Six days in Ambato have gone by and the everyday routine has started to set in. My Spanish is probably getting better, however starting from scratch I’m still next to useless: I can’t build sentences and I can’t understand what people say –which makes communicating… hard. Luckily for me I can hide behind Oscar, who’s Spanish is really good. Since he translates the overall picture of conversations, I usually understand most of what’s going on and can communicate questions through him. But why oh why did I learn German in school… Enough complaining, our work is interesting, the family is great and we are planning a lot of weekend excursions so it's all good.
Host family
We are five people living with the host family at the moment: me, Oscar Ralf, Anders, an American girl, Lauren. Anders and Ralf are studying economics together with Oscar in Lund and it was the three of them who set up the Micro-finance project with “Skandinaviska institutet” in Sweden. All four of us work at the same place but are more or less divided in teams of two: “Raul y Andres” and “Oscar y Poll” (Poll being my knew name here since no-one can pronounce Pehr). Lauren is working with another volunteer project, helping out at a small hospital in the mountains near Ambato.
The host family, which consists of Carlos and Maria (and their three grown up children which is rarely around), are genuinely nice and are treating the all of us very good. The four of us are living at the bottom floor of their house, which consists of three bedrooms, a toilet and a living room; all of which we more or less have for ourselves. Nevertheless they do have house rules and they are very concerned about us keeping it clean and tidy in our rooms. This we have noticed since they keep rearranging our shoes, picking up and moving around our clothes, instructing us to make our beds etc. This implies that they have not let the rooms out, but we are living with them as a part of the family – which is fairplay and part of the experience.
We’re being served breakfast between 06 and 07 and dinner is served around 19. Breakfast consists of one piece of bread and butter; something that could best be described as oatmeal, mixed with milk and different kinds of fresh fruit; gruel (välling) and home made lemon leaf tea. Dinner consists of a potato soup as entrée and then a main mostly consisting of rice or potatoes along with a small peace of meat, mostly pork or chicken. I can also mention that they use a fair deal of Plátanos and Maíz (different types of bananas and corn) in their cooking, which is very traditional for Ecuador. Neither breakfast nor dinner are big meals, which fill you up for very long, and to be honest they are not any culinary explosions. However it’s nice and interesting to eat traditional food together with the family. They are very talkative and interested in what we’ve been up to, what our plans are etc – which adds to the frustration of not knowing any Spanish.
Further more they don’t do insulation in this country, and since the temperature reaches around 10 degrees at night and 20 during the days, its pretty cold inside which makes two layers a necessity when sleeping – at least for me, it don’t seem to effect the other.
Other than eating and sleeping, we have been out running a few times after work around where we live. And that’s quite an ordeal on 2550 MASL. When we came to Ecuador the others kept on complaining about the thin air and how it affected them, but I didn’t feel anything and must have thought I was immune to the thin air. Until we started running… It’s probably the most exhausting feeling I’ve ever felt and I take every word back. Its not so much the legs that weakens it’s just the lungs that can’t keep up with the rest of the body and it doesn’t matter how much you breath, you don't get enough oxygen. Further more the HUGE amount of exhaustions adds to the breathing difficulties, living around here, I reckon is equal to smoking a few cigarettes a day. And adding to that the constant fear of being attacked by loose dogs it makes running quite a challenge.
Today, Saturday, we are going to Baños and on sunday we're heading to Riobamba where we're going to ride the Nariz del Diablo train (lit. the devils nose train) among others.
I'll see if I can write how that went and also something about where we are working and what we are doing at work soon. Also I don't have a camera and none of us like taking pictures so I reckon it won't be too much of that.
