Category Archives: Ecuador

There are pics posted in the coppermine of the protest.

After our Spanish class last Thursday, I turned to Bill and said something like, “Hey, I’m gonna go down to the U to watch the riots. Wanna come?” He was a little reluctant at first since he was dressed in his school clothes, but he said he’d text me at 4:00 or so and maybe he’d come over. We left it there.

I have been going to a copy shop at the bottom of the LaGasca hill; I know the woman there by now She makes small talk with me, always does the copying right away, and never cheats me out of even a penny. It’s a great place, but everytime there’s a student demonstration, its business suffers. It is about 30 or 40 yards from one of the primary demonstration intersections, and it frequently gets tear-gassed. I’ve gone there half a dozen times during riots and I’ve found the copy woman working the machine with a handkerchief over her mouth.

This past week, I was at the copy store two or three times while just 50 yards away, students were throwing rocks at police. I’ve been on the other side, too: the police usually station themselves near the Santa Clara market, and I’ve been walking from Santa Clara a time or two when I’ve seen the police in their urban camoflauge and gas masks, getting ready to launch tear gas into the meager student crowds. One day, while I was standing in the copy shop with its front-row view of the action, I thought, “I should bring the camera down here and take some pictures. This place is safe, and if things got out of hand, I bet the people at the copy shop would allow me to hide behind their metal pull-down door with them.

And so last Thursday, I invited Bill to go see the demonstrations with me. He text messaged us at 4:00 or so and said he was on his way. When he arrived, I was playing some video game, squinting at the little black and white screen. We took a bus down the hill and walked toward the tear gas, deciding on the way that the best route would be near Santa Clara market on the police side of things. Unfortunately, most of the action was at the far end of campus rather than near my copy shop, so we had to walk a little bit further.

When we finally encountered the action, we found ourselves right behind the police. Most stores were closed for business, their metal pull-down doors, um, pulled down. From our vantage point, we couldn’t actually see any students – only a regulat stream of rocks flying through the air and bouncing at the feet of the police. Just minutes later, we tired of the incomplete scene and decided we needed to get to a better spectating point. The police were at a T intersection, and we were in the stem of the T behind them. We witnessed a young man walk behind the police and go to the left; the rocks were coming from the right. We resolved to follow the guy’s lead and walk right behind the police. We hung out right on the corner for a little while, but since we were very close to the police and pretty much directly in the line of fire for the rock-weilding students, we decided to go join the crowd of spectators in the northwest corner of the T.

We passed the next forty-five minutes watching an oddly amusing back and forth between the police and the students. Rocks were thrown, the occasional tear gas was launched. There was a fortified tank-like vehicle parked pretty close to the students; they were throwing rocks at it and every once in a while, one of them would comically tiptoe up to the tank and start kicking it. Eventually, the tank left. Then the student crowd grew and they began to drive the police back. Some of them seemed completely unaffected by the tear gas; others would grab the smoking can of gas and throw it back at the police. As the students came closer to the stem of the T, they decided that we spectators were in a bad place, so they started throwing a few rocks at us. The crowd of lookers-on turned and ran; a few women were screaming, but most of us were laughing. It was surreal. For the crowd of watchers, this was entertainment, and our occasional transformation into targets only made it more fun.

In my class that night I asked one of my students about the demonstrations. Most of my night class are college-aged kids, and many of them are students at the Universidad Central. My student, Lenin, explained that two years ago, the president promised a discounted bus fair for all students. All you have to do is show your “carneta,” your student id, and the bus drivers are supposed to charge you 12 cents instead of 25. But the busses don’t honor this deal and the president has done nothing to enforce his promise. So every time there is a demonstration elsewhere in the city, the students come out to the Avenida America, a main street that runs right through campus, and they shut it down. They don’t allow any cars or busses to pass; they burn things, and they throw rocks at the police. The idea is to put continual pressure on the government to follow through with their promise.

And then two gringos go and join the crowd of amused spectators.

Ok. So first off, I need to make public the somewhat embarrassing fact that I brought the xbox back here to Ecuador after our Christmas break return home. When we moved in, our landlords had told us that they would provide us with a TV if we wanted one. We never really pursued it. We weren’t all that interested. But then, of course, before Christmas, with the prospect of going home and coming back with the xbox, I asked Luis if, when we got back in January, we could borrow a TV. “Claro!” he said. I whispered “sweet!” as I walked away and I made the fist of victory.

We returned in early January and I mustered up the courage to ask about the TV the day after we got back. Our landlords have six TVs. There is a 30-some incher in the parents’ bedroom. In the hallway-esque area between the parents’ room and the daughter’s room, there is another 27 incher. It is literally four feet from the one in the parents’ room; the two are separated by a wall. Then there’s a fourteen inch TV in the kitchen, a slightly smaller but black and white one in the study room, a 20-some inch one in the living room, and a puny little 5-inch black and white one in the daughter’s room. Indeed, the only room in the house without a TV is the son’s bedroom. Guess what TV I got. Yep. The 5 inch black and white one.

For the past month, we’ve been squinting as we watched the occasional Simpson’s episode and Napoleon Dynamite on the little guy. I limited my video game playing to only those games that were visible enough, and even then I sometimes had to be about 12 inches from the screen to see it. The scheming began. Despite Eileen’s very rational objections to spending over $100 on a 14 inch color TV, I started investigating. Plan one: find out if there were any TVs in Quito for a discounted price. They may exist, but they’re not very easy to find. I enlisted the help of some of my students in my research; one day, I even got a ride to some so-called discount stores in the southern end of Quito. Nothing. Plan two: buy a new one and sell it for 70 – 80% of its original price this summer. Multiple Ecua-sources indicated such an endeavor would be possible. So I resolved to carry it out soon.

First, though, I figured it would be smart to mention the plan to the landlord in the hopes that at the very least he could give me a ride to the store. Well, instead, he suggested I have someone buy a TV for me in the states and then ship it. It’s expensive to ship such things, I explained. No, he said, ship it through American Airlines. It’s cheap. A friend of mine did it once for 20 bucks. In fact, get us a little 9-inch color TV and have it shipped and we’ll pay you back. We’ll lend you our 20-some inch color TV if you get us a TV.

Ok. Let’s pause and review. The offer from my landlord was this: we’ll pay the cost of the TV and the shipping and we’ll lend you one of our color TVs if you find the new TV and arrange for its delivery. I accepted the offer.

Unfortunately, in my internet investigation, I found out there is not much of a market for 9-inch color TVs unless they’re flat screen and they fold down from, say, under the kitchen counters. I made note of a few smaller color TVs, including some TV/DVD combos which I hoped might be enticing, but I grew a little despondent knowing that a) the cheapest TV I had made note of was $120 and b) the American Airlines thing was a bust; to ship something weighing 1-11 kgs costs $75. Ouch.

I presented my findings to Luis et al, and they decided upon the $160 9-inch, flat screen TV/DVD combo from Wal-Mart. I said I’d look into a friend or family member bringing it to us when they came to visit. He said ok. I said bueno. He gave me the 14 inch color TV from their kitchen.

Eileen and I watched Mulan in full color (and in Spanish); then we surfed the channels (there were only about 7 or so on the little black and white, but this one has about 15), eventually landing on some music-video station. Next, we watched half of Napoleon Dynamite in color, the whole time marveling at the fact that the van was orange and not brown or tan.

And so ends the TV saga. The only remaining question is, who will bring us the landlords’ Wal-Mart TV?

We’re undergoing a slight rebound of homesickness now. It’s certainly not as pronounced and almost all-consuming as that bit we had back in Novemberish, but we are a little homesick nonetheless.

I think it’s because of two things. One: mid-service. Having seen the entire group again brought back all these memories of September, when we were so newly immersed in all this newness. Back then, all the talk was about expectations and about how this whole experience will alter your perceptions and – yes, it’s really cliché, but – change you. And back then, we were the people we were. That is, we came into this adventure from our corporate jobs, our college days, our familiar routines back in the known universe of the USA. And it’s not that at mid-service, people were all that different; nor is it that we talked about what going home will be like. Still, somewhere in our three-day crossing of paths there were the people we will be, the people who will return home, the year having come to a close at last, and be inarticulably alienated from our familiar old US. Mid-service somehow conjured up two selves – each a year apart in age – for everyone.

I’m sure I’m not making sense. Here it is more plainly: mid-service is, well, the middle of this volunteer experience. There are three times all 40 of us (give or take a few) are together: 1) orientation, 2) mid-service, and 3) end-service. Having been together for the second of three times brought to mind both the first and third times we’ll all be gathered in one place. And we have lives that lie beyond those first and third encounters. So mid-service made me, at least, think about home before and after this year in Ecuador. And that got me a little homesick.

It’s a different variety of homesickness, though.

The second cause is the fact that we went home for Christmas. Coming back here wasn’t as difficult as we anticipated because we saw that there are things about home that we miss, and there are also things we don’t miss. My brief visit to Madison West High School, for instance, happened to fall on a particularly cumbersome day just before winter break; as a result, it was kind of a downer. I got to hear about the workload, about intra-departmental bickering, about nightmarish parents. It didn’t make me miss my job. And to tell the truth, there’s a lot about how people interact with each other back home –especially in times of confrontation – that is thoroughly unpleasant. We miss the seasons, the landscape, the house, the familiarity and ease, the proximity to family and to resources, the pets. But back in November, our homesickness was wholesale. We missed “everything.” Now, we’re wiser. We won’t ever go back to the over-glorified “home” that we missed during the skewed perceptions of November. It doesn’t exist. It never has. Instead, come August, we will go home to a familiar place that we now understand differently. It won’t even be the home that we knew last August.

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.