a long overdue update from Ecuador

First, Ecuador is amazing :). I live with my mamí Christina my papí Jaime and my little one-year-old sister Paula in the bottom floor of a beautiful house in the northern part of Quito. I arrived in the night and spent several hours talking with mis padres before finally I became so tired I couldn’t speak any longer. The morning after I arrived I went with my family to see a little bit of the city. We went to this hill above the center of town where there is a huge statue of La Virgen de Quito who stands on top of a serpent signifying the dominance of good over evil and I suppose the dominance of Spain and its Catholicism over the indigenous people of Ecuador. We walked around the center of town with them at night and all the churches and old colonial buildings were lit up. We saw a bunch of chivas, which are these converted trucks that have a band playing on the roof and people travel below in a sort of parade. They played Quito’s anthem and my abuelo tried to teach me how to dance to it, but it wasn’t too successful. Most days, though I spend hanging out with my mamí and Paula talking about life and holding Paula’s hands while she tries to learn to walk. Paula is learning all the sounds of animals so I have been learning all the songs that she listens to in an attempt to participate in talking with her.

Papi and Paula at Mitad del Mundo

Mami and Paula

The university is amazing…a little, no very grandiose. There are tons of fountains all over the place and a lake (well, maybe a pond) filled with goldfish and koi. Needless to say I spend a lot of time at the pond staring at the fish. In addition to the carp, there are these black organisms that look like a cross between a tadpole and a fish larvae. I can’t find anyone who knows what they are.

Plaza at USFQ

Koi pond at USFQ

School is a little bit different than I expected. My lit professor is crazily strict, the exact opposite of what Ecuadorian professors are stereotyped as. On the first day of class she instituted a one dollar fine for being able to see a cell phone, let alone if it rings in class. We also have to be in class every day or we can lose up to 10 percent of our grade in the class. And if we are more than five minutes late to class it will count as an absence. Fortunately, the subject matter of the class sounds really cool. Basically what we are studying is the literature that is passed through generations of campesinos in Ecuador and for a final project we have to collect stories from an area in the province of Pinchincha and record the storytellers and present them in class and enter them into a competition of sorts in the city.
My tropical ecology class is in English :( and the professor can be pretty annoying. He asks questions as if he wants to start a discussion but then has a very specific short answer in mind that usually doesn’t follow the question he asked at all. But the material in the class is super interesting, and we get to go on a lot of trips on the weekends. We are basically learning about the ecology of the vegetation types that occur at all the different elevations in Ecuador. Because of Ecuador’s unique landscape, the only tropical vegetation ecosystem it lacks is savannah (dry grasslands at low altitudes).
Ecoanthropology is very cool; I learned today that I am quite the reductionist as far as anthropologists go. That is, I seek tangible/material explanations for symbolic aspects of culture. For example, many indigenous cultures in the east of Ecuador practice infanticide of females because they need men to fight wars with other indigenous populations. Soon, since they have been killing all the females, they need females to produce more men so they capture females from other tribes spurring more wars. The rainforest of Ecuador, while very diverse, is not very easy to live in and can only support small populations of humans. So while a culturalist would argue that the widespread practice of female infanticide is a cultural anomaly, I as a reductionist would argue that the culture of female infanticide probably arose as a method of self-regulating the population.
My animal nutrition and reproduction class is amazing, too. The professor is really friendly and we just chat about nutrition for the class hour. Yesterday he brought in samples of foods commonly used to feed livestock in Ecuador and we got to try them so that we can recognize them by taste, smell, and appearance. In case you ever are faced with the choice to eat fish meal, you might want to consider declining. It is pretty gross. However, crystallized methionine (an amino acid) is really good—it’s kind of sweet and tastes almost like sugary cereal :). We have to bring 25 samples of animal food into class soon so a few days ago I embarked on a mission to find animal food. Stumbling across a factory, I began talking to the owner who ended up being friends with my professor and quickly agreed to give me samples. He was not so satisfied with my intended containers: snack sized Ziploc bags. Instead, he sent me to a local pharmacy for “jars with tops”. I tried to explain what I needed to the guard at the entrance to the pharmacy but he didn’t understand what I was looking for so in an attempt to think of another way to describe them the first thing that came to mind was urine sample containers. Fortunately, he knew what these were and quickly led me to the counter where I had the pleasure of asking the clerk for 25 urine sample containers. The look I received was unforgettable. As he returned with a large shopping bag filled with urine sample containers, he managed to muster up the courage to ask me why in the world I needed 25 but my explanation that it was for a class to collect food samples didn’t seem to clear things up. The owner of the factory and I had a good laugh about the whole experience later that afternoon.
Finally, I am taking a class at the veterinary school called veterinary histology and embryology. This is probably tied with nutrition as my favorite class. There are six students in the class, all first year Ecuadorian vet students and our professor is a young veterinarian who just graduated from veterinary school in Venezuela and we spend the hour looking at tissue samples from different parts of the body. I am probably going to start an internship with the professor’s husband who is a veterinarian specializing in chickens. Overall, classes here are a lot harder than I thought they would be and I am kind of mad at myself for that preconception because I feel like I the assumptions originated in part from a hidden belief that schools in Ecuador could not be as good as schools in the US. Granted, if I was taking classes in English, they would not be nearly as hard as they are at Kalamazoo College but they are definitely challenging.
Between settling in to the university and now, I have been to the zoo and touched Galapagos turtles, been cleaned by an indigenous healer, along with many other adventures, but those are stories for another day.

Galapagos turtles at the Quito zoo

So the real reason I started writing this letter was to describe an amazing trip with my medicinal plants class this weekend. My professor, Vlasti, smokes approximately a pack of malboro cigarettes daily and his skin clearly reflects his habit. He accompanies the cigarettes with copious amounts of coca cola (carried in his rubber boots while in the field) and coffee despite his doctors’ warnings against it (he has serious ulcers). He is extremely skinny because according to him he was bitten by a poisonous snake as a child and can’t gain weight. Despite his rather feeble appearance, he is quite adventurous. We left Friday afternoon to collect plants we will study for the rest of the semester. As we ascended to the páramo armed with pencils, field notebooks, plastic shopping bags and rubber boots it began to rain. Regardless, we all scrambled out of the bus and Vlasti’s supreme knowledge of plants began to impress me. He would pick out plants with medicinal properties and give us the family genus and species name as well as the common names and medicinal uses. Finally he would describe the identifying characteristics of the family so that I can now identify Asteraceae, Piperaceae, Solamanaceae and Euphoreae families with ease. In the páramo, I excitedly tested my rubber boots in knee-deep mud collecting Solamanaceae for people and became immune to the stinging power of nettles thanks to a prolonged wrestling match with the herb in which I finally emerged victorious with a two 20 cm sections of plant with flowers stuffed into my supermaxi shopping bag.
We began to descend into Guajalito, a cloud forest reserve owned by Vlasti and some friends, as the rain began to increase and the width of the road narrowed and pavement disappeared. Nevertheless, our bus (equipped with red and green Christmas lights, blue tasseled valences and several images of Jesus) valiantly traversed the mud at surprising speeds. After several hours, we arrived at a series of concrete buildings. That evening, we learned how to press our collected plants in a concrete room scattered with newspapers and discarded plants in various stages of decomposition. Much to our surprise, after a couple of hours of pressing, we were greeted by warm soup, spaghetti, and peaches by Rosa, a native of Guajalito. That evening, warmer and with full stomachs we went to bed with much anticipation of the next day when, according to Vlasti, we were going to get very dirty.
Between collecting plants, learning how to identify them, and scrambling up waterfalls while navigation through a maze of fallen logs and mud I realized I had found my favorite place in the world. The palms and piperaceae plants generally have leaves longer than my entire body, I spent the better part of the day inside a cloud, learned how to ward off bulls while eating lunch in the company of a small herd of cows, scaled a tree, swung from a vine over the edge of a cliff, and fell in love with my rubber boots. And Vlasti was right. After several falls in the mud, I did return dirty. After an entire day of collecting and hiking through the forest, we returned in the dark to press our plants. Honestly, I wasn’t looking forward to the hours it would take to press our collections but after the first few plants the process of positioning the plant just so it fit perfectly in the square of newspaper, adjusting the flowers and choosing a leaf to flip over became very calming and enjoyable.
Our final day I awoke well before the sun rose to embark on an expedition with some Ecuadorian students to see a lek of cock of the rock birds sing. We found the lek just before the female began calling the males and quietly listened to their songs. The birds are huge with brilliant red heads and necks and black bodies with white stains on their wings. Coloration aside, they rather resemble a rooster. On our way back we walked along the pipeline that runs from the Amazon to the refineries on the coast and I was surprised to find that the pipe was quite hot; apparently to keep the crude oil flowing. After rinsing off in a waterfall, we left Guajalito and descended further into a tropical rainforest in La Perla. Walking through a bananna plantation to arrive at the reserve, I picked a banana from the tree for a snack. While the size of the trees in La Perla definitely impressed me, I was most fascinated by the leafcutter ants who crossed the trail we were following several times.

Vlasti in a tree

Butressed roots in La Perla

Walking along the oil pipeline after bird watching in Guajalito

Downtown Quito at night