Quito, Ecuador February 11, 1979

Almost two months and $700 later, I have finally arrived in South America.  I landed in Quito a couple of days ago and got a room at the Hotel Gran Casino, also known as the Hotel Gran Gringo, for obvious reasons.  Although there are lots of gringo freaks here at the hotel, I saw almost none yesterday when I was doing a walk around.  So I had lots of opportunities to use my ‘Spanish’, such as it is.  The locals don’t seem to have any problem understanding me, but, perhaps on the assumption that I can actually speak Spanish, when they respond to my queries they speak so quickly I can only catch the odd word.  Sometimes it’s almost enough... ,  

Quito is a beautiful city – perched high up in the mountains where, despite its location almost on the equator, it is cool and refreshing.  There’s an ‘old city’ in the centre with cobblestone streets and lots of old colonial buildings – stately white or stone edifices, often with carved columns or decorations, sometimes with domes and spires and neatly trimmed gardens with swaying palm trees.  I spent a day just wandering, seeing the sights, taking the odd photo.  In terms of the people, the Latinos here seem quite Americanized in their dress and customs – not particularly colourful, office workers and school kids alike wearing black pants or skirts and white shirts or blouses.  The indigenous people add considerably more colour – the men hung to their knees with great red, orange and black striped, woven ponchos and black bowler hats.  I managed to find a market street, the stalls all plastic tarped against the rain, which seems to be a frequent occurrence here.  I managed to find some fruit and nuts for the train trip to Guayaquil tomorrow. 

 

One of my first orders of business in Quito was to get a hepatitis shot.  I decided I ought to get one because hepatitis (both A and B) is fairly common here.  One of the reasons is poor sanitation: many community water systems are contaminated, and lots of babies and children get hepatitis at an early age; unfortunately many of them die (in some places the mortality rate for children under six is almost 50%) .  The kids who don’t die seem to develop an immunity – or just live with the disease.  Whatever the case, all of the locals drink the tap-water.   The other concern, for travelers who by and large are drinking bottled water is that a hepatitis infected person might be preparing the food you are eating, and might not be using any kind of ‘food safety’ precautions.  To get a hepatitis shot here, you just go to a drug store, tell them what you want, and either take the vaccine to a doctor, administer it yourself, or get the pharmacist to do it.  I opted for the last, and a cheery old guy with yellowed fingers stood and chatted with me as he gave me the injection.  

 

It’s realities like this that remind me I’m traveling in a second, and in some places third, world country.  Cities are dirty, people are poor, and mostly illiterate.  People who have lived here all their lives don’t know where things within a few blocks of their homes are.   They know only those places they frequent: their place of work, the market, their relatives’ homes, and maybe the local bus station.  But not necessarily the bank or post-office.  In any event, going to banks, post-offices and telephone agencies involves long waits, poor service if and when you get it, and usually incorrect information.  It’s an exercise in frustration, so most gringos tend to avoid going altogether.   It’s also difficult to ask for directions as most locals are so astonished when a gringo speaks to them that they freeze up, certain that you must be speaking a language they can’t understand.  Once you’ve repeated yourself several times, and they realize you are speaking Spanish, and they can understand, they will chat away for hours, often extremely rapidly, so that now you can’t understand them!

 

Things like electricity and running water often don’t work.  Because labour is so cheap, many things are done by hand rather than machines.  People carry great loads on their heads or in their arms; construction is done with hand tools, not power tools; clothes are often hand-made.  And there’s no such thing as ‘fast food’.  Graft, thievery and delinquency are ‘legitimate’, and very common, ways of life, especially in the city.  Still the people are friendly, helpful and good-natured, and have great senses of humour.  

 

The only real complaint I have, and it’s a big one, is the constant harassment that I, and all gringo women, am subjected to by Latino men.  Whistles, cat-calls, suggestive gestures, and frequent uncomfortable encounters.  It has been explained to me, by a Latino, that a woman alone on the street is, by definition in this macho culture, a prostitute, and is treated as such.  So the offers of ‘friendship’, or ‘showing me around’, or ‘going for a coffee’, are often thinly veiled propositions.  Their ulterior motives become more apparent when I decline their offer – they become persistent to the point, almost of my feeling threatened.  I don’t go out in the later evening unless I’m with a group: it’s simply not worth it.  And I have taken to wearing my grandmother’s wedding band, not that my would-be Romeos would take any notice.

But truly I feel as ‘safe’ here as anywhere in North America: there are so many people on the streets here, at all times of day and night, that there are lots of ‘eyes’, and I feel pretty sure people would intervene to help if they saw the need. And the Latino men, despite all their verbal advances, are too ‘macho’, and too afraid of being rebuked by a woman, to do anything more than talk – or catcall.  For the most part the Indian men avoid all contact with North American women, perhaps partly due to language barriers, their own cultural and social norms in terms of relationships between the sexes, and their natural shyness, or wariness, stemming from years/decades of oppression.  They are generally courteous and deferential if approached for directions or help.

 

The only thing I’m a little concerned about is the ‘drug squad’ or narcos whose ‘official’ job is to catch and stop traffickers and basically anyone they suspect is involved in drugs.  It’s an unfortunate reality in many of these Latin American countries that the USA, in its increasingly oppressive and interfering manner, pays these governments for each gringo arrested for drug possession and/or trafficking.  Or so we are told… .  It’s not clear what the benefit of this activity is, or what the US interest really is, as it’s pretty well known that most of the illegal drug traffic is financed by and benefits US politicians.  But the outcome of the program, taking into account how common graft and corruption is here, is that gringos are frequently framed by South (and Latin) American police and narcos.  For example, the last time I was in Guatemala City, four of us went into a Dairy Queen.  We no sooner got in the door than we were accosted by three undercover police agents.   A woman agent to me and the other woman aside to search us, explaining that the DQ was ‘the place’ for drug exchanges in Guatemala City.  The agent was a young woman (only 20).  I chatted with her, and was once again glad I’d taken the Spanish course as she spoke no English.  After a few minutes conversation she decided not to search us.  When I told her about my apprehension about ‘agents’ planting dope on me, she said: “Oh yes, they do it all the time in Panajachel’ it’s very bad…”.  To me, it’s both bad and sad, and just one more reason why pressure should be applied on the American government to butt out of the affairs of other countries and clean up their own back yard.  If it weren’t for the American demand for drugs, there wouldn’t be such a problem with drugs in most of these countries.

 

 

From a letter home…

I am experiencing multitudes of ‘new things’, but I feel that the experiences are, for the most part, drifting through me, not sticking.  A few have penetrated through the fog in which I wander, but those are mostly images – fleeting glimpses of this or that – the women washing on the rocks at Lago Atitlan; a beggar in the street with unseeing eyes, looking, looking at the people passing by her upturned hands as her husband, crouching there beside her, scraped away on his old violin; a child running barefoot and ragged down a dusty jungle-desert road after a spotted cow, frightened by the clack-clacking of our train; the icy angular beauty of a snow-clad volcano rising over rolling green-gold checkered pasture land; innumerable bamboo or sugar cane huts thatched with palm leaves, or adobe block homes with dirt floors and too many children inside and out.

 

There is just so much to see, hear and experience here.  I am finally beginning to come to terms with the concept of ‘third world’.  With poverty, illiteracy, disease, and completely impossible ‘systems’.  Here there is more noise than you can imagine; you can easily break your leg falling into some hole in the sidewalk, now half-filled with garbage it’s been there so long, but will never be repaired.  Here you have to bargain even with the pharmacist for toilet-paper.  But here also is always (and sometimes too much and too loud) music.  And here also the people laugh and smile more.  And if I dislike the cities with their noise and grime here, I like the country more.

 

Outwardly I am ‘unmoved’ by the constant flow of beggar children, by the thousands of people who make their living by selling, on the street, whatever people will buy – matches, fruit, clothes, a song, a dance, a prayer.  It is a hard, hard world they live in.  And my constant safety belt is knowing that it is not my world, and likely never will be.  And they know that too, but they don’t know why.  For them it’s because I’m American, I have money, I am educated.  But they have no way of conceptualizing what exactly these things are.  So we all live in our little, culturally and personally coloured, worlds of illusion and fantasy.  There is no ‘real world’ as far as I can make out.