Money

<- This is $3.80 of food. It's 25 cents of bananas, 1 dollar of oranges, 1 dollar of grapes, 1 dollar of pineapple, 20 cents of papaya, 25 cents of lime, and 10 cents of tomato. That, below, is 50 cents of monster ecua carrots, a mystery of Andean nature which makes your skinny American carrots look weak and pathetic.

I started knowing exactly how much food does and should cost around November of last year. Around November I had been long-abandoned by Fulbright grant, yet went unpaid by the University that employs me. For months. I got to Christmas' doorstep before I saw a single cent of my salary... first because the finance office lost my contract, then because my bank wouldn't accept that I was a public employee (and am therefore paid by the state), then because important people started to hate me. I'm easy to hate when I can't afford a bottle of wine. So I went through 1st semester teacher blues, faculty meetings (bleh), mid-term exams, and a host of extra re-accreditation work without being paid. I also began feeling, for the first time in my decently long Ecualife, like I was approaching some semblance of equal footing with many of my colleagues and students-- lost in the bureaucratic jumble and thinking about pennies.

Escaped food

When people talk about food here, they are often talking about money, and what food their money will buy. A trip back from the market will often accompany a detailed report on the 10 cent increase in a pound of blackberries. "What's your favorite pizza in Ambato?" always comes with a multi-tiered explanation involving cost and how much free hot sauce you can get. Only the privileged buy produce at the supermarket, the rest of us are comparing cucumbers on street corners. Last November, fighting with old ladies at the market about how many tomatoes my 25 cents would buy, I began to get it.

First Communion/ Bible food

I should say the Ambato I occupy (and urban Ambato in general) is pretty solidly middle-class mestizo and I truly would hate to cement misguided fantasies about "the third-world." Middle-class Ecuadorians are not as consumption-obsessed and stuff-heavy as the American middle class, but are not poor and would never accept such a characterization. However, one of the unexpected consequences of being post-Fulbright, working for the Ecuadorian government, and generally being one of the gente (people), is a new perspective on normal economic constraints in Ecuador.

Just like when people talk about food they're usually talking about money, when people talk about education they're usually talking about money. And education is pretty much the only thing I do right now. Teacher soapbox: out.

 Food I Recently Learned to Identify (cactus fruit)

I teach at a free public university, or higher ed for the masses. Wealthy families in Ambato send their children to the private university, or to Quito where the universities are better. Like many many public school teachers around the world, I pay out of pocket for classroom materials and any non-textbook thing I want to use in my classes. My university gives me access to my empty classroom, a whiteboard, and the occasional projector I can check out if there are any left in the computer lab. I pay for everything else-- from the toilet paper I use in the bathroom, to the marker to write on that whiteboard, to the paper to print an activity, to any/all copies I make. I am fined each time I don't sign in within 10 minutes before, or 5 minutes after, every class. Fined. Like $. For being 5 seconds late AFTER a class, even if I spent that 5 minutes peeing or helping a student (both noble causes).

Guinea Pigs (ie food)

Let's say it's exam time. My exam is 3 pages long and I have 120 students. That's 2 cents x 3 pages x 120 students = $7.20. That's a lot of ecua-money, in fact, that's more dollars than I make in the hour it takes to administer the exam.Or let's take a 10-page article/question packet for my history class. That's 2 cents x 10 pages x 30 students = $6.00... for 1 assignment for 1 class. Now you know how professors here spend their first 10 minutes of class-- letting students file out to make copies of the activity packet.

I know how this looks, me asking students to cover the costs of running a class. Is it a financial hardship for students to make their $2 of copies per week? Yes, in many cases. But it is for me too, and much more for teachers who have families and cars and health problems. Students don't complain-- they've been asked to cover these classroom costs since Kindergarten and the money collection for copies is highly ingrained in the culture. So I'll complain on their behalf. Why is Ecuador's "free public education" (guaranteed at the university level) not free, either for me or for them? Why can they NOT pay us on time, but then also fine me for being hospitalized (ie missing class for 1 day for obvious emergency)? And why, as professional university faculty, are we often so concerned about how many tomatoes we'll get for our 25 cents?

Brown (trying to try to be a Dr.)

I remember when I first found out it was possible to be a "Dr." without cutting people open. I was in elementary school, and it was report card season.

As kids we couldn't open the report card, only examine the envelope home to our parents. We would compare envelopes, trying to analyze each others family situation based upon the address label. Some kids had two envelopes, one for each divorced parent. Some kids had "Mr. and Mrs. _(last name)_" and some kids had "Dr. and Mrs. _(last name)_," which meant their dad was a doctor and they lived in a big house. It was an unrefined, vaguely cruel exercise in elementary school social comparison. My envelope was unique and therefore brag-worthy: "Dr. and Mr."

Mom's Graduation

Cue the first conversation about the "Ph.D." with my mother, a clinical psychologist, who (happy mother's day!) got her Ph.D. with 3 children and many more obstacles than I will likely face. Cue the first time, of many, I would count how old I would be when I was fully "educated." How many years until I graduated from middle school, then high school, then college, then got my PhD (I think 4 was the number in my head, although that number seems laughable now). Eventually, that age turned into just "old" and the idea of being "educated" faded away. That's when I knew I was ready.

Not What Anthropology Is, Unfortunately

Trying to try to be a Dr. was not always inevitable. In elementary school, I didn't know about "years off" and South America and the academic job market. Or that people who write books aren't usually famous, or wealthy, and sometimes people with Ph.D.s turn into crusty professors with nothing interesting to say in real life, or no sense of what real life is.

I didn't know it would take me 13 applications over 2 years to receive one single acceptance to graduate school. Why don't more people say that? That tons of capable people in the world want to be (fully funded) anthropologists and getting into a program is this absurd gauntlet (for being fully funded)? I did interviews with faculty members who spent the whole hour trying to talk me out of their university, or the Ph.D. in general. I went to one interview weekend which was so ridiculous in its applicant one-up-manship, it felt like a jargon-filled reality television show. Feature characters included the former pro baseball player (anthropology of sports) and the already practicing M.D.  (anthropology of medicine, apparently 6 years of postgraduate work was not enough).

So here it is: In September, I begin my Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology at Brown University. It's a small cohort (8) and we all got the big prize (full funding). Providence looks like a nice place to spend several years, and the Anthro building is on the corner of Hope Street and Power Street (which I can only take as a positive sign). I'll be back in Ecuador during the summers for my research. 

In case you read this post a year ago, I haven't forgotten about you, aimless 20-somethings. I'll finish with the same Samuel Beckett quote: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."