certification

Wednesday 6.7.2016

I love working in the Study Abroad office because we get to talk to students about traveling.  Traveling is one of those things that possesses people; when talking to first time travelers, very much like myself last summer, I would always try to tell them about the parts of being abroad that are not fun.  Their eyes would glaze over thinking about the sights and smells of their dream destination during the “not fun” part of the conversation.  Transit between cities is one of those things.

Despite how small one may think Ecuador is, we were on a bus from Quito to Guayaquil for twelve hours.  The bus was fine and all, don’t get me wrong.  The entire ordeal of transit is remarkably stressful.  Getting to a terminal is never a straight line, taxi drivers always ask for a ton of money, bus companies are shouting from every direction trying to get your attention, lines are huge, getting to the right bus port at the right time is remarkably more difficult without signs, fighting in Spanish about seat placement… You get the idea.

The rides do give us time to think and sleep, two activities which often go unattended while in a city.  That morning, Molly and I interviewed Andrea, the tour guide from yesterday’s Old Town walking tour.  She had shared some pretty remarkable stuff with us.  For starters, we expressed how great it was to finally get the chance to interview a woman, especially given that discussing gender issues was a goal for this blog.  Her responses didn’t give us a lot to go off of; she believes that Ecuador is a remarkably gender-balanced country, lacking in the machismo culture that permeates so many other Latin American states and often espousing conservative-sourced resentment in the country.

I suppose that she knows what she’s talking about; after all, she has worked in the tourism industry since she earned her degree in National Tourism, and has led tours every day for five years.  But Molly and I had several issues with the way she characterized gender issues in Ecuador.

Primarily, it’s just a simple fact that men can get away with a lot more in Ecuador than in the States.  This may sound shocking given the recent prevalence of campus rape cases in the news, but young women report incidents of sexual assault at a lower rate than in the States and men are convicted at an even lower rate than back home.  

Furthermore, it doesn’t take a progressive outlook to see rampant incidents of sexual and gender-based discrimination in Quito.  Industries are remarkably segregated by gender, with next to no female police officers (an anomaly after Colombia’s impressive National Police force) walking down streets and not a single male waiter in any of the restaurants we visited.  Andrea confirmed this as well: women have a place in Ecuador, and hearing a college educated mother say that after hearing a defense of gender equity was a remarkable conversation.

Update: We arrived in Guayaquil, late in the evening.  I’ll just come out and say it: this place looks miserable. Factory after factory as far as the eye can see seem to be broken up by numerous shipping ports and damage from the quake.  Found a hostel that managed to not make us broke.  Sleep is hard to find.