Monday, October 27, 2014

Why Culture is Complicated


"...the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete."
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I love this quote, and I've come to understand its implications in the world far more since being in Ecuador. Culture is incredibly complicated. What I mean is that culture encompasses so many facets of the way people live and interact, that it's impossible to ever truly understand a whole culture. Also, every individual that exists as part of a cultural group lives a different reality than the rest of the group. Everyone eats food and has a family and goes to school, but we all eat different foods, go to different schools and interact in different ways with the people in our lives. When we talk about culture, we tend to make generalizations and stereotype, because if we tried to describe the experience of every individual or even every family in a country or ethnic group, we'd never finish.

I struggle a lot with making generalizations when I talk about culture, because I know that what I experience is only a small fraction of an infinite whole, and I don't want to diminish something so beautifully complex into one sentence. Lets use food as an example (because ya know, food!).

 It's hard to describe typical food in the US beyond hamburgers and french fries (which, as some of my friends would point out, are Dutch, not French, or American), because typical food differs from region to region. You can find different specialties in the south or New England or the southwest. On top of that, in the US we tend to eat a lot of food originally from other countries. I eat a lot of Italian and Mexican dishes, and when my family goes out to eat we can find restaurants that serve anything from sushi to tandoori chicken to pizza and everything in between. Why? Because the US is a country made up almost entirely of immigrants, and as a result our culture is a hodgepodge of other cultures. I love that about the US, because what is better than delicious food? A million different kinds of delicious food, that's what! But as much as I love it, it's also hard to try and explain this to people when they ask me what typical American food is. Maybe I'm making life harder for my self, because saying that hamburgers, fries and chicken wings are typical is an easy response to that question, but I don't want to perpetuate stereotypes.

Now I don't know if there's any real severity in letting people believe that we Americans only eat fast food, but this way of generalizing culture is something that I'm wary of. Maybe stereotypes about food seem harmless, but what about stereotypes about poverty and malnutrition? About lack of education or unemployment? Those kinds of stereotypes can be harmful to the way we see and interact with different cultures. It's easy to assume that everyone from one country or culture is rich or illiterate or living in poverty when all we hear about that culture are stereotypes. I think that generalizations them selves are not bad, in fact, they can be extremely useful when describing cultural norms. The danger comes in believing that the generalizations we make are true of everyone who pertains to a cultural group.

There's a lot more I could say about this, but instead of writing a novel here on my blog, I'll just recommend that you watch Chimamanda Adichie's TED Talk. She's far more eloquent than I am, and explains the idea better anyway. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg

 What I need you all to understand is that what I write here is only my personal experience. While I'm trying my best to describe Ecuador and the culture that exists here, I can only truthfully describe the things that I've seen and done. I'm sure to make generalizations, and I promise that what I write is true of my own life, but remember that it just might not be true of the whole country. I've only been here two months (and three days technically!) and I can already say that my life, and life in Guaranda, is very different from life on the coast, in the amazon, or in big cities like Quito and Guayaquil. Ecuador may be significantly smaller and more homogeneous than the US, but there is plenty of diversity to go around.

And now I'm going to talk about myself, because I figure this blog is supposed to be about my life and the things I do with it.

The Friday before last, I got chosen to be the "madrina" of my class, for the inauguration of the in-school basketball competition. Every class chooses their team, has uniforms made, and chooses a madrina to represent the class during the inauguration. Basically, this means that as the madrina, I got to dress up, curl my hair, wear makeup, and even put on my heels, so that I could walk around the school courtyard in front of my class' team in line with all of the other teams. I was told that usually during the ceremony there's a beauty contest between all of the madrinas, but they skipped over that part this year, which my classmates were disappointed about. Regardless, it was fun to see each class decked out in the uniforms they designed, especially the super little kids! I wish that I had a picture from the actual ceremony, but I wasn't in a good position to take any, and trying to take pictures while holding a bouquet of roses and trying to not run into the girls in front of me is a little above my capacity for multitasking. I took some picture afterwards with my classmates, and I thought I'd share them :)



I'm currently in Quito with my family. My sister, Christina (Who would have thought that I'd come all the way to the southern hemisphere only to have a host sister with the same name as my actual sister?), goes to university in the city, and we came to visit her for the weekend. Let me tell you something: I love coming to Quito. There are a lot of strangely comforting things about being in a big city. I was so incredibly happy to go to the grocery store with my mom, because it looked like every other grocery store in the US. I have never been happier to push a cart down the aisle. Ever. Also, there are malls, with movie theaters and food courts. I hate scary movies, but I was happy to go see Annabelle with my family on Saturday night, because the movie theater looked exactly like the ones at home. I find myself comforted here by things that I didn't necessarily love or do much in the US, but that exist here. Stores and brands and restaurants become comforting just by being familiar. I don't think I've ever eaten at a T.G.I Friday's, but there's one in the mall near my sister's apartment, and I smiled at the sight of it, despite not even being a huge fan of the kind of food they serve.

Seeing all of these things that are achingly familiar make me long not only for the US, but also for the opportunity to live in a big city again. I can't help but wonder what life would be like if I'd been placed in Quito. But at the same time, it makes me grateful for my life in Guaranda.I'm on exchange to experience a new culture, a different life style. I don't doubt that life in the big city here is drastically different from life in the US, but I'm glad that my life here is nothing like my life in the US. Its both draining and exhilarating to be experiencing something so foreign, but I  know that no matter how hard things might be sometimes, I'm going to want to keep getting a peek into unfamiliar cultures for the rest of my life. I thought I had wanderlust before I left, but that's going to be nothing compared to what I feel after this year.

Hasta Luego,

Elisa


Thursday, October 9, 2014

Public school is expensive...

Public school is supposed to be free right? I mean at least for the most part? That was the impression I was under, but I'm being proven wrong, ever day.

During my junior year in high school I wrote a nineteen page argumentative essay/research paper about the benefits of educating girls and some of the major reasons that girls don't get educated. I focused more on cultural prejudice against girls as the primary reason for the lack of female education, but I did include high school fees as a reason. I'm now getting first hand experience with those kinds of school fees, and I can absolutely understand why school is such an economic hardship for low-income families in countries where school fees are high.

In the US, at least in my experience, you have to pay a small fee at the beginning of each school year and then you have to buy your own school supplies. Here, and I suspect in quite a few other countries, you pay for everything. I mean EVERYTHING. Since arriving I've spent money on uniforms (one daily uniform, one P.E. uniform, and two pairs of shoes to go with), 6 textbooks (at about $16 each they don't seem expensive to me, but that's a lot of money here), curtains and a water jug for our classroom, a separate basketball uniform for the in-school competition, ten cents every day to put towards the class trip in June, notebooks, folders, and other school supplies, a set of protractors and rulers (that we have used exactly zero times), some of my tests (sometimes the teachers bring printed tests that we have to pay for in order to take), copies of a random assortment of other things (it costs about 10 cents to print of make a copy of anything), posters and supplies to decorate said posters for class presentations, and other small things that are hard to recall. There's even a third uniform that all of the girls in my grade have to wear on Mondays that I got out of buying (exchange student perks!). None of it is particularly expensive on its own (besides the uniforms), but it adds up in the end.

I've been noticing how everything adds up in the last week, and while I've got enough money to pay for what I need, there are girls in my class that say that they don't have enough money for all of the textbooks. It's so strange to me to have to pay for so much. When I told my friends that all of our textbooks are given to us and that we can print/copy as many pages as we want for free, they were absolutely shocked. No uniforms also cuts down on school costs by a ton. Going to school in Ecuador has made me appreciate a lot about American schools, especially how much is just given to us. Maybe I'll get into all of the other things I appreciate now in another post.

I'm here to learn all about Ecuadorian culture, so I figure its a good thing to tell you all about all of the cultural things I'm noticing now that I don't spend the whole day thinking "God, everything is so different here." AFS loves the analogy that culture is like an iceberg, you can't see about 90% of it. I've definitely gotten into noticing the 90% of culture here that you don't see right away, and its fascinating :)

Lets go back to school: Somehow, the girls in my class manage to insult and laugh at each other constantly, while also being close-knit. Its taken a while to get used to all of the names that they call each other and the fact that no one gets offended. When my friend asked me what the equivalent of "gordita" was in English, I had to explain that the closest thing was probably "chubby" but that it's not an affectionate thing to call someone the way it is in Spanish, it's more of an insult. Also, the girls in my class are constantly yelling. During class, during break, before school, after school, all of the time. A few people start to talk, then more people start talking, so everyone talks louder to hear each other over everyone else, until the whole class is yelling to be heard. This happens a lot when a teacher calls on someone to answer a question and they don't answer right away. Everyone else takes it upon themselves to answer the question at the same time. The volume escalates at record speed, its kind of incredible.

Tests taking here was also really strange for me at first, and still seems odd sometimes. Not only do you have to pay for some of the tests, but everyone whispers (audibly) to each other to ask for the answers they don't know. The teachers halfheartedly tell everyone to be quite and to not copy, but every test is a class collaboration none the less.

In the country materials AFS gave me before arriving in Ecuador, it said that in school, you don't argue with or question the teachers because it's considered disrespectful. While no one questions the validity of what our teachers teach us, there is certainly a lot of arguing with the teachers. My classmates argue about when homework should be due, what exactly the homework should be, when to take tests, what the questions on the test should be, whether or not tests should be graded or retaken, when projects should be due, and so on. When these kinds of discussions break out, the noise level skyrockets. Now that I think about it, it's a lot like waiting in line here: there is no line, you just try to push your way to the front, or be the loudest to be heard over everyone else. I cant quite tell if the girls in my class are really convincing or if the teachers don't mind changing due dates (even though we're "behind" in quite a few of our classes), but either way, the girls usually get their way.

School work always has to be immaculate. Everyone has a borrador (eraser) notebook where they write down notes from class and then later they re-write those notes in their notebooks for each class. There is also an unwritten rule that everything has to be colorful. Notes, posters, homework assignments, ect. I'm not really a fan of this, it seems like a lot of effort for something that doesn't exactly further your learning. But, what can I do, except to try and keep my notes clean, color coded, and organized?

My family here makes me wish that my family in the US didn't live so spread across the whole country. Here, all of my grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and everyone else lives in Guaranda. I eat lunch with my parents, grandparents, aunt, uncle, and cousins every single day. I never missed that kind of geographic closeness in the US because I never had it with my family, but having experienced it so much here, I know its going to be one of the things I miss when I come back. It's so nice to be around so many family members all at once, and so often too :)

I get along really well with the girls in my class and the other AFSers in Guaranda, but I'm not one to confide and open up to people quickly, so I've been missing my best friends lately. I miss not thinking about what I'm going to say, not having to try and explain my way around words I don't know. Its jolting to go from seeing the people you're closest to all of the time to only chatting on Facebook and Skype occasionally. Its hard, especially when there are so many thoughts that go through my head on a daily basis that I either don't know how to express in Spanish, or don't know who to tell here.

Sunday marks my seventh week in Guaranda, and once again, I don't know where the time has gone. If people ask me how long I'm living here, my automatic response has been to say ten months, but I'm trying to say that I'm here until June now, because I wont be here for ten months, at this point its only about eight and a half. I don't want that to be true, it seems like so little time, so I try to take my best friend Olivia's advice and celebrate every day that I'm here, because I'm going to want to come back even before I leave. I was telling my friend from school about saying goodbye to my family and how I cried on the plane and then I was explaining how its going to be so bittersweet to leave here. I know I'm not going to want to leave or say goodbye to people, but that I'll also be excited to see my family and friends in the US again. Who knows though, I definitely plan on bringing my family here to Guaranda, and I think I've convinced my whole class to come and visit me in the US sometime. I don't like goodbyes, so I'm determined to not make my goodbyes this year permanent.

Life goes on here, mine and everyone else's. I've reached the point that days just seem regular now, nothing all that special (except for the whole I live in Ecuador thing...). I watch, I absorb, I try to learn as much as I can now that I'm not constantly shocked by everything. I like being in that position. The world is a really interesting place, and I love that I have the opportunity to experience it first hand!

Hasta Luego,

Elisa