Chone

(For the sake of finally posting something new I'll just write about the non-medical part of Chone first and post about the hospital later)

The transition from Quito life to Chone life was like moving to another planet. Quito, with its stuffed buses, busy streets, thieves, restaurants, museums, night life, etc., can be pretty overwhelming. Chone (pronounced Cho-nay), is the complete opposite. We're living on a dirt road about a 20 minute walk from the center of town, a walk which we make almost everyday after lunch to our favorite corner. It has an ice cream store, a bar, a cyber cafe, and a block away is a bank and a supermarket. At first I thought we had stumbled upon a hidden gem within the city, but after talking with the host family, that's about all there is. The rest of the city seems to be a collection of nearly identical specialty shops, markets, and a few hole-in-the-wall restaurants. It's nice, though, to finally have nothing to do after clinic. In Quito, even during my free time I'm thinking about all the places I still want to check out. Here, the only location that calls my name is the hammock in the living room.

The weather here is hotter and less variable than in Quito. It's around 80° day and night, and very, very humid. There's no hot water, but taking a hot shower here wouldn't make much sense anyway. In the hospital we've learned to enjoy our time in the areas that have air conditioning. So far we haven't seen any other gringos. For a while we got a lot of strange looks, but now that we've been here a few weeks and everyone in town knows about the gringo invasion it doesn't happen as often. We do hear plenty of distant 'hello!'s and 'what your name?'s from kids that are learning English. On the road from our house to the center there's a house with a bunch of kids that always yell “Hi! How are joo!”. The older kids usually say things they hear from music and tv, like “Hey, wassup man”. One thing that's a huge relief for me is the ability to run as much as I want without worrying about getting altitude sickness. We'll be here long enough so that we will have to re-acclimatize when we get back to Quito, so I'm enjoying it while I can. The first day, Andy and I went running and got caught in the middle of a big youth parade. It was Monday around 2 pm, a strange time in my opinion for a parade. Kids from all different schools in town were wearing their school uniforms, led by a drum corp. Today (Wednesday), what I'm assuming was the same group of kids marched into the hospital parking lot and had a rally, trying to get the local school system to offer sex education. After working in the hospital here for a few weeks, I agree that they desperately need it. Just today we saw a 21 year old girl with a 9 year old baby, a 15 year old with a 2 month old baby, and a pregnant 13 year old. Some girls in the CFHI program in Quito did a study on knowledge of birth control among recently pregnant young women. They never learn in school or by their families, so they get pregnant and the doctor tells them everything they should have known beforehand. It was strange to see young kids actively protesting for the right to learn how to not get pregnant, while sex ed was thrown at me from all angles growing up.

Near the beer-and-ice cream corner is a peluquería (barber shop) run by a pretty flamboyant gay guy. For a while whenever we walked by he would come out and wave at us, maybe say a few “hola”s and “chao”s, so when Andy and I needed haircuts, naturally we chose him. For $2 he did a pretty good job, and even gelled our hair parted like it was picture day in 2^nd grade. Instead of a fancy electric close shaver, he used a straight razor to get around the ears and the back of the neck. We tipped him with money and beer. Now whenever we walk by we get an even more enthusiastic wave. Last night he was slightly inebriated, beer in hand, and looked so excited to see us I thought he was going to chase us down the street.

We're living in the same house together, with the Pepuyo family. There's Mariana and Pepe, the parents of Javier, a doctor who has an office at the house; Paula, Mariana and Pepe's daughter, Paula's husband Javier, and their two kids, Maria Christina (6) and Jose Carlos (4). For the first week and a half we were under the impression that Paula was married to the wrong Javier, who is actually her brother, and that her husband was a family friend that came over once in a while. Mariana Christina and Jose Carlos' combined energy at any given time could fuel an atom bomb. Jose Carlos believes he is Spider-Man and has an obsession with animals. Mariana calls him the “tsunami” because when he gets home from school he strips down to his underwear and floods the house with screams, shouts, and endless running amok.

On Thursday morning of the second week there was a 7.1 earthquake on the other side of the Andes from us, but we still felt it pretty strong. I had just gotten up and started feeling like I was swaying, then after about 15 seconds it grew into an all-out shake. No injuries were reported anywhere, but soon after our program coordinators were calling and emailing to make sure we were ok. I don't know what kind of news it made in the States, but I heard it was deep enough to not cause too much damage, but if it had been shallower it would have been much worse. Natural disaster narrowly avoided: check.

The first weekend in Chone we took a bus to Canoa, a small surfing town about an hour away. It looks a lot like an Oregon beach, and has sandy cliffs and tide pools to the North like Pacific City. Very similar except for what matters most: Warm air and warm water. It was overcast most of the time but the temperature was perfect. We made the mistake of booking our hostel, “La Posada de Daniel”, before getting there, thinking the town would be busy. It wasn't, and although our hostel looked cool, we were destroyed by mosquitoes due to the lack of mosquito nets and the bar blasted music until 2 or 3 in the morning every night. Luckily I was able to make up the lack of sleep everyday while digesting my lunch on a hammock. We met two strange British girls and went dancing the first night. There's one main dance club in town, and a few scattered huts on the beach that stay open at night and play music. We missed the bus to back to Chone Sunday morning, so we took a beat-up bus to nearby San Vicente, then waited over an hour in the general area of where another bus was supposedly going to come by and probably take us to Chone. Although we had our doubts, it worked out just fine.

The second weekend was Ecuador's independence day weekend and we didn't have clinic on Friday, so headed to Manta on Thursday and stayed until Monday. Manta is a pretty big city with crowded beaches and very good seafood. I had shrimp ceviche (ceviche, a Central/South American dish that originated in Peru is semi-raw seafood that is "cooked" in the citric acid of lime or other fruit) the second night, and a group of girls who were dressed like they worked for Hooter's but actually worked for the Ecuadorian equivalent to Heinz came by and proposed that I sample their mustard and hot sauce in my ceviche. I thought, when am I again going to be approached by a bunch of scantily-dressed women asking me if they can pour mustard in my soup? These are the once-in-a-lifetime moments that you get when you spend a summer in Ecuador. So I agreed, and it did enhance my ceviche experience ever so slightly. On the way back to the hotel we came across a street performance with probably 70 or 80 Ecuadorians crowding around. We wandered over to see what it was, and as soon as the two performers noticed the only gringos in the crowd, they told Andy and I to come to the center and made us do random stuff for about 30 minutes. They paired us up with two Ecuadorian girls and we had to dance to music that switched genres every 10 seconds, and perform a dramatic slow motion running-toward-each-other-in-a-field type thing to “My Heart Will Go On”. It's a good thing we could understand what they were saying, because we may have looked even more stupid if we hadn't. Both my sandals broke that weekend, but I was able to avoid buying another pair for $3 by fixing them with beer bottle caps. Don't ask how.

For the 4^th day in Manta we decided to get away from the city and took a taxi to Santa Marianita, a quiet beach with a few restaurants on the sand and not much else. It's a really popular beach for windsurfing, and there were plenty of foreigners and locals out there jumping 15+ feet in the air, doing backflips, etc... It was nice to take a break from the tall buildings, cars, crowds and fishing boats of Manta. Nearby is a giant rock overlooking the ocean, and at the base there are hundreds of crabs. Walking around the junkyard of boulders you can see crabs everywhere you look, and can hear the creepy white noise of them moving around. We even saw a few jump from rock to rock. It's hard to get close to them because they scurry away at lightning speed when they see you, but I was able to sneak up above some that were preoccupied with a dead fish. On the way back we drove by a recent car crash; someone coming back from the same place was drunk and drove off the road. Everyone seemed to be fine except for one guy with a bloody and possibly broken hand. The police showed up after a while and we left, then the ambulance passed us going toward the accident after about 5 minutes of driving. Seems strange that it wasn't the other way around; medical assistance first, questions and arrests later.

One last thing worth mentioning is the food. It's amazing. On the coast they eat a lot of yuca (usually in bread form or in soup), peanut butter and peanut sauce, ceviche, plenty of strange but delicious fruits as well as the usuals, and of course bananas. I became addicted to cooked bananas/plantains, especially chifles, which are basically potato chips made with banana slices. When I get home I'm going to cook enough bananas and plantains to finally get my fix; I never seemed to get enough at the dinner table due to the whole "sharing" thing.