Habla Serio

WARNING…the first two paragraphs of this post are a vent session about my host family here.  I have calmed down since writing this about a week ago and have come to terms with the fact that I only have to deal with them for about 6 more weeks.  Feel free to skip over them. 

I cannot stand my host family.  Granted there are some good days, where I actually feel as though we get along but usually it is just when I’m hanging out with Vito, the only cool/relatively sane member of the family/ 13 year old.  When they all get together, that is a completely different situation.  First of all, there are now ten of us living in this little house.  Patricia and her two kids moved in about a week ago because they were kicked out of their house.  So, now I have Patricia and Leonor ganging up on me about everything.  Half of the time I feel like they don’t listen to anything I say and the other half of the time they are contradicting what I am saying.  None of my ideas or inputs are every right with Leonor…she knows all.  She is never at fault for anything and always yelling and making up excuses.  An example: She convinced the county to come and pick up our trash.  In order for the truck to come we had to cut down some branches and build platforms for the trash.  We had about 3 weeks to do this.  I pestered both Leonor and Jefferson a lot about having a minga to build them.  Well, no one did anything.  The trash man came when he was supposed to and there was no trash and no platforms.  He stopped by the house, yelled at Leonor saying the community was unorganized, etc.  When I said, I told you so to Leonor, she flipped out and came up with a whole slew of reasons why is wasn’t her fault (the trash man drove the route backwards, he went too fast, the other people in the community didn’t build their platforms either, etc).  She also constantly contradicts herself.  Another example: She has a family plot of cacao near a fellow volunteer of mine (this volunteer happens to be a 50-yr-old male).  She wants this volunteer to work with her cacao and teach her things.  I told her that he would appreciate that because people in his community don’t trust him with cacao.  I then went on to say that people here don’t trust me with cacao either.  She says well, you don’t have cacao in your country, and haven’t worked with it before, so why would we trust you.  I agreed with that but then I asked why she would trust the other volunteer when he is from the same country as me and doesn’t have experience with it either.  She didn’t know how to respond to that and made up some excuse that I didn’t even bother to understand.  I am sick of her thinking that I am a dumb child.  

Most of the time I feel like she is lecturing me like I’m a ten year old and telling me all of the things that I should know how to do at this point in my life, like giving people injections for example (because that is totally legal in the US and definitely useful).  They are constantly criticizing me on my appearance, how I’m fat, ugly when I don’t wear makeup or my hair down, how all of the mosquito bites on my legs are hideous, how the new pimple on my face is really red, etc.  I realize that this a cultural thing and I put up with it, but it gets old when one person in the family makes a comment and then the 8 others make the same or a similar comment soon after.  They also say that I don’t know anything about the US because I don’t know all facts of Mike Tyson or Michael Jordan’s lives.  The whole Danny issue is getting really old as well, I am sick of going places with Leonor and them asking her if I’m the new daughter-in-law.  And then there is the whole issue with my ‘love kitten;’ the kitten that Danny gifted me.  The kitten likes to meow a lot and I can’t control it no matter how much I give it to eat or refuse to feed it.  In return the family likes to yell at me about my annoying cat, and they constantly ask me what I would do if they were to kill it or if the dog were to eat it or if a car were to run over it.  At first I just thought they were joking but then I found out that they killed four cats in the past with rat poison because they were annoying them.  I’m concerned for my poor kitten.  I’m concerned for my sanity.  I’m concerned that I am going to snap one day and just freak out and start screaming at all of them in English like a crazy person.

Other than issues with my family everything is going alright here.  I’ve been doing a random assortment of things to pass the time.  I harvested corn (they let it dry before they harvest it…you basically shuck the cob from the stalk) and de-grained corn (taking all the kernels off the cob to sell by the pound) by hand one week.  They brought in an old rickety machine one day though to finish the de-graining job.  In the end we had 107 quintales (100 lb. bags) of corn to sell.  I’ve gone to some APROCAI meetings and pruned some more cacao trees, but haven’t gotten to work with it too much.  We had a minga to weed/landscape the park (everyone landscapes with machetes…pretty cool to watch them perfectly trim a bush with a machete), a minga to lay hosing for water in the school (they actually accepted an engineering idea I had about the part of the hosing under the road), and built the trash platform in front of my house (nobody else has built theirs yet).  I have harvested and sold coffee (it is $30 for a 100 lb. bag of mixed ripe/unripe).  I run with a group of kids in the afternoons and then we play Frisbee or soccer after (the women I had running with me are now conveniently washing their clothes every time I come by to get them).  I have a pretty good following of kids in the town; they see me with the Frisbee and they head to the soccer field.  I’m still teaching English in the school two times a week.  After an awful week where a kid left crying, chaos in the classroom, and multiple headaches, I managed to keep them under control this past week and think that I have found a good balance of teacher and friend with the kids.  I got MAGAP (the ministry of Ag in Ecuador) to donate seeds for family gardens so we’ll hopefully be starting those soon.  I went with Jefferson and some other APROCAI members to an entrepreneurship class (a 2-week certification class set up by a government organization here) two days.  The class was interesting because I have never been to an adult learning class in the states or in Ecuador.  The teacher liked to pick on me a lot since she remembered the name of the Gringa.  It was, however, kind of fun to be able to answer questions and participate in class just as well as all the others, even though it was all in Spanish.  I’ve also gone to countless other meetings of all of the random groups in my little town.  I am amazed by how many different councils they have for a town of less than 200 people. 

I went to Riobamba one day to go to a ‘rally’ of sorts for the support of my provincial governor.  I am technically part of the province of Chimborazo which is mostly sierra; BA is one of the only coastal towns.  Thus, most of the people at the rally were indigenous Quechua speakers of the Sierra.  Most of them were dressed in their brightly colored ponchos and shawls, ornate jewelry, and bowler hats.  It was a really cool experience to be surrounded by literally thousands of indigenous people and see how much support they had for this governor and the projects he was supporting.  Mayors from certain regions gave speeches about all kinds of development projects that the provincial government was helping them with and everyone would cheer after every project.  Most projects were fairly simple, helping to better the most crucial things, such as health.  Then, the mayor of Cumandá got up and started to give his speech and talked about the millions of dollars that were used for the highway project in town and the millions more that they were going to use to get the irrigation project started.  The crowd was silent.  It was refreshing to see how the people were unimpressed by numbers/money.  And it kind of made me sad that I wasn’t placed in the Sierra in an indigenous community.  People in Cumandá are mostly mestizo and are super into status and money.  Some people in BA are like this too, especially my host-family.  I thought leaving the states I would get away from the brand names and technology, but people here can’t get enough of it.  My family says they don’t have enough money to buy fruits and vegetables regularly but after the next corn harvest they said they are going to get DirecTV.  It blows my mind how their priorities are so different from what I think they should be.  I think this will be an issue that I’ll have over the next two years.

Random Thoughts:

• My neighbor (who I have only seen once) likes to blast music at 5 am every morning.

• When men take a break from working or from playing soccer they like to lift up their shirts to expose their stomachs, rub them, and walk around like that for a while.  I guess it is their way of cooling off. 

• Most of the kids in my town have nicknames and most happen to be animals; my favorite kids are Cat and Frog.

• My cat has fleas.  I brought a flea collar from the states (bought it at the Dollar Store) and decided since it was too big for my kitten I would just rub it all over and hopefully that would kill the fleas.  Well she proceeded to lick herself after that and then went absolutely crazy for the rest of the night…I woke up to her dry-heaving and throwing up on my bed.  I think I drugged the poor cat.

• It is really easy to tell the men of Cumandá and Buenos Aires apart.  The men in Cumandá wear button up short sleeve shirts that are only buttoned up a little ways so that their chest hair is exposed but their beer bellies are covered up.  And the ‘v’ part of their chest is also normally sun burnt. 

• We go through a liter of palm oil every 3-4 days.

• Pepito bought me an empanada while watching the Saturday soccer match in BA.  I got violently ill the next day and could not keep water or food down at all…I have never thrown up so much in my life.  In the morning my family told me that I was exercising too much and that made me sick.  Later in the afternoon, my little host brother said I was pregnant.  In the evening my family finally accepted that I must have eaten something bad.  Leonor sits me down and begins to rub an egg all over my face and body and she keeps blessing me with it.  She then breaks the egg into a glass of water and ‘reads’ it.  Apparently my egg was clean so I wasn’t really sick…ok did she want to see my vomit in the toilet or outside of my window?  Regardless, I will not be eating any more empanadas.

• I used animals to teach the kids the alphabet.  Two kids got into a fist fight after class because the one kept calling the other Pig…whoops.

• I met a guy after a meeting one day that lived in Chicago for 30 years, retired, and moved back here.

• My ten year old host sister has a Freudian oral fixation issue.  When she is upset she wants to breastfeed.  I have witnessed her actually do this with Leonor…disturbing. 
•  People in BA know a select number of English phrases that they like to use frequently, normally at incorrect times.  They include ‘Let’s go,’ ‘Shut up,’ ‘Thank you very much,’ and ‘One moment please.’

• I have absolutely no table manners anymore.  Every meal I have a spoon in my right hand, a piece of meat in my left hand, both elbows on the table, and a wide open mouth to shovel in the rice.

•  Sometimes I feel like I am in a horror movie in the mornings when everyone heads out to the farms.  It is still kind of dark, normally misting a little, and everyone is walking down the street with a machete in hand, a Ghostbuster-style backpack sprayer on their back, and in large rubber boots.