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Our Peace Corps Years
Ecuador, 1994 - 1996 Two years in a highland village: the work, the food, the language, and what we brought home Tom and Julie Fredrickson |
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We were married in May 1993, and in January 1994 we got on a plane to Quito with
two duffel bags each and a lot of confidence we hadn't earned. We came home in
March 1996. This page is our attempt, three years later, to write down what those
two years were, before the details go soft. We've had a lot of people ask us "what
was it like?" at parties, and the honest answer takes longer than a party allows.
So, here.
A note about names: we've decided not to name our village, or the people in it, on a page anyone in the world can read. It's a small place of maybe four hundred people in the central highlands, the sierra, a couple of hours by bus up a dirt road from a provincial capital. The people there didn't ask to be on the Internet. We'll call it "the village" and the people by their first initials, and if you're a returned volunteer who served nearby, write us and we'll tell you where. How we got there · The work · A day · Spanish and Quichua · The food · The bus · Coming home · Staying in touch How we got there Peace Corps service is 27 months: about three months of training in-country, then two years at your site. Our training was in a town outside Quito, living with a host family, with language classes every morning and technical training every afternoon. Tom's group was agriculture; Julie's was health. Married couples are placed together, which was the only condition we'd made, and after training we were sent to the village with a letter of introduction, a map that was mostly right, and instructions to find the community president. The village is high, well over nine thousand feet. You feel it the first week, going up a flight of stairs like an old man. The nights are cold all year round and the days are bright and warm when the sun is out and cold the moment a cloud crosses. The hills around it are a patchwork of small fields, potatoes and barley and fava beans, going up the slopes at angles you wouldn't think a person could plow. The work (what we thought it would be, and what it was) Tom was an agriculture volunteer. On paper: soil conservation and reforestation. In practice, the first six months were mostly drinking tea in people's kitchens and being asked, politely, what exactly he was for. The work that finally took was a tree nursery, started with the school, growing native trees and some fast-growing ones for firewood, to plant along the edges of fields on the steep slopes where the soil washes away every rainy season. By the time we left, the nursery had produced several thousand seedlings and was being run by two women from the community who'd decided it was theirs, which is the whole point. He also helped a group of families put in small vegetable gardens with a few things that don't traditionally grow there (carrots, chard, onions) and learned far more about potatoes than he taught anyone about anything. Julie was a health education volunteer, working alongside the village's promotora de salud, the community health worker, a woman we'll call Doña M., who had more sense than both of us combined. The work was talks and demonstrations with mothers about clean water (boiling it, mostly, at that altitude, for a good long while), washing hands, oral rehydration for babies with diarrhea, and nutrition; a latrine project with a small grant that built about twenty of them; and a lot of walking to houses to check on new babies. Julie also ended up teaching a little English at the school, because everyone asked and it was a way in. If there's a lesson: the job you're sent to do and the job the village needs done are not always the same job, and the first year is mostly figuring out the second one, and earning the right to be listened to. We were told this in training. We didn't believe it. It was true. A day, more or less We rented two rooms in a cement-block house from a family at the edge of the village. One room to sleep, one for everything else, a tin roof that was deafening in the rain, a propane burner, a water tap in the yard. Electricity most days. No phone, anywhere in the village; the nearest was at the town at the bottom of the road. Up at six with the roosters (every house had them), boil water for coffee and for the day's drinking. Bread from the neighbor who baked on Tuesdays and Fridays. Then work, which meant walking: to the school and the nursery for Tom, to Doña M.'s house and wherever she was going for Julie. Lunch was the big meal, often at someone's house, because to walk past a house at lunchtime is to be fed. Afternoons more of the same, or a community meeting, which started an hour or two after the stated time and went on until it was done. Dark by seven, all year, because of the equator. Reading by the one bulb. Cards. Letters. Bed by nine, under every blanket we owned. Saturday was market day in the town at the bottom of the road, which meant the bus (see below). Sunday was mass and a soccer game on the one flat field, in which Tom played badly and was tolerated. Spanish, and a little Quichua We both came in with college Spanish, which meant we could read a newspaper and could not understand anything anyone said to us for about two months. The Spanish of the sierra is soft and quick and full of words we'd never heard. By six months we were dreaming in it. By the end, Julie could argue with a bus driver, which is fluency. Most of the people in our village were Quichua speakers at home (that's the Ecuadorian branch of the language spoken across the Andes; in Peru it's spelled Quechua). The adults spoke Spanish with us, the grandparents mostly didn't, and the children switched between the two without noticing. We took a few lessons and learned enough to be polite and to make people laugh, which in a small place is worth a great deal. Some of what stuck:
Saying allillanchu to an old woman on the path and getting a delighted allillami! back was, for both of us, the moment we stopped feeling like tourists. The food Potatoes. We had no idea. Dozens of kinds, in colors and shapes we'd never seen, and the people could tell you which one to boil, which to put in soup, which to leave for the pigs. Boiled potatoes with a little salt and ají (hot sauce) were most of most meals. Locro de papa, a thick potato soup with cheese and a slice of avocado on top, is the thing we've tried hardest to make at home and we still can't get it right. Mote (hominy, big soft kernels of corn), tostado (corn kernels toasted crunchy, in a bowl on the table like peanuts), choclo (corn on the cob, big pale kernels, with fresh cheese), fava beans, barley soup, fanesca at Easter, which is a soup made with a dozen grains and beans and salt cod that every family makes their own way and argues about. Eggs. A hen on a very special occasion. Sweetened coffee, weak, in a glass. And cuy. Guinea pig. Every kitchen had a dozen of them living under the stove, squeaking, and at fiestas they were roasted whole on a stick and served with potatoes, and it is a real honor to be handed one. The first time, at the village's patron saint festival in our first year, Tom was given a whole one at the head table, with the community president watching, and he ate it, and it was good, a little like dark-meat chicken and a little like rabbit, with crackling skin. Julie managed a leg. We were both told we had done well, which we took to mean we had done acceptably. We drank the chicha (a homemade corn drink, lightly fermented) when it was offered, which was always, and we never got sick from it, which people find hard to believe. We got sick from plenty of other things. The bus One bus a day, down in the morning, up in the afternoon, an old Ford with a wooden rack on the roof and a name painted on the windshield. On market day it carried people, sacks of potatoes, crates of chickens, a pig once, a bed frame, and us. When the seats were full the aisle filled, and when the aisle filled the cobrador, the driver's helper who collected the fares, hung out the open door and rode the step, shouting the destination at anyone standing by the road. If the bus stopped for a landslide (twice) or a broken axle (once), everyone got out and either pushed or sat down in the ditch and ate. Two hours down. Three hours up. Nobody minded but us, and after a year we didn't either. Coming home, March 1996 They warn you about this too, and you don't believe this either. We got off the plane in Miami and Julie stood in the airport bathroom and cried because the water came out of the tap hot. A week later Tom walked into a supermarket for the first time, got as far as the cereal aisle, and walked back out to sit in the car. There was too much of everything, and everyone was in a hurry, and nobody greeted anyone. We had been away 27 months, which is nothing, and we had turned into people who stood too close, talked too slowly, and couldn't stop mentioning it. It wore off, mostly. What we kept: we boil potatoes with the skins on. We say hello to people on the street. We keep the heat low in winter. We give things time to happen. We don't own much. We know how lucky we are, in a way we could not have known before, and we know that the people who had less than us were not, for that reason, less happy, which is a harder thing to explain than it sounds. And we know what we did there was small. A nursery, twenty latrines, some talks about water, a little English. The village changed us far more than we changed it. We were told that too. We believe it now. Staying in touch There's no phone in the village and no post office; letters go to a box in the town below and get carried up by whoever is going. So we write to Doña M. and to the family we rented from every couple of months, with photographs, and a letter comes back in three or four weeks, in careful handwriting, with news: who married, who had a baby, how the potato harvest was, whether the nursery trees are still alive (they are; there was a photograph last spring of a row of them along a field, taller than the man standing next to them). The two women who run the nursery wrote to say they've started selling seedlings to the next village over. We've sent school supplies twice, and a soccer ball. We're saving to go back for a visit, maybe next summer, if we can. Our daughter Ana is two now and we'd like her to be greeted on that path someday and know what to say back. If you're thinking about the Peace Corps, or you served in Ecuador, or you're a family with questions about what it's like for a married couple: write us. We'll answer honestly, which is the only kind of answer that's useful. Photographs: we have about four hundred slides in boxes in the closet. We're picking a dozen to have made into prints so we can scan them, which is a slow project. Check back this winter. 
Other pages The Nguyen Family: Our First Ten Years in Iowa - about coming to a new place and making a life there, which we did for two years and they've done for ten. Our Hawaii Trip: Maui and the Big Island - a family travel page we enjoyed. Love Letters from the War - transcribed letters. Letters are how we still know our village, so this one touched us. The RainForest neighborhood |
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since February 1999
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Last updated September 19, 1999 · © 1999 Tom and Julie Fredrickson 
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