This isn’t exactly what I had in mind. I’d been envisioning “closing off” my year in Ecuador with a nice, 1500-word blog post summing up my experiences there and what I’ve learned from them and how I’m different now etc. I sat down with my laptop and some notes scribbled on the back of an…
One of the hardest lessons I’ve learned since living in Ecuador is that friendships, even ones you think are forever, sometimes fall apart. Sometimes one person is more to blame, and sometimes it’s just a natural effect of being far away from each other. Maybe those relationships can be revived in the future, or maybe…
Home. What is home? Living in Quito has made me question the definition of home, reworking it to encompass my experiences abroad. I have often wondered how long it must one be in a place to be able to say one lived there. For it to feel like home. Is three months enough? Is 10.5?…
Having been teaching since October, it dawned on me yesterday that somehow, I still haven’t written about what it’s like to be an ESL teacher here. For a blog about my experiences living and teaching abroad, this seems like quite the oversight. I suppose I’ve been focusing a lot more on my personal experiences and…
Tomorrow is International Women’s Day, or as we call it in Ecuador, Día de la Mujer. Yesterday, I went to a production of the Vagina Monologues here at a lovely rooftop bar. Against the stunning backdrop of the historic center and the green misty mountains of Quito, American women (and a couple of Ecuadorian women)…
I hated reading as a child. My parents, both English teachers, did their best to coax me into a reading habit. They were people who, when my six-year-old self came downstairs in the mornings on the weekend suggesting we watch TV or play a game, told me to grab a book and join everyone under…
So when you’re accepted to serve with the Peace Corps, you might think that all the work is done. WRONG. Accepting an invitation actually begins a whirlwind process of tasks that the invitee must complete–applying for a diplomatic passport, getting finger printed/background checked, a bunch of medical/dental tasks, etc. One of the earlier tasks that…
In a few weeks, I will reach my exact half-way point of my service in Ecuador. As with so many other periods in life, it has simultaneously flown by and felt like so much more than a few months. Many of us, I would say, are in or recently out of what we call a mid-service slump….
I prefer deep conversations. I like conversations that stimulate your senses and make you reconsider what you thought you knew. Discussions that leave you hungry for more knowledge and a greater understanding of the world around you, that you vividly recall months and years later. Even as a child, I preferred serious conversations to surface level chats. I still…