choques

thus far my time in ecuador has been surreal. in all my adapting and adjusting and learning, i generally don´t stop and think about where i am. ecuador. south america. the rainforest. but every now and then i have those moments, choques de cultura (culture shock) that strike me when i see or am doing something out of the ordinary for the typical norteamericano. whether they be good, bad, humorous, sad, frustrating, or just plain weird, some notable choques include:

walking into a store and having the first words out of the vendor´s mouth be ¨¿que deseas?¨ for those ingleses it translates to ¨what do you wish for?¨ i´ve kinda gotten used to this, as i probably will get used to all of these choques, but it still bugs me cuz if its a store im not familiar with, i dont know what i ¨deseo¨ (desire). i just want to look at what u have. my typical reply, if i dont know what i want, is ¨estoy mirando¨ (i´m looking). and then the vendor follows u around while ur looking at their goods. it sounds trite and maybe it is, but when u go into 5 or more stores in a day and they all do the same thing, it bugs. but i realize it´s just a difference of cultures is all, maybe an ecuadorian in an american store would be bothered by the lack of it.

washing dishes in my bathroom. i don´t have a sink in the room i call my kitchen, thus, i soak my dirty dishes in a 15 gallon-tub and after a few days when im out of dishes (usually the spoons go first) i have to wash them in my bathroom sink. its not so bad, but when my sink gets clogged i resort to the shower, which seems really odd to me (like the episode of seinfeld where kramer starts cooking in the shower), but at least its pretty effective. i also hang my clothes to dry in my living room. there´s a wire stretched across it at 6.5 feet above the floor. its weird, but hanging stuff outside would take twice as long to dry.

the lack of change, specifically loose change ($). good luck trying to pay for that $3 sandwich with a 20. vendors just dont carry change. dollar bills are like gold here. technically, many of the dollars really are gold, they have an abundance of the gold dollar coins, which is actually good and i kinda wish the US used em more. at least ecuador uses the US dollar as its currency. but its pretty ridiculous when you have to buy twice as much as you wanted just to make sure a store can give u change for your 5 dollar bill. so if u ever visit, ur advised to bring as many dollar bills and loose change as possible.

people love coca cola here. for every cup of water i try to drink per day (8), the avg ecuadorian probably drinks 4 cups of coke per day. the large bottles also only sell in 3 liter bottles. obviously this isnt good unless u own stock in coca cola, as many people here have diabetes. plus, if i drink soda i´d rather have sprite.

pickup trucks (aka camionetas) are popular here, esp. in Tena. i´d say 75% of the autos on the road here are pickups. and a lot of those are owned by govt workers, as tena is the provincial govt. the others are taxis. car ownership isnt that high here. people do have motorcycles here though, which PC volunteers arent allowed to ride. but we are allowed to hop in the back of a pickup and ride into the jungle with 20 other people (15 of them indigenous kids), as i did last week. and pretty much every day i work with the consejo provincial i can expect to be riding in the back of a camioneta for at least an hour, sometimes having to sit on huge bags of fish food or getting soaked by huge tubs of fish-filled water. and getting soaked by the rain. good times.

people don´t like the police here. yeah, this isnt so much a choque, most ppl in the states dont, either. but people here dislike them more, they say cuz theyre more corrupt, which they may or may not be. they call them ´chapas´ here, its like the ecuadorian version of a ´pig´, or 5-0. sometimes they stand around and just hold big automatic guns, its kinda intimidating. yesterday i saw a policia running down the street with an m-14. too bad i didnt have my camera.

having to put a mosquito net over my bed to avoid getting eaten up. actually in the city itself theres not too many bugs. but as a precaution mosquito nets are good. it took me a couple hours to assemble mine. some of my partners that live in the jungle defintely need one. one of them woke up in the middle of the night with a mouse licking her hand through the mosquito net. and there´s always the slight slight chance we get malaria, although its not common at all here. we have to promise our nurses that we´ll take our malaria meds (mefloquine) once a week. and if we dont we can be removed. we started taking malaria a few weeks after we knew we were going to mosquito-infested areas. a side-effect of mefloquine is that it can give u weird dreams, and i would definitely say i had those the first few times i took it. one time i literally knew i was dreaming, but i felt myself being able to control my dream and make it, kind of, into a vivid movie in which i was the director. all i can really remember of it is that it took place mostly in high school and that it lasted longer than i wanted it to.

people here think it gets cold. guess what tenians. . u live in the jungle. it doesnt get cold here. well thats not entirely true, on very rare occassions it gets a little cold here at night, usually when its raining. and if u happen to be riding in the bed of a pickup truck while its raining as i have a few times. but other than that, i´d say its a very constant 75-85 degrees (with humidity, of course it feels hotter). and i thought californians were spoiled about their weather. it gets 50 degrees in so cal and people think its freezing. here when its 70 degrees they think it is. and i tell them, ¨nunca hace frio en tena (its never cold here in tena)¨ , and they just look at me like i´m crazy.

the machismo is ubiquitous. we had a little social studies lesson in training where we learned a little cultural history of south america. i had actually forgotten a lot of the little south american history i ever knew, but we were told that the conquistadores who came from spain came to the new world in search of gold. and some of them were pirates. they didnt come here to escape religious persecution like the pilgrims up north. they came here to reap the benefits of the land. thus, they didnt bring along their families as the pilgrims did, and they often ´conquered´ the indigenous women. anways, what im trying to get at is that some of this conquistador attitude has remained in ecuadorian society, and very often the men whistle, hoot, stare, oogle, hound, and offer themselves to the women (and sometimes girls) here. sometimes one of my coworkers, whose nickname is ¨don gato ¨(because he has green eyes), literally howls at women. and its more than just cat-calls to girls, its in the way the men drive (without fear), how they challenge eachother to drink the most, etc. i know a lot of other places are like this, i´ve just never had to live with it. it´s gonna be strange going back to cali and not completely turning myself around to check out half the girls.

the breastfeeding women. the indigenous women here have many many kids (if u have less than 7 kids people here wonder why so few), and are completely comfortable with just whipping out their boob at a social gathering or just walking down the street. when i go out and visit the kichwa communities and there are say, 25 women in eyesight, 15 of them are holding a child, and of those 15, 5 are freely breastfeeding. i´m not gonna complain, or lie, sometimes i look. lol. but yeah, i definitely get some culture shock at those times.

eating rabbit, cuy (guinea pig), snails, deer, alfalfa, and chicha. i had rabbit along with my fellow oriente volunteers during our technical trip. we killed 2 of them with blows to the head with a hammer and skinned em. im not gonna get into much more detail than that, it was pretty unnerving. we ate it in a soup, it actually tasted pretty good, like chicken but more gamey. i had deer here in tena, in a soup as well, served by a kichwa family i met. it was also gamey as one would expect, but didnt taste as good. i def wouldnt have eaten it had it not already been prepared and served to me unexpectedly. i ate guinea pig back in olmedo where we had training. its more common there in the sierra, its more of delicacy that they serve on special occassions. i had it twice, both times when my host family had extended family visiting. luckily i didnt have to see one killed or skinned. it tastes alright, i dont really see why theyre so popular, id rather eat a chicken. but theyre not too bad, quite salty as are most things in the sierra. snails i also ate in olmedo on one occassion. theyre called chorros. i ate small ones, about the size of raisins, with the shells on, their boiled, and then u just suck them out. i ate em with lime, salt, and aji (hot sauce) out of necessity. not good, slimy as one would imagine. the kichwa outside of tena also eat snails, which are larger, as big as the size of a fist. unfortunately i havent gotten the chance to consume one of those. alfalfa i drank as a ´smoothie´ in olmedo where my family grew lots of alfalfa to feed their 15o+ guinea pigs. it was bright green and actually quite tasty. nonetheless, i felt like a cuy drinking it. then theres chicha which is totally mind-boggling to me. chewing up yuca or chonta, spitting it out, letting it ferment a few days, and drinking it. i´ve now had it 4 times, each time it seems to get worse, although the yuca is slightly better than the chonta version. i will never understand drinking someone else´s spit, no matter how fermented/alcoholic it is.

and last but not least, hearing techno versions of random american songs. from what i hear from my sister, some of europe has the same thing, and the cds themselves probably come from europe. i´ve heard many strange techno cuts, but the weirdest so far are probably ´sounds of silence´, ´if you´re going to san francisco´, and ´losing my religion´. dont ask me. . .

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