Only In Ecuador

7.5.11

WARNING: longest blog post yet......

I’ve had a million ‘only in Ecuador’ moments, this is just one of them.

I MUST start with Wednesday… this is a great story.  So every day we all come home for lunch around 1 or 1:15pm. Well, I was the first one home Wednesday so I sat in the kitchen talking to Mary, the girl who cooks for us, waiting for everyone to arrive. I hear the car doors outside; my host brother and mom are home. My host brother walks into the kitchen first, then my host mom. I look up to greet them and immediately get goose bumps and an eerie feeling throughout my body when I see my host mom… her head is all bandaged up and her face is swollen. She had an ace bandage from under her chin wrapped around to the top of her head. She had cotton balls taped below her ears, and a dried blood mark running from the left side of her head down to her chest. And not to mention she was totally out of it. I immediately look at my host brother and said “WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED?” But my host mom answered and said she had surgery on her cheeks. (And I recalled her vaguely telling me that she wanted to get it done a few weeks back, but she didn’t have a date set and was only talking about the procedure.) I said, “oh, you did?” She didn’t answer because she was on her phone, what’s new. But when she was on her phone she almost fell over and ran into the kitchen wall because she was woozy from the anesthesia still. She got out of surgery at 12:30 and was home at 1:10p. I then recommended she go lay down. My host brother agreed, but she started helping Mary finish preparing the food… MY HOST MOM IS CRAZY! The story gets better.

So we finally get my host mom to stop worrying about the food and her phone and get her to bed. 15 minutes later there is a knock on the door and in walks a family from the TV station where she does her advertising. Marcia invited them over for lunch the same day of her surgery!!!!!!!!! Not to mention like an hour after she is off the operating table. She is nuts! She comes back down seeming to be a little more with it and she managed to wipe the dried blood streak on her chest. The doc said she shouldn’t eat, yet she still ate. The family kept saying, “Marcia, I can’t believe you invited us over. You’re so crazy. You should be relaxing.” “Eh, it’s no big deal.” She responds. I couldn’t handle sitting there worrying about her so I changed my clothes and went to go lay out and soak up some rare sun on the patio.

Later that night after she had had a nap I asked her why she didn’t tell me she was getting the surgery and asked her how long she had known about it. She said she had known about it since Friday and had just forgotten to tell me. I also found out she never told anyone. Not even my host brother who took her. She called him at 10:30am the day of the surgery and said, let’s go I’m going to get surgery. Only in Ecuador would someone “forget” to tell everyone about a pretty significant surgery.

So by now I bet you are wondering why Marcia had surgery on her cheeks, aren’t you? Well, let me tell you. She had liposuction on her lower cheeks and under her chin because she thought her face looked to fat when she was on television!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Can you believeit??? Oh, and she has to wear that ace bandage thing on her face 24/7 for 2 weeks!

And by the way, she loves telling people about the surgery. She is so excited to have gotten it done. And she likes telling people that it was free because the doctor who did the surgery is a good friend of hers. She is a wonderful woman, but she is crazy. I could never in a million years imagine my real mom “forgetting” to tell me she is having surgery or having surgery because her face looks chubby on camera. Mom, don’t go throwing me curve balls now.

My coworkers and I went to get hamburgers the

other night, but we got french fries instead

Thursday was a normal day, except that my lingering cough was getting worse and a cold started kicking in. I had a headache, my nose was starting to get stuffy, my body ached, and I still had that nasty cough. Cool, no biggie, I’m going to go to bed early hoping to feel a little better in the morning since I have to get up early for a big work meeting all day. I crawled under the covers around 10pm with my alarm set for 6:30am. Well, my 14yr old host brother, his 2 friends, and my 27 year old host brother decided that they were going to play computer games against each other in the kitchen starting at 10pm. (Kitchen is literally 3 steps away from my room) You know the war games where you can all be on your own computer but playing against each other at the same time? Yeah, that’s what they were playing. Whatever, I shook it off and rolled over and started sucking on some cough lozenges so I wouldn’t be up the whole night coughing… little did I know that it wasn’t going to be the coughing that kept me up…  THEY kept me up until 4AM playing those stupid games!!!!!!!!!!!! I wanted to strangle them and at the same time cry! They knew I was sick, yet, clearly they didn’t give a rats ass because they were screaming and yelling and fighting the whole time. I wanted to ask them to quiet down, but my 14yr old host brother and his friends would have just laughed at me because that’s how little respect they have for anyone. I’m ready to get out of the house and live on my own… can you tell? Love my host mother, but my host brothers are getting on my last nerve.

So I groggily get out of bed Friday morning and go to our big meeting planned at work. A representative from all 32 communities that we work with were suppose to come to this meeting that started at 8am. We were going to talk about our current projects, especially the bus project we have going. We were also going to nominate some to run for President for the FEPTCE organization. Don’t ask me what it stands for bc I have no idea. But FEPTCE is the main tourism organization in Ecuador. La Red Pakariñan, my organization, is part of FEPTCE. I don’t really feel like explaining it, but this org is big and it would be HUGE for La Red to have one of our team members as president of FEPTCE.

So it’s now like 9am and only ONE person has showed up so far. 10am rolls around and about 7 people are there. We decided that at 10:15 we were going to go ahead and start. Within that 15 minute time period we found out that the president of La Red isn’t coming because he now has other plans, the vice president isn’t coming, but that’s not a surprise (was my old counterpart). The secretary of La Red isn’t coming because he has to give a talk at some school, and the secretary of the communities of Ecuador forgot about the meeting and made other plans…. SO, successful meeting, huh?

But people did manage to show up throughout the morning. All together like 15 communities members showed up. 15 of 30 isn’t bad, right?? Haha. We did talk about everything, everyone gave all their input on the bus project and we did manage to nominate someone to run for president of FEPTCE. A representative from the Saraguro community was finally nominated after much debate. The “last comments” started at 1:10pm and didn’t end until 3:30pm. I wanted to shoot myself. Everyone was standing up and saying the same thing over and over and over. And everyone wanted the last word… 2 ½ hours later all the ‘last words’ were over and we went to lunch.

After lunch the Secretary of the Communities came and gave his presentation. To be honest, I have no idea what he talked about because I was all Spanished out for the day. I was daydreaming by like 1:30. Oops. The meeting was finally over around 6. Everyone left, but my coworkers and I stayed and fiddled around on our computers for a bit. But that turned into having drinks and a dance party J Great end to a hectic morning.

 The guy second from the right is going to

run from President of FEPTCE

And the dance party begins!

Super blurry, but heres some of the group

Saturday Hannah and I had lunch then went to the English/Spanish school that lets Peace Corps Volunteers rent books for free. I finally have some books to read, woohoo!!! When we walked in I asked the guy, in Spanish of course, if I could take out some books. He then started describing to me which sections were English, but in the middle of his sentence I realized he had switched to speaking English. And very good non-Ecuadorian accented English. Well, come to find out he was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the 60s here in Cuenca for 3 ½ years, married an Ecuadorian woman, moved to Ecuador, and eventually started up this English/Spanish school. His PC story is pretty cool. He gives discounts to PCVs for Spanish tutoring, as well. I might take advantage of that offer. Great guy, can’t wait to get to know him throughout my 2 years!

I then had to get to work. We rent tents to tourists. Altogether we have 10 tents of different sizes, but we needed to go through them and make sure everything was in each bag and we were going to mark the bags so we weren’t guessing all the time which tent was which. So from 3-7:30 Diego and I assembled every tent while Angie sewed and took notes of what we needed… come to find out like none of the tents were perfect. Some of the tents didn’t have the correct poles, some didn’t have stakes (before I proofread this I put ‘steaks’, my English is getting sooo bad!), some were still wet (gross!), some poles were broken, almost all were dirty on the inside, the list goes on. And we have been renting these tents to tourists!!!! Can you imagine??  But not a single tourist said anything about them.

So finally by about 7:30 we had all the tents in order. We even sewed the number of the tent on the bag, how many persons the tent could fit and which type of tent it was. We also marked every tent piece so if it ever got unorganized again it would be easy to put it all back together. SOOOOOO much more organized now! J

After that 3 of us went to Angie’s house to make dinner, watch movies, and relax. We had a slumber party! It was really fun!

Sunday was pretty tranquilo. I rode the bus home from Angie’s house! That was a big deal. I had never ridden the bus before. I’ve lived here for 2 ½ months and had yet to ride the bus. I live so close to the center of town that I always just walk everywhere. Go me! I feel a little more integrated now! J When I got home my host mother and a friend were mutilating a cooked turkey that we were going to have for lunch. She had sent the turkey to a store for them to cook it. The turkey had a good flavor, but since they were just pulling and jabbing (I guess you could call it shredding, but it a less organized manner…. Does that even make sense?) all the turkey off the bones I was biting into gristle and bone while I was eating it. It was a huge let down. This was the moment that I wish my dad and Grandma Fern were here to cut it for them! J So we all ate and chatted with the family that was over. Then we went to get ice cream and but a movie to watch. They bought Eat Pray Love and we all watched it upstairs. Well actually I wasn’t in the mood so I showered instead.

After the movie another family came over and they made corn pancakes. No flower involved though. Just corn put in the blender mixed with some milk and cheese then plopped on the pan to back. The consistency was more like a big hash brown. They were pretty tasty. Once done eating Marcia suggested we play a board game, this is when I snuck off to my room because I didn’t want to play. I had basically been gone since work on Thursday morning while being sick with a cold and nasty cough so I was ready for some quiet, relaxing me time. I can just see it in my head right now… my mom is talking under her breath, “no wonder she isn’t getting better.” J Aren’t ya mom???? I know you too well.

Monday , the 4^th, was just a normal day. I went to work, came home for lunch, and went back to work. I did come home and cook some pasta for dinner though. I made a banging homemade pasta sauce. It was delicious. That was how I celebrated the 4^th. It definitely wasn’t the same as burgers, beer, and fireworks.

I was pretty down all day. I hate missing holidays. And to be honest, I’ve been pretty down for the past couple weeks. The intensity comes in waves, but I’ve definitely experienced my first bouts of homesickness these past couple of weeks. I miss home, my family, boyfriend, friends, holidays, not struggling on a daily basis with language, the food, etc. And on top of missing all that I’ve been sick, I always get down around the US holidays, my host brothers are getting on my nerves, and the weather has completely SUCKED! As crazy as this is going to sound, I think it’s the weather that’s bringing me down the most. I’ve been in the mountains of Ecuador for 5 months now and the whole time it’s been cloudy and rainy. It doesn’t rain every single day, but the clouds are out 90% of the time. We get sunny days, but they are far and few in between. It’s now summer in the States and I’m missing out on hot days and laying out in the pool with my sister and friends and listening to music, all the while the weather is staying the same here. I’ve asked a million Ecuadorians when it’s going to stop raining and become dry season… first the answer was May, then it was June, now they don’t know. They really don’t have a clue. I honestly think I have a little bit of seasonal depression. And it’s getting progressively worse as time goes on. I LOVE the sun and it’s never out, ever. Like once every 4 weeks, maybe. There are days when it’s nice and bright out, but the clouds still hide the sun. I MISS THE SUN!!! I think I should have been placed on the coast where it is sunny and extremely hot every single day.

My boyfriend is coming to visit in 44 days (not that I’m counting or anything… haha) and we are going to head to the beach for a few days. Hopefully the sun is shining nice and bright on those days so I can refuel and come back rejuvenated with great amounts of Vitamin D to last me for a while!!

Although I am down in the dumps, I still wouldn’t want to be anywhere but here. This journey wasn’t meant to be easy. And let me tell you, it’s been far from easy! Hopefully this bout of homesickness goes away sooner rather than later and I get back to my normal self. Don’t get me wrong, I miss you all on a daily basis more than you will ever know and it will never go away, but this feeling is so not cool. It needs simmer back down to its normal level. I’m thankful to have such great Ecuadorian friends/coworkers and host mother that make my days pass rather quickly J I’m positive it will go away soon.

It is impossible for me to write short blog entries… impossible. This one only took me 2 hours to write this one, no big deal. This might be a record for longest, most wordy blog post yet. Haha.

And FYI I put way more pictures up on Facebook than my blog, so check them out!

As always comments and updates from you all are always welcome!!! :)

Until next week!

Heather