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.

Personal purity isn't political activism

In high school, I participated in a service-learning program called Global Visionaries. Along with a group of about twenty US high schoolers, I spent the school year doing local service work and attending workshops on social justice and anti-oppression. The program culminated with a two-and-a-half week trip to Guatemala, where we did more service, had Spanish lessons, and learned about the US-backed 1954 coup which toppled democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz, largely because his land reform policies threatened the interests of the United Fruit Company (now called Chiquita). The coup kicked off a thirty-year civil war, during which the US-funded army basically attempted a genocide of the Mayan indigenous people and used rape as a weapon of war. After watching a movie about the war, we gathered as a group to discuss the events that had shaped the past half-century in Guatemala. We talked about the horrors and heartbreak that the country had been made to endure, largely at the hands of powerful US interests. After we had been talking for a while, Chris Fontana, our program director shook his head sadly and said to the group, “And all this so we could have cheaper bananas…”

At the time, that statement angered me unspeakably, though I couldn’t quite articulate why. Learning about Guatemala’s violent history (which I’d been previously completely unaware of), I had been furious. This was back when I was a fervent idealist, before I understood just how many coups and wars the US has staged all over the world. I was angry at the way the United Fruit Company had political connections which allowed them to basically request a coup from the State Department. I was angry at the lack of democratic process inherent in military operations. I was angry at the collusion between corporations and the state. I wanted transparency, accountability, authentic political participation. Chris’s statement seemed to ignore all of these concerns. He reduced the issue down to one of individual choice, of conscious consumerism. His message seemed to be that if US consumers had been paying enough attention, they could have successfully boycotted Chiquita and demanded that the price of bananas reflect their actual cost, which would have magically prevented the coup. We all know that when the interests of power and capital come up against a group of law-abiding citizens making respectful demands, the people always win. Every single time.

Sarcasm aside, I should thank Chris for this lesson, which it took me years to realize the full implications of. Liberals sadly have a long history of equating personal purity and change with political action, something I believe has been extremely detrimental to the achievement of leftist political goals. I talked about this during my last post about veganism and the animal rights crowd, and the idea extends to almost every social or environmental issue I can think of. Anti-sweatshop activists try to convince people to buy fair trade or Made in USA items, while largely ignoring the economic reality that for many children working in sweatshops, the alternative is prostitution or slow, painful death by starvation. Pro-sweatshop people (yes, they do exist) have pointed out that when sweatshops close because of pressure by activists, many children wind up on the street, starving, or as sex slaves because they don’t have any other way to survive. And yet we persist with the myth that the solution to this problem isn’t critiquing and attacking the neoliberal trade agreements or economic systems that make sweatshops a virtual necessity, it’s encouraging people to buy fair trade. Not even to buy less (not like consumerism is feeding the rise of low-wage factories or anything), but just to buy differently. This is how liberals are going to save the world.

This framework appears in so many other places. Worried about global warming? Change to fluorescent lightbulbs in your house! If you’re serious, maybe buy a Prius. If you’re really serious, install a solar panel and generate all of your own power. Don’t bother protesting the opening of a new coal plant or putting your body in front of the bulldozers that will soon be clearing the ground for the Keystone pipeline. That might be confrontational, might get you arrested. It’s probably better to take shorter showers.

I have this conversation all the time with liberal friends, and I’m often met with a lot of resistance. People defend their individual choices, cling to the meaning in them. I’m absolutely not saying that people shouldn't try to live their lives in an ethical way, whatever that means to them. Personal choices are often catalysts to larger political action. Being vegetarian is what made me aware of factory farming, and by extension, most of the problems with our food system. But then again, I was a vegetarian for almost twelve years, and factory farming is still going strong. Why wouldn't it be? Slaughterhouses operate at capacity, twenty-four hours a day, which means that the meat industry is largely supply-driven. The world population is still growing and getting less poor in absolute terms, which means more Chinese and Indian people are demanding meat in their diets. My one choice, even if it’s magnified by the impact it has on my friends and family, is not going to bring down the Tyson-ConAgra-IBP-Cargill empire.

I do believe that positive choices matter much more than negative ones. Boycotting Coca-Cola because of their appalling human rights and environmental record won’t to a single damn thing to change their business practices, even if you write them a strongly worded letter about it. But supporting a local co-op which is just starting out and trying to do things right will help them stay in business, which is important. Still, while consuming differently (or better yet, just consuming less) is a noble and worthy thing to do, it shouldn’t be confused with legitimate political action. You can be as pure as you want, living on your organic farming commune with a mini-hydro system on a nearby river supplying all your power. You can hand wash all your clothes and make your own cheese from scratch and knit your own clothes until the cows come home, and the planet will keep right on getting warmer. Large corporations will continue to dispossess people of their land in the name of resource extraction. If you want is to withdraw from the system instead of trying to change it, that’s your right. But saying that your choice to opt-out amounts to some kind of radical political action is disingenuous.

This might be a depressing notion for liberals who are used to thinking in terms of the personal. But as I’ve gotten used to the idea that my personal choices are not an effective political tool, I’ve found it incredibly freeing in two ways. The first is that it lifts a lot of the guilt that’s a daily part of life as a well-meaning leftist. I remember this past spring, I was driving to a food justice conference with some fellow Whitman students. As we stopped for lunch at Whole Foods, we were talking about driving. I mentioned loving road trips. Another girl on the trip concurred, but then quickly shifted into guilt mode. “I should try to drive less.” she said. “I try when I’m at home, but it’s hard sometimes. I know I should be better...” I interrupted her, having heard one too many conversations go this way in recent weeks. I told her unfortunately, it’s virtually impossible to live your life in modern America without driving, and that that system wasn’t her fault; she didn’t create car culture. I told her that the worst, most self-serving thing that those in power have ever done is convince us that our individual choices are the most powerful weapon for change that we have. I told her that instead of feeling guilty all the time, she should keep trying to drive less when it was feasible, not worry about it when it wasn’t, and direct her attention at constructing a reality where driving isn’t a necessity. I stopped ranting, concerned that I may have offended someone I was trying to befriend, someone I still had three more hours in an enclosed car with. Instead, she smiled at me and said, “Wow, that was actually really inspiring.” And that’s basically what I’ve found. It is kind of inspiring, albeit in a terrifying way, to know that your use of a disposable cup this one time is not going to cause the apocalypse. It’s so freeing to re-channel the energy you’ve been spending feeling awful into thinking about how to go about building a better world.

The second benefit of moving beyond individual choice is that it makes it so much easier to not be a self-righteous asshole about the way other people are choosing to live their lives. I spent a good portion of last spring working out my feelings about whether vegetarianism was environmentally a good idea, and if so, under what conditions. I’d basically decided that all things considered, eating meat did more harm than good for the planet. I had a pretty well thought-out set of arguments, so I set about trying to convince my friend Henry, who had started eating meat again about when I did, after we both The Vegetarian Myth. I explained to him about the agriculture and water required to sustain cattle (even grass-fed ones), the reality of trying to feed a growing world population, the global warming contribution of cows. He listened to me and said I had made some good points which he mostly agreed with, but that he was going to keep eating meat. I tried again a few days later, after he’d gone out and gotten a beef burrito for lunch. I said that in a situation like that, why wouldn’t you just order vegetarian? I said it’s so, so easy not to eat any meat, especially if you’re used to it because you’ve done it for years. I said that yes, our choices weren’t going to stop anything, but knowing the way animals suffer in slaughterhouses, why wouldn’t you just do that one little thing for them? I said again and again how it’s the easiest thing in the world to be vegetarian, knowing that he’d done it for almost as long as I had. He listened to me patiently, and then said, “I feel better and healthier when I eat meat. Being vegetarian is the easiest thing in the world for you. For me, it isn’t. For me, it’s the easiest thing in the world to not have a cell phone or a laptop. So when you’re willing to give up your cell phone and your laptop, then we can talk.” I was absolutely stunned. I had nothing to say, except, “Shit, you’re totally right.”

We all have things we’re personally capable of doing. We all have forms of opting out that are easy for us, and things that we’ll never be willing to do. Some people are vegan. Some people bike everywhere. Some people live off-grid. You do what you can. But once you recognize that political action is far more important than individual choice, you can stop monitoring and judging the actions of fellow liberals. You can understand that systematic factors shape people’s “choices” and that most people lack the means to be able to install solar panels or even go vegetarian (meat is cheap, calorie-dense and relatively quick/easy to prepare, all of which are hugely important if you’re busy, overworked and poor). You can encourage people to make good choices and try to educate your friends without coming off like a pompous asshole, because you know that the future survival of the planet doesn’t hinge on your success. And once again, you can put the energy you formerly devoted to judging people into thinking about how to meaningfully change the world so that people actually have options in their lives.

Rejecting the framework of individual choice is the most important political decision I’ve ever made. Don’t get me wrong, I love my local raw milk as much as any other foodie, and I absolutely make conscious choices to live my life a certain way. But knowing that those choices won’t even make a dent in global problems has let me get much more creative in my thinking. I’m opposed to global warming (what sane person isn’t?), but now I can focus on doing whatever needs to be done to make sure the Keystone pipeline isn’t built instead of trying to change all my lightbulbs. I recognize that having the time and energy to engage in activism is, in itself, a form of privilege. Many, many people don’t have the time, energy or inclination to do anything beyond make a few lifestyle changes, and I’m not going to attack anyone for that. It’s a daunting task trying to engage in bottom-up political change. I’ve been thinking about it for most of my life, and I’m still not quite sure where to start. But at least now, I know the answer doesn’t come in the form of a veggie burger.

Catholic churches and Catholic history

In terms of its practices, Catholicism has always appealed to me as a faith. I love ritual, love moments that are imbued with gravity. When I hear people reciting Hail Mary or the Lord’s Prayer, I feel the togetherness of believers all over the world, stretching back for century upon century. It’s incredible to me that over the course of human history, so many people have been united by a set of seemingly improbable beliefs. The Church is especially fascinating because virtually none of their practices are actually described in the Bible. There’s no provision for a Pope, for a hierarchy of priests. There’s mention of sacraments, but from what I’ve read, they don’t seem anywhere near as institutionalized as the Catholic Church has made them. Watching a mass, I feel like I’m witnessing the longest anthropological case study in history. This is what happens if you take people, with all of their ambition and flaw, and give them a holy text promising them eternal salvation. I always find myself wondering how many of the faithful lines up to receive communion truly believe that they’re literally consuming the body and blood of Christ.

I absolutely love Catholic churches. I’m not sure if it’s in spite of or because of my atheism, but Catholic churches and cathedrals have always fascinated me. They’re beautiful—lavish decorations, stained glass, statues of the Virgin Mary, and always the slightly grotesque Christ suffering on the cross. When I enter a church, I always feel weight inside, the accumulation of millennia of history. I believe that as a rule, institutions have secrets, things they’d rather keep covered up, things they know that the rest of the world doesn’t. The Catholic Church is one of the oldest institutions on earth, if not the oldest, and I get so excited just thinking about the sheer quantity of information they’re privy to, the intrigue and scandal and history that have occurred over centuries. In the cathedrals I’ve visited in Europe, my mind goes back to high school European history, back to the Crusades, the Great Schism, the Reformation and Restoration.

Here in Quito, I visited the Iglesia San Francisco yesterday. It’s in the same spirit as the European cathedrals I’ve seen, though I think it might actually manage to have more decorations per square foot. But the inside feels a bit different. There’s more gold. The Virgin Mary seems more emphasized (what does it say about our culture, I find myself wondering, that the holiest woman on earth is the one who was able to give birth without ever having to suffer through the sin of having sex?) The Lord’s Prayer is in Spanish, which doesn’t make it sound any more serious, but does give it an entirely different set of cultural connotations. My mind starts to go back to Europe, to monasteries made from stone. But then I remember that Catholicism has an entirely different history on this continent, and suddenly I’m remembering conquest, subjugation, smallpox. Latin America seems so Catholic today that it’s easy to forget how they got that way. Catholic beliefs and imagery are so present that I have to remind myself they came with the conquistadors.

When I think back on Europe’s long and bloody religious history, I can accept it as a given. The thought of a bunch of Germans slaughtering each other in the name of God doesn’t anger me. It’s a bit puzzling, a bit regrettable, but it’s history. But thinking back on the conquest of the Americas, knowing the role religion played in justifying that endeavor, I find it harder to be neutral. I can’t bring myself to be outraged for something that occurred five hundred years in the past, and I’ve always believed that religion served more to justify something that would have happened anyway, rather than as an impetus to slaughter. But still, remembering the blood woven throughout Catholic history, I think to more modern problems. The refusal to ordain women or let priests marry. The sex abuse cover-ups. The willful spread of misinformation about condoms. The construction of sex as something sinful and shameful, and the way that’s impacted women in particular.

As an institution, the Catholic Church both intrigues and terrifies me. I am angered by the people who have suffered at the hands of power, five hundred years ago and today. I am angered at the blatant sexism that underlies so much of what the church teaches. But as a faith, I still find Catholicism beautiful. I am heartened by the knowledge that No More Deaths, as well as many other aid groups for undocumented immigrants, have a Catholic background. I am inspired by the wisdom and humility I’ve seen listening to lifelong Catholics speak about their faith. I am drawn to stories about human imperfection, about people trying to be better in spite of themselves. I am drawn to the churches, to the intricate decorations, to their attempts, however flawed, to bring the Divine a little closer to earth.

Making the most of my semester

I’m having a great time in Ecuador so far. I’ve gone out dancing in sketchy clubs, seen a fantastic Ecuadorian movie and understood almost all of it, videotaped band rehearsal for my host dad and brother, and tried to explain the debt ceiling crisis, my disillusionment with Obama, the situation on the US-Mexico border, why neoliberal economic policies and Latin American dictators in the 70s were connected and the events of 9/11 in Spanish to various host parents and siblings. Quito isn’t what many people would picture as a city in the Third World—there are malls with legitimate North American and European brands, plenty of people driving nice cars, and a refreshing lack of stray dogs. Athens, Greece looked more like a developing country to me than Quito does. My host family here is very cosmopolitan. My parents and 17 year old brother are all fluent in English. They’ve been to Miami several times. My dad and brother are in a rock band, complete with a gorgeous set of professional equipment—electronic keyboards, a drum set, a sound board, electric guitar, bass, amp and microphone.

I’ve also been thinking about withdrawing from my study abroad program. Because as much fun as I’ve been having, I feel a little too comfortable here. My classes are with the other students in the program—all gringos—and while I love everyone in the group (and I mean that seriously; we have an amazing group of people), I never come to class terrified that I won’t know what to say or won’t understand something. I have two hours of Spanish class a day, and I speak a bit with my host family, but overall, I’m not practicing as much as I’d like. While the ecology and science stuff we’re learning in class is really interesting, I’m not sure that’s the best use of my remaining two and a half months here in Ecuador.

My alternative vision for the rest of the semester involves returning to the Intag cloud forest area that the group visited on an excursion. The community of Junin has been the center of an anti-mining struggle, and there are a ton of projects that the people there need help with. The anti-mining activist group DECOIN is working on developing their ecotourism program to provide the community with an alternative source of income. They have an adult high school where I could teach English and computer skills. There’s also a newspaper in another town in Intag that I could spend time working on. So I’m thinking of heading back out there after the group goes on our Amazon trip in a week and staying until the end of the semester (except for the Galapagos Islands trip—not trying to miss that), which would give me about two months in one place.

In Intag, I would be miserable for at least a few days. I would be scared, unable to communicate with people sometimes. I would be so incredibly sick of the food after two months of plain white rice and yucca with fried eggs that I would probably swear off starches for good. I would get to shower once (maybe twice a week). I would be covered in black fly bites. I would probably get sick. But I also know that I would learn a lot more about the kinds of things I care about. I would make legitimate connections with Ecuadorians. I might even be able to help the community in a meaningful way, and at the very least, I would understand what they’re going through much better.

All things being equal, I would go to Intag in a heartbeat. As things stand right now, I’m waiting to hear back from Whitman about policies with withdrawing from programs. I have to consider cost, my grades (study abroad grades don’t factor into GPA, but I’d still rather not have 3Fs on my transcript) and the other people in the program, who I would miss tons if I head off into the wilds of rural Ecuador.

Sylvia, one of the program academic directors, was talking to the group yesterday about our independent study projects. For the last month of the program, everyone spend a month by themselves working on a project to benefit a local community (projects are chosen based on the intersection of student interest and community requests) and writing a report in Spanish about it. She told us that we would get about 70 requests for projects, and that many of them would appeal to us. She said that we would never know our opportunity cost for choosing the project we did—we would never know if we would have been happier doing something else, so it wasn’t worth worrying about. That advice seemed very applicable to my situation. If I stay here in Quito and finish the program, I will get to go back to Intag for a month for my project. I’ll have a really fun semester, go out dancing a lot, see more movies in Spanish, get to know the other students on the program really well, and keep learning guitar under the direction of my host brother (I'm up to two chords, and it takes me about 30 seconds to switch between them). My Spanish will improve, perhaps not as much as I’d like, but a decent amount. If I go to Intag, I’ll get to do something I think is really important, get to know a group of Ecuadorians much better, learn about actual activism, practice my teaching skills and improve my Spanish a lot. Either way, I’ll have a great experience, and while I know which one I’d rather pick, I’m not going to worry too much about it. I’ll decide sometime this week, as soon as I hear back from Whitman and talk to my parents. And I’m so excited for whatever lies ahead.

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.

Reflections on a decade

I spent a long time thinking about what, if anything, I wanted to do on the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Both of the Ecuadorian families I’ve lived with have asked me about the attacks, have told me that they remember that day, that they watched it thinking how terrible and sad it was. I remember that morning with a combination of striking clarity and inexplicable haze. My dad had a business trip scheduled. He got to the airport, was told that all air traffic was grounded, came home and turned on the TV. I remember watching after the first plane hit, when no one was sure what was going on. I remember that I was watching when the second plane hit too, though reflecting on this now, I question the clarity of my memory, now a decade old. The second plane hit before 10am in New York, meaning I would have been up unusually early for school on the West Coast. Still, I remember seeing it, my dad sitting next to me, our whole family silent with disbelief. When the first tower fell, my dad sat shaking his head in his hands, murmuring, “Oh my god, oh my god…” I thought I saw tears in his eyes—to this day, the closest he’s ever come to crying in front of me.

I remember asking my parents if this was a Big Deal, thinking in my head that the events of this morning would come to define my generation, would be a story I would recount to children and grandchildren. I remember thinking I was the perfect age—old enough to understand what was happening, but young enough that someday, I would be part of a select group of really old people, the last generation alive when September 11 happened, and my great-grandchildren would come interview me for middle school history projects. After I had these thoughts, I remembered that people were dying and immediately felt guilty for thinking of posterity before human suffering. In the following years, I would feel validated in my predictions, proud that my ten-year old self understood politics and history well enough to grasp the significance of that moment. I would later sit alone in my room on March 17, 2003, crying silently after watching President Bush’s speech announcing the beginning of combat operations in Iraq. I thought about the bombs falling on Bagdad, and part of me wondered if we weren’t just re-creating the horrors of that September morning for another people in a far-away land.

Soon enough, Iraq faded to the back corners of my mind. I was, after all, in middle school. I was preoccupied with reading, gossip, depression, boys and environmental problems. I let my outrage on that night in March fade into the back of my head, alongside the sadness and gravity I felt on the morning of the attacks.

Since then, I’ve re-opened those emotions a handful of times. Junior year of high school, I did a project for my American history class on pro-war and patriotic songs, and spent a few hours watching and re-watching videos of the attacks set to music. I was transfixed by one in particular, set to the Requiem for a Dream score, which had video of the planet hitting the towers interspersed with photos of people jumping and falling from the burning buildings. What stuck in my head the most was the 911 call made by a man stuck in one of the towers seconds before it collapsed, the call that ends with him screaming, “Oh god!”, followed by the sound of debris falling, and then silence. I watched that video again and again in the name of “research”. I was transfixed. I thought about the people jumping and the man on the phone, imagined what must have gone through their heads. I cried and cried and cried. And then I became numb. After enough consecutive viewings, I couldn’t summon the horror, the sadness, the sense of connection. I compartmentalized, stopped caring. Eventually, I recognized that this wasn’t healthy. I stopped. I didn’t let myself think about it too much.

With all the buildup around the tenth anniversary, I thought about reliving that morning again. I read opinion pieces and commentary about the US’s reaction to the attacks, with several commentators on Al-Jazeera English arguing that the US should have chosen to prosecute the attacks as criminal acts, rather than giving the attackers what they wanted—a war based on ideology with no end in sight. I thought about readings for some of my classes, about discussions I’ve had with friends about the morality of pre-emptive war, about the way our culture fetishizes and immortalizes the victims of 9/11 while forgetting so many other who’ve died because of our foreign policies. I remembered reading Osama bin Laden’s Speech to the American People for my international politics class and feeling disturbed by the clarity of his logic, the legitimate grievances he cited against the American government. I thought about imperialism and Iraq and Afghanistan. I thought about anything but what actually happened on September 11. I didn’t want to go down that rabbit hole again. But then the TV in my house was on, and I ended up watching half an hour of an overly dramatic re-enactment of what happened inside the first tower on that morning, awkwardly dubbed in Spanish, with my host mom. I read a story about the forgotten victims of 9/11—the airport workers, the woman who checked in Mohammad Atta at Logan International Airport, the flight attendant who called in sick for American Flight 11 the night before. I thought once again about the human costs of that morning, the people who are still suffering, who will suffer for the rest of their lives. I wanted to cry, but couldn’t find it in myself. And I wondered why we feel compelled to do this every year, why as a nation we insist on re-opening old wounds every year in the name of remembrance.

So now here I am, once again picturing bodies falling from a flaming tower, silently thanking gods I don’t believe in that I have the option to walk away, largely unaffected, that I don’t know anyone in New York City, that no one in my family is a flight attendant. I want to honor the victims and remember them, but I’m not sure all the TV specials and longform stories are helping anyone heal. As an aspiring journalist, I’ve always believed fervently in the value of holding people’s eyes open, forcing them to look misery in the face and grapple with their inner demons. Now, I find myself wishing we would all close our eyes and say a prayer instead. I can’t help but feel that all this remembering and collective suffering is what begat our ill-fated foreign policy in the wake of the attacks. I can’t help but wish that we would stop picking at scabs, that we would learn to separate emotion from policy. I know that the feelings I had on the morning of those attacks is the most common ground I’ll ever have with so many Americans, and I wish so much that that could be different.

I wasn’t going to write anything about 9/11, because I didn’t think I had anything important to say. I still don’t think I do, it’s just that after thinking about that flight attendant calling in sick and the families of people who chose to jump, I have so much sadness and regret inside me that I had to get it out somehow. I feel guilty knowing how much emotion 9/11 can well up inside me, a feeling that the horrors we’ve inflicted in Iraq and Afghanistan will never hold a candle to. Mostly, I sit silently, still trying to decide if it’s ok to close my eyes when so many would keep them open, knowing that it does no good, knowing that it just keeps your heart aching for longer. I don’t know if I can cry anymore, so I pray instead, hoping that for something as important at this, God won’t mind that I’m an atheist. I pray for forgiveness, for healing, for remembering without reliving. And then, I pray once again to forget.

Intag: development and protest

If you’re a scientist, you might like to know that the Intag Cloud Forest Reserve is home to some of the most spectacular biodiversity on the planet—219 species of birds recorded, more orchid species present than in the entire United States. Even if you’re not science-minded, you’ll appreciate the fact that the Andean tropics contain at least 15% of the entire world’s plant species when you’re walking through the forest or stopping to admire the breathtaking views of rolling hills punctuated by the occasional plot of maize, yucca or banana. Locals in the pueblos surrounding the forest walk for hours to harvest food and visit family members in neighboring towns. The whole area isn’t a postcard for living in harmony with nature—there’s plenty of blaring radio music at all hours of the day and night, not to mention beer and rowdy games of fútbol. Spend the night in Plaza Gutierrez or any other town on the edge of the forest, and you’re likely to be woken at 5am by crowing roosters or the sounds of a pig being slaughtered. But the chaos of daily human life blends almost seamlessly with the natural world, and the area has an undeniable beauty to it, the kind that makes you want to pack up everything you own and buy a one way plane ticket to Ecuador.

Of course, if you’re a mining company, you see Intag in an entirely different way. In addition to its spectacularly biodiversity, Intag has been, depending on who you asked, blessed or cursed with mineral riches—copper, concentrated enough to justify extraction, in a world which has come to rely on the metal for telecommunications cables.

The fight in Intag started in the early 1990s, when Mitsubishi began exploratory work near Junin, one of the communities in the region. Initially, people were excited. The company meant jobs in an area where work was getting harder and harder to come by. But then wages were lowered and people started getting sick, skin irritated from the initial work being done. In 1995, Defensa y Conservacion Ecologica de Intag (DECOIN) was formed to fight against mining in the area. They tried to talk to the company and contacted government representatives asking them for help. When they received no reply, they burned down the mining camp, which convinced Mitsubishi that they would do better leaving the people of Intag alone. They left the area for good in 1997.

In 2002, the Ecuadorian government auctioned the mining claims in Junin off to another company, this time from Canada. Ascendant Copper tried to win people over with promises of schools, hospitals, computers and work, but by then, locals had done some research on mining in nearby areas and decided that the development projects weren’t worth the destruction of their forest. In the words of activist Marcia Ramirez, “Nosotros sabemos que la mineria no es desarollo” (we know that mining is not development).

The people of Junin had Mitsubishi’s original environmental impact statement, which stated that four communities would have to be relocated to make room for an open-pit mine, and that desertification of the mined area would occur. When he spoke to us, activist Carlos Zorilla wanted us to understand exactly what mining entails, because he says most people don’t know. He’s lived in Intag for years and has been fighting against mining since Mitsubishi first came to the area. He told us that the copper they wanted was buried 500 meters underground, and that the only way to get it out was to dig an open pit. The ore in Intag is 0.6% copper, which is high enough to make it worth the effort to extract in today’s market. The 99.4% of the ground that isn’t copper includes mercury, arsenic and uranium. The processing required to extract the copper from the rest of the earth would leave behind heaping piles of toxic waste, laced with heavy metals and radioactive elements. In addition, the mine tailings would almost certainly be leaking sulfuric acid, which is created when iron sulfide in the earth is exposed to air, oxidizes and combines with water. Tailings are generally left in ponds, lined with plastic, capped to prevent leakage. But they invariably leak. A quick glance at the list of Superfund sites in the United States will turn up hundreds of old mines scattered across the desert West. The list reads like a toxic apocalypse—contaminated groundwater, elevated cancer rates, neurological problems in surrounding communities. Carlos asks us what we think will happen if you take the same process and move it from a sparsely populated desert to a lush cloud forest full of flowing rivers and unparalleled biodiversity. No one answers. No one needs to.

When Ascendant Copper realized their development plans weren’t going to win people over, they began a smear campaign, accusing DECOIN activists of attacking them and saying Carlos was embezzling money from the group. When that didn’t slow the opposition, they sabotaged the local radio station and hired paramilitaries to come to Junin. When the people guarding the road into town wouldn’t let them through, the paramilitaries began shooting and spraying the people with tear gas. I watched a video of this attack, and in my mind, it would be dishonest to describe it as anything but a one-sided massacre. Efforts were made to contact police and convince them to defend Junin from further attack, but these requests amounted to nothing. Marcia told us that the government does what it wants, with little respect for human rights. “Lo que nosotros digamos no cuente para él” (what we say doesn’t count for him), she said, referring to president Rafael Correa and his pro-mining vision for Ecuador.

Eventually, DECOIN was able to get Ascendant Copper to leave Intag, largely because an Ecuadorian court ruled that the mining concessions had been granted illegally. But for the people of Junin and the surrounding communities in Intag, the fight is far from over. Rafael Correa, president of Ecuador, is deeply invested in mining as a form of development, and has said, “We can’t afford to be beggars sitting on a pile of gold.” While the new Ecuadorian constitution (written in 2008 under Correa’s administration) was the first in the world to give rights to nature, in practice, the government’s policies have been very pro-extraction. Correa believes that the country’s rich mineral resources, combined with a socialist platform of high taxes and wealth redistribution, can bring Ecuador a more prosperous future. His vision is one of responsible mining, where companies comply with strict environmental regulations and pay high taxes on the wealth they do extract—10 or 15%, according to my academic director. This money is substantially more than a company pays to mine on US federal lands, where regulations written in the 1870s allow companies to acquire gold mining claims for $5 an acre and pay no royalties to the government for any gold extracted. But for Carlos Zorilla, Correa’s vision is incompatible with the rights laid out in the Ecuadorian constitution, which says that people have the right to a good life.

The mining issue has been deeply divisive in communities in the Intag area. During my time there, I spent three days with a family in Plaza Gutierrez, one of the poorest pueblos in the forest. My host mother told me that the mining question has turned families and towns against each other. Plaza Gutierrez is rare, because almost 100% of the people who live there are opposed to the project. But the town where she grew up, Garcia Moreno, is almost 100% in favor. She told me that she’s opposed to mining, as is one of her sisters, but that her mother and another sister are very much in favor. Communities in the interior want the mining companies to come, because they think they will get jobs. She’s not convinced, she told me. The poorest people in Intag are the ones most opposed to the mining, so what does that tell you about their supposed “development?” There might be jobs at first, but then the company will hire outsiders. It’s not worth the loss of the environment. People just need to work harder, tend their crops, find other ways to get by. But mostly, she said she doesn’t want there to be any more fighting. She described the conflict with the paramilitaries as a guerra—a war. She said that if the government wants mining, they’ll probably get their way, because after all, they’re the government. She doesn’t want to see her home divided, fathers refusing to talk to their sons, pueblos full of bitterness and hatred. She wants her home preserved, but more than that, she wants peace.

Now, the Ecuadorian government is once again trying to open Intag to mining. This time, they’re working directly with Codelco, a Chilean mining company which extracts 12% of the world’s copper annually. The government has asked Codelco for technical assistance in developing Ecuador’s mineral resources, which means that if armed men come to Junin again, they will do so with the full force and power of the state supporting them. Carlos said that in recent years, Correa’s administration has been consolidating power in the executive and criminalizing protest—blocking a road now carries a five year minimum sentence, and 95% of people who are arrested on this and similar charges are activists opposing mining and extraction. When Carlos tried to register DECOIN as an NGO in Quito, he wasn’t able to, because legally recognized groups in Ecuador have to comply with the government’s development plan, which includes mining. Another NGO representative told Carlos, “Get this through you head—the state is going to control everything. Find something else to do.”

Carlos and Marcia seemed confident that they can defeat the latest incursion on their home. I wish I could share their optimism, but I’ve read this story so many times in so many places after the epilogue has been written. Sometimes the activists win, but mostly, they don’t. The documentary screen fades to black, and solemn white text appears to list and catalogue the precise tactics the company used to finally get their way. Sometimes, the decision is still being appealed, but the filmmakers know that including this fact is the only way they have to let themselves fall asleep at night; their thin, inadequate shield from the brutal reality that is power. I want a better story for the people of Intag. I want to go back and talk to more people, try to figure out how one-sided Carlos’ account of the struggle is, meet those who live in Intag and aren’t opposed to mining and see what they think needs to happen to allow the people there to live better lives. I want to tell this story to the rest of the world, in the naive hope that in truth, there is at least a glimmer of power. I want people to understand that the technologies in their lives are not without a cost, and that this story has been repeated thousands of times all over the world in the name of cheap oil, necessary resources, development and profit.

Meanwhile, I will honor Carlos and Marcia’s requests for help. If you’re compelled by this story and want to learn more, the DECOIN website has more information. If you’d like to make a donation to support the legal defense fund and the other work DECOIN does, more information is here. And if you have any old computers or cameras that you’d be willing to donate, the people of Intag need them to document their struggle, get the word out, and help improve the quality of education in local schools.

The politics behind language

Every Spanish-speaking country has its own linguistic idiosyncrasies, its own words that have filtered in from indigenous cultures, shared history and a dozen other small things that seem insignificant. As I’ve been learning Ecuador’s own particular breed of Spanish and re-learning vocabulary I’d forgotten, I’ve realized how much culture and politics shape language.

 My first week working on the farm at Hacienda Ilitio, I was talking to Marcelo, the dad of the family that lives and works on the farm. I was trying to figure out the word for farmer, so I asked him what the word was for someone who works on a farm. He said it was trabajador (worker). I said no, specific for someone who works on a farm. He said empleado (employee). I tried again, and he said there weren’t any other words. There’s definitely a Spanish word for farmer. Several, in fact. But I realized that his answer was reflective of the history of agriculture in many Latin American countries, including Ecuador. Ecuadorian farm society has historically consisted of large landowners who control enormous plantations and have workers working under them. The American concept of a small-scale, self-sufficient, back-to-the-land sort of farmer doesn’t really exist here. “Farmers” in Ecuador are either giant, rich landowners (the bosses) or poor laborers who don’t own the land they cultivate.

 Similarly, Ecuadorians don’t say (what?) when asking someone to repeat something. Instead, they say ¿Mande?”, which is the third person command form of the verb mandar, to demand. I talked to Sebastian, the owner of Hacienda Ilitio, about this, and he said it goes back to the same agricultural system. Workers on giant plantations would say ¿Mande?” to their bosses when they didn’t hear them because it basically means, What did you want me to do? 

This week, I did a short (three day) homestay in Plaza Gutierrez, a tiny town in the middle of Intag, which is a cloud forest region to the north of Quito. I was explaining to my host mom that back in the States, I’m a cashier in a grocery store. I asked her what the word for someone who worker in a grocery store was, and she suggested vendedor (seller, with a connotation of someone having a degree of autonomy) or another word I don’t remember, which meant someone who owns/runs a small store. Again, there is a Spanish word for cashier that’s distinct from the ones she suggested. But in her mind, someone who sold food at a supermercado was one of those things. People who sell stuff in stores are sellers or store owners. They’re not cogs in a corporate wheel whose main job is to do math for the store and make sure things ring up properly.

Ecuadorian Spanish is also laced with words from Kichwa, the main indigenous language spoken by people here. Which means it’s very likely that I’ll travel to another country later and forget that saying “¡Ah chay chay!” to mean “it’s cold” wouldn’t be understood by anyone in another Spanish-speaking country. It’s a little frustrating knowing that you have to re-learn Spanish a bit every time you cross a border. But it’s also so cool to notice how much seemingly little things can shape a language.

What it means to be in love

Environmentalists are always saying they love the earth. I do love the earth—I love hiking and the scenic views of mountains that make my soul breathe a bit easier. But when I get out in forests, I remember that I feel more than just love for the earth. I’m in love with the earth, so completely. My love isn’t the chaste admiration of Emerson or Thoreau. It’s not about writing poetry inspired by majestic sunrises. My love is intimate, physical, wet, wild.

I want to walk naked through mud, cover my body in earth, feel it squish between my toes as I try to become part of the ground below me. I want to nestle myself into the branches of trees, limbs entangled in a messy pile of twigs and leaves and skin. I want to stand under a freezing cold waterfall and let its raw power wash over me as my skin draws in, breath coming louder, faster until I can’t hold it in any longer and I scream, always surprised by how cold glacial runoff can be. I want to stay up late sharing secrets with the moon while the desert breeze plays with my hair, caressing me as I drift in and out of sleep.

Things you love, you’re willing to help. You sign petitions and write letters and try to waste less and eat locally. But you know that sometimes, you lose. You always have an out, the knowledge that we can destroy the planet completely and some form of life will survive. You’re rational with things you love. You make backup plans. You don’t base your whole world around them.

When you’re in love, it’s different. You’re stupid. You fight for things you know you’re going to lose. You put your body on the line if you think you have to. You try anything you can think of to keep your beloved from being harmed. You base your entire life around your relationship, no matter how much the odds are stacked against you. Even if every river on earth has turned toxic and the ocean is full of plastic, you refuse to leave your home behind. You never give up. You never stop fighting.