I live in Ecuador.
That fact has been objectively true for almost two months now, but it has only just started to feel real. I’m not here for a vacation, or a retreat, or even a semester. I live here. The streets are becoming familiar. I know the bus routes. I exchange pleasantries with my neighbors as I walk to work.
I live here.
Something that comes with the mind-blowing fact that I live here is the equally mind-blowing transition of having extraordinarily beautiful interactions quite frequently. Extraordinary is my new ordinary, and it will be for the next year. The result of that reality is that, after nearly two months here, the stories that I could share on this blog are beginning to pile up. I’ve decided that for this (overdue) blog post, I’m going to share two of my favorites. Hopefully they’ll give you an idea of what I mean when I say extraordinarily beautiful.
A few weeks after we arrived in Quito, our program director told me about an opportunity at the local parish. One of the sisters would be organizing a music school with the help of two professional musicians every Saturday. The musicians are a pianist and a guitarist, one from Venezuela and one from Quito, respectively. As far as I can tell, they wanted to hold this music school simply for the joy of teaching and the love of music. That seemed very cool to me, and I’ve always wanted to play the guitar, so I knew I had to go. The first lesson was during our third week here, and it remains one of my favorites memories so far.
When I got to the church on that Saturday morning, it did not feel like a music school. I was also ten minutes late and expecting to be embarrassed by that fact, so seeing that I was the first to arrive was a confusing realization. While we waited for others to show up, I met the two teachers. They spoke to me passionately about music and how quickly I could learn the guitar. They asked me a bit about myself, a common practice when meeting someone new which used to be fun and now makes me feel slightly on edge. Because Spanish. Thankfully, they were both patient and understanding. I loved them instantly. About twenty minutes later, I had a guitar in my hand and my new professor, a quiteño man named Raúl, was writing chords on the whiteboard. Even though we are currently eight weeks into this experience, I still feel like I’m barely following most conversations. You can imagine how I felt on this day about five weeks ago: significantly in over my head. That‘s partly why that first day, and every day I’ve gone back since, was so memorable for me. It’s because, despite the language barrier, I followed all three hours of instruction… más o menos.
Something that I’ve come to appreciate about learning a language through immersion is that it forces you to always be present. My conversations here are never simple; each one feels like a test for which I did not study. It requires intense focus and mental effort just to participate. If I space out, I’m basically out for the rest of the interaction. I love this music school because I know music. I know what we are talking about even if I don’t always really know what we are talking about. You can change the words, but the sounds will always be the same. These lessons feel like what people describe as “getting in the zone.” It’s hours of nothing but making music and trying to figure out what’s happening. The moments that I know exactly what’s going on are more rewarding than anything I’ve ever experienced.
A few weeks ago, we met a man at church named Emilio. He was incredibly friendly and welcoming, so we asked for his number, as is our practice when we meet incredibly friendly and welcoming people. The next day, Peter and I drafted a message to ask if we could come visit him later in the week. He told us to come over the following Sunday after mass. Upon walking inside his home that day, we were greeted by the smell of food and what seemed like every single member of his family. When they saw him walk inside with us, they got out of their seats, hugged him, and said, ”¡Feliz cumpleaños!” In English, happy birthday. The shock on our faces was so apparent that his daughter asked us if we had known. No, we told her, we had no idea.
At that time, I was in a habit of baking banana bread muffins to bring to neighbors when we visited. I was particularly grateful at this moment for the three small pastries that I had brought along with me. I gave them to him as a birthday present.
For the next hour and a half, we chatted with him and his lovely family while we ate delicious authentic Ecuadorian food. His wife owns a restaurant, and the food was some of the best I’ve had here. They asked us why we were here and shared about their own origins. Emilio’s older daughter even offered to have us over to her apartment closer to the center of Quito. It was exactly the kind of experience that every Rostro alum that I have ever met has described. An outpouring of hospitality for strangers that I’ve come to regard as classic Ecuadorian behavior. I left their house that day feeling elated and loved.
My friends and I back home would call both of these experiences God moments. They are beautiful things that happen to you which feel divinely orchestrated. I’ve been having a lot of these recently. They are extraordinarily beautiful to me not because of what actually happens in the moment, but because of the feeling that it gives me and the meaning behind it. The actual experiences are pretty average for the people here, I’d expect, but they are not average to me. They are simple human moments that feel like magic. The magic of living in a new culture. The magic of witnessing a life different than my own.
Although I am starting to get used to life here, I know that I’ll never get used to the view. From where I’m sitting on our roof right now, I can see all of northern Quito and two volcanoes. It’s a clear day, and the sun is starting to set. As I wrote this post, the light outside slowly faded, and the sky turned a deep purple. At the same time, the snowy peaks of the volcanoes held on to the day. I watched every color of the sunset reflected in their white tips, minutes after they disappeared from the sky. The effect made them appear to glow. They shifted from white, to gold, to pink, to purple, to blue. Slowly. Matching both the pace and the beauty of my new life.
…How did I get so lucky?
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