Some random thoughts and observations about Ecuador (well, Cuenca, at any rate).

 

Your average pink-skinned Westerner is just never going to blend in in Ecuador. I never realised how pinkish most of us look until we came here (some of us get pinker when we are hot, too). The average Ecuadorean has an olive to dark-olive skin tone. There is some variation – some are lighter skinned, but it seems to be a minority. It really struck me one day when we were sitting waiting and watching the people go by that westerners stand out a mile away, as most of us look rather pale and pastel-coloured in comparison with Ecuadoreans.

For starters, if you don’t have jet-black hair here, you stand out. I think I have yet to see a bald Ecuadorean man, or even one with a receding hair-line. It is very rare for Ecuadorean women to have short hair - the indigenous Indian women wear their hair long and in one or two plaits (along with their shawls and colourful skirts and distinctive hats – see photo of flower market from a blog or two ago) and most other women (particularly young women) wear their hair starting at below-shoulder-length, and generally longer. And there are very few people with grey hair. They seem to go grey a lot later than westerners – maybe not until 60-ish.

And the people are shorter. They don’t make the buses here to fit tall people, and invariably Brendan’s knees are sticking out into the aisle, as he needs an additional 3 or 4 inches of leg room to get his knees in behind the seat in front.

And if you are a female, you have to wear blue jeans. Tight blue jeans (but no hipster jeans, with the accompanying muffin-top effect – thank goodness for that!!), with high heeled, or at least pretty, shoes. Even in Guayaquil, where it’s hot and humid, the rule still applies – people just don’t wear shorts, unless they are tourists. The women rarely wear dresses or skirts even where it’s hot – if they wear work uniforms, they seem to wear slacks, not skirts. Men generally wear jeans too, or slacks, and fortunately the jeans here are not worn around the knees like is common back in Aus.

And there are lots of children. Breast-feeding in public is not uncommon, and why not save time and do so while walking? No-one blinks an eye. Babies and toddlers are not in prams or strollers. Mostly people carry their babies and toddlers in their arms – mums and dads take turns. The indigenous women carry their children on their backs, tied tightly into their shawls (very handy these shawls – they are also good for tying sacks of rice etc onto their backs – these women are tough – some of the loads they carry make your mind boggle!).

Given the state of most of the footpaths we’ve seen, prams (or other wheeled devices) are just not a practical option here. In some areas, footpaths are reasonable, but it seems in most places they are a bit of an obstacle course designed to stop you getting bored while walking! When we were in Devonport (Tas), I used to wonder what possessed the powers-that-be to plant electricity poles right in the middle of the footpath in some areas. Well, here we have: electricity poles in the middle of the path (the path might only be about a metre wide, anyway – although they are a decent width in the old part of town), random bits of metal (such as man-hole handles) sticking up out of the path, which of course you don’t see until you nearly trip over them, sharply bevelled driveways that inconveniently appear out of nowhere (Brendan tripped and fell on one of these, and I nearly twisted my ankle on another one of these). Plus pot-holes and some dog poo. Also on rubbish-collection day, you have to swivel your eyes alternately from down at the path up to the walls or fences of the houses – the racks the rubbish bags are put up on to keep them out of reach of dogs, stick out (they fold back against the wall for non-rubbish days) and generally they are at a level where you can walk into them and smack yourself in the head if you happened to be preoccupied by watching where your feet were going! But the streets and kerbs are very clean – there are always street-sweeping people around. There might be pot-holes, but at least they are clean and tidy pot-holes!

Sometimes it’s just easier to walk on the road …

(click on pictures to enlarge)

The use of seatbelts in cars here is somewhat optional. When I used to see people on TV travelling in cars not wearing seatbelts, I used to think that even if I lived somewhere where you didn’t legally have to wear seatbelts, that I would still do it. But often we don’t! Largely because if you are in a taxi, in the back seat either the seat belts generally are not there, or the strap is, but not the clicky-thing at the bottom to click the belt into. And besides, if you have 4 people in the back of a car, it’s a bit pointless to be worrying about who gets which seatbelt.

The shopping centres/malls and some other buildings have security guards/information men. You could assume that they are just there to help you find things (e.g. toilets, how to work the machine that swaps notes for coins, which government department you need), and they are very helpful and friendly. But the fact that part of their uniform is a bullet-proof vest, makes you wonder!! And some of them carry guns, shotguns and/or truncheons. Hmmm. Haven’t worked that one out yet. But we figure if you don’t give them cheek, you’ll be alright, anyway.

Something that amused me a couple of weeks ago. A while back, we came to the conclusion that “banos” means toilet (we figured this out from signs at shopping centres, etc), and then a couple of weeks ago, we got to the area where we were going to be going witnessing, and there was a traffic sign that indicated a couple of small towns/suburbs nearby. One of which said “Banos”. I just had to ask someone did they seriously name a town after a toilet, coz until then I thought it might be one of those tricky things where the words just sound the same but are spelt differently but here it was exactly the same spelling! But upon clarification it turns out that “banos” means either of “bath”, “baths” (as in warm springs), “basin” etc., depending who you ask (The road sign we saw pointed to a little town where there are warm springs). So we assume that at the shopping centres, “banos” is actually the more polite American usage, meaning “bathroom”, rather than “toilet”, like us Aussies would say.

It has taken us a while to get used to witnessing here (still getting used to it!). Before we came here, we read various experiences and blogs of people witnessing in the Spanish congregations, and having lots of studies and lots of interest etc etc. But because we are in the English-speaking congregation, it’s rather different. Mainly we are trying to locate people who are either native English-speakers (there are lots of ex-pats here – you see them at the main park in the centre of town, or at the American-style supermarkets, or near the visa/passport departments), or who speak very good English, and we leave the Spanish speaking people up to the Ecuadorean brothers (there is no shortage of willing Ecuadorean brothers). But in order to locate the English speakers, we have to call at all the houses, and ask, in Spanish, if there are any English-speaking people there. Within the English congregation (around 40 publishers), we have about half Ecuadoreans, who have chosen to go to the English cong, and the rest are native English-speakers with varying amounts of Spanish. The problem with asking a question in Spanish is that you are likely to get an answer in Spanish!! If they just say “no” (same in both languages), we can handle that. But if someone starts getting chatty, we have problems. So we always make sure we go with someone else who has more Spanish than us – that would be just about anybody!

Outside of our Kingdom Hall – along with two Spanish speaking congregations, and a sign language congregation, the English congregation meets here.

Inside our Kingdom Hall. 

All of the Kingdom Halls in Ecuador have been financed and built by the branch in Ecuador from funds that have been donated worldwide, because the brothers here can’t afford to build them without outside help.

 

We’ve had conversations with different ones in the congregation and asked them about learning Spanish, how they’ve gone about it, how do they think they are going, did they have lessons and if so, what sort, etc. There seems to be endless different answers. Some who are really focused get stuck in straight away (possibly these may be the ones who go straight into a Spanish congregation even without very much Spanish to start off with – from what I can gather, it can be a hard slog, but you will learn the language a lot quicker), whereas others choose to go in “at the shallow end”, and do it more gradually. I guess it comes down to what you feel you are capable of as an individual, and if you have family, what would be best for them too. Also learning styles – what will work for one person may not work for someone else, and one person’s time-scale is not going to work for everybody. Some have said it helped them to soak up some of the culture first and find their way around and get somewhat settled and get a general feel for things, before worrying too much about learning the language. So, from my various conversations, I gathered that you ask lots of people, gather information, have a think about it, and make your own decision as to what you think will work best for you.

Having said that, we really have to work on our numbers (the problem is, so many of them all sound confusingly alike, once you get past “10” – yes, that is a bit pathetic, isn’t it!). We’ve been brave and gone to the local market by ourselves the last couple of weeks. It’s actually really colourful and exciting and interesting and different and so much better than the supermarket, (plus cheaper) but more challenging as well, as there are no tickets with prices for the fruit and veg. And half the time (no, more like most of the time) we don’t know what they are saying, and hope that we give the right answer and don’t end up with 10 kilos of broad beans, or something equally disgusting. We suspect that at times we get “gringoed” (where they see gringos/ westerners coming and know that they won’t have a clue what the prices should be and therefore charge them more), but we figure it’s a learning experience and each time we do it we will get braver and hopefully have a better idea of what’s going on. You can tell that it’s market day, as there are people from all over the neighbourhood carrying bags and baskets and heading in the direction of the market.

A concrete soccer field for most of the week turns into a thriving market on Fridays

Fruit and veg

Anyone for a steak? (Fortunately, there are very few insects at this altitude)

Something smells a bit fishy around here!!

We’ve been told to wash/scrub/soak all fruits and veg really well (there are various solutions and potions people use for this), as foreigners are apparently very susceptible to the local stomach bugs and other nasties – different ones we’ve talked to here have got really sick at times.

We are finding the food here rather different from home. Can’t get used to the bread – there are lots of little bakeries (“panederia” – “pan” is Spanish for bread) around and they do little rolls, rather than large loaves. But they all taste slightly sweet. I’m told that Ecuadoreans like to put sugar in everything, so I’m not sure if the problem is too much sugar in the bread, or just not enough salt. And it has a different texture – almost like a cream bun or doughnut, and it doesn’t squash up when you bite into it, like Aussie bread, which is not a bad thing. But it’s still strange. And it can be hard to cook recipes here that you would cook without thinking twice about, in Aus – you get used to certain brands, (and certain items being easily available) and how sweet or salty or how strong they are. We bought vanilla essence here, and it was quite thick but not sweet. And I bought cocoa and it was way too sweet (I tried to make the choc chip biscuits I always made in Aus – not too bad, but definitely too sweet – and cooking at altitude – 2,500 metres above sea level - does not help either – they came out rather flat). The chilli powder we bought is not very potent at all. The white rice is possibly not as refined as in Aus, or at least processed differently – it has a very slight brown rice taste to it (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing – it just illustrates that most things range from slightly different to a lot different). Very hard to get a tasty matured cheese, and they cost a lot and are not the same – they do a lot of fresh or soft cheeses here. Sliced meats, e.g. ham, again, very rare, expensive and completely different from Aus - and not in a good way. So, for instance, hard to make pizza like we used to in Aus. Parmesan cheese that actually has some taste to it is difficult to find – the first one was almost tasteless, and we are onto our second brand and shall trial it shortly. Most of us non-Ecuadoreans conclude that you either keep looking and asking until you find a good substitute, or you go without. There’s a fair bit of trial and error goes on. Fortunately, we have enough Vegemite to last us for a while, so we should survive!!

Wanna buy a wheelchair, a stretcher, or a dentist’s chair?  (Dentist’s chair only costs $2,500)

These are available from the same store that we buy our weekly groceries.  This place is massive and  would be the same as combining a Coles supermarket, K-mart, a small Bunnings, an appliance store, a toy shop,  and a few other small shops for good measure.

 

The contrast between the open air markets and the store mentioned above, is quite bizarre, but it seems to work here.