A slightly more sober look at the first week

Arrival in Quito

Arriving off the plane in Quito we were immediately introduced to the collage of a country that is Ecuador. Huge tourist billboards juxtaposed pictures of the rocky Andes alongside the jungles of the Amazon. A huge tortoise from the Galapagos Islands finds itself next to a beaches from the main land coast. And that’s just the geography. Even though Ecuador is one of the smaller countries in South America it still boasts 17 indigenous languages, at least 17 political parties and 13,000 plant species(more than all of Europe combined).

My time in Ecuador is being spent as part of the Trent in Ecuador part of the Trent in Ecuador program(TiE). This program consists of four month of studying International Development with Trent professors and four months working in a field placement. I am part of a group of 27 students, most from Trent, but some like me from other universities. For the first half of the program we will be living with host families in Sangolqui, a small town just outside of the capital Quito. The second phase of the program when we do our field placement could take place anywhere in the country. One thing our professors and coordinator have made clear is that we are not here to be tourists; we will be pushed hard and expected to learn.

Quito is a huge metropolitan area with all the amenities and services of any of the world’s major metropolitan centres. The influence of American culture is inescapable. Yankees and Red Soxs hats dot the heads of people from all walks of life. McDonald’s, KFC, and Pizza Hut are common sights on any street. Popping my head into a few street side video stores I was surprised to find Sponge Bob, Sesame Street, and Barney staring back at me. On our way to the hotel from the airport we were treated to a medley of Micheal Jackson’s greatest hits on a local radio station. Ecuador has even adopted the American dollar as its currency. On one occasion I was stopped by a man on the street distributing pamphlets from some health product. This product could be trusted, he assured me, because it was used in both New York and Los Angeles. Something tells me that in had been in either of those places, someone would have tried to sell me an exotic Ecuadorian drug.

Our first week in Quito has been a wild mix of orientation activities, some mishaps, and a little misfortune. We’ve seen many parts of historical Quito and picnicked a top a mountain at Itchimba Park. A minor error by a worker at the Ecuadorian Consulate in Canada has resulted in a bureaucratic nightmare for some of our group members trying to register their passports. When we arrived at one government office we were told that they had run out of one their forms and that we should come back two weeks later. In another incident three of our group members were robbed at gun point shortly after leaving a movie theatre. Fortunately none were hurt and they lost nothing important. One even had the sense of humor to suggest that they were “just collecting a gringo tax.”

Now that the week is almost over my anticipation for leaving Quito is growing. As exciting as Quito can be, there is a big city sameness to it that makes me feel like I’ve just gotten of the bus from Waterloo in Toronto. Crowded streets, the dominance of the car (in one week a saw only a handful of bikers), and that large number of tourists means that there are physical and cultural barriers that separate me from most Ecuadorians. Walking through town I feel as if to some people I’m seen only as a potential source of income. The sameness of Quito also has another effect. It’s as if right now we’re living in a cultural bubble, while the “real” Ecuador waits for us outside. In a way I think we’ve been sheltered from true culture shock by a “lack of culture shock the big city creates. Next time I’ll bring you stories from the real Ecuador.