Puppies and Other Crazy Mammals

When I got back to Ecuador from my extended visit to the States, I was told by my regret filled friend Julio, who had been watching my dog, the Yana was pregnant. Yes, she was knocked-up out of wedlock and approaching her first birthday. I was angry put I was able to pull off the "surprised face", instead of the "I´m gonna kill you sucker" face and I slowly grew to accept the fact the Yana was going to be a baby raising baby.

Part of my acceptance was realizing that Yana was one of eleven puppies, so that I should prepare for a apartment full of little bundles of illegitamite joy. I began preparing; I asked every gringo and responsible person how many puppies they would take. I hadn´t done so much pushing since trying Boy Scout fundraising, trying to sell chocolate bars, before I inevitably ate them all. Even though I wasn´t worried about eating the puppies, I was still selling like crazy.

"Do you want a puppy?"

"No, we already have one."

"Yes, but do you have a gringo puppy? They can teach you English and I´m pretty sure they are born with citizenship to the US."

"No, we really can´t"

"You say that, but it seems that you really want one"

"No."

"Umm, if you take one I´ll give you five dollars and a piece of my lemonade gum that I brought back from the states."

"Well, okay"

"How about two"

So after having about seven of these conversations, I felt reassured that I could find homes for the others.

On February 13, 2007 I woke up around 1AM because Yana was being noisey. I went into my kitchen and saw that there was a bunch of blood on the floor, I paniced slightly then went to my room to get towels and other birthing materials. I thought about boiling water, but who the hell knows what the use boiling water for, I brainstormed and after deciding that I had no idea and no desire to scald puppies that I better leave boiling water out. I returned to put the towels down and found that Yana had already given birth. There was a black mess in the corner. I put the black mess on the towel and sat in one of my lawn chairs next to Yana, assuring her that she´d be okay. I waited until three, still no more puppies. I waited until 5, then decided that I needed to sleep and that she could have the other puppies on her own. Twenty-four hours later, she still only had one. I don´t know much about dog breeding, but I have come to think that they don´t normally have one puppy only. Yana only had one puppy. One little girl.

Now there are six people expecting a puppy and I only have one to give away. I´m thinking of holding a raffle.

Getting Back

I´m back in my site now.

It´s interesting, but coming back to Tena was a lot harder than coming back to Ecuador. i felt guiltier the closer I came to where I have been living for the last year. It´s odd, I felt bad for leaving people back home, which is expected. However, I also began feeling bad about being gone for so long, I imagined people feeling abandoned, feeling that they weren´t important to me, and perhaps they thought these were the reason I was gone for so long. I did really keep in touch as well as I should have.

It was an odd feeling, but being medically held in the states made me feel a bit embarrassed. It´s not bad to get sick, as long as that´s the only thing that happens to me. Come on though. I have gone through a lot of stuff in the last year, and I think my cumulative score adds me up to be a clumsy, accident prone gringo. There is a very certain type of finesse that I have achieved in this country and it leaves me wanting to wear a helmet to the open market, take multi-vitamins and carry a fire extinguisher with me at all times. I don´t remember being this person in the states, but perhaps it was just less noticable.

Many Ecuadorians have told me that I should invest in a five dollar curse removal. This includes a shaman, an egg, some leaves and perhaps a prayer. This makes uncomfortable, but I may be desparate enough to try. I´m about 74% sure that instead of being unclumsified, it would more likely leave me with a confused scrunched face, five dollars less in my bank account and an egg to scramble to eat. Perhaps eating the egg that you were cleansed with is a bad idea. It may be like eating the mop head with which you just finished mopping.

All of this makes me feel like I´m in a bad horror movie. It´s the classic horror house movie. Some idiotic family, in this case a idiotic guy, moves into a house, in this case it´s Ecuador, and the house does everything it can possibly think of to get the family out. It beats the unaware family up until the realize that hey this place doesn´t want me here, then they move out. I on the other hand am not going to move out.

I am committed to continue working hard.

Since I have been back I have:

Welcomed the latest group of volunteers into the country.

Had my camara and mobile phone stolen from my checked luggage.

Attended a Gender and Development meeting that was highly productive, where I helped plan one camp, was eleceted co-president to the committee, was invited to help facilitate a camp on the Galapagos Islands, and learned that Peace Corps has some quality volunteers.

Found that my dog has been knocked up before she turned a year old. I´m hoping the puppy process is not too horrible. Yeah, pregnant.

November Gone

A complete month has passed without another entry. The stamina fails and the ambition becomes ambitious.

Since the last entry I have been working on a few things, busy some days, bored others. A quick report for all you back home on what I have been doing.

Camp A.L.M.A

Aventura y Liderazgo para Muchachas Ambiciousas

 I helped run a facilitate a week long camp for fifteen teenage girls. It was the single most amazing thing I have experience in Ecuador, after ten months of developiong views of how everthing works in Ecuador, this camp shattered every bad thing I ever thought about work habits, general moticiation etc.

Shattered, temporarily perhaps.

These girls are indeed ambitious and worked so hard throughout the camp. They really enjoyed challenging themselves, and really thought outside of their Ecuadorian boxes. They did the adventure course of death with very little hesitance, falling from tables and jumping through webs with motivation beyond anything I have experienced in a camp atmosphere.

We visited manglars on the coast and saw birds that don´t exist anywhere else in the world. Yes, I say blue foot boobies. The manglars are trees that grow interacting with salt water, they are amazing and are one of the few things in nature that create new land. The nature in Canoa, Ecuador was ridiculously beautiful and mind boggling.

We also visited a secluded beach that is a good two hour hike to the Pacific Coast, this beach was secluded and we were told it is one of the biggest human trafficing points in Ecuador, people say a lot of things so I don´t always believe everything.

The girls received a few capacitation classes on small business ideas, like recycled paper business. A few of the girls really had business savvy minds and it made me think that people really do have opportunities outside of their circumstances.

My favorite part was what they called joven a joven, which means youth to youth. It was basically a sex ed charla. It amazed me how little these girls actually knew about sex and even about their own body. With such a different culture it strikes me as wrong, but they learn what is socially acceptable, but were happy to know more.

It was amazing, 

World Aids Day

On December first we celebrate World AIDS Day. I was trying to get connected with a high school where I could give an educational talk, but sex education and catholic high schools didn´t really go hand in hand. So instead I made borchure on HIV AIDS statistics and made red ribbons then stood on the footbridge everyone has to cross for three hours and passed information and ribbons out.

It worked. People probably think I am the weirdest gringo in the world but who cares? I wore my ribbon, brought Yana and put a red ribbon around her neck and we double teamed the city. I seriously think that a lot of people learned a lot that day.

I passed out 500 brochures and 125 ribbons.

Grant Writing

Oh man! I used to argue with my dad, I remember trying to convince him that money was not important and that you didn´t need money to be happy or get things done.

I was an idiot, of course you do. It´s obvious.

Some people here earn a living by cutting down tress, exploiting nature and all the stuff Captain Planet was fighting against. How do you stop this, you don´t just go and tell them to stop, you have to give them an easier more productive was of earning their money.

The ideas are endless, but the latest one that I have started working on is a semi precious stone jewelery course. Basically taking river rocks, polishing them, and then putting them into jewelery. Great idea and a couple of people are very, very into the project. The thing is you have to start off with money. To make money you have to have money, interesting concept, that I´m sure everybody already realizes. I´m just young and have recently fallen off of the idealistic band wagon.

This means I have had to learn how to write grants, which is not easy. I used to think that people that hired grant writers were just lazy, but it is tough work. Ridiculous work. So here I am writing grants in English and Spanish, trying to help some kids make enough money, so that they stop unsustainable practices.

Bamboo

Long term project. Slow starting.

Here is in called caña huadua. You can make anything out of this bamboo that you would make out of hard wood, you just have to know how to manipulate it. The good thing about it is that it grows to maturity in 5 years instead of the 40-70 the other types of wood takes, so again it is sustainable.

I am kinda waiting for next year´s funding to come, but I´m starting the leg work. Talking, talking and hoping I won´t stick my foot in my mouth.

25 Days Later

 I have sat down with this screen in front of me before. I have sat down with the same intention I sit with now. I want to share a story, a more or less sad one that does have an ending but it can not be classified as happy or sad. More than a story, I want to share my reflections, my guilt, my problem and my happiness regarding the story with all of you.

This story will also serve as an apology and an excuse for not writing in my blog for so long.

On September 29, I went home to have lunch which consisted for the most part of rice, which is not surprising unless you have never been to Ecuador before. After lunch I had a meeting that I had to attend because it would affect my work here for the next two years, a planning meeting. The meeting was at two, I finished lunch at one and my hammock was calling my name. I indulged in a nap, but set my alarm for one-thirty. I woke up at two-thirty. All of this information is just to setup the pure coincidence or divine intervention of the story and to show why I have lost so much sleep thinking about the situation and what caused the situation. It is not to make this blog entry sound like a chain letter email where I will at the end ask you to send it to ten other people if you don´t want to endure a horrible sex life for the next year. I will not do that and any bad sex that you encounter will be of your own merit.

So I woke up late and was worried about looking bad by arriving late to a meeting. After I oriented myself enough to realize that I was late, the first thing I did was I hop on my bike and decide to get to my office as quick as possible. Well, actually the first thing that I did was cuss loudly all the words I know that I would never say in front of my grandparents, hi grandma, then I did what I described before. Part of the "quick as possible" criteria was taking an alternate road to work that involves more back alleys and more bumps, but gets me there a bit faster.

However, this day it meant not getting into the office until the 17th of October, almost twenty days later.

I was riding my bike when a litte girl ran out of her house with her younger sister trying to catch up. They were both crying, but the older sister out in front was screaming as well. I had to avoid hitting them. I swerved and then I realized what was going on with these girls. The older sister out front, a six year old with olive skin and a beautiful smile was on fire. Flames flying from her small body. I got off my bike and forgot about everything, my meeting included.

After I tell a story a certain amount of times it becomes less about the experience and more about repeating the story. Like memories from when I was younger, some parts I remember from the actual experience and some I remember from mom telling me about how I was a big cry baby or from my tía telling me about how I once put sharp glass in my mouth. This story that I am writing here is what really happened, but now I can´t vividly remember exactly what happened or what it looked or felt like, but this story is true.

I got off my bike. I stopped her from running any further, I am not sure where she was running, but I think she was running to where her mother worked a few blocks away. I grabbed her and tried to put her on the ground and roll her around because being from the DARE days of education, I have been taught what to do in emergencies. What I didn´t learn in this education was how scary STOPing DROPping and ROLLing is. This process is horrific if you think about it and counterintuitive. You are basically putting your body on top of fire over and over again. She would let me roll her; she got up and I realized that this technique wasn´t the easiest thing to translate in an emergency situation. It is really horrible to think that because I couldn´t explain to her how to put out the fire that she may have endured more burns. Dar vuelta en el piso. DAR VUELTA EN EL PISO.

So I grab her again and start putting out the fire with my hand. I paniced and yes, I used my bare hand to put out the flames that were flying from her tiny body. She is so small, compared to a six year old in the states she is tiny. Probably due to malnutrition and the fact that Ecuadorians are just smaller in general.

At a certain point I remember putting her out. I immediately looked to my hand and there were blisters and skin falling or rather hanging off. Then this is where it gets confusing, and leaves me feeling really bad. After reviewing my hand for a few seconds I hear the little girl screaming again, I look over and she is on fire. She is on fire again. Or for the first time. I remember putting her out, so I would like to believe that maybe her clothing caught again and that it is due to the cheap fabric that she was wearing. This is the true story, the one I really remember. But to me it sounds fishy. I don´t know if it is possible for clothing to just recatch after they are put out. I wonder if it possible for my mind and my body to have double teamed me. Is it possible that my body made me pull my hand away and then my mind told me that it was okay because she was safe. It is horribly possible that I stopped saving her life before she was safe. I´d like to think that I wouldn´t do something like that but who knows, especially if I don´t.

When I see her on fire again, I start using my back pack to try to put her out. Back packs are not the most agile tool to swing at a little girl, plus after a few seconds my back pack as well caught on fire. There is nothing funny about this story, at all, but for a few seconds I was swinging a back pack full of heavy folders and books, that was on fire, at a little girl I was trying to help. Life is not beautiful of its own merit, but rather owes it beauty to the casualness of its impeded progression.

I go back to using my hand because the back pack quite obviously is not working. I get her put out and at this moment, a man comes up to me and starts pulling me off of her because he thought I was some guy that just went around hitting little girls. A crowd formed and they all started saying that I beat the little girl. However, the people that are in the center of the crowd realized what was really going on and put her, my bike and myself into a taxi. I find myself taking her to the hospital as she is screaming that she wants her mom. All I can say is "prometo que todo vaya ser bien". I promise everything will be okay. All I can think is that this little burned and now bleeding girl is going to die. She´s going to die with some gringo lying to her while she screams for her mom. It´s really too much to handle. She went into the hospital. I remained outside.

This is the section of my blog where I remind you all that these are my thoughts and in no way represent Peace Corps, the American Government or anybody else that doesn´t live in my head.

I walk into the hospital, the hospital in the capital of the province of Napo. The nurses are putting ice on her third degree burns. I know right away from my basic first aid that this is not what nurses, trained officials, should be doing. I call my hero, but I hadn´t learned that she was my hero at that time. She is the Peace Corps nurse that is one of the most amazing people I have ever met. She basically walks me through how to help this little girl and tells me that I should stay and make sure that they are taking good care of her. I do. I wont talk badly about this hospital anymore after saying this last thing. I even had to tell them to wash their hands before touching the burns that covered over 30% of her body.

I at this point I have a third and second degree burns on my pinky finger and blisters all over both hands. All in all, not that bad. I am told to go to Quito, where I am picked up by the Peace Corps nurse. I stay with her for a bit. I could tell you a lot more about how this person is really the hero in this story, but I think she is as modest as she is amazing and would perfer me not telling the world. Believe me though, Peace Corps Ecuador is more then lucky to employ her.

Just a little interruption to report that this day I also learned what people mean when they say, "when it rains, it poors". When I get on the bus to go to Quito, with my hand wrapped like a morbid Chritmas present, the bus driver starts making a bunch of random turns and starts going in circles around the traffic roundabout. We are pulled over and he, the driver, is drunk. The police arrested him and I sat on the bus for an hour waiting for another driver to show up. When it rains, it poors.

Back to the story. I left off telling about the quality care I recieved. I was able to call her family the following day and with help I was able to have her family bring her to a special burns unit in Quito. Their financial contributions will be the same in this specialized hospital as it would have at the other hospital, but the quality of care is completely different. Throughout the following week I collected about five hundred dollars to help the little girl and the family. I did this by asking the Peace Corps office for donations; they donated very generously and volunteers also donated with force.

A lot more went on between now and then, but it gets confusing with multiple visits to the hospital and trips to buy saline and medical supplies.

They have asked me to Baptize her and become her Godfather, and I said yes.

She is through the worst of the infection, and hopefully the pain, but I honestly don´t know. I have been told that bad burns heal slowly and painfully. Especially with cases like this little girl, where skin grafts are needed. They wont know for another few weeks how many skin grafts she will need. But the doctors are already guessing in the 20s.

My finger to this day is still not completely recovered, but everytime I feel down about it, I think this little girl is going through so much more.

I talked with her family and they are very thankful.

Everyone keeps telling me that I´m a hero and I know it´s due to a lack of other words, but it makes me feel guilty. I know I haven´t completely recovered from the shock of everything, but I feel more responsible for her catching on fire than for putting her out. I know that it is true that I helped her, that´s a fact that I will never forget. But I have asked myself countless times about the chain of events that put this girl in this situation.

She is six years old. She was at home with a 4 year old and a two year old, cooking lunch for her younger sisters. They were alone. I can hear the cries to the Department of Child and Family Services already, but really the family had no choice. They are what we and they consider poor. The mother has countless times thank me for helping a poor little family. This seems pretty status quo here in Ecuador, nothing to be surprised about, definately not anything unexpected. It seems to be a simple reality. It seems to need very little inspection, because people in most developing countries are poor. That´s maybe even why these developing countries are known. Simple. It just the reality. There are probably hundreds of kids that catch on fire every year that don´t have some Gringo putting them out poorly and then following up with a medical donation drive.

Ecuador has a natural resource level that is incredible. It has a beautiful and productive coast that supplies the world with shrimp and banana products, these two and much more. Ecuador houses a region of the Andes that also is very prouctive with flowers and other exports. The Galapagos is one of the most toured places on Earth thanks to Darwin and the boobies. Then, the remaining is the Amazon Jungle. All this hasn´t even included Ecuador´s relatively large oil resource that is being exported daily. All these resources serve a population of less the 14 million people. I´m not really good at math. I majored in Political Science and English, but I still see that these numbers do not add up. Especially when you see that the majority of the facts point to the same percentage of Ecuadorian that are considered very poor, below this line or that margin. This percentage is 70. 70 Percent of Ecuador probably has no choice, but to leave their six year old children at home to cook lunch for the younger ones. I came to Peace Corps because I know it is a program that really wants to help, but this is at the same time that the same country and many other like it are exploiting the poverty, exploiting the fact that some individuals care more about lining their own pockets than helping their country. 

Yes I have helped her, but how many years have I benefited from money and a government system that was probably taking advantage of the world´s six year olds.

I´m not an idiot though. I see that my family has worked hard for those benefits. I have worked hard to get those same benefits. I also have a strong feeling in my gut that the government is really trying. Trying. Trying to be "good". That thousands of people go to work every day without a single bad intention and really want to make and undefined and ambiguous difference in people´s lives. I see all this clearly, but I still can´t bring myself to say that any of it makes sense on an ethical level or on any level. Plus, I am pretty sure I a willing to argue to the bone with anyone that sees it as perfect and doesn´t get dizzy through the conflicts in their core. Somebody´s been taken advantage of and I can´t sleep at night. I can´t help, but feel that I helped put out a fire that I had been helping start for over twenty years.

Elections

Ecuador´s Presidential elections are going on right now. Since I am in a Province capitol, all the campaigns swing in at random times and take over the central park area.

From what I can make of all the fuss is that there are something like 20 candidates that are running for the presidency. Like everywhere, only three of these candidates will get any significant votes. Drum roll please, most favored at the moment is Dale Correa (pronounced like dah leh, not like the Chip and Dale cartoon series). He is from a recent party call the New Country. He is making the US a bit nervous because he doesn´t view the country very favorably, he may change the entire way that the US interacts with Ecuador. We´ll have to see.

Then There is Naboa, who is a really really wealthy Candidate, think back to Ross Perot and they put a latin american twist on it. Very enterprizing, very businesslike future. He´s in a close second place. I think the US would like him to win, because really who the US likes it when countries worry about the bling.

The last place of the top three is Cynthia, a woman Candidate. She is part of the Social Christian Team. Hmmmm.... I don´t much about her, except, except in every picture I have seen her in she´s hugging somebody and looking at them very sincerely. Hmmm. Sincere...

A couple of times I have heard them speak in the center. My spanish isn´t quick enough to keep up with political tongues yet, but they all seem to promise something in between the dancers and the fireworks. Being Ecuadorian gets harder when you have such a deep felt feeling that you want to make positive changes, but have no idea who can help your country do that best. Sigh....