Month 10: It’s a New Year and a fresh start

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Christmas lights are coming down and the snow is melting from 2010’s last storm. It was a year of challenges, travel, sickness, and things left unfinished. It’s finally 2011 and it’s time to move on.

What does the New Year hold for me? Good health I hope. On New Years Eve while people toasted the coming year and threw back glasses of Champaign I downed my last dose of medication hopefully putting the toxoplasma gondii in their place for good.

My friends and family keep asking me if I’ll be returning to Peace Corps in 2011. For now my answer is yes, I think so. I want to go back because I feel completely dissatisfied by my first Peace Corps experience. I was there for eight months and looking back, my few accomplishments seem small. I integrated into a community, became part of a wonderfully warm family and experienced the richness of Ecuadorian culture but I didn’t learn as much as I thought I would, I didn’t push myself as much as I could have, and I didn’t contribute to my community like I wanted to. For the most part I stumbled around in the dark trying to figure out where to start.

When I first got sick I felt like I was on brink starting projects and getting things moving. And when I got medically separated I thought I would be back in few weeks, healthy and motivated, ready to get started again. Now it’s been a few months, I’m still not healthy and my doctor recommends I find a new place to live because I have a high risk of developing complications if I get dengue again.

On Christmas day I called my host family to wish them Feliz Navidad and tell them I will come back to visit one day but I wont be able to call their village my home again. It broke my heart to hear them tell me that they are almost finished building my house, and that the girls in my environmental club are always asking about me, and the tomatoes I planted from seeds in my first month are finally ripe, and my cat is pregnant, and they all miss me very much.

I hung up the phone and cried, wishing I was still there and that I had never gotten sick.

Now I face the decision; do I go back to Ecuador, start fresh at a new site, and hope that I get the things out of Peace Corps that my last experience was lacking? Or do I move on and look back at it as an experience that was difficult and didn’t quite work out how I imagined it. After all, sometimes that’s the way life is.

I want to try again, because I think if I had stayed longer I would have had a wonderfully fulfilling experience. But first I need to get my physical and mental health back. To do that I’m going to finish something I started last year. Last year I started working as a ski instructor but left mid-season to join Peace Corps. If my health is good enough I’m scheduled to start back in a few weeks. I’ll get to spend everyday outside in the Colorado Rockies sharing my love for skiing with a bunch of kids. A few months of that should heal my aching heart and broken down sprit.

Month 9: I thought Peace Corps would be easy.

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Last November I was living at my mom’s house, with no job, no school, no boyfriend, and no income. I did have one thing however; a nomination to serve as a Peace Corps volunteer in Latin America. It’s been a year since then and suddenly I find myself in an oddly similar position, except I have no nomination, just a few peoples’ word that when I get better I’ll get to go back.

I’m home in Colorado recovering. I was medically separated in October because around mid-August I got sick with toxoplasmosis and dengue fever (I know, again right?). It’s a longer recovery than anyone, including myself, expected. It’s been hard. Especially the time I spent at my site sick, unable to work or do much of anything. Its funny. I had zero expectations for Peace Corps except for one maybe. I didn’t expect it to be hard. I have international experience; I’ve done over a dozen home stays, taken fifty-hour bus rides, lived without electricity, and made friends around the world. What could possibly make Peace Corps so hard?

I was at my site for 6 months and the hardest thing for me was not being good at my job, or even really knowing what my job was. I’m used to being good at what I do but with Peace Corps it’s really hard to be good at anything in your first few months, at least that was my experience. One of the coolest and hardest things about Peace Corps is that they drop you off at your site and leave you to figure out what to do, which can take months or maybe even years.

Just before I got sick I was finally finding my place in the community. My home stay family was building me my own house, and we finally finished building a fence to keep the geese out of the garden we started. The girls in my environmental club were excited about our meetings and we had big plans for the future. My counterpart organization applied for money from US Aid to do a crab population study and it looked promising. I still had a long way to go, but it was finally starting to feel like there was purpose in me being there.

Nine months ago I was packing for Ecuador jumping in blindfolded without looking back. Now I’m at home looking back at my last nine months wondering if I should go back. I flip through photos of my host family and little nine-year-old Roxanna. I see beautiful Ecuador and Quito the city surrounded by snow-capped volcanoes. I see the mountains and the mangroves and I miss it.

I thought about going back a lot when I first got home, but now I mostly just think about getting better. It’s been a rough few months and no matter what I do I just want to get back to living and loving life.

Month 5:When there´s no coffee houses

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A few weeks ago I went up to Cuanca to spend the night. The bus ride up passed through a cloud forest completely submerging us in fog. When we emerged the sun cleared the steamy windows and it was like I was in a different country. Mountains thick with vegetation that had waterfalls running through them like veins surrounded us. Bellow was an ocean of clouds, which gave me the odd sensation that the mountains were floating.

When I got to Cuanca I couldn’t stop staring open mouthed at the beautiful architecture and clean streets. I’ve gotten so used to seeing garbage that its absence feels oddly strange. It was wonderfully sunny and so I enjoyed a few hours strolling around the downtown.

I happened across a small flower market. I asked one of the vendors if I could take her picture. She smiled and we started chatting. After a few minutes she carefully picked out one of her plumpest red roses and gave it to me. This is why I love Ecuador, I thought to myself.

Ecuador is truly beautiful. When I was in Cuanca I admit I had tinge of jealousy for the Peace Corps volunteers that get to enjoy the beauty and modern comforts of the sierra. As I descended the bus ride back to coast I noticed the garbage and all the half built cement houses and thought of Cuanca, but then I noticed the tropical vegetation glowing in the pink sunset and it felt good to be going home to my little coastal village.

Since my trip to Cuanca I’ve tried to take notice of something beautiful every day, whether it be a butterfly flying over me as I backstroke up the river, or the smell of fermented cocoa as they dries, or a man carrying his giant chow dog on the handlebars of his bicycle. It helps to notice these things especially on those days that feel less than exciting.

Having been her over five months, this month was the first time I ever felt bored. The excitement of being somewhere new has worn off and it’s defiantly a learning process figuring out how to fill my time. It’s not exactly like Denver where when all else fails you can at least go out and get a cup of coffee. There aren’t coffee shops here. In fact there isn’t even a single restaurant in my village.

As the weeks pass my days slowly get fuller. It isn’t the USAid meetings or working on my census of the 140 families in the association of crab fisherman that make my days feel fulfilling but rather things like taking the kids to the river and teaching them to swim or going running through the cocoa and banana plantations.

I don’t live in the most comfortable city in Ecuador, or the most beautiful village, but I like my small little village off the Pan American highway. There doesn’t appear to be anything special about it. It looks like any other coastal village except it feels like home.

Month 4:I live here

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In the mornings the milkman rides by with his 25-gallon bucket wedged in front of him on his bicycle. He whistles as he passes and women run out of their houses to catch him and pay their 75 cents for a liter of milk. In the afternoon the bread-man rides by with basket of sweet breads strapped to the back of his bike. Kids run out with nickels and dimes to buy their afternoon snack. A few trucks drive by daily selling things like mattresses, avocados, dressers, and weed-whackers. They don’t exactly sell door to door. Instead a man sticks his head out the window and yells the name of his product over and over.

Living out in a small village I expected a blissful quiet where I would go to sleep to the sounds of crickets and wake up to songbirds. The only birds I hear are ducks, roosters, pigeons, and geese. I didn’t expect the traffic of deliverymen or the ‘my stereo is bigger than your stereo’ daily competitions between neighbors. Dogs bark all night here, pigeons pound on the tin roofs and the Pan American highway can always be heard in the distance. Suburbia, where my neighbors would complain if my dog barked at night and call the cops if I didn’t do anything about it, seems worlds away.

It’s been four months since I arrived in Ecuador. I’m still enjoying the newness of it all and feel settled. I am getting to know the people in my community and figuring things out like who sells the ten-cent chocolate covered bananas and where is the best swimming spot at the river. I’ve bought my own bicycle and got a cat. I live here. I’m not just visiting.

Even after two months living at my site, I see new things every week. Last weekend my family killed a pig to celebrate father’s day. The week before one of the congrejeros (crab fisherman) and his kids took me for a walk up into the mountains where, about two hours in, there’s a tiny village and after that natural hot springs. From the path walking up we could turn around and see above the mangroves all the way to the ocean. Being about four hours from the nearest beach I forget how close the water actually is.

I’m working more now that I know my way around, but I don’t schedule, which I love. I teach at the school about twice a week, English and environmental education. I’m working on a census of all the congrejeros in the association and I am starting an organic garden outside my house with the village kids to hopefully use as an example for other community members that want to start gardens. I finally feel like I have some idea of what I can do here, though I am learning more every day.

It’s comfortable here. I have enough work where I never get board yet I have plenty of time to read books and write letters. I’m never lonely and though I wish the dogs would stop barking and trucks wouldn’t honk so much on the Pan American, I like the whistling of the milk man and sound of my neighbor’s parrot calling her name when she is away at elementary school, “Roxanna, Roxanna.”

Isla Manglares

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From May 18, 2010

I went to an Island made of mangroves. I arrived by boat with US Aid and a handful of members from the crab association. We disembarked and the whole community came out to greet us. Children caring silk flags of Ecuador lined the street leading us to the school.

Everything was gray. The ground was thick and lumpy with cracked dry mud. Not one blade of grass or even a weed grew. The gray cement houses looked like they were sinking into the mud. The children with their brightly colored flags and the men and women with their colored T-shirts stood out like they had wandered into a black and white photo where they didn’t belong.

Every association wore a different color shirt. There were five in total including my own association. The members shook hands and the association presidents made speeches. The women from my association disappeared with the women from the island to make lunch.

As we were waiting for the food I asked questions about how an island so unfit for people could sustain the 1,500 families that live there. They told me all their fresh water and food come in on boats from Guayaquil. Every family on the island works as crab fisherman and they trade their crab for vegetables and supplies. The island floods a lot. The mud is deep and fills the houses and they have to cancel school because the teachers don’t come.

Mud days just don’t sound as fun as snow days.

A man that worked for US Aid told me that Peace Corps was sending a volunteer in August. I envied her getting to live in someplace so remote and have the hardcore experiences that people think about when you say Peace Corps. But realistically it was hard to imagine how the people who had spent a lifetime there were surviving, let alone a gringo accustomed it internet, cell service, and oh yeah, drinking water.

When I had gotten off the boat a man with a button down shirt, slicked back hair and black trousers greeted me and shook my hand. As we were getting ready to leave he found me.

“We need boats,” he said. “What if there is an emergency? We need them to get to Guayaquil.”

He pulled a man from US Aid in to the conversation. He was also American.

“We need a dispensary. We have no place to take our children when they are sick,” he told us.

White people work for organizations with money but I’m not one of them. I wasn’t sure how to tell him that. He looked at me and I could tell he knew it was a long shot. The shear fact that he was asking me spoke volumes about how few opportunities they had to get help. I told him that I worked in natural resource conservation and maybe in August if a volunteer comes to work with them in health maybe she can help.

I think her experience will be profound and more than anything I wish her luck. The island truly is beautiful, and people are warm and have bright smiles but they are constantly fighting to stay above the mud.We left in our boats and as we approached the river entrance leading to our own mangrove forests a pod of at least twenty dolphins surrounded our boat. We watched them for the good part of an hour and then headed back in the setting sun to mainland.

Month 3: So what am I doing here?

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This morning three boys stood outside my living room window. One stuck his little hands through the bars to pull the curtains aside to get a better look at me.

“Hello,” he said.

I looked up at them and then like a gaggle of well trained parrots the started chirping,“hello, hello, hello,” over and over again.

They watched me for quarter of an hour as I ate my breakfast. Their voices then followed me as I got up and went into the kitchen to do the dishes. “Hello, hello, hello.”

This is pretty normal for me. After just three weeks of living in my community I’m still a spectacle. People are curious. A lot of them have never met a white person in real life and they’re not really sure what I’m doing here. To be honest I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing here.

It’s not like studying abroad or traveling. As student or traveler people know exactly why you’re there and where you fit into society. I’m a volunteer, which is a strange concept in Ecuadorian culture. It’s hard for me to explain when people ask what I will do as a volunteer here in the next two years because I’m still figuring it out.

I haven’t done much in the last three weeks. When I arrived I was sick with la gripe or in English, a bad cold. As soon as I started getting better I got dengue fever, which for those of you who have never heard of it, it comes from mosquitoes, gives you a fever and makes you feel like your bones are breaking. So I’ve been taking slow.

I’m feeling mostly better and next week I’m going to try and start working— getting to know the crab association better and perhaps helping out in the elementary school doing environmental ed. The great thing about having two years here is that there’s really is no hurry to figure out everything in the first month. I’ve got time to settle and work out where exactly I fit in.

My community is small. There are about 200 people where I am living and 1500 where I work about 10 minutes down the road. All the women my age have kids. I think my host family is worried that I am already 23 and not married. There is and expression in Ecuador for old maids like myself; el tren se fue, or the train has left. They have graciously offered to make space for me on their land for me and my future Ecuadorian husband.

Not wanting to settle down quite yet, I’ve figured it’s a safe bet to hang out with the kids in my family. Everyday they come up to my living room window and ask me when we are going to play cards or ride bicycles. They never try and marry me off but they do wonder why I talk so funny. I once told them that I can speak English almost perfectly, but most of them didn’t believe me.

At nighttime we walk up and down the only street in my village holding hands. All their friends run curiously behind us. Sometimes it feels a bit odd to spend so much time the kids but they do every thing they can to make me feel like I belong; whether it be incessantly chanting the only English word they know as I eat my breakfast or teaching me Ecuadorian card games. It takes awhile to integrate into a place, and it’s nice to know that I already fit in somewhere even if I’m three times older than my new friends.

Month 1: the road to Ecuador

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A few months ago I was writing the epilogue to my memoir about volunteering at an animal refuge in Bolivia. I wrote:

“I want to head back to South America in the next year, but I don’t think I will make it to Ambue Ari. I’ve been there, and I’ve moved on, but I’m not done with animals or the jungle. Some friends I met in Bolivia when I was there with my sister started up a rescue center of their own in Ecuador. Maybe I will stop by.”

I didn’t exactly follow through with my plans. Instead I applied for the Peace Corps and marked Africa as my preference. But still I ended up here in Ecuador assigned to a site on the coast, down the street from an animal rescue center. That’s just how life works. Sometimes you start heading down a road and you never turn back.

I started down this road when I was 17 and my sister took me across Bolivia and Argentina to travel and volunteer. Since then I have turned down many different paths from that road. They took me back to Argentina where I studied Spanish, back to Bolivia where I worked with animals, to Denver where I studied writing and then to Thailand where I studied sustainable development.It seems like this whole time I’ve been driving down this road towards Ecuador, to do exactly what I’ve been assigned to do.

Ok. So here is my assignment. I will be working with the local crab association in a small community helping them harvest crabs sustainably and protect their mangroves. In addition I will be helping them find income generating activities like eco-tourism and helping a women’s group start up their crap pulp business. I won’t completely understand my role in the community until I get there of course, but from what I understand so far, it seems like a great place to work for the next two years.

My counterpart is an Ecuadorian woman who has been working with the association for years, but doesn’t have the time to be in the town everyday. Her family owns a farm 15 minutes away where they grow bananas, cocoa, and take care of rescued wild life. She also breads threatened species of local parrots to be re-introduced into the wild. She studied ecology at CSU in Fort Collins and claims to have learned English in ski school in Colorado when she was a kid. She is way cool.

I still have about three weeks of training left before I get to move to my site permanently. My host family there has already contacted me since I left my site visit to remind me of how excited they are to have me. I’m excited to be there to. I’m sure in the next two years the road will be windy, full of ups and downs, but that’s what makes life exciting and I wouldn’t want it any other way.