Author Archives: tim

When mid-service ended on Saturday, Eileen and I decided to travel south a little with Jessie, who was placed in Montanita. Seeing her site was a true education in how different our experiences have been. Montanita is a very small vacation town, but when we entered it, we walked one block down its main perpendicular street (a street which heads straight to the ocean) and we turned left onto Jessie’s road. It was a dirt road lined with a mixture of cane huts and half-built cement block structures. It was not at all a quaint little Oceanside town. There were chickens strutting through the streets, dogs galore, and a donkey lying down and tied to a post. Jessie’s place was a one-room habitation, smaller than a dorm room. It had an attached bathroom, but the water would work only if she went down stairs and turned on a generator at the other end of a large, dirt-floor courtyard-slash-meeting room. Even then, the water was a little hit or miss. That afternoon, it was miss. Her room was really the only half-finished structure on the second floor of an otherwise just erected building. The rest of it was a mess of cement pylons with steel bars jutting out of them. We dropped our bags off in her room and then headed down the precarious steps to her “entryway,” which, she explained to us, had had bats; so she had to leave the light on at night so they wouldn’t come back there and leave their guano all over the floor.

We went down the street toward a hostel where Jessie had originally lived for the first few weeks back in October. As we walked through the mostly-dirt streets, every third or fourth kid shouted “Jessie!” more like a command than a greeting. Jessie waved back to them all. Since the town is so small, pretty much everyone knows her, a nice fact for a single gringa on her own in Ecuador. She says she feels pretty safe. Of course, you can never really take your safety for granted here, but from what we saw, she was probably in a safer place than we are just by virtue of her fame.

The hostel we ended up staying at wasn’t luxurious, but it was right on the ocean and they provided a mosquito net and a bed for $5 per person. We got the key for our room and then walked toward the tourist side of town. It was a completely different place, filled with pizza joints, seafood restaurants, bars, bikini-clad women, muscle-bound men, reggae music, people selling hand-made arts and crafts, and finished buildings. We were happy to be walking with Jessie, a quasi-native, though she got fewer “Jessies” on this side of town.

The beach was much more crowded than the beach at Alandaluz, but it was still not bad – nothing like your typical American hotspot beach. Jessie told us about how she ran pretty frequently on the beach and how she had been learning to surf. She’s considering getting her own board and doing it more often. She’s currently on a summer vacation for the next couple of months. Her classes ended last week; just recently, the town transformed into this ultra-touristy place to cater to the vacationers who come from other coastal cities like Guayaquil, which are also on summer vacation.

It was an odd mix of envy and gratefulness that we felt in Montanita; we were at times envious of the more rustic experience she was having, of the ocean, of the local fame, of the ability to escape easily from the cement world of Quito. But we were also grateful that when we need groceries, we don’t have to undertake a three-hour round trip excursion; that we have a real stove, running water, and a refrigerator; that we have easy access to copy machines, internet, movies, and travel hubs.

More to come . . . In the meantime, we´ve posted pictures in Coppermine.

Our travels this past weekend took us first to an ecolodge named Alandaluz, right outside of Puerto Lopez, and then to Montanita, a small surfing town and a very popular tourist location. We flew to a city called Manta, where we were greeted with taxi drivers offering to take us to the bus terminal. Once I mentioned that we were going to Puerto Lopez, a chorus of replies echoed with the slightly cooler “a Lopi” and/or “a Lope.” The coast was noticeably more laid back. On our bus ride, we passed through towns full of people reclining on hammocks. The landscape leaving Manta was dry and dirty. We drove through miles of hilly land covered with leafless bushes. The bus was cramped and uncomfortable, and the heat and humidity were difficult to tolerate, but they were playing a movie starring The Rock and Christopher Walken, which they followed up with Triple X, starring Vin Diesel, so the three-hour trip wasn’t too bad. Once in Puerto Lopez, however, we changed to an even less comfortable, more crowded bus for the 15 minute ride out to Alandaluz.

Alandaluz was essentially paradise. It’s an ecolodge which boasts cabanas complete with funky, pastel-colored trim, palm leaf roofs, and four-poster beds with classy mosquito nets suspended above. On your way down to the very quiet beach, you’ll see a plethora of beautiful flowers, and if you’re watchful, you’ll see the occasional iguana or exotic bird. The food is safe and yummy, and while we were there, at least, we saw way fewer bugs than you see during the normal Wisconsin summer. This is where we had our mid-service meeting, at which we shared some teaching tips, discussed the status of our expectations, and assessed where exactly we thought we were on this whole journey/adventure.

The mid-service itself was sometimes tough to handle, what with iguanas running through the woods and the constant wash of ocean waves beckoning from the beach, but it was great to see everyone, many of whom we hadn’t seen since our month-long orientation in Quito last September. We will have an “end-service” meeting sometime at the end of May, where some of us will see each other for the last time in our lives. And then Eileen and I, at least, will be here for another two months, finishing up our teaching at our schools. It looks like a handful of us will extend the stay in Ecuador for another six months or a year. Chances are good, they tell us, that one of us will marry an Ecuadorian. One of us may stay off and on in Ecuador for the remainder of his or her life. Some of us may, as a career, stay involved with WorldTeach or get involved with some other volunteer organization that has ties to Ecuador. A few of us will go back home and start up grad school of some sort, an endeavor which ultimately will affect what we end up doing with our lives more so than Ecuador will. Some of us will return to the US with a sense of superiority from having experienced firsthand that life without “America” is possible. All of us, I imagine, will return frustrated with our own culture. And of course, none of us will ever be the same.

To be continued . . .

Just a quick story. My first day back at SECAP, I climbed the stairs to go to my office. Unfortunately, the door to room 4 was locked, and since I need to go through room 4 to get to my office, it was a very bad beginning. I asked the security gaurds if they could open it, but they said they didn’t have keys and that I’d have to wait until 8:00 to get in. I was a little miffed since my class started at 7:30. But luckily, at about 7:35, I found a custodian sweeping up the burnt new year’s refuse in the parking lot. I asked him for help.

Together, we climbed the stairs again and he tried his key on the room 4 door. It didn’t work. I started thinking of how to run class on a non-existent plan B, when he went into a closet and came out with a screwdriver. He simply wedged the door open. It was great to be back.

It’s difficult to answer when people ask us, “So how is Ecuador?” I’ve been trying out “different” as my first response. Some people want to know a lot more and so they ask more questions. Some people just say “yeah” and change the subject. It’s somewhat difficult terrain. In just three months, we’ve learned a lot. And in our interactions, there’s just a hint of the more profound alienation we’re gonna feel next August when we’re back here for good. What I mean is that we’ve seem some things that make this country, this state, this city, this school district, this sewage system, this everything seem so clean and efficient and effective. I know there are still problems. So it’s not that I don’t sympathize when people complain about the new “small learning communities” structure at West High School. But truthfully, Eileen and I have now seen much larger problems. On the one hand, I want to inundate people with stories about how corrupt the Ministry of Social Well-Being is in Ecuador and that they regularly find abandoned babies in dumpsters but the adoption process is horrible, etc. On the other hand, teachers here who complain about the small learning communities or about the stupid rules over having animals in public schools are certainly not being entirely selfish.

It’s just that we’re left in an awkward place. We have a certain amount of disdain for the so-called “problems” of well-off Madison. But, of course, we certainly don’t want to send the message that we’ve now seen the third world and as such are now “smarter than you.” The problem is that we’ve just experienced four months of living in Ecuador, and at some point, you start experiencing first-hand some things you don’t believe even as they’re happening to you. You experience things that defy your expectations, that stretch your cultural understanding. To convey these experiences through words is such a daunting task, that it’s often just easier not to speak at all.

So how is Ecuador? It’s different. Here, we can flush toilet paper, we don’t have to look for the bottle of boiled water when we brush our teeth, we can drink tap water, we can eat so much parasite-free food. But there’s a lot more to it. Here, every morning feels like Christmas morning. We are such a fortunate people.

We haven´t posted in a long time. In other words, Tim hasn´t posted in a long time. I´ve been a little sick. We both figured we´d get the illnesses over with before returning home, so Eileen went ahead and got herself a cold followed by some stomach issues. Then I had her spit on my food so I would get the same. Actually, no. I only had to breathe the same air. At various points next week, I will be able to say the following:

We will be sure to write an entry or two in the next couple weeks, but we will see most of our diminishing audience while we’re home. This may be the last Ecuadorian entry for 2004. I have been having the occasional narcissisic fantasy about our return, most of which include cheering, chocolate chip cookies, and phones ringing, but I´ll have to spare you a “Tim´s Narcissistic Fantasies Part 2” entry for now. We’re looking forward to being back.