On the Daily

In an email from my sister a few days ago, she mentioned that she really had NO IDEA what my life was like down here. I imagine this is true for almost everyone who might think about me on occasion and wonder where I am or what on earth I´m still doing here. SO, I will take this opportunity to give you a little insight into my little world, on a less exciting, more comfortable regular basis.

I´m living in the only hostel in Estero... run by the family of Carmen and Lucho Moreno. When I first arrrived in Estero (almost a YEAR ago) I lived in the hostel until I found a family with which to live. After living with this family for 5 months, Carmen invited me to return to her house and help take care of the hostel and the store they own during the week while she and the kids were living in Atacames. (The kids are going to school in Atacames and come back to Estero on the weekends.) So, I now inhabit a very small corner room with a window on the 3rd floor of the hostel. Stephanie´s duffle bag and Joseph´s back pack are on the floor next to my single bed and are still holding my little wardrobe. I share a bathroom (which is on the 2nd floor) with other inhabitants of the hostel... which at the moment consist of loud, early-rising men who are working on paving only road that passes through Estero.

One of the most challenging and occasionally frustrating aspects of my daily is helping in the little store on the first floor of the hostel. My mental math and random food item vocabulary has drastically improved since the beginning of my stay there. I can also tell you the price of almost every item in our store... which becomes a fun game for me whenever I step into an actual grocery store and start comparing prices. (I get that from my mother.) However, I never realized how much I appreciated the presence of common courtesy that I have always been more or less surrounded by in the States. Of course, there are still occasional rude people polluting the North American environment. BUt, for the most part, we were always taught to be courteous... to wait in line, to say please and thank you, to not yell, to not say ´´give me´´, etc.
Common courtesy is not a part of the culture of Estero de Plátano. As a result, for the first month or so I was personally offended by how rude all of the customers were who showed up at the store, cutting in line and yelling ´´GIVE ME´´. I´ve since learned to accept this part of the people that I´ve grown so attached to... but I still force them to say please and thank you and scold them like children when they yell or cut in line. This isn´t Vietnam, this is a TIENDA, THERE ARE RULES.

I still teach in the school every day and wash my clothes in the river less often than all of the other women in the community. (They wash almost 4 times a week.) Like many of you all, my friends (and family) here make sure I´m taking my vitamins and make me clean my room and brush my hair more often that I would like to. My afternoons are usually spent helping high-school kids with their homework, having meetings with the youth group, selling in the store, cleaning the hostel, eating fruit, going to harvest something in a farm, or laying in a hammock reading.

A few weeks ago I led a health-sanitation workshop with a fellow Yanapuma volunteer for a small group of people that live up the hill from the pueblo of Estero. We had previously sent a sample of their river water to a laboratory in Esmeraldas for analysis and wanted to use the results as kind of a basis for the workshop. The purpose of the workshop was to explain the cycle of disease.... what causes disease, what is contaminating the rivers, how this contamination leads to disease, and how they can prevent so many diseases. They were really interested in what we had to say and were extremely grateful for our willingness to teach them. It was awesome. Gratifying moments such as these in which I feel useful have been relatively rare during my time here in Ecuador. It was a good day. I think we really got through to them. I´ll be teaching this same workshop to the kids in the school, Viña del Mar, in addition to a few other groups of people in the pueblo (hopefully).

I spent most of last week helping a volunteer group from England work on a few various projects in the school. Only two of the 12 of them could speak Spanish... thus I spent most of my time translating for them and the men from Estero with whom they were working. This, in itself, was not only gratifying but extremely entertaining as I have ALWAYS found the british accent to be extremely entertaining. On occasion I was unable to translate for the volunteers because I had no idea what they were saying. For example...¨Could you tell him that I was going to buy a LOLLY-ICE?¨ (Stephanie, say that in your best british-man accent.) I burst out laughing and told him that I had never heard the word lolly-ice in my life. Anywho, the volunteers painted a beautiful mural on the dining hall of the school and left 2 weeks later. I´ll try to get a picture for all you beautiful people real soon.

Confession: I, along with almost all of Ecuador, am addicted to nightly television shows-soap operas. This is what I do every night during the week in the company of about 7 grown man friends... from about 8:30 to 11:00. I wash the dishes from dinner and clean the kitchen during the commercial breaks. I´m sure this is way more than you ever wanted to know about my daily.