Beach Buzz: The Puertos

The first stop on the Route of the Sun adventure was a small fishing town called Puerto Lopez. According to the books, Puerto Lopez remains the best place to catch an eyeful of a humpback whale during its mating season (June and July), so I am almost positive a return trip will be a must this June. I cannot really conceive of an animal that is bigger than the Tunas I saw at the Monterey Bay aquarium, but after seeing Cast Away again on television, whale watching must be a cool experience on some level. In fact I am almost inspired to pick up my copy of that whale book that they made us read in high school. According to that book the blue whale´s manhood is over 9 feet long, and each whale can control said manhood with the same dexterity possessed by humans over their thumbs. Ah high school. What would I have done without you.

Anyway, there isn´t a whole lot to report about Puerto Lopez, except that I had the most delicious ice cold passion fruit juice of my whole life. Since we had been traveling all night, I was soaked in sweat, and caked with pit stains the size of Denny´s pancakes. Doom seemed eminent. I am not sure if I have mentioned this yet, but it´s impossible to find cold things in Ecuador. It´s probably one of my top five frustrations. Basically no one likes regrigerated juice or water, you cannot drink ice because you might get the runs, and refrigeration is expensive. Most people even choose to drink warm beer. The only thing guranteed to be cold on some level is yogurt, but trying to quench one´s thirst with yogurt is like trying to soften a hard camping ground with extra clothing. I mean sure the intentions are good, but when it comes right down to it you are pretty much just as miserable as when you started. Considering this reality you can imagine my utter and unadulterated elation when I saw my passion fruit juice arrive with Slurpy like consistency. If I had been my good buddy who somehow doesn´t have the gene that contracts brain freezes, I might have downed about seven. As it was I polished off two.

Our next port was Puerto Rico, which is a tiny town barely on any maps. So tiny in fact, that when I told the bus driver the name of the pueblo and the name of the hotel, he gave me the Dan Quail ¨I just mispelled ´potato´¨ face. Anyway, despite its size, Puerto Rico was the site of my program´s mid service get together with all of the country´s vols to share ideas, feelings, and aspirations for the rest of our committment. We stayed at an outstanding hosteria, which provided hard wood floors and rooms from which you could hear the crashing ocean.

To be honest seeing everyone again for the first time after orientation was an absolute treat. The people on the coast are all tan, the people in the Sierra have the ability to run forever on the coast, and everyone has ridiculous and hilarious Ecua stories-though I must say that Old Kanedog´s trip to the beauty pageant was a true show stopper.

The other amazing thing was that everyone seemed to be in incredible spirits. You might imagine how being in a forein country, where you constantly get the gringo tax on all your purchases and where everyone sees you as a pompous sex object, can get frustrating. I am sure that other conferences have carried a much more bitter atmoshpere, but my group was suprisingly positive.

Consider the following quandry: What do the military, middle school, fraternities, and my Ecuador program all have in common?

The answer? Every single one of these endeavors forces people to suffer through incredible circumstances together. And, based on my experience and that of my friends and colleagues, these experiences have an undeniable ability to bring people together in the bonds of friendship. I hardly know every single volunteers, except the ones that live in Ibarra, but all of us feel an iron cast kinship. The power of mutual hardships to bring people together is awe inspiring to me. I mean consider the possibillites. What if every time two people-whether it be political leaders or rivaling countrymen-couldn´t get along we just offerend them their choice of the following circumstances: a) Spend two months non-sleeping in the rain, sleet, snow, or unbearable sun somewhere in Virginia learning having to rely on each other for tactical strategy, b) Spend three years covered in pimples with raging hormones, puberty, and homework having no clue what your purpose in life is, c) Spend nights together in a closet trying to polish off handles of booze between the two of them, or d) Give them no hot water, no edible food, and constant danger in a foreign country with no one else to rely on. Problem solved right?

The last reality that I garnered from our meeting is that teaching is hard. Really hard. The fact that teachers get no respect in the states is absolutel BS. Having the daily responsibility of planning engaging, exciting, and fun lessons for 75 Ecuadorians is daunting in and of itself. Now add the fact that you are responsible for all of your students´ future earning potential. Dont forget that you cannot slack off for one minute, or even go to the bathroom. If you arrive in a bad mood your class will be in a bad mood. If you dont feel like working you waste a day that you really cannot get back as your students will lose huge chunks of motivation. Conversing with my fellow Ecua teachers made me realize how amazing each and every one of their contributions is, and I just hope that I am doing my part.

By the way: Quick food update on the hosteria. Reknowned for its ability be entirely self sustaining, I arrived excited to see what the hosteria had to offer:

1)A delicious new type of soup. Dish Rag Dirty Sock suprise. Unbeliveable how drowning a soup´s broth in EcuaCheese gives off the smell only all too familiar to that guy who works the shoe rack at a bowling alley.

2) Delicious Bannana Bread. Mouthwateringly fantastic. In fact I charmed the waitress into letting me have a second piece.

3) Mixed Seafood served with a peanut butter sauce in a chute of Bamboo. Um.....yum. When I get back to the states I am probably going to eat sixty-five peanut butter dishes in a row. It´s unfathomable to me how Ecuador has not picked up on the deliciousness of P B completely.

Lunchtime.

-Kanedog

Beach Buzz: Getting There

Last week marked the halfway point of this Ecuadorian extravaganza. Luckily for all of the people participating in my program, that meant an almost all expense paid trip to the beach and Ecuador´s famed, ¨Ruta del Sol¨, or ¨Route of the Sun¨.

You may remember my previous discussion about Atacames, which is a beach on the northern part of the Ecuadorian coast line. If you traveled south from Atacames, about three or four hours by bus, you would land in a town called Manta. Manta is one of Ecuador´s largest cities, and also the site for the United States military base that wheels and deals with Columbian drug lords. A decade ago Manta was a dump, but sice the US troops´placement, the city has turned a corner to become safer, nicer, and more developed. As you continue South from Manta you first hit a place called ¨Jipijapa¨(pronounced with H´s and not J´s). There´s isn´t a whole lot to do in Jipijaja, as it is pretty much a site for transferring buses, but all of your bus transfers head directly west to the coast, make a left turn, and contine almost 6 hours down the Ecuadorian coastline along the Route of the Sun: Ecuador´s version of Highway 1. Both roads provide constant beautiful scenery of the glorious Pacifc Ocean. The only difference is that whereas Highway 1 zooms through cliffs on a windy road, the Route of the Sun shoots directly south, with almost no bumps and far less man made structures.

Our trip to the Route of the Sun was less than smooth. What was listed as a 13 hour bus ride, ended up taking almost 17 hours. Yikes. The most fun highlight was a 1 hour ¨pit stop¨during which our bus driver proceeded to down about sixteen eggs and twelve pieces of bread. The best test for when a situation in Ecuador is screwed up, is to see if the Ecuadorians are freaking out. Last Wednesday night I was privy to a view of Madison Square Garden pandemonium when Johhny Chubbo forked in his 15 egg. People were the complete opposite of happy and chill, but such is the life of long bus rides. In fact, I think Forrest Gump should be re-written completely. If you open a box of chocolates your options are not unlimitied. On an Ecuadorian night bus, however, you can not only receive, but also are able to count on, absolutely anything on the great green earth happening. To be honest if aliens abducted the person sitting in the back row on next bus ride, I might blow my nose and then go back to watching White Chicks (Terrible movie by the way, though the break dancing part reminded me of my College days watching whatever that movie was called over and over in #32).

In summation, 17 hour bus rides are brutal, but I do have to share one quick observation about traveling. At least as far as traveling is concerned Machiavelli was one to something. Though the bus ride was horrible and terrible, the minute I saw the beach everything seemed to be OK. Maybe the ends really do justify the means.

Books of Life

In the past couple of weeks I have found the time to actually talk to two of my good friends about life growing up here in Ecuador. And though a picture may be worth a thousand words, a person is probably worth 10,000 to the 10,000th power words. When I was a kid I used to always marvel at the following scenario: Imagine if every person in the world had a book about their lives that recorded every single event that ever happened to them. Thus as you are passing random people in the street your name ends up on page 6 billion of their book for one small line, never to be seen again. Or, more interestingly, your name has appeared in their book countless times, where each mentioning occurs for only six seconds as you pass each endless times in the same city, bar, or wherever. I am sure the Kane Russell Book is filled with innumerable names and faces, but its nice when a random mentioning of a name actually gets their own chapter.

My first friend was born in Esmeraldas, a fairly large and almost entirely black city on the north Ecuadorian coast. He is currently in his early twenties and lives with his sister in Ibarra. Picture Kwame Brown, though slightly darker. He came to Ibarra in search of work, as Esmeraldas was not brimming with job opportunities, and a better life. Probably the equivalent of a young person from Bolinas decides that La Costa Canyon might offer a more hard working less laid back working environment. However, as is the case with much of Ecuador, his job in Ibarra proved to be frustrating as time and time again his pay days are late, or his boss fails to show up to take care of his employees. Nonetheless he is a hard worker, who comes from an honest family, and is trying his best to make a living in the big city. He tried to sign up for English classes, to better his chances of earning more money, but ultimately couldn´t afford the fee (50 dollars for 10 weeks), because of the insecurity of his pay schedule.

Probably sounds pretty pedestrian for life in the third world, but last night I had one of the most endearing conversations since arriving in Ecuador. My friend told me, seemingly on the point of shedding one of those single movie type tears, that I was one of the nicest people he had ever met in his life. Why? Because a white person had treated him as an equal. He explained that he had never talked to a gringo ever, but in the past two days had actually had an extended conversation with me (we walked home from my Supermaxi scavenger hunt because he did not have any money to afford the bus), had another white person (Ally) say hello to him on three separate occations, and had the opprtunity to chat with two other people from the United States that I had introduced him to on the way home from the Supermarket.

The racism in this country is sick. Obviously the United States has a long way to go, but I do not know one person in San Francisco who will refuse to talk to a person of color on principle. For my friend´s whole life he had always wanted to have a Gringo chapter in his book, and now had four different entries thanks to me. I cannot even begin to explain how nice it is when someone makes you feel like you are doing some good down here, and my conversation last night did just that.

My second friend grew up in San Antonio, the wood-sculptor capital of Ecuador. Its located just outside Ibarra, and the artwork that comes out of the small city is beautifully done. He himself is a wood sculptor, so on the way home from Quito I got to pick his brain about life as a craftsmen.

The most feel good part of his story starts with a pair of pants. Hanging out with his Dad one day in a department store, my friend saw a pair of jeans that he really wanted. His own pants were tattered and stretched, so he respectfully asked his father for a new pair of jeans. His father´s reply mildly stung. ¨Son you are 17, it´s time you start making money to buy your own pants.¨

Thus my friend grabbed his best buddy and headed off to visit every wood carving shop in all of San Antonio. They walked in to every master craftsmen and asked if he could benefit from anything-sanding, sculpting, cleaning, aiding, learning-in his shop. After being turned down countless times, my friend finally found a job sanding wood in a shop at the far end of San Antonio. He would be payed money to show up to the shop for ten hours a day. My friend didn´t remember the actual sum, because in those days everything was in sucres.

Thus he explained to me the joy and elation he felt as he picked up his first pay check. While he was describing the story his face literally lit up like the quintissential christmas tree at the memory. And you know what? Mine did too. Who could forget my first pay check written on to the Minnesota Mowers after a week´s worth of serious lawn mowing. In fact, I feel like the first pay check story is one in almost everybody´s life book that provides at least one chapter filled with genuine happiness. In fact, if you ever find yourself depressed or unhappy, just think of the moment you received your first pay check-the first time you held money in your hands that you earned-and I almost guarantee you can provide yourself with a slight smile.

My friend went on to explain how he later went on to begin his own wood carving business, and his first commission were wooden skulls for a local market. He started off being able to make one skull a week, but when the owner of the story told him that she wanted as many of the skulls as he could turn out, he slowly improved his craft to allow him to make one skull a day, later two a day, and finally one an hour.

He also explained his conception of wood working, which I found to be very interesting. He explained that every craftsman starts with something easy, maybe something that his or her father has taught him or her, and slowly works up to the tour de force project. For many sculptors this is the human form, but for my friend he spent the first half of his career preparing to build a horse. We all have had tasks that we put off time and time again, saying that we are not ready, only to finally garner the courage to dive in head on one day.

He later explained his perception of modern art, which I found to be very interesting. He stated that he cannot respect an artist who dives headlong into abstract creations from the beginning. For him, an artist has to first be able to recreate reality, exactly as it appears to the human eye. Once they have succeeded in this endeavor, then they have proof that they are talented enough to not only recreate life objectively, but to recreate life subjectively, which is in essence the point of modern art.

We later discussed one of the biggest perils of Ecuador´s work culture. Basically nobody can get a patent for anything. Thus my friend has created many cool original ideas, but the atmosphere in San Antonio is so tight knit, that people instantly copy good ideas to make them main stream copies and fakes almost immediately. Thus if you are in Ecuador ever, or anywhere for that matter, always look around to see if you can find copies of what seems to be a cool idea. Only then can you be sure to reward the artist who originally conceived the novel project.

Gotta run. Look for a blog about the beach sometime this week.

Supermarkets, Sports, Food, and Arnold

Forgive me as I dont really have a clear idea what the topic of this entry is about, but maybe I will figure it out along the way. Join on in for the ride!

Anyway I started off this past weekend by taking my students to Supermaxi for a scavenger hunt. For those of you not Equa, Supermaxi is your insert name here grocery store. Thus as you travel from west to east through the United States, Supermaxi is your Safeway-Raley´s-Albertson´s-Cub Foods-Country Market- equivalent. (Seems to me I have forgotten the name of the grocery store in New Hampshire. My how time flies). However, as Supermarkets names change as you go across the great US of A, Ecuador has one and only one supermarket. Supermaxi. We´re talking the mother of all monopolies.

Anyway the point of the exercise was for the students to find American made products, and then tell me something about the product by reading the various English writing. For example, one question had the students find a box of Duncan Hines Wild Maine Blueberry Muffins. From there they had to tell me what ingredients were required for the recipe in addition to the mix, and finally they had to summarize the directions for preparation by checking out the back of the box. Two main thoughts stick out from our trip to Supermaxi. The first is that there are a ton of American products sold in Ecuador, but not really the ones you might think. Whereas you might think that something delicious or intelligent might make the transition from US to Ecuador, the fact of the matter is that Supermaxi is filled with Oreo cookies, Betty Crocker, Duncan Hines, and sugared cereals. Post decided that OreoOs would be a valuable addition to Ecuadorian culture, but left out Rasin Bran. I mean you would think that Rasin Bran above all else should be a staple. The second thought seems to have escaped my mind at this point, but it has been replaced by a much more profound nugget of life advice that you can take to the bank. Do not enter a grocery store, or for that matter try to write a blog about a grocery store when you are hungry. Doesn´t work at all.

My weekend was peppered with awesome activities. First was my return to my buddies in the basement facility with a ¨Gimnasio¨sign that hangs outside above the door. I made it a point to slap high fives with all of my old friends like Lou Ferrigno (the dude who played the Hulk back in the day), the dude that played opposite Hulk Hogan in ¨No Holds Barred,¨and of course the Governator. In case you are wondering yes they are all still incredibly huge and incredibly willing to give you that extra boost that you might not get in a different gym that is not collaged with photos of behemoths. If TNT ever gets around to showing the movie ¨Around the World in 80 Days¨, tune in for one of the most absurd Arnold roles of all time. The short of it is that he plays a Turkish sultan who has an affinity for statues. Yes Arnold has an Egyptian queen type black curly fro wig. Yes has a statue of him in his castle that portrays Arnold in ¨The Thinker¨pose. Yes said statue is adorned with a plaque that says, ¨From your buddy Rodin.¨ Yes he takes a hot tub with Jackie Chan, who by the way is wearing one of those early 20th century one-piece horizontal black and white stripe swimsuits that you always see people (read: women) in during those old news reels that played before movies back in the day.

Next on the docket for the weekend was a trip to the birthday party of Ally´s host brother and his girlfriend. In what turned out to be a really interesting day, that opened with a 6.5 rictor scale hangover, Ally and I accompanied about forty or so Ecuadorians up to a Hacienda north of Ibarra. The highlight of my day was my first foray into two ulra Ecuadorian experiences: Voli and Yuaralocro. ¨Voli (pronounced bolee)¨is Ecuador´s version of volleyball. It features three people on a side, a ten foot net, a soccer ball, and the most lenient touch rules of all time. The first player, called the ¨flyer¨is responsible for doing all the running. He plays in the back and dives for every ball. Clearly this was to be my job, as my ¨teammates¨didn´t really feel the need to run when they had a Gringo who had never played to do it for them. The second player ¨the setter¨probably does as much work as Paris Hilton on vacation. His only job is to the set the ball once the flyer tracks it down and hits it perfectly to him. The last player, ¨the placer¨finishes off the bump, set, spike trio, not with a spike (since the last time an Ecuadorian hand reached heights of ten feet was when the whole gravity phenomenom was just getting it´s feet wet), but instead with a savy soft shot aimed at one of the court´s four corners. The highlights of the game for me were swollen and literally black and blue bruised arms from trying to bump a soccer ball for two hours. After the first hour and a half, my arms felt like I was trying to knock over a solid metal rose bush with my forearms. The second highlight was a lot of pats on the back for being a solid first time player. I guess it´s time to start banging my forearms against a wall in preparation for my next game. Got to build up my pain threshold.

Yuaralocro is a true Ecuadorian specialty. ¨Yuara¨means ¨blood¨in Quichua (the indigenous language) and ¨locro¨means soup. Once I found that out I was pleased that my powers of deduction proved to be perfect, as yuaralocro is in a potato based soup broth in which is placed delicious blood sausage. The bloodier the better. You can imagine that my first reaction to the menu announcement was one of slight disapointment, especially when my hangover was screaming bloody murder for a Billy Bob. However, once lunch was served my mood seriously improved. Once I sat down my mind immediately harkened back to the famous Fajita meals served between Baker and Lion in SF. For those of you unfamiliar, for Fajita meals you get a tortilla on a plate, and in front of you are bowls filled with delightful goodies, with which you can make a delicious creation to your liking. Now, in Ecuador, on my plate was a bowl of potato soup, and in front of me were avocadoes, onions, ahi (ecuadorian delicious salsa), mote (ecuadorian corn), salt, pepper, cheese, and, of course, heaps of blood sausage. I quickly stocked my bowl with all the familiar faces, eyed the juicy bloody ground beef looking bowl, and then dug my spoon in. Why not right? You only are in Ecuador once. You will be happy to know that I even went back for a seconds.

I finished off my weekend with a trip to Quito to check out an Ecuadorian soccer game, a movie (at a theater!!), and some Chinese food. I also chatted with one of my closest friends in Ecuador about his profession, which hopefully with be a new entry in the next couple of days.

MindoLindo

So work has been absolutely killing me recently. I currently have three classes, each with 20 or more students, with every single student studying at varying levels of English. It´s going to be a long couple of weeks before I get my feet solidly under me. Some of the most exciting stuff that has happened in Aula (classroom) number two in the past week is that we did a put on\take off cothing relay type race to study the vocabulary words for clothing. Thus I got to see Ecuadorians dressed in all of my clothing which certainly provided a couple of laughs.

So as I mentioned on Wednesday I got to check out Mindo a week ago. The immediate thing one notices about Mindo is that it rhymes with the Ecuadorian word for beautiful. Thus if you could have a weekend retreat in a place called Rutiful, Critty, or Morgeous you would be in the same boat as I was in. However, sometimes my sense of humor doesn´t translate into Spanish. Not one single person thought it was funny when I burst out, ¨MINDO-LINDO!¨In fact they just remarked, ¨Well yes Mindo is a beautiful place.¨

This has happened numerous times. Ally was able to score me a Alvaro Noboa t'shirt on the eve of his destruction in his third presidential race. Thus I brought it my Noboa t'shirt to the clothing race thinking it would get some laughs, but no dice. People take politics VERY seriously here. I guess that makes sense when you have 115 presidents in 100 years. However, sometimes sense of humor is the only way to cope with ridiculous circumstances. My most recent joke bomb was, upon entering into my host family house dripping with sweat (I had just walked about three miles to get home from paying my taxes! YIPPEE I can still go back to the US without getting arrested!) my host brother asked me why I looked so hot. I told her I was going through menopause. Crash and burn Mav. Crash and Burn. I wish I knew how to say ¨Slider (sniff) you stink¨ in Spanish.

Anyway after our rocky re-entry into the country, my now augmented work schedule, and my propensity for telling jokes to a silent audience, our weekend retreat came at a great time.

A couple things about Mindo that proved to be fun.

1) There were no banks in the entire city. We had traveled with 40 dollars between the two of us. Not a good idea. Thus we grovelled around the streets desperately searching for a place that accepted credit cards so that we could eat some dinner. However. We finally found a brand new hotel in the outskirts of town that did in fact accept the plastic. (By ¨outskirts¨, I mean to say that Mindo´s downtown consists of two city blocks. After exiting downtown you enter the suburubs-basically a soccer field and some churches, and arrival in the outskirts demands a 300 yard walk from the center of downtown).

2) We actually encountered some pretty nice people in Mindo, which was a huge pleasure. One of the people was a gent who rented us some decent mountain bikes, which turned out to be the highlight of the trip. Though the bikes were old, and Ally´s gears didn´t work, we did manage to make it up to the top of the mountain. About 6 km to the top, we switched off between biking and walking (much to my masculine chagrin. I would have made it if I wasn´t traveling with a girl obviously) and were able to snap a pretty cool photo of the town from where we were. Nonetheless, thanks to Sir Isaac, ¨What goes up must come down.¨and we promptly bombed the entire hill straight down. Thanks to loose suspension and soft tires the rocks weren´t too bad, and the adrenaline rush was outstanding. Bombing down the mountain´s curving trail all the way to the group of buildings known as Mindo is one of my top 5 best memories of Ecuador.

3) After our bike ride\walk the next coolest part of the trip was an hour we killed lying in our canopy-well mosquito netted anyway- bed before going to dinner. Right at sunset- and this is the best way to explain it- started up a symphony of frogs and toads. It sounded like the most elegant child burping contest in history. As the light faded they got louder and louder, pretty soon the birds chirpped in, and as soon as everything got dark it was time to go to dinner. Awesome experience.

4) Ally cooked her own dinner at the credit card place. When she found her fish to be undercooked she asked the chef what she should do. He said that he way taking a break. So Ally walked out to the grill and cooked her own food. Definitely a first for me and I am sure a huge majority of the United States population. I mean honestly, how many times do you go to a restaurant to cook your own food. Plus we encountered the first Ecuadorian (a waitress) who didn´t know what rum was. We asked for some rum and juice and got to watch this waitress do shuttle runs for twenty minutes bringing contestants back to her boss for the winner of the ¨Which one of these is Rum¨contest. You gotta love times when you feel like you have to be on candid camera or Punkd or whatever.

5) The next morning we checked out a butterfly, orchid, and humingbird ¨living museum.¨Not really knowing what to expect, we went in with marginal hopes only to be pleasantly suprised. I would say that I had the exact same experience with my viewing of the Da Vinci Code. The orchids were, for the most part, slowly dying, but there still was a plethora of different speices and colors. After the orchids we entered the museum´s tour de force: The butterflies. Absolutely spectacular. In what was pretty much a conference room sized space, enclosed by a mosquito net, flapped about 100 butterflies. Everywhere you walked the little buggers darted around, over, under, and next to you (Do you like my prepositions? I really am getting a harness on the English language.) In fact, in one of the best unintentional comedy moments to date, one of the butterflies flew into an Ecuadorian lady´s shirt. She shrieked in terror, while her son filmed the whole thing with the camcorder laughing like a that truant kid everyone had in their class as children (mine was a kid who´s Dad looked like Bram Stoker´s Dracula) who had just succeeded in whoopie cushioning his least favorite teacher. We got some dynamite pics of the butterflies that I will try to put up as soon as I find an internet cafe that allows laptops. The humingbirds were also cool. They sounded like a helicopter, with all their little wing flaps reverberating on top of each other.

6) The bus ride home featured the worst smelling bus in the history of phantom pooped in the corner pranks. It couldn´t have been any worse. The bus helper made three separate trips to case the place with air freshener, sniffing desperately to find the origin of the scent. I mean I really was begging for the candid camera people to make an appearance. How could they not. Sometimes I really wonder if I have actually been placed on some sort of Reality National Lampoons Movie Set.

I hope everyone in the states is doing well. We have our half-way point conference in a couple of weeks, which basically means an expense paid trip to the beach. It´s definitely going to be interesting to see how everyone else is faring in their respective provinces.

Big hugs to everyone.

Kane train

Re-Entry

Greetings!

Please excuse my long absence, but I have been super busy. Allow me to explain.

-When we first arrived the airline lost our bags. If you adjust the pain-in-the-butt meter to allow for the ¨Ecuadorian Effect¨you arrive somewhere in the ballpark of a 10 day impossible to remove splinter or having to do the DMV for two consecutive days.

-One of the volunteers working in my city relocated to a different site for personal reasons and to fill a need left by a volunteer who ¨ET´d¨ (PS there is no way that I am the only person who finds this terminology a little funny. Not only does the person share the outcast label of not being able to hack it in Ecuador, but they also get named after a Someone with extremely long glowing fingers. Tough Break). Since the volunteer left our site with almost no notice, it has been my job (and Ally´s-PS #2 a couple people have asked me about Ally. Yes she lives here and works here and I love her.-If you are interested in Ally´s take on life here please access her blog at www.allyinecuador.blogspot.com) to completely compensate for her absence. That means taking on a whole new crop of students, abandoning some of my older students, and teaching four extra classes per week. I am sure that as soon as I get my feet under me I will be able to resume normal life, but the abruptness of the change has called for some extra devotion to non-blogging, non-exercising, and non-reflecting exercises. Please excuse my absence.

Anyway returning to Ecuador one main thought has been very clear to me. There is a weird paranoia that exists constantly. In the words of old Buffalo Springfield:¨Paranoia strikes deep and into your heart it will creep.¨Couldn´t have related a more true feeling. Living in Ecuador immediately creates a seed of paranoia that slowly grows over time. However since I was home for such a short time, I had acrewed four months of paranoia, left it behind completely in the US, only to return to four months worth the minute I set foot on Ecuadorian soil. I guess I was carrying it along with me while home without even realizing it.

The paranoia, as I am calling it, is most simply that you do not trust a single person that you meet while you are down here. Shopkeepers, taxi drivers, even friends are all subject to these sentiments because so few people actually prove you wrong. For example, the first cab we tried to grab at the airport to our hotel embarked us on our conversation as such:

-8 dollars please.
-No I am sorry miss that price during the day is 2.50. Thus the maximum price should be 5 dollars maximum (nightime prices are double)
-That will be six dollars please.
-(Did you really just say that) Mam, pardon me I dont mean to be rude, but the fair price is 5 dollars.
-5 dollars please.

Awesome. The next cab we tried to grab pretended he didn´t know the location of the most famous hotel in the city since we knew the correct price was 1 dollar. Thus with encounters like these you immediately are on your guard against everyone. Being home reminded me that you could actually trust people to help you out according to fair standards.

In light of all of this I had an epiphany. Since part of our job here is to create exciting lessons that apply the English language to different realistic situations, I have come up with a firm two week unit.

CUSTOMER SERVICE!! That´s right. About four weeks from now my students and I will all embark on a English Langauge excursion that examines the intricacies of being nice to people, not screwing people over who don´t know better, and going the extra mile when that´s your job!

I digress. The point is that I wonder if travelers or minorities in the states have similar sentiments of paranoia at all times. My guess is probably, but there is now way that it could amount to the same degree. The United States is filled with agreements of fairness such as price tags, taxi meters, receipts, street signs, well-labeled maps, etc. So many of the things we take for granted in the States actually give us a strong sense of comfort and relaxation that allows us to actually trust people around us.

Nevertheless, at the beginning of our entire experience here, our directors told us about the ¨cultural adjustment curve,¨which shows the emotional experience someone has adjusting to a new cultural environment. It starts with a high of ¨YIPPEE everything costs less than two dollars,¨drops slightly to ¨How come we have to shower with cold water,¨rises slightly to ¨Well at least the food is cheap and I am learning just so darn much!,¨and then drops. Severely. Something along the lines of, ¨Wow I dont trust a single soul in this country. I might as well crawl into my room and draw on my forehead.¨

It´s at this point that you truly hate your decision. However just around the corner is the highest high of all. It´s the point where you actually accept and love your surroundings. You feel comfortable and excited as you start to become a part of a new life.

According to past volunteers this occurs after month 5, which for me is just around the corner.

Stay tuned. Also look forward to an entry about Mindo maybe this Friday. Ally and I went there to try to get some R and R in light of our paranoia and had a blast.

Abrazos.
Kanedog