The first week

I am happily sitting in my new house watching the sunset and listening to the howling of dogs and the shouts of a game of volleyball below. Its a good feeling to have unpacked my cases and moved in. I am renting a room in a beautiful house in Guapulo, a little town which is now a suburb of Quito, perched on the hillside on the eastern edge of the city. It has great views down across a green valley whose name I forget and up to the snowy peak of Cayambe when its clear.

Guapulo

Guapulo Plaza

My first week here was packed with newness and learning - learning on every level: from the importance of taking a map everywhere with me even if I think I know they way and the value of factor 30 sun cream, to lots of background about the history and culture of Ecuador. I have felt really privileged to have a personal orientation program with talks from experts in the fields of politics, social movements, gender and other subjects.

I've also been having Spanish lessons in the afternoons from a brilliant teacher Maria who is a linguistics lecturer at the Catholic University here. To practice speaking with fluency and using tenses in the past I have been retelling two very different stories: one a huge serious analysis of the modern day reality of Ecuador, and the other, The Hobbit (which I have been listening to on my ipod thanks to Colin). So, my vocabulary is expanding rapidly in terms of words to do with exploitation of the peripheries, globalisation and unequal terms of trade, as well as magic, dwarfs, dragons and elves.

Yesterday I went to Otavalo, a nearby town to visit Rocío, another development worker who works in environmental education. She took me to see a market of organic produce from small scale producers in the local valley, a great new project supported by CEPCU the organisation she works with, and then on a really interesting tour of schools in the area (see photos below).

The farmers' market

Rocío at one of the schools she works with

View down to Otavalo

Of all the new sights, sounds and information, I think the most striking thing for me in my first week here has been huge social inequality. There are massive USA- style “malls” which are far more glitzy and scary than anything Edinburgh has to offer with expensive branded clothing, lattes and enormous supermarkets, whilst outside throngs of people desperate for some form of income clammer to run up to the windows of cars or leap onto buses to sell chewing gum or joke moustaches for 50 cents each.

In one of my orientation talks I was told that the average household income is $250 a month whilst the basic basket of necessities is $430. Unemployment and underemployment is huge and many thousands of people leave every year to seek work elsewhere. It's fascinating and frightening seeing immigration to Europe and the USA from the other end of the process. The first message you see on arriving in Quito airport is a huge billboard saying “say no to coyoteism” (they call the networks of people smugglers who try to get immigrants into the USA coyotes).

I'm told the going rate is $12,000 to have three dangerous attempts to cross the border where the USA is busy building a wall and creating laws just as draconian as Europe to allow in only as many cheap, exploitable workers as they need. Whilst the migrants used to be mostly men, in recent years, lots of women are heading to Europe, especially Spain to meet the demand for care workers. The money which immigrants send back is apparently the second biggest source of income here after petrol and the impacts on families and society are huge.

It's pretty sobering to compare my happy adventuring journey over here to the frightening forced migration of people in the other direction. I feel a bit like a cheerful, innocent little hobbit.