Puyo

Mark has posted my Quito pictures on yahoo photos. The link is:

Quito photos


Commenting on them with this bad Internet connection would be a week-long endeavor, so for now you will have to guess what I was doing and who is in the pictures.

I have arrived in Puyo. When I got here, I called the doctor on a public phone. He said "wait for me" and hung up. Luckily, he showed up ten minutes later, drove straight up to the only American girl around, and asked me to get on in. After confirming that he was Dr. Torres, I got in and we went to his house.

I am staying in Dr. Torres´s nice home in Puyo. The streets and the infrastructure here make Quito look like San Francisco, but we have Internet and phones, etc. The Internet is as slow as ours in New Richmond, and international calls are rather expensive, 20 cents a minute. Considering a huge pizza and soda for lunch at a nice restaurant put me back 4 bucks, taxis to anywhere are one dollar, and the bus is a couple cents, international calls are ridiculously unaffordable.

The climate, as could have been expected, is humid and hot. It rains every afternoon. Bugs are everywhere. These huge flying ants crawl up my curtains, but in Puyo itself, the mosquitoes aren´t really a problem.

This week I will be heading over to Shell, fifteen minutes away. Shell is pretty much a little airplane landing for planes going in and out of the rainforest. They have a hospital there where I will be working for three days. Then, later this week, Dr. Torres and I will head out on a bus for a clinic two and a half hours farther out from Puyo, to help the nurse who runs it. Next week, I have a plethora of hospitals to visit and doctors to talk to. The third week, I will be heading off to a Shuar community.

So busy times ahead. Dr. Torres was very interested in my studies and work, and he made me happy when he told me that he really liked the way that I saw the world. He even is hinting already at staying in touch in the future, and he gives me the idea that I might be able to become an ally to efforts here somehow. I am not sure because he refuses to say much now, promising "you will understand, we will talk more later, you will see..." I press him for more answers and ask him if my preconceptions are incorrect. He says no, but refuses to explain, adamantly restating that "i will understand" and the conversation was over.
So, obviously, I am very intrigued.

I will try to make phone calls this week before heading out to Esperanza on Wednesday or Thursday, but I am going to wait for a day or two because calls are so expensive.

Know that I am relatively healthy and safe (as long as this dang traffic doesn´t kill me.) Love you all!