(Jen): Don't Drink the Water
Ecuador is a beautiful place to look at but not so much to listen to, considering that most of what I’ve heard the last four weeks goes something like this:
(Insert sounds of severe rectal disturbance here)
The primary impression I’ve gotten of travel so far is that it may broaden your horizons, but mostly in between spending a whole lot of time miserably ill.
Mark’s on his second cold in a month, I (rather unsurprisingly) caught a bad cold after coming back soaked to the bone from Sisig, and both of us have gotten a severe bout of Montezuma’s Revenge (although I guess down this far south it should be Atahualpa’s Revenge instead). We can’t drink the water down here anywhere without getting severely ill, so although we generally avoided using plastics back home we’ve been burning through water bottles in Ecuador like they’re going out of style. Hell, we can barely even use reusable bottles down here like Nalgenes because we a) can’t wash with the water without getting sick and b) can’t refill on anything but disposable water bottles. We managed with some cheap knockoffs throughout the project, but that’s only because they kept a reliable source of purified water in the kitchen.
Before anyone starts thinking that this has something to do with Ecuador’s third-world status or water infrastructure – don’t. It really doesn’t except in very far highland areas such as Pucara. We had some Ecuadorian students also working on the project, and although most of them couldn’t speak any English and thus did not interact with us, one of them did. She’d been able to go study abroad in faraway, exotic Iowa, and had also spent most of the time there completely sick and unable to drink our water.
While we were on the project, one of my staff duties involved looking after the health of other students, since they were just as prone to get sick as Mark and I were (if not more so, since several of them were frustratingly unwilling to take care of themselves, know their own limits when it came to alcohol, and generally tended to be the kind of college students that drove me nuts when I had to live with them as an undergrad). At least two of our students were sick or injured the entire project, one with persistent bacterial infections interspersing with flu and vomiting, another bleeding sporadically out an ear after a mishap in a soccer game with local kids where she got kicked in the head. A third got what I assume to be a cold or gripe (flu) somewhere around the second week and then kept going out to do fieldwork with us, which we suspect is how Mark got sick again.
And then there’s me. I guess I can’t really complain about the other students not taking care of themselves considering that I spent most of my time down here in complete agony and didn’t tell anyone for two weeks.
I’m not entirely sure what it was in hindsight - I guess a combination of the stresses of travel abroad for the first time, being stuck somewhere I can’t speak or comprehend the language even well enough for very simple transactions, or just the general OMG RUSH HURRY DIG FASTR kind of atmosphere around the first half of the project when we were doing archaeology – but somewhere in the middle of the first week I developed what felt like an itch in my left lower canine that refused to go away and I couldn’t figure out where it came from.
By the second week it had developed into a solid knot of pain in my lower jaw and I had finally figured out what it was. I was grinding my teeth at night again, a condition known as bruxism that I’ve had for a long time, has occasionally given me issues and I’ve been recommended a mouth guard for before. But I had never had anything near as bad as I did right then. Two pills of Advil every four hours around the clock became four, and even that barely dented the constant, drilling pain that had me ready to put a fist through a cinderblock wall. For a long while I didn’t tell anyone except Mark, since it was such a specialized problem and I was so used to being unable to access medical care that the last place I figured I could ever get help was here. Fortunately for me, after an evening of me crying on his shoulder because I had been in constant pain for over a week straight, Mark talked to one of the other students we were grouped with for our applied anthropology classes (the Spanish speaker) and thus the ethnographic interview we were supposed to be doing that day at a medical clinic turned into me sitting in a dental chair, getting fitted for a mouth guard by a local orthodontist.
Let me just say that medical care is uncomfortable enough when you can actually talk to the doctor, and far more so when you have absolutely no idea what he is saying half the time. But on the other hand, the cool putty he put on my lower jaw to fit me was the best feeling I’d had in weeks, and he told us that the fitting and the guard would cost thirty dollars and would take at most two or three days. I hadn’t even had to wait to see him, either.
To make a long story short, after a few more days of aching, followed by a few days of itching (again!) and then a bout of facial swelling that made me feel like I should be swinging off a bell tower at the Hacienda shouting for sanctuary, I mostly recovered. I’m still probably on a bit more Advil than I should be since that one point of pain in my jaw is still there, itching and aching when I forget, but I’m due for another (much more expensive, this time) visit to a dentist when I get back to the States.
Ecuador isn’t a country with the most spectacular record of caring for its people’s health, as Mark’s flower plantation posts will probably tell you; even with the clinics in the outer rural parishes being state-run and free, they are very limited in their services and often do not have the drugs that their patients need, requiring them to pay out of pocket for medication. Many of the rural people we spoke to said that they simply would not go to the doctor if they did not also have the spare money for medicine. But for the Quiteño – the urbanized Ecuadorian student who spoke English – and for me and the other students on the project, the availability of medical care was never in question, and even for many of the people in the rural cantons it wasn't either, since at least the basic care was free. Sometimes it could be questionable (for some reason, possibly the gauge of most of their needles, just about every student that went to the clinic ended up with multiple shots in the butt) but at least it was there.
There’s something very wrong when I feel safer about getting sick in a developing country than I do at home, even if I do tend to be sick a whole lot more than usual.
