Almost a year later...I have posted again! Yay!

So, the rundown would be the following:

1) I finished my intership with PAHO in August of 2009
2) I took a trip to Spain to turn in my residency papers
3) I finished the MPH core classes in fall of 2009
4) I was granted my Spanish permanent residency with permission to work (too bad there are no jobs there!)
5) I spent several weeks literally living in the computer lab to get my MPH project report done on time
6) I started teaching biology classes at Salt Lake Community College as an adjunct professor
7) I finally finished my report!
8) I passed my defense
9) I walked in April with the rest of the cohort
10) I was accepted to several doctoral programs but chose to attend the University of Texas
11) I am playing a lot, including taking second place in the BYU mens's softball intramural league (yes, I know I'm a girl, but there was no women's league so we played with a coed team)
12) I am managing to postpone doing anything that requires too much effort or concentration and am using the excuse that I need to take a break before the next long stretch of school starts
13) I am taking lots of road trips... in the next month I will be traveling somewhere by car every weekend

Yep, that's about it.

"La Costa" weekend trip

So...life and internships continue. I am now waiting for several things on my research: 1) universities to get on it and send me a simple list of emails of a specific group of medical students, 2) students to answer the online survey I've sent them. The problem seems to be that the universities are good about saying they're willing to help, but don't really prioritize it at all, thus, six weeks and MANY pleading emails and calls later, I'm still waiting for six universities. They also seem to have forgotten to tell the students to check their email...so it's taking awhile to get the responses. Longer than I expected.

Now that I only have three weeks left the worrier part of me is coming out at times...what if no one answers? What other project could I do? How can I salvage this if it really does go downhill? that kind of thing. I think it will really be fine, but it's concerning. I've been doing some personal visits at the universities to try to get things moving, so that's required some traveling lately.

Like I've said before, Ecuador has 3 VERY different areas...the coast, the mountains, and the jungle. I managed to visit two of the three in the last 9 days, and only missed the jungle by about 30 minutes. I had to visit two universities on the coast last Monday and Tuesday, so I asked if I could schedule my flight for Friday afternoon and I wandered the coast for the weekend.

I arrived in Manta in the evening, just before dark, so I got to the bus station and had to find a bus that went to Puerto Lopez, about two and a half hours to the south...Up until now I've been mostly in Quito or traveling in a car, so this was my first large scale introduction to public transportation in the pueblos and country. I think the bus was about 5 feet tall inside, so I had to hunch to get to a seat which I then really didn't fit in. The headrest hit my back at about shoulder blade level, and the poor guy in front of me had my knees jammed in his back the whole way. Then the guy next to me fell asleep and kept resting his head on me- not a big deal except it's hot there so he was all sweaty... It was a great adventure. I actually was smiling most of the way just looking at the rickety old bus as I thought about how that was more what I was expecting of my time in Ecuador than living in a big city and working in a 15 floor glass office building. They just cram you in, too...live chickens with heads sticking out of potato sacks along with all other bags and several yard long bunches of plantains that people were taking home.

Puerto Lopez is a now touristic fishing village, so it was easy to find a hostel- I splurged. $10 per night was a pretty high price (nice, huh?), but it had hot water AND a mosquito net. I didn't dare use the blanket though, for fear of fleas (I sprayed the sheets down really well with bug spray, but still managed to get a few flea bites). I should have taken a picture of the way I slept since it did get chilly at night since it's winter here...I put my feet into the arms of my wool sweater, wrapped some pants around my stomach, and wore a couple of extra shirts to keep my arms warm. I couldn't move much without something being exposed to the cold, but it worked.

I was taking a tour the next day, and as we walked down the beach toward the boats we walked through the fishing boats that were selling their catch...One guy dragged a shark across the sand right in front of me. Another was skinning a Manta Ray. Not your typical Idaho fishing catch!

We set out into the open water on my first real ocean experience as we headed to la Isla de la Plata, an island that's about 35 km west of the Ecuadorian coast. It's called the "Poor Man's Galapagos" since it has some of the same rare bird species as the Galapagos Islands. We did a hike around the island and saw some really amazing birds- like the Blue Footed Booby.
They are born without any pigmentation in their beaks and feet, but the fish they eat contain a chemical that acts as a pigment that accumulates in their bodies over time...so their feet and part of their beaks turn a brighter blue with age. We also saw a rare species of albatross that tried pecking at us as we passed, and several sea lions that just decided not to continue migrating south about 4 years ago.


The island was Sir Francis Drake's pirating base as he launched his raids on the Spanish ships carrying gold from the America's to Sevilla. It's still strange to me that a pirate was knighted...but history is always different depending on which side you're on! The story is that he was being chased once, and had to dump part of his cargo of silver in the coral reef in the bay to get more speed, thus the name of the island, the Island of the Silver.


We went snorkeling in the coral reef (my first experience swimming with tropical fish), and I got stung by mini jellyfish. It was more annoying than anything since they're so small you can't even see them. On the way back to the mainland we did some whale watching. July and August are the months that the humpback whales from the Antartic area come to the equator to birth and mate, so there are hundreds of them in the area just of the coast of Ecuador and Columbia in the warm water there. We ended up following one male (he was about 14 meters long- or about 45 feet) who was really active. Every 20 to 30 seconds he would jump out of the water. We tried to stay at least 100 yards away, but he would get further away, then come really close. He jumped once about 30 yards away and we got a little of the splash. He then bumped the bottom of the boat before he came up on the other side of us. We followed him about 45 min and it was incredible. I took tons of pictures, and some turned out pretty good. The videos didn't work though. It was straight off the Discovery Channel or out of National Geographic- definitely one thing I thought I would never get to see in this life.

And that's the short version of day one...

Sunday morning I caught a bus back toward the north, and ended up finding a church in a pueblo called Jipijapa. The members were amazing...much more welcoming that I have ever seen in any ward or branch anywhere I've traveled. Usually there will be a couple of people that come up and introduce themselves to make sure you know where to go, etc, but these people were lining up to come introduce themselves and welcome me, even the teenagers and primary kids. They made sure they included me in the discussions in the classes, asked me to lead the music, and gave me a copy of the Liahona when I left so I would have something good to read that sunday afternoon. It was cool to see these very humble, very loving, and very dedicated saints who had nothing that the world considers important, yet the single mother has white ironed shirts for her three little boys even though they have old worn out shoes and pants and they all are just HAPPY. All they have is their family and the gospel and it is enough. It was a good reminder.

I wandered around the next few days, spent Monday night in another coastal pueblo listening to the ocean just outside ($7 at this place!) because the city of Manta is more expensive and I'd rather be in small communities anyway. My university visits went well, so all was good. I decided that it's a lot more fun to travel with someone else, though...there's no one to share it all with when you go it solo! I got back to Manta with a few hours to wait before my flight back to Quito, so I wandered down the beach for awhile. They make fishing boats and yachts by hand in the port there, so even though it stunk like rotten fish I hung out there watching for awhile.

The ironic thing was that I had just spent 4 days out with the people who make up the large majority of the population of the country...the poor who live in small cities and just barely survive, so when I was sitting in the airport I was really annoyed with everyone. The contrast was amazing...everyone with their portable electronic devices, wearing expensive clothes, talking or texting on their blackberry. I realized that I had felt more safe and much more comfortable on the incredibly crowded bus. All the poor people were friendly and welcoming, going out of their way to help me and make me comfortable...all the wealthy people were "cold" as they would describe it here, and totally self-absorbed. It made me wonder if that's how I am, too...

I'll have to write Part II tomorrow...to be continued are the descriptions of volcano lava eruption sightings, diving off a bridge, etc.

Quy

I felt kind of strange about it, but I tried a traditional Andean dish
today as we made our way back to Quito...quy. They raise them here as
a food source, and though it used to be eaten by the poor, sometimes
now it is considered a delicacy if you're eating at the right place.
My half qui cost as much as half a roasted chicken. The internal
conflict came, however, in that the translation for quy is "guinea
pig"...which, as you all know, are considered as pets not food in the
U.S. It actually wasn't bad when I didn't think about which type of
little animal I was eating. I drew the line at eating the slab of
cooked pig skin that my friends were eating instead of the quy,
though. I felt like I took the better of the two choices!

Catch up

This is Loly Guzman and I on our way through the mountains toward the coast. The road behind us is THE road that goes clear from the north to the city of Guayaquil. The Guzman family (Carlos, Loly, and their daughter Gaby) are a member family that kind of took me in. They let me come with them on several trips, and helped me find my apartment, etc. They just left for Utah, though, to visit one of their sons.

Hello everyone! Sorry for not writing much lately...first of all i´ve had technical issues with the internet both at my house and at the office, and second, things are getting busy. This last week I did all of my focus groups which I have to now finish analyzing so I can write the last 5 questions for my survey (they are on topics that need to be pertinant to the students that are being surveyed, so the answers have to come from them), then it has to be changed to "Ecuadorian" so it has their common terms, etc, then translated to English to make sure they understand the spanish version to mean the same thing that I think it means, then i have to send it to several students to pilot test it so they can give feedback, etc, then it has to be sent to experts in the field, and only then can I start to send it out to medical students. The great part is that all this has to happen relatively quickly, since they leave for summer vacation within the next two weeks, more or less. And the pressure is on!

To kind of explain for those of you who aren't familiar with my project, I'm working with the Pan American Health Organization as an intern for the summer. Part of my responsibilities is conducting personal research, so I'm doing a study among medical students to see if including training in a specific child health care strategy (called IMCI) actually leads to them wanting to apply it or not.

I'm also responsible for getting contact with the LDS Church area authorities because the Ecuadorian Ministry of Health is interested in organizing in a very strategic way the trainings that are being done for neonatal resuscitation. The Church humanitarian organization does these trainings all over the world, but here in Ecuador they've been fairly haphazardly done. Basically no one understands the heirarchy of the Church enough to figure out who to talk to in order to change the way things are currently going down. And as one guy at PAHO said, "out of heaven drops our intern"... who just HAPPENS to be mormon and know how things work. It's pretty tough to find the numbers for those guys, though. I thought I could find them online, but it's impossible. You've got to go through the stake presidents. Even finding the mission office number was next to impossible. It's a good thing I know the way things work!

I get to explore this week, though (good because i get to see more of the country, bad because it takes time away from me being able to do the analysis of the focus group results), because we have two workshops. One is in Cuyambe, and the other in Otavalo. Otavalo is a city made up mostly of indigenous people and they have some really cool markets from what I'm told. It's also considered the "Utah" of Ecuador because a large percentage of the population are LDS. These are traditional dancers from that area. The Guzman family took me to a pueblo one afternoon and it happened to be the day of a special celebration for the community. It was cool because it was real- not something just for tourists.


I did my proposal on Thursday to representatives from 8 universities, the Ministry of Health, and PAHO (the organization I'm working with). I thought it went pretty well, but afterward one of the PAHO reps went off, basically telling me that my study will never mean anything. I was respectful, but was boiling inside. I went and talked to her the next day after cooling off, hoping to be able to better explain myself. She doesn't really listen, so it didn't go over all that well. I thought it was interesting how critical she was when she hadn't even read my proposal. She didn't want the document I'd prepared that had answers to all her questions and criticisms, so that's that. She's supposed to be reviewing my proposal this weekend and we'll talk about it tomorrow, but I think she's already pretty biased against it so she's not really reading with an open mind at this point. Once again, I'm being reminded that it's much more difficult to work in a second language. It is making me more excited to get to present my project to my committee at BYU, though, because I'll be able to express exactly what I'm thinking when they ask questions! It was so much easier as a missionary when the "Spirit carries" the message to their hearts... ;-)

So today I met a lady who brought a group of students down for 6 weeks to learn Spanish...she decided that she's going to check and see if I could accompany them on a few of their Saturday excursions. That would be nice, because I don't have anyone to travel with now. There are hundreds of things that I want to do, but don't dare go alone...

One of the next trips I want to do is going to the Cloud Forest of Mindo, where they have zip lines all through the canopy, amazing hiking, canoeing, mountain biking, etc. Still thinking about who to try to talk into going with me.

Ecuador is a very diverse country. It is part of the Andes, so it has 3 very distinct geographic areas. The side to the east of the Andes is part of the Amazon, so it is jungle with very little development (except the oil companies that are now invading). Pretty much the only inhabitants are various indigenous tribes. Each tribe is very different. The ones from the jungle have very different traditions than those in the other areas of the country. They are generally very short, build huts with thatched roofs, and are very community oriented. The PAHO driver was telling me the other day that he actually got to go with a group years ago to visit a different type of tribe...you have to go by boat, and said that when they arrived they almost weren't admitted to the tribal village because they were wearing clothes. Eventually they worked it out (bribes of chocolate, more than anything else) and he said that when they entered he was amazed. They were ALL HUGE- he said he didn't come close to their shoulders, men and women. that would make them all over 6 feet, and he said they were really strong. Apparently it was easy to tell, since they were all naked... I immediatly thought of the pictures of the sons of Helaman...

The side to the west of the Andes is the coastal area which produces the most bananas of any country as I understand it. Ecuador was THE original banana republic. They also have more varieties of banana than I knew existed. They use plantains as we use potatoes- in soups, to make flour, etc. They're actually really good. The overripe plantains get really sweet and are used in a different set of recipes. The plantations are gigantic, and have to each require hundreds of laborers. Closer to the coast you find a lot of areas that flood during the wet season (they don't really have the 4 seasons here- on the coast it's either hot or hot and rainy). That kind of flooding leads to houses like these... they're made up of bamboo, and if you look closely, some have boats tied underneath. Areas that are not quite so poor have cement pillars instead of bamboo. It was actually surprising to see how many houses were built like that, even in areas that were not low-lying. They'd all have a couple of hammocks strung up underneath, and chickens and little kids running around. The cities are mainly made up of cement buildings, which I'm sure is similar to most latin american countries. The poor areas are a combination- lots of tin sheeting and bamboo is used. This is a village in the coastal plain.


Like any coastal area there is also the beach cities...This one is called Salinas. The Guzman family lived there for awhile at the military base (Carlos is one step below an Admiral in the Ecuadorian Navy).


The "sierra" is the andes area that goes splits the country from the north to the south. Quito is smack right in the middle of the andes, thus, the high altitude and cooler temperatures. They call it the city of eternal spring, and that about explains it. I'm finally to the point that climbing the stairs to the 10th floor where our office is (twice a day) doesn't utterly kill me, but I still am breathing hard when I get there. It's amazing how long it takes to adjust.

There are parts of the Sierra that are very arid, but the western part that I have seen thus far looks more like jungle to me than mountains...

This picture is as you begin to descend toward the coast- this is the less inhabited part. I'd still see random houses on hilltops, though, kind of like the Emporer's New Groove type idea, just a little more beat up. It is a beautiful area. After about 1 pm or so the clouds start descending, so if you're headed TO Quito, you've got to leave the south early. We got to this part a little late, and the cloud bank was so bad that we were driving less than 3 or 4 mph for a good part of the climb up through the mountains. You can see the clouds starting to form above the mountain in the middle...
The country has had major political difficulties even up until the last few decades. Because of the lack of a strong central government for so many years, there really isn't any kind of freeway system. I went to Guayaquil on the southern coast a couple of weeks ago and it was an 8 hour trip of two lane highway (a large portion of which is winding through the Andes as you go east before dropping down to the coast), and that is THE main road between the two largest cities in the country. On our way to Guayaquil we drove through this pueblo which is famous for the sugar cane taffy they make...may not really be sanitary the way this kid is pulling the taffy, but it was REALLY good, especially fresh when it was still soft!


This is a statue carved out of the mountainside. Carlos said the artist covered it up while he was working on it, so no one knew what he was carving until he revealed the giant devil's head...

There is another road that goes south from Quito that stays in the mountains, and goes through what is called the Valley of the Volcanoes. The Incans went that way when they attacked Quito coming north from Peru. There are lots of active volcanoes here, but it's been awhile since any had a serious eruption, so don't worry anyone!

My mentor here, Dr. Oscar Suriel, is from the Dominican Republic, and he and his wife, Janete, invited me over on Friday for a drink (yes, they know I'm LDS, so my drink was juice). I got to hear the history of the Dominican Republic and Haiti, though, which was fascinating. I was interested to find out that Pirates of the Carribean is basically the fictional history of those two countries. The isle of Tortuga was real, and is in the bay of what is now Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti. Pirates from all over the world used it as their base, and rum still continues to be the famous Dominican drink... now you know! Thought you "little boys" would enjoy that bit of info.

Janete is an oral surgeon and said that she actually had a good friend who was in the stake presidency of their city back home. She volunteered to do all the premissionary dental work at cost, which I thought was pretty cool. They've been here just over a year, and she said that she went around looking for a clinic she could work at, but that the maximum she was offered was $300 per MONTH. Gives you an idea of how things are here, huh? Minimum wage is about $200 per month, and most of the poor laborers don't even get that.

I think it's that type of economic situation that leads people to convert a little moped into a family/business vehicle...


I'll include some other pics, too, though most of them are probably on Facebook. Enjoy!

This video is of the old part of Quito- Mom, you may not want to watch all of it because you could get nauseous. Just a warning...



At a zoo just outside of Quito.


These two men in the statue are Simon Bolivar (Venezualan?) and ? (don't remember the Chilean freedom fighters name right now). They were the ones who really got the various Andean countries from Venezuela in the north clear to Chile in the south to fight for and gain their independence. Bolivar was fighting in the north, and the other in the south of the continent, and they met up in Guayaquil (where this statue is found) to agree to work together.


I am told that this is an Incan sacrifice site- it's on top of the hill el Panecillo in Quito. The video you may have just watched shows el Panecillo (it has a huge statue of the virgen on top of it now). What would it have been like to be there when this place was being used?


And finally, this video is of the same area as where the first picture on the post was taken. I just stared out the window in amazement during the whole trip...



Hopefully I'll have more adventures soon to write about!

Eleven lessons from Ecuador

Well, I am lucky i'm in the nice part of the city so I DON'T have rats, and I get to walk to work everyday. My fellow cohort member, Ashley, inspired me with her list of things learned about New York, so here are some interesting things about Ecuador:

1- There are thorny trees here. Be careful, or you'll be impaled. (I tried to upload a picture of them, but blogger wouldn't recognize it...maybe later)
2- There are always people of lower SES, shall we call them, trying to sell anything and everything to the drivers at every stoplight. Some have no legs (really, i saw a guy walking on stumps of his thighs this afternoon), some are old crippled women, and some are little kids. While walking home from work the other day i came upon a group huddled around one of those little kids who had apparently been hit by a car...which brings us to...
3- I thought Utah drivers were bad. Sorry, since you're almost all from Utah, but you can feel better about yourselves because Utahans usually stay in the lines painted on the road. It's optional here. Major roads abruptly go from 3 to 1 lane and all three lanes just jam together and honk at each other instead of merging to form one lane. It's no big deal to straddle the line...if someone behind you wants to pass they just honk or flash their headlights at you.
4- You guys remember that Ecuadorian video we watched about the oil drillers destroying the rainforest with Dr. Cole? Anyone remember the drink the indigenous tribe made by having the women chew up yucca and then spit it back out and let it ferment? Yep, I was offered that TWICE this weekend, and don't think I could have stomached it even if I hadn't know it had alcohol...
5- Ecuador has these giant wild boar-like things (I forget all the new names) that roam through the jungle, but they are almost horse-size. They make most of the paths that are later used by the indigenous people. Not to mention the giant bugs that could pick you up and carry you away...
6- They eat bannanas with everything. Fried, baked, double fried, roasted, made into flour, etc. You find them instead of potato chips. Mostly plantains, but all these options are doubled up because you have both the green (more like potato) variety and the ripe (sweeter) variety. They're actually really good.
7- I can eat a two course meal including desert and a freshly blended glass of juice from anywhere from $1.5o to $3.50. I tend to go the cheap route... Last week I was given some unidentifiable portion of meat, however. I chose to just eat it as quickly as possible and then to enjoy the rest of the meal. It looked suspiciously like pigs ears curled in on themselves...
8- NO ONE is EVER on time here. I work from 8 to 5 and most people straggle in anywhere between 8:20 and 9 am. I went to a meeting at the Ministry of Health for all the regional directors of the health departments last week- we started about an hour late, and the coffee break that was scheduled as 15 min lasted about 90 minutes. Interesting.
9- The news is really sensational. Think of the most dramatic voice you can imagine, and then think about listening to that for an hour. I can't take it, so I just don't watch tv! They show the dead bodies and everything...
10- I think about Dr. Cole's class alot- "don't eat the food from street vendors", "wow- did you see the HUGE cloud of smoke coming out of that bus exhaust pipe?", "what process did the city go through to clean this water? is it REALLY clean? can I wash my hands in it? or do i need to use hand sanitizer afterwards?"
and 11- Toilet paper: You can't flush toilet paper here. If you do, it will clog the pipes under the buildings and it has to be dug up and cleaned out. You also are lucky to find toilet paper in public restrooms. If you are so lucky as to find a restroom with toilte paper, it's not in the stall where we would expect it to be, but outside in a dispenser (which you may or may not have to pay to use).

Yay! Now you know a little more about Ecuador...It really is a great place, though, and I'm excited because I get to go to the coast on Friday afternoon for the weekend. My adventurous side keeps telling me to try new things, which sometimes turns out well and sometimes doesn't.

Oh, yeah. I got a real mattress on Friday- that's pretty big news. I've been sleeping on a foam pad about 6 inches thick, but the problem is that the boards that support said "mattress" keep moving (which i didn't figure out until last week). Basically, they'd moved toward the head and foot of the bed, leaving a giant hole in the middle where my back and hips would lay. I thought it was just the mattress not filling out again after sleeping on it- that is, until i knelt on the bed to reach for something and it finally all sunk through the hole. Hammocks are way more comfortable than this was. Even the two mattresses made of foam on the floor that I slept on for two months during my mission was better than this, so I'm SOOO excited about the new mattress. It actually has springs in it!

The internship is going pretty well. Dr. Suriel, my mentor, was out of the country for the first two weeks, and the others that were put in charge of me didn't really understand the focus of my project. First they thought it was a qualitative study, then a quantitative evaluation of the IMCI program nationwide (holy HUGE project- don't know how they thought I'd get that done in 3 months!!), and then just told me to add some info to my proposal about the Theory of Planned Behavior (which they are not familiar with) so i can sell it to the medical schools I'll be sampling from for my study... so the rest of the time has been spent fixing my proposal, directing it to medical school directors, adding more historical info about Ecuador and IMCI, and now having it translated. I'm laughing at the crazy translations the PAHO translator programs is turning out, though.

My mentor says we'll get a handle on this project and get it rolling then he'll have me dive into the other work he'll be having me do. That's REALLY comforting to know that he'll make sure this gets done...

I'll post pictures later...I got to see some cool stuff this weekend!

So I'm finally doing it...but it's just because I'm 3633 miles from home for the next 3 months

It really is that far as the crow flies from the farm in Idaho to Quito, Ecuador.

Hmmm...so I'm not sure how I'll keep a blog up to date since I don't even write in my journal very often, but I'll try.

Tomorrow is my big day for adventure...we'll see if I can navigate myself around the city without getting too lost. I tried to take a taxi the other day and he apparently didn't know where the address was- he drove in the entirely opposite direction, then dropped me off at a corner and said it was a block to the left. After walking a few blocks, I discovered that was just his way of getting me out of the taxi without actually having to find the government office I needed to go to in order to register my visa. At least I can communicate with the people... so I went into a bookstore eventually to ask if they recognized the name of the street. They didn't, of course, since Quito has 1.2 million people, so I bought a map. This time when I climbed in the cab I was armed properly, and we arrived with no incidents with me navigating.

Josh West (one of my professors for those who don't know him) called it "opportunistic sight-seeing" when he heard about it. I'd rather the planned variety, though.