Long Over Due Random Thoughts Post

1-19-10, Tuesday

Where to start where to start…this is always the question with these things just because there are so many points that I could start with! I think I will start with a little of what my life is currently like.

I am still living in El Retiro outside of Machala as I will continue to do so for the next 19 months of service hopefully. However, I am also still unfortunately living with my host family. Normally, after three months of living in site with your host family you then find your own apartment to move into by yourself. And yet, as I hit my five month mark tomorrow, I find myself still living with my host family as there are not really available apartments where I live. There is a lady though who is looking to build some apartments so there is some hope there. My plan is to talk with the President of the neighborhood more or less and get something moving here so that I can move out in a month or two more…if that doesn’t happen, then I will either live in Machala or Santa Rosa nearby. This is not ideal, but it is better than my current situation.

Now don’t get me wrong, my host family is not horrible by any means. But with all of the culture differences, it is hard not to have a space of your own. Especially when you consider that I have been living with host families now for a total of seven months and the culture here is VERY family based and not independence based like the States. Not being able to cook or really do anything at all without being judged can get old pretty quick as well as not having your own stuff. Not to mention there are two men in my house that snore all of the time along with three kids of the ages of two, four, and five which are here at least fifty percent of the time that make it hard to sleep at times. Point being, I need my own space for my own mental health.

Other than that, my work right now is starting to come to an end as the school year ends with the last week in February – it will start again in April. This is kind of nice though as it is going to give me some time to reflect back over everything and see how I am doing overall. We also just got back from ReConnect in Cuenca, which is your five month mark in site more or less. ReConnect is a weeklong conference with other PCVs of your group (11 for my group) and your counterparts where you get more training on how to implement projects into your community and how to work on your community assessment tools.

Projects to come in the months of vacation include a fight against the trash here in my town (where we are going to paint and put up wooden signs that say to put trash in its place more or less as well as clean up all of the trash in the street and the Indore fields), a medical and dental brigade in Pasaje, a neighboring town, for two weeks in February (with a NGO from the states called Ecuadant where we will be helping with translating, locating potential kids as patients, and spreading the word of the mission), and hopefully starting to spread the word of a community bank and possibly starting that out. I also have my first project report, like a progress report if you will, due the 5th of February for the PC and a community assessment report due on the 19th of February. So all in all, I think I will find myself enjoying the change in my schedule while still keeping relatively busy.

Now onto the fun(ny) parts of my life.

I have officially had the Ecuadorean hair cut that is given to most North Americans/Europeans/Caucasians at some point during their stay in Ecuador. This hair cut one might just call…well…a mullet. I have no idea why, but for some reason it is what a lot of PCVs have had as a hair cut at one point or another and not by choice. I understand that our hair is different, but I don’t really get why we seem to end up with a mullet cut most of the time. I had this hair cut done in Cuenca during ReConnect. So once I got back to my site I had my lady across the street, who lived in Spain for three years and therefore knows how what to do with my hair, cut my hair. So now, I no longer have the mullet. Just overall short hair which I think I can deal with since the heat is still way up there. But I can honestly say that I had a mullet for three days now…don’t know if that is proud fact or not.

Second point, I have actually had an ant in my pants now. I was in a rush one day and I tripped on the stairs and ripped a hole into my jeans (which I am proud to say I sewed up later). However, throughout the events of the day I ended up down at the river where I picked up an ant somehow. And I am not talking about a little friendly ant here. I am talking about a killer I want to bite you as many times as I can ant. So I came back home to eat my dinner and as I was finishing up I started to feel the little thing biting me in my pants. Somehow it had crawled through my hole and got itself stuck in my jeans. So I ended up excusing myself and running back over into the house so that I could rip my jeans off! In the process, I ended up grabbing the little thing through my jeans so that it would stop biting me at least. I think all in all it probably got about six good bits in…but I would like to say that I had the last word as I made sure to smash it to death with my shoe. So point number two, I can now honestly say that I have had an ant in my pants.

I now get excited when I see that there are two knobs in the shower; one for hot and one for cold is just craziness! Where I am at, we just have one knob and the temperature of what is what you get. There really isn’t a choice. I also think that I am now vaccinated against anything and everything that is possible as we just had the H1N1 vaccination as well. I cannot even tell you anymore how many shots I have had or how many things I am immune to now! And one thing that I have learned since I have been here is that chickens make great garbage disposals. They eat just about anything and everything that you would normally put down the garbage disposal. I think I have also found a new perfume for myself for the following 19 months…it is called bug spray and I tend to put it on at least once a day.

I also have come to the sad realization that I will be two different skin tones for the rest of my time here. My stomach and other parts that get no sun are still my brilliant white while my arms are starting to become a nice shade of red along with the lower half of my legs and face. I tend to wear my thick strapped tank tops a lot as well which also make for lovely tan lines. I guess while we are at it, we can also put the color black/mud brown in there as that tends to be the color of my feet with all of the dust here. I also find myself wondering if my watch tan will ever go away as well.

In other news, I think I have started to integrate some as throwing rocks at dogs is starting to seem normal (I know this might seem odd to you…but the dogs down here are the farthest thing from domestic and they do bite). Not to mention eating with a spoon for just about everything and anything, going to “bathe” yourself in a river as you jump in with all of your clothes on, sweating as you get into the shower as well as the minute you get out no matter what temperature the water is here in on the coast, and accepting the fact that random drunk men will hit on you in the middle of the day no matter what you wear, do, or say. My English has also gotten worse as well so I can only hope that my Spanish has gotten better in the process! It is actually really funny when a group of the PCVs get together now because we all speak in Spanglish and have come to the realization that we are now social awkward in Spanish as well as English. I also am starting to get used to the Spanish key board which now makes it harder to type on the English one!

Other things that might seem odd to you but now seem normal to me: buying a jaba (the equivalent of 12 forties or so) and using one cup for everyone to chug out of as you pass the cup around in a circle until all of the beer is gone, hiding in the shade the minute the sun comes out (well this was normal to me before, but still everyone does it here!), putting a ton of water on your head when the sun does come out because most of the people here have black hair, smashing a ton of people onto a bus until the bus cannot move because of the weight, bug bites twenty-four seven from some type of insect even if you cannot tell what type of insect bite it is (and yes…you will scratch them), and music on telephones. I have to say, I don’t get the last one yet! It is like headphones don’t exist here so they just blare music from their telephones where ever they are whenever they want…let me tell you, it gets old quickly.

I have three other random tidbits for you all to finish with. Number one, my whole definition of Hygiene has now changed. When you have to wash a good portion of your clothes by hand and put them all up on the line to dry…it kind of changes your definition of what is dirty. Jeans for example, they are not dirty until you can see the dirt in them. And when you sweat all day long with a lot of dust, you are never really clean other than maybe for two minutes right after you get out of the shower (but don’t worry people…I still take showers basically daily).

Number two, all I have got to say is one word; bugs – ants, spiders, flies of all types, mosquitoes, cockroaches, grasshoppers on steroids…you get the idea. I hate the lovely little things and I have also learned that with the rainy seasons it is worth the extra thirty seconds at night to tuck in my mosquito net to my bed. I quickly learned this after one night when a grasshopper on steroids (they are the size of the cockroaches) jumped up inside my net on my bed stand. The next morning I had a cockroach fly over my sleeping body onto the inside of my net. The funny part was with the cockroach, I actually didn’t get upset that there was a cockroach inside my net. I got upset because I knew I then had to get up to get my shoe to kill it.

Number three, over our Christmas vacation trip, at one of the restaurants that we ate at, we received a plate of food with a hair in it. And for the five PCVs, it was our natural reaction to point out the hair, laugh at it, and then continue shoving the food into our faces without wasting another second. It was at that moment that we realized we were starting to become immune to the oddities of a third world country. Normally, you would send the plate back and ask for a discount on your meal…instead; we all just laughed at the fact that there was a hair in our food and continued to eat it all without a second thought (this same theory tends to apply with bugs more or less).

Oh the life of a Peace Corps Volunteer…you can’t hate it because you know you will be sad to leave it. And yet, you don’t love it because deep down inside you know the things you are getting used to are not things that you want to be permanently used to…at least not for this girl.