Sunday, March 8, 2009 – El Día Internacional de la Mujer

This was my last day with the Espinosas before going back to Quito and then to the rainforest. I wasn’t sad at all, I was pretty excited. In the morning I got up early in case they were going to do something and had breakfast. I overheard they were going to church at Camila and Mimi’s school since Cami’s class was doing something so I kind of invited myself since they didn’t seem like they were going to. Just the parents and Cami went. It was a modern-style Catholic church with nuns and communion and everything. The fifth-graders sat where the chorus would be and sang and read some scripture. One boy read a poem for mothers, waving his hands around for emphasis. It was really cute. All the kids gave their mothers flowers, which was funny since a lot of the mothers had been holding the flowers for the whole service and just gave it back to their kid so their kid could hand it back to them.

So then we went home and I finished packing. A little later Pati (my host mother) called me into the living room and they were all sitting there. She’d called a little family meeting to thank me for coming kind of and to tell me what she thought and supposedly to find out what I thought. She told me that she thought we didn’t have a lot of dialogue since I was an independent person and in my own world and they wanted to respect that. While I’m not arguing that’s a decent description of me, I had been trying so hard all month to get them to talk to me and do things with me that I felt like they were completely just letting themselves off the hook for not being more welcoming. Of course I’d be independent or else I would have stayed at home, that’s no reason to not talk to me, especially when I’d always be asking questions and trying to include myself and they would hardly respond. And there were Sami and Mimi sitting there who’d hardly said a word to me all month. It was just very awkward and uncomfortable. I thanked them for having me and gave them the present I’d put together with Pittsburgh things and dog toys and marshmallows (they LOVE them, it’s a little gross) and some chocolate and a charcoal pencil for Camila since she likes to draw. They gave me a nice light scarf and a leather bracelet they’d written my name on, and that was the family meeting.

We went to lunch at the Cuena restaurant called Rom Boy. My host mom, who was suddenly acting all friendly, I think because of the dog toys, recommended a typical dish she liked, which ended up being the stomach fat of a cow with sauce and rice. I couldn’t eat it since it made me gag, so I hide a lot of it under the rice. What the girls got looked really good though, so I’ll get that when I visit Cuenca. It’s steak with a fried egg on it with rice and French fries. After lunch we went to the mall and Sami wanted to get her cell phone fixed so we sat around in the cell phone store for a while. They were taking too long so Pati brought me back to put my luggage in the car and we picked up the rest of them on the way to the chapel where the bus was picking us all up to go to Quito. A few people weren’t there yet so we had an awkward almost goodbye time for a while. We took a picture. When we really said goodbye it was fine. Sami kept her iPod headphones in. Pati looked pretty sad all of a sudden though, and her eyes got bloodshot.

We took the bus back to Quito. Some people were a little upset, but they can go back to visit while we’re in Quito really easily. I sat next to Adam and Meredith though, and their families were more or less the same deal. We always felt the distance and never felt totally welcome or comfortable. At least I had Camila, so it wasn’t all that bad. We went to the Hotel Alston, where we always stay in Quito, and I went on a walk with Rachel and Zach before it got dark. Evidently another guy on our program had seen someone get shot in the head when he was in Quito with his host family, so we were a little on edge, but we found the artisan market, which is really cool. I’ll take pictures later.