I found some angels in LLoa...

What did I think this blog was going to be?  What did you think you would find here?  An account of my day to day?  I seem incapable of this.  At least incapable of recounting the steps I take and the hours I take them.  My imagination and emotions are what define me, and so under their direction my words flow from my fingers.  I hope that is okay.

It is hard to be away.  To try to understand and accept a life in a different culture, to accept it… that means letting go of your own for a little while, or at least loosening your grip.  This is hard to do.  Sometime I have moments of utter misery born from a longing for people, for places that I love, for things that I could do without but don’t want to.  These moments are too frequent.  When will the dreams I have at night be of the world I am now in, not the one I have stepped out of for a little while?  When will crossing off a day on my calendar be marked my sadness for another day in Ecuador gone instead of the glorious morning ritual it is now?  This is hard.  But, then I come across moments that make me smile despite the stubbornness of my desire to cuddle up on my pillow of sadness. 

In Ecuador, in the United States, in any place of the world, these are moments that are waiting to be found.  My heart has been wracked with disgust and misery learning about the lives that were lost in Newtown Connecticut.  Glowing beams of potential, imagination, unguarded love… faces torn from their host of light, buried in the ground.  But while the faces are gone, the light is surely still there; I know this to be the case. 

To get through things like this that are too hard to understand I look for moments that make it impossible to do anything but smile.  Sometime I stumble across them and sometime I need to work for them to be found.  This is important for me to remember; sometime I need to make these moments for myself.  That is ultimately why I am here, isn’t it?

Today I found such a moment when I found myself surrounded by a group of little angels.  This is how I found them…

Standing at a distance, distance being a comfortable home I often make for myself, I spotted the group of angels.  They had wings that were as white as the snow that will never fall here, and they had dresses that floated around them like little puffs of clouds.  Their little laughs and smiles were enough to make me smile… and then they started to sway side to side.  Swaying turned to twirling at the hip with their arms delicately slapping their fronts and their backs, and then little feet picked up a rhythm and began to hop up and down.  Soon hopping feet danced in circles, slow to start but gradually gaining momentum spinning faster and faster.  As tuning a guitar and baking a cake are based off of unique ratios of sounds and ingredients, the spinning angels had their own kind of ratio based in a majestic energy.  As twirling increased in speed, laughter got louder, smiles got bigger, flailing arms more difficult to control.  The angels must of felt somehow that my heart could not bear the overwhelming happiness of the moment much longer; for they collapsed in the same moment I turned away overwhelmed by emotion.  And I felt so lucky, because those same little angels then got up giggling relentlessly, and took form in front of me to share in the tune of my guitar and send their little voices of light and joy out into the world.  ‘Silent Night’ will never feel the same again.

 

This is a moment that has been rooted to my heart and my memory forever.  It is a moment like this that helps me appreciate why I am here.  I am sure I have been present in similar moments like this in my home in Connecticut or Maine, but did I ever appreciate them before?  Distance has cracked me open to a well of emotions I didn’t know I could feel.  Sometimes pain and longing for that ambiguous word, “home,” but other times joys for the beauty of little moments my eyes where never before trained to see.

And now I conclude with one more thought… in the moment that I watched the little spinning angels, the joy I felt connected me to a moment when I was one of those little angels, twirling wildly for no other reason than the fact that it felt so wonderful and free; sisters, friends, acquaintances, twirling and twirling with me.  I am 25, still very young.  How lucky I am to be reminded, now, that there is still a little angel within me.  I have so much of my life still before me.   In that time I can continue to discover the beautiful wisdom and freedom I radiated as a little girl with big eyes, short hair and a poufy dress.  In honor of the children who lost their lives in Connecticut, and for the love and faith I have in my life; I am making it a life resolution to never lose sight of the potential, imagination, and unguarded love that I knew as a little girl.  I don´t feel it is my place to tell any of you to do the same, but maybe you will; maybe you can find that child within yourself and see the world with those fresh, eager eyes.

¡Feliz Navidad 2012! 

Thankful

                  What are you thankful for?  At your dinner table on Thanksgiving, do you think about this question?  In the Brown´s house, this is never something we formally express, but, through the act of making food together, setting the table, making nifty nametags, smiling, laughing… it is felt that we are all thankful for each other.  Here in Ecuador, in explaining Thanksgiving to people I have really begun to think about this question.   In this moment, what are the things to which I would like to express thankfulness?  My thought process starts with thoughts about guilt…  (Bear with me; I get to the thankfulness part eventually!) 

                  I recently read an article about feelings of guilt that can accompany a PCV in their community throughout their service.  The article did not surprise me at all, and maybe this is presumptive, but I feel like a lot of times that is what you might expect to hear.  Going from first world USA to a small community in the third world, shouldn´t I expect to feel guilty when I see how little others have in relation to how much I have waiting for me back at home.  And I am not referring to only material things, but things like food, and the fact that I have the privilege of choices in my life. 

But, guilt is not a feeling I have had in my first six month in Ecuador.  I have felt guilty before.  Backing down on a promise I made someone, forgetting to be somewhere, intentionally lying about something… these things have left me rolling in feelings of guilt.  I would describe myself as an introverted person, and as such, feelings of guilt have left me paralyzed.  So, to feel guilty would be completely unproductive.  How do I feel now?  Sometimes I feel like I have been thrown in a turtle shell and then asked to run, or like I am trying to swim through a pool of honey.  Words like development and sustainability heighten these feelings.  But, mixed with frustrations of having my feet planted deep in mud (or maybe cow manure is a better image for Lloa), I also feel incredibly lucky.

I feel lucky when I think about all the kids who are starting to become my closest friends and my host sister Mayra who has already become an influential figure into the development of who I am.  And this is where guilt starts to swell ominously like clouds in the horizon of my thoughts.  Its pending approach is what clarifies a reality for me.  This reality being that guilt is an emotion for me that I feel as the result of something I have done, an action I made that I was able to control.  While I cannot feel guilty for being born into the situation I have in life, I would feel guilty if I did nothing to try to understand other people and how I can use what has been given to me to work with others.  I would feel guilty if I left in two years having done nothing to help Mayra see how amazing of a person she is, and all that she can do in her life.  I would feel guilty if I didn’t make an effort to develop sincere relationships with everyone I was able to.  In two years it will be relationships made that stick in memories forever.

And here is where I become thankful.  I am thankful that as I write these words, I do so with tears swelling in my eyes and with a distinct turning of emotions in the pit of my stomach and cap of my mind.  I am thankful I am able to feel these things.  These feelings are what motivate me, inspire me, and remind me constantly that I am exactly where I am because I need to be here for my community, but more directly, for me.  I am thankful that I was raised by a family who shares a capacity to love that approaches unbearable limits, and I am thankful that the people of Lloa are open to accept a similar kind of love that I feel compelled to give. 

So, Happy Thanksgiving!  I admit to having many moments where two years feels like an eternity and I desperately miss home.  But, then I think about it for two minutes, and I continually find myself at the same conclusion.  I feel so lucky, so thankful to be exactly where I am.  If you’re reading this and thinking about your own life, I hope you will end up at the same conclusion.   

October flew by!

Wow!  I can´t believe it has been a month since my last post.  I would not describe my days as being busy, yet time seems to be flying.  Time is a funny thing.  This month was filled with more days trying to fill out community surveys and working on my analysis of community needs.  I also began a steady routine of teaching English in the schools of LLoa and am starting to look forward to projects with the youth of creating crafts made of recycled materials to be sold in LLoa on busy tourist weekends.   

Imagination and creativity have been the words at the forefront of my mind when I wake up every day, for both my own personal thoughts and in my interactions with others.  

Highlights of my month have been:

•   Spanish tutoring.  Twice a week I take the bus into Quito in the evening to meet my Spanish tutor, Diana, in her home for an hour of tutoring on Spanish grammar and pronunciation.  I feel so lucky to have Diana as a tutor, she is fantastic!  The more I am growing comfortable with Spanish the more I am realizing that there might only be room for one language in my head.  It is not hard to notice that my spelling and general understanding of English words seems to be digressing as Spanish begins to make more and more sense in my mind.  There are times when I am searching for words in Spanish, and then I realize I don´t know how I would say it in English either.   

•  Generally felling like I am a part of LLoa.  On the streets, in the schools, neighbors, tiendas…  I feel like people have accepted me into the community and are opening up more and more in their interactions with me.  The kids shout my name (Rebe or Rebequita) whenever they see me and I am graced with lots of hugs whenever I pass by the school.  The second weekend in October there was a regional meeting for all the volunteers in my cluster (11ish volunteers).  I realized part way through the meeting that I have become proud to be able to say I live in LLoa.  This realization hit as I became aware that all my conversations seemed to turn back to how great LLoa is.           

• Finding humor in random things like… Hair Gel.  Many of the male teenagers in Quito understand style to be something achieved with buckets of hair gel.  I imagine their mornings to be reenactments of the opening scene to the movie, ‘Grease.´   In my mind this is how I see it… After jumping a few times to fit into complicated jeans with zippers all over the place the radio would be turned to techno salsa and their position would be taken in front of the mirror.  The mirror would reveal a face scrunched up in a self-critical expression as a comb is wielded this way creating intricate sculptures out of their hair.  I have had a few moments sitting behind particularly intricate, hair-art on the bus when I have had to fight the urge to touch it… how satisfying it would be to rustle that hair making it crinkle as dry leaves do under your feet in the fall. 

• Another joy of mine this month has been the start of project with an amazing friend of mine from college, Stacey Seiler, who is currently a third grade teacher in Baltimore County, Maryland.  Through the World Wise Schools project of the Peace Corps we have started a blog in which her class will communicate with me and others in my community as way to learn a bit about one another’s culture.  For those that are interested, the blog we created can be views at this address:  marylandecuador.blogspot.com  

•  Another reliable source of happiness for me has been my host family.  My host Mom, Isabelle is a little fire cracker.  Without fail every morning at 4:00 I hear her frenzied shuffling of feet as she rushes to go milk the cows.  My slow moving host Dad, Alfonzo, is the polar opposite and according to Isabelle´s shouts at him, he always seems to be running behind.  I live upstairs with these two.  We have a nice balance of respecting each other’s space while also always leaving our doors open for conversation.  Isabelle, who reaches about my shoulder in height, has gotten into the habit of hugging me, picking me up and down a few times a day.  Everyone should have a lesson in hugging from Isabelle, she gives the best hugs.  Downstairs lives Carmen and her two daughters Mayra and Adamáris.  Mayra is undoubtedly my best friend in LLoa.  Her favorite thing to talk about is what kind of bread we are going to make on Saturday… this has become a fun little tradition of ours.  So far we have made:  honey oat, chocolate, tomato, carrot, blueberry, and corn bread.  Adamáris, is a four year old with the attitude and style of a teenager.  When my friend Ryan cut my hair realllllly short, I can home and she instantly told me, ‘How ugly.’  She then told me everyone one going to think I was a boy.  She also had a solution; she put her bow in my hair.       

I would like to send a few messages out to anyone reading this…  

I hope everyone is doing okay in the wake of hurricane Sandy.  My thoughts are with all of you.  

Happy Halloween to everyone!

And, finally, a HUGE joy to share with the world… My double cousin Dan, and Mili had their baby today.  I have been smiling all day thinking about my new niece, Kaia, the leader of the next generation of Browns!

Here are the only new pictures I have on my flash drive at the moment...

Kids group, Arte al Aire Libre, attempts to draw a bunny rabbit together with a marker attached to a tennis ball.

Mayra reads the book, 'The Giving Tree,' while Adamáris draws pictures and waits for her hair to curl.

Sunset in the Andes from my bedroom window.

 

Moments of September

Do you ever find yourself in moments when you feel a ball of energy in the center of your chest which triggers the idea that there is more to this world than you will ever be able to understand?  I have had a few of those moments this month.

The first was when I was sitting in the park the other day.  The electricity was out on account of the wind, so I took up a seat in the sunshine with my journal and sketch pad.  As I was getting ready to fumble around with a portrait of the church sitting humbly in the shadow of the volcano Pichincha, an old man wearing a poncho stumbled forward interrupting the line my pen had made a moment before.  His feet never left the ground as he shuffled forward.  Beside him, black posts made a good guide leading to the steps of the church.  The way his hand searched desperately for the posts made me wonder if he was blind and I started to get anxious the closer he moved toward the steps.  Once there, he proved capable.  Slowly, he made it to the top and directed his shuffling toward the church.  Both hands pressed against the church's wooden doors and for a moment he stood there perfectly frozen into the scene.  Then he turned and continued to shuffle, this time to descend the stairs.  Descending the stairs, was this a feat he was capable of?  The wind asked the same question.  In a sudden gust it lifted his poncho up over his head.  Not knowing why this had happened, not ready for this surprise, he let out a loud cry.  The park was empty besides me.  I am sure he did not know I was there to hear his bewildered cry out to the world.  Still caught in a moment of confusion he stepped forward too quickly, down the stairs.  His feet betrayed him and he fall backward his head hitting against the corner of the threshold of the church.  He cried again. 

It was in this moment that I should have gotten up to help him.  I felt a burning inside of me in the center of my ribcage.  But I could not get up, the weight of his cry made me explicitly aware that there existed a magnitude of pains and joys he had lived through of which I would never be able to understand.  So, I did not feel that it was right in that moment to enter his story.  I sat there welling up a strange emotion and I thought, where is this feeling coming from?  And I thought there is a part of me that I really do not yet understand.

Another moment I had this morning.  I woke up feeling excited that I was exactly where I was.  Though I am generally happy, this kind of contentment has not visited me frequently, so I sat down with my journal to try to understand where it had come from.  As my pen tends to run ahead of my thoughts, I found myself writing about children.       

This is where I have found my happiness in past experience and I have found it here again in Lloa.  I love working with children.  I love what they teach me, I love that they hold no reservation in accepting and returning a hug and a smile, I love their imaginations that run wildly from thought to thought, I love their wonder and fascination for the simplest of things, and I love the opportunity to hand back to them all of the lessons they give to me.

Yesterday I started teaching English classes in the schools.  This must have been what sparked feelings of happiness which greeted me this morning.  This combined with a weekly kids group I facilitate, reading Harry Potter aloud to my host sister Mayra and drawing flowers with 4 year old Adamarís, hanging drawings my kids group made in an artisan fair last Sunday and having them bring their families to show off their work, a hug on the street, a smile passing by, all of these I will add to the list.  I guess I am just starting to realize all the potential there is for me to fit into the world of Lloa.  And more than anything else the children are making me see Lloa as home.

So that ball of energy that swells in the center of my chest.  It is inspiring and mysterious.  It is not a part of me you can see with your eyes, but it is the core to who I am.  Sometimes I lose it, forget why I am here, who I am.  But watching the old man in the park and learning more about the children of this place have made it throb within me.  They have reminded me why I am here and of the person that I am and want to be.  No different than everyone else, therefore completely unique.  I wish I could harness this part of me every day.    

My Bedroom Window

At 6:00am every morning my watch beeps.  I roll over, throw on a warm sweater and stand on by bed to tuck the curtains up behind the corners of the curtain rod.  My window faces west, so morning sunshine is not blaring.  I then sniff my socks from yesterday; if they are clean-ish (washing wool socks by hand is a real pain) I toss them on my feet and turn the corner outside of my door to go into the kitchen.  Here I boil water and set up my slow drip coffee contraption.  As I wait for my morning cup of joe to filter into my mug I go back in my room, sit on the corner of my bed and stare out my window.  Watching the slow hustle bustle of mornings in Lloa, I sort through lots of questions in my mind.

What am I going to do at work today? This is a big one; I push it aside for later.

Should I go for a run?  Surprisingly the answer to this has frequently been, yes.  I have never been a runner, in fact I have often argued that some people just aren´t built for running, and I am one of those people.  There have been moments in my life where I tried to be a runner.  For instance, there was a period of time in seventh grade when my Dad would wake me up a 5:00am to drive to Weston Public Schools to run around the track, training for a 5k.  While this remains one of those father daughter moments that I cherish, in terms of the act of running, I have only disgruntled thoughts.  In training for various wilderness expeditions with GRAB I also tried to pick up running and as much as I have tried to motivate myself, my lungs never seem to cooperate.  Severe pains in my side and irritating moments in which I am left gasping for air is what running has been for me.  But, here in Lloa running is starting to become more than an outlet of movement and exercise.  If I can get out of bed in the morning and push past mental aversions I have toward running, then maybe I can better embrace the part of me that will look at language, culture, and ambiguity as exciting challenges in Lloa instead of paralyzing barriers.  The mental challenge of running has thus become a parallel for me to the self-motivation that is required to let go of thoughts of home and embrace a day in Lloa.       

So, I´ve decided to go for a run.  As I tie my shoes I grunt considering my next question.  How am I going to avoid the dogs?  I have yet to succeed in this task.  There have been moments where I am legitimately terrified that I am going to be attacked.  The dogs here exist more as guardians of territory then they do cuddly, cute friends.  On a particularly bad morning one of the dogs from my house followed me.  She must have been in heat or something because at least five other dogs where attacking her the whole time.  It was terrible.  She kept running around my feet while the other dogs snarled and growled.  All I could do was concentrate on not tripping and making sure I was not in the line of those teeth.  My host family is working on constructing a lightweight pole that I can run with for such occasions.    

Window staring resumes after a morning run and I bounce around more questions.  How am I going to work carrots into my meal for the day?  In my first weekend in Lloa I went to the local market that takes place behind my house.  As I have decided to cook for myself, I set out to buy some veggies.  I returned to my house with a very heavy bag of carrots.  Between a combination of shaky Spanish and not realizing the prices for things I bought a women´s entire table of carrots for a dollar.  So many carrots!!!  I am still trying to use them up.  Carrot bread, carrots with quinoa, carrot patties, carrot sticks, carrots in granola..?

Other questions and thoughts that bounce around my head as I’m staring out my wonderful window… I wonder when my host sisters Mayra (12) and Adamaris (4) are going to knock on my door.  Are they going to want to read a book or cook some granola?  Do you think that being connected to the Internet, running into constant reminders of home makes this experience easier or harder?  I wonder when I will stop feeling guilty about reading a book in English.  When am I going to find a day to hike up the volcano Pichincha?  I wonder what juice my host sister Carmen (34) is preparing downstairs.  I wonder how my sister Molly is doing in Monaco and how Julie is doing riding on the excitement of being recently engaged to Kevin.  I hope I have a good turn out to my kids club this week… where did I put my room keys?  When is this wind going to wind down?  Why does my cell phone keep shutting off? – Guess I have to get a new one.  Where is that door up there on the mountain?     

My watch beeps, 9:30.  Now I go back to my first question, what am I going to do at work today?  My counterpart organization is called Faro del saber.  Faro means ´light house,´ Saber means ´to know.´  Put them together and you get the idea behind the organization.  The organization houses rows of computers, which are to be used by the community for educational purposes.  My counterpart is a very driven and kind woman who had a baby my second weeks here, sooo……. I spent a lot of my first few weeks in a sea of computers and Internet wondering what exactly I should be doing.  In the first three months of service in the PC we are supposed to do an analysis of the community’s needs, which will be the foundation for getting started on different projects.  In the past few weeks I have been walking around my community introducing myself and conducting surveys.  If I have one good conversation with someone from my community in a day, I go to bed feeling successful.

 Well, that was a brief glimpse of a bit of a typical morning and what is rolling around in my head.  It is impossible to convey everything that I have experienced and thought.  For a few of the experiences that would take too many words to describe, here are some pics.

A few weekends ago my feet carried me across the threshold of seasons.  I walked from the cool of fall into the warmth and lushness of spring.  You can do this in Ecuador.  I did this walking on a trail from Lloa to Mindo with a group of youth from Lloa and surrounding communities along with my host sister, Carmen.  

I turned 25!

Making some granola in the morning...

Hiking the volcano Pasochoa with nearby volunteers...