My Tropical Tiputini Adventure!

When I was seventeen years old, I went to Costa Rica. That trip is the reason I am in Ecuador. I´ll never forget my first night in the rain forest in Costa Rica, the night we took a late night walk across a shaky suspension bridge rocking back and forth over the Sarapiqui River. With no artificial light in sight, I looked up at the stars and had never felt so small, yet so a part of the big picture.

I didn´t change in Costa Rica. I discovered what had always been there, and suddenly I felt more like myself than I ever had.

While in Costa Rica, I kept a journal. It was the most important journal I had ever written because it documented one of the most important weeks of my life. I had all of my academic notes that came from using the rain forest as a classroom, all of my deepest thoughts, and all of the precious moments that sometimes fade from memory with time--all in that notebook. When we got back to Boston, the teacher that accompanied us on the trip collected all of our journals to grade them for academic purposes. She lost my notebook. Only mine. And ya know what? I cried. I had ripped out the especially personal pages, so those are safe in my room at home, but everything, everything I had learned, was lost.

So, when I went to the Tiputini Biodiversity Station in the middle of nowhere Ecuador, all of these thoughts and feelings from Costa Rica came rushing back. Briefly, Tiputini is located on the Tiputini River in the Amazonian Basin in the Yasuni Biosphere. It was founded by my university here, and co-financed by good ole Boston University (what else is new). It´s not a tourist spot. Students, academicians, scientists, and National Geographic photographers visit this spot.

Now, I will share with you some of the fun facts about the rain forest that I learned while at Tiputini.

1) Army ants can be used as stitches: you rip off their heads, which have huge scissor-like jaws attached, and close your wound by digging these "jaws" along the wound.

2) There's a plant called "yerba de amor", that some indigenous tribes use to show romantic interest; the man throws this sticky plant at the woman of his choice (Check out the picture below).



3) Red things in the rain forest often indicate poison, so stay away. Contact with the sap of this one tree with red roots that we saw would give a person a heart attack in ten minutes.

4) The Matapalo trees strangle the trees over which the grow, until the poor old tree ceases to exist.

5) There are these ants, that taste like lemon (we ate them!!), that are so acidic that they prevent vegetation around them. You know they're around when you see an empty plot of land in the middle of the rain forest. The indigenous call this spot the "jardin del diablo", the the garden of the devil.

6) You can tell the gender of the turtle common in the Tiputini area by the curvature of the underbelly of its shell.

7) Bullet ants, when they bite, give you the sensation that you've been shot.


Well, these are just a few, but now I must go! More coming soon!

Ley de Educacion Superior

Bueno,

Here's the deal. I'm at school right now. There's a raging thunderstorm outside and I'm soaked from it. I just got out of a school wide assembly, one of the most attended in the history of the school says the chancellor.

(The power just went off in the school, so I had to restart my computer)

There's a lot of tension in this country right now. The government (which basically equals the president) is proposing new laws to go with the constitution, Ecuador's twentieth, by the way. However, a huge part of the country is accusing Correa, Ecuador's president, of turning into a dictator. One of the laws, Ley de Aguas, spurred widespread indigenous revolts that included marches and blocking highways-we were advised not to travel that weekend. This assembly focused on the Ley de Educacion, which would basically centralize education, clump public and private education into one messy blob, require exams for specific careers that everyone would have to take to be able to apply for a job, determine a "country development plan" that would exclude the opinion of academics, and change the face of education in the country for good. Scary. How would you feel if the government determined what your education would be! We were told that with the new law, students would not be allowed to double major. What if someone told you: "You can't study what you want to study."

Tomorrow, there is going to be a peaceful march through the center of the city against this law. Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to participate. My program director says I shouldn't go because I will get arrested or attacked. But I really want to because I believe that education can't look like this law. Especially because the law is so vague and contains so many loopholes, Correa would be able to do whatever he wants. Should I go?

Sorry!

Sorry I´ve been out of touch, dear friends! If you understood my internet situation, you would forgive me more readily. To illustrate, let´s take my two hour PowerPoint presentation on Total Quality Management and ISO Norms in relation to Sustainable Development (all in Spanish, by the way) as an example. Since I have no internet access from my computer in my house, my three internet options are as follows: 1)My brother´s laptop which in constantly by his side at home or in class 2) The University computer lab 3) the internet cafe across the street from my house. I started working on on the project on my brother´s computer. The day before the project is due, I call my brother from school to ask if I can borrow his computer when I get home. He says no because he has to take it to class. My thumbdrive is on me and he can´t find one at home. I´m so stressed out that I don´t even think about asking him to email it to me. Anyway, he finds a thumbdrive. I run home after class, it´s six in the evening by now, dash for the the internet cafe, which closes at nine. My brother is still not home. I use my family´s ancient desktop which starts to give me trouble. When I finally figure it out, my sister, in whose room the computer resides, wants to go to bed. Thankfully, my brother returns home at that point. But, to my dismay, he only have PowerPoint 2003 and my presentation is in PowerPoint 2007. So I stay up until two in the morning organizing my presentation in Microsoft Word, only to get up four hours later to get to school by eight to put everything into PowerPoint 2007 on the school computer before my midterm at eleven. I would get about six to eight hours of being productive lost.

So, that is why I can´t update the blog as much as I would like. When I´m not in class, I´m studying or reading, and when I´m doing neither, I´m traveling. Asi es mi vida.



On Monday, I fasted for Yom Kippur in a country with approximately seven hundred Jews, six hundred plus of which live in Quito. That evening, I went to the only synagogue in Quito. The cab driver couldn´t enter the street of the synagogue. I had to present my ID to enter the street. Then I had to go through a metal detector and bag check, as well as get a copy of my ID made. It was one of the most beautiful synagogues I had ever seen. All white, with a view overlooking the mountains. The place was packed. Even though I was praying half the time in Spanish surrounded by Jewish Latinos, I felt at home.

The day before, I went to a Liga (the Quito team) vs. Barcelona (the Guayacuil team) football game. They shot off the confetti before the game even began. We, Liga, destroyed Barcelona 4-0. It´s amazing to be in a football loving country, especially the days that the national team plays. Go Ecuador!

Two weekends ago, I went to Baños, an adventure town that sits at the foot of the (active) Volcano Tungurahua. Perhaps some of you have seen my profile picture of Facebook, but yes, I jumped off a bridge headfirst. Harnessed, of course. It was one of the most exciting experiences of my life. The feeling of standing one hundred feet above a roaring river surrounded by big rocks was almost too much for me. I don´t know how I finally decided to jump. I´ve never even been on an upside down rollercoaster. I´m scared to do cartwheels because I don´t like the feeling of being upside down. And look what happened. The moments of free-falling, before the bungy cord pulls are 99.9% of the experience. Pure fear. And joy.

Next week is my host mother´s birthday. The family is stumped about what we should do and what we should get her. She´s a fancy lady, so if anyone has any suggestions, I´d love to hear them. Speaking of my family, I don´t know how I´m going to leave them. I love having brothers. My parents suggested that I go home for winter break and come back Spring semester. I´m tempted.


My next post, which will come sooner rather than later now that hell week is over, will be about this country. Living here, I really see the beautiful and the ugly side by side in a way that I´ve only really seen it in Russia. Although, I must admit that the overall natural beauty here trumps that of Russia (or at least the city that I´m from). Scratch that, I can´t compare the natural beauty of two different climate zones like that.

Nos vemos!