Being prepared... for (almost) everything.

Two weeks into my adventure in Quito and I have begun to realize that my year of Brownie Badging has done me wrong... I am prepared for (almost) every calamity, for (almost) every bout of loneliness, intestinal wavering, insomnia and language mishap. I have read all sorts of books and have brought all sorts of books on how to be in Ecuador, how to speak like a native (still working on that, whew), how to order, how to ask how tall someone is and how to greet and say goodbye to folks. In the sanctuary that is my brightly painted (sunrise orange) bedroom, my months of preparation sits around me in cheerful piles... my stack of books for my independent study, my jumbo box of brown sugar cinnamon frosted poptarts for my days of crashing, photos of my family and friends and a small yankee candle that smells like Gram's house.
It is when I leave the house that I realize how insignficant and Global North all this preparation is... how I am really insolating myself in a space that is not allowing me to be in the present, to feel as if I am free to move about without a sense of restriction, without the weight of owning (and having on me, at this particular moment) THE right things. I have traveled twice now with my co-workers and both times I arrived with my Eagle Creek Travel Bag, stuffed to the brim, wobbling on my back, eager and... prepared. Both times I have had to stop the urge to hightail it back into my house to clean out the ridiculous amount of extras in my bag... my huge Spanish-English dictonary, my industrial size can of natural bug repellent, the 8 billion coins I have gathered from various transactions.
I have the Poisonwood Bible on my bedtable, and once I get some of these environmental ethics books read, I am going to reread it, if only to remind myself of the Betty Crocker cakemix that the frantic mother sews into her daughters' petticoats as they prepare to fly to Africa for a year. How much cakemix have I brought? How much does it weigh? How much do I really need?I will let you know after I eat those dang poptarts.
I hope you are traveling well, treading lightly, and living in the present.

Lago Agrio- how crude.

I am working as a pasante (intern) with CRS Ecuador, learning as much as I can about human mobility (immigration, emigration, Internally Displaced Persons) and the effects it has on individuals, families, communities and the country. This week we traveled to Lago Agrio, an area within the Zone Frontera, near the border of Colombia, to assess some of the education programs that are taking place in the schools.
A place of border crossing in Colombia, the town of Lago is popular with drug traffickers, prostitutes and...oil companies. The jungle around Lago is breathtaking- green and lush, with all sorts of flowers dripping through the foilage. The town itself is in disarray. There are massive potholes- in the street and in the sidewalks- the buildings are crumbling, the people seem empty.
Oil companies- particulary Texaco and Chevron, have pumped billions of liters of oil from this area. According to the people, the damage they left behind is unbelievable. There are open-air pits of crude oil smoldering in the hot jungle, some as large as a football field, and these companies have contamenated the water supply and tampered with the fragile ecosystem.
As noted in the town, they have contributed little to the infrastructure of the town and pumped the oil off to foriegn lands, to fuel foriegn cars and feed foriegn appetites.
Want more information than I can give you from my short, short time there? Read up on the class action suit filed against chevron: www.chevrontoxico.com or www.texacorainforest.com.

3 Gringos Lost in the Woods

It was sunny on Sunday, a first for my time here in Quito. I ventured out with my housemates, Lukas and Bianca, to drink in some vitamin C, take in a Spanish Mass and go for a wee stroll in the city park. Little did we know that the city park was not so much a plaza with trees and ice cream vendors but a forest/jungle with all sorts of things slithering in the bushes. We quickly got lost... hopelessly, entirely lost... and the only people we came across in an hour spoke... Italian. Alas, we continued to wander, discussing what it meant to follow one's gut (and not a map, as we did not think to bring one, nor did the park creators think to create one and post it in the park). The sun was setting as we came across two women, a golden retriever and a chihuahua, who fell in love with Lukas immediately (the women, not the dogs, although he would claim differently) and led us out of the park onto a city street. Had we not found these women, we would still be in the woods, eating crumbs of my last Luna Bar, drinking our urine and contemplating how to send smoke signals from Lukas' dying cell phone. We must have collected good karma from our tourist venture into the Basilica for mass... ah, yes, it pays to go to church every so often.

Porque estoy in Quito?

Why Quito? Why now? Why not? In order to finish my final practicum for my degree in Social Work, I am in Quito for a semester, working as an intern with Catholic Relief Services on issues of human trafficking and indigenous people. In 15 weeks, I will complete 700 hours of work as assistant with CRS, learning mountains of Spanish, living next to the Equator, seeking to understand the challenges of indigenous peoples in and around the city of Quito. I find, after three days of being here, that I have a hard time recalling English...therefore, please forgive the mistakes. Read on, companeros...