading about Ecuador.

And then...Ecuador!!! I just got official confirmation that I get to spend two weeks before my study abroad program starts working on an Ecuadorian farm/wildlife refuge. According to the email from the guy who runs the place, I am expected to work 7am-3pm weekdays doing any and all of the following things:

-cultivating the fields 
-taking care of both wild and domesticated animals
-fixing fences
-building
-milking cows 
-any other thing that we need to do


Which means OMG I GET TO LEARN HOW TO MILK A COW. This is serious, guys. This is worth at least +15 hippie points.


And then I'll be studying abroad!


I'm off in a little over a week, and I'll try to update as much as I can while I'm traveling the globe. Hopefully I won't get killed by a cow, or the aforementioned intestinal parasite.

MTV, travel and cultural insensitivity

MTV has a new reality show featuring the ultra-spoiled rich girls from My Super Sweet Sixteen. Apparently, their parents have gotten sick of putting up with their tantrums and whining. So the girls are being sent to third world countries for a week to learn...well, I'm not sure what exactly. You can watch the trailer for the show here: http://www.mtv.com/overdrive/?id=1587292&vid=232277

When I first heard about this, I thought it was an interesting idea for about three seconds. At first glance, it's easy to think that maybe these girls would learn something from this experience, even if they don't come out of it with a sense of the incredible privilege they've been born with. But then I thought some more, and then I watched the preview. And here are the problems I see with this idea.

1. The lack of meaningful change that's possible. These girls are spending one week in the countries they're being sent to. A week is barely enough time to get oriented and get the feel for another culture for a seasoned traveler. It's barely enough time to adjust to the time difference for half the places these girls are going. And for girls who've probably never stayed somewhere that wasn't a resort or five-star hotel, one week is nowhere near enough time for them to get over their expectations of service and comfort, much less start to reexamine their own lives and privilege.


2. The obnoxious American stereotype being reinforced. The host families for these girls are treated horribly and have their cultures, lifestyles and traditions insulted repeatedly. In the process, stereotypes about American tourists are reinforced, which pisses me off, and the host families are forced to endure yet another case of first-world privilege. In spite of what we like to think, American life isn't inherently superior to these people's lives, and as a basic matter of courtesy, you shouldn't insult the home, culture, country, or lifestyle of your hosts anywhere in the world. But instead of any of these issues being addressed, I'm betting that the girls will learn nothing, or some cheesy one-line statement like "people are poor and that's bad" or "you don't need money to be happy". So they'll come away with nothing, or worse, thinking they've learned something profound that amounts to nothing, and as they fly away, the host family will be sitting there thinking, "Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with that country?" Which they'll be completely justified in doing.


3. The idea that third-world countries are some sort of panacea for all issues that first-world teenagers have. The parents of these girls, instead of looking at the ways in which they've encouraged and enabled spoiled behavior, are assuming that the poor, hardworking villagers in whatever country the girls are being sent to a) are miraculously able and b) want to teach their daughters lessons about work and poverty that these girls should have been learning from childhood in their own homes, rich or not. As the original post on Racialicious (http://www.racialicious.com/2008/06/20/mtv-a-licious/#more-1596) pointed out, there are much better ways to give these girls a dose of reality. Have them support themselves on a minimum wage job for a month, or make them do some community service work. But the idea that sending them to a third-world country is the only way to "fix" them is offensive to those countries, ignores very real social problems in the US, and shifts the blame for their behavior from their parents and upbringing to American culture as a whole.


This isn't just true for this show. The sheer amount of programs where first-world teenagers have the opportunity to travel to third-world countries, do work, experience the culture and live with locals show that this belief is common. Of course these programs have upsides--they allow us to experience incredible things and connect with people across the world. And tourism is a large part of the economy of many developing countries. But I think in all this travel, first world tourists need to be incredibly careful about the assumptions they make about their host cultures.

Too often, I think travel to these countries gets simplified in one of two ways. The first is from the insensitive/unadventurous traveler who stays in resorts and never tries to do anything that involved interacting with locals. And the attitude they come away with is one of privilege, where locals exist to serve them, and any local culture and customs that haven't been co-opted by tourism are stupid, irrelevant or otherwise inferior. Along with this attitude comes and general lack of interest in learning about and appreciating other cultures. Sample behavior: on my Costa Rica trip, one of the adult chaperones and I were discussing languages and travel. I said I'd like to learn Japanese at some point so I could travel to Japan. She responded, "What's the point? They all speak English now anyways." She also got incredibly frustrated when the clerk at a grocery store didn't understand her requests in English and before she finally surrendered and allowed me to translate.

The second way tourists simplify their experiences comes from the liberal, young neo-hippie demographic who travels to escape the consumerism and materialism of American culture. This is the groups that romanticizes the places they go, rhapsodizing about the beautiful simplicity of life and ranting about the evils of corporate America. I admit, I've been guilty of this. When I returned from Costa Rica, I was feeling very anti-American culture and really wanted to go back and live the happy, simple life that I saw there. But this view is only a small part of the picture. It's easy to assume that the families who treated us so kindly in developing countries have a perfect life or that they're free from the worries about work and our future that we have in the US. And to some extent, this view makes sense--studies have shown that the work-related stress and illness experienced by many corporate workers in the US isn't anywhere near as pervasive in other parts of the world. But this view ignores the very real challenges and problems faced by those in developing countries--lack of access to clean water and medical care, increased prevalence of infectious diseases, malnutrition, corrupt government, civil war, and others--issues where Americans fare much better, on average.

The solution to this, I think, is simple. When you travel to another country, listen. Don't make assumptions about what people think or want. Understand their country and culture from their point of view. Don't tell them how to live their life, don't assume their life is better or worse than yours. And I'm not saying don't judge anything. Because in a travel situation, both parties have the opportunity to learn from each other. In Guatemala, I was lucky enough to get firsthand insight from my host mom and language teacher about their opinions of the sort of service work travel programs that come to Guatemala from the US. This was judgement about an aspect of my culture, but it was incredibly interesting to hear their perspectives and discuss them. Also, on the reforestation work team, some of the Guatemalan teenagers were burying the plastic bags that the trees came in next to the trees in the dirt. The GV kids on that work team took the opportunity to explain to them that the bags should be thrown away and that burying them in the ground in the forest wasn't a good method of disposal. Getting other people to think or teaching them something is always a good thing. But do it in a way that doesn't imply the superiority of your culture, ideas, or country.

I think the attitude of a good traveler is best summarized by this quote, which GV hammered into our heads in Guatemala. An aborigine activist once said, "If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you understand that your liberation is tied to mine, then let's work together."