Returned Peace Corps Volunteers

We landed in Quito, Ecuador on June 20, 2007 along with 45 other trainees of Omnibus 98. Along with our ridiculously overloaded suitcases, we arrived filled with high expectations, hope, fear and dreams of making a difference. We were ready to leave the American lifestyle behind and embrace a new country and culture as Rural Public Health Volunteers.

This blog is merely a glimpse of our Peace Corps experience in an incredibly beautiful country and culture. The posts are filled with stories of Ecuadoreans who unknowingly challenged us to open our hearts and minds and see the world from a different point of view.

We are forever changed by our Peace Corps service. The time was filled with incredible challenges and accomplishments as we learned to live and work in another country and cross the cultural divide to form friendships. We joined the Peace Corps to give of ourselves, but we received so much more than we ever dreamed.

Saying good-bye to our friends and leaving our home in El Chaco was one of the hardest things we’ve ever done. The good-bye parties started nearly a month before we left and continued until we caught our final bus to Quito. Our friends in El Chaco are some of the most generous and humble people we’ve ever known and they will never be forgotten.

We flew out of Quito as Returned Peace Corps Volunteers on August 15, 2009, just as the sun was rising over the Andes Mountains. The raw beauty of this small South American country never ceased to amaze us. We choked back tears as we thought about how soon we would be able to return.


Life is calling. How far will you go?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0sTWqccxRU

COS Reflection

A friend suggested this little activity to me to put COS, Close of Service, in perspective and you guys are just lucky enough to read it! Here’s my list of: What I’ll Miss About Life in Ecuador, What I won’t Miss, What I’m Looking Forward to About Life in the U.S., What I’m Not Looking Forward to About Life in the U.S. of A.

What I’ll Miss About My Life in Ecuador: (in no particular order)

- My soccer team/playing soccer
- Having an entire day with nothing to do
- Walking everywhere
- Español
- Grilled corn with cheese from street vendor lady
- Lunches/dinners for $2 or less
- The beautiful scenery
- The tranquility
- Our precious wooden house
- Life without stress
- All our friends, The Ashqui Family, Rosa, and Rebeca’s family
- Public transportation
- Really fresh milk and cheese
- Wearing sweats and t-shirts more than I should
- Not worrying about fashion
- Living very GREEN
- Nearly perfect temperatures year-round
- The “kiss” greeting
- Evening walks to get street food
- Really cheap fruits and veggies
- Fresh shrimp at $3.50 a pound
- Our PCV friends
- Not driving
- Sleeping in buses
- Drinking warm milk in the evenings
- Sunny, gorgeous days in El Chaco- few and far between, but wonderful
- Rafting with the Ashquis
- Green trees and plants year-round
- Juan 23, our church group and the music
- Women openly breastfeeding in public

What I Won’t Miss About My Life In Ecuador:

- Sweeping
- Hand washing clothes
- Always sticking out
- Turkeys’ squawking/roosters crowing waking me up
- Cold, rainy days where I can’t ever get warm
- Making meals from scratch when I’m hungry
- Missing all family events
- Missing American holidays
- Always looking for new projects
- Really slow internet
- Mold
- Mice, spiders and abnormally large insects in our house
- No personal bubble in public places
- People butting in lines
- Washing the milk bucket
- Having the milk boil over and kill the flame and then having to clean up the spilled milk and start over again
- Peeling potatoes with Ecuadorian women
- Cooking with Ecuadorians and having to cut up vegetables without a cutting board with giant, dull knives
- No public bathrooms
- Really nasty bathrooms with no toilet paper
- Hand washing dishes in cold water
- Always being worried about getting robbed outside of El Chaco
- Night buses and not being able to sleep
- Crazy, unsafe drivers and not having a seatbelt

What I’m Looking Forward to in the U.S.

- Washing machine and dryer
- Vacuuming instead of sweeping
- Dishwasher
- Microwave
- Having a separate life from Gregg’s
- Being with our family and friends- number one, but I already wrote in no particular order
- Holidays
- Season changes
- Always being able to talk without being embarrassed
- Weekend trips
- Getting my Masters
- Having regular work
- Getting a dog
- Meeting my niece Alexis
- Buying a house
- Being able to make quick, easy meals

What I’m Not Looking to About Life in the U.S.

- Stress, stress, stress
- Driving everywhere
- Ridiculously hot and cold weather
- Pointless spending
- Fashion- it’ll make me buy new clothes and then I run into pointless spending
- Traffic
- No free time
- All English
- Lots of Gringos
- Not living as greenly
- Canned and frozen fruits and veggies
- Expensive everything

Check out more photos on Facebook... 182 to be exact: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2013098&id=1463436368&l=a218f61dc0

Work

Why all the blog posts all of a sudden? Reason Number 1, this blog will soon come to an end. Number 2, I often start writing blogs when I get an idea, but never finish them. Now I’m finishing partially started entries. Number 3, I have time now, so I’m making up for the months without blogs.

We did work these last few months even though we rarely wrote about it here. Gregg has been working for the last six months on a community bank. Peace Corps really pushes the community banks as income generation projects. Gregg started the bank in the neighboring town of Santa Rosa with our friend Jose, who lives there.

There are about 30 members and each member has to put $2 each week in the bank. Members can take out loans and pay them back with 10 percent interest. At the end of each year the bank is liquidated and the members split the money equally. Then the bank starts over again from scratch. Pretty cool concept.

Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Prize back in 1996 for his work in Bangladesh with community banks, microfinancing and “helping the poor help themselves.” Peace Corps pushes the same sort of bank model as Yunus’ Grameen Bank.

Members usually take out loans ranging from $20 to $100 and it is amazing what a relatively small amount of money allows people to do. They are now able to buy more seeds and have bigger harvests or buy an extra cow and produce more milk. The bank members are going to be diving into their extra money this weekend to throw us a good-bye party… or maybe they’ll have to take out a loan!

I’ve been done with my work at the high school now for a while. Although I really dislike the whole school system here, it seems the students enjoyed my English classes. Even though I didn’t have any official health classes this last semester, I still tried to incorporate a lot of health/self-esteem type topics in my classes and do lots of activities. More than anything, the students just seemed happy to pass an hour of their day not copying from the board!

Overall, it was a really good experience for me working in the high school. I’ve learned a lot about crossing the cultural divide and connecting with kids. I decided I truly hate grading. I also decided that I’m going to keep with this teaching thing for a while.

Living Green

We’ve become quite environmentally conscious since we arrived here. Even before we joined PC we acted a lot “greener” than your average American. But now, we are glowing… or stinking green. I even did one of the surveys online to see your environmental impact and ours is nearly non-existent!

- The average temperature in El Chaco is around 65 degrees, which means no heating, no air-conditioning and no fans.

- The electricity regularly goes off during the day and it usually takes us awhile to realize it. Year-round the sun rises at 6 a.m. and sets at 6 p.m., so we only really need electricity at night.

- We reuse everything! We’ve had the same 15 Ziplock bags, since we arrived. Just wash and reuse. Butter containers, yogurt jars, etc. are our Tupperware.

- Everything is cooked from scratch. This means barely any trash- no boxes, cans or cartons. All of our organic scraps are buried in the ground to make fertilizer. Unfortunately, we can’t flush our toilet paper, so we still have to take out the trash every week.

- Only high efficient light bulbs in our house. If you don’t have them, get them!

- Our only electric appliances in the kitchen are our fridge and blender. Everything is cooked on our little gas stove. Wait… I guess those are the only appliances in our entire house! No washer or dryer… just the good old washboard and wringer.

- If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down. An easy water-saving tip… not gross, just environmentally friendly. When we enter a water crisis, nobody will be making fun of me!

- We shower every other day. Saves water, soap, shower gel, shampoo and conditioner! Only Americans are crazy enough to think you have to shower everyday.

- Our milk bucket has been washed, filled, boiled, emptied and reused every week for two years.

- No lawn mower here. Just pull out the machete and start chopping.

- No cars for us. We walk everywhere and take a public bus to Quito once a month to do our shopping and visit the Peace Corps office. When in Quito, we hardly ever get a taxi. We hop on the electric Trolley for .25 cents.

Now obviously, this green lifestyle is much more difficult in the U.S., especially Missouri. This is something I’m really going to miss though- especially never having to use the heat or air-conditioning and not driving has been a huge plus!

With no Target around, I’ve learned to live without many things that I used to think were “essentials.” Reduce is one of the 3Rs that I think Americans often overlook, because we are such a consumer-driven nation. Although I’ll have to give up many of my green Ecuadorian ways, my motto Stateside will continue to be Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. And don’t call me cheap… I’m just being Green… and frugal.

Health Survey

We are finding some pretty interesting stuff, as we’ve started the whole packing up process. There is tons of stuff from our work as health educators that I had completely forgotten about- stories we had written about washing your hands, games we made, scary pictures Gregg drew of bad children that don’t brush their teeth and only eat sweets and our health survey results.

As we headed out of training, Peace Corps assigned us homework. We had to do a survey on the health situation/needs of our communities and present our results to PC after 3 months. With our counterparts, we administered the survey to 45 families in and around El Chaco. Based on our findings, we designed a work plan with our counterparts.

Here’s some of the results that I found interesting back in the day and still do compared with the U.S.:

-Average family size: 5.9

-Biggest problem in the community according to residents: 1. Water quality 2. Sewage system 3. Roads

-Families that have gardens: 66%

-Mothers that breastfeed: 100%

-How long on average did moms breastfeed their babies: 49% between 13 months and 2 years, 42% 7-12 months, 6% more than 2 years, 3% less than 6 months

-Children that are vaccinated: 100%

-Average number of pregnancy per mother: 4.6

-Average age of first pregnancy: 19 years-old

-Women of childbearing age that use birth control: 71%

-Women that have had a pap smear: 47%

If only I could post Gregg’s beautiful storybooks and his cavity-filled characters.

Not in the U.S. of A.

We received some really sad, scary news last week. Our comadre Rebecca (our goddaughter’s mom) went to the local hospital after having sharp pain in the stomach, diarrhea and vomiting. She was there for three days and the doctor diagnosed her sharp abdominal pain as a “stomach infection.” Her daughter Natalia finally decided something just wasn’t right and called a doctor in Quito. The doctor told Natalie to get a taxi and get her mom to Quito as quick as possible. Unfortunately, we didn’t find out about this all until she was already in a taxi on the way to Quito.

Apparently by the time they arrived in Quito, Rebecca was unconscious. It turns out that her appendix had ruptured and she went into an emergency surgery. The doctor said her “insides were rotting” after he took a liter of pus out and said she’s very lucky to be alive.

Rebecca has no health insurance and the surgery alone cost $6,000. She is going to have at least 5 months of “treatments” which are going to be very expensive. To put it all in perspective- Natalia, a school counselor with a college degree, makes $3,000 a year.

It is hard to believe that no one- doctor, nurses or her family- caught onto the “sharp abdominal pain.” The most frustrating part is that the doctor won’t receive any sort of reprimand! Almost all of the “doctors” here in the local hospital are very young, inexperienced and have almost no supervision. Medical school is a total of 5 years after graduating from high school and then they are sent to rural communities to do their residency- with no supervision!

Rebecca has some land in El Chaco and is selling it all to pay her medical expenses. There are some people that have medical insurance, but she’s not one of them. She also has a small grocery store in the front of her house, which she’s now going to have to rent out too. Really sad situation, but at least she’s alive. She’ll have to stay in Quito for sometime, while she receives her treatments. We’re going to visit her next week.

The good-byes
The good-bye get-togethers and “last times” are beginning. Thankfully, we’ve had very little work lately, so we’ve had lots of time to spend with friends and time to take everything in!

My soccer team threw us a good-bye party last weekend. The morning started by butchering a pig and the rest of the day was filled with cleaning, cutting, preparing and cooking ALL the parts of the pig! The pig was butchered at 9 a.m. and we ate 12 hours later. To say the least, I had a lot of hands-on-learning that day. After stuffing the intestines to make sausages, I never thought I get the smell of blood and guts off my hands!

My favorite part of the day was when all the women decided to take a break to go play soccer and volleyball. It was about 6:30 p.m. and I really thought we were just about done and ready to eat, but I know well never to assume anything here! Since there is no sense of time, nobody seemed concerned about serving the meal quickly, so that we could return to our houses.

We left everything where it was and left to play some very intense games. Some of the women played barefoot, because they were working heals or sandals. It got to the point were we couldn’t see the ball and we were falling all over the place and I kept on waiting for someone says its time to stop. It didn’t occur for a long time. It was one of those moments were I couldn’t help but think, this would NEVER happen in the U.S!

After the meal, we got to dive into the formal speeches. An extremely informal day, but Ecua-style is to turn every event into a formal speech contest. My soccer coach started off by saying how much they were going to miss us, what good friends we’ve become, that we have to come back to visit, etc., ect. Then came our turn to talk, and though I’m still not good at the “flowery speech” I did shed a few tears, which got all the women crying. A really long, but nice good-bye party.

Other happenings:

-Gregg’s team won El Chaco’s championship- super exciting. Mine team lost our last game and we ended up in third place- really big bummer.

- Telephone job interviews have started, for Gregg, at least. Seems like a Spanish-speaking RN is a big deal in KC.

- Jeff, the other PCV in El Chaco, finished up his service and left a couple of weeks ago. It was really sad, almost unreal to seem him go, but a good preview of what we will have to go through.

- Mice are officially taking over our house. I will not miss the daily battles of Gregg and Maggie vs. Mice and Maggie vs. spiders and abnormally large insects. Gregg thinks we should only kill the mice.

Food Poisoning and Fútbol

40 days to go and counting. It is getting sadder and sadder to see the days slip away. I’m already starting to feel the stress of the U.S. and I don’t like it one bit! I’ve lived 2 years nearly stress-free, so this is going to be a real adjustment.

Once were back in Missouri….

I’ve been spending a great deal of my time making plans for life after the Corps. After LOTS of debating, I will start classes this fall at the University of Missouri- Kansas City. I’m going to be getting a Masters in Curriculum and Instruction with secondary certification to be a Spanish teacher. We’ll see how this works out- hopefully better than my major in Journalism! I’ll just have night classes and hopefully I’ll be able to find a job, so Gregg doesn’t have to be my sugar daddy.

Gregg is doing lots of job searching right now. He will go back to nursing, while he applies to nurse practitioner programs.
I think due to pure boredom, Gregorio returns to make a blog appearance. Here’s his rundown of June:

Food Poisoning Fun:

With only a month and a half left in PC, I ended up getting sicker than I ever had in the entire two years. Ironically, we were in Quito at the time for our end of service medical check-up. We went to eat with a group of volunteers for a good-bye dinner at one of the nicest restaurants I’ve been to in Ecuador. I always thought I would get food poising from some sort of street food, like grilled chicken gizzards, cow intestines or fried pig skin, but no, it came from a $10 plate of salmon at a fancy Thai restaurant. I spent the entire night in the hotel bathroom and even kept up one of friends in the next room.

Last night after getting back to Chaco, we headed over to the Ashqui’s house. They served us a traditional meal of ceso or boiled cow brains. Of course, it didn’t even faze me!

Host family Visit:

After Quito we went up to Pesillo to see our host family one last time. It was really good to see our Ecua-brothers. The oldest Ivan is going to be 16 and heis really trying to join a student exchange program to study in the
U.S. They were all very happy to see us and we spent the afternoon doing what we mainly did in our three months living there, we played cards.

Confirmation Weekend:

Two weeks ago, we celebrated the confirmation of our landlord’s son, Darwin. The day got started with a 4-hour Mass, which of course started one hour late. 92 Chaqueños were confirmed, so El Chaco was one giant fiesta that day. Our neighbor’s party was still going strong at 3 a.m.

Fútbol:

On Saturday, Maggie’s team had a game with a team from the neighboring town. Her team was fully uniformed and on the field right at game time. The opponents didn’t show up until 45 minutes after the scheduled time, so Maggie’s team automatically won. Even though it is in the rule that there is only a thirty-minute wait time, the other team could not believe that they had the game called on time. I really thought some women were going to start a fight. It is serious now that they’re in the semi-finals. If Maggie’s team wins next week they finish in first place, however if they lose or tie, they don’t qualify for the next round.

My team won a hard fought 3-2 battle to my old soccer team. We are currently in a three-way tie for first place with two games to go. This has been a much better soccer season than last year!

The Last Hoorah

The last few weeks have been a blur of fiestas, sightseeing, buses and lots of diarrhea. Gregg’s siblings Cliff, Erica and Geoff came to visit us just in time for Chaco’s annual festival. After the fiestas, we traveled through half of Ecuador, riding approximately 40 different buses and eating at some really sketchy restaurants (if you can call them that). Diarrhea caught up with all of us at some point, but Cliff won hands down on toilet time, losing 12 pounds in his two-week visit.

Fiestas De El Chaco

It rained a lot during the fiestas, but we still had a great time. Just like last year, the four-day festival was filled with the running of the bulls, concerts, drinking, dancing and parades. Erica and I took advantage of .75-cent manicures the first day and then the siblings enjoyed a nice lunch of guinea pig. I ate roasted pork- still not a fan of guinea pig.

All the concerts were outside and since it was raining a ton, the dancing area was pure mud. Us Nurrenberns danced anyway (with a little pressuring from this Nurrenbern) until 3 a.m. in the rain and mud with about 500 other crazy Chaqueños.

Part One of Traveling

Part One of traveling includes from May 27 to May 31 when Geoff flew out of Quito with some really stinky shoes. Activities during these days included hot springs in Papallacta, bird watching, repelling down a waterfall and zip lining in Mindo, artisan market in Otavalo, leather market in Cotacachi, Indian restaurant in Quito and chao Geoff.

Part Two of Traveling

Part Two of traveling includes from May 31 to June 7 when Erica and Cliff flew out of Quito with stinky everything. Activities during these days included hiking around the Quilotoa Crater, night bus to Cuenca, a big colonial city in Southern Ecuador, Cliff vomiting on night bus, orchard garden, museum with real shrunken heads from the Shuar tribe, Incan ruins in Incapirca and then a night bus to Quito.

In Quito, Gregg and I had our two-day Close of Service conference, so Cliff and Erica were on their own for sightseeing.

Close of Service Conference

A very intense two days of “here’s what you need to do to finish up Peace Corps and start your life in the U.S.” and saying good-bye to many of our volunteer friends. This was the last time our whole group was together, because we pick our own dates to leave, between August 5 and August 31. PC staff did treat us to some fancy food, gave us a certificate and thanked us for our service in a closing ceremony.

Somehow I’ve become sentimental in these last two years. Now being the sentimental person that I am, I’ll include the Thank You from Peace Corps.

“As you close your service…
Thank you for staying and struggling when the road was almost too tough.
Thank you for all the work you put in to master a new language.
Thank you for leaving your family and friends, for what were, at sometimes, two very long years.
Thank you for giving up many of the comforts you were used to.
Thank you for learning to walk in another’s shoes and learning to walk by their side.
Thank you for being open to the beauty of Ecuador and the warmth of its people.
Thank you for empowering others to believe in themselves.
Thank you for your piece in the puzzle of interconnectedness, be it the child with the shining eyes who started (even if only for a minute) to believe in herself, the woman who learned to stand taller, or the farmer who found the foreigner valued his friendship.
You will never be quite the same, nor will Ecuador.”

Quito to St. Louis- August 15th

Our official Close of Service date has been set for August 15. It is really hard to believe we only have two months left! All though it may sound corny, I’ll say it anyway… my time in Peace Corps has truly been the best two years of my life. It is so hard to see everything come to an end. Right now I’m going through the “really sad to say good-bye and leave the laidback lifestyle stage,” but I know as our COS date grows closer I’ll be ready to head home to see all you family and friends.