2017 Frances

Week 1: May 22nd, 2017

Hola amigos! What a week it has been. I cannot describe quite what I am feeling at the moment—the week has been full of so many new experiences, conversations, and realizations, and it is hard to put words to this sensation of the uninterrupted learning I have been doing since arriving in Ecuador.

We landed in Quito on Sunday evening, and although our first couple days were a little slow, we jumped into our service sites on Wednesday. I am working at Yachay Wasi, a school founded and run by a couple, Fernando and Laura, who are both members of different indigenous groups in the area. They started Yachay Wasi with the purpose of blending modern education with teachings of the traditional indigenous cultures of Ecuador. During our orientation day, Fernando described this education model to me, and I found it fascinating—most of the indigenous teachings focus on living in harmony with, instead of exploiting, nature. Conserving nature and sustainability are subjects that greatly interests me, and I hope to work in global sustainable development in my future. This field consists of trying to find the intersection between allowing developing countries to prosper economically without a concurrent destruction of the environment, and due to this, Yachay Wasi’s incorporation of environmentalism into a modern education captures my interest perfectly.

However, within my first two days at the school, it has already forced me to ask questions and challenge assumptions I have made about development—most notably, what does global development look like in the context of the diversity of communities and lifestyles around the world? I had always thought of development as a recipe that could be cooked up in any country as long as the necessary ingredients were present. These ingredients, I thought, were modern education systems, technology, a high GDP, social mobility, a democratically elected government, and a focus on civil liberties.

In other words, I thought of development as synonymous with the United States.

But Yachay Wasi has poked holes in this definition of mine, revealing to me the intricacies of communities and how development is not a one-size-fits-all process: those at Yachay Wasi do not prioritize STEM-centered degrees or the newest iPhones; they do not focus on salaries or moving up career ladders. Rather, they place the most value in the tangible and individual relationship between a person and his or her environment and ancestors—“the seeds from which everything grows,” Fernando explained to us.

On our first day of volunteering, I worked on harvesting corn in the fields outside the school. After working for a while, I thought I had gathered most of the corn in the area where I had been told to harvest and was ready for my next job. Laura came out to check on the success of my endeavor, and surprising to none, I had missed many valuable pieces of corn. She proceeded to explain to me how she speaks to the corn and calls out to it, so as to be able to listen for where it is and not miss a single piece. Further, she told me that many of the pieces that I had written off as not worth harvesting (due to worms, mold, etc.) were perfectly acceptable—“If they have a single kernel,” she told me, “we can use them.” While these couple sentences were only the smallest insight into the concreteness of this active and symbiotic relationship with nature Yachay Wasi promotes, they showed me why my recipe for development is flawed—and in the most refreshing way, I cannot wait to keep discovering how I am wrong.

 

Week 2: May 29th, 2017

Culture shock finally hit me, but not in the way I expected it to.

It did not come from the confusion of Quito’s hordes of unfamiliar faces; it did not come from trying navigate the city’s insane bus schedule. It was not sleeping in a bed in the house of a (then) stranger that overwhelmed me, and it was not working in the fields for hours a day on the side of a mountain overlooking an unknown city that stunned me. It was not Ecuadorian food, the Spanish language, or my unexpected working conditions that finally threw me off.

Rather, culture shock hit me two weeks into the trip at our second group dinner, as I heard about the other sites at which people from my cohort are working.

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I am working at Yachay Wasi, a school that blends environmentally-centered indigenous teachings with modern education. This in itself is a pretty new concept to me, but one that makes sense with my reality—that is, one that fits into the narrative of what I know and what I believe about the world. I believe the environment is of pivotal importance, and conservation is one of my biggest passions in life. That being said, even though I had never seen a school like Yachay Wasi before, I find its education model to be both sensible and comfortable in aligning with my world view.

However, hearing about the experiences of the volunteers at the other sites, particularly at Camp Hope, is what finally shocked me into seeing the vastly different perspectives that exist in the world, apart from anything I have ever been exposed to. Camp Hope is a foundation dedicated to taking care of those with physical and mental disabilities, with children ranging in how much care they need from caretakers: those from our cohort volunteering there described some kids as having prospects of getting vocational jobs after graduating from Camp Hope—and others as nonresponsive, requiring intensive and all-encompassing care, and in some ways seemingly being kept alive, just to be kept alive. They described the daily routines of themselves as volunteers, which included feeding students, strapping them into their wheelchairs, pushing them around tight turns and up steep hills, and relying mostly on nonverbal communication (if any communication was possible) to understand the students.

They also described the daily routine of the employees who work at Camp Hope. The story of one woman particularly stood out to me: she leaves her house at 5:50 a.m. every morning, travels to Quito from two and a half hours away, works all day at Camp Hope caring for students in what can sometimes feel like hopeless and heartbreaking conditions—including working with those students who are unresponsive and being kept alive “somewhat to just be kept alive.” Then, she makes the two and a half hour trek back to her home. And wakes up the next morning to do it all again. Needless to say, hearing about these people’s realities astounded me, and it was in these moments of listening that my culture shock finally hit.

To me, “culture shock” typically connotes a sense of physical displacement that comes from going to a new country or new place. However, hearing about these experiences of those with disabilities and those who devote their life to taking care of disabled people shook me to my core, much more than my flight from Dallas to Quito did. I see now that culture shock is not about physical displacement. It is much more about mental displacement—being forced into seeing a perspective that does not coincide with one’s reality.

Through this shock—through exploring outside my reality—I learned what I think to be a reason why I am here. I feel pretty certain saying that during this trip, I cannot change or improve Yachay Wasi long-term. I can offer myself in the form of manual labor, enthusiasm, and a desire to build relationships, but I am just a disposable placeholder in all these areas. After we leave, another group of volunteers will come to do the exact same work as us, and (not to sound too pessimistic) we will be forgotten in the cycle of it all. However, I came here to experience culture shock, to push my reality and fold in new perspectives that will change the way I think and view the world. And I have no doubt in saying that at the end of my first two weeks, I have begun to accomplish that.

 

Week 3: June 5th, 2017

“What are you passionate about?”

It’s a question imbedded into our modern Western culture—a prompt that encourages people to find what makes them tick, to discover what they cannot stop talking about once they start, then to devote the rest of their life to advancing that cause. “Passion” can be described in many ways, but in the context of the question above, I want to define it as the internal driver that motivates a person’s most powerful aspirations and actions.

In some ways, I think passion is the main concept that underlies the modern American Dream: success is no longer based on money or achieving a certain level of social status—rather, success is achieved through the attainment of happiness and fulfillment in your life. In college, we are encouraged to take classes that interest us, to explore a variety of subject areas to find what most piques our intellectual curiosity. In the working world, it now seems more respectable—more impressive, even—to take the path less traveled in terms of careers, to find a potentially-less-paying job in order to be doing that which you love.

All this being said, I have been doing a lot of thinking on passion and what I am passionate about. To these ends, I have come up with the following thoughts. First, in and of itself, being able to “follow your passion” instead of following a career path that ensures financial stability connotes a certain degree of privilege. Not everyone has the luxury of answering this question, and coming to this realization has made me slightly uncomfortable and more wary of this lauded idea of living a life “following your passion.” This is something I still need to think a lot about, but it has definitely presented a challenge to me in confronting yet another aspect of my privilege.

Second, acknowledging this privilege and now attempting to answer the question with which this post started, I have recently discovered that there are many things I am passionate about, and many that I am not passionate about. This trip has introduced me to so many once-in-a-lifetime experiences, so finding which of these make me most excited, and conversely, which of them I do not look forward to, despite their one-of-a-kind designation, has been an interesting experiment in self-discovery.

For one, I have found that the environment is a real passion of mine—not just a side hobby I want to pursue through going hiking and camping in my free time. Going outside and being in the natural world rejuvenates me in a way sleep cannot, and having so much time to experience and reflect on this effect leads me to believe that environmentalism is one of my truest passions in life.

Similarly, I have also discovered that I am extremely passionate about people and conflict-resolution, specifically in terms of understanding relationships and power dynamics between people and countries. This sounds weird to be labeled as a “passion,” but I find analyzing these relationships to be fascinating, both personally in trying to understand the perspectives of people and what drives their interactions, and academically in looking at international relations. In Ecuador, I have discovered this passion through hearing about the diversity of experiences individuals in our cohort are having here and their reactions to these experiences, and through keeping up with international news, but through the lens of a completely new country.

At the same time, as mentioned, I have found many things that I am NOT passionate about, that some parts of me wish I was. For example, as much as I love kids, I am without a doubt not cut out for or interested in working with them long-term. This past week, I started teaching the fourth-graders at Yachay Wasi for an hour a day, and as much as I would love to love this experience, I do not find it as deeply fulfilling and enjoyable as I do many other things, and actually find it pretty stressful.

These are just a few of the examples of the many findings I am uncovering about myself on a daily basis here, and I am sensing a pattern in these self-discoveries: I am not surprised by them, and they have subtly been driving many of my life choices without being formally designated as passions (or as not passions): I love the environment, and for that reason, I want to work in sustainable development and conservation policy; I love people and conflict-resolution, and for that reason, I love studying economics–a field that is all about the study of human choice in a setting of limited resources.

It’s a weird feeling, having my familiar passions affirmed in a completely new environment, but I am nonetheless enjoying it–because as much as this trip is designed to push me outside of my comfort zone, maybe finding familiarity in these areas speaks to the purpose of passions. More than designating success in the modern American Dream, maybe they are what grounds a person amidst changing settings. Maybe they are what makes one excited about the world and its opportunities, even in an unfamiliar environment. And maybe in this way, passions are what make us each unique, but also bind us all together–the hum of energy we each have within us, drawn from a different source, that fuels a collective desire to better the world around us.