Writings By Date| Ecuador and the Curse of Quito | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
This isn't to say we didn't meet any nice people in Quito. It's just that they're hard to find, and they're getting harder to find all the time, since they all seem to want to leave. Most of the smart (and fortunate) people have been leaving the country to work abroad; in fact, residents working abroad is the second biggest revenue generator for Ecuador, right after pickpocketing.
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| Mercedes and Mercedes |
Among those who want to leave is our friend, Mercedes. Mercedes works as an administrative assistant at a computer company headquartered in the US, and I met her when I visited this company's remote office to check my email and steal office supplies. Having only known me for one day, she invited me into her home in Quito for dinner, with her mother and two children. Such hospitality is said to be common in Latin America, but you wouldn't know it from our experiences on the streets.
Growing up in Quito, she has seen it transform from a prosperous and pleasant city to one riddled with crime and corruption. Sadder still, she senses that with the economy continuing to go sour, it will only get worse before it gets better, and there are many who agree with her. Not more than a week before, she had a friend whose car was broken into and stolen. Another friend was mugged in broad daylight in recent weeks. And that very day, when she came to pick us up, the ATM at her bank ate her card — because it was pay day, of course. Mercedes is now trying to attain permanent work in the United States, partly because it's more prosperous, partly because she enjoys the country so much, but most notably for her family's safety.
Some people are willing to stay, but doing so isn't easy. Take Jan, founder of The Biking Dutchman, and the man responsible for bringing mountain biking to Ecuador's tourism industry. Jan was our guide as we visited Cotopaxi mountain, gasping for air on the down from 4500 meters on mountain bikes. Over the course of the day, he told us about how he had spent several years travelling the world (putting our 18-month plan in context quite shamefully, I might add), and intended for Ecuador to be only a temporary stop on the way home...then he met his wife, and the rest was history.
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| Presidential Guard |
He, too, has seen Quito grow into its current state, and he wants nothing to do with it. By American standards, he would be barely scraping by financially, but in Ecuador, he is considered a rich man. This luxury allows him to live outside of the city, in a sizable house he had built for his family, but he has to pay for armed security 24 hours a day. Otherwise, he'd be a target for kidnapping and God knows what else. Security such as this can actually be found all over Quito, where many of the affluent residents and businesses make use of guard dogs. Tourists walk by and see them peacefully sitting behind their bars, waiting for something to happen, but these Rottweilers are notorious for their temperament, and they are anything but docile. The dog guarding our hotel never so much as raised a peep, and looked more like a tired stuffed animal than a form of protection. Her friend tethered to the fence outside, however, took a bite out of the leg of a hotel resident who did nothing more than walk on by, not even so much as making eye contact. (That pedestrian was me. Can you tell now why I'm having a hard time liking this city?)
