And Back Again...

This final post has been a work in progress since my return to Canada. I have begun it many times and none seemed to convey my feelings correctly. Ecuador left me with feelings of wonder at life’s beauty and bounty, with new ideas to be realized and explored, and with reflections on how the world works outside of my bubble that is Western society.

The three months between my post “The Juggle for Time” and my eventual return to Canada were full of experiences I should have documented. These included the last month I spent in Pueblo Kichwa de Rukullakta and the amazing people I met while there. My experience moved past feelings of desperation and self-pity and into feelings of immense gratitude to the people who allowed me to live, participate and experience their life for a brief period in time. Although I did not have much to give back – just my written thesis – I take with me an appreciation and respect for grassroots organizations and democratic means of community self-governance. Somehow, I will find a way to repay them.

Just before Easter, I left my placement in Pueblo Kichwa de Rukullakta. Back in Quito, my goal was to balance the increasing pressure to pump out 45 pages of writing in two and a half weeks and the need to refamiliarize myself with living on my own, i.e. cooking for myself. Although I had many friends there for support, this time was full of a crazy amount of stress. Let me tell you, the jubilation involved with finally handing in that plastic bound manuscript to the hands of my professor was an emotion not quite paralleled.

For me, April 23^rd was an important day: it was the end of the Trent-in-Ecuador program (signaled by the submission of our final placement report) and my mom and stepdad’s arrival to Ecuador. I hadn’t seen either of them since my goodbyes in the Halifax airport the previous August (with the exclusion of Skype) and so the reunion was rather tearful. The next 3 weeks included being a glorified tour guide for two of the four regions of Ecuador: the Andes and the Amazon. We toured Quito, took a trip to a hacienda at Volcan Cotopaxi, and a trip to a jungle lodge deep within the Ecuadorian Amazon. These were separated by their boat trip to the Galapagos Islands and my trip to Cuzco and trek to Machu Picchu in Peru. Finally, our adventures concluded with a relaxing trip to Otavalo for some artisanal shopping and enjoying the general Andean beauty before our flights home.

Once back in Canada, culture shock was a very big reality. However, I had prepared for an experience that didn’t happen. I had readied myself for feelings of immediate alienation but these came gradually months later. I settled back into Alberta life smoothly with my summer job and friends. However, there were two things that struck me upon return: first, the overpowering and omnipresent need to consume, and second, the fact the those with whom expressed interest in my travels really only wanted to know the bare minimum.

The force to consume hit me within days and it was almost debilitating. I had never realized before, but everything in Canada is geared to make you consume. I cannot quite name why this happens or how, but it is there. I also would consider Ecuador to be quite Western in places, especially in Quito where there are billboards attempting to do the same thing. However, moving from a way of living where I rarely bought anything to one that pushed me to change my wardrobe every season, hit me like a ton of bricks. The feeling, to put it lightly, is one of the scariest feelings I have ever felt in my life. We are made to believe that we need to the newest and the greatest thing on the market, and even our judgments of how we and other dress, eat, live is driven by an omnipresent force to consume. Although I have again sold out to this viewpoint, as it is hard to resist, I refuse to forget just how potent this force is and how complacent we have become to it.

The second feeling was much more personal and eventually stemmed my gradual feelings of alienation from those around me. I expected people to want to sit down and listen to my stories or want to share in how life changing it was for me. However, I was hit with the stark realization that most people want a two-sentence synopsis and would appreciate if your realizations do not change their lives too much. Although I ended up respecting the expectations of other people, the realization that only a few people want to share in my experiences was a hard pill to swallow. The resulting feelings of being misunderstood resonated for a while but these too finally passed with the rest of culture shock. To say the least, culture shock has many manifestations and should never be underestimated, no matter how prepared you think you are to come home.

Ecuador has left me with many memories and new perspectives: ones that I believe have enriched my life. However, my reflections about Ecuador will never stop driving me to learn more about our world. This trip has opened up the door to many new and exciting possibilities and only time will tell what they are.

You may leave the journey but the journey never leaves you.

Thank you to those who have continually given their support in the writing of my first blog. Countless hours and thoughts have gone into this blog and so I therefore thank my readers who have undoubtedly spend many hours reading my musings, however dull or self-reflective.

I have started a second blog to continue documenting my thoughts and experiences on development, and you can find it here:

Confessions of an International Development Student (http://confessionsofanidsstudent.blogspot.ca/)

The Juggle for Time

To be perfectly honest, I do not have enough time in the day for everything I need to do in this placement. I have to first and foremost be present and active in the community, that is a given. But the hardship lies in undertaking this while juggling my own research, researching the theories behind the role my community has given me (namely sustainable agricultural development) and stay on top of current discourse concerning oil resistance. I am not very familiar with sustainable agriculture in the community context. I have grown up with it being around me in the city or in the global North framework, but not in the theories behind its practice in the global South. Because of this, I am having to do extra research. I also have been failing at keeping up with the discourse on oil resistance. These four things I am trying to juggle are taking a toll, and I often spend many hours in my room reading and writing. With so many important things on the go, I am left thinking that I honestly do not have enough time in the day. It also leaves me with a sense of guilt for not lazing around with my family on a Sunday, or with a general feeling that I am just not doing enough. I have just under 6 weeks left in my community and still have so much left to accomplish. It is 2 months today that my final 40-page paper has to be handed in documenting my experiences and my research. I have many questions still unanswered and not enough time in the day to do everything I need to do... I suppose this is a brief glimpse into my future if I decide I want to be a researcher. It also makes me thing that those who can balance this many things well really does have a gift, one that I am trying fruitlessly to learn.

The Power of Thoughts

Written: February 20, 2012

I am incredibly homesick, yet again. I would love to be back in Canada right now, enjoying my classes in Halifax and sloshing through the wet snow. But this is not possible as Halifax has its own problems and if I went back, I would regret that decision almost instantly. So, for now, I am going to make a pact with myself to make this my new home. I am going to try to love my host-family here and my surroundings as though they are familiar and my own. I have noticed that I have not been putting as much effort into this placement as I should have. I honestly have been wanting it to be over rather than trying to enjoy it. This I am going to try to change. I am going to make this place my home for the next 6 weeks. I know I will still be homesick, but I will try not to let this get in the way of my desire to learn and experience life in my community. This quote spoke to me when I found it and I am going to leave it with you as well. Hopefully you will find strength in it like I did.

“Thoughts are energy. And you can make your world or break your world by your thinking.” – Susan L. Taylor

Addition (from Feb. 22): I have realized that sleep in also incredibly important. If you are lacking in sleep, it can make challenges appear insurmountable. It can alter your thoughts so that your day seems hopeless. With a little sleep, the world rights itself and becomes attainable. This is the power of sleep and of thoughts.

A Break from the Amazon, or a Break from my Health?

After two weeks in Quito, I am back in the Amazon. I have been accepted back with open arms by my family and although I am still quite homesick and sick, I have decided to make the most of it. However, the two weeks I spent in Quito were eventful to say the least.

The first week in Quito, I spent preparing my presentation and project proposal for Wednesday, and two final assignments due on Friday, which would finish off two of my classes. I also was sick with a cold that had started Saturday while I was still in my community. Altitude automatically makes sicknesses worse so the being in Quito, compiled with the cold, caused me to become quite sick. I spent most of my time either at school or in my hotel finishing off my assignments and prepping myself for my presentation. I also found out a few days before I returned to Quito that my host-mom had got a new student so I could not go back to my house in Quito. However, unlike many of the other students who had been kicked out of their homes in Quito, I was allowed to keep the suitcases I had left there, and not be stranded with a tent, textbooks, and large amounts of clothes that I had left behind.

So being kicked out of my house, working on assignments, and being sick, it was shaping up to be an excellent week... my meeting with my program coordinator on Monday and my presentation on Wednesday went well, and I received some good advice to help guide me through the next 7 weeks of my placement. This included being more active finding out some of the answers to the questions I had posed about organic coffee production and oil resistance, as well as making an effort to be less judgemental about my preliminary conclusions as some had turned out to be wrong.

On Thursday night, while working late at the university with some friends on our assignments due the following day, we ordered in pizza. This however, turned out to be a terrible idea. When I got back to my hotel I started having sharp pains in my stomach as I tried to write a few more paragraphs on my essay. Painkillers did no good and I decided to give up and go to bed, maybe it would be better tomorrow. However, it was not better tomorrow, and the pain had moved through me to the toilet bowl. Throughout the day, this became steadily worse. I managed to finish my assignments minutes before the due date (I would not expect anything less of myself...) and went off to enjoy our new freedom from school.

However, over the next few days, I got progressively worse; so much worse that I decided to go to a hospital on Sunday. I sat around for 3 hours while they ran tests, but these tests all came back negative. I went back on Monday (after I had wished my friends goodbye as they headed to their placements), still not better, for another test, and that came back negative for parasites. I became really sick that night and vomited all over my bathroom a few times, and after much persuasion on the phone, my mom forced me to go to a different hospital on Tuesday afternoon. I was extremely weak by this point and they put me on an IV right away. They then ran a bunch of tests, gave me electrolytes, and finally when I gave them a stool sample, they determined that it was a bacterial infection, and gave me a prescription for some medication. I finally went home 7 hours later at 10pm, feeling a lot better, and crawled into bed.

Over the next few days, I lay in bed and watched movies, regaining my strength which had been zapped by the bacteria. On Friday, I determined I was well enough to go back to my community, packed up my stuff and hopped on a bus back to the Amazon. I was still pretty weak, and slept lots when I got there, but I am doing a heck of a lot better now. Cipro is a miraculous drug...

Las Fiestas de Rukullakta

From February 2 to 5th, my community celebrated themselves. This year marked the 5^th anniversary of their organization, Pueblo Kichwa de Rukullakta (the Kichwa Community of Rukullakta) which formed in resistance to proposed oil exploration by the Canadian company, Ivanhoe Energy.

This festival was unlike anything I had experienced before. First off, it had aspects I had never experienced: like traditional dance and singing competitions, a competition to elect the community’s 18 year old Queen for the year (pageants are extremely popular in Latin America), booths selling fruits and vegetables, handicrafts, and the traditional meal of tilapia cooked in a palm leaf (maito) and yucca, and most notably, the amount of drinking was absurd. Almost every booth and store had stacks of beer crates, and this ran out two days in, and more had to be trucked in. Almost everyone I saw was drinking, either beer, aguadente (sugarcane alcohol, which is very strong), or chicha, the traditional drink made by women to give energy to their working husbands, but also has a quantity of alcohol in it from the yucca fermented by the women’s spit. I pretended to drink the chicha, as it can make you extremely ill if not made from clean water, and I refused as much alcohol as I politely could, but still managed to be drunk by 3pm on Saturday. Luckily, I left on Sunday to go back to Quito, or else it would for sure be another day of endless drinking, ending in crazy dancing. From what I hear, everyone had Monday off as a day where you could be completely and utterly hungover without guilt, which I’m sure most people took advantage of.

This festival was quite intriguing, as it was an opportunity for everyone to get together and celebrate. However, many people did not join in, including my host-family, other than my host-mother who was helping to organize it. They barely attended any of the events, and at one point, Nina (the eldest) grimaced when I suggested she come with me to the election of the Queen.

Another intriguing thing was the drinking. Although drinking is commonplace in my community in the afternoons, and especially on the weekend, this was an amount above anything I had ever seen before. It reminded me of Frosh Week/Orientation Week at University where most students took the opportunity to get extremely drunk. The main difference was that it was not just 18-24 year olds getting drunk, but their parents and grandparents. It was rather amusing during the day, but in the evening, it became shocking and alarming. The next thing that was brought to my mind was the stereotype of Indigenous people as drunkards. I am only familiar with this stereotype in Canada, but unfortunately, I don’t think that there is a boundary at the continental barrier. I have come to believe that the drinking problems associated with indigenous people spans across the Americas, which no doubt is a reaction to colonialism, whether it was by the English, the French, the Spanish or the Portuguese. This was a sad realization for me on one of the darker realities of my community. I also think that my community isn’t that bad either, because most people have a sense of purpose in the community given to them by their intense organization to which they were celebrating that weekend.

On a lighter note, being around so many happy and welcoming people really made me feel like this was my community for the first time. I felt like I was a part of it, or as close as I could be given that I am still very noticeably a foreigner. I was introduced to many people through the other three volunteers, and through other community members I had met before through my host-family. There was even one man who has tried twice to set me up with his 23 year old son who works in the military on the Amazonian Columbian border, who I have also avoided meeting both times on account of me leaving to go to Quito for classes.

The festival was definitely a good time and it has definitely given me an opportunity to get to know my community a little bit more.

Amazonian Musings (End of Week 4)

Thoughts on Rain 

The Amazon makes even your expensive, Gore-Tex jacket feel like you are wearing a plastic bag...

What I find slightly interesting and intriguing is rain and people’s reactions to it here. It rains here a lot. So far, there has been at least one torrential downpour per day (although I am told it is not usually this rainy). Regardless, rain is a natural process here that happens quite frequently. It is the rainforest after all. However, when it rains, all activity stops. You would think that people would learn how to work through the rain like Northerners do snow and ice, but they don’t. Granted, the rain doesn’t usually last for days, just a few hours.

One morning at breakfast, my host-mom asked what I was doing today. I said I was doing what I usually do and going to the coffee processing center. She told me that because it was raining so hard, she doubted anyone would be there. I went anyways. She had told me this before but every time I had gone when it was raining, there was someone there, so why would today be any different? Well, she was right. No one showed up for two hours and I went back to my community dejected, called my coordinator, and he said we aren’t doing anything today because it is raining. Trying to keep up with people’s thoughts on the weather here is like trying to pin the tail on a running donkey while blindfolded...

Experiences with Rats 

For the last few weeks, I have been having problems with rats in my room. Yes. Rats. The first night I encountered them, I woke up to hear something rustling beside my head on my plastic covered mattress. When I turned over, it bolted off my bed, under my mosquito net, and up the wall. I initially thought it was a giant spider (I had just finished reading the second Harry Potter book), then a rat, and then my mind landed on a monkey, and so I went back to sleep. In the morning I asked my host-mom what it was and she said it was a rat, point blank. Well, apparently rat’s climb walls... 

For the next few weeks, I encountered or heard them every night. I saw them a few times running along the gaps in my walls and the ceiling. I was terrified and barely got any sleep. However, after a week of this, I decided I needed to get over my fear. My family has been living with rats all their lives and to be honest, they don’t really bother me. I’m not even sure they are looking for food because they are definitely well fed and big, and there is never any evidence of them eating the food that is left out overnight. My decision though was much harder than anticipated. I got a break from them when I went to Manta for a few days, but still I find the only days that I am not bothered with them are when I cannot hear their movements because there is a huge storm outside. To try and replicate that, I have been wearing my noise-cancelling headphones to bed because I don’t have earplugs and it has been working pretty well. I am starting to sleep through the night. Maybe, when I have lived there long enough, I will try to get used to sleeping with them without ear plugs. Until then, I’ll keep my earplugs.

On a side note, my mom looked up rat in her Aboriginal totem book and discovered that rats are a “sign of success, restlessness, and shrewdness.” They are also revered in Chinese because of their adaptability, intelligence and ability to reason. I don’t know what this is supposed to mean to me, but I hopefully I can understand the message it is trying to bring me.

 Placement Assumptions (written January 31)

As I write my real proposal for my placement, after one month spent in my community to be presented next week, I have had to go over the practice proposal I did at the end of October and my presentation that I did at the beginning of December. Looking back, I really had no idea what I was getting myself into. I had really high hopes for what I wanted out of this placement. However, what my community wanted me to do is not all what I had imagined I would be doing. 

I had thought in August that if I ended up with a placement that involved agriculture, I would change immediately. I hate gardening and getting my hands dirty in the sweltering heat was not my idea of a placement I wanted to do...

However, it turns out that I am having fun learning about coffee and more importantly, learning lots. I hopefully will be able to answer my research question, which has not changed, “How does oil development affect indigenous communities in the Amazon?” However, I had also thought that I would be researching social movements and their role in opposing fossil fuel development. I made the assumption that social movements were needed to guide the actions of indigenous communities, which looking back was rather racist and naive. In reality, my community is incredibly organized and are now helping guide other communities in the same struggles they are facing.

 Language and Discrimination

Language is such an important part of a culture and essentially leads to acceptance. If you are not fluent with the language, it is much harder to integrate. This I have realized. People also automatically think that you aren’t very bright when you have trouble with the language. You cannot participate in discussion that you normally would in your native language, and people think the lesser of you. I have experienced this with my coordinator. Often, he talks to me like I am stupid or just ignores me.

I also realized that I now have had a taste of how immigrants to Canada feel when they are discriminated against on their level of intelligence by adeptness in English. Problems learning the language does not mean you are stupid, it just means you have problems learning the language.

Observations from the Trip to Manta

The trip to Manta has made me recognize the knowledge bases in conflict, between me and my community. There is the Western knowledge base, which I more strongly connect with, and the Kichwa knowledge base. Although I have tried to be extremely culturally sensitive, the trip to Manta brought these differences out. Before the trip, the only really conflict I had had was that our conception of time is different. Often my coordinator would be late (30 minutes to two hours late) coming to a meeting that I had been early for, or he would be really early on the days that I happened to be accidentally late.

However, on the trip to Manta the differences became clear. The first was that the differences in the conception of time became emphasized. We had to have the coffee in Manta by 9am on Monday, and we left at 4pm the night before, leaving lots of time to make the 12 hour drive. The only problem was that we were driving extremely slowly; sometimes we were going up the mountain passes at the speed of a walking horse... It took us 9 hours to get from the community to Quito, a trip that should take about 4 to 5 hours. By 9am, we were just over halfway there. By that point, we also started getting frustrated calls from the project director who was supposed to be meeting us in Manta at that time. This clash was brought to the test when we finally got to Manta around 3pm (23 hours later) and the program director had to cover up for the community by saying that it was the driver’s fault, not the community’s tardiness. Being this late for a deadline could have cost them the contract that they have with the shipping company, but I don’t think that they recognized that.

The second knowledge difference was of gender. When there is a cramped space, Western culture places the woman in the best spot. From my experience in that ride to Manta, it might be the opposite in Kichwa culture. I already knew that men were placed at a higher standard than women, but my position in the car exemplified that. This may not seem like a huge deal, but when there are 3 people (and the driver) crammed into a truck bench seat made for two, something has to give. I was told to go in first and was given the worst position in the car, half on the seat, and half on the emergency break, having the stick shift jammed into my lower thigh every time the gear needed to be changed. I eventually dealt with this by talking clothes and blankets and stuffing them around the emergency break to create another cushion for myself. However, things got worse when the two men beside me were getting antsy and uncomfortable, and so they spread their legs and ended up pushing me so far towards the driver, I had to cling to the driver’s seat in order to stay upright. They did not notice, and when I asked them to give me more room, like gave me dirty looks and grumbled before they moved over maybe an inch. Apparently, even though I am in huge amounts of pain, their comfort matters more.

On a background note, the trip we made to Manta (a coastal city in Ecuador) was to drop off just under 10,000 pounds of organic, shade-grown, fair trade coffee at a shipping company so it could be sent to the buyer in Germany. I had the privilege of going because I am learning about the coffee process in their community as an alternative to oil development. This amount of coffee is actually only the last 2 months worth of production, which I think is amazing! I went with my coordinator’s assistant, the driver, and a chauffeur (because the driver didn’t know how to get to Manta). I did learn lots about the final bits of coffee production and they asked me to take pictures so that they could increase their small database of pictures they have of the process.

63 bags of beans (aroun 10,00 pounds - each bag is 125 pounds)

Also, based on my experience above, I decided not to go back to the community with them, opting for taking a bus. This decision was also reinforced when I found out that they were not going to stop so the driver could sleep, even though he had already been up for over 48 hours. Definitely wasn’t going to risk my life to get back to my community faster...

Anyways, it was an interesting trip to do to follow the process of coffee as far as I can take it. However, I doubt I would do it again...