Wrapping it up...but not for long!

Hey everyone! I am in Tena right now, wrapping up my internship. But I´m not wrapping up the work with her for long, hopefully - I got the internship that I applied for through Grinnell, so I´ve got the funds to stay here until sometime between July 14th or the 18th (depending on plant ticket costs). But what I am doing with the internship is yet to be determined.
I've kept working with the physical therapist, Nicole, and I am loving physical therapy. It is actually something that I think I might be able to do with my future. I would like to spend the summer working with her, to continue the research on physical therapy, but I have to get my grant shifted first. See, I originally applied for the grant before I started with this work, so its funds are technically for a project in Quito, researching the effects of pesticide use in flower plantations on the workers and their children. Which still sounds interesting, but I would be sitting inside doing research on computers all day. Here, I could be working in the PT office, interviewing parents, living with my amazing host family and working with Nicole, who is a great boss. And hopefully putting together a paper good enough to get published. I have to ask Monty Roper, the head of the grant program, if I can switch. We´ll see what he says.
In other news, today I learned to eat crabs. This morning I went out with Gabi and Cecilia (the empleada) (Francisco is staying with his grandparents for a couple weeks, so he isn´t home) to the open air market (the feria) to buy live crabs, green plantains, onions, and some mandarin oranges, and two fruits we don´t have in the states, one called a chirimoya and the other called a zapote. Then we went back to the house and cleaned and prepped the crabs (I took photos), and Ceci whipped up a plantain and onion soup and then at the end threw in the crabs to boil. We each got a whole crab and a bunch of plantain pieces, and encebollada, which is onions and tomatoes chopped up, a plate of rice, and a freshly made glass of passionfruit juice. It was pretty awesome. Ceci and Gabi laughed at me because I ate with a serious expression on my face, I guess. And when they were teaching me to eat the head, I accidentally started to eat the wrong part and had to spit it out because it was so disgusting. By the end, our hands were covered in crab juice and there were ants eating at the little bits that ended up on the floor. It was a good time.
Tonight, salsa dancing. I might let you know how it goes.

Oh! Grandma - I got your Valentine´s day card in mid-March, but I was a vaga, which means lazy, and forgot to tell you I got it. Thanks so much (a month and a half late)!

Still alive and dengue-free

I wrote this about 5 days ago, so it´s a little out of date. I´ll put more new things after it:
Wednesday
Hello everyone!
I had my first overnight shift in the hospital last night. I am dead tired and ready to sleep, but I thought I would update you a little bit first on how it went. Emily, Phoebe, and I chose last night’s guardia to attend because one of our favorite doctors, a resident named Dra. Violeta Muñoz, was on duty. Luckily, with Violeta came my favorite nurses, too, so it promised to be an interesting night. We got to the hospital at about 8 pm and stayed, in the end, until 8 am. At about 11 pm, the three of us got to see the first birth of the night (which was the first birth ever that I have witnessed in person). It came so quickly that there wasn’t enough time for the doctors to get there, much less for the mother (age 27, this was her 5th child) to be taken to the delivery room. The nurses had to catch the baby right then and there! Then the doctor arrived and whisked the baby away when she came in, and it was apart from its mother for another whole hour before the mama got to see her little girl. Shortly thereafter, a bus accident happened outside of Tena and about 8 patients got taken to our hospital. I was there when they started piling into the emergency room. One of the first patients to get there was a little girl who was 8 years old and had her forehead gashed open pretty deep. She required a couple of layers of stitches, but Violeta at least waited for the anesthesia to kick in before she started sewing. And, even better, she did a really neat job of it and I think the scar won’t be that noticeable blended with the girl’s eyebrow. As those patients proceeded to come in, I whipped out my blood pressure-taking skills (thanks for the lesson, Mom!) and helped out a little in the check-in process.
After that calmed down, I stuck around in Emergency, when a pregnant woman came in fully dilated, ready to give birth. Luck was on my side I guess, because I was the only student there and they only let one extra person into the delivery room other than the doctor and nurse. So I put on scrubs, face mask, surgical hat, everything (umm, is that normal? it seemed a little excessively sterile to me) and headed in. This birth was also quick, but the baby had its umbilical cord double-wrapped around its neck and it was slow to breathe. Phoebe and Emily were going to come in for the next birth, which happened pretty much right after, but they didn´t have enough scrubs, so I (luckily? I felt kinda bad.) got to stay in the delivery room and see the next birth, too. This was a 19 year old first-time mother, and its kinda sad that the thought going through my mind was "wow, this is only her first? she waited!". Her birth was slower, and was attended by a resident who hadn´t attended to a birth for 3 years. He was guessing a little bit, and wasn´t really talking to the patient much, so I tried talking her through some things, especially after when he was sewing up her episiotomy. As for that, the episiotomy didn´t seem entirely necessary - that baby was coming out pretty well - Mom, how customary is it for an episiotomy to be cut on a first baby "just in case"? Anyway, by the time all that was over, it was about 5:30 and I wanted a nap. So I took one, until 7, then pretty much wandered around until 8 because nothing was happening, and left. It was an amazing experience. I think I´ll be doing one every week. Okay, time to sleep!

So anyway, that was a week ago. Things have actually changed quite a bit for me in the hospital since then. Us gringas were "found" by a fellow gringa who runs a free physical therapy clinic on the fourth floor. I am really interested in her work and she wanted to do a research project on the link between how births go and the occurence of cerebral palsy and other physical and mental disabilities. She said that she sees forms of CP and haven´t been seen in the US in the last 10 years, and that is really interesting to me. So, I spent Thursday and today with her in her PT office. She is teaching me to work with the kids and we are working together on this project, which right now is becoming a big patient database with information on type of birth (vaginal or cesearian), birth weight, disability, birth complications, etc... with the hopes of running statistics on it later and presenting it to the health minister in Ecuador to change birth policies. I hope it works!! That actually makes staying in Ecuador for the summer even more enticing, because I could keep working with her in my free time, presenting our information.
That is another thing I don´t think I have really mentioned on my blog yet - I think I may be staying in Ecuador until mid-July, depending on if I get a grant from Grinnell or not. There is work that I´ve been offered in Quito to research the health effects of pesticide use in flower plantation workers. But, it is a volunteer research position, so me taking the work hinges on me getting a grant from Grinnell to do it. We´ll see what happens!
A change of subject: This last weekend, clearly, was Easter weekend. All of Gabi´s (my 27 year old host mom´s) family came into town on Thursday and Friday for the baptism of Gabi´s 3 year old son, Francisco. It was really neat having everyone there, though it was a little overwhelming too.
On Friday night, I went out with Emily and Phoebe to go to a bar and we ran into the physical therapist, and then we ran into a candlelight vigil procession. It stopped for each of the stations of the cross and was a pretty amazing sight. I definitely haven´t seen anything like it before. It was tons of people and candles and rosary saying. Wow.
On Saturday the family and I went to Archidona, the city next door, to see its zoo and then we went to a spot on a nearby river that looks like a jungle paradise to swim. Seriously - sandy beach, palm trees, clear water, a little cave, some rapids down below - it was amazing. Then we went to the baptism. The mass seriously went for 2 hours before the baptism happened! There were seven readings, each with a response, before the gospel, then a crazy long homily. Mom, was that how 3 hour long Easter services happened when you were little? Luckily, Gabi and family aren´t that religious so we snuck out after the baptism to go out to eat. The food was great and we had homemade coconut-vanilla cake. Yum!
The next day (yesterday...) all of the family left except Gabi´s sister Maria (24 years old) and Gabi, Maria and I spent most of the day watching movies. For a such a Catholic country, Easter was pretty chill. I´d say that the only major thing the Ecuadorians are missing out on is the trend to eat a lot of chocolate on Easter. Because really, what is Easter without a chocolate bunny?
So that´s my life until now. I am really hungry, so I´m going to go eat some lunch. ¡Adios!

I´m in Tena, safe and sound

Oops... sorry for not writing for so long. As you can see, I´m in my internship phase right now, in Tena. It is in the tropics, so it´s about 80 degrees outside, though luckily it isn´t raining right now. For those of you who don´t know, my internship is at the Hospital José Maria Velasco Ibarra, a public hospital. I originally though I´d spend most of my time in obstetrics/gynecology, but as it turns out there isn´t a whole lot of action there during the day. So instead, two other students (Emily and Phoebe) and I wander around the hospital looking for interesting things to do. We go on rounds in pediatrics in the morning and generally end up in emergency for most of the day after that. The hospital is pretty different from anything I´ve seen before, and so are the illnesses. There´s a guy in the internal medicine unit in an isolated room who got a parasite that eats away at the cartilage in his face and causes severe enlargement of his nose and lips. His face is huge, and the skin from his now-mostly-flat nose takes up about half of his face. I don´t think this is anything I´ll ever see again in my life. Hope I don´t catch it :) Parasites are also incredibly common here. The water isn´t potable and the rivers all have parasites in them, so every day I see at least five parents come into the emergency room with kids suffering from parasites (or the parents have them themselves).
One of the most startling things to me is how young women start having babies. One 23-year-old woman in the emergency room today was on her sixth pregnancy. I´m not sure if it is lucky or not, but two of them have ended in miscarriage. It seems like every 20-year-old woman that walks through the emergency room door is pregnant with at least her second child. I cannot imagine how that would be.
I´ve decided that there are a lot of doctors in the hospital who I would not want to be seen by here. Some are really great - they care about their patients, they listen well, they treat them like they are excited to see them and are just fantastic. But, there is a group of about four young doctors from the coast, on residencies here for about 4 or 5 months, that I would never want to be my doctor. Especially if I was indigenous. They treat their patients (especially the indigenous) like they are stupid, like they don´t want to spend the time of day on them, and they don´t care if they cause their patients pain or invade their privacy. There was a woman in the ER today with a prolapsed uterus (or something like that) - the same one who is on her sixth pregnancy - and the doctor was asking her questions but not taking the time to listen to her answers, then told the woman (8 months pregnant, walked an hour to get to the hospital, has 3 kids at home) that her emergency really wasn´t and told her to come back tomorrow to see a gynecologist. Ridiculous. With a different pregnant and very embarassed patient, legs up in stirrups, the doctors in the room didn´t object at all to nurses walking in and out during the exam. And on Friday there was a little girl, 3 years old, whose brother had almost cut off her finger with a knife while chopping pieces of sugarcane. She was also indigenous. They had to sew back up the finger, and the same doctor as the one treating the pregnant woman washed the wound very brusquely, making the girl scream, and then without any warning gave her shots of anesthetic. But then, she didn´t wait for the anesthetic to kick in before she started sewing, so with every stitch the girl would writhe so badly, I could barely hold down her legs. Her mom was crying too, because she knew her poor little girl was in so much pain. I wanted to vomit from the sight.
Anyway, as if all of this wasn´t interesting enough, tomorrow I am coming in at 8 to watch some surgeries - I think a skin graft on a burn victim and maybe a C-section - and then I´m going home to sleep some because I´m coming back at 8 pm to stay for the night in the hospital so I can see some emergency surgery, some births, things like that. I´m pretty psyched about it. And, I will be following one of the doctors who I actually like very much, so I know that I won´t be bothered by the way she practices medicine. I´ll try to keep you guys updated as to how this internship turns out and everything.
¡Ciao!

The Magic Roundabout

This weekend, Nora Skelly, Becka, Grace, and three other girls from our trip (Emily, Carla and Christina) and I went to a little hostal called The Magic Roundabout in a cloud forest in Las Palmas, about 3 and a half hours from Quito.
The couple who runs the hostal, Meg and Ali, are British expatriates. Ali decided that he was sick of England, so he and a friend packed up and moved to Ecuador because the living is cheap (though a month after moving Ecuador dollarized, so that isn´t as true now). They bought a parcel of land in the cloud forest and let it be, and built the hostal. A few years later, Meg wrote to Ali and asked if she could come and work for awhile. She and Ali fell in love, got married, and now Meg is 7 months pregnant with their first kid. Oh, and they are huge hippies - Meg is having a water birth, both have dreadlocks and Meg has an organic garden where she grows tomatoes, 7 kinds of lettuce (Which made the best salad I´ve eaten since my summer working with the CSA), sweet corn, peas, some other fruits, herbs, etc. They started growing tobacco plants for the purpose of making botique tobacco products (and because tobacco plants are good organic pesticides), but then Meg got pregnant so they ditched the tobacco products idea.
The food was organic and amazing (for the first time since arriving in Ecuador I felt like eating was a healthful activity) and there were hammocs (hamacas en español) where we sat and read that overlooked the forest and road, and I took a couple of hikes to see waterfalls on the property. We didn´t realize it before starting our first hike, but we may have risked life and limb to see these waterfalls. There were some pretty steep dropoffs on one side, and a couple of the hills we scrambled up required ropes for holding onto. And we had to wade up a river (they had us wear Wellies). Oh, and did I mention that it was raining? Still, the first hike was really nice.
Sunday, I went for one more to see the "big waterfall". Grace wanted to come but she slipped and bruised her hip the night before, and Becka tried to come but her asthma got to her, so it was just me, Ali, his two sweet dogs (Guinness and Winston) and a machete hiking up this really steep, muddy, jungle mountain. I fell a few times (and got a bruise on my knee from a boulder in the river), but came out alive. I´m not as sure if that waterfall was worth it, but I know that I would have regretted it if I didn´t go to see it. And when there isn´t much else to do that´s as good a reason as any, right?
We were sad to go that afternoon, but it was enough time to relax, rejuvenate a little, and adventure enough to feel like we had taken a worthwhile trip.
Oh! Mom and Dad - they had a poster up for the Secret Garden hostal in Quito Antiguo and said it was a pretty nice place.

El Lavabo/My most embarassing 30 minutes ever

Story time!
Setting: My bathroom, Thursday, 1:30 am
Once upon a time, there was a club called Bundalow 6. On Wednesday night, this club has no cover and free drinks for women between 7 and 10 pm. Wednesday night is universally, among CIMAS girls, the night to go out to this club, have a few drinks, and dance. Generally, we dance until about 12:30 or 1 am and then go home. This last Wednesday night we went to Bungalow 6, left at 12:45, and got home around 1 am. I proceeded to get ready for bed and noticed that my feet were a little dirty from wearing sandals. And I couldn´t wash them in my shower because it only functions as a shower, not as a bath. So, I decided to wash them in the sink. Because I didn´t want to get my sheets dirty, of course. As I was washing off my feet (and not pressing very hard on the sink) all of a sudden the sink fell off of the wall. You read that right. Just for emphasis, I´ll repeat myself. The sink fell OFF THE WALL. But it was still attached to the sink pipes, so I just stood there and turned off the water and held the sink while propping it up with my knee. Of course, the water was still on and so started spraying into the floor. At which point I came out of shock just enough to call for my host brother - "!Fabian, ven aquí, por favor!" - and he came. His response was somewhere along the lines of "what did you do?!" and he got his mom, Cecilia. So, Cecilia came in, looked at the pipes spraying water, and said essentially "I don´t know what to do, I´m going to go get Oswaldo." So in comes my 60 year old host dad, wearing pajama pants and slippers and bearing an enormous wrench. He takes a look at the wet floor and says "just a minute, I´m going to go change and turn off the water." He went to do that, and came back in bare feet and boxers. And I held up the sink so it wouldn´t crash onto his head and kill him while he proceeded to disassemble the piping and detach the sink from the wall. Then I gently put it in the bathtub, where it spent the night. Somewhere along the way, I said something like "Ridiculous things always happen to me!" and my dad starting laughing - at me, at the situation, I´m not sure. Probably a little of both. - and said "nope, this has certainly never happened before!" Meanwhile, Cecilia swept the water into the drain on my bathroom floor and got a little mad, asking me if I had put a lot of pressure on the sink. I guess I might be a little mad too, being woken up at 1:30 in the morning by my son because my host daughter broke my sink. Overall, both of my host parents took it all very well. It made me appreciate my host dad a lot, both because he knows how to fix things like sinks that have fallen off of walls and because he kept laughing and doesn´t get mad when things go wrong. And I appreciated Cecilia because she didn´t give me a hard time about it the next day.
In the end, I think that the moral of this story is that one should not attemt to wash their feet in a sink that is attached to the wall.

Whew! Finally I can take a breath of (polluted) air.

Yep, I'm back in Quito. We went for the last two days to a pueblo called Tabacundo, within which was Hacienda Guachala, built in 1583, where we stayed the night. It was a trip that really made me think. The first thing we did yesterday was visit a flower plantation, where we were brought on a tour by one of the owners (I think) who painted a very rosy (it's a pun...) picture of the floricola industry for us. The next thing we did, though, was walk through one of the last remaining agricultural areas with a farmer, who told us about how the industry ruined the community that once existed in Tabacundo. See, the people in the village used to be much poorer but they had community that was there when things were bad, so everyone pretty much came out poor but surviving. Now, there are the flower plantations and the community is broken down because of the nature of work in a factory and because there is now a lot of immigration from Colombia and the coast and emigration to Spain and the US. Plus, health conditions are much poorer because of all of the pesticides being put on the roses that affect workers and their babies. And there is a lot more divorce and girls having babies. So from a monetary perspective, people are richer, but from a community perspective, the people are much poorer. Now just try to get that out of our head the next time you're buying roses for that someone special. Sorry.
After all of that, we spent the night in this ancient hacienda. Let me tell you, it's pretty freezing up in the mountains at night. We all had fireplaces in our room though, and I pulled out my good old outdoor winter survival skills and built one. Unfortunately, the flames only lasted about 20 minutes but the effort put into building the fire warmed me up and was enough to get to be comfortably. My question, though: who decided that central heating (or space heaters, for that matter) do not belong in Ecuador? It may be on the equator, but there are lots of chilly spots. And they make me curse Quito every time I go to bed and it is 62 degrees in my room.
Okay, that's all for now. Quito, I apologize, I really do love you, I was just kidding.

Viajes, viajes, viajes...

Hola to all! Sorry I haven´t updated in so long. The last two weeks have been filled with trips to every geographical region of Ecuador. The first was to the sierra (the mountainous region), to a town called Baños, which is my new favorite city in Ecuador. To say that there is a lot to do in Baños is an understatement, and to say that said things to do are inexpensive is also an understatement. In Baños, we stayed in a great little hostal called Hostal Plantas y Blanco with the best showers I´ve taken in Ecuador so far as well as the cleanest rooms I´ve found in a hotel for $6 per night. We went for two nights, and in that time we took a three-hour hike in the mountains, went to the hot springs after which Baños was named, and took at 13-mile bike ride past seven or so waterfalls (and under one waterfall) to a huge cascade called el Pailon del Diablo. The bike seat was pretty uncomfortable but that was one of the most breathtaking bike rides I´ve ever taken. Though the bike ride was a little scary because we had to ride through a dark tunnel intended for cars and screamed the whole way through, praying that 1) we would not hit something in the dark, fall, and die and 2)something would not hit us in the dark and kill us. That and we biked on roads with approximately 200-meter drop-offs with little but a 1 foot guard rail to keep us from falling to our deaths. That said, the bike ride was so incredibly worth it, I would do it again in a heartbeat. And we bought freshly pulled taffy in flavors such as Guanabana (a fruit you can´t find in the states), blackberry, and avocado-mint, and ate at a bunch of really great restaurants.
Then on Thursday the 15th, I went to my summer internship site with the other girls who will be there. The location is Tena, in the oriente, which is hot, sticky, and jungle-y. The town is about 40,000 people and seems really friendly. Everyone walks around at night, which I took to be a good sign because that doesn´t happen in Quito. I will be working in a hospital there, likely three weeks in pediatrics and three in obstetrics/gynecology. I also met a woman who can potentially be my host mother, and her husband owns a jungle tour company. Turns out, Tena is world famous for its rafting, and she says her husband should definitely take us out while we are there. We came back on Friday (6 hours each way) and I packed to go to San Vicente.
San Vicente was the last location, and we went there for Carnaval between Saturday and Tuesday. I did not very much enjoy San Vicente (thanks, Kristin). It was the beach location, and on Sunday I ate some bad mariscos and spend Sunday night ill and Monday in bed, weak. I never want to see or smell seafood again.
And now we are off to another viaje, up in the mountains, so I´ve got to go! Adios!