San Clemente

I arrived in San Clemente on a Saturday afternoon. The last bit of the drive was a 2-mile trek straight uphill on a steep and narrow cobblestone road. As we inched up the bumpy route, I felt very grateful that I was not the one driving the manual car; that job was left to José, the only taxi driver I know who will graciously take a gigantic dog in his cab, and the person who, by the end of this post, you will undoubtedly come to see of as the hero of this story. Katembe sat up tall in the seat next to me with his head sticking out the window, only pausing his loud, open-mouth panting every 15 seconds or so to take in the biggest, longest sniff of the sun-soaked cows, dense corn fields, and muddy goat pens that the wide yellow taxi slowly crept past.

After a few stops to look around and say, “Acá?” Here? we reached the end of the cobblestone road. Knowing we’d missed our destination, we turned around. José spotted a woman walking up the road, so we rolled to greet her and ask her for help. “Cómo se llama el lugar?” José whispered as he rolled down the window. What’s the name of the place? “Tradiciones San Clemente,” I responded. He greeted the woman warmly, then within a minute, we learned that she was precisely the woman we were looking to meet: she was in charge of Tradiciones San Clemente, and it was right this way, just follow her. José pulled into the grassy driveway, 3 dogs immediately spotted Katembe’s giant face and started barking at his window, and I grabbed my backpack and his leash and we hopped out. After standing around to make small talk for a few minutes, José made sure I had everything, gave me a hug, and told me he’d see me in a few days.

The first thing I learned was the name of my host: Zoila. She was in her late 60s, at least 3 inches shorter than me, and wearing a thick green skirt with a teeny pleated pattern that almost resembled corduroy. She was also wearing a Simpsons t-shirt and white sandals. The second thing I learned were the names of the dogs that hadn’t stopped sniffing Katembe since we’d arrived: Chuchaqui, Mora, and Chester. Chuchaqui was a scraggly puppy who bounced when he walked, Mora was a gentle golden lab, and Chester, the smallest of the trio, had fluffy ears that were crimped from getting wet then dry, wet then dry, with the daily rains in San Clemente, which is situated high on the steep slope of Volcán Imbabura, one of Ecuador’s many inactive volcanoes. Probably because he was hardly the size of my dog’s head, or maybe because he was overly protective of his home and farm, Chester immediately showed a distrust and distaste for Katembe, and he barked at him often for the duration of our stay.

Zoila took me inside her house and I was immediately struck by the bright colors everywhere: green and yellow paint on brick walls; pink and red ponchos hanging at an angle from a rustic log coat rack; rainbow yarn masks hanging from a different log on the opposite wall; neon blue and green blinking lights in the mini Christmas tree in the front window. Zoila showed me to my room, one of 6 rooms in the house designed to welcome travelers who’d made the same journey up the mountain I had, who’d come to Tradiciones San Clemente for the same reason I had: to learn, experientially, about indigenous Andean culture in Ecuador.

Katembe sitting at a comfortable distance from a roaring fireplace.

That first afternoon and evening were a little awkward. Zoila told me that their program, which consists of her house and the houses of a few relatives and neighbors in the same area, can host up to 40 people at a time. However, on this particular weekend, the weekend before Christmas, I was the only person who’d registered. The relatives and neighbors didn’t seem to be around, either. So, the house was quiet. After giving me a full tour of the upstairs and downstairs, and after we walked around outside for a few minutes so Katembe could familiarize himself with some of the farm smells, Zoila built a fire in the fireplace, changed into a more traditional indigenous outfit, and then disappeared to the kitchen. I sat by the fire reading my book, wishing I knew what I was supposed to do.

(Side note: I brought The Kite Runner with me, which is fantastic, but also a huge!!! bummer!!! of a book. I don’t recommend reading it the weekend before you spend Christmas completely alone.)

The two other times that I have lived abroad in my life—when I studied for a semester in Madrid, and when I worked in Mozambique with Peace Corps—I was inundated with direct instruction in language, politics, and culture that was very specific to the location and context in which I was living. At NYU Madrid, I took courses on Spain’s government and art, and on the weekends, professors took my cohort on excursions to historic towns and cities in the south of Spain. I spent 4 months in Peace Corps in Pre-Service Training, where every single day, our instructors and homestay families gave us formal and informal lessons about how to communicate, cook, and care for a house according to local customs. I associate living abroad with periods of immense learning in my life. 

But very soon after arriving in Quito, I realized that no one was going to knock on my door and start teaching me Spanish or explaining how to cook traditional Ecuadorian foods. If I wanted to learn, I would have to seek out learning opportunities on my own. This is why I started taking weekly Spanish lessons with my tutor Jaime by the end of August before the school year even started. And this is why I ended up sitting by the fire reading my book and wishing I knew what I was supposed to do in San Clemente the weekend before Christmas.

Finally, Zoila let me know dinner was ready and we moved to the dining room table to eat. She had prepared a delightfully nutritious vegetarian dinner for us to share: first, a lentil soup served in a smooth, glossy wooden serving pot that looked older than me. We ladled the soup into our bowls, then topped it with shredded mozzarella cheese, a spoonful of fresh ají, and...popcorn. Corn in all its forms is very important in Ecuadorian culture and cuisine, and that means that popcorn on top of soup is a thing. Think of it like oyster crackers atop a tomato soup: while the addition may not add much flavor, at the very, very least, it offers a contrast of texture that is mildly noticeable to your mouth.

After the soup, we dug into a salad with ingredients that were all grown a stone’s throw from where we were seated. While it was nothing more than lettuce, tomato, cucumber, and avocado, when everything is that fresh, that’s a darn good salad. We also ate a puree of zanahoria blanca. The literal translation is “white carrot,” but it’s much more potato-like, and used in a similar manner as potatoes, too; the puree was zanahoria blanca, milk, and butter, and tasted like slightly sweet, slightly sticky mashed potatoes. As she was serving, Zoila confided that though it is not traditional, she likes to add some of the shredded mozzarella cheese to the puree. I let her know that mashed potatoes with cheese makes me think of my grandma and is a huge comfort food for me. She winked and nodded for me to put more on my plate from the rest of the table: carrots (orange, the ones you’re picturing), green beans, and perfectly fried strips of plantains.

Soup, cheese, popcorn, ají.

Veggies, salad, more ají.

While I did learn about foods like the white carrots, the main thing I learned during that meal was what I was supposed to do in San Clemente. Turns out, as was the case with my professors in Spain and my mai and pai in Mozambique, I was just supposed to listen. Once we were seated and eating, Zoila started telling me lots of stories about the community of San Clemente and the role her family plays in that community.

First, she explained where everyone was this Saturday evening. Apparently, the community of San Clemente—which is a small indigenous community of about 2,000 people, many of whom make their living with farming, many with traditional embroidery and clothes design, and many others with the “cultural” tourism I was taking part in—gathers together in the center of town one day per year to elect the local government for the following year. I happened to arrive that very day, so while Zoila was at home to greet me, basically every other soul on the mountain was just a few miles away, from 8am to 10pm, hashing out who will take charge of different community efforts in the coming year. Pointing out the trophies sitting on the mantle above the fireplace, Zoila then described that in a few days on January 1st, the community would host their annual day of competitions in soccer, dancing, music, cooking, and embroidery. She also told me about a “war” in the 80s where San Clemente residents banded together to fight a mining effort the Ecuadorian government wanted to sponsor that would have destroyed their land. She went on to tell me two alpaca stories, and regarding those, the notes I wrote that night before drifting off to bed are a bit sparse. All I have written down is: “the alpaca that ate the dogs” and “the alpaca that fell off the cliff.” If memory serves, those were two separate alpacas.

After a few more stories, Zoila brought out desert, which was a little treat she called “ratón a la miel.” (Ratón = mouse, miel = honey. But I can’t really make a smooth translation of this. I believe the treat was named by a child in the family, and the name is simply trying to conjure the image of a mouse in honey.) The “ratón” is a tomate de árbol, which is an oblong-shaped fruit that has a ton of seeds and tastes a bit like a tangy tomato. Tomate de árbol is used to make lots of juices and on the rare occasion it is used in salsas, but in this desert, it was boiled whole, then peeled, then soaked in a mixture of warm water, brown sugar, and cinnamon sticks. The result was a clear, watery, syrupy compote that tasted like a not-too-sweet, not-too-tart orange Jell-O.

Ratón a la miel.

After dinner, Zoila showed me a fresh tomate de árbol for comparison, noting how the stem of the fruit sort of looks like a rat’s tail.

The next morning, I woke up early enough to take Katembe outside and be back in time to help make breakfast. Chuchaqui, Mora, and Chester were still curled up in their warm, dry bed when we made our way outside, and Chester all but rolled his dog eyes when he saw Katembe traipsing around mindlessly in the rainy, misty front yard.

More pieces of the San Clemente puzzle started to come together over breakfast: I met Zoila’s husband Juan, their son Tupac, and Tupac’s wife, Fernanda. Tupac spoke English, but I let him know I was comfortable staying in Spanish as we passed scrambled eggs, avocados, tomatoes, and freshly blended mango juice around the table. Tupac ran through some options of how we could spend the next two days: hiking, cooking, crafting, or even learning about medicinal plants that grow in the area. After considering time constraints, weather, and Katembe-safe activities, we settled on a rough plan to explore the farm and learn traditional cooking methods on Sunday, with our sights set for a plant-rich hike Monday morning.

Right after breakfast, Fernanda brought me and Katembe outside the house and just down the steep hill to meet some of the farm animals. Chuchaqui and Mora accompanied us, with Chester lingering at a distance. Fernanda took us inside a small enclosure where she fed tall grassy hay to a few dozen guinea pigs, which are called cuy (pronounced “kwee”). Katembe sniffed the creatures with bemusement, and then he tried to get his body underneath the stacked cages to chomp at them. I pulled his collar and ushered him outside, telling Fernanda that maybe some larger animals would be a better fit for him to meet. Outside, we found a pen of at least fifteen sheep. Some were sitting, some standing, but overall, they were not particularly interested in Katembe. Just as I was starting to remark to Fernanda that I didn’t think Katembe had ever met any sheep before, there was a bolt of movement and all farm hell broke loose.

In an instant, Katembe was diving above a chicken coop, underneath a fence post, and racing beyond the sheep pen, throwing his entire body at a loose chicken that had flapped its wings at precisely the wrong moment. The other chickens, safe in their coop, started scream-clucking, Mora started howling, Chuchaqui started chasing Katembe, and Chester ran down the hill to leap at their sides and bark in Katembe’s face. I jumped over the fence post and started shouting, and Fernanda ran around the back of the sheep pen and stumbled into Tupac, who had burst out of the house seconds earlier. As I turned the corner by the sheep, I gasped when I saw that Katembe had the entire chicken in his mouth. Luckily, he was trapped between a steep part of the hill and the back of the cuy enclosure, so he had nowhere to run. Also luckily, I could see in his eyes that he was just as shocked as I was that he had actually caught the thing, and he did not know what to do next. Tupac gently pulled the chicken out of Katembe’s mouth and I ran over, grabbed his collar, smacked his ear, and began apologizing every way I knew how in English and in Spanish.

Fernanda suddenly covered her mouth with her hand, stifling a laugh. Tupac and I turned around to see what she was seeing: right behind us, merely a yard or two away, every single one of the sheep had moved to the near edge of the pen and were staring—eyes wide and unblinking, mouths open—directly at Katembe. I’ve never seen a group of gigantic animals look so terrified. As we started to walk away, the sheep stayed perfectly still, only tilting their heads ever so slightly in unison so they could track every step of the monstrous, destructive creature who was trotting casually along their land.

For his crime, and because he was soaking wet, Katembe was banished to a tree just outside the house for the next few hours. I have to imagine this was not Katembe’s favorite day of the trip. I only wish he would have learned his lesson on this day, though.

A dog who is sad but not quite remorseful enough.

Inside, I continued on with my traditional cooking plans: Zoila taught me how to grind dried corn with a stone to make fresh corn flour, and then using that flour, we made soup, tortillas, and a pastry that tasted like a fluffy cornbread cupcake with anise seeds and raisins, which was steamed inside a banana leaf, very much like a dessert tamale. I also learned how to make ají from scratch. Ají is the national hot sauce or salsa that you’ll find atop every table that has food on it in Ecuador: the ají itself is a small red pepper (or orange pepper or yellow pepper, depending on who you ask—it seems that a variety of peppers are considered “ají”) that sits close to a jalapeño on the Scoville scale. The sauce (also just called ají) is made with a volcanic-rock mortar and pestle: you grind together a few cut up peppers with chunky salt until they make a paste, then add a tiny bit of water, then grind in a handful of whole garlic cloves. Mix in chopped green onion, cilantro, and a little more water, and you have a simple and not terribly spicy topping to put on every meal you eat in Ecuador.

The process of making corn flour was very reminiscent of the process of making peanut flour in Mozambique; relatedly, I quickly remembered how sore my body felt all the time when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer. Zoila showed me a demonstration, then she left me to work on my own for over an hour.

Crushing the corn.

Sifting the corn.

The scraps of corn that do not become flour get used as chicken feed.

First application of the flour.

The dessert we made was very similar to a humita, a common treat in coffee shops which tastes like moist, steamed cornbread, but this one had a twist. I did not write down a name for it.

The fruits of my corn flour: a corn-based soup,

the unnamed dessert,

and tortillas with breakfast the next morning.

Over dinner that evening, Tupac shed more light on Saturday’s big community meeting. San Clemente is on year 10 of a 20-year plan, and every year, the community chooses a new set of leaders to continue implementing the established plan. The plan consists of initiatives in five areas: education, environment, sports, culture, and infrastructure. One of the environmental initiatives, for example, is removing invasive eucalyptus along the mountainside and planting more native plants. In the education realm, there is a push to incorporate cultural education into local schools. This is a difficult initiative because schools in San Clemente must answer to norms and standards set by the province and the country, and Ecuador, generally speaking, does not prioritize the voices and histories of its indigenous citizens. When I asked Tupac if he was happy with the new set of leaders elected the night before, he explained that who is in charge does not matter so much—the mission of the initiatives remains the same, and the changing of the guard is merely done to balance the amount of time volunteers commit to serving the community.

After Tupac and Fernanda went back to their house, and after Juan retired to bed for the evening, Zoila and I stayed at the dinner table drinking tea and exchanging more stories. I told her that part of the reason I’d sought out their program was because of a book I was currently teaching in my classes at school: in December, we’d been reading The Queen of Water, a novel based on the life of María Virginia Farinango, an indigenous Ecuadorian woman who was sent away from home at age 7 to work full time as an empleada (live-in maid) in the home of a mestiza family. The novel reveals the racism that exists between indígenas (indigenous Ecuadorians with darker skin) and mestizas (“mixed” race Ecuadorians with some European heritage and fairer skin) while telling the harrowing but inspiring story of how Farinango escaped the world of [remarkably: mostly legal] child labor she was sold into in the late 1980s. Farinango was born in a small indigenous community outside of Otavalo, and while San Clemente is certainly not the same place, I knew that visiting would help give me more context for how to teach about indigenous culture to my wealthy mestiza students.

Before I could explain too much about the book, Zoila cut me off, saying that she got the gist; like Farinango, and like so, so many other indigenous Ecuadorian women, Zoila also spent a bulk of her childhood living and working full time in the homes of wealthy mestiza families. She said she worked as an empleada for two families. From ages 12 to 15, she worked for a family in Ibarra that were very unkind to her. She was not allowed to eat at the dinner table with them and she rarely got to go home to visit her own parents and siblings. With this Ibarra family, despite never having heard of the Catholic faith before, and despite not being treated like a member of the family in any way, she was forced to go to church with them on Sundays and make her First Communion and First Penance.

She shared a very clear memory from around this time, when she was 13 years old, when she was trying her best to serve so many literal masters: her employers, who were demanding and cruel; her own family, who were counting on her to earn money; the Catholic Church, who every week spouted foreign ideas about creation and a higher power; and of course her own inner self, a tough but impressionable girl who desperately wanted to find her way in the world. The memory she shared was of coming home from church one Sunday after her first reconciliation class and asking her employers what a “sin” is. They responded, “Looking at boys is a sin.”

After she told me this, Zoila adjusted the tea bag in her almost-empty mug and gently flicked a piece of fuzz off the yellow table cloth in front of her. As a beat of silence settled between us, she turned and looked out the front window. I could see the blinking blue Christmas tree lights reflected in her faraway stare.

The other family Zoila worked for was very different. From ages 15-18, she lived in Quito with a French father, Ecuadorian mother, and their three children. Because the man of the house was born and raised in France, he was not as comfortable with the casual racism against indigenous people that Zoila had grown accustomed to: with this family, she sat at the table for meals, she did not have to go to church, and she was even able to leave the house occasionally to be a regular teenager in the city.

But of course, her encounters with racism did not end after she left her life as an empleada. The last story Zoila told me that evening was about the day that Tupac was born in the early 90s. He is her fourth child, and she had expected to have a home birth, as she had done the previous three times. But she was having complications with her pregnancy, and a week before she reached 6 months, her doctor demanded that she go all the way into Quito to get checked out in a hospital. She firmly believes that the bumpy, start-and-stop taxi ride across the city induced labor, and she ended up giving birth right when she arrived. Zoila dreaded being in the hospital in Quito because she was far from her family and community and she was surrounded by people who did not look like her.

I remember the exact number because she repeated it so many times: there were 43 other new mothers at the hospital when she was there. 43. Because Tupac was so premature, Zoila had not yet started producing milk. So, Zoila and a nurse went up and down the halls of the maternity ward, asking each of those 43 women if they would help nurse Tupac. 42 of the 43 new mothers were mestiza, and 42 of the 43 new mothers looked right at Zoila and said no. The 43rd new mother was a young Black woman. Without hesitation, she opened her arms to Zoila and gave Tupac her milk.

Shaking her head, Zoila repeated 43 one last time, then took her mug to the kitchen, wished me good night, and went off to bed. I spent a few hours reading The Kite Runner by the fire, and then I settled in my little room, too.

Before all the heavy conversation, dinner that evening was another vegetarian delight with more ways to eat corn.

I woke up early again on Monday morning so I could walk Tembe before Zoila started making breakfast. After a little 10-minute loop in the morning mist, we got back to the house and I realized his paws were soaked, so I hooked his leash to the door handle and ran down the hallway to grab a towel. Truly no more than 9 seconds later, I returned to the front door and Katembe was nowhere in sight.

I let out a curt, sharp sigh. Shit.

I quietly closed the door behind me and took off running down the hill. Within seconds, I saw exactly what I was expecting: Katembe was sprinting full speed in a zig-zag pattern across the farm, chasing that one particular chicken. Everyone on the farm sprang to life as I ran after him: the chickens started clucking, the goats started whining, the sheep huddled together in fear, and Chuchaqui, Mora, and Chester appeared out of nowhere to start howling, barking, and chasing after Katembe. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Fernanda running across her own field to join my efforts. The next few minutes should have been scored with the Benny Hill theme, as there were two different moments where I flung my whole body into the air in an effort to tackle Tembe to the ground. Both times, I managed to wrap my arms around his midsection, but both times, when we landed in the tall, wet grass, he wriggled out of my slippery grasp. On the third time that I dove uphill on the steeply pitched mountainside, I managed to grab his leash with my right hand and finally stopped him from his rampage. Fernanda caught up to us, and I rolled over onto my side, flinging my left arm across Tembe’s back and clutching the leash for dear life. “Buenos días,” I said.

About an hour later, after breakfast was ready and I was bringing plates to the table, something on Katembe’s leg caught my eye. I put the plates down, then crouched next to him and touched his right front paw. It was blood. Oh my god, the chicken, was my first thought, but then I nudged his leg a bit more and saw that the blood was oozing out of two very thin and perfectly straight slices that spanned in total about two horizontal inches around the front of his leg. I sat down, took his leg in my hands, and studied it closer, noticing that the cut looked awfully deep, and that the precisely trimmed fur around the area looked like it had been sliced with a razor. How did it take me over an hour to notice this? I wondered.

Tupac walked through the front door and I waved him over for my first conversation in English that weekend. I asked if there was barbed wire on the property, or broken machinery, or anything rusty that Tembe might have encountered during his chicken chase. He said no to all of these things, and instead, when he crouched down to study the bloody leg, he surmised that maybe a piece of broken glass was involved. “Do you think it’s very bad?” I asked. He stood up, took a breath, and stared at the leg with raised eyebrows and a pointed frown.

Last May, Marley and I hiked to the tippy top of Miller Peak in Sierra Vista as part of my mission to touch all my favorite peaks in the Huachucas before I got my tattoo. On that hike, Katembe ripped open the pads of three of his paws while traversing an unexpectedly treacherous rocky section of the trail. When we got back home, I was a mess, feeling all sorts of remorse and worry, and I wanted to take him to the vet. Marley, ever the patient soul, suggested that we call her dad and get some advice first. Marley’s dad is a lifelong Arizona rancher, and therefore he has spent decades discerning when farm animals need a trip to the vet and when they just need time to heal. On the phone, he immediately told us to avoid wasting any money, and he reassured me that Katembe would be fine after a few days of having his paws wrapped in gauze. He was absolutely correct, and from that experience I learned to trust the wisdom of people who grew up on farms.

So when Tupac the farmer looked down at me and said, “You should get your dog to a vet,” I knew it was the appropriate time to worry.

I texted José the taxi driver and asked if there was any way he could come get me sooner than the 3pm pickup time we’d settled on. He said he’d be there by 10am at the latest. I breathed a sigh of relief and then did my best to not panic and to enjoy breakfast.

I packed all of my things and sat with Katembe by the fire, anxiously reading my book, ready to go. When 10:00 rolled around, and then 10:30, and then 10:45, I started to get more nervous. I called José, and he answered on the first ring. “Are you on your way?” I asked. There was a pause of about 20 seconds. “On...my way?” he said. Shit.

He had thought I had wanted to leave earlier the next day, not that morning, but because José is a saint among taxi drivers and among men, he dropped everything and started the 2.5 hour drive immediately. Zoila and I made the most of our extra few hours together: she brought some dried corn over by the fire and I helped her organize the kernels into best-for-cooking, best-for-flour, and best-for-chicken piles.

Eagle-eyed blog readers may notice that Katembe also has a bloody back paw in this photo, but that cut was not very deep and was the very least of my worries.

Just before 1:30, Zoila whipped together some fresh tomate de árbol juice to give to José. She also presented me with a small piece of embroidery that she’d made which I now keep as a treasure in my home. As I was thanking her for sharing so much about her life, her skills, and her culture, we heard Chester start yipping, and we looked out the front window to see José’s yellow taxi pulling into the grassy driveway.

Zoila.

I texted my vet to let them know I was on the way. José drove me the 2.5 hours to their door, and when we arrived, I asked him to pop the trunk so I could get my backpack and all of my things. “No, no, no,” he said. He intended to wait for me and then take me all the way home. I told him I had no idea how long we would be inside, and that I could find another way. “No te preocupes,” he said again and again. Don’t you worry. So, we went inside and José waited.

Over the course of the next hour, Katembe learned that his cut was deep enough to require stitches. I learned that if your large dog needs stitches in Ecuador on a Monday afternoon, you are the one to hold him down while the doctor gives him a local anesthetic, shaves his leg, cleans his wound, and stitches him up. As I held tightly to Katembe’s back paws so that he couldn’t stand, I noticed how much I smelled like fire and farm, and I noticed all the little nicks and scars on his legs and nose that he’d gotten from mischief over the years. I also noticed that I was exhausted, and I suddenly felt years older in my bones. What an adventure we’re on together, I thought, gently stroking Katembe’s tired, proud face.

The bill for the emergency visit, anesthetic, stitches, and prescription antibiotics came to less than $100. The taxi ride cost more than that, but I would have paid José anything when I saw him still eagerly waiting outside, his eyes filled only with concern for Tembe’s leg, his spirit as chipper and gentle as ever. Katembe and I slept soundly that night, and the next morning I rode my bike to 8 different pet supply stores looking for a cone big enough for my dog’s giant head.

Katembe: the best adventure buddy there ever was.

While he cannot express it in words, I know from his silly face that Katembe wouldn’t change a thing about his experience in San Clemente. And if I’m being honest, I probably wouldn’t, either.

12 Photos, 12ish Stories

September 6: Climbing birthday party

Linde texted the teacher group chat during the first week of school to announce that she was having a birthday party at El Cap, a climbing gym on the west side of Parque Carolina. Come on out! We came on out. About 20 teachers and some non-teaching partners (even more than pictured here) showed up, some hitting the bouldering walls, some just sitting upstairs at the little bar to sing, play cards, and celebrate. For me, this evening was a beautiful early indicator that the Americano teacher community does not need much warning or notice—if a gathering is happening anywhere in Quito, people will show up and make it a fun time. In the months that followed this first trip to the climbing gym, I’ve tried again and again to build a habit out of climbing, as I have for the last few years of my life. I bought climbing shoes and a chalk bag at the local REI-equivalent, a store called Tatoo, and by December, I made Monday biking trips to the gym a light habit. Linde, Roy, Ben, Rob, Ry, and I went on one outdoor climbing trip in November, and we now have a group chat to encourage each other to stick to our gym routines.

September 10: Walk in the park

I’m going to borrow the caption I wrote for this photo on Strava (which is where you really need to follow me if you want updates on what I’m up to sooner than 4 months after the fact):

I recently read the sentence, “Oftentimes finding your purpose within your community and the parallels with your inner journey can provide great relief and meaning,” and I’m learning that my position in this community right now is to be the initiator of outside time, and I do indeed find great relief and meaning in that.

Many years ago, probably in the spring of 2021, probably at the light by Buffalo Soldier, probably on a drive to the Sierra Vista climbing gym trying to build a habit that didn’t stick, Noah and I were having a conversation about inviting friends to activities, discussing how he always seemed to be the one texting our friends, and he made a very small, very well-intentioned comment to the effect of, “Well, Sarah, you’re just not the kind of person to initiate activities,” and I burst into tears. We’d been living as roommates for at least six months at this point, so Noah was no longer phased by my bursting into tears in his truck. I responded back that I very much wished I was the kind of person who would initiate activities with our friends, but those activities—what I at the time called “Noah activities”—like hiking, and climbing, and camping, and bike riding, just felt so new and foreign to me, and I felt so insecure when I tagged along that the idea of initiating them myself seemed impossible. Noah, the friend who helped me buy my first pair of hiking pants and taught me what a Jetboil is, apologized a lot, and we continued on our drive.

I feel very confident in outdoor spaces now, obviously in huge part thanks to Noah’s patience and guidance, and equally thanks to many years wandering about the Huachuca Mountains with Katembe, with friends, or alone. When our new cohort of teachers first arrived in Quito, I fit right in with the outdoorsy folks, sharing that of course I’d brought my tent and four different bike lights with me in my checked luggage. All fall, I’ve spent multiple days a week hiking or biking in Parque Metropolitano, the massive wooded park that’s a five minute walk from my apartment, sometimes alone, but often with whoever responds to my message in the neighborhood group chat. I try my best to be gentle and inclusive towards my peers who are learning about outdoor activities—what 2021 Sarah would be shocked and heartened to know that I now think of as “my activities”—here, paying forward the kindness that Noah and many others showed me for years and years.

September 28: High Desert Classic VI (from afar)

“Just don’t go too over the top,” I told Steph. But...it’s Steph.

This September marked the first High Desert Classic I’d missed since I started playing pickleball nearly five years ago. Steph hatched a plan to have me video call during the tournament so I could catch up with the Sierra Vista pickleball community, who I miss very, very much. Using pool noodles, rope, and her creative genius, Steph fashioned a human-sized figure that held her phone so I could watch the games and chat with whoever passed by the centrally-located tree at the courts. Everyone who came up to talk opened with one of two lines: “Wow Sarah, you’ve lost some weight!” or “I really thought Mike had lost his mind and was talking to a tree.” (Both of these comments did not make sense until someone texted me a photo of my skinny noodle body and a handful of Mikes talking to the tree.) I spent a few hours there, visiting with so many dear friends like Linda (pictured here), and explaining, regrettably, that I hadn’t yet found pickleball in Ecuador. My heart was overflowing with joy after this afternoon, and I was so grateful that Steph, as always, ignored my request to keep things low-key.

October 4: Mindo bike ride

I first heard about the Mindo bike ride when I spoke with Louise, the now-retired Americano teacher whose apartment I took over, way back in June of this year. I’m glad I knew about it so far in advance, because that meant I knew how much altitude training I’d need once I arrived in Quito and got my bike assembled. (I suppose I didn’t really know how much training I’d need, but I knew it was a lot.) The Mindo bike ride is an annual epic trek from the city of Quito way west to the birder’s-destination-in-the-cloud-forest, a little town called Mindo. Teachers from Colegio Americano and Academia Cotopaxi, the two biggest international schools in Quito, have been organizing the ride every October for the past many years. This ride was very, very hard, and I felt so proud of my body after completing it (no walking the whole way!). Some stats for those of you who still aren’t following me on Strava: 53.34 miles, elevation gain of 4,797 feet, elevation loss (steeeep, muddy, rocky downhill) of 6,483 feet, moving time of 6:47:40, total elapsed time of 9:45:04. Photo is from a rest in the tiny town of Tandayapa, the last stop before the famously daunting “second climb.” Keeping up with (and even passing) some of the fastest men in the group on that tough second climb felt amazing.

October 11: Baños waterfall

Longtime fans of my blogging will be happy to know that there is a new “Tom e Jerry” in my life, and it is this group of people, affectionally known as “Cedrus etc.” the name of our WhatsApp group chat. (“Edificio Cedrus” is the name of the building where 4/5 of the group lives—I’m the “etc.” directly across the street in my nameless apartment building.)

The five of us were sort of thrust together as friends when we became neighbors three days after we all moved to Ecuador in August. This built-in community, a microcosm of the broader built-in school community that comes with international teaching, has been a major part of my daily life the past few months: we take the bus to work every morning, making sure to text or call when one person is running late, and we debrief about our days on the long rides home in the afternoon. When I got sick in early October, Izzy (Individuals and Societies, grades 9-10, far right) dropped off homemade banana bread at my door, and when Katembe got sick a few weeks later, she dropped off paper towels to help with a terrible rug situation. Ben (Language and Literature, grades 9-10, green shirt) learned that I grew up loving Bruce Springsteen, and he planned an evening for us to go see Deliver Me From Nowhere one rainy night in early November. Rob (Theory of Knowledge, grades 11-12, down in front) and I are the only two in our cohort who brought dogs and bikes to Ecuador, so we’ve found all the best parks in our neighborhood, as well as all the best coffee stops along the Ciclopaseo. Jabari (Science, grade 8, colorful bag) is sitting next to me as I type this—I use the oven in his apartment for baking, and as we were the only two of our little group to stay in Quito for the holidays, we got to spend extra time together baking cookies, discussing our shared love for writing, and watching an entire season of The Good Doctor on Christmas Eve.

The photo above is from a trip we all took to Baños, a town similar to Mindo that has waterfalls, rafting, and hot springs galore. We rented bikes and rode downhill along the Ruta de las Cascadas to see this waterfall, El Pailón de Diablo (Devil’s Cauldron), one of the most powerful waterfalls in South America.

November 2: Pululahua horseback riding

For a long weekend in early November, Elaine (Math, grades 11-12, the human in this photo) planned a trip to Pululahua Crater, one of only two inhabited active volcano craters in the world, which happens to be an hour-and-a-half drive from my apartment. Elaine rides the same bus as the Cedrus etc. crew, as she lives only a few blocks from us, and on one afternoon bus ride, she told us about her plan and threw out an invitation to anyone who wanted to join. I looked into where she was staying, saw that they had tent camping sites and were dog friendly, and I took her up on the offer. I actually got food poisoning the night before I was planning to leave and almost bailed, but I decided to tough it out. Elaine and I did some gentle walks together through the foggy farmland, we talked about our childhoods growing up religious and then finding teaching to be a form of service, and she lent me her Kindle when I decided I needed to sip some broth and lie down in my tent in the afternoon. After one night’s rest, my stomach was feeling more stable, and we went with a guide on a little horseback riding trip up a trail in the crater. Katembe, a dog who famously has tried to fight every horse, cow, and deer he’s ever seen, was an extremely good boy and became a friend to horses on that day. There were a few moments where his doggy intrusive thoughts got the best of him and he nipped at my horse’s ankles, and he did get stomped on one time as a result of such behavior, but I stand by my assessment: Katembe is now a friend to horses.

November 8: Cotacachi pickleball tournament

Along with a few dozen retired folks in Arizona, I was really, really worried I wouldn't find pickleball in Ecuador. After months of research before I moved, I made the difficult decision to pack my paddle but not my court shoes. Tennis and Padel are the popular racket sports in much of Central and South America; I was not overly hopeful.

At the end of October, after I’d studied Google Maps and asked colleagues and students if anyone knew about pickleball here and had still come up short, on a lark, I decided to check Instagram to see if there were any posts tagged with pickleball nearby. I found a page for a pickleball club in Tanda, which is a little town in the valley east of Quito. I sent them a message and was quickly connected with the leader of the club, a man named Pato (common nickname for Patricio here) who was thrilled to learn I had a paddle, a rating, and years of experience. “Can you play at 7pm tonight?” he asked, and just like that, I was folded into their little group that is working to grow the sport in this part of Ecuador.

The group I play with is all Ecuadorian men, mostly retired folks, but some younger guys, too. They do drop and dink, but of course there’s a lot of aggressive play at the kitchen line. A lot of the men I play with speak English, but they respect my desire to practice Spanish. I realized very quickly that making jokes with my partner and chatting before, during, and after games is a huge part of the sport for me, and it’s a type of communication I don’t use in any other settings: my Spanish tutor or my work colleagues can’t teach me the specific phrases I need in this specific sport. Figuring out how to say, “No, you were the first server!” and “Well, the ball doesn’t lie!” in Spanish was very important, and my curiosity helped me connect with the other players. In that little park in Tanda where we set up our temporary nets on courts lined for volleyball, I’ve started to feel like myself in Spanish, which has been a breakthrough: I already felt very confident on a pickleball court, and now I feel confident communicating on the courts, too. It’s a wonder.

One day a few weeks ago, a new guy showed up who I’d never met. We played a game and I crushed him with some skillful dinks at the line. He was smiling, but immediately asked for a rematch. My partner and I won again. We were sitting on the sidelines drinking water, when the new guy started saying things like, “We need to find a new name. Maybe Jorge, or Pedro...” I was confused, so I turned to my partner, Pablo. “He’s saying that we need a nickname for you because you play aggressively like a man,” Pablo told me, smirking. “Oh, or he could just live with the fact that he lost to a woman,” I responded quickly, and everyone laughed, even new guy, which was a relief. Pablo and I were partners in a tournament in Cotacachi, a town about two hours north of Quito, and we took silver after a long battle in the 4.0 mixed medal match. All I was thinking that whole match was how much I would love to play with the woman on the other side, who is rated a top-5 player in Ecuador. To my luck, she came to Tanda one Saturday morning and she was thinking the same thing: we paired up and gracefully, joyfully won some games together. One day I’ll have another female partner in Tanda. For now, I’ll keep practicing my Spanish and teaching these men some lessons.

December 7: Sunday call

I have been living away from home for over ten years now. This latest journey is the first time in all those years that my family and I have consistently stayed in touch on a weekly basis. I don’t recall setting this as a goal, but for months now, we have been talking every Sunday evening. Usually, my mom, dad, and Hannah have finished dinner, and I am making dinner and then eating as we get on the line. We chat about the goings on of the week in each of our little worlds. It’s very new for us, but I hope it sticks around. I think these calls are partly why I’ve been so lax in updating this blog, because every Sunday, I get to tell my stories and share my photos to my main readership. In this photo, I am giving a demonstration to show why we all need to agree on which direction we hold our phones.

December 13: A Christmas Carol

Jay (Individuals and Societies, grades 7-8, far left with candy cane, I’m done introducing teachers like this) is a fellow new foreign hire and party planner extraordinaire. In December, he organized a murder mystery Christmas party where we were all cast roles from A Christmas Carol. He created character cards for each of us that summarized our basic personality traits and gave important information that only we knew and would either have to keep secret or share. Throughout the night, dressed in our period-appropriate costumes, we mingled with other guests, trying to solve the mystery of Jacob Marley’s murder. I was cast as Ebenezer Scrooge, and I knew some of the ways that Marley had mismanaged some of the party guests’ investments, suggesting possible motives. In the end, the guilty party was the Ghost of Christmas Past. Bah humbug.

December 25: Hi Jeff!

Before the break, my students in my D2 class asked me if I was going home for Christmas this year, and when I said no, they were shocked. I explained that it was normal for me to be away from home during the holidays. When two Felipes pushed me to explain more, I did some math and told them that 2018 was the last time I was home in Massachusetts for Christmas. “But will you still miss your family?” my student Carolina asked. My family? I considered. A fair question, but hard to explain.

The family I really missed when I was alone on Christmas was not my own (sorry, main readership), but instead my friends’ warm families who had taken me in for Christmas for so many years: Claire’s family, Noah’s family, Steph’s family, and Cat’s family. Every year for four years during the winter break from school, I went to Tucson to visit Cat’s parents and brothers and played games, did puzzles, shared a meal, and laughed for hours. I think I only spent one Christmas with Noah’s family, but even when he traveled with them and I did not, we still called on Christmas morning to check in and share loving greetings. Steph’s Arizona family was a constant in my life, and I always saw her grandma Lupita around this time of year. I flew to Idaho last Christmas to be with Claire’s family after she, Harvey, and baby Leon moved from Arizona, because traditions are traditions, and waking up on Christmas morning with the Jacksons had meant a lot to me.

So, this year for Christmas, I called all of these families to visit from afar. Yes, I was alone, but I still got to hear Cat’s brother Zack call Katembe “Special K,” see the highlights of Steph’s Christmas morning with her fiancé and stepdaughter, talk with Noah’s dad about how busy he is in retirement, and even wave through multiple layers of technology at Claire’s brother Jeff, who was also abroad for the holidays this year. It was definitely a different way to spend Christmas, but my day was filled with connection and cheer nonetheless.

December 30: Papallacta hot springs

In a last minute effort to squeeze as much adventure out of the winter break as we could, me, Rob, Jabari, and Sharon (okay fine, Drama, grades 9-12, far right) planned a little getaway to the village of Papallacta, a cloud-foresty area like Mindo and Baños that is only an hour and a half east of Quito but feels like another world. We spent hours and hours soaking in the hot springs, occasionally getting out to dunk in the cold river water or just get cold by standing up in the rain, and then checked into our little mountain lodge, Mamallacta, and spent the rest of the day playing foosball and Rummikub and enjoying the Dot’s Pretzels Rob had brought back from his Christmas in the States. The lodge was dog-friendly, so Rob and I both brought our dogs, and they enjoyed curling up while we played games and exploring the farmland with llamas, cows, and donkeys just outside the window.

December 31: Tembe and Sama

Tembe struggled a lot with making friends when Noah and I first adopted him five years ago because he was still very young and very chaotic. He finally feels like an older dog these days, and he’s having a blast in Ecuador making friends with street dogs, park llamas, crater horses (see above), and farm cows. His very best friend in the whole world, though, is Sama, Rob’s cat-like Basenji who lives close by, right in Cedrus. When we walk out our door, Sama is always perched on the couch in her window across the street, watching Katembe make his sniffs. They go on walks in the park together, and they have traveled to Baños and Papallacta together, Katembe obliviously smothering Sama as he reaches to sniff out the window from the back of Rob’s car. Sama, ever the stereotype of the girl dog with a male owner, is usually curious yet standoffish around Katembe, except when she comes to our apartment and zooms around the backyard, stealing all of his toys and daring him to keep up with her as she bounces off couches and slips under chairs where he can’t fit. Katembe, with his old boy hips and legs, usually trails behind while Sama darts ahead on adventures, but he has wisdom to share as well, like teaching her how cool it is to stand on top of the dining room table in the Airbnb in Baños so they can look out the window and watch for their humans to return. In this photo, they pause from a hike along the rapids of Papallacta to pose before running back to dip their very-differently-sized paws in the river and look out for llamas together. They adore each other.

I Dressed as a Bus for Halloween

I dressed as a bus for Halloween.

More specifically, I dressed as a blue bus for Halloween. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here.

October 19th was a Sunday, and Sundays have come to mean one thing: the Ciclopaseo. Every Sunday morning, with orange cones, yellow tape, and a healthy amount of trust in public good will, Quito closes a 15-mile stretch of a major artery of the city to all traffic, and bicycles are given free, safe access to hours of road miles. You’ll see the occasional runner or roller skater, but mostly, bikes rule the Ciclopaseo. Every now and again, a car or motorcycle will cross the yellow tape and interfere with the closed route, but typically the mass of bikes is strong enough to force their shameful gigantic wheels off onto the closest side street. Linde and Roy, a kind Dutch couple in the Americano community, were the first to take me on the Ciclopaseo back in early September. (Linde is the reason they’re here—she’s been teaching Diploma Program (DP) science for the past 3 years at school, and Roy, the trailing spouse and full-time scientist, is no slouch himself. They travel often and move through conversations in English, Spanish, and Dutch with confidence and ease. They’re the epitome of the type of cool, worldly people you meet in the international teaching game.) I’ve since made it a habit of going to the Ciclopaseo every Sunday when I’m in town.

Linde, me, Roy on my first Ciclopaseo at the start of September. The little round hill in the background is the “Panecillo,” a hill topped with a famous statue of the Virgin Mary in the historic old part of Quito.

October 19th was also the first Sunday that my neighbor and fellow new foreign hire, Rob, had his bicycle here and assembled. He was eager to explore the city on two wheels, and I was eager to share my knowledge of my Sunday route. We set off from our apartments, zipped down the hill past Atahualpa Stadium, crossed Parque Carolina, and hopped on the Ciclopaseo on Avenida Río Amazonas. We went south, in the direction of Centro Histórico.

We were waiting at a stoplight, almost to Parque El Ejido, when I asked Rob, “Do you have a costume for the Halloween party?”

“Not yet,” he responded. “I don’t really want to, but I think I’ll have to go to one of the pop-up stores and see what’s there.”

The light changed. “Same,” I said as we started rolling. “I just haven’t come up with any decent ideas.”

We did a lap of El Ejido, slowing down to look at the art vendors set up along the north side of the park. As we waited to cross Avenida Patria, Rob commented on how safe the roads felt along the Ciclopaseo. Rob has a car here in Ecuador, and he has made many comparisons between driving in Quito and driving on Toad’s Turnpike in MarioCart; traffic can be very chaotic here, so it really is remarkable how calm the closed roads of the Ciclopaseo feel.

While we were still waiting at the long light, a blue bus whipped past us, mere inches from our front tires. “Imagine competing with them while on your bike,” Rob said. “No chance.”

Another blue bus approached the intersection, this one cutting off a line of taxis to make an absurdly wide turn, then coming to a rolling stop—not nearly a complete stop—to drop some riders from the back doors and scoop up some new riders, the group rushing in step to pull themselves on board by grabbing the metal pole by the front door like a train hijack scene in an old western.

Rob and I watched in wonder, then chuckled. “Maybe that’s what I’ll be for Halloween, one of those buses,” I joked.

“Just run through the party bumping into people and making a mess!” Rob said as the light changed and we started moving back towards safe, bike-only streets.

I’m sure a lightbulb appeared above my bike helmet. “You know, I was joking, but maybe I will.”

“Do it,” he said, and we bobbed through some kids on roller skates, speeding up as we hit the downhill stretch just before the southern part of Parque Carolina.

There is lots to see and do along the Ciclopaseo: above, I am about 8 miles from home, looking back towards the wooded park near my apartment. Below, L-R, we have an old neighborhood in the south of the city, me enjoying a $1.50 fresh coconut pitstop, and the mini bike park inside Parque Carolina.

So I had my idea. The only thing I had to do was figure out exactly how one dresses as a blue bus.

I began by studying the buses. Every morning and afternoon on my bus (school; yellow) commute to work, I took notes about common design features, and I read old news articles and travel websites in Spanish. From my extensive research, I learned a lot, but I was also left with many more questions about how the blue buses work. Here is what I do and do not know about the blue buses:

Things I know:

• The buses are blue.
• They are [almost all] owned by a company called IMETAM, but they are operated by the city of Quito as public transportation.
• Most buses have a list of stops in their front window that indicate where the bus is headed. The majority of routes travel north/south, because Quito is a very long, narrow north/south city.
• Each bus comes equipped with a driver and a “cobrador,” a man who occasionally hangs his entire body outside the open front door to yell at pedestrians about where his bus is headed, or to shoo away cars with his arms when the bus wants to merge.

Things I don’t know:

• The cost of one fare, or how exactly you pay, because people seem to jump on and off indiscriminately and sometimes the cobrador is too distracted yelling at people to make change.
• How it is possible to know where a designated bus stop is or when a bus is likely to arrive at that stop.

Things I don’t know for sure, but I assume to be true:

• If they ever come to a complete stop, the blue buses will explode, so best not to risk it.
• If the blue buses ever have less than 40 people inside, they will explode, so again, why take the risk?

I mostly studied their aesthetic. Even though they are uniformly designed, structurally speaking, any blue bus you encounter has a huge “bus tipo” name on the top of the front window—things like “Reino de Quito” and “Guadalajara” and “Quiteño Libre”—in an absurd script font that is unique to that particular bus. (I’m not sure if these names indicate the line, the final destination, or a blue bus family association.) The entrance and exit signs—entrada y salida—are also in random fonts, sometimes all caps, sometimes lowercase curly script. Inside the doors and windows, drivers decorate the space with their personal bus energy: you’ll often see giant felt dice swaying from the ceiling, neon LED lights blinking like a teenager’s bedroom, and any amount of scarves pledging allegiance to local soccer teams. Almost all buses have the “Quito Metro” logo on the back of the left side of the frame, and they all have their registration card in at least two places, but beyond that, sometimes the outsides are blank, or sometimes they are covered with “PedidosYa” ads. There are usually boxy white arrows pointing at the three different doors, and there are anywhere from 3 to 53 red and white strips of reflective tape lining the bottom edges of all sides of the bus.

I made the early decision that I would not try to look like a bus with my costume; instead, I would try to spiritually embody the terrifying, almost militant chaos that the blue buses bring to the streets.

Bus inspiration photos taken from my school bus and brave moments on bike rides.

On Monday after work, I set out down the hill to try to find some cheap clothes that I could destroy for this costume. I started at the pop-up Halloween store a block from Parque Carolina, about a 15-minute walk from my apartment. I perused for a while and found nothing but a soldier hat that was just the right color blue. I made my way over to Quicentro, the nearby mall. I went in and out of every store that had clothing, checking every blue dress, shirt, and pant, and came up with nothing. After nearly two hours, I found myself in the last corner of the mall—at Old Navy, of all places. 

(It’s a bit strange, the things that give you comfort when you’re living abroad: this was an exhausting evening with very few successes, but as I trudged around the massive Quicentro—my first time ever stepping foot in the mall—I felt waves of recognition and relief seeing the overpriced Patagonia store, the unending H&M, and (well, obviously) the food-court sized Dunkin’ Donuts battling the upscale Starbucks. After all, even if it is gross consumerism, what is comfort but predictability?)

This Old Navy was no Burlington-Mall-circa-2010-Old-Navy, though. Just like every clothing store in the mall, even the simplest, solid color, cotton t-shirts were expensive. Almost all clothes in the city are imported, so the import fees make buying clothes here quite the investment. (There are, of course, cheap places to buy cheap clothes in a city of two million people, and some of those cheaper places are in the old part of the city, where my Sunday bike route takes me. But those are biking distance away, not walking distance, and not necessarily where I’d like to go by myself in the dark on a weeknight.) I was staring at a $25 plain white t-shirt near the entrance of Old Navy when a sales associate approached me and asked if I needed help.

All night, when store employees had asked me if I needed help, I had quickly said, “No, gracias,” and shuffled along. But at this point, I was exhausted from not finding what I needed, and I managed to eke out in sleepy Spanish, “Yes, I actually am looking for any piece of clothing that matches this bright blue color.” I showed her the hat I’d bought hours earlier. A hint of confusion flicked across her eyes, but she smiled. “It’s for…it’s for Halloween,” I added, and she nodded and told me she’d start looking on the right side of the store. I went to the left side and started digging through the clearance racks and men’s shirts.

After a few minutes of searching, we met in the middle of the store again. She presented a pair of blue leggings and I showed her the youth XL t-shirt I’d found. She said that they didn’t have any sizes of leggings that’d fit me, but they’d have more next week. I explained that the costume party was the coming weekend, so next week would be too late. I looked at my measly options after two hours of searching dozens of stores: an overpriced boy’s t-shirt and a pair of pants that don’t fit. I couldn’t rationalize spending a ton of money on something that just wouldn’t work. I thanked the Old Navy woman for her help and promised I’d return if all else failed. I stopped in SuperPaco on my way out of Quicentro and bought some iron-transfer paper, then slowly made my way back up the hill, feeling a bit defeated, but still confident I’d be able to make this costume work.

I spent the next few days designing the details I would iron on to the clothes I still didn’t have. From my studying perch on my school bus commute, I recreated the Quito Metro logo and transportation registration cards, I designed a “bus tipo” sign that merged as many bus clichés as I had seen, and I copied and pasted enough “entrada” and “salida” text boxes to adequately capture how many doors are on these buses. (A standard blue bus has three doors, but as it speeds past you, it always feels like so many more).

   

Some of the pages I needed to print on an inkjet printer.

Thursday rolled around, two days before the teacher Halloween party, and I had all of my designs set. Since I had a planning period first hour that day, right when the bus dropped us off at 7:25, I went down to the print center at school and asked the printer man if, among the many printers all around the entire campus, there was one inkjet printer I could use to print on my iron-transfer paper. “No inkjet printers anywhere on campus,” he said in Spanish, shaking his head. “And it might be hard to find one—laser is much more common here in print shops.” Darn. I knew it’d be too easy if I could just print at school, but since I needed to go out again in the evening to look for blue clothes, I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to check in on a few print shops in my neighborhood.

Walking back to my room, I ran into Libby bringing a cup of coffee to her classroom in the 7th grade block. Libby teaches Individuals and Societies, which is fancy-IB-school-lingo for middle school social studies. Our shared students often accidentally call me and Libby by each other’s names, which everyone finds to be very fair. Libby is from Montana and is a couple years older than me, but she is about the same height and build, has blonde hair and glasses, and just like me, dresses like the prototypical young White American humanities teacher (think: cardigans). To a 12-year-old Ecuadorian child, at first glance, we are pretty interchangeable. Unlike me, though, Libby has been living and working in Quito for a few years, and she has an Ecuadorian fiancé.

“Are you going to the Halloween party on Saturday?” Libby asked, opening her door and waving me into her classroom. Core subject teachers have common planning periods based on when our students have specials like Gym and Art, so when I am free, the other English teacher Alina is also free, and so is Libby, and so is the rest of our block. I followed Libby into her empty room. “I am planning on going to the party, and in fact, I could use some advice,” I said. Within five minutes, we had Google Maps pulled up on her computer and both of our phones, and Libby was showing me the third print shop she knew of in the Carolina area. “By the way, right here, across from Quicentro,” she offhandedly pointed at a block of shops, “there’s a little store, very unassuming, you’ve probably walked past it dozens of times. It has random clothes and shoes imported from China. They’re not great quality, but super cheap. Anyway, go past there, take a right, there’s another place you can print...”

Lorelei the instructional coach poked her head in the room to say hi. Like me, Lorelei has an East Coast confidence and a let’s-get-this-done-efficiently attitude that she sometimes needs to check while working in a culture with a slower, gentler pace than her home of Maryland, and like Libby, she has been living and working here a few years and has an Ecuadorian fiancé. We told her we were talking print shops, and Lorelei confirmed a few places in the neighborhood that Libby had already pointed out. I thanked them both for their help and walked back to my classroom. Later that afternoon, Lorelei stopped me on my way to lunch and gave me the tip that if I was unsuccessful in my hunt downtown, she could call in a favor with a teacher over in the primary side of the school who she knows for certain has a personal inkjet printer.

By the time I made it home from work at 4:30 that afternoon, I felt ready to tackle the city again, this time armed with more knowledge and even an honest-to-goodness backup plan if I failed. I put on my rain jacket and boots and set off down the hill. Libby had told me to head to Avenida República de El Salvador, which is a J-shaped street that juts off of, and then runs parallel to, Parque Carolina. I decided to start in the hook of the J and then work my way north up the street. I went into the first print shop that Libby recommended and said the line I’d practiced all the way there: “Hola, necesito imprimir algo con este papel. Tiene un impresora de inkjet?” (Hi, I need to print something with this paper. Do you have an inkjet printer?) I had “tinta” (ink) in my back pocket as well, but the printer man at school had told me that “inkjet” would be understood. This printer man told me no, and pointed to another store a few doors down. I went there, said my line, and was told no again. I put my hand on the door and was about to say, “Okay, gracias,” and go on my way, but I stopped.

If one of your goals living in this country is to become fluent in Spanish, you have to start talking, I told myself.

Speaking out loud in another language is scary and vulnerable. It’s been five years since my days of speaking Portuguese in Peace Corps, and it’s been nearly ten years since I last consistently spoke Spanish in earnest, when I studied abroad in Madrid. I’m rusty; what Spanish I did retain after switching my brain to Portuguese during training in Mozambique is mostly dormant. I can talk with my Spanish tutor no problem, and when practicing with colleagues I always have the safety net of their bilingualism. But standing alone in that print shop staring at the printer man, a stranger, was very different. I could very well stumble over my words, not be understood, and leave feeling embarrassed. But enough of a little voice in my brain reminded me that that was not a guarantee, just one possible outcome. I took a breath.

If Peter Falk were a small, shy lady living in one of the largest cities in South America, you would have mixed us up as easily as my kids mix up me and Libby: “Just one more thing,” I said, turning back to the printer man.

We went on to have a fruitful conversation: I told him that I was looking to get words and images onto clothing for a Halloween costume, so I needed to find a place that could support the iron-transfer paper. He mentioned “el caracol” (Did he say snail?! I thought) but said that was too far away, and suggested I try a t-shirt design shop around the corner. Maybe they could put the designs for me directly onto the clothes I wanted, or at least they could help with printing. He walked me outside and pointed further north up the road. I thanked him profusely and headed that direction with a new Spanish bounce in my step.

The evening took on a winding turn from there: the t-shirt place used a different printing method, so I couldn’t print there, and though they drove a hard bargain, one complication in having them print directly on my clothes was that I still did not have said clothes. I talked with a few different guys in that shop, and one had me come around the counter to show me on Google Maps where I should go next. He pointed out El Caracol, which does mean snail, but evidently is also a shopping mall on the far side of Parque Carolina, about a 15-minute walk. It looked familiar on the map; I’d passed it many times on the Ciclopaseo. “You’re sure there’s an inkjet printer there?” I said. “Absolutely,” he responded. I put my hood up, because it had started raining, and started crossing the park as the sun set.

The section of Parque Carolina that I crossed that evening. Photo is from, you guessed it, a morning on the Ciclopaseo featuring neighbor Rob.

The t-shirt man told me it was “frente a” the McDonalds, which is an easy enough landmark, so when I got to the golden arches, I looked in front and found the entrance. I spent an interminable amount of time in this mall, going up, down, and all around, asking about printers and print shops, and being pointed in every direction. I was happy that I was being bold with my Spanish, but I was starting to lose hope with the main task of printing. I felt that sweaty, muggy discomfort that reminds me of walking across the Lower East Side to get to work in college: I had been stuffed in my raincoat and walking for hours at this point. I was hungry and my legs were tired. Finally, I found a little shop in the basement floor of the mall near the back stairs with five printers inside and one printer man sitting behind the counter. I walked in, my face and shoulders weary, and I said my line. “Oh, we don’t have inkjet printers here,” the man said. Before I could ask any follow-ups, he then said, “You should try going to El Caracol.”

My eyes narrowed, not to sneer at this innocent printer man, but to double check before I lost my mind.

“El Caracol?”

“El Caracol.”

“Is...is this place,” I gestured broadly with my arms, “is this place not El Caracol?”

“This place is not El Caracol.”

I did the thing that I’m very grateful I’ve learned how to do, which was to take a deep breath and check my East Coast attitude, because this was clearly my error, and curiosity would help me learn more, not anger. The kind printer man and I went back and forth for a few more minutes. I learned a lot this evening, but one of the most helpful lessons was that the phrase “en frente de” means “in front of,” and the phrase “frente a” means “across the street from.” I walked back up to ground level, emerged outside, discovered that it was now nighttime, looked back at the McDonalds, and crossed the street to find the real El Caracol, which was a dizzying, overwhelming, spiraling nightmare collection of electronics stores that had 0 inkjet printers inside.

El Caracol, photo taken a few weeks later when I was emotionally ready to step foot in this place again. This place is terrifying.

I was halfway home, standing across the street from Quicentro, contemplating whether I should return, tail between legs, to my friend at Old Navy, when I froze and thought of Libby’s comment so many hours (years?) earlier. Right across from...I spun around. There it was in all its glory, the little Chinese clothes store. I walked inside and immediately spotted a blue shirt. A young employee walked up to me and asked if I needed help. “Oh, I need so much help,” I said, the Spanish now spilling out of me with ease. I told her about the soldier hat, and the blues, and the printer fiasco. She seemed fascinated by me, yet delighted at the very specific task I was presenting. We got to work going through racks of clothes, and within 20 minutes, I had a full outfit assembled: a long sleeve shirt and shorts that matched the blue of the hat perfectly, and a white short sleeved cotton shirt to do the iron transfers. As I was leaving, the young woman asked me what exactly my costume was going to be. I pointed out the front door at the row of blue buses outside Quicentro. “I’m going to be one of those,” I said. She stared at me blankly, and then we both started laughing. I went back up the hill to my apartment, texted Lorelei that I’d need her to call in that favor, and fell asleep in minutes.

(Many weeks later, fellow new hire Jay was hosting a murder mystery Christmas party where we had to dress as characters from A Christmas Carol. I was assigned Scrooge, and I returned to the Chinese clothes store immediately after I was cast. When I walked in the door, the same young woman’s eyes lit up like she was seeing an old friend. “I’m looking for something kind of specific,” I said, and she smiled, said, “Of course!” and wanted to hear all about my new weird costume. I assume she has invented a very peculiar backstory for me, and I love it.)

The next day, Friday, Lorelei brought me to primary teacher Natalia’s classroom to print my designs, and within minutes, at long last, I had them in my hands. That evening, I video called Steph as I started ironing on all of the images in haphazard, chaotic directions on the white shirt. Steph, of course, had new ideas to add, and she convinced me to get up Saturday morning and walk around the block to the bike shop and ask for an old busted tire so I could “run over” the white shirt with blue tire tread to add to the chaos. Saturday morning, I was video calling with Steph again as I dipped the old tire in blue paint and pressed it into the shirt on my kitchen floor. It felt just right to involve Steph in this project because this is precisely the type of weird art we’d be doing together in her Arizona room had we both still been in Sierra Vista.

The Halloween party itself was a blast. Some people understood my costume. Here’s the thing that I’m sure will be a disappointment to anyone who’s made it this far into the story: I don’t really have a great photo of the final assembled blue bus costume. The best I can offer you is this awkward mirror selfie I sent to Steph to show her when it was done, and then this one photo from early in the party.

The one good thing that El Caracol gave me was a toy store where I bought a little stuffed man who stuck out of my pocket and served as my cobrador.

    

L-R: Neighbor Jabari, blue bus, Christmas host Jay.

***

My third week living in Quito, at the end of our two weeks of pre-service in August before the kids came to school, I was sitting alone in my classroom when my phone rang on my Ecuadorian line. I felt a little nervous, but I answered it. I had no idea what the person on the other end was saying. I did hear them say “Colegio Americano” at one point, so I knew it was not spam and was probably an important phone call. “Can you wait so I can find someone to translate?” I said breathlessly into the phone, then ran out of my room. I made my way down the 7th grade block: Alina was off at lunch, Libby was eating with Alina, and the Spanish teacher Tati was there, but I hadn’t yet heard her say a word of English, so I kept running. I made it all the way to David’s science classroom. David is an alumni of Americano and studied and taught in the States for a while, so he can bounce between conversations with local hires about community-specific politics and conversations with foreign hires about backpacking in Colorado gracefully—he is our 7th grade team lead and reminds me of a mix of my friends Noah and Harrison and if you know either of them you’ll know that is absurdly high praise. I burst in his door and said, “David, can you help me?” He sprung up in his chair and I thrust the phone in front of him. Without asking me any questions, he started talking to the person on the other end and scribbled some notes on a sticky note.

As he talked, I caught my breath, and it occurred to me I might cry. For the first time since arriving in Ecuador, I felt really, really overwhelmed. In that moment, I was simultaneously feeling grateful that this person I’d just met a week earlier was willing to drop everything and get on a random phone call for me with no context, while also feeling embarrassed that I couldn’t do such a simple communication task by myself, and also feeling scared that I might struggle like this forever. David ended the call and explained patiently that it had been the school’s transportation department, and they were just calling to let me know what bus number I’d be riding with the students on Monday and what time I should be outside my apartment for pickup. He handed me the sticky note where he had written the bus number and the time. I thanked him for his help and apologized for bursting in, and he assured me that it was no problem. I quickly left so I didn’t start to cry.

Then, a few weeks after Halloween, I was in the backseat of Rob’s car as we drove with Ry and Gianna, two other new hires, on our way to go hike Imbabura Peak. We were going to spend the night in La Esperanza, a little town with a hostel that mostly serves travelers who come to summit the volcano. “Listen, the guy from the hostel is about to call me,” Rob said, picking up his phone. “I need someone who speaks Spanish to handle this!” All eyes immediately turned to me, and, humbly, I picked up the phone and then took the phone call with ease.

A lot can change in a few months.

After successfully communicating with our hosts, the next day, we successfully hiked Imbabura, whose first peak sits at 15,000 ft.