¡Bienvenidos a Ecuador!

Buenos dias Donors, friends, and family!

(Writers note, the sentence fragments have been added for emphasis. Though I am told I will slowly lose my ability to speak and write proper English over the next year.)

It has been quite a week. Tuesday (7 days ago as I write this) I flew to Miami for three days of training with all the new program directors from Nicaragua and Ecuador. They. Are. Incredible. It was a blast getting to meet them and I am sure the programs in Nicaragua are in very capable hands. Right now, I’d classify the Ecuador PDs as a group of very different but energetic, caring individuals. At training we got to hear the short but vibrant history of MPI (from VIDA—Vanderbilt Intercambio De Amor {Vanderbilt exchange of love}—a group of friends who went to Peru for a spring break trip to the organization with the two permanent sites in Latin America it is today.

But we soon learned that the real reason we were in Miami was so that the Ecuador PDs (including myself) could apply for volunteer visas from the Ecuadorian Consulate. Before showing up in Miami we had quite a scavenger hunt for all the things we needed for the visa: an original copy of our birth certificate, four passport sized photos, a certificate from our doctor saying we did not have any communicable diseases (especially HIV) with attached labwork, and a certificate from the police saying we did not have a criminal record. It was an hour and twenty minute drive from our clean, beachfront budget hotel in Ft. Lauderdale to the Miami consulate, but we got there at 9:20 (20 minutes after it opened) turned over all our stuff and sat down. And waited. We waited until about 12:30, when a lady came out and told us we did not have the proper police reports; we needed them from Miami. We got lost a couple of times along the way but did manage to find the Miami Police Headquarters, where we were informed that because none of us were citizens of Miami-Dade County, we obviously would not have any criminal records so they could not give us a background check. Mark, the country director, then called both the County office and the central police station in Tallahassee, Fl only to get the same response. Dejected, we ate lunch at a small delicious Cuban restaurant near the police station around 2 and got back to the Consulate at 2:50, ten minutes before it closed on Thursday. Mark was told that the police reports from our home cities would work after all and to come back tomorrow (Friday, the day we were all flying to Ecuador) at 11:30. They kept our passports overnight. Incidentally, I’m told a US passport is worth about $5000 on the black market here in Ecuador. It must have been a very stressful day for Mark, but for the rest of us it was just a lot of sitting and getting to know each other. The Nicaragua PDs don´t need anything like this and spent the day at the beach. We only had to wait an hour Friday morning to actually sign our visas and get our passports back, which meant we made it to the airport on time for the first round of flights. Because we were in charge of booking our own tickets, people left at all different times. Once I cleared security, it was a pretty uneventful trip (to clarify, clearing security was also uneventful). I did learn several things you should keep in mind when you plan your next trip to Ecuador:

1)It is 4 hours 40 minutes from Houston to Ecuador

2)The Quito airport is right SMACK in the middle of downtown (until August 2010, when it will move south into the valley about an hour south)

3)QIO is one of the top ten most dangerous airports in the world to fly into, because of the mountains.

4)Sarah and Krysta inform me that if you fly LAN, they will make you wear a medical mask the entire time because of that recent H1N1 scare. I wouldn’t know; I flew Continental.

We landed at 11:10 Central time (which is currently Quito time, though because Ecuador doesn’t believe in saving their precious, this will change. Perhaps living on the equator has that effect on sunlight) and took about an hour to clear customs, which included having my temperature taken by infrared camera. Luis, the director of the language school we will all study at for the next three weeks, was there to greet us. I was one of three PDs whose host families were unable to come and pick us up from the airport. Luis crammed the three of us and all of our luggage (two huge bags a piece) into the smallest SUV I have ever seen and took us to La Floresta, the neighborhood we are staying. I was led in, said hello, bumped clumsily into a lot of furniture, shown my room and went to bed.

My family is great. My host mom is Eulalia, who lives with her sister Emelia and 80 year old mother, Abuelita. Their house is huge, freestanding, and beautiful. The house is bigger then my parents back in Austin, although the individual rooms are a little smaller. The shower has hot water, which I can already see is a necessity in a climate such as Quito; the only problem with it is that the water is heated by an electric showerhead with wires sticking out of it (called a widowmaker by some of my more humorous new friends) which runs out of “steam” very quickly. My family is very nice and tries very hard to talk to me solemente en Español. I haven’t had a dinner last under an hour, which is great even though I’m ready for bed by about 8:30 and have readings from Manna and homework from the language school to do. In general, Ecuadorians talk slow enough to be able to pick out individual words even when they are talking to each other, which should make learning easier. The food is great but very different than what I am used to. I have café in the morning, (normally a bowl of cut up fruit with yogurt sauce and un pan), a large almuerzo, and another café at dinner. Dinner is always a soup, made from scratch, which is incredible even if I can only identify about half of what I’m eating. Eulalia’s family is huge: she is one of ten children. There is always family in and out of the house. Yesterday was Emelia’s birthday, there were 18 family members present. I’m told there will be a big barbecue on July 25, and that there are 60 total family members.

It has been a real whirlwind of activity since I got here. On Saturday morning we met at the language school, about a half hour walk downhill, and then rode the busses out to Conocoto, in the Chillos Valley, where I will be living and working for the next year. The house is huge, great, and has an incredible rooftop with a view of Quito and the surrounding mountains. I have been to outdoor market in Sanloqui, the largest outdoor market in Quito. This is the market we will buy most of our fruit and vegetables for the next year. On Monday, I started intensive Spanish classes which will run for the next three weeks. I have one-on-one intensive tutoring four hours a morning. I have only had two lessons, but I am optimistic about how much I will be able to learn in three weeks. I definitely have a lot of homework and vocabulary to memorize.

So how is what I’m doing different from a vacation so far? Well, we certainly have had out share of just getting to see the sites. But, in addition to spending a lot of my time and energy learning how to communicate (es muy importante), I/we are learning the lay of the city, how to use the busses (I think I might have just about figured it out yesterday) and where to buy things. I have also gotten to see the library/teen center where Manna runs its programs and hear about the programs we will run and what the communities we will be in are like. Next week the seminars about how to run the current programs will begin, so I should be able to report more about my future work soon.

I´ll try to get some pictures and more of a description of what the country is like soon. Chao!

Chet

Song of the blog: "Bonjour" from Disney´s Beauty and the Beast