Arrival: New Communities

Every culture is a collection of unique individual communities. If, as Max Weinrich quipped, a language is merely a dialect with an army and a navy, then what we call a country’s culture is merely the sum of microcosmic social expectations that acknowledge a given ruling authority.

For me, much of this past week has centered around both entering and establishing communities. What exactly are those communities? Of course, there’s the obvious single answer – Ecuadorian society – but a second evaluation quickly reveals a more nuanced response. 

The main micro-community I’ve entered this past week has been my study abroad program group. We have fifteen college students from across the United States, coming from relatively homogeneous situations yet diverse backgrounds, meeting for the first time in another country to spend three and a half months together discussing the way humans establish power dynamics with one another. Oy. With that alone, I think I can understand why SIT believes five days of orientation is a good idea. We’re a brand new conglomeration of strangers creating a unique community based only on the fact that we all chose to participate in this particular program in Ecuador – for vast and varied reasons, at that. With only that single unifying factor, we’ve already started to mold a unique dynamic within our group. Watching each part of this community build itself has been fun, and watching myself be part of it, more so. 

Then there’s the interaction with tourist-catering Ecuador, the people used to Americans and internationals, ready with the appropriate customer service questions and responses in Spanish or English. In airports and hotels and taxis, this was the community we first encountered upon arrival. Although it wasn’t quite as filtered a version as true resort tourists would likely have gotten, it still kept us insulated from local daily life. At least in part, I think the program kept us cloistered away in this bubble the first few days so we could focus on constructing our own internal group dynamic before spreading across the city. Well, there may have been other focus-related reasons, too… but we’ll stick with talking about community-building for now. 

Communities can establish their identities around the most random things, can’t they? However well I may know it, watching it in practice was oddly fascinating. Our group declared corporate love for the two llamas roaming around our first hotel in Ecuador and promptly claimed them as a mascot. They now grace our iconic GroupMe picture. 21st century identity symbols don’t disappoint.

Yet despite the apparent ludicrousness of this, we have integrated into our communal composition those initial interactions with the version of Ecuador made accessible to tourists. Our first encounters with Ecuadorian food, animals, amenities, and people formed the groundwork on which we will build and rebuild throughout the semester. 

There’s also the interaction with what I would think of as the internal, daily life of Ecuador. There is, of course, a clear difference between urban cities and small towns, even within the province of Pichincha, where Quito is located. When we arrived, we stayed in a town called Tababela, about 45 minutes from Quito. Although we spent the majority of our time in orientation at the hotel, we got to roam through Tababela a few times, and oh, it was beautiful.

The town square fascinated me. Not so much the square itself, but the phenomenon: people speed-walking to work, school, a doctor’s appointment; people meandering through; people sitting, sometimes in conversation, sometimes in silence, some with a friend, some alone, some eating, some napping, some simply watching. The peaceful, communal sense of the square seemed like a binding force within the town, a metaphorical as well as literal center in which to share daily life. Physical space can crucially determine group interactions. I don’t know why this is isn’t intuitive to me, but I’ve had to learn in recent years that an accessible (or even unavoidable) central area creates space for the individual interactions that comprise a community. Here, I got to see its impact on the level of urban-planning as the square simultaneously reflected and created local culture. The town square was central to the communal ambiance both in Tababela and nearby Yaruquí, which I spent part of a day exploring with a few of my companions (alas, no camera for me that day). 

And then there’s metropolitan Quito – but I will be in Quito for the majority of the next couple months, so I’ll refrain from delving into that here. Suffice to say I’m definitely not a city girl (yet), and it’s a fascinating place. 

Within Quito, we have yet one more layer of individualized community that may well comprise the nucleus of our time here: host families. Like every family across the world, each is idiosyncratic and has implemented Ecuadorian culture with its own unique twist. It’s quite an adventure stepping into the home of a family you’ve never met to become part of their lives for three months – their meals, their weddings, their funerals, their car rides. I only arrived here Friday and am still figuring out my place with mine.

The program directors told us we’d have this sense of regression for a while after getting here, and it turns out they knew what they were talking about. There’s a feeling of helplessness that comes with not knowing the norms: when to barter and when to pay up; when to get more food and when to decline; when to kiss on the cheek and when to just say hi. (I kissed my teenage host sister’s cheek (or rather the air by her cheek) yesterday morning after greeting my host mom with a similar peck, and she gave me this odd “What the heck are you doing?” look. Umm… Nothing. Never mind. Undo. Sheepish grin.) The confusion can leave you feeling a bit ridiculous. 

But I have a mama who has shown me how to navigate those situations graciously for all of my twenty-one years, and I think she’s pretty much got it just right: you laugh at yourself a bit with everyone else, ask what you should have done differently, and learn to be comfortable with getting things wrong. Deep breath. It’s a good life lesson for me. It’s also the only way to engage with where I am. 

Even after a week, things are slowly starting to shift into place. Conversations become more natural, expectations become more clear, and the language slips off my tongue a little more easily. Interactions stack into a cohesive pattern, one after the other, and community happens in the midst of it.