Between fevery naps I was able to reflect on what I would have liked most on my birthday, besides seeing all of your lovely faces:

1. hummus
2. sharp cheddar
3. a good veggie burger
4. tuna and salmon sushi
5. a burrito
6. a good trail to go for a run on
7. a real hoppy IPA

I spend a lot of time thinking about food. If anyone can figure out a way to smuggle any of these across the border, an unbelievable thanks would be in order!

Thanks everyone for your birthday wishes on facebook, I’ll try to be updating my blog more.

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.

My counterpart never stops talking about his “plan estrategico” that they’re making in the office for the upcoming years. It sounds ridiculous to me every time, as if we’re making a strategic plan to drop stinkbombs on other competing tourism sites. Nevertheless, I too have been doing some strategic planning in my head – what am I going to be doing here?

Thinking forward, it has been pretty eye-opening to see just how big of an operation Chone is. The city apparently has about 800 employees, and is already running with some big projects. They are currently rebuilding the municipal administrative building and are designing a project to manage the sewage lake which is not big enough for the growing population. Soon they will break ground on a dam upriver, and it will be one of the largest in the country, some 200 feet high. Additionally, there are approximately 40 schools, and a significant university. So where do I fit in all of this? This isn’t the stereotypical go to a mud-hut village and build a bridge scenario.

I’m working with municipal office of tourism, the environment, and international relations (weird, I know). There’s way too much work to be done in these areas for the 3 people that work in the office. I’ve been shadowing the guys, which has involved some cool trips to pretty rural towns to give talks promoting environmental consciousness or addressing some environmental issue like drinkable water. Sadly, however, it seems that there’s mostly a lot of talking, and not much doing. This is really challenging for me, being a go-getter, but it has helped me think ahead to what I want to be doing here, and equally as important, how I want to do it.

I’ve already gotten started working on teaching people here to make blogs for tourism and publicity. I’ve been making a guide in Spanish on making a blog with WordPress, and tomorrow I’ll be helping the first group make a site. It will be very interesting to see how it goes – I still don’t know the level of technological fluency here. All of it could be really straightforward, or really challenging. A lot of computer stuff feels overwhelming to the people here, but WordPress has a nice interface and a Spanish translation so that should help a lot. I’m really excited to get going on this; I think it’s essential to bring Chone forward a bit.

Most of all Chone needs to improve its environmental practices, or it truly risks becoming a humanitarian tragedy. The canton has been nearly completely deforested, which has exacerbated flooding and erosion problems, and also created drought problems that didn’t exist before. The people throw trash and toxic waste directly onto the ground or into the river. My compañeros in the office give a lot of community and schools talks to promote better waste management and reforestation, to which the people nod their heads in agreement without changing their habits.

I need to continue to define my role here, which will involve doing things a bit differently than my counterpart. The environmental talks they give are good, but don’t stick. They try to tell the people that money isn’t everything, and that they should value the natural surroundings instead of exploiting them. I don’t disagree with this, but I think we have to be more pragmatic. These people are poor, and don’t have the luxury of sacrificing income that their family needs. Since nearly every hectare of land here is farmed, I think it’s absolutely essential that we promote better agricultural practices. Such practices would not only improve the environmental state here, but also provide more stable and sustainable income to the people. Agriculture is a bit outside the domain of my counterpart (and outside my areas of knowledge), so I need to make myself more independent of the office rather than my counterpart’s assistant.

Well I’m beginning to integrate into the Chone way of life. Among other things, I’m now used to eating dry baked banana and rice three times a day, I’ve started jumping off the bus while it’s still moving (next step is jumping on), and I’ve even started dropping my s’s when I’m speaking. Life here is certainly different.

I keep regretting not having my camera on me, as it seems every day I see something really strange or really funny. For instance, a bike here is not full until it has 3 people, and an umbrella while riding is standard issue on rainy days. I think a lot of t-shirts here must come from thrift store leftovers – I saw a City Sports Boston shirt and your average macho Ecuadorian man with a Hanson shirt complete with a graphic of the boys on the back. Regularly girls here unknowingly wear t-shirts with very suggestive English messages on them – at some point I’ll start asking them if I can snap a photo. The funniest thing so far was seeing a poor woman riding a horse which proceeded to mount another horse. They strategically threw cold water on the horse to calm him down.

Needless to say I’m avoiding horses. However, I have been hunting down a good bike to buy. They say I can get one for as cheap as $40, but we visited a few shops and they were asking double that for bikes that looked pretty shoddy. Everyone rides mountain bikes in town, and no one raises the seat up, so they stick their knees out to the sides to pedal. I’m hoping to buy a road bike, but it might cost me. A guy in my office suggested that I could buy all the parts separate and he would help me put it together – could be a fun project, though I wouldn’t look forward to negotiating for every part. This is a frustrating thing for gringos here, as there are certain prices everything should cost, and everyone knows them but me. Anyway, having a bike would give me a lot of freedom to roam around.

It rained a lot this week, and once again the river overflowed into the streets. I call it Lago Chone, though the joke here is Venezia Pequeňa. During the rainy season it floods, and during the dry season there isn’t enough water. In the past there was always enough water, though there were even more flooding problems before they build up the riverbanks. My counterpart (Luis) gave me more background on Chone. Before WWII, it thrived economically as a commerical center between the coast and the Andes. In the following decades the economy plummeted as commerce moved to other coast cities, and just this decade Chone is trying to overcome serious problems of political infighting and corruption. Luis likes the current mayor, and he seems solid to me as well. In the new constituion here, after an official is in office for a year, the people can take steps to have a re-election, in order to encourage hard work on the part of public servants. In July, every Ecuadorian official could feel the effects of this, so it should be interesting, especially here where there has been so much division.

I’ve been looking to play soccer (which btw, we need to start calling ‘football’) with people, finally tomorrow I’m going to go play with a guy I met whose parents have an internet cafe. He’s kind of a goofy kid, and my counterpart told me that other kids make fun of him a lot – the perfect buddy for me. He’s really nice, and always tells me that I look like different teen pop stars from the US because my hair is longer. I really need to get it cut, but I’m afraid to!

Pronunciation system
Spanish is awesome, because it’s highly phonetic. Spanish dictionaries don’t need pronunciation guides next to each word – once you know the system, you can pronounce anything. The rules for pronouncing a word are as follows:
1.all words ending in vowels, n, or s are stressed on the second to last syllable
2.all words ending in consonants other than n or s are stressed on the last syllable
3.i and u are weak vowels, and join with any other vowel to form a dipthong of one syllable
4.all words that are stressed on a syllable that does not agree with the above take an accent on the stressed syllable

Por vs para
This is a really tricky for English speakers, and usually not explained well. Both of these words can often be translated as ‘for,’ but they should be thought of in much more specific senses. Por is ‘because of,’ and para is ‘for the purpose of.’ If something is being done because of a reason or thing that already exists, use por. For some future purpose or end, use para. There are places where both could be used, and it often depends on what you’re trying to emphasize. Thinking about the distinction in the above way has helped me a lot.

Qué vs Cuál
Many people try to oversimplify this by saying that qué is ‘what’ and cuál is ‘which,’ but this doesn’t really work. In most cases they do function as such, but be careful when you ask ‘qué es….’ This question is always asking for a definition. If you say ‘Qué es el río?’, the response should be something like ‘a river is a body of water that flows downhill from the headwaters to the mouth.’ It’s asking for a definition. If you say ‘Cuál es el río?’ the response might be, ‘that’s the Charles River, it flows right through Boston.’ Cuál asks for identification. As far as I can tell, this is the only tricky insight with these words.

Tú vs Usted
This subject is something very foreign to English speakers, as we don’t have anything similar. It is always explained as formal vs informal, with tú being used with peers and people younger than yourself, and usted used for older people or people in positions of respect. This is not untrue, but doesn’t really paint the whole picture. A native speaker in our group described it instead as personal vs. impersonal, and I think this gives a better feel. Someone could be in a position of authority, but if you are close to them, you use tú. Likewise, for a younger person serving you in a restaurant, you might use usted out of respect but also because you don’t know the person well. All of this is pretty relaxed and fluid though – my host family parents constantly switch between tú and usted with me.

Aquí, Acá, Allí, y Allá
Both aquí and acá want to say ‘here,’ and both allí and allá want to say ‘there,’ but in certain situations you will always hear one or the other. In general, acá means ‘over here’ and allá ‘over there.’ I hear acá and allá more often because they’re used to refer to locations relative to oneself. When we would say ‘Let’s go over here/there,’ they might say ‘Vamos por acá/allá.’ For things more abstract, aquí and allí are used. Just like in English, these don’t refer to exactly how far away something is. We could use ‘here’ for something 10 miles away, or ‘there’ for something 5 feet away. It’s relative to where you are and what’s being spoken about.

False feminines
A frustrating thing for English speakers in Spanish is gender, especially since there are so many words which appear to be of one gender, but are actually the other. In general the words that break our expectations in this regard are almost always masculine words that appear feminine. There are just a few feminine words that end in ‘o’ – mano, foto, moto, and maybe others. But there are a whole host of words that end in ‘a’ but are actually masculine – particularly those words ending in ‘-ma.’ Take care also with words ending in ‘-ista,’ like machista, which can refer to a man or a woman – you can never say machisto, nor turisto. Therefore, be more careful with words that appear feminine – they may not be!

Tomar vs. Sacar
In the dictionary you’ll see both of these generally defined as ‘to take,’ which is silly because they have very specific uses. Tomar is always used to say ‘take in,’ and sacar is always used to say ‘take out.’ You tomar a drink, and you sacar something from your pocket. In Spanish classes, we always learned to say ‘sacar una foto.’ I’ve found that everyone now says ‘tomar una foto,’ and this makes sense, since camera technology has changed from needing to take out film, to just storing photos in your camera. Makes sense, right?

Punto vs punta
I used to always get these confused. Punto is a dot (o). Punta is something pointy (A). Just as in English, they are often applied in more abstract ways, like point of view (punto) or a point of land on the coast (punta).

The above are just my observations. Please correct me! I think grammar is important.

Last week in Quito the day after some vicious bathroom trips, I started to develop a really high fever. Eventually the fever hit 104, with delirium to boot. I was pretty concered because it was probably the highest fever I’ve ever had, but it went away pretty soon the next day. Since then, thankfully, my digestion has returned to normal, but apparently the 3 stool samples (yes, 3) I gave to the docs revealed my aforementioned buddies.

I feel normal – maybe this will be a miracle fat loss method. From what I hear, this won’t be the first time I get some sort of parasite here. Really common.

Casilla 13-03-007
Chone, Manabí
Ecuador

If you really want to, you can put South America on the next line.  The woman in the post office had a coastal accent of the worst variety, so I really don’t know what was going on, but I’m pretty sure this will work one way or another.  If you send something, declare a value of $0.  If you declare any value, they will probably open the package, and they will try to charge me three times as much to pick it up.

We had a our swearing in ceremony at the ambassador’s mansion in Quito, complete with moustaches, so now I’m a real volunteer.  Congratulations to all of the volunteers in Omnibus 103.  Afterward we had a barbecue and stayed up into the late hours of the night.  It was a lot like the end of freshman year of college.  We know we’ll all see each other again, but it was a pretty quick end to a nice time we had together during training.  Suddenly we’re all on our own.  It’s kind of scary, but I think all of us were ready to be doing our thing.

So here I am surviving in Chone, land of beautiful women and brave (machista) men.  The accent here I just as bad as I remember from my site visit, thankfully my Spanish improved quite a bit over the course of training.  On my final language test I scored advanced low!  I still have a lot moments where I’m completely dumbfounded, and I need to figure out something other to say that “Si!” when it happens.  My listening has improved so much that when I was listening to my music in English the other day, I actually picked out lyrics that I never heard before.

For our first 3 months, Peace Corps wants us to chill out and just get to know our communities, so that’s what I’m trying to do.  I’ve taken a fair amount of naps, and I’m getting my exercise routine going again.  The other day I went with my counterpart and his friend to Portoviejo and Manta, and we visited malls (called ‘shoppings’ in Spanish) that truly felt like the US.

My host family continues to be extremely friendly, and the house is way nicer than I could ever ask for.  They don’t like it when I hang out alone, and they tell me every day “nuestra casa es suya!” so sometimes I hang out on my computer in the living room or watch tv in the kitchen just to make them feel better.

My next goal is to hit the beach, and soon.  The legendary waves of Canoa are just a little over an hour away….

We finally have a lot more freedom, which means we’ve been painting the city red while trying not to get robbed. A couple of people in our group have already “lost” cell phones, and yesterday some sketchy guy followed us back to our hostel. Luckily nothing happened, but we still don’t know who he was.

Quito is a pretty nice place. The climate is just unbelievably great, and there are some really nice corners, despite its rough edges. We’re all in for a shock when next week we’re alone in the far corners of Ecuador.

Am I ready? I don’t know. My Spanish has gotten a lot better, but I’m still far away from being able to speak naturally with the ridiculous accent they have on the coast. The first few months will be very interesting as I try to figure out where to focus my work efforts.

The trip started out around Quito, where we spent a couple classroom days in a monastery, which felt like a not-so-subtle hint from PC that we should be on our best behavior. We were happy to leave and head down to San Vicente on the coast, about an hour west of my site (Chone). Every time we go from one region of the country to another, I’m amazed by how diverse this country is. It’s so small, but you can get on a bus and be in an entirely different climate and culture.

We did a boat tour through a mangrove preserve near San Vicente, learning about community tourism, and then went just across the bay to visit a dry forest in Bahia de Caraquez. Beautiful locations, and on top of that we got to drink beer in the swimming pool at our hotel.

We headed a bit north to the forest reserve of Lalo Loor, where we stayed in a giant bamboo hut and hung out with howler monkeys while trying to avoid tarantulas. The forest is one of the pieces of private land here that has been preserved from deforestation and agriculture.

Finally we headed north, staying on the beach (here) near Same in the province of Esmeraldas. It was downright beautiful, and we swam in the ocean every chance we got. Esmeraldas, even though it’s just above my province, is very different. It’s known for having a large Afro-Ecuadorian population, and the coast is a mix of beach resorts and fishing villages. We had a great time hanging out while the waves crashed below our cabin, and the only downside was that room service took $40 from me. Asi es la vida.

Overall the trip was great and we were able to learn more concrete things that a lot of us will be spending a lot more time with in our sites.

I’ll be uploading more pictures shortly. Promise!