Home Away from Home for the Holidays

American Thanksgiving Ecuador style

Not surprisingly, the holidays can be a particularly challenging time to be far from home for anyone. No matter your rough and ready attitude or seemingly insatiable wanderlust, when the season of food, friends, and family settles in, it can make for a good time to reflect on your loved ones across the seas and the new companions you’ve collected on your voyages far from home. It’s a time for sharing time-honored cultural traditions like American Thanksgiving (complete with explaining why engorging ourselves for an annual sumptuous meal does not, no definitely could not equate with America’s expanding waistline and soaring obesity rates. Just pass me the pie, please), and for overhearing your co-workers retelling your abbreviated account of that first bountiful meal (so the natives gave the Pilgrim people food and then the Pilgrims killed them all, but the Americans don’t really celebrate that part anymore. Now it’s something to do with family and pie). Eventually you have to intervene to offer an edited abbreviated version of the feasting holiday :)

Paseo de Guapulo dancer ahead of fiestas de Quito

It’s also a time for partaking in local traditions, in learning what a wonder higos and queso (figs and cheese) can be around Christmas (no really, you’ve gotta try it!) and finding out how in Ecuador in celebration of the New Year men frolic the streets in minifaldas (miniskirts), tacos (tacones altos, high heels), and wigs dressed as viudas (widows), the forlorn wives of the passing year, soliciting coins for their welfare in the streets. In Quito in particular, the grand parade of the holiday season starts the first week of December, which is dedicated to fiestas de Quito (parties of Quito), a weeklong celebration of the foundation of the city. (Happy 280^th birthday, Quito!!) A week of shortened work days and seemingly ceaseless partying and gallivanting, including converted pick up trucks posing as chivas (party wagons) to cart imbibing revelers around the city, the week ends in a series of food festivals and concerts all across town. Puts American New Year’s to shame. 

Amidst all this reveling and merrymaking with family and friends new and old, another thought creeps in. Though I have willingly chosen to pick up, pack up, and carry on life overseas, there are many who simply did not have the luxury of choice. Those for whom home was no longer an option. And those are the people I came here for. The ones who most likely will not get to spend the upcoming holidays with the people they love most.

El mirador (lookout) at the laguna de Cotacachi (Cotacahi lagoon)

                               
Though conditions in the country have improved drastically over the years, roughly 10% of the Colombian population is estimated to have been displaced by the violence that has dominated the past few decades. Neighbor to the long-since conflict-ridden country, Ecuador has played host to some tens of thousands of officially registered refugees and has served as a space for nearly 200,000 asylum-seekers from its northern neighbor. Asylum-seekers encompass a diverse group representing several classes of individuals in the displacement process, including solicitants who aim to receive official refugee status under Ecuadorian law and solicitants who seek resettlement by third country parties in North America, South America, Europe, and elsewhere. Since I arrived, I’ve been slowly absorbing what exactly the tedious process of gaining the coveted refugee title entails in Ecuador. From arrival to seeking out NGO support and relief assistance to lengthy entrevistas (interviews) with UN officials chronicling every—often painful—detail of abuse, assault, and attacks before escape. Just a few months ago, this process was confined to a mere 15 days from the date of arrival. Beyond that date, a solicitant’s petition would be summarily denied, whatever the circumstances. Fortunately, however, due to intense pressure on the government, that window of application has recently expanded to a far more reasonable 90 days.

Road to Otavalo

So here you are, perhaps a mother with two young children, ages 8 and 14. Your husband was executed a few years ago, mowed down with several friends on his way home from work. A waitress, at times, you were forced to provide food and lodging for known drug traffickers, on several occasions that also included sex. For quite some time you endure it because you have no one to flee to who can protect you and you want to at least provide for your kids. Then the day comes when your son is threatened by a gang of traffickers—join or die. And that’s when you know it’s time to go. You don’t have the option of looking back. And there you are. In the middle of a new country with the clothes on your back and the children in your arms, and what happens now? If you’re lucky, if you’re not in hiding from fear of retribution even hundreds of miles away, you seek help and maybe you come to our office. You tell your story, your case is passed on and if the governmental powers that be deem you worthy, your case credible, then you get a tiny slip of paper that determines your fate—Ecuador, Canada, USA, Sweden, etc. You have a new home. 

Many believe that the story ends there. The verdict has been handed down. Your destiny served to you in a manila envelope with cold impersonal clasp. Maybe there is a resettlement or protection officer somewhere silently cheering the new status flashing on the screen: accepted. Maybe there is a family member left behind who calls to wish you well: you’re safe. Maybe nothing changes. It’s been nearly a year since you came to this country and maybe you still wake up and can barely feed your kids; your food ration coupons withdrawn after you surpassed the allotted period of food aid. Maybe you still walk the streets trying to conseguir trabajo (acquire work) however piecemeal and by whatever means necessary; some days you cook, some days you clean, some days you just simply sit and wait. But wait for what? Initially it was the day when you could flee your country to relative safety nearby. Then it was the day when you interviewed with those officials, pleading for your life and your children’s welfare. Then it was the day you knew the food aid would come. The clothes would come. A verdict would come. Then it was when, when, when.

Market days

But maybe you already know nothing changes. You can’t afford more than beans and rice, no nutrients for your growing kids. No one will hire you because you are Colombian, no work to keep the family stable. Your children are mercilessly belittled by students and teachers alike, no reprieve even behind scholastic doors. Yet still every day you come home and wonder maybe. Maybe today things will change. Maybe today will be different. 

When I joined a team dedicated to durable solutions, for quite some time I had no idea what that really meant. Sure I had grown accustomed to hearing of medios de vida (livelihoods) that enable impoverished families to get back on their feet with some form of income-generation. But the idea of durable solutions en sí was fairly new. So much of relief assistance is predicated upon humanitarian emergency standards—disaster strikes and organizations flock to the field to administer immediate support. Imminent danger passed, those same organizations (and often their funds) withdraw leaving whole populations to wonder what next. This is referred to as the ill-tended relief to development continuum, that treacherous path between emergency response and the road to long-term recovery. This is the very nexus in which so many refugee families are caught in a limbo that leaves them at times fed, clothed, housed yet without a way to move forward. Hence durable solutions—sustainable, impactful, and lasting intervention that builds resilience and the ability to withstand future shocks. So much more than just finding a job.

Cotacachi

For the past three months, I have been fortunate to participate in three budding projects taking shape among refugee populations in Ecuador—building a stepladder out of ultra-poverty through a model that helps families graduate from stages of pobreza (poverty) with consumption support, skills training for the workplace, and savings; another project connecting young people to livelihoods opportunities (internships, scholarships, etc.); and a third providing access to credit and formal financial institutions. (Some wonder why the latter would even make a difference, but you think about what your life would be like if you were barred from opening a bank account, were unable to store up safe savings for a rainy day, or could not access that vital seed capital to get you to the next step in your business, education, or mortgage.) Each of these projects aims to help cushion families from that next lethal and unexpected blow that they just might not recover from. We often take for granted our social safety nets and the very social capital (friends, family, neighbors) that casts a vital lifeline in times of crisis. For refugees, that is the first thing to go in a strange new home away from home. 

Teleferico. What exactly am I doing, you ask?

I have gotten many questions about just what exactly I am doing in Ecuador right now. Well, so far I've have spent a great deal of time researching whether we are meeting our mandate to provide durable solutions and how we can gear our programs to better do exactly that. Some take monitoring and evaluation for granted, as tool to be applied to please donors, but the way I see it, at the end of the day M&E is what keeps us honest in the provision of aid. It is what reminds us of why we are here, what we came to do and for whom and how and when. 

So what exactly am I doing? Precisely what Fulbright brought us here to do: live, learn, and try to love the process, or at least like it when the going gets rough with all the myriad trials and tribulations of adjusting to a new country and new life. Most days I just have to remind myself to appreciate every moment, even the painful bumps and hiccups, however difficult that may be. Because at the end of the day, at the end of my stay, the fondest memories are the memories I carry home for the holidays and all the days to come—days winding my way through markets, dancing down the aisles for festivals, diving into new dishes, meeting hoards of new faces, and going on trips to take in all the breath-taking sights along the way. And with every step of this program in the name of cultural immersion, there’s some hope that maybe I'm designing programs that truly will make a difference, maybe someone can wake up to a life filled with just a few less maybes. A life where not going home for the holidays will mean feeling a little more at home in a new home for the holidays and every day. Maybe, just maybe. Because then with the grateful words, big smiles, and warm hugs of comfortably, even happily, settled individuals, we´ll know we’ve been doing the job just right all along. And just maybe I won’t need my evaluations to tell me that after all ;)