Life is different here...

Buenas Noches Friends, Family, and most importantly Donors,

Sometimes, other than the fact that everyone speaks Spanish, it is hard to remember that I am living in a place wildly different than where I grew up. Other days, it is painfully obvious. I have two stories about that for you now.

MPI ran a medical clinic in our community this past Friday and Saturday partnered with an organization called Healthechildren (pronounced healthy children) and Aliñambi. The five girls who compose the medical part of this year’s set of Program Directors worked their tails off to get ready for this: meetings to plan how the clinic would be run, making t-shirts, staying up illustrating Ecuadorian food pyramids and preparing charlas (read: talks) on brushing and flossing. We (being the non-medical PDs) had more to do as well, though ours wasn’t as much fun: we had more cooking and cleaning, more library time, time spent advertising the clinic on busses (Erik and I can put a flyer on the interior of a bus on average every three minutes), and fewer hands to go around for the summer camp in the mornings. Overall, with all their hard work the clinic seemed to go really well. I spent some of Friday afternoon and some of Saturday morning being around to help facilitate things and keep children entertained. Friday there were no children, so Mike and I kicked the soccer ball around and solved a 300 piece puzzle (which in Spanish is referred to as a “broken head”). Saturday morning there were a lot more kids, and I got to play 3v4 soccer with them. Two months in, and the air is still pretty thin up here at 9000 feet if you are going to try to run around. My team lost 4 to 5, but I promise you it was only because I let them win. I also got to spend a little time Saturday morning helping in the pharmacy.

This brings me to the first thing you can’t do in the states: administer prescription medication without at least being a pharmacy tech. The clinic was staffed with actual doctors. The pharmacy was stocked with actual medications, some of which were labeled “donated, not for prescription in the United States,” which I think is very nice of pharmaceutical companies to do. One thing we were short of was pharmacy technicians. I got to fill in. It is actually pretty easy. A patient brings in a prescription. You find it sitting somewhere on the floor of the room. It is probably in a box. The exciting part is when it isn’t in a box. Then you get to count out the pills on the sterile paper taped to the table, label a plastic bag with a sharpie, put the pills in, and tie it in a knot. I feel like I am pretty skilled at counting by natural numbers at this point. I even made sure to count everything twice. It was actually a lot of fun, but I don’t know if that is because I may have a backup career as a pharmacist if this whole “development” thing doesn’t pan out or because I spent the whole time thinking how I couldn’t ever do this in America. Life is different here.

The second thing is paying the bills. I understand that my bill paying experience in life is really quite limited. I pay most of my meager number of bills online, whether I’m at home, at school, in Ireland, or in Ecuador. I have paid some medical bills with my credit card by phone before. I’m not sure I’ve ever had to mail a check in to pay a bill, which makes me different than, say, my parents. But I think we all can agree that I have listed most of the standard ways to pay a bill in the states.

We play by different rules in Ecuador. I paid the internet bill yesterday, making me I believe the first PD of ’09-0’10 to pay a bill. I discovered it wedged behind our schedule board Monday morning before our 3 hour staff meeting. As Financial manager, I am not in charge of personally paying every bill (rent, electricity, water, phone, internet) but I am in charge making sure they get paid. This bill was about a week late (due the 21^st, it was the 31^st). Now, as testament to how things are run…er…differently in Ecuador, they hadn’t cut our internet off yet, which is good, because I can tell you after living in this house that the world would end as we know if the internet was out. So how does one pay a bill in Ecuador? Send the company a check? No, no checks. They only trust American Dollars. Pay by credit card then? No-what did I just say? Cash only.

So cash it is. Well, cash is legal tender for all debts public and private in both the United States and apparently Ecuador (it says so in the bill Towers’ Varsity Market and American Airlines inflight beverage service) so just grab 5 V notes (theV stands for veinte, more traditionally referred to as a $20 bill. I feel pretty smug about my Spanglish nicknames) and go pay at the counter in the office of the company I owe (in this case Novanet). No, that puts too much trust in people, who may be corrupt. The proper procedure is in fact to walk to a bank (in this case Banco Pichincha), take a deposit slip, deposit it into the Novanet account with Novanet’s name written on the deposit slip, then go home and send Novanet an email (again, good thing they didn’t cut off our internet for something as silly as not paying them) with all the deposit information so they know it was you, and not anyone else, that put that money in their account to pay a bill.

Talk about luck, it is only about a 15 minute walk with $100 in cash on me up to the nearest Banco Pichnicha. The line was the shortest I have ever seen inside there, with the line of people only extending to the end of the velvet ropes that swerve drunkenly around the first half of the lobby. It only took about half an hour to get up to the window. The only eventful thing that happened in my wait was my realization that one of the security guards had a picture of the Virgin Mary over his heart in his little clear picture-holder. It was probably for the best, because that vest looked neither bullet nor stab proof. I left an awful lot of blanks on that deposit slip (efectivo) blank, but the teller said she had everything she needed from me. And that is how you pay a bill in Ecuador. Is it a hassle? Sure, but we are pretty sure it makes it harder for someone to steal the money.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the leniency in bill pay here in Ecuador, but I know too much about the money multiplier and believe too much in credit to think this is a better system than online, phone, check by mail bill pay. But again, life is different here.

As a further quick update, the Microfinance team (read: Erik, Chet, and Bibi) will meet with CIDE Thursday to iron out the details on us becoming certified to train small business class instructors. Hopefully it will go well. The first art class will probably make egg crate caterpillars (next Tuesday).

Chao,

Chet

Song of the Blog: “Punk Rock Princess” by Something Corporate

PS: That is a picture of the monument at Mitad del Mundo (read: Equator). Its not technically on the Equator, its actually off by about 200m, but you can't blame them for giving it the old college try.