Eleven lessons from Ecuador

Well, I am lucky i'm in the nice part of the city so I DON'T have rats (sorry Ashley), and I get to walk to work everyday. Ashley inspired me with her list, so here are some interesting things about Ecuador:

1- There are thorny trees here. Be careful, or you'll be impaled. (I tried to upload a picture of them, but blogger wouldn't recognize it...maybe later)
2- There are always people of lower SES, shall we call them, trying to sell anything and everything to the drivers at every stoplight. Some have no legs (really, i saw a guy walking on stumps of his thighs this afternoon), some are old crippled women, and some are little kids. While walking home from work the other day i came upon a group huddled around one of those little kids who had apparently been hit by a car...which brings us to...
3- I thought Utah drivers were bad. Sorry, since you're almost all from Utah, but you can feel better about yourselves because Utahans usually stay in the lines painted on the road. It's optional here. Major roads abruptly go from 3 to 1 lane and all three lanes just jam together and honk at each other instead of merging to form one lane. It's no big deal to straddle the line...if someone behind you wants to pass they just honk or flash their headlights at you.
4- You guys remember that Ecuadorian video we watched about the oil drillers with Dr. Cole? Anyone remember the drink they made by having the women chew up yucca and then spit it back out and let it ferment? Yep, I was offered that TWICE this weekend, and don't think I could have stomached it even if I hadn't know it had alcohol...
5- Ecuador has these giant wild boar-like things (I forget all the new names) that roam through the jungle, but they are almost horse-size. They make most of the paths that are later used by the indigenous people.
6- They eat bannanas with everything. Fried, baked, double fried, roasted, made into flour, etc. You find them instead of potato chips. Mostly plantains, but all these options are doubled up because you have both the green (more like potato) variety and the ripe (sweeter) variety. They're actually really good.
7- I can eat a two course meal including desert and a freshly blended glass of juice from anywhere from $1.5o to $3.50. I tend to go the cheap route... Last week I was given some unidentifiable portion of meat, however. I chose to just eat it as quickly as possible and then to enjoy the rest of the meal. It looked suspiciously like pigs ears curled in on themselves... I am also worried about the water they add to the juice...
8- NO ONE is EVER on time here. I work from 8 to 5 and most people straggle in anywhere between 8:20 and 9 am. I went to a meeting at the Ministry of Health for all the regional directors of the health departments last week- we started about an hour late, and the coffee break that was scheduled as 15 min lasted about 90 minutes. Interesting.
9- The news is really sensational. Think of the most dramatic voice you can imagine, and then think about listening to that for an hour. I can't take it, so I just don't watch tv! They show the dead bodies and everything...
10- I think about Dr. Cole's class alot- "don't eat the food from street vendors", "wow- did you see the HUGE cloud of smoke coming out of that bus exhaust pipe?", "what process did the city go through to clean this water? is it REALLY clean? can I wash my hands in it? or do i need to use hand sanitizer afterwards?"
and 11- Toilet paper: You can't flush toilet paper here. If you do, it will clog the pipes under the buildings and it has to be dug up and cleaned out. You also are lucky to find toilet paper in public restrooms. If you are so lucky as to find a restroom with toilte paper, it's not in the stall where we would expect it to be, but outside in a dispenser (which you may or may not have to pay to use).

Yay! Now you know a little more about Ecuador...It really is a great place, though, and I'm excited because I get to go to the coast on Friday afternoon for the weekend.

The internship is going pretty well. Dr. Suriel, my mentor, was out of the country for the first two weeks, and the others that were put in charge of me didn't really understand the focus of my project. First they thought it was a qualitative study, then a quantitative evaluation of the IMCI program nationwide (holy HUGE project- don't know how they thought I'd get that done in 3 months!!), and then just told me to add some info to my proposal about the Theory of Planned Behavior (which they are not familiar with) so i can sell it to the medical schools I'll be sampling from for my study... so the rest of the time has been spent fixing my proposal, directing it to medical school directors, adding more historical info about Ecuador and IMCI, and now having it translated. I'm laughing at the crazy translations the PAHO translator programs is turning out, though.

My mentor says we'll get a handle on this project and get it rolling then he'll have me dive into the other work he'll be having me do. That's REALLY comforting to know that he'll make sure this gets done...

Well, good luck to all! I may just copy and paste this to my other blog...Hmm, not a bad idea...