Cause in my head there’s a greyhound station, Where I send my thoughts to far off destinations... -Death Cab For Cutie

Given my time here, I thought it was important that I write one final ode to this country that has been my home for the past eight months. Right now I am sitting in the airport, not even beginning to comprehend that when the plane leaves the ground, the look I get at the ant-like city below me will be the last for at least a couple of years. And what has this year meant to me? Right now that is difficult to say. Through sleepiness, and illness and a failure to grasp that I am leaving, I have come to the conclusion that what this year has been for me and all that I have learned will become apparent only when I have left.

I spent the last couple of hours of my time in Ecuador with a lovely Scottish woman I had met in my hostel. She had been travelling for the last year all throughout latin america. Her name is Lily. We talked while she filled up her hot water bottle and while I made myself some toast and peanut butter. We watched tv together for a while, but not before exchanging my peanut butter, jam and bread for some of her hardboiled eggs and mayonnaise. We were both very happy with this trade.

My last taxi ride in Ecuador was with a man named Luis. He asked all the familiar questions; where are you from? what were you doing here? where is your boyfriend? He didn't overcharge me for the ride.

Now in the airport, I was befriended by a woman from Quebec who saw the Canadian patches on my backpack. Though I am sure that after this journey to Miami we will have been nothing more than passing acquaintances in each others lives, it is nice to have company, even if its just for a little while.

I am not heading back to Canada just yet though. I will be stopping (more like back tracking) to Costa Rica to visit a friend for three weeks before the final stretch of my journey is realized. Until then, consider me airborne, in between other places and home.

So I suppose that this is the final post of my journey in Ecuador.
All I can say is that it has been an incredible, valuable and challenging experience.
I can't have imagined spending my year anywhere else.

Thank you Ecuador.
Un abrazo. Nos vemos.
-Sarah

Hats off to my distant hope... - Bon Iver

It has been almost 3 months since I’ve last written for this blog and so with this one you will find some serious gaps in my adventures here in Ecuador as I do not plan to recount them here. I will only talk about what has been happening recently in these parts down south.

I am currently in Carchi in my placement in the small community of Jesús del Gran Poder, where everybody knows each other and they are all somehow related. As I write it is in my room, fingers icy with a view out my window of green patchwork quilt mountain tops and clouds. I can only get into town about once a week to use the internet but such things as this I can write beforehand.

Yesterday I spent my day with five farmers, one the owner of the land on which we were working, harvesting artichokes or alcachofas as they are called here. For hours we spent walking the hectares of land, in between the rows cutting down artichokes the size of baseballs and putting them in the buckets hanging at our sides. When it started raining (as it does every day here) we continued working. By the time we had finished we had harvested around thirty 33 kilo bags, all to be brought to Quito where they are to be processed and then exported to places like Europe and the U.S, to be eaten by people who will never know the faces of those who made a part of their meal possible.

And here that is what I am doing. Working and talking with farmers, trying to find out why it is they are producing what they are, for whom, and how that might have an effect on their livelihoods. 

Pesticides are used a lot here. Prior to coming to my community, I had this romantic and idealistic imaginary world in my head where nobody uses pesticides, everything is organically produced and the land and people would be healthier for it. Being here, I see now just how far-fetched this pretend world of mine really is. Before it was easy for me to think this way because I come from a place where, for a few people, this is possible. Here I feel I have been given the opportunity to understand something that I otherwise would have remained ignorant to. 

I am just over half way into my seventh month here which is crazy to think about. Crazy too to think about the fact that it’s been almost seven months since I’ve seen my family and friends; that Christmas for me passed by without snow or the same old gatherings; that most of my past year has been spent in a different country, with different smells and people and foods and traditions and ways of communication; that I will spend my 22^nd birthday with a family that has come to treat me like one of their own; that in May I will be back in a familiar country that might not seem so familiar to me anymore.

Admittedly though, home is something that I and many of the students here have been thinking of a lot lately. To be completely comfortable in ones house. To eat whatever one wishes to and when.  To sleep in past 6:30am and not feel like we are being lazy. To be with people we’ve been missing. I think that is what we are craving the most: friends and family who are, in spite of emails and phone calls, still worlds away from where we are right now. In talking to them when we can, they are sure to say something like “ just enjoy it while you can, live in the moment, you will be home sooner than you think”, but this is not so easy when the one thing you want the most cannot be had.

Homesickness is the worst kind of illness. It is incurable though the symptoms of it can be, to some extent, relieved. It is always exacerbated by physical sickness as we seem to revert back to child-like dependency in our most vulnerable states and want nothing more than to be taken care of by our parents. It is like a constant tugging at your heart, a void that can be filled only one way. And time, as if to mock those experiencing homesickness, passes by even more slowly.  This is what can ruin your present whereabouts. So the trick is to not let it take you too far ahead into the future, where in your mind you are already home amongst the things and people you’ve been longing for. But of course like most things, this is easier said than done.

Surely it should be said that my time here in Carchi has been amongst my most valuable here in Ecuador and I have been extremely lucky to have found a placement so well-suited to my interests and passions. I have been accepted by people whom I would have otherwise never gotten the opportunity to meet and I have been learning an immense amount from many of them. When they ask me if I will ever come back to Ecuador, I say yes, seeing myself returning to this place and being welcomed back warmly and with open arms.

And so here I am. Eating a lemon in my bed trying to fend off the last of a sore throat, waiting for Monday to come when I will go into town and send this to all of you and for a few brief hours, feel connected to people back home. And then I will be back here, working and learning and counting down the days until I am back in Quito, until I am travelling again, and finally until I am in Canada, snapping my fingers together with one of my dearest friends, marveling with her at just how quickly time does move and slip between ones fingers like water.

Punk police are afraid of me... -Rage Against the Machine

Carchi, Ecuador

Volcano!!! On my way to my community.

After travelling to Carchi for the weekend to check out my prospective placement in a community called Jesús del Gran Poder, having altitude sickness and spending all of Friday night/ Saturday morning on the toilet and throwing up as a result of food poisoning, Irene, the woman I was with and I began our journey back to Quito at around 5pm. In her beat up standard, we began our way back, climbing and falling with the slope of the mountains. Little did we know this would be no simple four hour drive back to the city.

Ok so…I had started this blog post thinking of making it really dramatic and suspenseful (as the night was), but I haven’t had any time, and in fact I wrote that first paragraph over a week ago.

So as distasteful and vague as this is, I am going to use bullet points…if anything to remind me of what happened 5 months from now. I apologize for all the gaps I am about to not fill in.

-we didn’t know there was a pilgrimage happening meaning that crowds of people were walking a ridiculous distance from Quiche to Quito (or the other way around, can’t remember). This meant the Pan-American highway (the main highway in Ecuador) was shut down. Great.

-we got stopped just outside a gas station. All we wanted was biscotti’s  as I had not had anything to eat all day and they are some of the best in Cayambe.

-We got stopped by the police. Irene kind of overlooked what they were telling her (turn around here, you can only get back to Quito at 4am tomorrow), drove past them and into the gas station.

Here we are sitting in the car. Irene is just about to tell me to get out of the car and lie to the fuzz. Party going on whilst we are trying to make it back to Quito!

-From here, after eating some food, we snuck by the police and began following a government vehicle down an empty road.

At the next police stop Irene told me to get out of the car with my Censo card (Ecuadorian ID) and copy of my Canadian passport and tell the three police officers blocking the road (in Spanish) that my mother was landing in Quito at 9:30pm that night; that she doesn’t know Spanish or anyone in the country and that I had to get back to Quito before then…at this point it was about 8:15pm. Who knows whether or not they believed me, but they let us through.

-The next police stop, the police officer told us we couldn’t get through. I handed him my identification again (which he said was basically useless) and after pleading with him (didn’t lie this time) he let us through saying he didn’t want to hear about any dead pilgrims the next day. We told him we were women and that we would drive very carefully. Yes, we stooped that low.

-At this point I kept looking at the gas gage…we were literally almost on empty. Irene didn’t voice it, but she told me later that if we hadn’t found a gas station we would have been fucked. We were in the middle of nowhere in the mountains. Luckily we found a gas station that has just closed and the man there was kind enough to open up a pump for us.

A few of the vehicles on the first road. Dusty and bumpy.

-Shortly after this we picked up a 21 year old hitchhiker named Byron. He was trying to get back to Quito to see his wife. Irene asked what I thought about him before letting him get into the car and asked if he has any guns or weapons on him. He kept us company during our hour and a half drive on a dirt road, seeing hardly any cars and no lights from Quito which we had caught a glimpse of about a half hour before getting on this road. I thought we were lost, but eventually we found our way back to the pavement.

-When we finally arrived in Quito at around 12:30am, we were famished and I had my first meal at KFC in about 8 years.

-I got into a cab after this, willing to pay the guy 20$ to get me home safely, but he was nice and I only paid the standard of about 3$.

Lying to the police, dealing with an upset stomach, picking up a hitchhiker and eating at KFC? Quite an experience here in Ecuador, I’d say.

Don't go chasing waterfalls... -TLC

          As promised, I am sticking to my theme of pictures over words. Here is a trip that my friends Constance, Emily, Tamara and I took when we had a reading break at the beginning of November. We spent five days in a place called Baños, about five hours South of Quito.

         After having gone on yet another trip to Otaválo with out Kichwa professors to observe 'El día de los difuntos' or the 'Day of the Dead' at both an indigenous and mestizo cemetary (a day when people honour their deceased loved ones by bringining flowers, food and drink to their graves, cleaning them and then conversing with the dead), Constance and I returned to Quito just in time to catch the last bus to Baños. From here I will let the pictures speak for themselves...

Ziplining adventure...

Yes. One of the first things we decided to do was to go ziplining across a kilometre wide canyon. Did I mention I'm afraid of heights?



Getting ready to fly.





Constance, ready for take off!



On our way back across the canyon...




Scariest trail ride of my life. You tell me if you think riding on a cliffside with loose footing and trees whacking you in the face isn't scary?

Tamara, Emily, Constanc and I getting ready to ride the (mountain) range!

A view from the back of a horse.

Sketchy, steep trails.

This is Volcán Tungurahua, (from Quichua tunguri (throat), rahua (fire): "Throat of Fire" or from Panzaleo), an active stratovolcano located in the Cordillera Oriental of Ecuador. One of the last major eruptions was in 2006.

This is pummice, a result of the eruption in 2006.

This is a bar/hostel that our guide Jaime took us to, literally only accessible by horseback. Would have never known it was there otherwise!

We had to cross a small canyon and river to get to the bar. We sat in cage attached to a wire and zipped across. It was kind of like ziplining but a lot less secure.

Jaime showed us this swing in the middle of the forest just a few minutes away from the bar. So much fun.

A view from the bar in the middle of nowhere.

This is the random tree house Jaime took us to as well! Tamara was the first to climb up...the ladder was a little unstable.

Just about to make it to the top!

Bikes, waterfalls and river swimming...Here are pictures from a bike ride that Constance and I took one day. After renting bikes, we had planned to bike the 61 kilometres from Ba

Taking a break to take in the view of the waterfalls and to give our bums a rest.

The sensitivity of nature tranforms in man the magic of creation.

From the top...after crawling through a cave to get there.

Now at the river for some down time...did I mention the amount of steps to get down to the river and back up were CN tower worthy?

Taking a break.

My view from my lounging spot in the river.



They keep going...




and going...



Ah, feeling Canadian.

Not exactly the most peaceful place as there were many people swimming in the river, but this man was looking for some kind of inner-peace.

This was our view as we ate lunch after we ascended all those flipping stairs.



This man we met outside the restaurant. He asked us if we wanted a ride back to Baños. We were dead on our feet, but still had hoped to keep biking to the Basin. He told us it would be another 3 hours from where we were, and it was already 4 o'clock. So, (gratefully), we hoped in the back of his truck, exhausted, with the hopes of a nap when we returned to our hostel. 



Thank you Baños, for an eventful and thrilling experience!