La comodidad de la familiaridad

Ecuador feels really comfortable. It's funny, I feel like this whole time I've been bracing for this big epiphany that "wow, I'm in Ecuador, crazy!" But it hasn't come. I'm not sure why that is, but here are some thoughts.

The most obvious reason is that I already know this place. I'm familiar with the cultural norms, I know how to take buses and not get mugged, and I even know many of the Quechua names for Ecuadorian foods. Plus my Spanish is pretty good, definitely lacking in the vocab department, but sure to improve. So that's one likely explanation, that I'm comfortable here because I've been here before, and rather than feeling that big exciting splash landing in a new and crazy environment, it just sort of feels like a home away from home. Which is nice, I think.

The other is that I've been with gringos a lot, which also means speaking lots of English. I 'm sharing an apartment in central Quito with two other fulbrighters, one of whom is here with his fiance, and while living with fellow gringos is certainly less energy-consuming, it also means spending less time connected to my surroundings, which for me is Ecuador and speaking Spanish. It can be a little tricky to make Ecuadorian friends as a gringo, but thankfully, my housemate Nina has an Ecuadorian boyfriend named Nacho, and we've become good friends since he's around the apartment a lot, so that's nice. Also, I get to spend time with Ecaudorians in Spanish in a couple classes at a nearby public health program (one course on Global Health and another on Health Systems), and I'm doing a lot of reading in Spanish about Ecuador health care systems in preparation for my research project. But all in all, the gringo factor might be part of why it hasn't yet hit me that I'm here, because much of the time it doesn't necessarily feel so much like I'm in Ecuador.

So anyway, given that I feel quite settled and comfortable here, it's actually influenced how I look at my work. In terms of how health care systems work, Ecuador has become a model that functions very differently from that in the US, but through understanding and analyzing those differences, I have been able to put the US system into a kind of global context. My study is very comparative. I'm comparing Quito and Guayaquil's health systems. To understand how they both fit into the national health system, in addition to considering how the new constitution might change things, I'm comparing Ecuador to regional counterparts, like Chile and Colombia. And then on a global scale, I need to consider European, Canadian, and US systems as models of successful and failing approaches to health care. So anyway, the fact that I'm comfortable here in Ecuador has made my work more accessible, but also more relevant for me in the long run, cause it's pushing me to understand a different model in a sociocultural context that I am familiar with.

All in all, things are settling in nicely here, and I'm having fun and enjoying what I'm studying. I guess we'll juts have to wait and see if that "wow!" moment ever comes.