What I Do These Days....

So. School’s done, what ever do I do to fill all of my glorious free time? Well, there’s this little thing called the ICRP (InterCultural Research Project, phew, what a name), which has been filling, um, some, of my time. The general concept of an ICRP is a project/internship/apprenticeship/volunteer work within the community that we are living in. Our program’s program is relatively flexible, and the first couple of months we were researching and testing out organizations to figure out how we would fill this five-week span in Jan/Feb, while also reading and discussing texts on development, volunteerism, and Ecuadorian society. Unsurprisingly I elected to do something within The Arts. I actually have two separate jobs, one at an organization called Arteducarte (Art to Educate Yourself) and the other is an apprenticeship with a well-known Ecuadorian painter.

Arteducarte is an organization that brings local artists into public schools to hold art workshops once a week. It is a non-profit, completely Ecuadorian funded program, although it was originally founded by the Guggenheim. Now, to the average American, this idea sounds cool, but not ground shaking. But what I’ve come to learn after working several months in the schools is that Ecuador really has very little infrastructure for art education. The school system is very structured and much of the schooling is based on repetition and memorization. Meaning, children don’t get art education. Also meaning that many kids don’t know and/or have forgotten how to be creative. Overall meaning that Arteducarte is slowly bringing a very important new thing to select Quiteño schools. The thing that I’ve find really fascinating about the program is the type of projects that the artists bring, usually more conceptual and open-ended than traditional classroom art projects. The artists usually have to work within a subject area given by the teacher, and I’ve seen solar-system hats, animal arm-puppets, clay monsters, and collaged counting books, among many other things, flow in and out of the classrooms. I’m a volunteer in the classes twice a week (read: crowd control, interesting foreign distraction, occasionally I’m actually useful), and I also work a couple of days per week in the office (read: cutting cardboard, filling glue containers, counting paper, painting things white, probably the most concrete contributions I’ve given). It has been a fun experience, especially talking to the very intelligent director of the program and reading the v.cool book they recently published. I’m not ever, ever, ever going to be an elementary school teacher.

The other part of my ICRP is a bit more, well, “open-ended.” I convinced our program leader to let me figure out some type of apprenticeship or internship within the Quito art scene, so that I could get a feel of what’s going on here and possibly form some contacts. I landed up with the painter Marcelo Aguirre (he was my painting prof. fall semester), who had just started a job of coordinating a shiny new gallery space in the basement of a graduate school. Which is neat, and actually a pretty big deal, because the Ecuadorian art market/scene dropped dead after dollarization, and this is a small symbol of progress for the art world here. For the first week and a half, I worked really really hard with a couple of other folks to mount a painting show in the space, including a quite complicated installation. It was fun, I learned a lot, I worked dutifully, and I got great feedback from my temporary co-workers. After the opening of the show and wrapping up all the details that pertained to it, my workload quickly dropped off, and left me scrambling to fill my time. I’ve been hopping from person to person, visiting studios, filling odd jobs, being a secretary. It’s been hard to not have a fixed way to fill my time, and jarring to be in the work force for a bit. The experience has certainly forced me to think about future job possibilities and what-people-do-with-their-lives. And, although I’ve kind of had fun being a little floating worker-drone, it reminded me that (as I found when I was working 40+ hrs/wk in NYC) being a student isn’t all that bad, and I’m not too upset that I have to slave away at my studies for another 1.33333333 years... life advice quite welcome at this point.

The bi-polar trust issue.

One thing I realized recently is that my trust has been put through a rigorous obstacle course since being in Ecuador. Usually, at least in the States, I’d say that I’m a naturally trusting person. [This is not to say that I’m not cautious in some ways, growing up in the dirty D did teach me to religiously lock doors, be alert outside alone after dark, and to be weary of anything that came on my porch and rang the bell (often resulting in me cowering motionlessly in my room if I heard the doorbell ring and was caught home-alone). For these things I am thankful. I felt triumphant when, during a string of break-ins and muggings on campus, I knew more or less how to deal with the situation and didn’t have a panic attack.]
However, Ecuador is a different story. I don’t really trust anything. Food and water have the potential to invert your intestines. Vendors, upon hearing an accent and seeing hazel eyes/delicious creamy complexion, have the tendency to double prices. Ditto to nighttime taxi drivers. Dogs attack. Buses veer off cliffs. Random people harass. Electricity fails. The Internet glitches. Stores close randomly. Time is flexible. Things get stolen. Hot water makes itself scarce. Walls are topped with barbed wire and broken glass. There are security guards with massive guns. People misinform rather than admitting that they’re unsure. We´re living with essential strangers. Even the earth, the ultimate constant!, rumbles with earthquakes and spews out lava unpredictably.
I noticed that I had become so untrusting when I went to places that I trusted. In Peru in the tourist-infiltrated hostel and more recently at an amazing eco-lodge in the Ecuadorian mountains, I relied on the advice of others, used honor systems, and left valuables lying around. Wow! I take trust for granted! I realized that trust is yet another one of the convenient little advantages that comes in the tidy package of privilege. If everyone around you has similar resources, there’s much less temptation to abuse others’. (Funny how these things reveal themselves). And I am looking forward to returning to my comfy trusting home, so that the little sliver of me here that is always on edge, always suspicious and guarded can rest and rejuvenate, remember to trust again.

Traveling vs. Study Abroad

I just returned from a ten day vacation to Peru, which was kick started with a quick tour of southern coastal Ecuador. After wrapping up the academic loose ends, breathing a deep sigh of relief, and cleaning my room corner to corner, I hopped on an overnight bus with friends to Guyaquil to watch the National University Track Championships in which, I am proud to say, I had several friends running. After suffering through the oppressive heat of the equatorial coast and exploring a bit of the Big City, we escaped to Salinas, a classy beach town. And, after just one night in a sterile hotel, Rachel U. and I hopped right back on the bus towards Guyaquil, to begin our Peruvian Adventure.
Before we even made it to Peru, the experience already felt different. We found ourselves in a cavernous, arching airport of glass, metal, and polished stone, being approached (actually, more like attacked) by the over-friendly, over-helpful, and over-English-speaking sales ladies in duty free. A stark contrast to fluorescently lit bus terminals with shifty eyed ticket collectors and being approached by pre-pubescent vendors of gum and cigarettes. The businesspeople and upper-class patronizers of the air made me, in my casual attire tinged with the South American Explorer aesthetic, feel a bit out of place. It was also the first trip that I’ve planned All By Myself, and Rachel and I found ourselves a bit giddy to be mature grown-up type travelers in a real live airport.
¡Bienvenidas a Lima! Wow. A throbbing hoard of expectant family members at the exit of the airport, followed by a half hour taxi ride through the expansive city of roughly twelve million. We stumbled upon a hostel in our guidebook in the touristy suburb of Miraflores, and decided to take a chance there. It turned out quite well and we were very comfortable; comfortable enough to stay our first six nights there. We met a variety of young backpacking adventurists. People you meet traveling are a distinct breed. When we first arrived, I was full of interest for the stories of Australians with around the world plane tickets and the Americans motorcycling the length of America del Sur, and was excitedly engaged in tales of traveling escapades. And then, after a few days, the dialogues started to blend and blur. It seemed like everyone and their brother had visited Machu Pichu, and couldn’t for the life of them understand why Rachel and I weren’t racing to the Inca Trail. I heard all about muggings, hectic buses and taxis, embarrassingly broken Spanish, wild nights out, and explanations for the recesses from “real life.” I felt myself grow uninterested in the tales, yet unable to start conversations without the prescribed safety questions. And it was really hard to watch people swoop in, without ANY sense of the native language or customs of a place and expect to be accommodated to. It was weird, too, to sit on my ivory tower of The Study Abroad Experience and reflect and interpret and observe what was going on. But I really enjoy being critical, and I’m also quite thankful for the experiences I’ve had in the past with traveling in an intuitive way. My family is a great bunch of voyagers, and I’m grateful for the perspective they’ve given me on experiencing journeys and breaking the box of tourism.
The trip was great. We didn’t “do” a lot, in terms of the requisites set up by the tourist industry. But we did relax, cook and eat good food, have serious conversations, almost die from laughter (literally), and meet some truly interesting people. It was nice to dip our toes into the webby world of backpackers. But I don’t think I could do it for six months.