Monthly Archives: November 2004

Some new pictures in the coppermine. Over the long weekend we spent a day with our “host family” at a trout lake/farm. There are also some pics of the house and a few of my work.

The lack of seasons here is really beginning to gnaw at me. In Wisconsin, the years are broken up, divided by temporal distinctions which mark and foreshadow the passing of time. Autumn is the beginning of pants and sweatshirts; it brings with it distinct, environmentally related memories: orange and yellow and red trees, crisp leaves underfoot, apple orchards, pumpkin patches, football games, Thanksgiving. It’s not that there are no such time landmarks here. There are holidays every month or two. But the sun sets everyday at six something; it’s a little chilly every morning, the sun comes out at some point, and there’s a chance of rain. Every day is pretty much the same weatherwise.

I find my own mind eager to latch on to memories of home; I find myself missing the seasonal distinctions which help me file away my Wisconsinite memories. It’s like this: in Wisconsin, the seasons act as colored file folders. When I go to the file cabinet to look up a memory, it’s in one of the red, yellow, or orange folders of autumn. Here, all the folders are manila. Of course, here, the cabinet simply doesn’t have much in it either.

Nor will it. A year can’t compete with 30. I look out the window of my Spanish class and I see a building vaguely reminiscent of a lighthouse. Suddenly, I’m hearing the peeping of seagulls agitatedly hovering overhead; feeling a cool, constant, perhaps slightly foggy breeze; and smelling the conspicuous absence of salt in the quasi-maritime scent wafting through the air as I think back on a ferry ride in Door County.

I pass a patch of cut grass here in Quito and I see myself squinting in the late morning sun of June, July, or August, as Tember lies relaxed but alert, head erect, ears at attention, eyes slowly pulsing shut and open as the hum of the mower and the summer heat lull her into a sleep that will never happen because being outside on a summer day is just too exciting enough. And I sweat slightly as I walk behind the droning machine, watching my path and in turn remembering my golf course summers, mowing greens and tees at 6:00 am, keeping my lines straight and uniform.

I miss smelling snow in the cold air, looking up to see it falling from the early evening darkness, feeling the soft flakes hit my eyelashes, hearing the dampened patter of my steps in the snow. Quito’s early sunsets return me to the waning light of winter afternoons. And a mutt of a memory, bred from Christmas TV specials and carols and nighttime winter strolls, crystallizes before me. I see the glow of holiday lights; I peep, in passing, through the windows of houses to see people sitting down for dinner; a vague, twinkling – perhaps the result of Salvation Army bells just within earshot, or maybe a Christmas carol sneaking through some momentarily opened shop door – gives me a little hope.

Obviously, I miss home. A year is feeling long. It’s time to fess up that this is how I’ve felt every time I leave Wisconsin for an extended period. It’s nice to have a home. But I also fear that I won’t allow Ecuador in, that I’ll avoid assimilating to the point of comfort. One of my narcissistic fantasies before leaving was that we’d be able to return to everything as it was. We’re conveniently coming back about a year later. We’ll simply pick up where we left, moving things back into the house (as if we were just cleaning it really, really thoroughly), mowing the lawn, watching the Simpson’s. Tember will still enthusiastically greet us every time we come home; the cats will lounge relaxedly around the house like they always have; farmers’ markets will continue every Saturday; and Madisonians will still be a little too self-righteous.

I have a tremendous penchant for hope. I can endure long journeys as long as that carrot is in front of me. We go home at Christmas; we have breaks in February and in the spring; we’re attempting to coax family and friends here. It would be easy to simply endure this year in Quito.

And of course, my first reaction (and probably most people’s first reaction) to such a prospect is “oh, that would be horrible; I/you should really try to ‘get the most out of this experience’.” But what does that mean?

I should clarify that I’m not dying of homesickness. It’s just that, as one would expect, this whole experience is starting to have its influence on me. And I’m simply stepping away from myself, as I tend to do quite frequently, and observing the change.

And the most interesting question I’ve encountered in my labyrinthine metacognition (ok, that’s just too much, right there. Stop it, please, Tim) is this one about “getting the most out of the experience.” Does it mean I should try to travel around Ecuador as much as possible? Does it mean I should get involved in all the volunteer activities I can? Does it mean I should talk with people on the street? Or does it mean I should establish a routine, live here like the foreigner I am, in slight discomfort, and then come home with a thorough understanding of what it is to move to a foreign country and live dreaming of home?

The thing is, getting the most out of the experience could be any of the above. Really, I don’t think I can go wrong. So despite my homesickness, I’m actually hopeful that I will get the most out of this experience. How can I not? Still, at this stage, I wonder, “to what extent do I allow the experience to change me?” And is that my decision?

  O woe! O woful, woful, woful day!
    Most lamentable day, most woful day,
    That ever, ever, I did yet behold!
    O day! O day! O day! O hateful day!
    Never was seen so black a day as this:
    O woful day, O woful day!

So last Friday night, my English class decided to take Eileen and I out to dinner. We were invited, which means that the students paid for everything, including our taxi ride home. As I said in a previous post, I’m really enjoying my night class. There’s a good dynamic, great personalities; they really want to learn English; and they’re smart (we’re about three days ahead of my police class). Although they had told me we were going out for some traditional Ecuadorian food, we went to a Chinese restaurant. It was cheap and it was pretty much all the food we could eat. At some point early in the evening, Tatiana, a maid from Guayaquil, proclaimed that we wouldn’t be speaking English at all. Tatiana is hilarious. She’s this very gregarious little woman who laughs a lot and calls me “profe.” She’s probably about 25 years old or so (I’ll try to get some pictures posted later). Anyhow, she told us a story about how she was cleaning a room in the hotel and she noticed this little doll and thought, in passing, “how cute.” But then a minute later, the doll turned toward her and spoke. She screamed and ran out of the room. It was apparently some sort of new doll from Europe that has a sensor on its forehead. She called it Chucky, pronounced chooky.

At the dinner table, we talked about President Bush, music (one of my students is really into heavy metal), and bad words in Spanish. Eileen thinks I caused a scene by saying one of the bad words too loudly. But it’s funny: without years’ worth of social context, words like “verga” mean nothing. I may have caused a scene, I don’t know, but after my spiel on Bush, I had a couple students saying “Tim for president.” So it wasn’t all bad.

As we left the restaurant, Tatiana accidentally went into the kitchen thinking it was a bathroom. Good times. Once outside, we had two offers for post-dinner activities: karaoke or a pipe bar (one of those Arabic communal pipe places – what are they called?). We opted for karaoke.

I have three students in my class who are siblings: Manuel, Jessica, and Amparito. They’re all really good-looking; Eileen and I have taken to calling them “the good-looking siblings.” Anyhow, Jessica and Amparito latched right on to Eileen all night. They were great. At one point, Jessica asked Eileen how old she was. Eileen said “I’m 22,” to which Jessica replied, “oh, joven!” (young). Eileen asked her how old she was and she said 23. We laughed and then Eileen pointed out that she would be 23 in a few weeks, “so we’re the same age.” “No,” said Jessica, “soy mayor” (I’m older).

Once at the karaoke bar, we all sat at a table and browsed the catalogs of songs. There was naturally a lot of pressure for me to sing a song in English. “No one will know if you screw up,” they all explained. But I kinda held off till the opportunity was passed. Some other dude in the bar ended up singing a couple of songs in English, one of which (Phil Collins’ “Another Day in Paradise”) he dedicated to us. His rendition of “Dust in the Wind” was much better.

In keeping with the rest of the American public, I feel strongly about this upcoming election. I didn’t used to be so politically interested. For much of my life, I was cynical towards politics. I felt it was a game played by rich liars, who perpetuated their richness by lying. But to tell the truth, I don’t know if I was even interested enough to be as cynical as that previous sentence. I think I used to see politics as detached from what really matters (Town hall voted to allocate x amount of dollars to the construction of a new pool – ok, so what?).

I don’t know where or when, but gradually, things started to change for me. You read a few essays here and there about American atrocities. You begin to investigate more publicly-owned news media. You begin to understand the effects of “corporate interests.” And slowly, you realize that CNN and the Today Show and even the New York Times are not doing a great job. Most newspapers are written at a fifth-grade level. Local TV news is a joke in that it gives very little information (I think the average is 12 minutes of “news” per half hour). And overall, there’s so much we don’t hear or see. The US has sunk three fishing boats off the coast of Ecuador because they thought they were drug boats. They weren’t. They didn’t apologize. On TV here, you actually see footage of the war in Iraq. You see bodies.

I am still pretty cynical about politics and politicians, but since I’ve realized we’re not getting the whole story through mainstream sources, I’m more interested. There is lot to be angry about. There is a lot to be sad about. There’s a scene in the New Testament in which Jesus enters the temple and finds people using it as a marketplace. He gets angry. He overturns tables. Apparently, there are times when anger is the godliest reaction.

I recently read this article by Tim Wise (you should check it out here). A man named Jared Taylor, who’s pretty much a neo-Nazi, wrote an article in which he claims: