More from Arbolito

I think I am officially becoming ecuadorian. i walk down the streets at night when its in the 70s, and i´m FREEZING. feel the need to put on a sweatshirt. whoever thought life would come to this.

things i´m missing - glasses of milk, cereal, my boyfriend, beer (sad but true), grass, sitting and talking to someone who´s known me for more than 3 months, big salads
things i´m not missing - malls (such a liberating thing not to buy clothes for a year), competitive cutthroat environments, rainy cold days in boston, cell phones
things i´ve lived through - a scorpion giving birth to about 40 scorpion babies right when we were trying to kill her. amazing sight. and yes, said scorpion was in conor´s room right across the hall from mine (dont worry dad, i´m fine).
my third latin american earthquake (the first in lima. second- only felt the house shaking for a few minutes. no big deal, life went on as usua. third - in a small sierran village at a friends house in the middle of the night. wake up to doors and windows rattling bed shaking. conor: is that an earthquake? me - yup an earthquake. went back to bed. woke up an hour later and threw up from altitude sickness)
a ride on a 1 person moped with two other guys, one of them being a 6 foot 5 ecuadorian, which i assure you is QUITE a spectacle when most men here are 5 foot 4. it was a gringa sandwich. we got lots of laughs, and halfway home, we got a flat tire from glass in the road and had to walk the moped home. jumping off of a bridge into a river in nowhere, ecuador yesterday. so fun

so yes, i´ve been spending my time doing a variety of interesting things recently. they include writing a version of a christmas carol in spanish with my friend wilfrido (the church youth group is going to put it on), going to reina pageants (theyre like miss america pageants) where i have the privilege of watching 15 year old girls prance around in heels in the ¨sportswear¨competition, waiting on street corners for the number 5 bus, the only bus that comes to arbolito, which inevitably never comes when you need it (becuase really, who would want to come to arbolito? besides me of course . . . ) and eating endless amounts of bananas, rice and fresh baked rolls.

living here for 3 months, there are a bunch of sights that no longer surprise me. part of this is good, i think, because it means that i´m getting accustomed to life here. the bad part, i think, is that i´m getting a bit hardened to the realities of life here. i never want to get cynical or to stop letting the sadness affect me. anyway, these sights include
-seeing a litle girls riding down the street on her tricylce. a normal sight, until she turns around and has a cigarette dangling out of her mouth. upon questioning, you find out she is dutifully bringing it to her dad (cigarette can also be substituted with beer)
-seeing that same 5 year old girl shake her butt way too well and get down to the floor while dancing and singing to the latest reggaeton hit, which is probably about sex and taking advantage of women
-walking past piles of burning trash, and sometimes thinking that it´s actually a kind of pretty sight
(this is what happens when you live in an area with no grass. trash burning fires become your beautiful scenery)
-seeing women sell everything from fried chicken and french fries to rolls of toilet paper and ice cream from their rooms in the womens prison
-seeing kids come into my class during school (when they should be in class) to try to sell candy to my students. the sad thing is that this seems totally normal to everyone else around me. apparently, i´m the crazy one
-seeing kids light a match and burn the thong of their flip flops to glue it back to the base and fix it. (this is probably so that they wont get hit at home for having a broken flip flop. ditto on the getting hit for losing a pencil).
-(my personal favorite) - laying on a beach a few weekends ago on our retreat. i was actually reflecting about how much i felt at home, because beaches are all the same everywhere and it reminded me of sag harbor. then, of course, i look up and see a white goat heading straight towards me followed by about 50 of his friends and no owner. i just returned to my journal writing.

I am convinced that i life in the noisiest place in the world. i fall asleep to dogs barking and fighting and mating. i wake up to dogs fighting. i believe i teach in what is officially the loudest elementary school on earth. music is never loud enough unless it can wake up your neighbor 3 blocks over. also, i can assure that it is a myth that roosters crow at dawn. they also crow at midnight. and 3 am. and 3 pm.
at first, all the noise drove me crazy. occasionally, when i´m really tired or frustrated, it still does. but one thing i´m definitely learning here is to have LOTS of patience. without it, i´m not sure i could survive. arbolito is pretty much the farthest thing from northeast us culture you could find . .. so try putting a fast paced, type a northerner like myself in arbolito. organization, schedules, etc just doesnt happen here. so a lot of what i´ve been going through has been a big process of letting go. letting go of expectations, my need to be in control and in charge, my need to have things the way i want them. good lessons, definitely, but sometimes all of it really runs counter to my desire to be a mover and shaker, to get things started and organized. but i think it´s healthy for me to release a bit my desire to be in control . . . .

as for how i´m doing in all this. its really a constant up and down. i´ve been thinking a lot recently about hope. hope in some ways gets harder to see every day as i learn more about people´s struggles. it just seems impossible to move out of this vicious cycle and its hard not to let it get you down. ive really been struggling recently with the culture here of relationships within families - short, frustrated. there seems at times to be a lack of compassion for kids being kids, for other people´s struggles . . . i am SO sick of hearing two phrases - ¨el me molesta!¨and ¨te voy a pegar!¨(hes bothering me! or i´m going to hit you!) i swear, molestar and pegar are the two most commonly used verbs there. it just seems like everyone, mostly kids, go around accusing each other of hitting or bothering each other. even in stable, good families it seems like the response to a kid breaking something is to yell or slap. the lack of a nurturing environment, in homes and in schools, has bene hard for me to deal with. and i´m really worried about myself getting used to it, falling into it, losing some of my empathy and compassion, not letting the hard things of life upset me as much as they did. and this is where lack of hope comes in - the cycle - you were hit as a kid, had a kid at 16, hit that kid, your husband doesnt let you work, your kid has a kid at 16. (my friend wilfrido, by the way, is 21 and a great uncle!!)

and i´m not sure, with all of this, where i fit in. ive realized in this whole letting go process that the first step is some kind of acceptance of powerlessness. i am not going to change arbolito, eliminate domestic abuse, get the schools to recognize the importance of critical and creative thinking. in a religious sense, i think it means realizing and accepting that im not god, trusting and putting faith in the fact that this crazy world somehow makes sense. but where i´m stuck - once you come to that place of acceptance, the question becomes - now what? where do i go from here? how do i put my gifts to use best? i´m definitely struggling with these questions a lot, and rostro, being such an open and undirected program, certainly helps to prompt them.

i´m definitely not totally despairing though. as i said, hope sometimes is harder to see every day. but from another perspective, as i get to know people and see their joys, feel proud of their accomplishments, learn about their struggles, i also begin to discover their strength and desire to move forward. so i´d like to share some signs of hope.

one of them is semillas, the afterschool program i help to run. its a source of constant joy among all my confusion and frustration. its growing in so many ways! in sheer size - we´re averaging about 80 kids instead of 50. also, we´re seeing kids more excited about coming, feeling a sense of pride in it. there are a ton of new ecuadorian volunteers, and we´re all coming together with our creative energy and trying to figure out ways to improve it, to have it not just be a safe space for kids for a few hours (which it most definitely is, and that´s probably THE most important thing it is, so i´m certainly not underemphasizing that value), but to really make it more of a place for learning and creative thinking - which, as i´ve said, is not emphasized in education here at all.

another small joy that´s in the works is a women´s group here in arbolito. we know a bunch of women who want to get something started. it´s been a bit of a frustration, since we´ve tried to have a few opening meetings that haven´t happened yet, but we´re trying to work with a few key women and try to empower them to realize that they can get something started. our goal is to help them to organize, but to not lead - to have them to lead as we support them. i´m so excited about this because women have SUCH a difficult position here - often captive to their houses (people here can´t go out and leave their house alone bc someone always has to be inside, guarding it) and captive to their husbands. they could draw so much on support from each other, and hopefully find some creative ways to help the community and find resources too. i´ll keep you posted on the project

my friends here too are also a source of joy. the ones who are really excited about improving themselves, improving their community. i´ve just been looking at them and realizing that while some of the kids i work with will likely end up in jail or doing drugs, some of them will turn out to be wonderful, moral people who will treat their family and friends well. all of this while still going through the incredibly crappy education system here.

so all in all, i´m trying to keep the faith, keep pushing for my improvement, and keep loving people in every moment i´m living. it´s tough going, and it´s been a bit of a down week for me, feeling frustrated about my impact here. but i´m hoping that at the very least, i´m growing in the process. i said before i came down here that i believe that real growth comes only when you´re challenged, so i´m trying to remember that through my struggles.

if you´ve read this far, thank you!!!! i still feel like i left a lot unsaid . . . i miss you all so much. please keep in touch

un abrazo fuerte,
kerry