Cultural Reflections

This photo depicts my host sister Areli interacting with the owner of a small market close to my host family’s house in Puyo. My host family often has me take their electric moped to this store in the evenings to pick up groceries for supper. Something I appreciate about Ecuador is the abundance of these small family-owned grocery stores. In most areas, you could pass about 10 of these before finding a chain grocery store. Not only is the proximity convenient, but these small stores allow people to support local families instead of large corporations. This is just one of the ways community is prioritized on another level here in Ecuador.

This photo was taken at Omaere, the organization where I am doing my service. During the first couple of days, I felt a warm welcome from Nenqui, who showed me around the trails at the organization and spoke extra slowly, which made me feel good about my Spanish. 🙂 He also taught me a few words in Waorani, which is the indigenous culture in which he identifies. In this picture, he is taking a photo of a spider that had created its web over one of the trails. Instead of knocking the web down to walk through, he ducked under to leave it unharmed. It was evident that his culture had taught him a different outlook on nature and humans’ role in it. I am grateful for the kindness and knowledge that he has shared with me.

This photo was one of many taken at the artisanal market in Otavalo. What I appreciate most about this photo is the colors. Wherever we walked in the maze of tents and vendors, there was never a lack of color. I spent hours just observing all of the different products being sold, and I couldn’t stop myself from buying a hacky sack and an Ecuadorian soccer jersey for myself. The variety of products was also quite something… a couple of friends and I tried some quail eggs from a little cart, and I must say they were quite tasty.

One of the most authentic cultural experiences from SST so far was the weekend of Carnival. I was able to go to the historic center of Quito with my host mom, her grandson Cami, and Dani, and we didn’t really know what we were getting into. Once we were out of the subway station, nearly every person on the street was covered in spray foam (called carioca), and many had accents of paint smeared across their faces. We were immediately confronted by one of the many carioca vendors, and each of us received a can of spray to participate in the fun. As soon as we had our own carioca, we were ambushed by about every person passing by. One teenager yelled “Hasta los gringos pagan!” before running up to us with a group of his friends and attacking us with spray foam and paint. I was lucky enough to avoid having eggs cracked on my head (but unfortunately, Dani wasn’t).