Up to this point
I leave tomorrow for a week-long visit of my new hometown. I have never been there and only have a hazy visual picture of what it may (or may not) be like.
In case you are a little bit confused about what my life has been like for the last month, let me do my best to give you a a little bit of background... including a few names and pictures.
This is a picture of me with my family the first week that I was in Ecuador. Not all of the people in that picture live in my house, but not all of the people who live in my house are in that picture either. I love my family... they are funny, interesting, intelligent, and take super good care of me... there is never a dull moment!
This is a picture of the view that I have every morning when I leave my house (the blue one on the left). Often times, I go jogging at 5:30 or 6:00 with a friend, and the sun is just rising over the mountain as I step outside. ¨Oh Lord my God, in awesome wonder, I see the...¨
Here are a couple more scenery picture of what I see when I look around the valley from my town of Tabucundo (pop. 6-7,000). The sunsets (and sunrises) are consistenly amazing... and most mornings the clouds clear and we can see Cayambe (the almost 17-18,000 ft. mountain) watching over us.
Here are a couple of pictures of friends.
This is my Ecuadorian brother Jose. He just graduated from college with a degree in Psychology. He is 25 and we have a good time hanging out and discussing language, philosophy, and culture... he´s much smarter than I am.
Sarah from D.C. standing in front of a beautiful valley where we went as a group to have leadership training. There is a waterfall on the other side of the valley... that you can´t see in this picture.
These are a couple of pictures taken from the 5 hour hike that my brother and I took with another PC friend and his little brother. We hiked up the mountain directly behind our little town to see the lakes that lie in the crater. Jose told me that we go up to around 4,000m, which is between 12,000 and 13,000 feet. Looking down into the valley on the way up was indescribably gorgeous... as you can tell from the pictures! Sorry... I know you are jealous right now. Here is a picture of the Lakes in the crater.
Hope that you enjoyed my pics. I didn´t update so much about what I have been doing... so here is the short version:
About half of the time I meet with 4 other volunteers and an Ecuadorian Spanish teacher (who is super cool). We meet from around 8:00am until 1:00pm and then have lunch together. In the afternoon we have things to do, like hang out at the local youth center with kids, investigate certain organizations or schools, plan activities, or hang out with our families to complete spanish/culture assignments. The other half of the time (Monday through Saturday... Sunday is our only day off). We travel about 45 minutes to a smaller town called Ayora, where the 25 Youth and Family volunteers meet together for ¨Technical Training.¨ This training is everything from small group facilitation to sex/HIV-AIDS education, from how to run parenting classes to how to build an organic garden, from self-esteem workshops to how to make recycled paper and shampoo. Additionally, we have taken a 5 day trip, we are leaving for an 8 day trip, and we will have two more short trips in August before we finish training the 23rd or 25th of August (not sure). All in all... it is a crazy schedule, and it is a necessary break once or twice a week for a few of us to go into the town of Cayambe (around 50,000 people) and hang out for a few hours.
Thanks for following along with me. I look forward to seeing a little more of the Ecuadorian reality this week.
A new place called Home
Today, I found out where I will be living for the next two years. Super exciting!
I can only give you a few bits of information about it, because I don´t have more myself... but here it is: I will be living in a small province (state) called Carchi that is in northern Ecuador bordering Columbia. The town where I will be living is called Mira and there are about 5,000 people there. It is not really in the mountains and not really in the temperate zone; kind of in-between. The majority of the people are Afro-Ecuadorian and it is an area famous for producing the best soccer players in the country (virtually all of the players on the World Cup team were from this area).
I will be hanging out with loosely organized groups of youth and trying to figure out what I can do to participate in what they are already doing and then figure out ways that I can enhance and capacitate them to do other things. It seems as though I will have a lot of freedom and a lot of flexibility in what I am doing, but there are already a lot of young adults interested and working hard, so I am excited about joining them.
I will be going to visit Mira all next week, so I will have a little better idea of what is going on and what it is like.
I tried to put on a couple of photos... Let´s hope it worked. A few are just vista´s, a couple others are really cool friends, and one has most of my Ecuadorian family along with some Peace Corps friends. I will put more up soon (as long as it worked this time).
I run a risk by writing here about experiences that I have had here in Ecuador. The risk is to glorify myself and what I am doing and/or to make the people here appear to be in desperate need of my personal assistance. This is simply not true.
On the other hand, I want to give you a glimpse of the need of the people as well the strengths and the amazing perserverance that they display.
A balancing view: The family with whom I am living during this training period has a computer and four televisions. My brother who is 25 just graduated with a bachelor´s degree of Industrial Psychology and is super involved in a local Youth Development Organization. I love chatting with him about politics and philosophy and he ¨takes me¨in just about every discussion that we have. This family is not ¨rich¨or really even middle class, it is just that they have pooled the resources of 6 working adults in order to live comfortably all together at a level that would be more or less acceptable to the common American.
I just finished visiting a city in the south of Ecuador called Machala for 3 days on a ¨Tech Trip.¨ The purpose of this trip was to get a better idea of our upcoming daily life and work. We did a few different group exercises with mothers and we did a sexual education class for a group of 7th graders. Additionally, we played soccer with kids and hung out with local teens at the office of the local volunteer. These are all typical activities that could have happened in Midland or Chicago or any other place, but instead they happened on top of an old trash dump which is now a neighborhood for thousands of people who build their wood slat houses on stilts and get their water from barrels filled by a water truck now and again.
I don´t know how to normalize that picture for you, but it really is not a very uncommon type of thing. The extraordinary thing is that the children and the families are just like every other child and family. The are smart and fun and mischevious. They have problems and I´m sure that hope is sometimes difficult, but there is also love and trust and support.
My job is not to come in and save people. My job is much harder. It is to attempt to get to know these people and allow them to get to know me. Then, if I am worthy of their friendship perhaps they will teach me about life, while I try to help them find ways to navigate a broken system in order to allow them to use the many strengths they already possess in a way to escape from a life without options, without opportunity.
Intercultural Exchange
I arrived in Tabacundo just in time for the ¨season of Fiestas.¨ There really is no seasons here- the ¨summer¨ is colder than the ¨winter¨and the only real difference is that right now it doesn´t rain. Instead, the had to make their own seasons (not really), so they decided that they would have half of the year for continous parties and then rest the other half of the year. :)
The Fiesta de San Pedro just finished. It was awesome. 4, 5, 6 hour long parades 4 days in a row, indigenous communities dancing in traditional clothes with traditional music, schools of kids dancing and singing and playing instruments, and even Steve - all dressed up in Zomarros, poncho, y gorra - dancing, singing, and stomping his way through the streets.
Since there are a bunch of Peace Corps volunteers living close by right now (we are training until the end of August), we decided that we would throw our families a 4th of July party. We bought hamburgers, hot dogs, and watermelon, and fixed up some potato salad and then invited everyone over. We ended by roasting marshmellows over a bonfire and setting off some fireworks. I think all 40 or so of the people who came had a great time.
It is cold here. Well... not cold, but chilly. I generally wear a long sleave shirt on and in the evening and morning I always wear a jacket. Tomorrow, I leave to visit Machala, which is on the coast only a few miles from the Ocean. I guess that things are a little different there... it never gets below 80.
Oh yeah... a few more interesting tidbits.
- My sister pointed out the Southern Cross to me the other night (constellation) and I can still see the big dipper. The stars here are incredible.
- I have jogged the last couple of mornings, and the sunrises are awesome... back-dropped by a 19,000 ft snow'capped mountain. The jog is pretty hard though, since we are at 2900 m ( I think that is just under 10,000 ft).
- I am officially living at 0 Latitude. I think that I am really 5-10 kilometers north of the middle of the middle... the ¨line¨.
