We are currently in our third week of the Global Semester. So far the trip has been amazing, packed with countless activities for our group to enjoy and which show a different part of Ecuador. Our explorations in Quito have been fun as we get to know the city, Santa Lucia was a great trek to explore the fantastic ecology of the country, and Antisana showed us some gorgeous landscapes and volcanoes. This week, however, was one of my favorites, and not just because I get to write a blog post about it. The real draw to this week was the connections we made with the people here. 

On February 18th, our group left Quito for Runa Tupari, a community tourism project in Cotacachi where we stayed for two nights with indigenous families. I stayed with a woman named Laura, while others stayed with her sister, Christina, in a house a few dozen yards away. We also met Christina’s nine-year-old son, Catar, with whom we connected right away. When we arrived, one of the first things we did was play some pick-up soccer with Catar on the wet grass. We quickly learned he is a big soccer fan and quite the player. As a soccer fan and player myself, this meant that we were going to get along great.

The next day we woke at 6:00 a.m. to help Laura milk the cows. In getting a sense of how she lived day-to-day, we learned this was how she started each one, followed by walking the same cows down to the pasture for a little food. Each of us took a turn with the udder, but frankly, we weren’t very good, only managing to get a thin stream of milk at best. Laura showed us up, filling the bucket in about a minute and a half. We also fed the pigs and took the sheep out to their pasture. Taking care of the animals was crucial to Laura and Christina because it is their main source of food. Cows are used for milk, chickens for eggs, sheep for wool, pigs for their babies, and all of them for meat when they’re ready to be eaten. These animals were talkative, too, which kept us up throughout the night.

With Laura and her extended family, we made “humitas,” which are a kind of cornbread. We began with a bunch of ears of corn, which we de-kerneled by hand into a large bucket. Then, we took these pieces of corn and ground them up into cornmeal, again by hand. Next, we moved to the kitchen, where we mixed our fresh cornmeal with sugar, cheese, and a secret ingredient that was supposed to make it taste better. Finally, we scooped the mix into the corn husks from earlier and steamed them. Obviously, the fun part was getting to eat them the next morning. They were fresh, dense, sweet, and delicious.

We had a wonderful time getting to know Laura, Christina, and Catar over shared meals and our activities together. At each meal, Catar would tell us a story that I had a tough time following, even though Spanish is my second language. Even through the language barrier, it was still great to have him tell us about his soccer team, school, his friends, and some wild stories that I still think was just him recapping a movie to us. An interesting thing we learned is that Catar doesn’t speak Quechua, the native tongue of his community. It made me wonder whether the language was dying out with his generation due to a lack of need to speak it.

Finally, we spent some time in the Otavalo market and got a chance to practice our bartering abilities. Our group bought a lot of matching sweaters. We also got a chance to try cuy, or guinea pig; a unique flavor, to say the least, but I don’t think it was super popular among the group. Back in Quito, we learned how to salsa dance with our instructor, Kalimba. This was definitely new to me, and the group had a great time learning the steps from a great teacher. Next, we are headed to the Amazonian rainforest. Hopefully, I won’t get eaten by wild pigs!