Friday Allie and I traveled to Riobamba, about six hours by bus from Tena. We stayed with her host aunt who is a student in a culinary school there. She was so much fun and was beyond generous about inviting us to her house. The first night we ate Mexican food, which was amazing after not having it for so long. We ended up at an outdoor disco-tec and it was freezing compared with Tena! Saturday were huge festivals with a street parade, vendors and marching bands. In the afternoon we went to a bullfight and the the bullfighter was a woman. I could only watch one and we left before it actually ended, although it was difficult to push our way through the all the people. That night we went to an enourmous outdoor concert and a singer named Fausto Mino was the big attraction - girls kept running up on stage and hugging him during the songs. Coming back to my host family in Tena was ok and I am now in the last week of the internship. I have been doing interviews with pregnant teens about sex education, their family situations and abortion - all of which has been really interesting. So now i am sitting in an internet cafe - it is pouring outside although it is bright and sunny and i am trying to work on the big paper...

Riobamba

airport

so....

after thinking a lot about the summer and the possibility of returning to work in Quito, I decided to go home...so much to assimilate from the semester and a lot to look forward to in California. I only have a week left at the internship and so much to do....a 20 page thesis paper in Spanish! I am working on researching teen pregnancy (a huge percentage of the births here). Basically I have a week to really do the research...so it should be interesting. The last overnight shift was unbelievable. First Allie and I got to watch a c-section and I had to beg for clothes from the ER nurses, who are hilarious. The washing machine was broken, so the supply of sterile clothing was limited. Then, there was another birth, but it was horrible because when the baby was born he was blue and took way too long to cry. During the night there are only residents and no actual doctors, meaning that this situation (and many others) could have possibly been avoided had a doctor been there to do a c-section. I helped to pump oxygen for the baby boy...i have no idea if he will have long-term brain damage. We slept for a couple of hours in the surgery unit on gurneys and when we woke up and went down to the ER a woman had literally walked in to the exam room and had her baby right there....so it was an interesting surprise. This weekend i am off to a city called Riobamba for festival...about a 6 hour bus ride. my host family is getting a little less pushy, but we still have our moments. I finally met my host dad and he is really nice...I wish he lived here. Also, yesterday it rained so much that the roads were washed out to Archidona, the next town over. Allie works in physical therapy and some of the parents carried their kids the 12 kilometers through the muddy roads to get to their appointments...amazing dedication.

Tena

easter in quito

weekend in Tena

My host family went to Quito for the weekend...leaving me at the house to work in peace on my essays and spend time with Allie in Tena. It is always hot here and humid most of the time, except right after the heavy rains. I love walking though town...i live on the main street, so when i leave the house there is always something to see. directly next door is a shop that sells touristy items...jewlery and plates etc...then there is the hair / nail place where allie and i got $3 peticures, which were kind of painful. next door to that is a meat shop with all sorts of interesting pieces hanging on hooks and often cow heads, so i hurry past that shop to the amazing bakery with fresh bread smells...so it keeps going like that with all types of shops right next to one another and we always seem to run into someone from the hospital...so now we are finishing at our favorite internet cafe and off to run at the airport that is used as a public track. lots of love from the amazon. xoxoxoxoxox

tena hospital & family

If everyday in Tena was as incredible as Wednesday, then I would be less frustrated. I left the hospital three hours later than normal simply because I could not drag myself away from the excitement. I started the day doing OB-GIYN rounds with a great doctor wearing jeans instead of scrubs and lipstick on her teeth. She dictated and I wrote prescriptions, which is scary because I am pretty bad at spelling and I kept having to check that I wasn’t prescribing something else. I saw several c-section bellies and many shriveled, beautiful babies wrapped in bright-colored blankets. There is only a nursery for sick infants, so the healthy babies snuggle in bed with their mothers. The eight-bed rooms have absolutely no privacy and they put miscarriages next to new mothers….so usually I have no idea what I am getting into when I enter the room. My research project is exploring the social work aspect and socio-economic situations of adolescent mothers. I went through the hospital records for 2007 and calculated that about 1/5 of the 300 births this year have been women under 18. Anyway, I went down to spend some time in the ER and coincidentally a 16-year-old came in about ready to have her baby. This really nice doctor taught me how to feel the stomach to determine where the head, feet etc. are located and the girl was patient enough to let me poke around and listen to her baby’s heart. In the hospital, family members are not allowed into the delivery room, so I spent several hours with this girl and then went out to give her mother, aunts and sister updates. Right when she was about to have the baby they told me I could not enter the delivery room because they did not have enough sterile clothing….so I spent time pacing outside with the family and they were thinking of names for the baby girl and could not figure out how the hell to pronounce “phoebe.” Anyway, the baby is healthy and they were all so excited and I left feeling happy about my research and excited to be part of such a big day.

My home-stay situation has been more than a little difficult. I work and live with the same woman who happens to be one of the most pushy and aggressive people I have ever met, which does not gel with my personality. I have been getting better about communicating that I do not want / need three cups of white rice with every meal and she has stopped calling me every ten minutes to ask where I am. However, we had a very unsettling dinner conversation and it turns out she is one of the most racist people I have ever met. I do not understand how a person can be a social worker in a hospital serving a largely indigenous population then use derogatory words and forbid their child to have friends who are indigenous or afro-Ecuadorian. I was so appalled I could barley speak, but I managed to voice my opposing (and to her, a ridiculously liberal) viewpoint before going to my room, calling Nora and crying. I feel so uncomfortable living with someone who holds these beliefs and then calls themselves an advocate for underserved populations. The other thing that kills me is when she talks to her yappy, mean, miniature poodle dog using baby talk and a high-pitched voice right after the dog tries to attack me. Overall, this place is beautiful and I do not want to complain…..I am just trying to focus on my work and spend as little time at home as possible…luckily I have Emily and Allie here to talk to when in seems overwhelming.

back to Quito

I went to Quito for the weekend to visit my host family and it was incredible to feel like I was home, comfortable and for the first time since leaving for Tena….cold. I made a deal with my Tena family that we would spend Friday in Quito together visiting their relatives, and then I would spend the rest of the weekend with my Quito family. We watched a famous procession in Quito Antigua with purple, robed people called cucuruchos, men dressed as Jesus carrying huge crosses and all sorts of other people from marching bands to women selling chochos. The streets were lined with thousands of people, which for me was the most interesting part – just watching all the families, children, vendors. The rest of the weekend was very low-key…..I helped to paint my host families house, we ate fanesca (a special soup for Semana Santa) and I went to my first Ecuadorian mass. There was a lot more music than I expected and the place was full of people because of the Easter holiday. I was supposed to travel with Tena family back that evening, but they did not call (apparently they forgot my number) so I spent an extra night and traveled the next morning the 5-hours back to Tena.

baby

last night was our first guardia at the hospital (from 8pm to 8am). All the doctors had said these are the most action-filled shifts and it truly was incredible. we watched a birth that happened really quickly and the doctor never made it...the nurse had only just put on her gloves and for a minute i thought i was going to have to catch the baby girl myself. in addition, there was a bus accident, a one-year-old with a bloated belly from a parasite and a man with a resistant TB case. we took a nap for a couple of hours on an old mattress and when i woke up there were definitely cockroaches on the floor assuring me that the hygene is a little lacking. the doctors were amazing and we worked out our schedule so that we can do a guardia each week.

Jungle

This past weekend was amazing in large part because Emily`s host father runs a tour agency. We went into the rainforest with him on Saturday and visited an indigenous community. The adults in the community work on a minga (communal work projects or farms) so there were maybe 20 kids running around and we played with them for awhile. Later, we ended up at an incredible lagoon, but I managed to fall, scrape my back and tear my shirt...all of it worth it for the swim. On Sunday we went rafting on a beautiful stretch of river and stopped on an island for a picnic lunch in the rain which included pineapple cut on the spot. The work at the hospital has been incredible...we wear white coats and look official until we speak. Most of the time we observe - anything from stomach parasites to stitches to broken bones. Some of the doctors are amazing and even take time to explain different things to us; however others prove the point that compassion is not a prerequisite to be a doctor. This evening will be our first over-night shift and I am excited because the doctors told us that most of the interesting things happen at night. The internship so far has not had a lot to do with social work, but I need to pick a research topic and there are many options in that area. My host family is very loving, although my host mother is very pushy especially about food, which can make meals somewhat awkward. Allie lives next to the airport and around six at night it cools down enough to run. The town uses the runway as a track, so it is a perfect place to run.