I started work with the Patronato this week, and everything is super chévere (cool). For the foreseeable future, here´s my work: Monday through Wednesday (or Thursday if we get waylaid in some manner) I’ll be in the jungle working with health promoters within the constructs of FODI, a government organization that helps promote health and education for children. There are four sectors, all out in the campo but of varying distances from the metropolitan hub of Guayzimi. The plan now is to alternate from group to group, area to area, and work in all 4 zones and with all eight health promoters in the Patronato. Right now I’m just kind of going with the flow and helping them with their projects, but once I get to know the people and the language more I hope to start up some of my own projects as well, in areas where I feel there´s a need.

So the week went like this: last Thursday there was a day long meeting, of which one sentence at 5 oclock pertained to me…namely, which area of communities did I want to go to first? The communities farthest into the jungle, obviously. So on Monday at 7:30, Bolo, Angel, and Myself took a bus as far as buses go (about an hour and a half past Guayzimi), then waited for the daily motorized canoe to leave from a town called ¨The Orchids¨ at 10:30. We rode that as far as it could go (4 hours in a 15 person canoe packed with thirty people and a pig at first, then fewer and fewer until the three of us and the chauffer were the only people for the last hour or so) past beautiful vegetation, cliffs and waterfalls. When the water got to shallow, we got out and walked for two hours in the jungle, arriving at a town of 12 families at 6pm. This place was out there, no water, electricity, or anything like that. The people ate almost exclusively yucca and bananas that they picked daily. It was absolutely beautiful. I could see three houses, the school, a meeting hut, and the building FODI had built earlier that year from the center of town, which over looked some kind of enchanted mountain. I forget the story exactly, but it definitely looked enchanted. Anyway, once we got everyone round up we had a meeting, which consisted of about 10 people. As it was the first week after vacations, we just took care of logistical things, namely what was going to happen in the next year, registering children, and introducing the gringo that everyone was afraid of.

We visited 4 more villages in the next 2 days, hiking on average 2 hours through the jungle (my job is hiking through the Amazon rainforest!) or catching a boat if we were lucky. We went from purely native shuar villages deep in the jungle, to mixed shuar and saraguro, to mixed indigenous and mestizo villages with electricity and almost drinkable water. Side note: even the pure shuar villages have become modernized. Upon arriving at the first village, I was greeted by a dude wearing a t-shirt featuring a popular American wrestler.

So yeah, it was pretty cool. Hiking through the rainforest is just ass bad ass as it sounds, for better or worse. I don´t know if you´ve heard, but it rains a lot in the rainforest…hard. The trails we covered with 6 inches of mud, which made going up and down ravines in ill fitting rubber boots difficult (but not for Angel and Bolo. On flat ground I could smoke them, but I couldn´t keep up on their home turf). When I wasn´t saturated and cold, I was dehydrated and hot. I was told not to bring much water, advice that I followed to lighten my load. MISTAKE!

Science Lesson: Prairie dogs are so well adapted to life in the desert that their nephrons (The millions of tiny blood filtration gizmos that make up the kidneys. Not at all like a radiator, mom) can reabsorb 100% of the water from their blood before the filtrate is passed through the bladder. This obviates the need to hydrate. In fact, if you feed prairie dogs human food, the extra water will mess up their osmotic balance and they could die.

Science lesson over. My point is Ecuadorians are like prairie dogs. They NEVER drink water. With meals they will have one class of liquid only, but never pure water…that’s just weird. The tiendas have water almost exclusively to sell to gringos. The other weekend, while ¨checking out¨ after shopping, the owner looked confused and asked, ¨don´t you want to buy some water?¨ Why yes I did, thank you. I had forgotten.

Anyway, Angel and Bolo packed zero water, but I knew better and packed 2 litters, which was to last me one day until I could boil water the first night and refill. That chance never happened, nor did it happen the next night. In three days I drank my 2 liters of water, a cup of Chi cha, and another cup of muddy water. Bolo and Angel drank less, and seemed to be fine. I was thirsty and borderline dehydrated the entire time. I was going to bring bleach to put in water, but that doesn´t kill the two organisms you need to worry about in river water, and iodine tablets were nowhere to be found, obviously. Dad, if you haven’t already…send me some of those!

The food situation was a little better…I ate 2 meals daily. Again, Bolo and Angel are total badasses and were able to go without. I however, am a wimp (as it turns out) and was hungry for the three days. I had been eating 6 times daily to gorge my raging metabolism, which is a total blessing in a civilized society, but sucks in the campo when food is limited. I kept recalling the maximum amount of time humans can go without food or water, and was dismayed at how mentally soft I was. I wasn´t even close to dying of thirst or hunger, but I felt like I was because we´re so used to being totally satiated at all times.

Anyway, after getting my hair cut by mayor’s wife, I spent today eating, sleeping, reading, and otherwise recovering from the trip. I was overwhelmed by how kushy life is in Guayzimi…

Next week I go with a different group of promoters down a different river. Now that I know what to pack, the journey should be more enjoyably bad ass and less miserably bad ass.

PS- In one of the towns we visited there are a ton of petrified shells. This was one of the closer ones to civilization, and they were extending the road to it and blasting through the hills with dynamite, which uncovered a bunch of fossils. I found two pretty cool souvenirs for my house, one of which is part of what must have been the biggest shell ever.

Time doesn´t exist here. There are no seasons. The weather never changes: it’s always either rainy or sunny, or rainy and sunny (how?). Get up, work, play soccer, go to bed. Every day is exactly the same. You don´t spend time, you pass it. You don’t grow old, one day you just die.

I have learned to happily step aside and let time pass me by. Why worry about a trivial thing that that, anyway? I was even prepared for it. ¨Latin time¨, they call it. I wasn´t, however, prepared for the obliteration of direction I´ve experienced while here. Palm trees stretch up mountains in every direction. There is either no sun, or so much sun you can´t look at it…and when you notice the vibrant pink of a tropical sunset, the sun has already dipped behind a mountain. But you can´t tell which mountain. Seriously, I´ve tried. The sky lights up above the mountains for a 360 degree sunset, so you can´t tell which direction west is. I´m living in a floating bubble somewhere far removed from the space time continuum.

Sometimes, while in the ¨Purple Bubble¨ of Williams College, I would look up on a clear night and see that stars in all of their bucolic beauty, their vibrance unencumbered by light pollution. The infinite expanse and clarity always made me feel uncomfortable. So small and insignificant. Here, I look up on a rare cloudless night, and am even more overwhelmed pinhole illumination piercing the heavens. Only here I feel peace radiating from within rather that anxiety beating down from above. Sometimes its nice to be reminded of just how small and insigignificant you are.

Where to start, where to start…

First of all, I´m starting to really like it here. I realize that all of my problems have arisen due to the language barrier, and I shold be able to break that down more and more as time goes by. All I need is some patience. That specific virtue has never come easily for me, but lord knows I´m getting a lot of practice working in the elementary school (more on that to come). Other than the language barrier, I like the general way of life here better than in the states…my way of life that is. I have more free time, and in that free time I play a ton of sports and read books that I never had time to read in college. I say ¨my way of life¨ because it’s a little different from the way most of the people here live. While no one is ever really stressed out, but they work a lot here…some hard, some not so hard, but they still work. A lot of the guys I play sports with are still in high school, which they attend from 6:30 to 11:00 at night so they can get up and work from 7:30 to 5:00. Then they play soccer from 5:00 untill it gets too dark to see (around 6:30, right when classes start) then they eat dinner and shower, skipping the first period. For this reason, many of my friends are 19 or 20 years old and still have a year or two to go in school.

And what a grand school system it is. Every day I grow more and more frustrated with the incompetence on every level. The teachers are generally lazy. For example, today I went into the second grade classroom to retrieve a class room full of screaming, fighting, and crying 7 year olds for gym class. Their teacher was no where to be found, and hadn´t been in the class room for an hour…an hour! You can´t just leave 30 seven year olds alone for an hour! That’s negligence in the states, but here it´s a daily occurance. Upon seeing a child (one of my favorites mind you) crying after being punched, I had had enough and confronted the teacher. I asked him who was watching the kids (¨no one¨,obviously) and where he was (¨right here¨, unashamedly). For the first time, I stood up to him and the backward system and said, ¨you can´t not just un care to 30 kids are alone. they are crying, hitting, no adults. serious¨. Zing, I got him good.

Apart from the negligence, the kids have never even been taught how to learn. All of their exercises consist of mindlessly copying verbatim everything a teacher has written on the chalkboard. As a result, all the kids have stellar hand writing (you should see the signatures people here have. big, loopy beauties) , and can color code like it was their job. But they never actually learn anything, and original thought is unheard of. The only questions I am asked in class are ¨what color should we be writing in?¨ and ¨This page is full of writing (copying), what should I do now?¨ I tried to do some exercises that required a low level of mental cognition, but the kids not only couldn´t handle it, but the teacher totally nixed the idea before I could even give them a chance to think it though and use their brains a little. ¨That is not how the kids are accustomed to learning.¨ No shit. The kids here aren´t accumstomed to learning at all.

Case in point: I´ve been helping my 18 year old host sister with her English homework, and after 6 years of studying English, she cannot speak a single word. Here, I do not exaggerate. Not a single word. She has a work book full of diagrams of the human body with the organs labled in English, and translated songs by billy joel, but apart from using her optical nerve to transduce the refracted light signals off the chalkboard and motar neurons to tell her hand to write, she has never had to use her brain for anything. Math is the same way. She asked me to help her with Logarithmic functions (which I never learned…we have calculators for a reason) so I had to teach myself. Once I had seen enough problems, I had figured out the basic rules, and once that was done the problems were just applying the simple guidelines to novel sets of numbers. I pointed this out to her, and she then told me that the teacher had given her the rules, but she couldn’t figure out how to use them with the problems. I tried to help her for 2 maddening hours but made absolutely no headway. She’s not stupid, the school system here is just absolutely ridiculous. Its moments like these I´m grateful I went to good schools that, if not actually teaching me any applicable information (believe it or not, I haven´t had to explain the Kreb´s cycle to anyone here yet), they at least taught me how to think. It also makes me want to be a teacher at a progressive public highschool, since I now know how much more valuble experiential learning is: I can communicate enough to get by after 3 months of emersion, compared to language I didn´t learn in the 4 years of Spanish I didn´t study in high school.

So yeah. I never thought I would be stressed out and irritable after playing with kids for 4 hours a day (did I mention that they don´t discipline here, and whining is operantly rewarded?), but after lunch I generally need to lie down and recover. Luckily, I (finally) start work tomorrow with the Patronato, which is what I came here to do. That should be sweet.

Looking back on my my frustrating time spent as a teacher, it actually seems pretty ideal. The Patronato work will be amazing, but it will take me away from town on adventures frequently. While i´ve always loved me a good adventure, staying in town has given me a chance to get to know the people, and I´m going to stay on and teach gym class one day a week, which will give me a chance to stay connected with the kids…who outside of class are awesome. I see myself in a lot of the ones I am continually attempting to discipline…

Besides everything I´m involved with on a daily basis, i´ve learned to embrace the randomness that comes when you move to a place you don´t know, full of friendly people you can´t understand.

Examples:

Last Sunday I woke up with absulultely nothing to do besides wash my clothing, clean my room, and nourish myself. These activities can, in fact, take an entire day to accomplish if you wash your clothes by hand, your roof is made of decaying wood, and you don´t have a fridge. Also, if you’ve learned to reverse your multitasking ways and take as long as possible to to anything and everything. That’s a skill. So I went to the store (why go to the store once a week when you can go twice a day?) and on the way back some guy I had talked to a couple times (Marco) invited me to go to his farm. Another lesson: never turn down an ivitation. Instead of a boring day spent washing clothing, I got out into the campo (in the back of a truck!) and milked cows, witnessed and aborted attempt at bull rape, ate freshly slaughtered chicken and freshly dug up yucca, and contributed to rainforest descruction for purposes of small scale cattle farming with a freshly sharpened machete. Upon returning from the finca, I was invited to dinner and ate freshly made ¨cheese¨ with freshly squeezed juice. I also grew to hate the school system here more. Marco (a teacher) is one of the smartest guys i´ve meet. He can put himself in my shoes and explain things to me in terms i´ll understand…as opposed to my host mom. One time I didn´t know what olla meant, so she explained by saying ¨olla is olla¨. Aggravating. Marco would say ¨you use an olla to boil water or cook soup on a stove¨ then he would make the shape with his hands. Brilliant.

Even though he´s clearly one of the brighter people here, he still managed to spend 8 years on the states without learning the language or culture. I told him it was pronounced ¨mouth¨, not mouse, and it meant boca, not nariz. He also thinks that there are no farms in the states and that everyone eats hamburgers exclusively. One reason for this is lack of resources, as he never had the opportunity to travel outside of New Jersey. I believe the other reason is that the inept school system he grew up with next instilled the importance of learning. Upon moving to Ecuador, everyone in my group instinctively learned everything we could about the culture and language. It had been ingrained in us…why wouldn´t we? Whereas Marco, a bright guy and hard worker, spent 8 years hanging out with other Latinos and buying yucca at the one store that sold it. Why wouldn´t he? Why try to understand your surroundings more when you´re getting by O.K. as it is?

The next weekend I had no planned activities, and the start of the day played out almost identically to the previous Sunday morning that led me to get to know Marco and his family better. This time, I went to the bread store and invited myself to go fishing with the bread makers. We were to be gone all day, but they didn´t pack any food or water…with freshly baked bread sitting right there. I was a little puzzled, but I always try to do as the locals do, so I didn´t pack any food either. After jumping in the back of 2 different trucks to get to the river, we came upon a road that was lined with guyava and guava (no idea about spelling here) trees which we took turns climbing to get the fruit. I´ve always considered myself part monkey, and an excellent tree climber, but these guys put me to shame. Climbing up a featureless trunk, then manipulating a bamboo pole with one hand to reach up and knock the fruit from a high branch. wowy.

The fishing was unsuccessful (we netted the ugliest 3 inch fish ive ever seen) but on our way back up the fruit lined road we ran into some shuar hunting with blowguns, which they let us try. I instantly got mad props, because out of my 5 friends I was the only one to hit the target the first try (si tu puedes!) However, when we started to hunt birds (which is really hard, with any weapon) my friend ¨The Sheep¨, who was by far the worst during target practice, got lucky twice and killed two birds (two darts, not one stone). Nobody else hit anything, not even the shuar. Lucky sheep.

The third, and final, random story. Last night, just walking around, I came across the ¨gym¨ in town that I hadn´t known about. I poked my sunburnt nose in and instantly 3 overweight women invited to join them for aerobics, which I did despite the fact I was wearing sandals and had just drank a liter of whole milk. While gyrating about, the latter made me produce sounds that I blamed on the former.

After I was thoroughly sweaty, for the fourth time that day, a song came on (like the rest, that generic thump thumpy techo beat that makes you want to gel your highlighted hair and fight someone at the same time) that happened to have really dirty English lyrics This was the first time since arriving i´ve profited from the language barrier. I don´t want to come out and say the lyrics (there might be children reading) but suffice to say the singer really appreciated the flavor of either a specific cat or a specific organ of a specific female´s anatomy, as he dedicated the entire song to repeating the same sentence praising the taste over and over again. As the women continued to step clumsily and unawares, I was absolutely dying of laughter.

So the point, if there is one (which there isn´t) is that i´ve learned embrace randomness. Getting out and doing something is always better than staying in a doing nothing, even if you have no idea what you´ll be doing 5 minutes before it happens. Also, the public school system here sucks.