Meeting Family and Sangolqui

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  Quito, Ecuador, Ecuador
Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Last Friday we met the families with whom we will be living for the next three and a half months.  We spent the afternoon waiting in the lobby of a Country Club on the edge of Sangolqui.  Come evening, families entered one at a time, our name was called as we joined them and sat for dinner.  Before we were served, the students put on a short presentation about Canadian (and United States) culture.  This included introductions, interactive camp songs and a line dance finale accompanied by yours truly on the banjo.  It was about a half an hour total, and we only had about three days to prepare.  We were able to extract a few laughs (regardless of our broken Spanish) and it seemed the families enjoyed getting to know our group a little better.
 
After finishing our performance I went to join my family at the dinner table.  I sat with my host mother Irlanda, father Patricio and their two siblings Andres (5 years old) and Allison (9 years old).  They were joined by Irlanda´s sister and her son.  We spoke a lot about me: what Minnesota is like, how long I´ve been playing the banjo, why I´m interested in breakdancing as well as what I think of Ecuador and what there is to do in Sangolqui.  Frankly, I had trouble wiping the stupid grin off my face. It was there partly because I felt so happy to be in the company of such nice people, and partly because I was so surprised that I could actually speak Spanish.
 
My host family has been so accommodating, always asking how I am, how my day is going and insisting ¨Estas en tu casa¨ (you are in your house) whenever I ask permission to do something.  They (or perhaps I should say we) live in a quaint house only several blocks from downtown, about a ten minute walk to school and only blocks away from many of the other students.  Their house is connected to another where Patricio´s brother, my host uncle, his wife and daughter live.  Patricio is an architect and has his own office attached to the house, Irlanda works at home raising two adorable kids and cooking amazingly delicious food (I´ll have another entry where I will describe the diet here, it is way different than I thought it would be!)
 
Our first weekend spent in Sangolqui has been quite an introduction.  We entered just in time for a large celebration: streets full of people, live music, cowboy parades and lots of beer.

Cowboy Desfila

 
My largest dose of culture shock so far came during the Fiesta del Torros.  On Saturday afternoon we drove to the edge of town to a large plaza.  The plaza was three stories tall, built in 3 days out of scrap pieces of wood, tied together with large pieces of blue cloth and packed with about 4 thousand people.   In the center of the plaza was an enormous lawn upon which there was nothing but a 15 by 10 foot cage and a 10 foot by 10 foot wooden stage.  One by one, bulls were released into the middle of the plaza allowed to run about in the middle.  Besides the five cowboys who rode about in the center, there were about 100 bystanders from the crowd.   Primarily drunk young men, these people jumped in the middle to test their bravery by running about, taunting the bull and seeing how close they could get without being tossed about violently by the horns of an angry bull.  Some left with nothing more than more adrenaline in their veins and a drunken sense of accomplishment, others left with bruises, scars and other injuries for actually being caught.
 
As we arrived, we pushed through the thick crowd of people that surrounded the plaza, making our way to a rickety ladder and climbing to the second story with my host mother, aunt, brother, sister, cousins and their friends.  We took a seat and watched as random people put their masculinity to the test, throwing garbage and rocks at enormous bulls and then running for either the cage, the stage or climbing up the inner wall of the plaza trying to escape the reach of the bull.  Some strategies worked better than others, but I preferred mine: staying in the stands.  One by one the cowboys would round-up the bull with their lassos, putting them back in their pen before releasing another larger, angrier bull.  After about a half an hour we heard a crack, one of the lateral boards holding up the story above us split from the pressure.  We quickly moved to another section of the Plaza while two young men secured a couple of 1x8 boards in a triangle shape to reinforce the cracked pillar.  Once this small project was complete we calmly moved back to our seats and I tried not to think about it.

The parade

 
I was surprised at myself, it was a scene that I could not stop watching.  About once every 15 minutes the bull would get a hold of someone; I found myself covering my mouth as my jaw dropped, unable to pry my eyes away from the scene, others screamed loudly.  Some men would get up quickly afterwards, receive a cheer from their friends and continue to run about the center of the plaza, taunting the bull.  Others ended unconscious and were carried to the side by a group of slightly more sober individuals.  This festival continued for three days: Saturday, Sunday and Monday.  Rumor has it that three people died on Saturday alone.

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The ladder	Middle of the Plaza	The first bull we saw	The third bull we saw
Panoramic of the Plaza

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