My next 6 weeks!

Here I am in Otavalo for the next six weeks for the internship portion of my study abroad experience! I already love this city. It is small enough that I am already starting to get to know it after five days, but seems to have enough for me to explore and keep myself busy. Which, I should say, does not require a lot since I grew up in Pewaukee. Being in a foreign small town, this is interesting enough for my time here ;) I'll start with my house/family, since I spent my first day at home recovering from a cold I picked up on my last day in Quito. This house is quite a bit bigger than the one I lived in in Quito, and my room has its own bathroom and balcony! Not that I really minded sharing a bathroom with my whole family in Quito, but the introvert side of me likes not having to interact with people in another language until I've woken up a bit :) My family is super sweet and welcoming though! I do really like my host family in Quito, but it took a little longer to develop a relationship with them. Most of that probably has to do with the different language levels then and now. My mamá here is very involved with my program and has American students here all the time. She also directs two large nurseries a ways out of the city for impoverished Indigenous children. I can't wait to go see them! My papá works at/maybe owns a tourist agency. Which means we drive around in a huge tour van :) My sister, Karly, is 23 and will be graduating from college in a few days I think. She wants to do something similar to her mom with children. She is SUPER friendly and outgoing! It's also a little intimidating to have a big sister when I've always been the big sister. I'm not sure why. My brother, Mateo, is 11 and is cute and likes to spend time with me, which is great now that I don't have as much homework as I did in Quito! We also have a girl who works in our house cleaning and making food named Mari, and she is 20. She is also really nice, and is basically a part of the family. When I came, my host mom said "now I have three daughters: Karly, Mari and you!" It got me thinking about the whole having-someone-work-in-your-house thing, and while I've always been turned off by the idea, it's actually a nice way to give someone a job if you treat them well. Mari seems happy with her work here and gets along really well with the family! Oh! We also have two dogs named Oso and Luna. They live on the roof, and I didn't even know we had them until I was leaving for work one day and saw them up there. Apparently they just never come down. Oso is really dirty - I want to cut off all of his hair, clean him, and let him start over. Anyways, picture time for this part!

Our house, pink and squished in with the others! I like this tight, colorful way of doing houses!

Out on my balcony :)

My bedroom.

Mateo showed me up onto the highest part of the roof when I asked to go see the dogs. Only involved a little climbing to get up here!

Oso and Luna :) They smell, and Luna is crazy. I do plan on hanging out with them up there though, since I miss Belle!

Luna - the one that gave their presence away. She makes a good gargoyle, don't ya think?

Now I'll tell you a bit about where I work, but I'll tell you more once I start elaborating my final project (which I am really excited about, by the way!) I work at Jambi Huasi, which I told you about last blog. In reality, I don't do a lot there. I guess there's maybe not a ton for me to do, but I do realize I need to take more initiative and actually ask for projects when they're not telling me to do anything. So far I have gotten to observe a few things, like an egg cleans, a cuy cleanse, and a family planning appointment. I didn't understand much about the first two since where there are Indigenous patients they tend to speak more Kichua. I also got to go out to the market with the two nurses, where they asked some of the Indigenous people there if they or anyone in their community had symptoms of Tuberculosis. I thought that was an interesting way of finding out without having to travel outside of the city - just ask them when they come here to work! There was one man who thought he had TB symptoms, but was too busy for a test and said he would stop by Jambi Huasi later. Other than those observations, I have put some data into excel for them, read some of their books for my project, and played with the receptionist's daughter. Also, we watched a soap opera about a couple who was trying to lose weight. It was unnecessarily dramatic - I thought the wife was trying to poison and kill the husband by the drama/music involved, but it turns out she was only putting sugar in his soup.

Here it is! It looks small in this picture, but there is a courtyard-type-thing and more rooms on the other side of the building.

Standing in the courtyard.

I found a puppy! It doesn't like me very much though. I think about 15 feet is the closest I have gotten... but I have 6 weeks to work on that!

Emily! She played receptionist like her mommy for while, writing down my random data, and then became my dentist!

Dental exam done by the youngest dentist ever!

Jambi's library where I can look for books for my project.

This puppy wandered into the office, and when people kept trying to shoo it out, it hid behind me on my chair and fell asleep :) We have no idea whose it is, so it might just be a street dog that wandered in.

I love my lunch breaks here because it doesn't take me very long to eat and I get a good 45 minutes or so to explore this little town! So far I have spent some time in the park, and found a cool cultural center! I got to talk to the director of the cultural center for a while about the shows they put on, and he said I should bring my flute there sometime! Then when I got home, my host family told me he lives next door. What a coincidence! Hopefully I'll be able to get more involved with that!

Rumiñuahi, an Indigenous warrior we learned about one day in Spanish. I think he's like a hero or something, but all I remember is being surprised that he sacrificed his brother rather than letting him flee with everyone else.

One thing about cities here is that when they were first founded, the center was a park with the government buildings and a church on each side! The church was also considered part of the government back then, so that's why it was included on the central square. This is the church in the center park of Otavalo.

Aaaand the park has free wifi! If I wanted to have my laptop stolen, I would come here with it :P

There's a lot of these paintings on the walls around Otavlo! I think they're nice, and a lot more attractive than the sloppy graffiti that covers Quito.

This is like some place dedicated to one of the Catholic virgins. There are pew-like benches in front of it, and inside the cave is a small pond with water dripping from all over the cave, and a doll of said virgin in the back.

Some cows on the side of the road I found during my wandering!

The cultural center, Kinti Wasi, has a giant bird head sticking out of the front! The door of it was open, and there was hardly anyone in it, so I just went in and asked the first person I saw, "What is this?" 

 I worked Tuesday and Wednesday, then had Thursday and Friday off for some Otavalo-specific holidays (well, Friday might be for Day of the Dead). Thursday I went with my family to see the parade, which was nice for the first hour! It was a really long time to stand and watch marching band after marching band after marching band. After that we were going to go to some fashion show that my sister was putting on, but apparently nobody put up a tarp and it was going to rain, so it got cancelled.

Cute Indigenous school playing recorders :) I do really like how many of the women of the Indigenous community in Otavalo (which is over half of the population) wear their traditional clothing all of the time! At first I thought it was a little strange, but now I realize it's just like professional western men wearing suits all of the time. Both cases are just a defined group of people wearing the extravagant clothing of the identity they are proud of!

They usually had a little couple dressed up like this in front of that particular school's marching band.

I think this one is either a university marching band or a professional one. If you ever wondered what over 100 piccolos sounded like (some of them pictured here), stop wondering! It's not good!

One more random thing that doesn't fit into these categories, but that I think is funny about Otavalo, is that the gas truck and the garbage truck play these cute little tunes when they drive! It's just like an ice-cream truck, except with things that no child would ever want.

Gas truck!