Wahoo! Wowee! Wowza!

Heaven is a balcony. It’s standing next to Claire, wringing her wet hair out onto the tin roof below us. Listening to her repeat a story about her grandfather’s lucky tooth, deciding a long time ago not to tell her that I already know how it ends—I love to hear it anyway, and I like the way she smiles at the punchline: “he’s not even Swedish!” Heaven is sitting in silence with Konrad, trading wordless reactions to our respective paperbacks (mine: Martyr! and his: The House of Broken Angels), looking up only to point at a blur of reds and yellows that might be a masked trogon or a hummingbird. This, I think, is where I’m happiest: almost-inside, almost-outside, looking out into the great big everything, someone I love by my side. So yes, if you were wondering, life is very good. 

It’s also very full. Three weeks in and I’ve already managed to speed-run a hospital visit, so now I’m two stitches richer and $100 poorer, about to gnaw my hand off trying not to scratch at my mosquito bites or my now-neatly-sewn shut knee wound. I don’t recommend getting hurt abroad, but it’ll definitely make you feel more fluent by the time you’ve left the emergency room. As a brief overview of my time here so far: I got sick, lost my camera, made some maps, put canguil (popcorn) in my soup, found my camera, danced to a three-hour Humazapas set, fed hummingbirds from my hand, baked a tres leches cake for my host brother Alejo’s birthday, taught my classmates how to salsa, kissed a pretty girl on a zipline, climbed a few waterfalls in the cloud forest, slid around in the mud, read Wendy Cope’s The Orange to my friends (humans, cows, mutts) at Ilaló’s summit, and befriended a dog named Chiquita who I think may have been a saint or an ancestor or a spirit or something else woo-woo and wonderful. In short: my knee is closed and my heart is open. 

Universidad San Francisco de Quito's (USFQ) campus is incredibly gorgeous, complete with the sexy dragon from Shrek as their symbol (not their mascot, as I was corrected repeatedly), and most exciting: a pig named Gaston who you can take out for walks. I haven’t had the chance to free him from his enclosure just yet, but I have big plans. After a week of Spanish classes, we launched into our first module, GIS, which has been packed with field trips and fascinating maps like this one, which our professor Wagner Holguín worked on. Konrad and I did a dramatic reading of the Zootopia abortion comic for the whole class on a bus ride to El Chanquiñan, which received critical acclaim from the one and only Lucy McCabe, who later performed a somehow-less dramatic reading of Emily Dickinson’s I felt a Funeral, in my Brain. Nika and I got food poisoning from Burger King after a day at the hot springs. I hiked Rucu Pichincha with a dachshund named Colette, who made me miss my Colette (human, sunshine incarnate) from University of Southern California (USC). Most of my day-to-day life involves ridiculously incredible clauses like “when I get back from the Amazon…” or “before we go to the Galápagos…” I walk through clouds and cow pastures for homework. I take pictures of mountain flowers and toucans for class credit. I wake up every morning with the sun (and sometimes a rooster) and take a bus that keeps its doors wide open on the highway. Yes, life is very, very good.

And yes, there’s all the mountains and waterfalls and forests and sunsets, but I also want to tell you about the people. My first week here, it was Alejo’s great uncle’s birthday. The night ended as any good Latino party does, with half of us still in the living room despite having said our goodbyes hours prior. Old-head salsa blared from a speaker in the dining room, where the adults talked shop and drank cafecito at 11 P.M., while Alejo and I helped his cousin Joaquin with his math homework. Explaining how to round to the nearest tenths place is hard enough in English, so it’s a miracle I made any sense at all in Spanish. After Joaquin went to bed in his Among Us pajamas, Alejo and I traded advice on each other’s respective girl drama. At one point, he made an aside about feeling like he doesn’t leave much of an impression on the people in his life, which I told him wasn’t true. I told him I’d never had a brother before. He said neither had he. So when Alejo fell asleep on my shoulder on the car ride home, I felt like I might be able to earn Anilu’s incredibly kind introduction: not “this is Anya, who’s staying with us,” or “this is Anya, a friend from out of town,” but “this is Anya, mi hija.”

I’m still working on it. I’m still working on all of it. I’m speaking Spanish like it’s the water Toni Morrison spoke of, with its perfect memory and its ache for home. I’m working on the being someone’s daughter, the existing in a new hemisphere, the living presently, which means I’m eating a lot of plátano maduro and dancing every chance I get. That’s all I have to say for now. I love you, I'm glad I exist.