Baños

This past weekend, my Study Abroad group and I went on our first excursion outside Quito.  We travelled to Baños, which is a little tourist town about 4.5 hours away and the whole trip was an awesome adventure!  I really enjoy being around all my Study Abroad friends and feel very lucky to be able to experience Ecuador with a group of such wonderful people.

Highlights from this Week:

·      Monday – This afternoon, I helped take Clarita, an 85-year-old woman, to the Comedor, which is where the seniors in the community eat lunch.  Just three years ago, Clarita could walk to the Comedor by herself, but now she needs help getting there in her wheelchair.  I couldn’t stay to help serve food because I had to go to class, but the program for seniors seems like a wonderful thing for the community.

·      Tuesday – I had my first ecology class today.  It looks like the we will be talking more about how being aware of environmental issues can help you professionally than ecology, but that is interesting, too, and it should be a good class.

·      Wednesday – After classes, Paige, Lauren, and I ran into Zach and Leo and we all piled into a taxi to go home.  You know all those wildly inappropriate jokes about piling Mexicans into a car?  How about gringos?  (It was quite fun, by the way, though I’m very glad the car was full of people I know and like rather than strangers.  If the car had been full of people I didn’t know, the ride would have been very uncomfortable.)  I’m also starting to become addicted to two telenovelas, which is a good sign I’m adapting to the culture.

·      Thursday – Happy Birthday Hillary!  After classes, everyone in our group went to Hillary’s house for singing and cake and ice cream.  There were two wonderful cakes and three flavors of ice cream and a new “tradition” for us Americans.  Essentially, Hillary was supposed to take a bite out of each cake without using her hands.  This pretty much ended with her face in the cake (after some “help” from her host mom and María).  We sang Happy Birthday in Spanish and English and visited and just had a wonderful time.  After a while, we went to dinner at a sushi place in Cumbayá where Hillary had her first “official” drink (technically, the drinking age in Ecuador is 18, not 21, so it was more like a first “U.S. official” drink).  All in all, it was a fantastic evening and a wonderful way to celebrate our friend’s birthday.

·      Friday – After classes, I returned to Lumbisí to help at the minga, which is like a community work time to better the town.  We were cutting down trees and hauling the logs down a hill for later use in building a greenhouse in the community’s organic garden.  It was really hard work, especially after it started to rain and the hill became wet and muddy.  It also didn’t help that we had to wait half an hour in the rain for the truck on which we were supposed to load the logs.  Once we were done, we were all soaked and muddy but very happy we were able to help.

·      Saturday – Greetings from Baños!  Starting early this morning, we travelled from Cumbayá to this semi-touristy town about 4.5 hours from Quito.  The area is at the base of a very active volcano, which routinely erupts ash but, since the Virgin Mary appeared by one of the waterfalls near the town, ash has never fallen on Baños.  On the way to our destination, we stopped to take pictures of gorgeous views of towns and a green lake with a shady history that involved government workers throwing bodies of enemies into the water.  Later on our trip, we stopped at a painter’s house to learn how the indigenous people of Ecuador paint on leather canvases.  The artist we met uses acrylic paint, but he paints the traditional way and his work in gorgeous!  We spent much of the afternoon at the Zoológico San Martín, which is the zoo in Baños.  There were many different animals there, most of which I had never seen.  A few of us were very lucky and got to see the condor, Ecuador’s national bird, up close when it landed on a rock near where we were standing.  We also went to a shop where we learned how sculptors carve palm ivory.  In the evening, we went to the hot springs at the base of the waterfall where Our Lady of Baños appeared.  The water was wonderfully warm and, though there were a lot of people there to take advantage of the water’s healing properties, going to the hot springs was a wonderful experience.  It was interesting, too, that when you looked out into the darkness surrounding Baños, the only thing you could see was a lighted cross high on top of a mountain.

·      Sunday – This morning, we went to tour the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Agua Santa at the center of Baños.  The walls were lined with paintings depicting the many miracles credited to Our Lady of Baños.  There was also a shrine to Mary in a side room and we stopped there to talk about it and/or say a prayer, depending on our religion.  Later that morning, we went on a tour of the nearby waterfalls.  I rode a cable car across a canyon to take pictures of two falls and a bunch of us walked right up to two twin falls after crossing a suspension bridge over a river.  We hiked a path that went through the jungle and by a number of waterfalls as well.  In the afternoon, we headed home and, though this was a lowlight rather than a highlight for us, we dropped off Leo, who’s continuing his Latin American adventure.  “May the road rise up to meet you.  May the wind be always at your back, the Sun shine warm upon your face, the rains fall soft upon your fields.  And until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of His hand.”

Random Notes:

·      Question:  How many things can you do with a banana?  Answer:  Not as many as the Ecuadorians can.

·      Jugo is not juice from a bottle or carton.  Jugo is chopped fresh fruit and water blended and then strained through a sieve.

·      A piece of (delicious, freshly-baked) bread from the local bakery costs $0.12.  An (delicious, freshly-baked) empanada (bread with cheese inside) costs $0.25.

·      The bus does not necessarily come to a complete stop if you’re the only one getting on or off.  You just kind of have to jump.

·      Ecuador pretends to be a handicap-friendly country.   Ecuador is not a handicap-friendly country.  Also, when I say “handicap,” I don’t just mean being confined to a wheelchair for the rest of your life.  If you need crutches for a broken leg or a brace for an injured knee or anything at all to support your joints or bones, in Ecuador, you have a handicap.  This is not to say that you couldn’t make things work for you in Ecuador…I’d just, personally, be a little hesitant to try…

·      Speaking of being handicapped, practically no one here is (perhaps because you can’t really afford to be…).  You frequently see 75-year old women carrying 50-pound sacks on their backs.  They just wrap a blanket around themselves and the sacks and tie it in front of their chest and off they go!  On a trip into Quito, we saw a woman carrying a garden on her back!  There were plants on top, but you could tell most of the approximately 3’ x 2’ x 2’ box was filled with dirt.

·      A very important local volunteer organization is FeVi.  Get to know them because they’re awesome and have awesome people working for them.  Almost anytime you’ll be doing volunteer work here, it will be with them (at least, in this program).

·      At USFQ, the international students hang out by the lake and the Ecuadorian students hang out by the lions (the statues in front of the main building).  Hence, as beautiful and serene as the lake is, you will want to try to spend some time near the lions.

·      Bring a flash drive with a decent memory.  It’s the best way to store readings and other homework-related things when you don’t have Internet at home.

·      All food safety rules that apply in the United States also apply in Ecuador, even if many people here don’t realize it.  One member of our group wasn’t feeling very well over the weekend and one of our program directors thought it might be from the sushi we all had last Thursday.  Yup…raw fish will do that…