Toilet paper, guinea pigs, homicidal traffic, indigenous painters

This is the most interesting thing in this entry, so I will put it first... in Ecuador, guess where you put the toilet paper? If you guessed the toilet, you guessed WRONG! Because the plumbing is so bad, you have to put the used toilet paper in the waste basket next to the throne so that the pipes don´t block up. Poopy paper in a basket, that´s something to get used to.

So, I have had intensive Spanish for four hours a day the past two days. Since I don´t need to practice reading or writing, we are just talking and talking, which is hard to do in any language for four hours straight. Yesterday, I learned a lot about traditional medicine. They use a lot of eggs, guinea pigs, tobacco, and rocks. They rub the rocks and (unbroken) eggs over people to restore the balance between negative and positive energies. They also rub a guinea pig all over the person, then cut the guinea pig open while it´s still alive. (Obviously, it then dies.) In this manner, supposedly, they can see what is wrong with the person by looking at the insides of the guinea pig.

My teacher and I talked about the positive and negative benefits of such "cures." I think that a lot of the rituals are more psychologically and culturally important for the patient, while the herbs and teas they use actually do have a scientfic basis. The only problem is when a traditional healer diagnoses someone with "el mal aire" or "el mal viento." This is what happens when one goes alone somewhere and the soul escapes from the body. The person becomes very ill, and the healer has to perform a series of rituals to get the soul back in the body. This is a problem if someone really has a serious illness and the healer tells them they just need to get their soul back, when they really need Western medicine.

There are also definitely cases of fraud, where people calling themselves healers claim to have supernatural powers. They charge exorbitant prices to their patients, taking advantage of local superstitions to make quite a profit. But you got to be careful messing with some indigenas. My teacher told me about one town where such fraud occurred, and the people threw the fraudulent healer into the river and hit her with spiny plants as a punishment. Apparently, they take the law into their own hands in some of these towns.

Quito looks a lot like North America, being a big city and all. Then my host mother last night informs me that gays are thrown in jail for a month if they are caught... being gay, I guess!! After some rigorous reasearch in guide books, it appears it has recently been legalized... but talk about different from San Francisco!

On to other topics, forget malaria and guerrillas, the most dangerous thing here is the motorists. When they say they don´t stop for pedestrians they mean THEY NEVER EVER EVEN COME CLOSE TO SLOWING DOWN for pedestrians. One motorcyclist that almost hit me today, proclaimed "oh, haha, I almost killed you, my love."

That´s the other thing. My new names include "my princess, my queen, my love." Unlike a lot of men in Rome, the men here don´t drool like they´ve never seen a woman before, but every comment I get from men is followed by "my most beautiful princess." They seem very cavalier. I haven´t run into too much machismo yet. But the younger generation of men are generally a lot less machista; in fact, many of them seem simply courteous and sweet.

Today, I went to La Fundación Guayasamín, which shows the works of the most famous Ecuadorian painter, Guayasamín, who was half-indigena. He was quite the progressive, and let´s just say he didn´t think too highly of Latin American dictatorships or the CIA. Some people criticize him as a Pizarro rip-off, but I thought his work was rather amazing. From the museum, which was high above Quito, I could look into the whole valley and the surrounding mountains. It´s like nothing I´ve ever seen before.

I will put up a link to the photos as soon as I figure out what Mark´s telling me to do with them online.

Hasta luego.