pirates!

We are refueling in Singapore (though not allowed to get off the ship) and going through the Strait of Malaca (I think). These are apparently the most pirate-infested waters in the world, so we’re pushing through at 26 knots, nearly our top speed (we usually go around 17 knots). There’s a pirate watch stationed, and our ship is being escorted by police boats. We have been reassured that it is extremely unlikely that we’ll be targeted, because there are so many people on board. Usually they go for cargo ships with a lot of valuable freight and only 4-5 crew aboard. Nevertheless, we peer around in the gloomy mist that has shrouded our ship and reduced visibility.

shipboard website

I’m on the website team for our Semester at Sea shipboard website. There’s a lag in updating because it has to be approved by the Powers that Be, but it’s pretty nifty.

http://www.semesteratsea.com/voyages/fall2006/fa2006_onboardwebsite.html

(by the way, we’re in Vietnam, which is turning out to be an amazing and mind-bending experience).

typhoon!

We left Japan in a hurry and are chugging along to Hong Kong at a rapid clip to avoid the typhoon that was supposed to hit the Japanese coastline the day after we left. We’re supposed to be the fastest passenger ship in the world, and the captain has assured us that we can outrun the storm, should it change course. We have changed our itinerary and are bypassing Qindao (China) entirely, going directly to Hong Kong. This unfortunately cuts 2 days that we were supposed to be in China, but for SAS field programs, like the Beijing university visit I’m signed up for, ISE (Institute for Shipboard Education, which runs SAS) will be shouldering the extra cost of changing our plane tickets, as well as giving us a 50% discount on our trips since they’re going to be shortened.

This gives us all an extra 2 days on ship without classes, which is good for catching up on sleep and work, but the ship is pitching and rolling and a lot of people are feeling seasick. I’m fine unless I try to do focused work, such as reading. Which is what I have to do. We’re skirting the worst of the storm – in the center, winds are over 100 nautical miles an hour, and the swell (waves) can get up to 13 meters. We’re staying where the swell is under 2 meters, but it’s windy enough that at times they’ve closed all the outside decks, and we’ve been told to secure everything in our cabins.

update 9.25.06: We made it to Hong Kong and have already left again; now we’re moving past a tropical cyclone en route to Vietnam. We only have two days between China & Vietnam, so I’ll be posting about China after we leave Ho Chi Minh City.

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum

At the last minute, I got a cheap ticket to Hiroshima and went off at 5 in the morning to see the Peace Memorial Museum. I will try to recount what I saw there, but I won’t be able to adequately convey the sense of chaos, destruction, and loss caused by the bomb, and its continuing legacy today in cancer victims.

When the bomb exploded just above Hiroshima, the heat of nuclear fission vaporized people and buildings, killing thousands instantly. A pressure wave of 19 tons per square meter swept out from the hypocenter, caused by the extreme expansion of superheated air. Nearly all buildings – wood, steel, stone – within a 1 km radius were completely flattened. Flying shards of glass from exploded windows knifed deep into walls and organs. People were burned beyond recognition, their skin flayed to the bone, hanging in shreds off their limbs, dripping blood. Everyone left alive struggled to get out of the city, seeking shelter and water to cool their burns. As they fled before the flames that swept through what was left of Hiroshima after the explosion, survivors begged forgiveness from those they left pinned under debris to burn alive, unable to free them before they were engulfed. Black rain poisoned the rivers with radiation.

The city has since been rebuilt, but the consequences of the atomic bomb are still harbored in the bodies of the hibakusha, the bomb survivors. Cancer continues to claim them, one by one. A whole generation of babies with microencephaly – brain damage due to radiation exposure in the womb – have grown up, and their aging relatives worry about who will take care of these victims of the radiation after they pass away.

To me, one of the most poignant moments was the realization of why there were bottles of water left along with flowers in front of the Cenotaph, the memorial containing the names of the victims. After the blast, people who were not killed instantly struggled to get medical attention, to flee from the raging fires, but most desperately they begged for water to quench thirst and bodies sucked dry by the intense heat. One little boy tried to suck the puss from the stubs of his fingers as he stumbled home. The water offerings are a request for forgiveness by survivors who could not provide that water to those victims.

Why is it that I had to come here to be concerned, really concerned, about war and violence? Yes, as a child I was taught that war is bad and I condemn violence, but I have never before acted to end it. What is it about our humanity that we must experience these horrors so closely in order to arouse the kind of passion that leads to action? I am reminded of the white moderates Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. refers to in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail – the population Dr. King said posed the biggest obstacle to his mission, for while they agreed with him, their apathy was the inertia holding the social institutions firmly in place.

scroll down

I postdated one of new posts, so scroll down past Reglas de las Colonias Vaccacionales to find it (ChasquiNet).

reglas de las colonias vacacionales

Rules of the Summer Camp (Casa de la Ninez)

1. no pelear (don’t fight)
2. no decir malas palabras (don’t say bad words)
3. no coger las cosas de los companeros (don’t steal things from others)
4. usar la palabra magica por favor (use the magic word “please”)
5. no botar basura (don’t litter)
6. no aburrirse (don’t get bored)

riding the trolley

I love riding the trolley (especially when I can get a seat). Quito’s public transportation system is excellent. It costs 25 cents for however long you want to stay on, and the trolley buses are fairly clean. They come every few minutes (sometimes they are litterally 30 seconds apart, because so many people ride the trolley).

Just about everyone rides the trolley – hip youth in torn jeans with headphones, mothers carrying infants (often breastfeeding them in public), men and women hunched over with age for whom people vacate seats, beggars, the blind, businessmen in suits, pickpockets. Everyone rides the trolley. It’s probably the only place where peopel fo every ethnicity and socioeconomic background rub sholders.

It’s impossible to get a seat usually, even though the trolley comes so frequently. During peak commute hours everyone is jammed together so that there problems with doors closing on people, and you have to watch your bags carefullly to avoid being the victim of pickpocketing.

During my commutes to and from work, I enjoy observing my fellow passengers and how they interact. It’s interesting enough even to make up for having to stand for 40 minutes and hang on to avoid being thrown to the ground by the starts and stops of the trolley.

children & the cycle of poverty

It used to be that seeing a gaggle of young kids running around, or a little girl clutching her mother’s skirt and peeking around it timidly evoked an “aww” reaction and unadulterated pleasure. Now that I’ve been working in the shelter and walk past children begging or peddling goods on the street, that reaction is tempered with sadness at this vision of the next generation of poverty.

Most of the kids I’ve talked to have many siblings, sometimes more than 7. Not infrequently, when asked about their siblings they mention that they used to have more, but some have died.

With so many children, there isn’t enough parental attention to go around. Older siblings care for younger ones, and they all quickly learn to fend for themselves and amuse themselves. Kids here are strongly independent and unafraid to venture out on their own, which is strongly shaped by the fact that it is nearly universal among poorer families to send children out to work on their own (shining shoes, selling gum) when they’re not in school (and sometimes they are pulled out of school when the family doesn’t have enough money and needs the income from their children). All of this contributes to the difficulty we have with keeping groups together and paying attention to an activity.

Mario, an educador (educator) at Casa de la Ninez, commented that there is a culturally instilled desire to have many children, in part because of the indigenous farming culture (many of the children we work and their families are immigrants from rural Ecuador) and in part because of machismo - having many children proves the man’s virility.

Having little, kids are always on the lookout for extra things – an extra orange at snack, an extra sheet of paper when we’re drawing. There are two main tactics for getting what they want – deceit and begging. They might hide the orange and say they didn’t get one, and when you aren’t looking crayons disappear. The other method, begging, is the Ecuadorian counterpart to American children’s whining. There is a certain tone of voice they take on, which they use to beg to go to the bathroom when you’ve told them to wait, or to lend them money (which is strictly against the rules of Casa de la Ninez). It’s the same tone of voice they use to beg for money in the plazas. It’s just as grating as listening to a kid whine, but whereas whining stems from a sense of entitlement, begging comes out of a hope for getting something you don’t deserve (I’m ignoring the ethical arguments regarding wealth distribution for the moment).

Working with Ecuadorian children has been frustrating because of their nonchalance towards authority and deceitful tendencies, and the omnipresent begging. At the same time, sometimes I get to see children sharing, or an older sibling anxiously looking for a younger one after camp and then wrapping their arm aroudn them and launching into an animated, private conversation. Work is quite the mixed bag.

my host family

Half of us volunteers are staying with a host family in the north of Quito for the first month while the other half stays in the shelter; then we´ll swap.

I’m staying with a host family first. It felt good to settle in once we’d made the decision of who was staying where. It´s rough living out of a bag – I don´t know how backpackers do it. You find yourself constantly weighing your desire for an object against teh effort fo digging it out and putting it back under mountains of other things (presuming you know exactly where it is and don´t have to do some hunting in addition). I´m glad I got put with a host family first. It´s nice to wake up in the morning to food on the table, and come home at night to hot food as well (in the shelter, we cook for ourselves, which wouldn´t be so bad if the shelter staff weren´t so delinquent in finding the pots and pans. they did get the microwave within the first few days, and the burner after a week, but the pots are still eluding them, apparently. I hear the volunteers at the shelter have been subsisting off guacamole and chips, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.)

My host family is very gracious and insists on helping me do everything, getting me drinks and taking away my dishes though I protest that I can do it myself. My host mom is especially bad about this. For example, I always make my bed before I leave for work in teh morning, and I come back at night to find taht it has been remade. Every day, without fail. No matter how well I made it. The closest I´ve come to benig able to help out has been the one night I was allowed to set the table. However, I hear my situation is not the most outrageous, as DeAnna´s host family won´t let her get up to get her own spoon.

My host dad, Cristián, is very animated and has a great sense of humor. He never misses an opportunity to teast his wife and kids, and I´m not exempted.

My host brother, also Cristián, is studying medicine (he´s my age- their education system is slightly different here). We´ve had a couple cool conversations about medicine (I´m very interested in biology and the field of medicine, though I don´t intend to pursue it as a vocation) and about languages and traveling. He hasn´t been aroudn much, though, becuase he´s studying for finals (year-long cumulative: ow!). Hopefully he´ll be aroudn more when he gets out for the summer.

I have two host sisters, Ana and María Belén (here, most people have 2 first names, and they can go by the first, second, both together, or different ones at differnet times, according to their preference=. Ana is 20 and majoring in fashion, and Belén is 13 and also quite interested in clothing. Belén likes to ask my opinion on various outfits and models, which puts me completely out fo my element. Maybe we´ll find other common interests to talk about.

Meals with my host family have not been so different from what you find in America. We´ve had salads, pasta, lasagna, grilled meat, and soups. There´s always a soup with every meal (more often cream-based than not), which are hearty and filling (I love soup). These are more traditional Ecuadorian recipes, and they´re always delicious. My favorite part of meals, though, is the fresh squeezed juice (lemonade, orange juice, even guanábana (soursop) once!).

Once major difference from the quintessential American meal is the omnipresence of rice (which I believe is cooked with a smidgen of butter). When my host mom mentioned that some hostees in the past had to adjust to rice being a staple, I laughed and recounted one of my freshman experiences – arriving in teh dining hall to be shocked that rice wasn´t abundantly available with every meal.

Well, I´ve rambled on and on, but the gist fo this post is that my host family is awesome and I´m glad I got put here first while I adjust to life in Quito and working at the shelter.

pardon the typos

I got a chance to look at my last post as it is on the page, instead of in the tiny box where I type. Whoa, there are a lot of typos! Appologies for this; the computer I am typing on is a little short on RAM (computer memory) and thus tends to forget some letters I type, and hiccups in displaying what I input fairly frequently. I”ll try to minimize the typos in the future.