On TV lately there have been two beauty pageants, The Worldwide Queen of Bananas (with participants from North, South and Central America, and Germany) and the Queen of Guayaquil. People are actually interested in watching them, but I don’t know why. I watched part of one for a little bit and it consisted of the women walking on stage in their bathing suits, the announcer announcing their measurements and hair/eye color, and then they announced the winner. Not very profound, but its entertaining to the locals. Another reason why I’m excited to move into my own little apartment so I can get a TV and watch the news.

Sunday for the adolescent pregnancy prevention thing, not many adolescents actually showed up but lots of adults were actually interested in the birth control methods too. We had some keychains that everyone wanted, so I made them demonstrate how to use a condom in order to win one. They are interested in the pills and injections and stuff as well, but HIV is an increasing issue nationwide, and although there have not been any cases in my town, it’s still important to educate them about it. The majority of new cases of HIV being detected are in housewives who have most likely never even heard of HIV before. The government provides anti-retroviral treatment for free, and there is a group of 16 volunteers that are working just with HIV to promote testing and treatment and break stereotypes of people living with HIV (people think you can get it by mosquitoes or if someone coughs on you). In my community I just want them to know first what it is and how to prevent it. I’ll teach more in depth about it in the high school, but every chance I get I try to briefly explain it to people, especially the women who have husbands working in other cities which is pretty common here.

I hung out with some teenagers on the street this afternoon and ate some chicken organs that they were cooking. They always have weird questions about the US that I wouldn’t even think of, but because of things they’ve seen in movies or on TV they think that’s what it is like. For example, they asked what is a tornado and why does it occur, or why do I only have one sister. A few people have asked me about the Twin Towers too or if everyone is really tall in the US.

Surveys

So I did about 8 surveys last Sunday, and maybe 4 or so on Monday, then probably over 50 on Tuesday! There were a ton of people in town to receive food donations from a government program so I took advantage of that and set up next to the table where they had to register and people were begging me to fill out the survey. I got a lot of people from other communities which is good because my goal is to get at least 5 or so from each community if I can. I don’t think I’ll be able to work in all 28 communities, but I’m trying to find out where people don’t have any sort of toilet or latrine so I can help them with some ecological dry toilets (which are really cool and I want to build one in my house when I go back to the US) and where there are women’s groups working so I can give them training on birth control methods. There are some that are already really well established and doing community bank projects, so hopefully I can work with them a little and then just talk about that to women from other communities to encourage them to do the same thing. I think the birth control “charlas” will be really important too because its not uncommon for families to have 8 kids and make $100 per month, and the women don’t use birth control just because they don’t even know what it is. It’s all free in the subcentro, so hopefully if I just talk to them about it they’ll take advantage of it. I’m finding from my surveys too that everyone is interested in home gardens, so I’m planning on doing something with the agriculture volunteer who is already in my site. Now I just have to go through my surveys an make a spreadsheet or something to analyze them, so that should be lots of fun hours sitting at the computer.

Sunday is the Worlwide Day of Prevention of Undesired Adolescent Pregnancies – I bet you didn’t even know that existed did you? I made some little posters and hand outs to give out and next week I am starting to teach at the high school. I will be doing sex-ed stuff, but I want to start out with self esteem stuff and then later talk about STDs and general anatomy and stuff, but I invited all the high school kids on Sunday and am making some of them do a homework assignment of 2 things they learned and 2 questions they have. Hopefully the teaching stuff will go well; I’ll have 2 classes of 14-15 year olds, about 30 minutes with each class every week.

That’s all for now, I’ll write more after classes start!

Beginning of CAT tools...

I never know what to write on here, so here’s just some random stuff:
• I have fleas in my bed that I can’t get rid of. I haven’t tried very hard I guess – I put some powder in my covers, and I should put them out in the sun and the mattress too, I just don’t want to in case it rains. The bites are really itchy.
• I met my great grandma who is 95 and takes care of her daughter who has rheumatoid arthritis. I also met my great uncle who is a guide on Chimborazo – now I have a goal to climb it before I leave.
• I haven’t really done any projects yet, obviously since I pretty much just got here, but I feel like just being here stuff has kind of happened. For example I met a youth group and then I told the doctors about it, and they set up a meeting with them so now they’re gonna do something together and I didn’t really have to do anything. We have had 2 meetings now with the midwives since I’ve been here, and I don’t think they really met that often before. I did say I wanted to meet the midwives, but I didn’t have to do much work for either of the meetings. It kind of seems like in some ways my presence here makes everyone more motivated. Also I mentioned I wanted to have cooking classes and I needed to clean out the kitchen, and one day when I wasn’t there they cleaned it out for me! Today when I got to the subcentro they were writing a letter to the president of Ecuador asking for an ambulance. They don’t think small!
• I have made pizza 4 times in the last 3 weeks; everyone wants to learn how to make it. Next week I have planned two other cooking dates with some other people. But it never turns out just right, of course they don’t know the difference though. I don’t how I’m going to do these cooking classes because I want to teach nutrition along with it and make things with ingredients they can actually find here. SOOO many people are interested in these classes and I don’t know how I’ll buy the ingredients or if I’ll charge a small fee for people to come to cover my costs.
• “No sea malito” is a phrase they use a lot here. Literally it means don’t be a little bad person. For example if you ask someone to do a favor for you you always say that after you ask them.
• Another interesting cultural aspect is that if you are eating food and someone else comes over, you pretty much have to share with them. The other day I was walking by my neighbor who was eating an orange, I just asked how she was doing today and she gave me some segments of her orange.
• I went to the market today and spent $2.65. I got some fresh oregano, some nabo (a local cabbage), 2 heads of broccoli, a bunch of beets, a bag of melloco (a small root veggie), and a bag of habas (kind of like really big beans). What a deal! Also you can get like 30 oranges for a dollar.

I finally started my surveys today, and I got lots of mixed responses. Some people said they couldn’t help me because they were busy even though they were just standing there. A few were very interested, one woman in particular talked with me for like an hour while I sat with her in her booth at the market helping her husk peas (is that what you do to peas?). She is part of a group of women who just started meeting 3 weeks ago and are working on a gardening project. She is going to talk to the president and see if we can maybe do some projects together – they already have the gardening stuff down but maybe I can teach them about birth control options or talk about pap smears and stuff because lots of people just don’t know. There was one woman who I asked if she had a few minutes to help me with this survey, and I kind of briefly explained why I was doing it which is just kind of awkward, but she said no she wouldn’t help because she went to the doctor once for a checkup for her son and they told her he was malnourished but didn’t give her any vitamins for him. There is a program here where they give out this baby food mix that has lots of vitamins and stuff, but because she didn’t get pills she didn’t like the services in the subcentro. I asked if she had received some tips on nutrition so she didn’t need to give them vitamins they could just get it from the food they eat, but she said no. Everyone has a little nutritional guide on the immunization record so I know she has heard something about it if she has taken her kids to get them vaccinated, she just has this idea that without pills you can’t fix anything. Some other people I met asked if there was a plant or something that could work to “not have more kids” because they don’t want to take any pills or get injections, so it’s just interesting different people’s perspectives on health.

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Yachag

This weekend I finally got to see the shaman practice – for some reason he wasn’t working the last 2 weeks. His first name is Espiritu. First, I observed a cleaning with eggs. These are just normal eggs that the patient actually has to buy, and I’m not sure yet why they use eggs, but the shaman takes them in his hands and just rubs them all over the patient and sometimes he blows on them. After a few minutes he drinks some special water with medicinal plants and spits it on the eggs and stores them to burn later – however on one adult patient he spit the water actually on the lady, but the other cleanings were on kids. Someone had requested a cuy cleaning and actually brought their own guinea pig, but that never happened because while the yachag was examining it he found some fleas so if it’s not healthy he can’t do it. He gave everyone prescriptions too of plants they should put in water to take a bath or to drink, with very specific instructions like “bathe in this on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons for 2 weeks.” Apparently some of the plants are really hard to find too – and I thought it would be cool to plant a garden somewhere near the clinic, but some of the plants only grow at really high elevations or in a certain ecosystem called the páramo which is kind of a high elevation wetland I think. I also watched a midwife perform a manteo, which is done when the baby is in a weird position and they try to move it back to normal. In this case, the baby was upside down with its arm ready to head out first. The pregnant woman was laying on the ground and first the midwife rubbed oil and bengay stuff on her stomach. Then she put a cloth under the pregnant woman and lifted her up shaking her all around to try to reposition the baby. At one point the mother of the pregnant woman was holding her legs up while the midwife was shaking her around – the whole thing just looked really painful, even if you weren’t pregnant. That’s another shocking thing about pregnancies here is that almost all of them give birth at home with no anesthetics or anything! Maybe some of the medicinal plants they use have anesthetic properties…I think it would be really cool to analyze the plants to find the active compound, and compare it to the drugs we use – I bet they’re pretty similar, and a lot cheaper just to grow yourself!

meetings, meetings, meetings

Things have picked up lately, well I guess they never were slow to start with really. However these next few days are gonna be pretty busy. Friday I went to a meeting in the local government office about the baby that was abandoned under the tree. Saturday I went to a youth group meeting with some high school students who work in the area of rights of youth to prevent child labor and child abuse. They have some little skits they do and are in the process of recording some radio programs. Saturday evening I’m going to a goodbye party for my dad’s brother who lives and works in Spain and came back to visit for about a month. (I would say the majority of the people here have a family member living in Spain or the US and working because they couldn’t make enough money here) Sunday there will be a lot of people in the subcentro, and I think I’m gonna give a presentation about Colorado a ne what is the Peace Corps. Monday I don’t think I’m doing anything important so far, but Tuesday will be the big meeting with the midwives. I’m going to do my presentation again and give them a survey for my community assessment that I have to do. It will more likely be an interview because apparently a lot of them can’t read or write. Wednesday I’m going to the high school with the obstetrician to see when we can give health classes; we want to do it once a week. Then the next Saturday is a get together with everyone from our “cluster” which is all the other peace corps volunteers who live near Riobamba.
Now instead of feeling overwhelmed with so much projects to do in so little time, I feel kind of useless now. I have been learning more about the projects the nurses and doctors at the clinic are already doing, or planning on doing, and besides these I don’t know what else I can do and I don’t know why I’m here if they already have all these plans. I know they are really understaffed, so maybe I can go out to the communities and do the projects that we plan together while they stay in the clinic, but this won’t be sustainable after I leave. They told us in training that right away when you start thinking of a new project you should start thinking about your exit strategy. Also I’ve been finding out about these other groups, for example the youth group and other NGO’s and government organizations too that work with children and stuff, but yet there is still so much poverty and health issues in the communities. For now I’ll just keep going to the clinic every day to get to know more about what they do on a regular basis and what kind of people come in to see the doctors. School starts next week and I think then everyone will have a more set schedule and I’m hoping I will too – I want to start a youth group and teach in the schools maybe a few times a week. I also need to work on my community assessment, however they have already done that too. There was a comprehensive one done last year by a doctor who used to work there; it’s a Word document that’s 79 pages. I also got a copy of the thesis that the obstetrician did this year for her master’s on undesired pregnancies, and one of the nurses is currently working on her thesis on prevention of maternal death. These projects all make my diagnostic seem silly, but I’m still going to do it so I can get out in the communities and personally talk to people, but it’s a good thing I’ll have all these other resources to fill in gaps in my research.
NOTICE – MAY BE A LITTLE GRAPHIC On Wednesday I went to my other grandparents house whom I hadn’t met yet – the parents of my host mom. They live in a community about a 10 minute bus ride and a 20 minute walk away. They only have running water from a faucet outside and they only cook with firewood like the other grandparents too. They were still out working when my sister and I arrived so we went to check on the animals first, then went to the house and harvested some potatoes for dinner. We peeled them, then caught some guinea pigs (cuyes) from their pen – she thought 3 should be enough for the 6 people who were going to eat dinner. I held a bag open while she threw them in, then we took them into the kitchen to kill them. She just snapped their necks and later cut their eyes out with a knife then I held them upside down over a bowl to collect the blood because her grandma likes to eat it. Then she would take them and dunk them in boiling water so we could peel the fur off. I helped with this too, but I wasn’t as fast as her. Pretty soon our parents arrived and the mom helped us butcher them to remove the organs, but she kept them too to put in the soup. We also put noodles, onions and salt in the soup with the potatoes and the cuy. It was an interesting experience!