Gossip Girl here: on Culture, Physicians, and Gangs
- DizzleD
- Aug 5, 2015
- 7 min read
Blog 1. Chone, Ecuador.
Wow. Today was so much more packed than last night. I've been traveling for twenty hours the past two days I've been in Ecuador. Today, I'm in Chone!
Yesterday, when I arrived to Quito from the airport, I was taken by taxi to my host mother’s house, Rosita Tamayo, and crashed completely. Two students were already there, Ally and Clark, both from Oregon and both in the intensive beginner spanish program — meaning that they came to Ecuador knowing exactly zero Spanish, and have only 10 - 12 weeks to learn as much as they can. Rosita, my host mom, was incredibly nice and very relaxed. When I woke up from my nap, I asked Rosita about tomorrow’s plans and she said, “Va a Chone mañana.” When I asked for a more detailed itinerary, she said, “No tengo mas detalles. Solo Los Estados Unidos esta preocupada por los detalles. Ecuador es mas facil; no tenemos muchos plans aqui. (I have no more details. It’s only the United States that’s preoccupied with details. Ecuador is much easier; we don’t have a lot of plans here.)”
Huh. I thought that was very profound.
And it’s true, in Ecuador, everything is much slower here. After dinner, I packed away my things and left for Chone the next day.
Quick aside about dinners and food:
In Quito, and in most of Ecuador, meriendas (the Ecuadorian word for dinner) always starts with a soup. Always, always, always. Soup is usually followed by a serving of rice (white rice! as a Chinese-American, I deeply appreciate this), some lentils (lentejas) or beans, some vegetables, and meat (usually beef, but can be chicken or pork).
In Chone, the food has been a little different, but still absolutely phenomenal. There’s no soup (sopa) to begin with, but the same foods follow, and there’s also dessert (postres) accompanied with fresh fruit juice, which is so, so, so, so fresh, especially in Chone because the fruit is all natural and picked from local land.
A quicker aside on Ecuadorian slang:
Banana - banano. Or, more commonly in Chone, guineo.
Sigue no mas - continue through. You would think this means, continue no more, but it actually means, continue and focus on nothing else except continuing. Something along those lines. It also applies to comer no mas, etc.
Merienda - dinner. Cena, normally dinner in school-taught Spanish, means a giant Christmas feast here in Ecuador.
An aside about money:
Also, a note on food: a good lunch here (including rice with meat and vegetables and a fresh fruit juice) is $2.50!
Save your quarters and ALWAYS ASK FOR YOUR CHANGE BACK! Bus rides here are $0.25 (a quarter!) But beware of pickpockets. They’re really good at what they do. A 5-litre water bottle is about $1.00.
An aside about the pickpockets:
I heard tell from the amazing people I’ve met today, who’ve been traveling in Ecuador for about a month already (Justin, Jennifer, Michaela, and Amida) about the pickpockets. Boy are they goooood.
I heard tell that one of their friends was on the bus with them. She had her arms wrapped around another person in their group, because, as with all buses in Quito, even the ones at 6 am *ahem the one I rode this morning*, buses are wayyy crowded. She was wearing her backpack on the front of her (as you should ALWAYS do when traveling on public spaces to minimize the chances of being pickpocketed) and when she walked out of the bus she found her wallet missing. Her wallet had been deep in a hidden inside pocket inside her bag, which was zipped and secured.
She later said, “You know? Whoever stole my wallet kind of deserved it. He WORKED for it.”
Yeah, they’re THAT good, apparently. I bet that pickpocketer would have had an amazing career on America’s Got Talent.
An aside about people in Chone:
Chone is really hard to find on a map (where is it, I ask you?) because apparently it’s not a touristy town. Which is a shame, really, because Chone is BEAUTIFUL. Just one look around you, even when we were passing through the countryside, and you can tell that what the guidebooks say about Ecuador being one of the most diverse places in the world is 100% true.
Anyways, the common pastime of people here is that they’re super incredibly family oriented. Even for people my age (young adult, 18 - 25 range), according to my host mom, there’s not a lot of clubs (discotecas) or parties (fiestas) that people like to go to during the evenings. [Apparently, the biggest fiesta in Chone just finished; people from around Ecuador came to party, and we just missed it.] However, aside from the fiesta grande, most people seem to enjoy coming home, and taking walks around the block, and sitting outside on their porches as the sun sinks on the horizon, watching their neighbors go by and shouting “Buenas tardes” “good afternoon” to people they aren’t familiar with and bits of gossip to people they are familiar with. It’s such a nice ambiance — it really seems as if the city is alive, brimming with people.
[Fun fact: In Chone, the sun rises at 6:30 am and sets at 6:30 pm. Trippy.]
El Centro in the city of Chone.
Speaking of the city, we were wandering around El Centro (the central plaza of Chone) today, buying bottled water and bananas and recharging my Ecuadorian phone (recarga, as they say, which means going into a supermarket and giving the salesperson your telephone number so that they can help you put money in your phone to text/make international phone calls). As we were wandering our way back, we saw a bunch of students who had just been let out from school. They wore white uniforms with green silky ties and pants for the boys, and green ties and skirts for the girls, and were all excited to see us, a group of foreigners, wandering around town. I suppose in a place like Chone, which is a LOT more homogenous than LA, lemme tell you, it’s exciting to see someone not like you. Kids kept sneaking us glances, and the bold ones would pipe up “Hello” loudly. When we realized we were lost in the neighborhoods (los barrios, which are never-ending), we asked some kids for directions, and they, like the people of Chone, were so eager to point us in the right way. We had about twenty different voices and shining black eyes shouting at the top of their voices in rapid Spanish about the best way to get to where we needed. The same happened again when we asked a police officer to call us a taxi; we were suddenly surrounded by twenty kid students, deliberating with the officer the best way to get where we needed.
And we met the host family’s nephew (el nieto) who is so, so intelligent at 9 years old and very reflective and very serious (muy grave por sus anos). He was such a sweetheart and eager to tell us what he knew and thought and play with us soccer and volleyball.
An aside about medicine and local health (which is what I came here to learn, although I realize I have been waxing about everything except medicine so far):
To be honest, that’s because I haven’t gone on any health rotations yet. Also because I’ve been so scattered traveling all over Ecuador. Tomorrow is my first day!!!!
But I did learn loads from my companions on this trip. From them, I learned some really shocking things (of course, understand that these were in response to my question: what was the most shocking thing you’ve learned since coming to Ecuador?)
Here are las respuestas:
physicians in Ecuador are often taken from public hospitals/private practices to work for the gang lords and their people. If they don’t comply, there are “appropriate consequences.” If they do, they simply finish their work for the gang and are released back to their practice.
as you might have noticed, there is gang activity in Ecuador. Although Ecuador does not produce drugs or have drug cartels, Colombia and Peru do, and they use Ecuador as an intermediary thoroughfare to traffic their drugs through. Hence, there is drug-related gang violence. Northern Ecuador is apparently very, very bad off. NEVER travel to northern Ecuador as a tourist if you can avoid it.
women in maternity wards must conceive by themselves and in full view of anybody who walks in. Due to cultural customs, family members are not allowed to come with the mother into the maternity ward. However, students, other physicians, nurses, or anybody who wanders into the maternity ward are allowed to see the birth happen.
very little screening of material here for children. Apparently, watching a surgery in Ecuador really means watching the surgery, including the whole insert-the-catheter-into-a-penis kind of deal that surgery sometimes necessitates. In terms of children, the city of Quito has not hesitated to screen a full catheter surgery on an HD-TV in the supermarkets, where children are seen to pass by every few seconds. [Fun Fact: this is also true on buses. Buses have televisions, and we have noticed that buses tend to play THE MOST violent movies, the kind that makes people my age cringe, the kind with a lot of carnage, the R-rated American films that have been translated into Spanish. These buses are often full of children traveling with their families as well.]
in some hospitals, especially government-owned ones, the government has mandated that physicians start work at 7 am in the morning. Most physicians are allowed to get off by 1 pm.
due to the recent tuberculosis outbreak, the act of making a local kind of beer, the equivalent of what we’d call “moonshine” has changed. The beer is made of corn, and the longer the corn ferments (the max allowed is 12 days after being processed), the stronger the alcohol. Before, locals would chew the corn, and spit out the leftover juice, letting their spit help the process of fermentation. Now, as a result of tuberculosis, that is no longer allowed.
I’m intrigued, to say the least, about tomorrow’s experience rotating in the clinic.
An aside about CFHI:
The program is apparently super, duper, duper allergic to communicating what they have organized for us. We find out what we need to do a few hours before we do it. Ejemplo: we traveled across Ecuador to Chone with only a number to call, and when we arrived the number did not work, until a pharmacy worker figured out the problem.
Despite this, I really appreciate the way the program has been set up, in that it seems like a truly authentic experience. Part of travel is getting lost, isn’t it? And when you get lost, that’s when you start truly learning more about the culture. At least, you aren’t afraid to ask for more directions.
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