Week Six – Sleazy

Author: Masha

Photographers: All students on the trip.

Week Six – Sleazy

July 2019

This week, we continued our days of class as usual; with one change. At the end of last week, the English-speaking instructor, G, left. Now, I have class with N. all day, which is great. She is energetic, has good pedagogy, and gets us speaking. I also enjoy it because we are learning Quichua from Spanish. It’s much smoother to just work with Spanish and Quichua than switch between English and Quichua with G and then Spanish and Quichua with N. Additionally, another Quichua instructor arrived from UW-Madison (there are four Wisconsinites in our small program), who I will refer to as A., who is also very pleasant and a good instructor. 

In class, we also began learning Quichua songs. I am posting the link to two music videos for two of the songs we are learning. 

“Charapa Shunku” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4MxrAOmTzM

“Tamya Tuta” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6pSgsjjPb0

…

This week we celebrated the 4th of July. There is a nice hotel next door to the field station that has frequent events and activities for people who are and are not staying at the hotel. We often go there to study and have a cup of tea. Thus, on the 4th of July, the hotel had a 4th of July party, complete with karaoke and roasting s’mores over a fire. It was a riot, in a good way. I wasn’t planning on singing anything for karaoke until another student had my name read as the next person in line. I sang Kesha’s “Sleazy”, did a duet to Kesha’s “Tik Tok”, and also sang Mala Rodriguez’s “Quien Manda.” Many people sang multiple songs so the poor audience had to listen to all of our bad singing multiple times. It was a lot of fun and a little piece of home, especially with the s’mores.

On Saturday of this week, a group of 13 of the graduate students set out with the program director to a Waorani (Huaorani) community. Waorani are one of Ecuador’s indigenous groups, and in the last several years they have been fighting oil extraction in Waorani territory and recently won a large court case. (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/04/indigenous-waorani-win-landmark-legal-case-ecuador-gov-190426221504952.html)

It was a long journey to get to the Wao community. First, we had a two hour bus ride east, then, we all piled on a long canoe with a motor on the back and headed downriver. It was a beautiful canoe ride. And I don’t think words of pictures can really do it justice; yet, it was a difficult canoe ride. The river, the Nushino, is shallow, thus watching the Waorani boat drivers navigate the river felt like watching a surgeon perform surgery. 

The canoe ride would have been three hours, except we broke down twice, and the motor had to be repaired. The second time we broke down, we just ate lunch in the canoe on the bank of the river. Eventually, late in the afternoon, we arrived at the Wao community…