almost done!

Hello everyone! I’m sorry it has been so long since I’ve written. Life has been pretty busy here in Tena with the therapy program, but I’ve got a little bit of down time because the physical therapist is on vacation visiting her family in the United States, so I thought I’d write you all an update.
Before Nicole left for her vacation we had a pretty hectic time, because we were trying to get in as many patients as we could and we were also busy conducting our study. For those of you who don’t know, we are looking at the characteristics of the cerebral palsy population that comes to therapy sessions at the hospital. So, for the week and a half before Nicole left I did one-on-one questionnaires with the mother of just about every patient who walked through our door. I created the questionnaire that we used with Nicole’s guidance (and her fiancé’s help with the Spanish wordings). We asked questions about the families’ socioeconomic status, the mothers’ pregnancies and the children’s births and health in the first months and years of life. Some of the patients were really easy to interview, but some were much harder because of lacking Spanish skills – both theirs and mine! Many of the mothers speak Kichwa as their first language and so their Spanish isn’t very good. Combine that with my non-native Spanish speaking, and some of the questionnaires…well, lets just say I’m not sure how accurate some of the details are. The questionnaires were interesting for me sociologically though. I learned so much through them about life in the developing world. Lots of the patients don’t have light, running water, or indoor or outdoor toilets. Most of the women didn’t attend enough prenatal check-ups because of lack of access to the hospital or lack of education about their importance. And a few women likely have disabled children because they tried to abort their kids, usually because their husband or boyfriend (or father) didn’t want them to have a baby. Abortion is illegal here – which means more that it is expensive than that it doesn’t happen – so the poor mothers turn to taking herbs from shamans, injecting easily-accessed drugs like pitocin early in their pregnancies, or beating their stomachs. Hearing about what these women (or their partners) did to try to cause abortions, and seeing the results in their disabled children, is one of the strongest arguments for legalizing safe abortions that I could ever experience.
In the next week, I’ll be analyzing data and writing the majority of the paper that Nicole and I want to put together. Nicole comes back from the US on Saturday or Sunday, and next Monday we will resume therapy sessions. I will either have my last day be next Thursday or Friday, depending on when I head back to Quito. The roads have been bad between Tena and Quito lately – two weekends ago there were so many landslides from the rainy weather we’ve been having that there was no way to pass from one city to the other. So, if by next Wednesday the roads aren’t looking so hot, I’m going to have to buy a plane ticket for Friday’s flight from Tena to Quito just to make sure I can get to the US on Sunday! If the roads are OK though, I’ll take a bus early Saturday morning.
In the non-therapy, non-anxious-to-get-home aspects of my life, I’ve been running a lot and this past Friday afternoon I ran 3 miles for time and, shockingly, ran the distance in 25:51! I had no idea I could do that, so that was pretty cool! That night I went to the Gallera, which is Tena’s discoteca, to see an all-girl group of Vallenato singers from Colombia (Vallenato, I learned that night, is a style of music that is usually sad and romantic, though it didn’t sound all that mournful to me). As usual, since there were drunk Ecuadorian and Colombian men around, I got hit on a little bit. And by “a little bit,” I mean that one guy told me that his dream in life was to be with a North American women, two more “jokingly” called Gaby their future mothers-in-law, and a fourth guy, this fat 40-something who I used to (until Friday) wave to on the track when I ran, couldn’t take the hint to leave me alone. Thank goodness Gaby played wingman for me with him. If there is one thing I won’t miss about Ecuador, it is the machismo.
I did start feeling some premature nostalgia at the concert though, knowing that in two weeks good Latin music won’t be found at the local bar for a four dollar cover that includes a drink, but will instead be something I’ll have to seek out on special occasions. I was surprised at myself in a happy way, because these days I mostly can’t wait to hop on a plane and get back to Minnesota.
Anyway, this is getting pretty long and I’ve got a date to chat with Zach on Skype, so I’m going to get going. As always, if you want to chat with me send me an email, though I suppose you could also wait approximately 12 days and 22 hours to do it in person. Ciao!