Life life life :)

Hello!

I am in my third week here in Santa Ines/Tena. I am beginning to feel very comfortable here. I have made some good friends (or as good of friends as you can be for knowing each other for 3 weeks) and have had some very very interesting experiences here. I have eaten worms, snails and cow head now. The cow head was more funny than anything. We were sitting in our kitchen when someone came to the door, theY brought a freshly chopped off cow head as a gift to my family. I am not talking a nicely precerved lets through that puppy on the wall type of cow head, I am talking brains basically falling out, tounge hanging out and eyes still open. Yeah, that was a shocker haha. It just was sitting on our kitchen counter for a while....then got moved to the backyard....then we took it with us to a birthday party in another town (yep, cow head in a bag on the bus)...finally they cooked it and we ate it. Well, I tried to eat it but it is tough tough meat, I missed out on the brains, I guess that the brains are a softer and easier to eat.

I have about 1,000 stories to share about my experience here but am not sure how to reley them to the masses. I am sure that when I get home they will just kind of come out randomly. I will share one right now though, just to keep people updated a bit.

I went to a birthday party with my host family this past Sunday. It was a very fun experience with very fun people. The interesting part is that the man of the house so to speak is an old shamin man. We were walking aroud his garden and he was explaining to me all of the different medicinal plants that he has and how he uses them. Well, he decided that he wanted to cure me of all my problems and suffering. I guess he is saught out by many people and people in the community often say he does not live there or is dead so that people leave him alone, he is going to Texas to do some work there soon. So basically, he has had an incredible amount of experience in this work. We went into a room and had me rub a candle all over my body which he then lit, he started asking me all these questions and filled up a cup of water and put in my palms, blew smoke into it and then started to ask me more and more questions about my health. Some where questions and some were more like tellling me what has been wrong with me. He told me to turn over and lay down...he then plunged at my lower back and started to suck really hard. Quickly after he began almost vomiting into his hand, his hand was then full of blood that he poured out onto the ground. He told me that it was my bad blood coming out. He did the same thing on my front. That was a very new and different experience for me, partly because I was alone with him and not always sure what he was saying (old man Spanish can be very hard at times) and then suddenly I was getting flipped around and sucked on. He did a few more test type things and then we went back to the party, for me to be cured later. The party was incredible. Dancing like no tomorrow to all types of music. Cousins dancing with cousins like people dance at the clubs haha. It was great!! Ahhh so fun. I wish I could describe. But then, I was taken back to be cured. He spit many things on me made from plants and did more things with smoke and in the end sucked more blood from me. By the end of the curing he could no longer suck out blood which meant I was clean from whatever it was that was making me bad. To finish it off I had to drink a remedy made from a very intense plant, I know cannot take pills or drink for 8 days. My new friends (it is their dad) were sharing stories with me of when they had bad blood and different other problems that their dad fixed. It was reassuring to hear of other people going through this. My verdict is still out on the experience, I am very glad that I had it. It was incredibly different from anything else I have EVER experienced that is for sure.

So that is one new story I thought people might be interested in. I know for me it was very new anyways. May tales from the jungle continue! :)

I spend most of the week teaching. I teach 2nd level through 7th level everday a 1/2 hour each class. Let me just say...1/2 for a class IS NOT ENOUGH. Also, I understand why it is a problem to have a large class size, it is impossible to know if every child is grasping the concepts or the pronunciation AT ALL. It has been a good experience so far, I have a lot of respect for teachers thats for sure. I try to do different activities everyday and I try to keep an open chill vibe in the classroom. I have been very interested in breaking down the teacher student dichotomy by asking them to teach me words in Kichwa or in Spanish. The goal being to decrease the idea that the teacher is the one who knows and students are the ones who don´t know, because that simply is not the case and does not encourage learning. That has been going well, the students get very excited to learn and to teach. They are very courious. Sadly, 6 weeks is just no time at all for a language and in the end they will know how to say somethings but mainly vocab and simple ´hello my name is´ type stuff. For the younger ones who knows if we will ever get past numbers, eek. Yet another learning experience :)

My health has been more or less which has been kind of hard here. Currently I feel healthy though. We don´t have running water the vast majority of the time and it is not fun to be sick (that kind) without running water. Also without a shower, lets just say....I was feeling fairly gross. We also buy meals one by one because there simply are not the economic resources to have extra food in the house at all. So, I was feeling very weak too. I had a low phase in there as well, my host family is great as a whole but my host mom is not that motherly with me so I felt pretty darn alone while sick. But, things are really turing around. I went to a coworker of mine´s house and got to know his family which was great and like I said I have been making more friends here and have things to do on weekend nights and stuff. We go out dancing and it is a blast. That is something that I will miss an incredible amount when I return, all the dancing! Sure we have places to dance in the states but firstly, sorry guys, men dont dance in the states! They stand there. It is so fun to be met in the middle and actually dance! Secondly, the dances here cumbia, salsa, merenge, everything are just so fun to learn!! I suck of course, but people are patient with me and it is just great.

Moral of the story, it will be very hard to leave this part of the program in May while at the same time it makes me miss home more than Quito ever did or could. Yahoo for crazy life experiences :). I hope all is well wherever you are reading this!!

Time to start yet another new life!

It has been so long since I have blogged that I have yet another new life. I moved to a city in the jungle. Santa Ines is a community near Tena where I am going to be teaching english. I am living with a family in the community and it has been quite the change in my life. I am enjoying it thus far and am excited to see how this streches me. Just for startes...I ate slugs (or at least I think they were slugs) and they were delicious! I should also mention that with my dad and my sister I ate Cuy...for those of you who do not know what that is...it is guinea pig! I am a whole new Julia :)

Report from Santa Ines:

I am getting very used to the living situation. I live in a cinderblock house on the side of a highway. I take a shower with a bucket next to the house, it is covered by a tarp so it is kind of private...that is unless someone else walks around to the side of the house, it is only blocking the view from the street. My bed is pretty much a board and I use my northface for a pillow, but I have been so tired here I just konk out and I cannot even tell the difference, well I can tell the difference obviously haha but I can still sleep. My view on the house has changed an incredible amount, I am noticing how nice and liveable it really is. One does not need much more than this. The one thing is that I have my own room while all 7 of my family members sleep in the same room on 2 beds. I could imagine that getting old fast.

Today something insane happened, one of the most intense experiences I have had I must say. I just got done ´taking a shower´ and was changing in my room when I heard my host mom scream a scream I had never heard before. I knew it was something serious but was hoping it was a snake or something. I thought I should finish putting my clothes on before I go see what was going on. Then wailing from my mom began and frantic comotion. This comotion traveled to my door and she pounded pounded on my door screaming crying. I opened my door (in my bra mind you) for my host mom to tell me that the baby died or was dying. My host brother just staring at me with a lack of hope in his eyes. She was blowing into the baby´s mouth trying to do something to help it. She then thrust the baby into my arms hoping I would know what to do, or just because she could not look at it anymore or something. Thank god the baby began a moment after being in my arms so I knew it was alive. I just rocked the baby and kissed it on the head while my host mom regained sanity. Mental picture: me holding my baby sister, in my bra, my host mom trying to calm down, my 15 year old brother starring at me and my little 3 year old sister (who knocked the baby off the bed) looking so sad and shameful. It was intense. They had me call my parents in the states to see if we should go to the hospital, she keept asking me things like I would know the medical response, I think that has something to do with being from the US. I basically forced us to go the hospital where we went and waited for 2 hours to find out she is fine. When she feel off the bed she turned black and cold and could not breathe. I forgot to mention that before. But, I guess she is okay. Thank god. I stayed in Tena to do some reaseach now...then I will go back home soon. I am glad to have this time to process a bit.

School is going well, I don´t start teaching until Monday so I have just been observing and getting to know the other teachers. Everyone has been very nice and welcoming. I am super nervous to start teaching but I am sure it will be fine, I think it helps that the kids have started to get used to the fact that I am there...although they still take pictures of me and stare haha. It is a strange feeling to be such a minority and be treated as such. But, it will be great, the kids are so cute and curious.

Anyways, thanks for reading! I hope all is well with everyone at home! I will try to keep everyone updated as much as I can with limited internet access.

Oh, yeah....the whole reality thing...

So, I realized that I am only writing about my weekend adventures and have not really commented on the everyday life that I live. Both are important, one just happens to hold better stories.

I live in a city called Quito. Quito is a huge sprawled about city in a valley created by mountains. Although this makes the city very pretty, it also traps the pollution in the valley. Some days it is very hard to breathe because of all the pollution in the air. When buses drive by the black puff of smoke that is produced is incredibly large, and kind of scary. Also, there is not a very good trash/ recycling system or education about that so the streets are pretty much littered with trash. I do not have any pictures of the area near my school because to have a camera out is screaming ¨please rob me¨. Every bus that I take I feel like I am in a mosh pit. And, on almost every bus there are kids selling things. With all of that said, I still am loving it. It is a fairly large culture shock, but one that I am learning from. For example, wherever I go I am reminded how I do not look like anyone here, because people look at me like ´what are you doing here?´ I think this is an important experience to have, and I am getting used to it. It really has taught me a lot about having to be aware of how I act and present myself. When a lot of us (from the program) are together in public we often notice how incredibly loud we are, this is just a cultural difference but one that I had never noticed before and find interesting.

Shoot, I wish I could write a little more and explain my new day to day reality better but I am off to the park with my host family and our dogs!! I shall write more later :) Sorry this is so incomplete... adios!

If only words could describe...

Why hello there!

The thing that I feel most strongly that I want to tell people about right now is the trip I went on this last weekend to Baños. It was absolutely incredible. Let me explain...

We arrived in Baños on Thursday night after a beautiful bus ride through the mountains. We met a traveler from Holand and went out and got some wonderful food. We then went out dancing and called it an early night so we could get up at the crack of dawn and start our adventures.

Friday we woke up and found a place to rent bikes, 5 dollars for the whole day, and began our 45 kilometer ride. We biked through green lush mountains with clouds floating just above us. It was so refreshing to have complete control over where we went and how. We could stop and look at waterfalls whenever we wanted as we biked through tiny little towns busteling with people selling fruit and grilling everything under the sun. As we continued our ride we came across 2 bridges where they had ´bridge jumping´, this is like a form of bungee jumping. As we rolled up on our bikes we all said ¨HELL NO ARE WE DOING THAT¨. Yet, for some reason we stayed there watching the men who worked there jumping off in different ways. For some reason, we could not leave...hhmm...lets just say within 20 minutes all but one of us had jumped off and LOVED IT! It was one of the most exciting experiences of my life!! Standing on the platform saying ´no no no no no´ and then jumping and plumiting towards the raging river to be saved by the cord which swings you back up towards the other bridge until you swing swing swing, slow down slow down slow down, and a guy throws a rope at you to get you down. It was awesome!

We then got back on our bikes and kept going as if nothing had happened. We came across a cable car that went over a huge canoyn, toward a waterfall. Of course, we took it and that was very beautiful as well. We then hiked down the mountian, across a bridge like in Indiana Jones, found a place to eat lunch and enjoyed bread, cheese and fresh fruit under the trees, laughing all the way. We then hiked back up to the road and continued our journey on our bikes. After about an hour or so more of biking we decided we should head back, so we waited for a bus. What ended up taking is back was a truck where we stood in the back of with our bikes. It was sooo beautiful to be riding in the back of a truck, through the mountains with the air cooling us down.

Later that night we enjoyed sitting in the thermal baths or hot springs and just relaxed. We crashed that night and went to bed. Woke up in the morning, ate some breakfast, and began a 4 hour hike. We hike straight up one of the mountains and when we were almost at the top we ran into a man named Manuel who works as a farmer in the mountains. He invited us over to his house to drink some natural tea (which he picked from a tree right outside his house) and eat some plantain chips. We talked for about an hour and a half about everything, including Obama. He even had 2 torn out pictures of him in his house. To be sitting in a two room cinderblock house in the middle of Ecuador with an extremly kind farmer and hear the hope Obama has given to the world was so touching. We then left his house and hiked back down to Baños. A few of us took the bus to go zip lining (jump off a cliff, connected to a cord, soar over a river and land on the otherside). Sadly, that zip line was a very short ride, but very fun and a friend got over her fear of heights so it was worth it! We then got some dinner and went out dancing to cap off the weekend.

Otherwise, things are still good. I started the education track this week and that is going well so far. No set internship yet. I will for sure post when I know about that.

If you are still reading after my long brain dump, thanks for reading...I hope that my story did not bore you. I have not recieved enough updates on other peoples lives snide040@umn.edu .... please use it!

<3,
Julia

ps-That picture below is of my host parents.

I have been so bad a blogging!! Catch up time!

Hola!!!

I wrote a long blog about a week ago but because of the sketch internet connection, it failed to post. I will try to be brief with my update....

As far as day to day life goes I normally get up and go to school, where we are in school from 8:30 until 4 pm...kind of intense I must say. We are learning about the economic history of Ecuador, the cultural history of Ecuador and development theories. We then have a Spanish class. It normally is a lot of information everyday, so I often forget some of it sadly. We have an hour and a half lunch when we go and get lunch somewhere around the school. Typical Ecuadorian food is a lot of rice, chicken and soup. It is incredibly cheap too, an entire meal is normally 1,60 ish. But, we are in a big city so we have eaten gyros, Chinese food, pizza, hamburgers with eggs on top of them (that was interesting). Fritdada (friend pig) is really common too.

I still have an amazing host family. Last Friday night my friends met up at my house before we went out and my parents hung out with us. We drank wine and listened to music. The best part of the whole event was we asked them to teach us how to salsa dance and within seconds music as blaring, furniture was moved and we were dancing the night away. They were so encouraging and fun...they have only been married for two years and you can see the freshness in their relationship as they taught us how to dance by dancing together.

I just a moment ago had my 'interview' with our program director about our future internships. It turns out I most likely will be in an indigenous community just outside of Tena, Ecuador (near the rainforest). I am so so so excited! She suggested rural (and i requested rural) beause I have a larger chance to develop a theatre program (or anything along those lines) than if I was in an urban community where everything is pretty set in stone. I am so flippin excited to see if this turns out...I think I will be the first intern in this community, and so there is a lot of freedom and a lot of nerves as well!! Once it is solitified I will write!!

Thanks for reading, things are great and I hope that things are great at home too!

~Julia~

The first Week

Hola hola hola!

Things are going great here. This weekend we went with my school to a subtropical forest and swam under a waterfall after a very long hike though millions of different types of plants. We were on the equator and learned about how intelligent the Inca people were. They knew sooo much that Europe did not, but sadly most of the information was destroyed by the conquistadors. But, on a lighter note...we balanced an egg on a nail because of some crazy thing with energy on the equator. It was pretty incredible. Last night we went out for the first time in Quito, we went to a salsa club. There was a band of almost 10 guys from Cuba who were PHENOMINAL. Everyone was dancing and have an amazing time. It is incredible to watch the way people can salsa dance....it is like they have practiced that specific routine 100 times. The vibe was just amazing...so much fun!

Otherwise, things are great. My host family is still amazing and everyone on the trip so great thus far as well! That is all I got for now......please email me and update me on life in the US...snide040@umn.edu

Nos Vemos!

Los Principios

Wow! Quito! This city is quite a mix of amazing things. Firstly, it is surrounded by mountains and volcanos, although the smog or clouds have stopped me from seeing the tallest point of the largest snow capped volcano. Secondly, the contrast between one building to the next is incredible. One store will look almost completly run down and then the next looks like it was built last year and is flurishing. There are stray dogs and cats roaming around and people trying to sell you fruit at almost every stop light. Thus far, I love it.

We got our introduction into our program today and, man, was it inspiring. All of the people on my trip have such great goals and motivation to acheive them, I cannot wait to get to know everyone better. The leaders of the program have great attitudes about what this program is all about as well. They gave us a little pep talk about how the world is in crisis right now so we need to figure how that happened and what we need to do to change it, and the means of doing this is through what one man called a spiritual potluck. They come at our education from a stance that we all have many important things to say and they want us to share them and they will share their expansive knowledge and together we shall all grow as people.They really want us to look at them as friends and as people not as powerful figures. It is a very non power relationships approach to education, how refreshing!

We then met our host families!!! I am in love with mine thus far. I have a wonderful mother named Monica who when we met came at me with a huge hug (that was a relief!), a little host sister who is 13 (and speaks 4 languages), and a father who is simply a prince (one of the nicest most inclusive people ever made I think). We live in a nice part of town with an incredible view of Quito. Tonight we stood on the balcony and looked at all the lights of the city and I thought I was in a dream.

So, moral of the story is things are going very well!! This weekend we are going on a retreat to a cloud forest, I think. Thanks for reading for those of you who are and I hope that things are going well for everyone at home! I miss everyone!

Pre-Ecuador Blog

Hello!!

I have sent you a link to the site I hope to be blogging on while in Ecuador. Now, I must confess that I have never been a "blogger" before and I cannot promise that I will be any good at keeping up on this or writing any sort of profound anythings. BUT I really would like to keep in touch with people while abroad and I thought that this was a good start. Now, the other task is for people to tell me what is going on their lives when I am abroad because I know I am not the only person who will have stories to tell. With that said....

I do not have much to say about my trip yet (being that I am still in Minnesota) so this is more a short practice post. I leave on Monday January 19th at 10:30 am. AAHH!! I am getting excited, very excited. Oops, for those of you who do not know even why I am blogging....I am going to be studying abroad in Ecuador this spring through a program called MSID Ecuador (Minnesota Studies in International Development). The program is set up so the first 1/2 of the trip we spend in Quito (major city and capital of Ecuador) learning about development and globalization in Ecuador and the second 1/2 of the trip is spent at an internship site. The track which I am on is education and literacy so my internship site will be at a school most likely and this school could be anywhere from in the rain forest to on an island to in the mountains, I won't know until I am there for a while, but everyone goes off alone to their own site. The internship aspect is a main reason why I signed up. My personal goal is to be able to implement theatrical tools in the classroom experience, because lets face it...we do not all learn the exact same way and I hope to encourage using the physical/creative side of our brains as much as possible. I also cannot wait to learn about how the educational system works in a country that is not my own, I think that there is a lot to learn about the different methods of teaching and learning that could benefit everyone. So in a nutshell that is the plan for the next 4 and 1/2 months, we shall see how all of this actually happens and what of what i have just written is totally different when i come back! :)

Okay, that is my game plan. If you are interested in seeing what is going on feel free to check back to this website. If not, no harm done I will see you in June!! Have a fantastic day!

~Julia~

PS- As stated above...please keep me updated on your lives as well. please. please please.

PPS- I watched The Motorcycle Diaries last night and it got me quite inspired, if you have not seen this movie I HIGHLY suggest that you do.