Since it’s been soo long since I updated it just feels like such a daunting task, to catch up on everything, so unfortunately if you want a post I'm just gonna skip whatever else from the last month and write what I feel like :)
First of all, Omnibus 102 has officially been in site for over 6 months (February 20th was 6 months)! And in country almost 9 months (9 months in a week or so)!! Wow, time passes so quickly yet so slowly. And the world keeps on moving back home… My parents had to deliver some bad news a few weeks ago over the phone, something I know they dreaded doing and continue to dread having to do for any other occasion. It is hard being thousands of miles from the ones you love yet telling/receiving bad news. My dog of 18 and a half yrs, Bitsy, passed away February 16. She had a wonderfully long life and overcame great odds several years ago when a huge tumor was removed from her spleen. I honestly was starting to think she was Wonder Dog. I’m sad that she won’t be there when I come home but I knew it was likely to happen while I was gone for 2 years. She was the best dog I ever could have wished and prayed for, and she will be greatly missed, but I’m sure she is happy and no longer weighed down by her aged body. After all, all dogs go to heaven
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So I can’t really remember if I talked about the crickets in previous posts, but yah. They are huge and disgusting. It was a tough few weeks when they first arrived. Basically when the rainy season starts, the crickets come out of the ground and like to go in people’s houses to scare them and eat their clothes. Ew. And they’re huge. And they are very unskilled flyers so they can usually go about 3 feet then plummet to the ground, usually on me or near me. Plus I was killing at least 20 of them nightly during the first part of the rainy season, so they were pretty much everywhere. It was a pretty jumpy time for me. And they’re huge, like easily 3 inches long with a very very tough exoskeleton (if you want to kill them you really gotta put your weight into it). And when you do kill them, it’s like a crush then squish, because once you get through the outer shell inside they’re just like jelly. Buuut I survived through the major plague and now I have them but they’re much less frequent and also smaller. The ones I've been killing lately have been like teenage size, just an inch or so, and without the super tough skeleton. Oh, the big ones are clumsy as I mentioned and also like cockroaches (which I've had more since the rainy season started, and those too near the size of my hand) they can’t flip themselves over if they’re on their back. So during the plague, I would go to sweep out the dead bodies in the morning and as soon as the broom touched them they would come back to life and start squirming. Ew. But anyway, the ones I have now are much more agile and to kill them I sometimes have to jump around like an Irish dancer. But I always win :) Other creepy crawlers I've had since the rainy season include: more ants, as expected; scorpions (very nasty looking black 4 inch long with a huge stinger, ugh... but not deadly – my host brother got stung by one on his leg and said it was like a bee sting but it went away after a couple of days); the aforementioned cockroaches; and of course mosquitoes. The mosquitoes are ridiculous! The females are huge, can be half an inch across, but slow (which makes them an easy target with the bug zapper my family sent me!!). The males are smaller, faster, and smarter. They not only creep up without me seeing them, but they bite through anything – jeans, 2 long sleeve shirts, socks, etc. And the little bastards bite anything that is open to air. I have bites on my ears and hands, even though I am constantly putting on repellent! The other things that have been eating me are small flying bugs that look like gnats but I think may be baby mosquitoes (if that’s possible?). They pass through the mosquito net and get me in my sleep, so what I've been doing is taking the bug zapper into the net with me, setting my light on a timer to go off after a couple of hrs (they come toward the light) and sit and wait for them. After I kill about 20 of them (and I have masking tape in my net too to pick up their bodies so I'm not sleeping in a bug graveyard) and it seems like they’ve calmed down, I finally get to sleep. I just started this counterattack method about a week ago and it seems to be working. Finally, I have a lot more newts living in my house now. They’ve been having babies, because there are some precious little inch long wall crawlers in here. Some of my fellow volunteers are afraid or disgusted by the little lizards, but I like them for 3 reasons. 1: they’re terrified of me. Sometimes they startle me if I turn on a light and they scamper up the walls, but once I realize its them they’re already hiding from me anyway. 2: they eat mosquitoes, moths, whatever other bugs are hanging out in my house. And for this I am very very appreciative. They’re great hunters! I've seen a newt stalking its prey for 30 minutes, slowly inching forward until it’s within lunging distance then BAM dinner. Also, the crickets make cricket noises (extremely loud, deafening really) at night in some people’s houses. In my house though, the cricket makes noise for 15 mins maximum and soon the newts move in and kill and eat it. There was a cricket in the corner making lots of noise about 20 mins ago but about 10 mins ago the noise stopped and I just saw 3 newts scamper from the corner. Coincidence? And 3: They’re soo cute! I wish they wouldn’t be so afraid of me so I could interact with them, but I guess that’s their choice. I don’t know if I would want to have it crawling on me, but I’d like to get up close and feed it a moth or something. The only downsides are when they scatter up the walls when I turn on the light (startles me sometimes) and they leave poop around the house. The poop looks like mouse poop, but I had deducted that it is indeed from the newts based on the fall patterns but then I actually saw one of them poop once which confirmed it. They have large poop for such little critters…
So the other thing about the rainy season is that it is HOT! Last night it was 92°F at 7pm. Yeah. Today’s a little cooler at 82°F while I’m writing at 10:30pm. Buut we’ve also had a lot of problems with the power in my town, again. Specifically my street. Last night the transformer blew out (with sparks etc) for the 3rd time this month. I've gotten really fast at getting up and unplugging everything, starting with the TV/computer, then the fridge and the water pump, then I get the little stuff. The other day when the power blew it burned my host family’s fridge, washing machine, and their TV. And my neighbor’s fridge burned up too. I’ve been lucky; I only lost my recharger for AA/AAA batteries and a couple of light bulbs. It’s gotten pretty ridiculous though. Today when the power guys came to fix the transformer a lot of people on the street went to talk to them. I just watched so I don’t know exactly what they were saying but they spent about 30 mins fixing the transformer and brought in some new equipment this time so hopefully it’s good now… They temporarily rerouted the power or something last night so we only were out a couple of hours. Today we didn’t have power from 8am until 7pm though… Which also sucks when its 90°+ in the shade, because my fan doesn’t work without the power. Also my water pump doesn’t, so it was a smelly day :) but that’s the life here. I’m lucky I have a placement where there is electricity!
So work wise I’ve been working outside of my town now for the past month or so. It’s not very steady work, which means I have lots of down time, but it’s been pretty fun and rewarding. Basically I've been going to the big city working with the health promoters that I trained to do AIDS charlas. They are in charge of planning the workshops and I’m there as support and to answer questions etc. Last week I went to an AIDS foundation that another volunteer works with It was very helpful. They gave me some handouts and posters to use in the workshops and talked with the new director of the AIDS program. Peace Corps Ecuador is being expanded by adding staff and another 50+ volunteers in the next year. In addition to the four current programs (Health, Youth and Families, Agriculture, Natural Resources) they are adding an HIV/AIDS subprogram into the health sector that will be focusing in the highest-risk provinces in Ecuador. Because Guayas (the province I live in) has the highest incidence, most of the volunteers are supposed to be stationed here. Anyway, I received some pointers for the charlas and some materials to use, which has been super helpful. Overall the charlas have gone really well, some better than others. The apparent success of the charlas was inversely correlated with the number of children present (imagine that correlation graph you psych majors!). Basically the best ones were where they were few children, and babies are easier to deal with than bored mischievous toddlers. The workshops were for both the parents, but in reality there was only one man in the workshop, if any. Obviously it’s important and more effective to get the message to both the man and woman, but I am more comfortable doing the charlas with the moms anyway :) Each of the charlas consisted of basic information about HIV/AIDS, an activity called “truth or fiction” where common myths were dispelled (you can get HIV from shaking hands, etc), and sometimes an activity called “Levels of Risk” where the participants decide whether certain behavior has high risk low risk or no risk of transmitting the virus. So pretty much every charla was the same. After the first 10 or so I felt like I could do it in my sleep. Then something surprising happened. When we were talking about the use of protection in sexual relationships, one of the mothers asked what a condom was. And the promoter turned to me to explain. It shouldn’t have, but her question really caught me off guard. And of course no one had a condom with them so I set out with my insufficient Spanish (if we were going to talk about condoms I would have read through the material to refresh the terminology etc) to explain what it was. So we fumbled our way through that (afterwards I realized that there was probably a pharmacy the next street over where I could have bought one to explain better but things always work out better in afterthought) and I plan to go back another time to that group to demonstrate and explain properly. But on the bus right home I was thinking about the incident and realized that probably most of the moms wouldn’t have a clue what a condom is. The high schools just recently started teaching sex ed, and I don’t know how extensively they cover the material, but sexual education is one of the topics the high schools have requested my assistance in. So the next day when I set out to do the next charla, I brought a condom with me. Talk about taboo! I asked if anyone knew how to use a condom or if I should demonstrate and received awkward silence. So I asked the lady whose house we were in if I could borrow a plantain. There was a lot of giggling but we got through it and now they probably all think that the gringa is absolutely insane. And I discarded the plantain just before they got the idea to get out the camera phones – score! I’m too realistic to think that now that they know what a condom is they’ll be buying and using them, BUT they won’t be forgetting that charla any time soon and hopefully they took away something besides the funny parts. Afterwards I talked with a few of the mothers about whether it was a good idea to show how to use a condom (it's hard to tell how conservative people are and I was worried I had offended someone) and they said they thought it was great. They said it’s such a taboo topic so some people were uncomfortable but it is good information that most people haven’t heard and I presented it in a funny yet respectful and informative manner. One of the moms asked if I could come back and she’d bring her teenage girls so I could explain it to them – yikes! So I’ve decided to be prepared for teaching about condoms in the last couple charlas but again save it for the end of the charla so I can get a feel for the group. If I had pulled a condom out at the beginning of that charla who knows how it would have gone over. So even though sex ed was not something I was really interested in doing as part of my service, I guess I’m learning to live with it. There's definitely a need here. Next challenge, sex ed with high schoolers – yikes!
So now that that potentially awkward part is over, depending on who is reading this… What else is new? I bought a toaster oven finally (which broke my budget for March haha). I splurged and got a good one. It’s about a foot tall and has 2 heating elements on the top and 2 on the bottom of the oven. It was $43 and to get a small crappy one was $25, so it was a bit more expensive than I planned but I am soo happy I got this one. It bakes perfectly! I’ve been making baked maduros (yellow sweet plantains that you eat with cheese or margarine); bread like it’s my job (I bought yeast when I got the oven. I forgot how good yeast bread is as opposed to baking powder bread…), and even made brownies for me and my host brother Saturday. The brownies turned out excellent! I used cocoa powder like you use for making hot chocolate, ground peanuts, and put chunks of chocolate bar inside. Like heaven. I also gave some to my neighbors who were sitting outside and we had a great bonding moment. And I found out they can smell everything I cook in my house, and they say I cook good smelling stuff all the time. I guess I’ll have to start sharing more :) This weekend was a big cooking weekend for me. My host mom was at her mom’s finishing up her graduate thesis, so only my host dad and one of the host brothers was at the house and of course the men here have no clue how to cook so they’d been eating street food for several days. So Thursday night I made spaghetti and homemade garlic bread for them, and Friday night I made a ham bacon and veggie frittata (if that’s what it’s called.. it’s basically an omelet but baked). Then they left for the beach Saturday morning and the other host brother came to my town, so I made macaroni and cheese and brownies for us. Then the family got back from the beach last night but this morning my host mom went back to her mom’s to work on her thesis, so the 2 guys were left alone again. So tonight I made a potato cheese soup (I was sad to find that after the fridge was off all day from the power outages the bacon/ham mix I had bought went bad) and homemade soft pretzels (all that I lacked was a mug of Hofbräuhaus beer to have a good German meal). My host brother and one of his friends came over and ate. I was expecting to bring the food to their house but they came over here and quite frankly my house is a huge mess, so I was pretty embarrassed. But it was motivation enough that after they left I cleaned my house haha. I’ve learned that if I’m going to offer food to the men in this country I should put some aside for me if I want any for later :) so I stored enough for lunch tomorrow in my fridge before they got here haha. I did start back at the gym last week though (I was really sick for a week then another week just feeling icky and not wanting to work out) and it’s been great. It is soo hot here to be working out, but I know that the hour I’m at the gym is an hour of good exercise between the workout and the heat. Tomorrow should be a gym day but since I have internet I don’t know if I’ll go. Though I haven’t been working much in my site, I’ve been busy trying to prepare for an event my jovenes and I are planning. I’ll tell about that in the next post, hopefully after the event has been a huge success :)
Things with my host family have changed a lot recently with the schools on winter vacation, the cook having her baby, and my host brother Andy starting at the university. First, the schools are on break so my host sister is out of classes and my host parents are off work until April. (something I’ve never really understood is that the schools in the sierra have different break schedules, so they’re not in vacations right now. Maybe it has to do with harvest times?) My host mom and sister have spent pretty much the whole time at her mom’s house because my host mom is finishing her graduate thesis and is working with her sister who also lives there. And there are cousins there for my host sister to play with that are near her age, which is nice for her. It’s weird that every time I go to my host family’s house there’s no one there. Which is also partly because the cook/house cleaner had her baby a couple of weeks ago, so she’s off work (potentially permanently since she now has 3 kids and can’t put the baby in day care until he’s 1 year old). Which means that the 2 remaining family members (the host dad and host brother Joao) are there sometimes (but they don’t cook as I talked about earlier). To clarify about the brothers: the 16 yr old, Jair, is in high school in the big city. The 20 year old, Andy, just started in the university in the big city in January and is living at his grandmother’s house except when he comes here on some weekends. And the 24 yr old, Joao, is also in the university but prefers to commute so he lives here and is gone some days to the university. Anyway, especially when I was living with them, I spent a lot of time talking with Andy, and now that he’s not around, I feel my Spanish slipping. It has made me realize how much he helped me with my Spanish and how patient he always is explaining things to me, talking to me is like talking to a half literate 5 year old. It’s also due to my weird work situation right now and that the host family is basically not around at all, but it’s something I’ve noticed and wanted to reflect on. That being said, I also am going to start working harder on my Spanish since I don’t have as much conversational exposure. Meaning studying once a week and trying to watch movies in Spanish with English subtitles. And I’m sure when I get back to daily work in my town next week things will improve as well.
Emotionally, life remains a roller coaster. I have good days and bad days, and I’ve hit my first real slump in the roller coaster. It’s been especially hard with the host family not around much, but soon things will get back to normal in that department. And my work schedule isn’t helping. It will be work to go back to getting up at 7 to go to the houses, but I know that I need that routine right now. But every time I'm having a bad day there’s always that little thing that makes everything seem better, a random text, running into a friend in the street, getting a free apple from the little lady at the market, or having an apparent stranger walk up to my house. That last one’s a good story: Sunday a woman came to my house to get a drink of water and knew me but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out who she was. But I invited her in and she plopped down in my hammock like we were best buds. I maintained a guard as if she were a stranger but treated her like a friend (something I’ve gotten incredibly good out here) because odds are I know her I just don’t remember her, and she sat here in my house and chatted with me for about an hr. Before you freak out, 1) she knew my host family and 2) Andy told her to come here for water since they were out at his house and 3) she wasn’t an immediate threat even if I didn’t know her. But apparently I knew her, her husband, and her daughter. It was awkward for me but entertaining in general. We chatted about my house, about life here in my town, about work, about her husband who was at the bar watching the soccer game, about her daughter that lives in the sierra – I know everything she bought for her daughter’s house, etc. After about an hr I told her I needed to get to the market before it closed so I walked over to the host family’s house with her and she hung out with Andy while I made my escape. I was afraid it was too obvious that I was just trying to get out of the situation, but went with it anyway. Later I asked him who she was… turns out she’s my host aunt, but I only met her once and she lives in the big city. Of course she remembered me but I think I played it off fairly well that I knew her. I felt a little bad about it and hope she didn’t think I was rude and blowing her off something. Next time I see her I’ll have to be extra friendly though. And I’m supposed to email her a recipe for pizza, so I’ll be extra friendly in the email. Still don’t know her name though…
The last thing I wanna tell you about is Carnaval. I was getting over having a bacterial stomach infection/an amoeba I named Jimmy, but decided to go to Guaranda for Carnaval. I’m going to try to experience Ecuador more instead of staying in my site all the time. I’m not going to be out of my site tons either, I’m just talking about taking a 3 day weekend to go to a different part of Ecuador instead of sticking around here in the coast. Anyway, Guaranda is one of the biggest Carnaval celebrations in Ecuador and I happen to have a friend who lives there, so it was the perfect opportunity. Getting to Guaranda was a challenge though. We knew tickets would be hard to buy the day of, so someone went a few days ahead of time and bought the tickets. But that bus company decided to cancel all of their buses (why??? No one knows) so we got our money back. So the day of we went to a different company and bought tickets (for a totally jacked up price by the way). There was a miscommunication between my friend and the ticket lady and we understood that there basically were no scheduled buses; it was more of a first come first serve. So we took our time, ate something, and then went to get on the bus. But what the lady meant was there was no hour for the buses to arrive, they just get there when they get there, but the bus number and seats are assigned. So basically we had missed our bus. So I was designated to get us different tickets or our money back. After about 20 mins I was getting nowhere so I had the person who bought the tickets come down hoping that could fix the situation. But they wouldn’t give us new seats and wouldn’t give us our money back, no deal. So I negotiated that we could ride the 5 hrs sitting on our bags on the floor (best case scenario at this point). Luckily they went for it and we spent 5 miserable hrs (more so for me because I was already feeling nauseas from the amoeba and the roads in the sierra are really windy) sitting on the bus but we finally made it to Guaranda! In the end I was so glad we went… Carnaval is Mardi Gras for Latin/South America, minus the beads and flashing people (at least where I went). In Guaranda they had an extravagant parade with all types of dancing, costumes (there was a group dressed as cavemen?), and tooooons of water/flour/foam. Basically it’s like a free-for-all with people throwing buckets of water, water balloons, tossing flour or corn starch on your head, and spraying this foam from big cans. The foam is really neat, it pretty much dissolves when you touch it and it’s apparently water based because it doesn’t leave an oily residue or anything. The colored ones do leave coloring but when I got back to site I was able to wash out the stains without much trouble. The best part is that it smells really good! So basically it’s not bad to get sprayed with, and even more fun to spray back :) It’s so crazy though; you have little 5 year olds running around attacking adults and grandmas without any repercussions except maybe getting a bucket dumped on his head. And that little cute grandma is the one holding the bucket. Amazing. It would get old for any length of time, but it was so much fun for the couple days I was there. And because it is an Ecuadorian holiday, people drink A LOT. I couldn’t drink because I was still on amoeba meds (apparently will make you violently ill if you drink on them, and I didn’t feel like finding out. Side note though, I lost like 10 lbs in a week with an amoeba. It was a painful week but there’s always a silver lining). And the people I was with weren’t huge drinkers, so we pretty much just enjoyed the festivities during the day then at night we just chilled and played cards or whatever. It was really nice and just the mental health break I needed. Now that I’ve seen the sierran celebrations, I think next year I’ll head to the beach for Carnaval :)
FYI here’s the link to my facebook album so if you’re online you should check it out. http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2044645&id=46900557&l=32ee64547a
Ok last thing for real. I finally started my gardening project :) I planted tomatoes, basil, beans, and bought a lime tree sapling (though that seems to be pretty much dead at this point…). So far the lime is outside (as the guy told me to do) but everything else is inside in planters. If the lime tree dies I’m gonna go back to the guy and talk to him, and try to get a discount on another tree (though it was only $2.50). The sad thing about the lime tree though is that it won’t yield fruit for 2 or 3 years, so I won’t get to reap the benefits of the tree. I guess when I come back to visit some years in the future it may be here though :)
Alright, I think I covered pretty much everything I have to say for now, which is a good thing because I’ve been typing for 3 hrs and surely you all stopped reading 3 pages ago :) The problem is that once I don’t update for a long time it’s hard to start again, but I’ll try to update more often so I don’t get back in the same situation again. Hope all’s well, miss you all!
