A trip to the remote tropical regions of Ecuador with our good friend Barbie.

My (Susie) reluctance to go to Borbon was no secret to the team. Having lived in Ecuador all my life I had never had any reason to visit that region largely because the only thing it boasts of is being the epicenter of infectious diseases in Ecuador. When Nick suggested that Barbie (see days 1-7, she is the cake my mom had made for my birthday) come along on the trip I perked up. So Nick, Tanner, Susie, and Barbie in a box embarked on an all night bus trip to Borbon. Anat stayed behind to nurse an unidentified sickness and consequently start our group report. The bus ride to Borbon was long and painfully sleepless. When we finally arrived in Borbon at 5:30 am a nice young man from our collaborators’ project was there to meet us. He took us to our “hotel” which was an unmarked building where we had to wake Sra. Rosita up to get in. The hotel was a cement block collection of rooms with beds. Nick and Tanner’s room had cute frilly pink and yellow mosquito nets dawned over the beds. They looked very cute under their pastel coverings.  Arriving in Borbon restored my notions of how Ecuador is and was. Being in Quito and Guayaquil I was so disappointed to see how western imperialist corporations had overrun the cities (no corporations mentioned, but you can guess). It was nothing like the developing country I had remembered growing up in. Being in Borbon made me realize that the majority of the country does still live in dire poverty, but the cities are developing quickly making the gap between the rich and poor even more apparent.

An orphaned child who was very upset to be getting her blood drawn to test for HIV.

We rested for about an hour until we had to meet our collaborators at 7:00 am.  When we go to their offices we arranged a “lancha” which is dug out canoe with an outboard motor to take us to three villages on the river to interview the lab technicians. When we asked them if we needed to wear life vests he looked at us and asked “you don’t know how to swim.” We got life vests and went on our way. We spent that entire day in the boat going to three small rural villages and interviewing people. We witnessed several EU projects for rural development. One was a water pump right next to the river that the locals said had never been used when asked why they responded “the river is right there why would we pump water.” Apparently an education campaign did not accompany the mass building of water pumps. Another was a sugar cane mill, which was a successful enterprise for the people.  But my personal favorite is the story of the genetically engineered chickens.  The EU donated a bunch of chickens that had been engineered to grow bigger, faster with the aid of a dietary supplement.  For an unknown reason the locals refused to give the chickens the supplement and consequently they turned out smaller and occasionally deformed.  The locals refused to use their eggs or eat them because of their abnormalities. We also recieved my favorite questionnaire response in one of the rural villages.  When asked “What is your favorite aspect of the diagnostic test you perform most often?”  The trained technician responded, “The buffer.”  Tanner, Nick and I stared at eachother and asked for clarification.  Jokingly he said, “ I like to drink the buffer, it has nice side effects.”  Clearly, staying in this village with no access to TV, radio or other entertainment had led to a little experimentation for fun.

A friendly little guy who played soccer with us in his rubber boots. The wound on his head was later cleaned up by a research clinician.

The day was a success except for the part that we couldn’t feel our asses because we had been sitting on wooden benches in a canoe all day. We got off the canoe and decided we needed to find food. We went to the one restaurant everyone recommended and had a pretty good meal there. Then we had to decide whether to take a nap as we were very tired or press through and go to bed early. We decided the latter. So we went to arrange interviews for the next day and make sure we had transportation to the next remote village we were going to. Then there was nothing left to do but hang out. So we went back to the same restaurant and started playing cards.

Kids love the gringos.

We attracted a large number of local kids who became very interested in our game and then Nick had the best idea yet….to go get Barbie and feed her to the kids. So Barbie made her debut in Borbon. We took tons of  pictures and Nick served Barbie to the 20 kids populating the town.  The kids loved us after that and hung around us the rest of the night. This is the exact amount of parenting Tanner, Nick and I are capable of: feed them, give the kids a nice sugar high and do our part to contribute to diabetes in the remote places in Ecuador and then leave once they start to whine at the end of the sugar high. The beauty of a small town is that if you sit anywhere long enough the town will come to you. As we sat there two dr’s who were very helpful to us in arranging visits and in being interviewed themselves came and sat with us.

Barbie shortly before being devoured

I was pretty beat and so I called it a night before Nick and Tanner. We all slept very soundly that night especially considering the fact that in the back of our minds we were all worried we might get Malaria, Dengue or worse Scabies, which we soon learned was the number one diagnosed infectious disease in the area.

-Susie