Once Upon a Time in Ecuador…there was a kindly older man in Quito, tall and thin with a sweet smile, named Fernando. Fernando worked for ACLAS, the Andean Center for Latin American Studies, and it was he who greeted 22 sleepy and scared American students their first night in the country, shuttling them off into the dark with Ecuadorian hosts they couldn’t understand, to begin semester-long experiences that would change their lives.
Once Upon a Time in Ecuador, Fernando and his kindly smile oriented us to the city of Quito, to speaking Spanish, and to Latin American culture. And I was so young, then. And so eager. I had no idea what life had in store for me. To digress a moment, I thought yesterday, as we breezed through the streets of Pokhara, me on the back of a motorcycle, shadowed by the Annapurna Range of the Himalaya and speaking in Nepali, how startled I would be if I could travel back those six years, to Ecuador, and tell my younger self where I am today. I think I would have felt hopeful, and a little proud, but mostly terrified of all that laid ahead of me, of all the hurdles I’d have to surmount to get here, to Nepal. South America was, after all, the very first time I left the US.
But back to Fernando, in that far off land of Once Upon a Time. Fernando greeted us with a big friendly smile and a hearty “hola!” that first morning at ACLAS, and gave us a wonderfully eloquent, humorous speech that I now know will stick with me for the rest of my life. He spoke very formally and eloquently, but with a thick Ecuadorian Spanish accent, and he said to us, “When you hear the horns, and they are loud, and all of the cars are honking, do not think, ‘how annoying. How loud.’ You must think to yourself ‘Ah! It is like music! The music of the streets of Ecuador! How interesting! How different!’ “And when you see the dogs in the street, or the men who stop in the alleys to urinate, you must not think to yourself ‘This is disgusting, this overwhelms me,’ but think instead ‘I have never seen that before! How interesting! How different!’ “And when you go into the jungle or to the Galapagos and you meet the people there, whose lives are so different from yours, you must not let yourself think ‘how peculiar! How strange!’ but instead think to yourself ‘Ahhhhh…how interesting this experience is! And also how different!’”
And because Fernando was like none other, and could see his own culture and the way it was experienced by foreigners with such clarity, we took his words very much to heart, and made them the mantra for the duration of our trip. Cockroach in the hallway of the hotel? “Why!” we’d proclaim loudly, “that is a huuuuuuuge cockroach! What an interesting difference!” And when we all got sick from the water and took turns polluting the bathroom with our infirmity, out we’d come, sheepishly grinning with the awkwardness of it all “Interesting difference! What an interestingly different experience I just had.”
And so the message has stuck, and for me at least, transcended the bounds of the South American country from whence it came. I’ve reminded myself to cherish and value the “interesting differences” of four more countries since that day six years ago, and often share Fernando’s speech with other internationals I meet on my travels, some of whom originally lacked the insight needed to appreciate and engage with what they were experiencing. When I last came to Nepal I shared Fernando’s lesson about the interesting differences experienced during travel with Rekha, my first language teacher and friend, and she laughed with recognition.
When I first arrived and was struggling to formulate sentences in Nepali about people I knew, or ask basic questions, I often asked Rekha about other travelers or other students I had met, recognizing the “interesting differences” they’d failed to appreciate in their travels here. I shared the story of Fernando’s speech with Rekha when I was explaining in class how I had been slow to come to an understanding of some aspect or other of Nepali culture, and she embraced Fernando’s story from afar, as a kindred spirit to her role in Nepal. And so now, when I tell her that I was flummoxed when I met some teenage Nepali girls and that the first thing that they asked (before my name, country, anything) was whether I am married yet, she says to me with Nepali accent, conspiratorial smile and eyebrows raised, “It is an interesting difference, yes?” And I laughingly agree.
International travel is precious to me for the lessons it teaches us about appreciating the interesting differences in our lives, and about seeing them for what they are. Sometimes it takes a moment, and the recollection of Fernando’s great grin, to appreciate those little things despite the deeply ingrained cultural expectations we carry with us, which they contradict, fighting occasional revulsion at or resistance to the small things to try to appreciate the bigger picture, and how it (and we) all connect. I love how travel of this nature pushes you to see yourself and your place in the world more clearly, and how it makes you struggle to come to grips (especially as an American) with how much of the bounty in your own life you fail to acknowledge.
And so tonight when I ate at a new friend’s house, a Master’s student who is very interested in social science surveys (and aren’t we both!), my mind went again to Fernando, and the beauty of the “interesting difference,” as we ate on little woven mats on the concrete floor of my friend’s kitchen, lit only by the light of my tiny maglite “torch” because the power had gone off again. His mother served us a brilliant and delicious pickled mango dish to go with the daal bhaat, which was itself incredibly savory. My friend (whose name is Deepak) shared after a few minutes that all of the food was made fresh by his mother that day, exclusively from plants she has grown in their small backyard. And so it was with the greatest reluctance that I declined the fresh buffalo milk (fresh as in she just came in after fetching it from the large animal moored in their back shed) because I am afraid to get sick again. But I almost tried it – I was so close. I think when you have a night like that, eating comfortably from your hands on the floor, underneath a starry Nepal night, sharing food and stories out of hospitality, kindness, and interest in expanding your world and that of others – it is then when you can really see, feel, and taste the “interesting differences” that Fernando didn’t want us to miss out on, all those years ago.
-M-
