Cars drive down the street with their windows rolled down and music pounding from the stereo (more often than not Gangnam Style, which must have been peaking in South America). That was one of my favorite characteristics of the city; every other pedestrian, police guard, and street cleaner had Latin dance music coming from some hidden source on his or her person. This was the first time I had left the US since China, and I kept getting déjà vu walking down the city streets, with the crowded public buses and the inquiries about whether my hair color was natural or not.
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| As part of a government initiative to have the people take better care of their houses, entire hills jumbled with poor homes are painted vibrant colors. |
We attended Spanish mass at the cathedral Sunday to bring our total of churches visited to 6. The city is one whose population ranges from extremely destitute to extremely affluent, from hillside ghettos filled with ramshackle houses to gated communities filled with pristine mansions. The entire city seemed to lack a safe building code, but the downtown was charming in that winding oft cobblestoned streets jumbled with flimsy, yet decorated dwellings were more common than the few skyscrapers. The homes, little cafes, and shops were completely open to the street, where you would often find a family gathered around a little television screen watching the local soccer team playing. We visited as many plazas as churches, from Plaza de las Iguanas to Plaza San Francisco which reminded me of Saint Marc's Square in Venice it was so dominated by pigeons. I ended up napping on a bench in Plaza San Francisco halfway through the day, only to be awoken by shouting and honking and flapping of wings. The entire city had gone crazy with the win of the Barcelona soccer team. Every third person had on a jersey that day and flags were everywhere. At one point I asked a taxi driver why everybody liked the Barcelona team. He said it was a "favorite" around Guayaquil. When I asked if any players were from Guayaquil, he replied rather snappily yes. I was amazed at how a town could get so excited up by a single win by a team that was all the way in Spain. Eventually, we discovered that the team was actually Barcelona Sporting Club which played at a stadium in Guayaquil not Football Club Barcelona in Spain, although they had the exact same coat of arms and very similar jerseys.
Besides bringing two large suitcases full of medicine and supplies, we worked at the Funcrisa clinic in Guayaquil, my father doing 53 surgeries and I translating where needed (the first two days in the operating room). Translating for a technician in a sterilized operating room while the surgeon was holding a scalpel and asking highly technical questions about the patient under anesthesia before him (all while everybody's mouths are obscured by face masks) provided some challenges for an interpreter. I most enjoyed translating for my father when he conducted post-operative meetings with the patients on whom he had operated, because (without surgical masks!) I was able to talk to the people whom the clinic was serving and see how much surgery had helped them.