[Note: This event happened near Christmas, but the message is still applicable to my life now.]

“Do you want to go [incoherent words in Spanish]?”

“Sure. Where are we going?”

“[Incoherent name of town in Ecuador]!”

“Alright. What time do we leave?”

“Six in the morning on Saturday.”

It was certain from the start that I had no idea where I was going or what I was doing. I never found out till I got there, and this is how most of the situations of my life living in an Ecuadorian family start out.

After four hours in a bus through jungle trails and a half hour canoe ride to an island, we arrived. Not sure whether to be more overwhelmed by the heat or the confusion, I plodded through the mud, following the Kichwa shuffle music. Arriving at the party, I felt extremely intrusive as I scanned the families lined up along the walls. Then, she informed me that it was a wedding.

Even though I felt very out of place, I was welcomed in the ceremony; they invited me to drink the traditional fermented yucca juice, join the lines of dancing, and sleep in the community school room. I giggled at their attempts to say my name, and they giggled at my feeble attempt to eat their meal of special occasions, monkey.

Carrying my sleeping nephew, my sister and I returned to the school to sleep. On the way, I saw a pregnant woman from the village smoking. After explaining to me the lack of pregnancy safety awareness, my host sister confessed her own vices during her pregnancies, saying, “I am very lucky that my boys turned out healthy…hmm…well.” Then, she looks to her son with his speech defects and the other with his lazy eye and said, “I wish I had known.”

I wish she had known, too. When I left the next morning, I knew I was coming back. Since then, I have been working on ways to spread basic pregnancy education throughout Amazonian communities because it is not just a woman, it is my friend. My sister.

Day in the Life

A white girl. In a skirt, nontheless. She walks in your direction, talking on her cell phone, and you give her a quick wink…to which she winces.

After filling up on banana leaf-wrapped tilapia, you ask what appears to be her host mother if you might take this girl out on a date. The entire family gathers around to hear the girl’s answer….a feeble and very unsure si.

*

I had nothing else to do that morning. Why not get swept off my feet? I gave him a chance and two hours. He proceded to show me every picture on his laptop…highlighting how cool it was that he had a laptop and then, with only a half hour left, took me to the river.

At this point, I was aware of my escape plan and mentally located my phone in my bag just in case. We drove 20 minutes away to a private alcove in the river with an underwater cave. He got in, and I just watched him with my skirt and dry, for once, clean hair.

He called to me in Spanish, “Alright, Tess. I am here about to swim into this cave, and you are standing on the shore. If you want, I can take you home now and you can tell your family how stupid I am. But…you are in the Amazon; you never have to see me again, and you will probably never come to this place again. Your choice.”

Of course, I went in.

*

In addition to the responsibilities I have in the hospital, I have an entirely other set of responsibilities to be a blond, white girl here in the Amazon. It’s a constant hassle to decide to take the offers (ex. free bus fares, front seats, exclusive help, and occasional excursions to random rivers) that come to me or not, all the while protecting myself…and still be a normal 19 year-old girl and a good representation of the US. There are also things that are forced on me that I can only decide to let it affect me or not, like the constant catcalls, the “accidental” touch in the bus, or the ritual of questions: “What’s your name, guapa? How old are you? Are you married? Do you have a boyfriend? Can I be your boyfriend?…Why not?”

*

I can’t possibly list all of the things that have happened to me, but I will share with you my favorite worst pickup lines that I’ve gotten.

-Him: “You shouldn’t go to Columbia. It’s dangerous. You know why?” / Me: “Ohh, what’s it called…the FARC?” / Him: “No, they will all fall in love with you.”

-Him: “Do you like sweets? Because I am your chocolate.”

-Him: “I live in the jungle. I’m like George of the Jungle…just looking for my Jane.  Anything is possible right?”

-Him: {looking at me, just waking up on the bus next to me} “I just woke up from,  a dream” / Me {leaving} / Him: “See you in my dreams, love!”

-Him (unnamed governmental employee): {attached to an official email regarding my project after I stopped in to ask for information on maps} “Greetings, my beautiful love. You are a pretty, precious maid. I want to get to know you. Give me your cellphone number. The truth is that you have beautiful eyes. Sincerely, another admirer in your life.”

I have two options in responding to these…harassments. You either laugh it off or you react negatively.

(…or you could even cut your hair off like I did to try to ease the cat calls….which unfortunately didn’t work).  I can’t say that I always choose correctly, and I don’t think there is any correct answer. I don’t want to seem like it is acceptable that they treat me this way, but I also don’t want to project bad images of Americans. This culture is in some ways good and some bad; one of romance…and who am I to be a judge of the quality of that?

Never-ending battle.

My previous host family's cute puppy they named "Feo" or "Ugly"...

Witches, tarantulas, haunted houses. Yes, all perfectly scary, but this Halloween nothing is scarier than “BIG PROBLEMS”. A month ago, another fellow and I had a conversation about how Global Citizen Year’s motto should be this phrase because each fellow is investigating big problems with taunting solutions like health, education, the environment, etc.

Our conversation drifted to what we consider the BIGGEST problem facing the world today, and I brought up a fact I had heard before that “99% of children with disabilities around the world do not have access to education”. That is scary. But even scarier were our responses to this.

After discussing the shock factor of this fact, our conversation concluded with the idea that this issue is overlooked because it is a first-world issue. In the United States, our economy and institutional structure is stable enough to worry about these issues, but for a developing country, like Ecuador, what are the incentives to educating the disabled when their country is still agriculturally focused and standing on an arguably unstable government?

One “incentive”: while these children have a slower learning curve, they are still children…human beings–human beings who feel the neglect of being in that 99%.

Instead of trick-or-treating this Halloween, I instead went door to door visiting the disabled children in the jungle. After driving for an hour deeper into the Amazon we reached a house. I saw a girl lying in a box. The girl could not have been more than four or five years old, but she was nine. There was not much more than skin on her bones; her stomach was bloated; and her limbs had bruises from hitting the sides of the box. Her diaper had not been changed for days. The doctor took a look at her matted hair and asked when she was last bathed. “Ayer”,  yesterday. Lies. I could see the doctor getting angry now. The aid items from the clinic hadn’t ever been used.

The dentist quickly brushed her teeth with a simple brush.  Her gums started bleeding and her mouth was full of blood. They had never brushed her teeth.

This tiny girl of nine has no voice, and I was about to cry for her.

I looked at the lying parents in shock. I could tell that they were scared. Not only because we were there, but every day to take care of her. I was afraid to leave her there.

I didn’t know if I could handle another visit that day, but it was worth it. The second house had a little girl who was seven years old in a family of similar wealth (from what I could tell). I was there for the same amount of time and all I heard was laughs. The little girl could not stop laughing and smiling. Happy little girl. Happy mother. Happy family.

The difference is care. Love is not expensive. I can’t demand that families treat their children with disabilities with all the care they can, but I can tell that it makes the difference.

Back to the question of whether it is worth it or not: I still don’t know. That’s why we have big, scary problems that we have to fix.  The experience of visiting these children didn’t exactly change my mind about this issue, but my mind was changed. If we ask ourselves what Halloween is really about then we remember that it is not just about scary things, but it is also about the sweet gifts whether it be chocolate or a new perspective.

Sometimes I feel like I am living on the Discovery channel. Even in my own house you can see the mile-long lines of ants carrying leaves, or even those bugs that look like leaves. Before I go to bed at night I look around my room and wonder, “Are there bugs near me, many of which I have never seen before?” Yes. Am I going to do anything about it? Nope, tonight is an adventure.

One night my host family and I were sitting in our open air living room and the electricity went out because of the storm. Where I am in the Amazon, when the lights go out…they really go out. You can look over the mountains and there isn’t a single light. Except for one. Before we got out the candles, a huge lightning bug came and lit up the entire room. It’s a bug that is around 2 inches long and has an orange belly and two huge green eyes that radiate. It was silent. I can’t really describe it, but it was a special moment with my host family.

It rains every day and the power usually goes out. It’s not cold, sad rain; it’s fun rain that relieves the heat of the day. I get excited for the rain every day.  Afterwards there’s a beautiful heat lightning show. Yesterday, I was lying in my bed with the door open when my light got hit by the lightning. As scary as it was, it was fascinating and there was no space between the lightning and the crackle. If I had only been standing up, it would be a different story.

Other things I never really appreciated are some of the only things that get me through the day. Like when the screaming baby stops crying because she sees a strange white girl smiling at her, or when I am feeling homesick and all of a sudden there is a puppy for me to pet with whom I will never share language misunderstandings. When there is no reminder of home, sometimes you just have to make a new one. I never expected to have lightning, bugs, and lightning bugs make me feel at home. Now they do.

My host brother and I in the Cloud Forest

Two miles of zipline

View from the Spanish classroom

As fellows we were all asked questions before we left about why we were taking a gap year. In my house it was “Will this experience be worth it?” If I had already been abroad for a year in Germany, then was I wasting time before starting my career? After my first week in intensive Spanish classes, I am finally starting to answer this question.

I am going into this experience with no more knowledge of Spanish than anyone who has ever been to a Mexican restaurant. Of course living in an Ecuadorian family is not a Mexican restaurant. Communication is a little different when there’s no mutual language. Instead of words we use hand signs, drawings, facial expressions, and laughter.

Each day I get home from Spanish or Culture classes and have two or three hours alone with my host mother before the rest of the family gets home. On the first day, I understood nothing and made noncommittal answers that left me out of trouble like, “Mhmm…” and “Yes, that’s great…” I was in a vicious circle of shame–ashamed of myself at first for not understanding and further ashamed for not understanding that not understanding is okay.

After a few more days of patience…and sometimes lack thereof… we left for a weekend in the Cloud Forest. As the rest of my family went for groceries, my host mother and I waited in the truck. It felt like a test. We began talking and my noncommittal answers became real answers. After twenty minutes my family came back and before they reached the car my host mother turned to me smiling and said, “We just had our first real conversation.”

So back to the question: “Is this really worth it?” Sometimes speaking in three word sentences all day makes me feel like it is definitely not worth it, but I am forgetting something. Last time I went on exchange I came into the experience with language skills and no understanding of international experience. Now it is the exact opposite. Continually answering this question of whether it is worth it creates my experience by analyzing what I really want from this year—to understand.

It is fair to say that I caught my travel elephant living in Germany last year as an exchange student. I lived in a small town on the Baltic Sea that had never hosted an international student before. Living in such a rural place gave me a chance to connect to the people on a deeper level and learn how to independently create my own lifestyle. That´s one thing I really love about Global Citizen Year–that they recognize the importance of home life in the fellows´ experience to make deeper connections into the culture.

My time in Germany gave me the chance to grow up and become comfortable being myself–a lesson that I was fortunate to learn at such a young age. Now that this project for me is complete, I am ready to be selfless and learn about the world around me and how I can best provide for this global community…and that is why I have chosen Global Citizen Year.

What really separates this experience from my other travels is the opportunity to network with a group of students who share my passions and are excited to reveal their unique interests. Despite the cost of this program, having that kind of inspirational community to belong to is priceless and an investment that society makes for a better future. Thank you to all of the people who have supported me along the way and I hope I can be of support to someone who also wishes to change their life.