A Day in the Life

*The following ‘day’ is a compilation of several memorable days in Ecuador *

I got up this morning around 6:30 am and stumbled my way into a few pieces of my uniformly drab wardrobe (see right) before heading downstairs to make breakfast. The domestica, Martita, was already there and we performed our daily too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen tango. I enjoyed my English muffin (they don’t sell them here, but PC gave out a cookbook full of recipes for the stuff you usually buy) with an over-easy egg and tea while I watched a bit of the French Open on ESPNla. Except for the maid and the Spanish commentary, I could have been in the States.


I headed out around 7:30 am and walked the four blocks between my host family’s home and the bus stop. There’s a fountain in the square by the bus stop that is never on, but instead is used as a waiting room, so I nabbed a spot and watched the morning bustle. The highlight of the wait was definitely an open-backed truck that went by around 8 am. It was transporting four large pigs, one of whom had his front feet propped up on the cab to better enjoy the breeze. He looked just like a dog with its head out the window, and I’d swear he even had his tongue lolling off to one side. At 8:30 am, 60 minutes and three buses going the wrong direction later, I got on a bus headed out towards the Centro and the surrounding community where I work.


PC wants all volunteers to do a community assessment survey during our first several months in site, so I hiked over to an as-yet unvisited house and shouted out what I hoped was a friendly-sounding ‘hola!’ An older gentleman tottered out of the small brick-and-mortar house and sized up the freakishly tall gringa smiling down from his gate. He gave me the benefit of the doubt and invited me to sit in one of two plastic chairs next to the house. I introduced myself with my usual speech about how I’m the girl who teaches English at the local school and am from PC’s Sustainable Agriculture program, and would he mind answering a few questions. As usual, he looked suspicious about the survey, but curious about why on Earth I was there, so he agreed.

About two-thirds of the way through my questions, his wife walked out and took over. I asked if migration existed in the area and she said no. Seconds later, she said that she did not know what migration was and that yes , she had family who had migrated. I’d long ago given up trying to make sense of this very common series of responses, so I smiled and went on to ask her what projects she thought I could do to improve the condition of agriculture in the area. She told me that I should help the community get a priest (not allowed by PC), and that I could help with the community garden the Parish (in the Louisiana sense of the word) had started but not completed. My eyes lit-up. A community garden ready to go!? The women led me behind her house to a small school, crossed its courtyard, weaved between the buildings, and popped out next to a lovely garden patch freshly tilled and enclosed with a barbed-wire fence. It was perfect.


English classes at the local school begin between 10:30 and 11 am, so I thanked the woman profusely for her input and made my way to the camino (pathway/dirt road) that leads up to the school, basking in the glory of the new-found garden. I love this hike (even if I am always dripping in sweat by the time I reach the hilltop-perched school). It winds up a hill in the center of a beautiful valley full of semi-arid smaller hills while graceful, dark green mountains look down from all sides. I veered-off onto a steeper but more direct cow path and was spit out onto the final stretch to the school a few minutes and a few hundred vertical feet later.
Blocking most of the path were five cows, one of whom was an enormous bull with horns that twisted menacingly in my direction. The cows stared at me as I approached and made a few grunting noises. I think the bull even stamped a foot, but he might have just been transferring his weight. Panic-stricken, I edged over to the fence along the road and called out towards the nearest house. A young mother walked out to see what the fuss was about.


“Es bravo el torro?” (Is the bull aggressive?) I spluttered. She looked at me confused. I tried again, this time adding that I needed to reach the school and was it safe to pass around the bull.

“La vaca?” (The cow?) she asked. She gently told the cows the Spanish equivalent of ‘shew’ and they moseyed away. As the torro turned to go, I noticed that ‘he’ had a lovely set of utters. Oh. I’m an idiot, what can I say? Who knew cows had horns? Certainly not this former city-chick.

“Oh well,” I thought to myself, “now there’s at least one more person in the community who thinks I’m an idiot. At least they don’t grow potatoes at this low of an elevation, so I can’t confirm my agricultural ignorance by mistaking one for a weed (it’s hard to tell the difference!).”

A few minutes later I made it to the school, having carefully avoided looking the bravo campo dogs in the eyes (thanks for the advice, Holly!), and gave an English lesson to my eager and remarkably apt students. I left at 1 pm with the intention of conducting another interview before catching a bus back into town for a late lunch. The survey went well and I got to meet a set of my students grandparents who were both well into their eighties.

We’re now in the dry season here and it’s been several weeks since the last substantial rainfall, so the path is dusty and loose. Distracted by the beautiful scenery, I stepped on a particularly loose patch of dirt and my foot slid out from under me, and with it, all the hope and good humor I’d collected that day. I landed with a thud on the dusty road. Suddenly my surroundings were foreign and unpleasant, not exotic and beautiful. My work was meaningless and silly, rather than delightfully unstructured, and the people I’d met were uneducated and uninterested in change, rather than welcoming and hopeful. I sat in the dust wallowing for a few minutes until the bought of overwhelming homesickness passed, then picked myself up, brushed off the dust, and started back down the hill. The path is, fortunately, long. I had time to locate a bit of the hope and humor that had slipped out before I reached the bottom.



After lunch in the market and a trip to an internet café back in town, I changed into workout clothes and met my host aunts, Mariuxi and Tania, to go ‘trotando’ (jogging). Mariuxi is in her mid-thirties and Tania her early-fifties and the two are fast becoming my best friends in Ecuador. The fact that they can outrun me by about 6 miles is also shaming me back in shape. We jog on the dirt track that surrounds the local soccer field. Mariuxi and Tania have adorable, pink, matching MP3 players that wrap around the back of their heads, and they always manage to look cute in their running attire. I jog around in the hodge-podge collection of gray, white and black workout clothes that found their way into my suitcase and wear a pair of large, black, mismatched headphones that snake down to my second-hand iPod (thanks Theresa!). Needless to say, I don’t look cute while I’m jogging.

I managed to run diez veultos (10 laps, or 3.3 miles!), then retired to do my abdominals y flexions (sit-ups and push-ups). Tania and Mariuxi each ran 25 laps, or a little over 8 miles, while I walked. On the way home, we chatted about weekend plans, food, and from which parts of our bodies we wanted to lose weight. Mariuxi turned and asked me in all seriousness which part of her body she needed to work on. I burst out laughing, stunned and embarrassed by the question. I explained that that kind of honesty was just not something I was used to. Mariuxi and Tania explained to me that among good friends in Ecuador, that’s exactly the sort of thing you actually say to each other. They said it was good encouragement to look their best. I remembered learning about similar openness among close friends in France and now wonder if this is a romance-language phenomenon. Who knows, but I need to take care. Apparently, I now have two friends who won’t hesitate to tell me if they notice I ate one too many ice creams….

Trotando was followed by a quick shower. On a side note I saw a TV show a few years ago that claimed we wash our hair too often, so, until very recently, I was limiting myself to a maximum of two shampoos per week in a sort-of ‘why not?’ experiment. According to the show, shampooing strips your hair of all its natural oils, thus provoking excessive oil production in a sort of vicious circle. This is crap. After six weeks of limited shampooing, all that happened to my hair was that it constantly looked greasy. I will admit that after about three days of oil build-up, it doesn’t look any greasier, but a three-day build-up is still gross. Needless to say, I’ve terminated that experiment.

Next came dinner with my host parents (rabbit – que rico! (how delicious)), then a little TNT movie-action in Spanish followed by a brief foray into Spanish study before giving it up as a bad job (I get plenty of practice going about life here) and snuggling under the covers (see right). Lights out – approximately 11 pm.