¡tengo una lechugita!

¡I have a little lettuce! Well... kind of.

When we were last in touch, i was pretty anxious about how everything was going to go at this dance. High pressure to date this girl. cute as she is, i don't know much about her. We went, listened to quality andean pan flute music, danced some merengue, some salsa and a bit of reggaeton. I also talked a lot with my buddies from physical therapy, my great canadian buddy jessica and a bunch of german volunteers from the hospital. Notice anyone missing? So did I.

Lechugita didn't talk much more than you'd expect a head of lettuce to. It was bizzare, I asked her tons of open-ended questions and threw her tons of opportunities, but she just smiled or giggled at every chance to talk. "she's just shy" they said "she really likes you a lot!" Donkey snot. If you like someone and you're talking one on one and you don't bite at a single one of nearly hundreds of questions, that's pathological. Well, I thought that was a bit harsh and premature, so we decided to give it another shot. We went for drinks and crepes at La boca del lobo here in the mariscal, and had a bit of a better time. Definitely more conversation, it develops ice cream and french pastries are the key to an ecuadorian woman's heart... and mouth. Anyway, she's decided after that date (does that even count as a second date? me thinks no) that we're getting married. She sends me crazy as chuck text messages about our future and asking when I'm going to come back to ecuador...

I was beginning to get really worried about what I'd gotten myself into when, of a completely honest coincidence, I lost my cell phone. Sweet relief! I've never felt so good about losing a personal electronic device like this. Well, I'd feel terrible about what this might do to my leafy friend if i just dropped off the face of the earth, so I'm gonna find her number one way or another, but it's going to be tough. She and all her friends are on vacation now, and she's out of quito for the week.

So that's the deal with lechugita.

¡vamos a la peña!

let's go to the dance! a bunch of med students are putting on a dance here and invited me and some of the other volunteers along... i have no idea what to expect other than they're trying to set me up with one of the girls. i hope they know mikey's not trying to marry a quiteña he just met a few days ago... Anyway, it's a good thing i've been taking salsa lessons since i've been here so i'll have something to do to at least try to keep up! Over a few drinks they were interrogating me with a veritable barrage of preteen quesitons, "what kind of girls do you like?" "which one of us do you like?" "what do you think of latin girls?" It was everything i could do to squeak out some words in spanish, my face was so tight from smiling streched cheeks and my tattletale of a flushed face giving away my embarrassment. They asked me to say some nice things about them in french and the first thing that popped to mind was "ma petite chou," my little cabbage, a nice pet name which doesn't translate very well. "Lechugita!?" they exclaimed, and a nick name was born. They tell me that gringos aren't the best dancers because even when they know the steps they're a bit rigid. This is almost too much pressure, i feel like an ambassador for my people, i'll report back with details.

it's going to be two guys and five girls from quito that i've known for a week now, four chicas from germany and a great guy from australia that's living at our house for a week or two working on picking up spanish.

wish me and mi lechugita luck i'll need everything i can get!

¿tienes phobia?

my volunteer position with the hospital is pretty flexible. i've got eight weeks in total, and i'm starting my fourth week next monday. it's hard to believe how quickly it's going by. my first two weeks were with men's internal medicine. a bit of the run of the mill hospital life. hanging out, passing out pills, taking temperatures and chatting with the characters on the ward.

this last week was with minor surgeries. it's great because doctors have to be there and there's no where for them to hide so i'm seeing a lot. they don't have any nurses, just a guy named johnny that's a med student taking some time off to make some money. He's a fantastic guy though. We spend a fair amount of time chatting and working on his english. He showed me where i can find free lunch in the hospital if i bring my own spoon.

The first two or three hours of every day involves taking vital signs for the day's patients. I've learned a lot and can corral folks and get the info we need almost as well as johnny now. The rest of the day is watching as doctors meet with their patients evaluating either the need for surgery or their progress in recovery post-op. Lots of taking out stitches, though i'm not quite there yet. two or three times a week we've got minor operations. This is the toughest part for me and one of the reasons it's really good for me to be here.

The first day we had a woman with a hurnea. I was supposed to assist, handing gause and scalpels etc. but it was a bit much to take in and i had to sit every ten minutes or so. Cold sweats, pale in the face, the whole nine yards. Eek. Thankfully everybody's got a fantastic sense of humor and we could joke about it. Everybody loves talking about my phobia now though i really don't think it's that fair of a characterization. If i was afraid, i wouldn't be in the room. It's just the physiological response i get when people are cutting other people. I think that's perfectly normal. The second day was much better. A cute nine year old girl had a fibroid tumor on her arm, which they took out in a jiffy. Hopefully I'll be super tough next week.

After next week, I'll have to see what's next. I'm hoping to see a few births while i'm here so I may take a rotation on neonatology, but I'm really curious about the pediatric ward here and the challenges of the E.R.

a nice dinner in tena

one of my amazing canadian buddies, heather, is volunteering in a clinic in the jungle in a town outside of tena. we went to visit last weekend and ended up having a number of outside the lines adventures.

the six hour bus ride from quito is a thrilling survey of the eastern offerings of ecuador's topography and climate diversity. distinct mountains become severe ranges, gradually thickening in flora to denser and denser rainforest on lower foot hills. The trip is broken only by the occasional rest stop and passport check, and by personal election card games and shakey book reading.

after arriving and orienting a bit on friday night, we hit the hay to get out to misahualli(pronounced ms. hawaii) early the next day where heather spends most of her time. We helped out filling prescriptions, filing patient histories and wrapping tongue depressors to be sterilized. In the meantime, we practiced taking each others' vital signs. After having such a blast with the doctor and nurse (who was satisfying the national requirement for all health professionals to serve a year in the jungle or the coast) we couldn't turn down their offer to come back and dance at the salsa bar in the middle of the jungle. We went back to tena to gather our things and grab a bite. Dinner was much more than we bargained for.

Five dollars bought filet mignon in a red wine sauce with baked potatoes and steamed veg. It was amazing. Absolutely amazing. Just as we were finishing and thinking about dessert, a rustling on the wall above our table caught my eye. Looking at the fuzzy form for a bit, i eventually registered the creepy crawly as a sloth. Yes. A sloth. it crawled from one hiding spot to another some four feet away, moving like it had a different allotment of space and time than the rest of us. We got so worked up by the sight of it we had to ask the owner if there were more, to which he replied in proud broken english, "yes. i have another in back. it is - how do you say - extinction?" "endangered!?" we asked "oh yes, that is what i meaning, there only 200 left in jungle." And he had one in his restaurant. He brought it out and the little pygmy sloth peed on his shoulder in silent protest.

We went back out to Misahualli by taxi, found our clinic folks and went out dancing. At some point i some how got paired off with a girl named Belgica. After a couple rounds of salsa, i went to buy another round and the whole staff had their eyes on me. After a bit, the youngest among the staff asked with eyes darting around sheepishly, "are you belgica's boyfriend?"

Uh oh. Decided it'd be safer just to dance within our own group.

The next day we worked a bit more in the clinic before heading out. It was a lot busier, so we filled more prescriptions and I helped take out stitches on an especially tough munchkin. I'm quite jealous of the scar he's going to get.

making chocolate at a hostel called cocoa

Me canadian pals had heard of a hostel called cocoa run by a tour operator in town. It's an amazing place right on a river, just down the road from an old fruit farm that's just used for tours these days.

After talking the bus driver into letting us on (yes, we can see it's sold out, can't we just sit on the floor in the back?) we rode the 4 hours through mountains and cloud forest to Puerto Quito the nearest town to the hostel. A drive with high-traffic upholstered seats dampening our road trip chatter on the floor.

It's so nice to get out of Quito. As much as I love it with all of it's sleazy shawarma joints and live music, it's still city and it's always a treat to get out.

At cocoa, we had a tour of the fruit farm, a huge spot with bananas, pineapples, at least 5 types of citrus, passion fruit, cocoa, coca and more - it was a foody's dream to spend an afternoon walking around eating organic produce straight from the plant. Afterwards, we went back to make some chocolate. It grows in these pods pictured above which are either purple or orange depending on the variety. The seeds are pulled from the pods and furmented for 8 days in a tank and then dried for 2-3 days depending on the intensity of the sun. We picked up at the next step, which is roasting the beans to improve aroma. We did this standing on a fire next to the river. The roasted beans are shelled and then ground in a meat grinder, the grounds are then added to boiling milk and cane sugar for the freshest purest chocolate i've ever had.

After dinner (which of course came after the chocolate), we went down to the river again to salsa dance for hours. After working up a sweat (it being almost as humid as georgia's summers), we cooled off with a dip in the river. It was nice enough just to swim a bit in a pool retained by a rock dam, but sitting on the other side in the middle of the rapids was like a natural jacuzi.

Somehow i made it back, though they need volunteers and i might have to disappear for a week or two :)

a few stories from volunteering

for the last three weeks i've been volunteering at hospital pablo arturo suarez, in the north of town.

It's a public hospital and is a bit of a madhouse at times. right now, i'm just in the men's internal medicine clinic but still, something wild happens every day. thought i'd share a bit. still working on photos, will try to get some of my buddies that are patients.

These days I'm working mostly with the nurses, so I do a lot of cleaning, talking, bathing and wheeling around in wheelchairs. On one of these sojourns, I had to take a patient down to have an ultrasound. On the way back up to the ward, the elevators broke. Both of them. One with people inside screaming and freaking out folks in the hallway. While we were waiting for them to come back around, three med students came up, and in typical fashion, decided repeatedly tapping the button would be of some help. I almost started counting how many people came by and thought that the more the button was pushed, the faster it would come. Some things know no cultural lines.

Anyway, these three guys started joking about how they should carry our four-wheeled friend up the stairs. He seemed okay with it, they didn't ask of course, but he told me it would be okay. I told him we didn't have to do this and that they'd have the elevator fixed soon, but i think he really trusted the med students. So when they couldn't lift him in the chair, they told him he had to walk. I negelected to mention this guy was a heart patient, and we're six flights of stairs down from the ward. He winced with every step, but once we'd started, it'd be just as bad to turn back. We made it up, but what a terrible course of events.

Another friend in internal medicine doesn't have much family and has been there for a while. They've run a bunch of tests on him, and it sounded like they said they even told him that he has HIV, which the tests showed he didn't. One of his many symptoms, among pussing sides and loss of function in his legs, is a horrible eye infection that has swelled it shut for weeks now. I wheeled him down to talk to the optomologists and an american doctor volunteering in the hospital recognized that his symptoms matched with toxitis. he ordered some more tests, and creams for his eye. After the first day, no one had run the tests, i asked all the nurses and they insisted they'd take care of it. After the second day, still nothing so i talked to the nurses again and some of the docs on the floor, again, more guarantees. After the third day, i took out his history and walked the med tech folks on the floor through the orders and insisted that we get this guy taken care of, it was only then that they said oh, yeah, we don't do those tests here. And they'd be $50 that he doesn't have anyway. at least his eye is better.