in two months i will be in my comfy little home in santa monica. i will have eaten in n out, slept in my very own bed, and on the 28th of december i will have to call into the superior court of los angeles hotline to see if i have jury duty the next morning or not. at that point i will have spent four days walking the inca trail to machu picchu, some time in the ecuadorian amazon and i will have written a 25 page paper in spanish on sumak kawsay and the government's most recent promises to the indigenous peoples of ecuador. i will probably be in some ecuador appreciation group on facebook. my hair will be another inch longer (hopefully).

i am really far from home and in some ways and on some days i want those two months left to be a lot less. my life in the last two months and the next two months consists of some pretty cool situations and things that i need to remember. ecuador has colada morada y guaguas, fruits like guanabanas and naranjillas and uvitas and tomate de arbol and guayaba which all make fantastic juices and batidos, ecuador has quarter buses and loving families and kisses on the cheek and weather with character and presidents to meet and waterfalls and many many new experiences for me.

even though on occassion i buy a hot dog or french fries i know that once i'm in the states i will be craving ecuadorian food for the rest of my life and any ecuadorian restaurants i find will never ever compare to what i eat here.

phase one of my semester abroad is over after tomorrow. phase two, the study trips, starts friday and ends at the end of the next month. phase three is the three and a half weeks with nothing to do but write a 25 page paper in spanish and say my goodbyes to ecuador.

new experience of the day: meet president

today was a good day.

maya having a good day.

some reasons why i had a good day:

1. i learned the happy birthday song in quichua:

sumak wata paktay
sumak wata paktay
sumak wata _____ charichunmi
tukuykun munanchik!

maya having a good day in front of an amazing mural in the presidential palace.

2. i sat in a yellow room for two hours listening to the ecuadorian president speak about what he did this week (on wednesday at 8:30 after breakfast i had a meeting with...) while occasionally having a camera stuffed in front of our faces for the press conference's showing on national television tomorrow morning.

maya having a good day inside of the yellow room of the presidential palace with the president, a breathtaking guy, hannah and camille.

3. after all the blah blah blah finished, our little group got a photo op with the tall, broad-shouldered president who has the most beautiful eyes and delicious cologne out of all the presidents i have ever met. "Con cariño para Maya, RC, 24/10/08" is what this president wrote on my copy of the new constitution and when we sadly departed, he gave us kisses on the cheek.

still having a good day while looking at the presidential sash in the yellow room of the presidential palace.

4. after the adrenaline of being with mr. president wore off we went to calle la ronda with the man who made the night happen, professor and translator jose, to eat good food with good company.

maya having a good day with her signed constitution in bag and unsigned good people surrounding her.

5. getting to what is definitely now home at a decent hour at a decent price with more than a decent friend accompanying me on the ride home (awwww).

new life experience of the day: i got stung by a bee! and an ecuadorian bee at that. the bee tried to nest in my luscious, cozy hair and felt my head to figure out what i was feeling, it stung me in the finger.

and it's always surprising what a difference a slip of the tongue, the letters a and o, b and v can make when explaining something in spanish, like getting stung by a bee. bee is abeja in spanish but when ELLIE tried to explain what happened to her maid, she said that an oveja (not abeja), a sheep, had stung me. which is incorrect but humorous nonetheless.

so in other, slightly more important news, I'M MEETING THE PRESIDENT OF ECUADOR TOMORROW. yup. that will be my new life experience of the day for tomorrow. meeting a president, i really didn't think that would be something i did in my life.

once on here i said that it rains in quito but never pours. that was incorrect.

a beautiful day full of adventures and historic center venturings and watching friends play basketball and delicious food. that's chapter one.

chapter two. a friend and i begin the walk home, more or less a 45 minute venture total for me because we walk to his house and then i walk to mine. three minutes after we leave the rest of our friends at the warm and cozy quicentro, a very modern, very large mall, the rain begins, and not the normal splashing friendliness with the sun still shining through.

cars splash us, i worry about my ipod and school stuff i have on me. my friend has a rain jacket and of course i do not. i get to his house expecting the rain to simmer down but not. it only gets worse. so i decide to start the trek home, borrowing his umbrella he left at home. his umbrella went inside out on three separate occasions and by the time i got home it really didn't matter if i stepped in the newly formed puddles or not, my feet were sloshing around in my shoes anyways.

i guess that's my two chapter adventure of the day. life is good.

my brother is blasting i want you (she's so heavy) by the beatles. it's 9:15 and i am about to eat hot dogs for dinner. i have contracted ADD while in ecuador. public libraries don't exist as far as i know and the major university libraries are really low on updated resources.

i just ate dinner. my dad got drunk at a cousin's house with my mom and came home a complete goofball. my sister is getting bad grades and my dad threatened to not let her play soccer anymore (which is more important to her than school).

i went to a casino for the first time last night. i lost two dollars in the penny slot machines but was handed a tall glass of beer while playing as some form of encouragement to continue. ellie and i both lost two bucks while the three guys who came with us won money. one guy won $35, one $6 and one $5, all in the same kind of machine ellie and i were playing at. lady luck doesn't like the ladies.

i'm just about halfway done with this experience. yup.

i love quito, i really do. i enjoy this city life, the weather and the people here but there is a definite dark side to the city.

with the generally accepted fact that we are not in claremont any more comes the understanding that, like in any big city, we need to take extra safety precautions. i don't take my laptop out of the house just because it would not be worth it to have it stolen. no walking alone after 8 or 9, especially in certain parts of town, and the buses stop running around then, too, so the only other option for us is to take a taxi. inconvenient but worth it. big city life but, again, worth it.

there are other things that happen here, which i do not know what i can attribute them to that i doubt happen in places like los angeles; certainly not as frequently as i have experienced them here in the last month and a half.

several weeks ago, i walked down to eloy alfaro, the street where i take the bus to class every morning, and crossed it to get to the side i needed to be on. on the median of this street, which has trees and grass and brick paths to cross it, i found also had a dead dog on top of a pile of filled garbage bags. i crossed the median as quickly as possible and did my best to not look at it hoping to never see it again.

the next day i walked down to eloy alfaro, crossed the street to get to the other side, and realize that the dog, on top of the plastic garbage bags, is still there. a bit taken aback, i hop on the next bus and head over to my community service.

the next day it is still there.

so i walked down the block where there are police officers directing the traffic every morning and told him of what was still lying there on the median of my street, after 3 days. the next day it was gone.


two weeks ago, again walking on eloy alfaro after a quichua study session, i cross the street, unnecessarily expensive ipod in hand, and i realize that, 10 feet in front of me is a man lying on the ground. he isn't just lying on the ground, he is unconscious on the ground, the lower half of his body splayed on the street while the upper half on it's back on the sidewalk.

he wasn't obviously injured. i told myself he had just had a bit much to drink at four in the afternoon on a sunday. i felt, at that moment, like the most useless human. i didn't think i could do anything as a small, white girl from the usa, would i tell someone else to do something? kick him? so i just stared as others walked by like he was a filled garbage bag, of no importance, and i just kept going in the direction of my house.


today i was walking up a different street to meet up with my friends to start our research at a university library. a beautiful day and then i find a dirty dead cat to my left on the sidewalk. keep walking, that's my routine, my motto.

several hours later as i walk at night to the bus stop on that same street i notice a long rectangular box near where i found the cat earlier today. there were paws sticking out of the box.


those have been some of the most physically disturbing, bothersome experiences of my time here but really, they shouldn't be. every day i see mainly afro ecuatorian preteens to teens juggling in front of cars stopped at a red light to try and earn a bit of money while not going to school. i watch these guys go up to every driver's side window and knock on it while the drivers of bmws or benzs ignore them or look right through them.

ever day i see indigenous women dressed in indigenous clothes, sitting or standing on a sidewalk with a basket of candies, cigarettes and gum, selling any of it for 20 cents a pop. sometimes i see a wiggle coming from their backs and i realize they have a newborn they are trying to feed.

the easy thing to do is to ignore it all. honestly there isn't much i or any one could do unless they wanted to buy something off of every street vendor or give change to every kid ditching school to support themselves or their families.

this is my dilemma. i don't know what to do. all i know is that i would rather see a million dead dogs on the sidewalk then have to live with the guilt of knowing what little i could do to help these people i don't actually do, i usually keep walking, hiding my ipod under my jacket so it doesn't get stolen.

it's been a while

pictures are of the crew on the train, 2 views from and of the train and 2 pictures of cuenca. and they are ellie's.




i love walking through the rain and seeing my breath without actually feeling cold and i get to do this almost every day. the weather here is unpredictably predictable yet i still never bring an umbrella with me when i go out. when i come back to the states it will be a disaster for me when it reaches the 80s or 90s. oh and i'm just barely starting to get used to the metric system and celsius. a healthy person has a temperature of 37 degrees celsius.

this weekend i ate like a queen and as usual, for less than 5 bucks for a royal meal. at many restaurants, ask for el almuerzo, lunch and they give you their lunch for the day, usually a soup, rice and some kind of meat, fresh juice and maybe some dessert. ecuatorianos know how to make pizza, too. i went to cuenca, the third biggest city in this country and ate their traditional dish, mote pillo, which is some delicious corn cooked with eggs. i could eat that every day. and the ice cream, oh the ice cream i would breathe it if possible.

i took a train on saturday at 7 in the morning. i sat on it's roof and watched ecuador for 7 hours. i saw many variations of the color green and some brown everywhere and all across the hillsides which looked like quilts sown into the ground, just as beautiful as useful. we saw snowcapped mountains in the distance which looked like white camoflouge hidden in the openings of the clouds. i forget how big space is until i do something like descend the nariz del diablo, nose of the devil, and see a panoramic view of what looks like an entire world of canyons and rivers and delapidated buildings and railroad tracks that go farther than the actual train goes.

cuenca is magical. that is all there is to it.

the life is good and it keeps on going that way.

here i will briefly outline the rest of my semester for your reading pleasure:

in three weeks, halloween to be exact, i will fly away to peru to see what is machu picchu with my own eyes until the 7th of november, exactly a week later. then on the 9th, a sunday, i go a couple hours north of quito to san clemente, an indigenous town where i will live with an indigenous family for 10 days, waking up early and farming and experiencing something truly new in my life. then, a couple days later, a friday, i am off to the jungle, the amazon to be exact from the 2st to the 24th. then i begin my 3.5 weeks of intensive research which will hopefully conclude in a 25-page paper on sumak kawsay, or buen vivir, or good living, which comes from quichua. this phrase appears in the preamble to the new constitution and is similar to the idea of the pursuit of happiness except for that they are using an indigenous word. my very large (hatun) paper will focus on what that phrase means to indigenous people, what the constitution says it will do for them, and what they think will, if anything, actually happen for them as a result of the constitution.

i ride a bus twice a week and at one specific intersection there is a huge line on the sidewalk from both sides of the main street trying to turn onto a smaller street that is barricaded off to cars every single time i ride by it. last time i caught a glimpse of the building they want to enter, and it is the spanish embassy.

this weekend i went to a touristy place called baños and rode a bicycle 40 km down the ruta de cascadas until reaching the big mama of waterfalls, which lined both sides of the canyon our road/trail/highway was on.

ellie ate a guinea pig and got sick.

yesterday i went to my first latin american soccer game. the sport usually bores me but being in the stands is something else. the teams were, liga, the quito team and one of the best in south america versus boca junior, a team from argentina. the stands were open seating and where we ended up, general north high, was where they were putting all the boca fans. they did this by asking what team you were for and directing you in once direction or the other. in between the two sides was a buffer zone ten feet wide at least, police lining it by standing on every other large step in full riot gear.

this was the occassion where i learned lots of very creative curses in spanish directed at the other team or the refs that me and my american friends would repeat to each other and translate and laugh. the guy friends yelled just as insulting words in english.

ther were lots of team chants that the audience would arrupt into, but none of us caught any of the words. the only chant we could sing along to was the most basic and most familiar, "ole, ole ole ole..."


things that interest me these days:

sumak kawsay-buen vivir-good living

political graffiti: "Uribe fascista y narcoterrorista"-"Uribe (prez of colombia) is a fascist and a narcoterrorist" "¿mineras: seguro que tenemos futuro?"-"miners: are we sure we have a future?"

Juan Leon Mera

medicine


the doctor i work with at my community service is slowly convincing indirectly to want a career in medicine. he was doing so indirectly by saying it's the most rewarding job, it's universal, it can be done anywhere, you really help, etc. today he asked me a few questions like how i handle seeing blood and whatnot and afterwords said, matter of factly, "you are qualified for medicine." and inside i went"yes!"

the doctor is a bit of a diva. he doesn't remember my name even though we talk for at least an hour after seeing patients everytime i go. today when i walked into the office he said, in english, "give me a pen" and after the second it took to process this was english and understand through his accent, i got him his pen.

after seeing the first patient he told me to take the blood pressure of the next guy and walked out the door. i did so (135/76) but the doctor didn't return for 20 minutes. he drove off apparently, picked up his daughter from who know where, returned and gave the kid to someone who works there to take care of her.

every single time he explains something to the patient he acts patronizing but not in a way that i dislike and asks, "do you understand?" and usually the patient is too intimidated to respond with words. sometimes they nod, sometimes they do nothing but the doctor continues anyway, not actually paying attention to the response.