Adventuring outside of Quito

I'm doing an independent study project that correlates with my internship and focuses on the experiences of women in indigenous organizations in the Indigenous Movement of Ecuador (Movimiento Indígena del Ecuador). I have done a few interviews, on trips with my boss or here in Quito but last week I made the trek out to a different town to meet with a couple of women there. This is how my very long, exhilarating, adventuresome day went...

I woke up at 5:45 to get ready to leave the house by 6:45 with my host sister, Lucía, who was heading in the same direction to go to class. After Lucia's stop, I rode the bus to the end of the line, to one of the big bus terminals in the north of Quito (Quito is extremely long and skinny, so everything is delineated by being north or south). When I got off at the end of the line I went to one of the kiosks and asked for a bus to Otavalo or Ibarra, both of which could get me to my final destination, Cotacachi. However, the women at the kiosk informed me that I was at the wrong terminal and I had to go to one farther north. I didn't even know another one existed up there! She kindly put me in a taxi and I arrived 10 minutes later at the other terminal, feeling slightly harassed, for something already having gone awry. Well I managed to buy my ticket and the helpful security guards ushered me to the appropriate bus. First challenge surmounted.

I asked the bus helper dude (most buses have a driver and someone, usually a man, collecting money and shouting out the destination from the door) to let me know when I should get off to go to Cotacachi, which he did about a 3 hour bus ride later. So there I was, gotten off the bus outside the entrance to Cotacachi with rather vague ideas about how to proceed. Luckily, a friendly indigenous woman had gotten off with me and helped me take another bus 10 minutes into town. I could have taken a taxi, but it was nicer and cheaper to take the bus with this woman. Having arrived in Cotacachi, I didn't really have a destination in mind because I was supposed to call the woman I was meeting, Magdalena, to set up the interview. So I hopped across the road, recharged my minutes on my phone and called my interviewee who told me to meet her at her house in 1/2 hour. This gave me just enough time to register for classes at the internet shop (my registration had opened at 845 that morning) and hail a cab to take me out to her house. When I arrived, she wasn't there which wasn't totally unexpected because she said she was out and would be arriving around the same time as me (also, I was functioning on US time and she on Ecuadorian time). But there was a cute 11 year old girl and her dog hanging out in front of the house, so we chatted. For 15 minutes. and then 1/2 hour. And then 45 minutes... Meanwhile I am playing games with this girl in my notebook that I don't know the rules to and calling other phone numbers of people in Cotacachi to try to set up more appointments. Well, an hour after our meeting time, she shows up carrying a shawl full of beans on her back and apologizing for not calling, but she had no minutes on her phone.

After finally making contact, I was very happy to get down to interviewing. We sat on her cement porch and I offered to help shell beans (I probably shelled one for every 5 that she did) and set about interviewing with my handy voice recorder. We talked about a number of interesting things including her experience becoming a woman leader in the local indigenous organization but because I have to write a 20 page paper on that soon, I'm not going to go into it here. She cooked us some choclos (a kind of corn) and we shelled beans and talked about politics. Then she gave me some more numbers of women in the area and sent me on my way with best wishes and a recorder full of experiences.

It was then about 1 o clock and it was time to call one of the women I'd already gotten ahold of. She had to decline because she was too busy, but the number Magdalena had given me turned up a meeting at 3 o clock right in town. I went to town and got lunch, two great cups of coffee and purused the multitude of leather stores Cotacachi boasts of. Then at 3 I headed down to the office of the main indigenous organization in Cotacachi, UNORCAC. There didn't appear to be anyone in the open office so I poked around a bit and then waited in one of the chairs by the entrance way. A few minutes later a woman and a little girl wandered in. We small chatted a little and it turned out she was the sister-in-law of the woman I was hoping to meet, Luz Maria. While we waited, two women wandered in from the back of the office and asked us to help them with something. Turns out they were taking promotional photos for the organization and needed us to sit at the computers and look useful. So maybe I'll make it into the promotional material for UNORCAC, who knows.

Eventually, the photographer helped me find Luz Maria and we had an intriguing interview about her own process of becoming Leader of Women (Dirigenta de la Mujer) in UNORCAC, punctuated by various children playing in the office and asking their mothers for money for sweets. Luz Maria introduced me to two other women who I may be able to interview, and I got the number of one of them. I may be making this trip again this week.

Then, at about 4, I walked over to the bus stop and grabbed a bus to Otavalo, where I grabbed a different bus to Quito, to get back by 7. Whew.

Fotos!

I've been uploading photos while neglecting my blog, so now you can see all my hard work!
Mona's flickr photos!

The Rain and the Devil

So according to Ecuadorian legend, when it's sunny and raining at the same time, like it was this afternoon, it's when the Devil is marrying a female devil. So what I'm trying to tell you is there's been a wedding.

On Driving Here...

It is crazy! I have obviously not been driving, but whenever I am in a taxi or the car with my family, we all fear for our lives. Quito is really hilly and all the cars are manuals so everyone slides back about a foot or two at all the lights. Taxis force their way into itty bitty spaces and go around cars to jump in line at lights, especially at turns. No one stays in their lane, people are all over the place trying to edge their way up the line, and there are pedestrians and salespeople in the road all the time! It's a mad house! Last night I learned some good new swear words from my otherwise somewhat proper host mom. All I can say is, it's possible I will never complain about Minnesota drivers again.

The Amazon!

So this last weekend I went to the Amazon for the first time in my life and it was awesome. We stayed in a Sani Lodge (here: http://www.sanilodge.com/) run by the Sani Isla indigenous community of the area. The lodge brings in a lot of needed tourist money which is good because the community decided 2 or 3 years ago that they were not going to allow petroleum export on their land  (more on that later). The lodge was incredible. I was in a big room with 4 other girls and we had mosquito nets that looked like princess canopies and windows on all sides that were just screens. Those are for the heat and humidity. When we first got off the plane from Quito (which is often quite chilly and very dry when it's not raining) I nearly died of the humidity being a California coast girl. My friend from Florida loved it, said it made her feel at home.

Anyhoo, we got to Sani by way of a 3 hour boat ride down Rio Napo, after which we walked for 20 minutes (Hayley and I were briefly lost in the Amazon jungle before one of the guides came and found us; also on that detour I kicked a spiny plant and my foot still hurts), and then a 15 minutes canoe trip to the lodge itself. All I can say is, it was beautiful and sort of surreal to find myself in a totally foreign, magic place. While we were there we went on a bunch of different hikes in small groups of 6 or 7 with our own guides. My group's guide was Sergio and was pretty quiet but also awesome. He would charge off into the woods with us running along behind and then all of a sudden he'd have found monkeys or parrots to look at. It was like a sixth sense for cool animals in the jungle. We went to a bird viewing tower and saw toucans, howler monkeys, parrots, parakeets, woodpeckers, tanagers and a bunch more that I didn't catch the names of. Some girls in my group were making a list so I'll have to borrow that from them for the full report.

The only bummer of the trip was that our whole group got sick a one point or other. In fact several of us are still feeling a bit ill. It wasn't the food from the most excellent Sani Lodge because the handful of Brits, Germans and other Americans who were there didn't get sick, just us. Who knows what caused it, but apparently at least some people have amoebas.

Now for the serious part of the trip. We spent the first day on a bus trekking through people's farms to get to petrol pools and spying burning poles above the treetops burning off excess natural gas. When petroleum is extracted, they find petroleum, toxic water that can barely be called water anymore, and natural gas. The water and the unusable petroleum get pumped into these horrific pools, which a basically shallow holes in the dirt in the middle of the forest or someone's old farm that the oil companies have paid for the right to dump there.

The pools look like this but way bigger.

There is no protection for the environment whatsoever. The oil and water is dumped straight onto the ground where it leaches into the ground and water that the local people live on. There are a million kind of health problems in the nearby communities including cancer, and health problems in kids. The plants and soil along the edge of the pools are completely dead and black. It was jarring to see them strewn through a landscape that is otherwise so full of life. I was horrified, and also horrified that I was so shocked because clearly I have known for a long time how terrible oil companies and oil extraction are for the environment and the people. I am going to take this as a call to action to be more environmentally friendly in my daily life. I think I'm going to look into solar panels for our house (heads up Mom and Dad) this summer. There's a Bay Area company called SolarCity that leases them.

The trip was beautiful and sickening (oh, puns) in a myriad of ways and I am amazed at my luck and privilege that allowed me to go.

Lost in Quito

So for the most part I have a good sense of direction once I get oriented. I was lucky enough to have almost a week to settle into Quito before the program started, so I got to know a lot of locations in my friend Anna's life. This has served me pretty well so far, and I have been expanding my knowledge of the city and how to get around it every day.
Today my compañeras and I took a new bus to a newish location and it all went swimmingly. This was not the case on the way home. Whitney and I took the same bus back, but it being 6 o'clock, there were a thousand people crammed onto one tiny bus, and it was raining so all of the windows were completely fogged up. We couldn't see the street names to save our lives. Eventually, we said enough was enough and figured we were sort of close to our houses (we live in the same neighborhood), and forced our way off the bus (easier said than done). Unfortunately, once we managed to squirm off the bus with our belongings, we didn't recognize any of the streets. Poo. So we started walking, hoping we would recognize something soon. As we were walking (and not recognizing anything) it was beginning to get dark, and one of the main rules is not to walk at night. Sooo we started trying to hail a taxi, to no avail, then tried calling taxis, the numbers of which we were apparently dialing wrong, all the while having forgotten our maps at home. Finally we saw a taxi on the corner with no one in it, successfully talked down the outrageous price of 3 dollars to a more reasonable 2 dollars, and were on our way home.

Things are fine now, and I have something to write about for my homework assignment "una experiencia en las calles." Also, I am safe and dry in my house well before the streets got too iffy and have survived getting lost in Quito.

Un Poquito de Quito

I'm in Quito! This is my blog to let ya'll know how I'm doing and what I'm up to in Quito. Right now I am avoiding my homework (yeah I'm as surprised as you are that there is homework abroad) and decided that it was high time to start my blog. This post will be all over the place, but no me importa.


Today I went to a market with some new friends from the program as part of "Immersion Experience 2" and I saw a thousand fruits that I didn't recognize. My host sister (who is fabulous) has been teaching me some fruit names, like tomate del arbol and naranjilla, but most of them I forget the second we move on to a new topic. After the market we went to this cute coffee shop that Anna recommended to me. The Cuban manager is very sweet and remembered me from the last couple times I'd been and we joked about how I always order americanos.

Speaking Spanish isn't nearly as scary as it was before. I still make tons of mistakes, of course, but I'm not terrified of speaking. The first night I was with my family, I was super excited, but also so stressed about my Spanish. Now I can keeping talking through my mistakes, which allows me to get way more said.

It's late now, so toodle pip