A Leap in Time

I always intended this blog to have 2 main functions. The first is to communicate to interested parties back home what I am doing so that I don’t have to answer the question “How is Ecuador?” 50 times a year for 50 different people. The second is to provide a record of my time here that future Peace Corps Ecuador invitees/trainees/volunteers may be able to read to prepare themselves for the experience. So far, I am failing on both fronts. My most recent blog post describes something that happened approximately 2 months ago. My life situation is completely different right now than it was when I went to Santa Elena (not that I described much of my life situation back then in detail anyway). Neither have I written anything that could be considered very useful information for the group of trainees set to arrive at the end of May (or for any future trainees). In all honesty, if I were to actually try to keep up with this blog on a regular basis, in detail, it would become a major obstacle to me just living my life. And my daily life has really not proved to be great blog material either.

That is why this blog post, which I am writing on April 19, 2017 and intend to publish on April 20, 2017, is a break in the time-space continuum of my blog at large. This post is to quickly catch you up on the most important aspects of my life. At some point in the future I will return to writing about all of the stuff that happened during training, but since I am now a full-blown PCV and no longer a trainee, I think it’s time my readers caught up to reality.

On March 23, our Omni had its site reveal. Sites are probably what trainees stress about the most, try as we might to not, especially in Ecuador and especially in TEFL (I actually don’t know what happens within Community Health/Youth & Families) because we find out our sites relatively late during training and because in Ecuador there is so much variation between the Coast/Sierra/Oriente. My site turned out to be Guayaquil, but I already knew that. I’ll explain how I knew my site before everyone else in another post sometime in the future. We met our site host families the next day and left for our site visits the day after. We came back to Quito the next week, had about one more week of training, had our Swear-In ceremony (that also will merit its own post someday), packed up our lives, and left for our sites for good.

If you don’t know anything about Guayaquil, google it, but I’ll provide you with some quick tidbits. It’s the largest city in Ecuador. It’s hot, humid, and dangerous (supposedly). It has a great Metrovia system (a system of buses that operate like a subway, with stations and intersecting lines and automatic stops) but the regular city buses are impossible to navigate, and it is necessary to use them because the Metrovia doesn’t go everywhere. I live in an apartment in the center of the city. My host family consists of a 71 year old retired widow and her 37 year old daughter. My host mom owns the building, and we live on the top floor. I basically have my own wing, which is separated from the rest of the apartment by a hallway, and I have my own bathroom. My host family is friendly and kind and relaxed and doesn’t get all up in my business, which I really appreciate. The only downside—and this is a major downside—is that we don’t currently have internet. My host family is under contract with an internet provider and expects to eventually get it, but nobody knows when that might happen. Bureaucracy, am I right? Could be next week, next month, or next year. I know that many PCVs serving in distant lands would scoff at the hardship of no Wi-Fi, but when you’re living in a city of over 2 million people, you expect to have internet. Our way of life revolves around having internet. In a rural village, the culture has developed ways of communicating with people and passing the time sans-internet. Here in Guayaquil, we don’t just stop by the neighbors’ for a tea and a chat, it’s not considered safe to be out at night, and it can take 2 hours to get across the city by bus. The internet is what keeps us sane, and I’m afraid I’m starting to lose my mind without it. If I want to submit an assignment to Peace Corps, post on my blog, or even just download something, I have to walk 8 blocks with my laptop in my backpack (front-packing, of course; keep it where you can see it) to the nearest Sweet & Coffee (the Ecuadorian equivalent of Starbucks), all the while hoping I don’t get robbed, and spend at a minimum $1.10 (which is a pretty good chunk of change on a Peace Corps budget) on a beverage or food item I don’t necessarily even want. One nice thing about Guayaquil is that there is free public Wi-Fi in many of the parks and Metrovia stops, and it works sometimes. Still, you have to be kind of a daredevil to take your phone out in a crowded Metrovia station or on the street.

All of this is to give myself a valid excuse for why I will continually be months behind on blog posts. Also, if I start to sound rambling and disoriented in my writing, it’ll be the Guayaquil heat and lack of contact with the rest of the world that will have done me in. After all, only in a city where it is 87° and 94% humidity every day of the year would you see a man crossing the street, barefoot and homeless wearing a KFC bucket as a hat, with a gigantic grin on his face. It takes a long period of exposure to cultivate that sort of crazy.

Santa Elena (on a bus)

Once again, I'd like to start this post by apologizing that it has taken me nearly 2 months to write about the following experience. This trip took place right before the first round of Ecuadorian elections, and we are now in the midst of the second (and hopefully final) round.

Around the third week of February, we had our very first trip of Peace Corps training: the coast cultural trip. We were divided into 4 groups and sent to various places within the "coastal region" of Ecuador. The "Coast" as a region, by the way, does not necessarily mean beachside views. It simply refers to the area of low elevation west of the Sierra (mountains). It's like how anything east of the Appalachians is the "East Coast" even though I was nowhere near the ocean living in Winston-Salem. Some people were so unfortunate as to end up in the Forsyth County of Ecuador.

For the coast trip, I went to the town of Ballenita in the province of Santa Elena. It's a small town right on the oceanfront with only a couple of main paved roads (the rest are more like dirt paths). It kind of reminds me of Ocracoke in some ways, though it's definitely more populated. I stayed with the host family of a current Youth and Families volunteer who is also from North Carolina, so we had quite a time reminiscing about places and food back home. His host niece turned 2 while I was there, so I got to go to a legit Ecuadorian birthday party, with chips passed around individually on trays, a massive pot of arroz con pollo, and a guest list to rival a neighborhood block party. Of course, we waited a good 2 hours for all of the guests to arrive, but that's ecua-time for you. There's also a curious tradition of each and every individual family unit posing for a photo with the birthday girl beside the cake display after singing Happy Birthday but before cutting the cake, so that process also took about half an hour. Naturally, the night ended with all the children being put to bed and the remaining aunts, uncles, and cousins passing around a bottle of whiskey and dancing.

Ecuadorian arroz con pollo: the pot takes up 4 burners.

Piñata time!

It's not over until the uncles dance.

Once that fun was over, we got to spend the next two days being dragged from town to town across the province of Santa Elena by our LCF's (language and culture facilitators, a.k.a. Spanish teachers) in the blazing sun and 90% humidity. I jest; most of my travel companions were wilting under the coastal conditions, but to me it just felt like summer in Jacksonville. Heat, humidity, and mosquitoes are nothing I can't handle. The towns/cities we shuffled between—Santa Elena, La Libertad, and Ballenita—were really fairly bearable as soon as the sea breeze would come in. The main focus of our activities in the area was fishing: We interviewed fishermen on the malecón in La Libertad, went to the fish market, and learned how to knot together a fishing net by hand. There was one afternoon when we also visited the Amantes de Sumpa museum, named for a roughly 10,000 year old pair of skeletons found embracing in their grave, which details the archaeological history of the ancient Las Vegas culture on the coast of what is now Ecuador. Then, we did an interpretive dance about it. This may have been the most interesting activity we endured on the trip.

I don't remember what this move symbolizes, but I do remember
that I was laughing at them when they had to do it.

This saga ends with a somewhat comical adventure involving Ecuadorian elections, Ley Seca, and my birthday, but as I am still under the watchful eye of training staff, y'all will have to stay tuned to hear the rest of the story later on.