Brittany: The end is here

Soo….I am back from the beach. It was amazing—really relaxing and I got a lot of sun (maybe a little too much…)

It is hard to believe I have been here for 3 1/2 months! I am excited to see everyone, but am worried I may die from the cold! After the Amazon and then the coast I have lost all tolerance for cold. It is 50 degrees in Quito today, and I am freezing!

I´ll leave you with two quick lists…

Things I Miss from the USA:

• Good chocolate
• Real coffee
• Washing machines and dryers
• Flushing toilet paper
• Driving myself anywhere
• The food
• Spices of any kind—anything but salt!
• Drinking water from the tap
• Having more than one week´s worth of clothes
• Eating healthy
• Independence
• American boys
• Animal Control
• Brownies and cookies

Things I Will Miss from Ecuador:

• Traveling on a whim
• Fresh juice in the morning
• Raspberry-coconut batidos (juice with milk)
• $1.25 beers (and they´re nearly twice the size of the standard US bottle)
• The music
• Waking up to mountains or jungle or ocean
• Cheap fruit (especially $.20 granadias)
• The flowers
• Kissing on the check to say hello and goodbye
• Magnum icecream bars (yes, that is really their name)
• So few responsibilities

Brittany: Leaving Tena

Photos with my family from my last day in Tena.

Brittany: Almost the end

It is my last week in Quito. The program ends tomorrow and then I’m off to the coast for a week and then returning to the US on December 20!

I got back from the Amazon during the Fiestas de Quito, a weeklong celebration of the founding of Quito. There were a ton of events throughout the city and the nightlife was on steroids.

I also went to my first soccer game (finally!) with my host family. My host dad’s team lost, but it was still fun. We ate at Pizza Hut after, which was way fancier than in the United States and they had a play place. I’ve been doing some last minute site-seeing with my friends, too.

Here are some photos of the past week:

Brittany: Adios Amazon

I am leaving Tena tomorrow! I am ready to move on, but the time flew by. I will be in Quito for one week, and then Friday, Dec. 10 is the last day of the program! I will then be traveling with a friend until Dec. 20. Can’t believe it is almost time to come home!

Some observations and random thoughts from being in Tena:

• I have had regular Internet access in my house while living in the Amazon, but have gone days without running water.

• There is nothing discreet about breastfeeding here. When it is time, women just whip out a boob, no matter where they are. A good example? The other day I saw a women breastfeeding while riding a motorcycle.

• It is very interesting/hilarious to watch the news. The national and local level regularly bring out a newspaper and talk about the stories published on the front page. The camera even zooms in on the paper in the broadcaster’s hand.

• Tena is a cute tourist town, but also has alarming rates (at least in my opinion) of suicide, teen pregnancy and drunk driving.

• There are a ton of government commercials on TV. They are about eating healthy or people with disabilities or being proud to be a black Ecuadorian.

• There is this horrible show called “Heroés Verdaderos” or “True Heroes.”  It is on Sunday nights and my family loves it. It is about famous people—actors or models, although once they had the captain of the national police—who go to really poor neighborhoods in Ecuador, find a family, and then live there life for a few days. So basically, they just talk about how rough these people have it in a really condescending way. Of course, they do have it rough—no indoor plumbing, living in shacks, one bed for the whole family. One guy had to work like 20 hours a day; his kids even help. At the end of the show, the family comes to the TV studio where the host, a model, gives them things to make their life better. They give out each prize one by one—silverware, sink, beds—until the end where they give them a house. It is like Extreme Home Makeover…but way worse. Of course there is no discussion of the fact these people will still make maybe $5 a day, even with a nice new house.

–Brittany Libra

Brittany: Some silly things

The park (Parque Amazonica, where my internship is) received a $50,000 grant from the US Embassy—they fund different development projects—to build a science center/library on the island. The grand opening was a few days ago and so the US Ambassador to Ecuador, an entourage of embassy people, the Mayor of Tena and other local government people all attended.

Afterward, Anna and I were invited to a lunch event with our boss, the ambassador, the mayor, and their respective groups.  It was a little awkward—I felt like we had no business being there—but we got to go to this delicious restaurant and had a tasty, free lunch.

The gift giving began once everyone was done eating. The mayor gave traditional jewelry to the ambassador, like a “on behalf of Tena” thing, and the ambassador had things for the mayor and my boss. The event was winding down, but then out of nowhere, the mayor made Anna and I come up in front of everyone!

He apparently had two extra necklaces and thought it be a good idea to give them to the two random American girls. So we had to go stand at the head of this long table of people, say where we were from and why we were in Tena, and then the mayor slipped necklaces over our heads. It was pretty ridiculous.

Then, after work I went over to Julia’s house. She lives above a store, and so to get to her front door you travel down a long enclosed hallway beside the store that is open to the street. Once inside, you go up some stairs, through another door and then there is her house.

That explanation really is necessary because when I went to leave, I couldn’t open the front door! Someone had come and stacked giant bags of detergent all the way down the hallway so the front door couldn’t open all the way.

It was so absurd that Julia and I about died laughing. The door could open about 6 inches, so we tried scooting the bags out of the way. I tried squeezing my body through the crack. I contemplated trying to shove myself through and then climbing over the bags.  We even considered finding a window to climb out of. I was literally stuck inside her house! Luckily before I tried the last option, this guy came and moved the bags for us.

That describes my general experience in Ecuador well. I often feel out of place and strange things are always happening that don’t quite make sense, but it always works out in the end and makes for a good story!

–Brittany Libra

Brittany: Parque Amazónico internship

I enjoy my internship, although it has little to do with my academic/career interests or my final project for the semester.

As I explained briefly before, I am working the Parque Amazónico. It is on an island (well, technically a peninsula) in the river that goes through the center of Tena.  The municipal government runs it, and its purpose is environmental conservation and education.

It is free to visit, and one of my jobs is to give tours to visitors. There are a lot of plants and a decent amount of animals. (The only snakes I have seen are the boa and the anaconda they have here, both of which are safely secured in a cage). There is also a big observation tower from which you can see the Sumaco Volcano.

A flood in spring 2009 destroyed a lot of the park’s infrastructure, including the bridge that connected the island to mainland.  Now, people have to come across in canoes.  That is also how Anna and I have to get there. There are plans for a new bridge… but government moves slowly and there isn’t a lot of money for such a big project.

Anna and I also work in the office some days across from the island on the mainland, doing random jobs.  Most days we work a lot in the mornings, have two hours for lunch, and then spend the afternoon waiting for 4:00 so we can leave. Sometimes there just isn’t that much to do, or our boss doesn’t use us as much as he could. In a typical week we work Monday through Friday, 8 to 4.

The last two weeks have been really busy. Last Wednesday was the first day of our “Day in the Park” program. We invited fifth graders from 10 schools around Tena to come to the island at different times over the next two weeks for a special program geared toward kids. The theme is the connections between animals, plants and humans, and we give the kids a tour and play a game, all connecting back to that theme.

So far it has been pretty exhausting. Sometimes the kids are super crazy. And last Thursday, a school came on the wrong day and two schools came late so we ended up having three schools there at once. That meant Anna and I were basically dealing with 100 kids at once!

Overall I enjoy the job. And, of course, getting to play with the park’s monkeys doesn’t hurt…

–Brittany Libra

Brittany: Boys, bugs and beer

It is getting to that point where I really need to write my final paper for the semester, and I really don’t want to.  I have been interested in oil the whole time I’ve been here (and before), but a few days ago I got it into my head I’d rather write about teen pregnancy and compare cities to rural communities.  But it is too late to change and so oil it is…

I’ve accepted the fact I am just going to have a lot of mosquito bites until I go back to Quito.  I wear repellent, but there is no way to avoid them completely.  The worse is when you sleep.  My sister closes the windows—there aren’t screens—but it is too hot and stuffy for me! I have to sleep with them open, so that means sleeping with whatever flies through the window too. Yesterday I saw this flying beetle/cockroach thing. I swear it was at least four-inches long.

The food has gotten better.  Not healthier, but better.  I made a joke about Ecuadorians eating a lot of rice, which my family found hilarious and brings up daily, but since then they have been giving me a lot less.  That wasn’t my intention, but it works! There have been fewer boiled potatoes lately too.

I have been running a lot. The thing to do here is exercise at the airport.  It is really small and planes only come a few times a week, so everyone runs up and down the runway.  If a plane comes, the siren goes off and you just move.

Boys are the same as in Quito.  They don’t whistle at girls, instead they hiss!  They make a series of short, little weird noises with their tongues against their teeth.  I’m guess I should be used to it now, but I am always going to think it’s totally creepy.

Water is sometimes an issue here.  It will just randomly stop working for a few hours.  I am not sure what the causes are in those instances, if it is just basic infrastructure problems or what.  Last week there was construction on the road near us and they accidentally broke a pipe.  There was no water for two days!  I had to shower with a bucket in the yard where they do the washing, which actually wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.

I think I may have given some people the impression I am living in a much smaller town than I actually am.  Tena is small enough that you run into people you know all the time, but big enough that there are plenty of things to do. It is becoming a destination for ecotourism too, so that helps.  Tomorrow for example, we’re all going out with Francisco’s family to this touristy thing where we can swim. We have found some pretty good restaurants for lunch, although Anna and I also make sandwiches a lot and sit on the boardwalk by the river and eat.  There are a decent amount of bars and places to go dancing.  I am going to have a hard time going back to the US where a beer at a bar is $3 or more! We went out yesterday and I spent $6.50 the whole night, including two taxi rides and a few beers.

I can’t believe Thanksgiving is this week!  Everything here stays green all year, and so sometimes I forget it’s fall-almost-winter in the US!  We have Friday and Monday off of work Thanksgiving weekend, so the people in Tena are probably going to travel somewhere.

Brittany: Coca, an oil town in the Oriente

Last week, Mallory and I took a bus five hours north to Coca. We met up with our environmental professor. He was taking another group of students around the city to learn about oil, but had invited us to come along.

Coca was very strange.  It was horribly hot—a lot worse than Tena. By 10 am sweat would be dripping from everyone. The town basically exists because oil companies set up shop here back in the 70s.  Texaco was first, but now there are a bunch, including Haliburton.  The town has a different feeling than Tena.  It’s hard to say what that feeling is exactly; it just has a bad vibe. The entire economy is commercial—everyone is selling something. It isn’t that safe and there are a lot of problems with drugs and alcohol abuse. A lot of people work in the oil industry. The poor workers live in neighborhoods surrounding the city; the wealthier only live in the city during the week.  During that time they live in fancy compounds and on the weekends they all go home to other cities where their familes live.

Apparently there are two nice hotels in town and the rest are scary hostels, with nothing in between.  So our hotel was definitely a lot nicer than the places we normally stay in when we travel. There was a pool and our rooms had air conditioning—something I haven’t seen the whole time I’ve been in Ecuador.  There were also some birds and (mischievious) monkeys running around. It was a little sad though because the birds’ wings were clipped and the monkeys had obviously been brought there to entertain the guests, possibly illegally. That type of monkey—barisos—are often trafficked illegally and made into pets.

We spent a few days talking to different people about oil. One farmer took us to Sacha, outside of Coca but in the same province (or state), where most of the oil activity is happening Looking through the fence at a PetroEcuador site, we could see a huge fire. When they drill for oil, gas is also released, which they just burn. That is obviously terrible for the environment and one reason it is hotter in this region—there is all this terrible gas being sent into the air, creating an umbrella-effect over the area.

He used his machete to show us the oil in the soil

The man also took us took us to see different oil pools that had been created and then “cleaned up” by Texaco. In one, you could clearly see the oil in the water and the soil. In another, the pool was completely covered up, but the contamination was still evident. The fruit that grows there isn’t safe to eat and the animals that feed there are sick.

We visited the man’s home too, which was frightfully close to some of the pools. He said there is more untapped oil in the region and the oil companies keep trying to expand, even though people live and depend on the land they want to exploit.

Oil pipelines

We also talked to different government departments at the local and providence level about the different problems in the area and what they do (which sometimes seems like not much). The Ministry of the Environment, for example, only has 3 investigators that deal with oil companies in the whole providence.  Bureaucracy is to blame of course, but a general lack of resources is also a problem.

I learned a lot about the Yasuni-ITT proposal, which I wrote about here.  Mallory and I were hoping we’d get to go to Yasuni while we were out here living in Tena, but it doesn’t seem likely. It is really expensive and you need at least 5 days for the trip. You also have to go with a guide, and the trips seem to be organized around “seeing how the native people live,” which is really awkward and uncomfortable. And it seems a little contradictory. The government offices say that part of the goal of this proposal is to protect indigenous people living in voluntary isolation…but in the same breath they push tourism to see these people. Mainly I would want to see the wildlife. Yasuni is one of the most diverse places in the world, but there is a good chance it won’t exist in 10 years.

–Brittany Libra

Brittany: Life In Tena

I’m getting used to living in Tena. In a lot of ways, it is easier than Quito. It feels like a beach town minus the ocean. I can walk by myself, even after dark. It is small enough that everyone seems to know each other. Sometimes I can’t stand the hot weather—but it rains a lot so it isn’t unbearable all of the time.

I’m not necessarily enjoying the food. It is okay, but it lacks variety.  We have rice and scrambled eggs a lot.  And lately I’ve been getting a plate of potatoes for breakfast… We eat a certain type of sweet banana frequently too, which I do like. I have tried some interesting meats—armadillo and turtle!  They don’t have a microwave though…so leftovers are cold.  They tell me I can sleep in on the weekends and eat when I want, but cold rice and eggs isn’t too appetizing.

I’m settling in with my new family.  I could do without the religion thing, but I really like my host siblings.  They are all in their 20s and a lot of fun.  Only one sister lives in the house all of the time, but the other sister and my brother visit every weekend.

I went out with my sisters on Saturday night to this Queen of Tena/Guayusa thing.  It was at a stadium/concert hall with bleachers and a large stage.  It was a bigger deal than I realized; there were a few thousand people there easily.  They had a couple of musical performances: a salsa-ish singer, a strings/brass group, and these 20-something guys who must be pretty popular based on the way everyone under age 15 freaked out when they came on.

The actual show was a bit hilarious, but fun.  It was a full-on beauty pageant.  There was swimsuit/talent, formal wear and question-and-answer.  The swimsuits were super skimpy and their “talents” seemed to mostly just entail dancing and walking suggestively in their suits.  The formal wear was really funny because the girls walked around the stage and waved reeaally slowly.  For question-and-answer, all of the questions were about tourism in Tena.  Some were opinion and others were trivia.

Also during the Queen of Tena pageant was a separate competition for the Queen of Guayusa.  This was more cultural.  Girls wore indigenous-style clothing and their question-and-answer part was in Quichwa.  They switched off between a Tena candidate and Guayusa candidate.

All the girls had enormous banners with photos of themselves and their names hung up throughout the auditorium.  One girl’s banner was easily 10 feet long!  Beneath her photo were the words, “Nights of fantasy and glamour,” which I thought was strangely suggestive….

The show was super long so toward the end we went outside and talked with some of my sisters’ friends.  There were judges and everything, but I don’t actually know who won.  It’s hard to know what is considered beautiful here sometimes.  The girl my sisters liked was way too skinny and had hair that had been chemically lightened.

–Brittany Libra

Brittany: Serena day trip

Julia, Anna, and I attempted a day trip last Sunday. This German guy (maybe in his 40s) works in the municipal government office below me, and he gave us a list of fun day trips. We decided to try the one to Serena. He said it was short and had a really pretty place to swim.

We found the bus after asking a bunch of different people at the terminal. It wasn’t in the station with all the other busses but rather down the block—typical Ecuador logic.  It was hot and smelly on the bus. One family got on with two puppies and a plastic sack full of chicks, which didn’t help much with the odor…

Our friend had said it was only 40 minutes, so after an hour on the bus I started to get a little worried.  We were driving deeper into the jungle along little dirt roads. We passed some tiny communities, but we were pretty isolated. We finally got to what the driver said was the Serena stop. We asked for directions to the river at this little restaurant. The man there said we were close but needed to walk down the dirt/gravel road twenty minutes or wait for a bus (the one we had been on turned in the other direction). We decided to walk and of course it was a lot longer walk than 20 minutes. We walked for nearly 40. By now it was noon and really hot. A few cars passed, but none had room for three hitchhikers.

Finally we reached the river and a sign that said Serena. There was bridge and we decided to cross.  It looked like that was the only way to get down to the water. Once we started crossing, however, I began to seriously question our decision. It was really, really long and very high off of the water. And the boards weren’t nailed down!  They would wobble as you stepped off of them.  There were gaps between a lot of the boards, and you could see the water rushing by below. It was really scary.

Once our feet were on solid ground again, we felt like we were in the middle of nowhere. There was a narrow path and a few houses, but mostly just jungle. We guessed what direction to walk and by pure luck found a path that brought us to the water.

We weren’t sure if this was the place where our friend had intended to send us, but it was really beautiful. There was a stretch of beach on our side of the river and huge cliffs shot out of the water on the other.  It was just a little strange because there was no one around; it felt like we were the only people for miles.

We had a picnic lunch of fruit, juice, crackers and trail mix.  We tried to swim, but the water was moving really fast, so instead we spread out towels and lay down on the sand.

I was just getting comfortable when we heard the buzz of motorcycles. We looked up and four motorcycles came barreling down the beach carrying 15 teenage boys. We frantically pulled on t-shirts, but kept sitting on our towels. We didn’t want to call a lot of attention to ourselves, although obviously that was pretty unavoidable as we were the only other people on the whole beach. The boys went further down and basically left us alone, apart from the typical cat calling and one boy took our picture, which was pretty awkward.  Just as I was starting to relax again we heard a huge BOOM. The boys had set off dynamite in the river!  Luckily after that they all piled on their motorcycles and left.

Shortly after, we decided we needed to try to get back too. We had been told the return bus to Tena wasn’t until 5 pm…so we were thinking that getting back was going to involve a lot of walking and hitchhiking.

We headed down the narrow path again and then back to the bridge.  I had been dreading the return trip across the bridge all afternoon but I set off, keeping my eyes on the boards ahead of me and trying to get through it as quickly as possible. I looked up toward the end and realized Julia and Anna were getting on a bus! We got lucky and somehow the direct bus to Tena (the one we now realize we should have taken from the beginning) was right there at the end of the bridge. We jumped on and in thirty minutes we were back in Tena.

–Brittany Libra