The Adventure of the Day-to-Day

While having an injured ankle certainly prevents a person from seeing many of the sites in a new city, in my case it has given me time to settle in with my new family. We volunteers in Riobamba don´t start teaching until October 12th, and consequently have plenty of time on our hands. I can´t quite say the same for my host family. My host dad works full-time as a math professor and my host mom works full-time as a health educator. My host sister apparently manages an entire shopping mall herself, and the precocious seventeen-year-old niece goes to university all day. And then there´s me, the presently dead-beat volunteer who loafs in bed until ten every morning.

Sitting around waiting for my ankle to heal, I feared I would begin to collect dust. I thought it would at least be better to mill around in the kitchen with the Carmita, the maid. And so every morning now I´ll hobble into the kitchen with a ¨"Buenos dias," and plop myself on a stool in the cheerful, sunlit kitchen, enveloped by incipient aromas of almuerzo (lunch) simmering away on the stove. Though I am probably all the company of an oversized toddler, Carmita doesn´t seem to mind having me around. I liked Carmita right away upon meeting her. She´s a stout woman with a thick rope of black hair, her face framed by earrings that dangle down to her shoulders. A single mom in her thirties, her life can´t be an easy one, but somehow she always seems to glow.She´ll bustle around the kitchen, scrubbing the counters and teaching me a few basic nouns like "sink" or "cow," and whenever I make some preposterous mistake she´ll just laugh her Woody Woodpecker laugh and keep scrubbing. She even taught me how t make fresh juice from tomate de arbol, a special sweet tomato here that grows on trees and makes a delicious frothy fruit drink.

My first real interaction with Carmita was laundry day. I had awkwardly toted my laundry up to the roof terrace, where there was a faucet, basin, and clothesline. It was a sunny day, warm and breezy - the kind of afternoon that makes manual labor pleasant. Other rooftops nearby were strung with flapping laundry as well, splashes of color dotting the beige cement walls. I could look across the city all the way to the volcano Tingaragua, where clouds tumbled over its craggy grey summit. I dumped some detergent into the cold water and was scrubbing my clothes inexpertly when Carmita appeared at the top of the stairs, ready to help out. Apparently, however, the faint brown tint my socks had acquired simply violated Carmita´s perfection standards. Seizing my socks, Carmita took over with the zeal of a crusador. (Carmita´s other cleanliness standards include waxing the door frames and polishing the marbles in the flower vases). She scrubbed until I was afraid my socks would disappear, but when she was finished, they could have passed for new.

I told her I was a little embarassed about my laundry abilities, but she just winked and said, "With me, no."

Most upper-class households in Ecuador have a such maid or "empleada," evidence of a still very classist society here. Generally, empleadas are paid hardly more than a dollar for hours of difficult labor, which is just evidence that there enough impoverished people that they will take any job they can get. Our directors warned us that empleadas might be treated terribly, with our usually-sympathetic host parents turning briefly into tyrants, but I´m happy to say my family seems different. Though Carmita and her seven-year-old son David still eat apart from the family, my host dad will joke around with David and the mom will compliment Carmita´s cooking. My host parents´niece Jessica, though, confided over a game of cards that she doesn´t like the idea of empleadas at all. "I think all people are the same," she told me in a low voice, out of earshot from her aunt and uncle.

During the evenings and weekends, I´ve also had the time to get to know the rest of my host family, and we´ve taken excursions to movies and nearby towns. Because my family likes to entertain, I´ve met quite a few friends and relatives as well. I always know there will be interesting fare served when company is over. Last time, my mom pulled out her best plates and dining decor for catered burritos bowls of guacamole that guests ate straight with a spoon. My mom filled elegant glass bowls with Doritos and her best glasses with Coca Cola. For dessert, we ate a kind of peach pastry with a side of lavender jello. To be fair, I guess the meal did manage to hit most areas of the food triangle.

The company dinner before that, however, was decidedly more peculiar. I came home for lunch to find the table packed with unknown relatives. My host mom eagerly asked me if I had tried the soup "locra" before. Admitting I hadn´t, my mom placed a steaming bowl in front of me. Jessica looked at me with a kind of desperation from across the table. That wasn´t a good sign. I took a bite, and my teeth came down on something rubbery. I chewed....and chewed, and chewed, but to no avail. It was like being asked to eat rubber bands for dinner, and I didn´t think I could do it without fangs. (I did, however, eye the nearby pair of ancient grandparents, who seemed to be slurping down their soup without any teeth at all. How did they do that?!). Jessica managed to sneak hers into the trash when no one was looking, but I unfortunately was not that quick. I never was able to finish it. I found out later that it was intestines.