So this is the first update I’ve actually sat down and wrote before I came to the blog update page. Maybe everything will be spelled correctly? I also just fell 10-15 feet down a mountain while crossing a landslide on a path, that sucked. The more I tried to get out the more dirt kept falling so Molly had to help me find some rocks to grab onto. Read this as each section a different story, it’s kind of a grab bag of stuff while I’ve been here. Here I am crossing the creek after falling:
One funny thing is that I always bring old clothes for the workers on the farm. One guy was wearing all the GMU final four shirts we brought last year. A volunteer on the farm asked him about it since it’s not something you’d expect to see while traveling here and he replied, “I was at all the games, it was an amazing time.” Just thought it was kind of funny how they’re always fucking with people here.
My girlfriend’s mom’s boyfriend is 30-31 and loves rap. One of his favorite artists is “Busya Rhymes.” Right now I put on some GZA for him.
We were at this school two towns away opening a government subsidized internet cafe for them. We couldn’t get any power to where the switches, computers, and satellite communication equipment was so I went into the school to try the power there. No lights in the school worked, they couldn’t remember how long it’s been since the power worked. I investigated a little bit further and found a switch at the main breaker, turned it off, then back on, and viola their power was restored. Who knows how long they’d been without power at the school. Anyways, we spent about 3-4 hours there getting this internet cafe set up. There was no cell phone service at the school, which made it difficult to get into contact with Global Net, the contractor. They came in, did a shitty job setting up all of the equipment, and for some reason at any of these cafes didn’t finish the software setup. The village elder kept bringing us food and “Inca Cola” (a bubble-gum tasting cola), asking Molly and I when we were getting married, and at the end of the session killed a chicken for us to eat. Killing a chicken doesn’t sound like a huge deal, but here it’s one of like the highest respect things. We all felt really bad that we couldn’t eat the chicken this 70-year-old man had prepared for us. Those people were definitely very hospitable and gracious for us being here. Also, as an afterthought, and older woman asked us where we were from. We told her the United States and then she asked us how close France was to it.
There’s a chocolate lab puppy on the farm named Tuddy and it loves to play kind of crazy so its thing is to try and bite my dick. Not the best way to play. On the subject of dogs, we also had to put to sleep two three-month-old puppies this week. They were vaccinated for the Parvo virus but still got it; one of the puppies had it in the stomach/respiratory and the other had it in the nervous system/respiratory. The true sad part of this though was when the owner was told about the nervous system she said to bring the puppy home so it wasn’t nervous anymore.
The whole healthcare thing here is kind of crazy too. A girl here thought that babies were dropped from airplanes and the ones who weren’t caught correctly were the deformed. Well, once she discovered herself, she became pregnant then realized how babies were formed.
The more I’m here the more shocked I become with the culture. A woman is cooking on the farm for a week so that way she can get a DVD player, that’s just something we don’t think about. She’s the farm worker’s wife, 25, and has 4 kids. Her husband makes $60 a week working and that’s to support 6 people. I can’t get over it, $60 buys you a week to week and a half of gas in the US.
And speaking of gas, it?s $1.48 a gallon here.
Part II
So two nights ago I was at a local fiesta in Quinara. This wasn’t something crazy, it reminded me of the shitty state fairs in Virginia. Here was something different though. Airsoft guns are all the rage here but they don’t have orange tips, so it seems like every kid is running around with a handgun and aiming it at you. That’s beside the point though; once the power went out due to the dance pulling too much power while blaring reggaeton, things got crazy. I have honestly never seen this many people this drunk in one place during my three years of college. We all sat there in amazement.
Men were pulling their dicks out like 5 feet away from us and pissing on their selves, people were falling asleep on sidewalks, and when we arrived back in Vilcabamba at 2 AM for their festival was ending and someone was taking a dump in the street. Not to mention we paid $20 for a $5-6 taxi ride since the guy was the only person driving who wasn?t drunk.
This truck that drove us was a late 1950s, early 1960s converted Ford pickup. The bed was stripped off and rebuilt with wood to allow for much more cargo to be held and here I was with three Ecuadorians riding in the back. I started thinking about how society continually fucks itself into a downward spiral. Refusing an offered drink here is a pretty large insult and no one will leave us alone unless we tell them alcohol will kill us.
The problem here is similar to that facing “natives” inside the United States. Europeans have been drinking wine for thousands of years and have built up alcohol tolerance while natives of North and South America have only been drinking for something around 600 years. This is causing grave addiction in the area as well as lower tolerance for alcohol. So, I guess the point is it?s just sad how something as simple as alcohol can cause so many problems in one small area.
