My second day in Ecuador

Here’s a little story that I’ve waited a while to tell everyone. My second day in Ecuador, we were in Quito in our hostel, in the dining room hanging out before dinner. The food was going to be a bit longer, so I decided to head to the lobby to make a phone call home to let my parents know I had gotten here ok. That didn’t quite work out.

As I bounded into the lobby, I noticed there were some people in there hanging out. This didn’t seem unusual, as there were often friends of the workers there who hung out and watched tv, etc. Except this time, as I was about to jump up the couple steps to the level of the hostel desk, one of the guys there pulled out a shiny silver revolver and pushed it to my stomach. In that fraction of a second out flowed all of my breath and into my blood rushed every ounce of adrenaline. One moment having a jolly good time in a brand new country, and the next being yelled at by two guys with guns in a language I barely knew.

I was pushed to the area behind the desk where the two Ecuadorian hostel workers had already been having an ordeal trying to hand over all of the money. Still pointing the gun at me, they emptied my pockets and then put the three of us face-down on the floor while they finished collecting all the booty for another thirty seconds or so. All the while, my fellow Ecuadorian buddies repeated “tranquilo, tranquilo” to try to calm both us and the frantic ladrones. The seconds waned on, with our cheeks to the cold tile floor, trying to breathe, until our newly-acquainted amigos finally ran out to the streets of Quito.

When we were sure they were gone, we got up, and with an outpour of relief, I shared a hug with the Ecuadorian girl who worked at the desk. I barely knew her, but she had talked with us the night before in our toddler-level Spanish. The hug was a pretty unique “welcome to Ecuador” moment.

For me, the whole thing was terrible luck. The rest of the other 25 or so PC volunteers in the dining room didn’t know anything was going on. I simply had the stupid luck of pulling a Kramer door-opening move on a classic stick-up scenario. Unfortunately I think my Ecuadorian buddies had experienced similar things before. Such are the cities of most of Latin America.

The other day there were gang killings here in Chone, with 2 young men and 2 police officers dying. None of the locals were surprised. There are 2 main gangs here that operate and compete on minor drug trafficking. Ultimately, the American simultaneous demand and war against drugs is to blame for much of the violence in Latin America. Nicely for us, the war doesn’t happen in our backyard. The global economic turndown has only worsened things. There just aren’t good enough alternatives for people to improve the hand of cards they’re given.

I know I’ve just made Ecuador sound like a war zone, but it’s not. It’s an amazing country to see. I challenge you to name another country this small that has as much.