Ecuador y Peru

For pictures supporting this post: http://picasaweb.google.com/jacob.stiglitz/ecuadorandperu/

Well, I’m writing - which means I’ve been traveling. Before I start talking about the trip, I should quickly write about the previous six months that I haven’t written anything.

Work at QuestBridge has been going really well. We were able to match over 200 students from all around the countries with full scholarships to our 20 partner colleges this year. We are hoping that we will see a similar increase (almost double) in admissions through regular decision as well for the other applicants. I’ve moved into a great apartment in Palo Alto about 2 miles away from work, so I can bike. I live with two roommates who I found on Craigslist, and we all get along great. Kacey is in her second year as a PhD student in psychology at Stanford. Priscilla went to Stanford and is now working for an economic litigation consulting firm in Menlo Park (about a mile past where I work and across the street from my friend from Pomona who works at their competitor). Over Thanksgiving, I bought a white BMW from Alan’s sister, and, after a quick unexpected trip to the mechanic, it made the trip back from Arizona just fine.

So, onto the trip. My aunt and uncle, Joe and Anya, invited me to come with them to Ecuador and Peru for 2 weeks. Fantastic! The timing couldn’t have been better either, because it was right before the week between Xmas and New Year’s which I got off from work anyway.

The trip started right after work on Friday. I rushed home from work to grab my bags (with clothes for summer in South America as well as winter in Maine and Tahoe later), got on the train, and got stuck on it for about two hours. We actually got off at one point, got on a different train for about 20 minutes, only for them to have us get back on the first train with all of the passengers from the second train as well. Not surprisingly, however, the plane was delayed as well, so I didn’t miss the first leg of the flight, SFO to LAX. I got to LAX at about 11pm, and found a comfortable place on the ground to sleep until my 6am flight to Miami. I don’t think sleeping there would have been too bad, as I can usually sleep through just about anything, but for some reason they felt like they should play a bunch of different renditions of ‘The Little Drummer Boy’ really loudly. Needless to say, I slept really well on the cross-country flight. Miami to Quito went well, and I sat next to this very sweet lady originally from Ecuador who told me all about what I should do while there during the flight, and even gave me the numbers of her nieces and nephews to call to show me around once I got there.

Ecuador- For the first time in my life, there’s a guy waiting for me at the airport with my name on a sign. My Spanish is basically non-existent, but the driver talked to me anyway for 30 minutes straight to the hotel, which was easily the nicest hotel I’ve ever been to. Hotel Plaza Grande is located in none other than Plaza Grande, Quito’s old-town. It was well after dark when I arrived, but the view from the hotel was still beautiful, overlooking all of the lights of the houses on the hills surrounding the area. I spent the next day doing what I usually do when I arrive in a new city: ignore the guide book and walk until I’m completely lost. Quito is a huge city, and I couldn’t possibly walk the whole thing in a day, but the parts I was able to see were really beautiful. I poked my head in some really neat churches, where the influence of the native people could definitely be felt. There were a ton of squares, parks, and markets with people hanging out having a seemingly good time.

My uncle arrived that night. We went to the only restaurant I’ve ever been to where they had tobacco flavored soup. Of all of the things I’ve eaten in my life, however, I couldn’t actually bring myself to try it. We left early the next morning for Cuenca, the third largest and “Cultural Capital” of Ecuador. Cuenca was my favorite city of the trip, set in a very high valley in the mountains. There were four rivers that ran through the city, which join with each other and eventually become the Amazon river. The town is about 300,000 people, who all appeared to be very friendly. We stayed in this beautiful hotel in the middle of the city which used to be an old manor home called Mansion.

Cuenca is the first place where my uncle was giving a talk. It was really funny for me going around to this (and later) places with him because everyone assumed that I must be some sort of important person as well, but they just weren’t sure who I was. They would ask if I was an economist as well, and when I said no, they were simply at a loss as to why I was there. By the end of the trip I was answering that I will be an economist by the end of the trip, and they always thought that was funny. I learned a lot from my uncle on the trip, and I think everything that we was saying makes complete sense- people should do a better job listening to him. I’m not going to do him the injustice by trying to repeat or even summarize what he said, but basically the world would be a better place if people focus less on immediate monetary gains for the rich and more on sustainable long term gains for the people who actually need the money.

We spent our days in Cuenca touring around. One day was spent doing your typical tourist stuff: churches, museums, etc. There was one art museum which was pretty neat because (in addition to the art) it used to be a jail house for drunks, until they all escaped. Since then they’ve used it for a variety of purposes, now as an art museum, using one cell per artist. The other day we began by touring some of the factories which are housed in Cuenca. We went to a place where they make leather goods, a ceramic tile factory, recycled paper, and a Panama hat museum/factory. Panama hats are actually made in Cuenca, but are called Panama hats because they were shipped through Panama on the way to Europe, where they became famous at a World’s Fair in the late 1800s. The things you learn on a trip like this! We also did some great outdoorsy sightseeing as well. We traveled to an even higher elevation, close to where the mountains became snow capped, to this beautiful pond up in the mountains. We also went to a church that had a magnificent view of the city. The setting is truly great, and I hope that it doesn’t grow too much more, so as to keep the “small town” feel of the place.

We flew back to Quito where we were supposed to be greeted by Anya, but her plane had been rerouted to Columbia instead. She was, of course, rather unhappy with the whole situation, which they only succeeded at making worse by doing everything they could to make the situation the most inefficient possible. The rest of our stay in Ecuador was riddled with seemingly unlucky and/or unreasonable events, none of which had any effect whatsoever on our having a good time: Joe needed to get dental work done, there was a city employee holiday which closed a few museums, and there was a meeting scheduled in a town about 90 minutes away in order to allow us to visit this town famous for its market, yet we arrived too late for it. Luckily, however, Joe was able to survive with the tooth, other museums were open, and the was another market at the town for us to visit.

And we are off to Peru! Peru was more of a whirlwind. I don’t think we stayed more than a day at any one place. Sightseeing in Lima, flying to and sightseeing in Cuzco, train to Machu Picchu, visiting other Incan ruins on the way back to Cuzco, fly back to Lima and poke around a little bit more, and then fly back to the US. Anya’s friend Beth joined us in Peru, celebrating having just finished a book. Anya and I did a full day of sightseeing in Lima the first day, and I think we did pretty good considering the size of the city. Lima is huge, which is partly due to a huge part of the population moving to the city during the 80s when there were terrorists in the countryside. The first day was really nice out, which is unfortunately a fairly rare occurrence. Apparently, there is a thick fog that sits over the city most of the time, similar but worse to what we are accustomed to in San Francisco. But, we were able to go to some great museums and churches in, and we ate at the oldest deli in the city (country?) – delicious!

It was a fairly easy flight to Cuzco, but since we arrived fairly late in the day, we decided to go straight out and sight see rather than do the typical hour or two of rest that you are supposed to do in order to adjust to the altitude. Cuzco is another amazing city, both in its architecture and setting. Unfortunately, it has reached the point where enough of the population exists on tourism that some of them will really chase you down and bother you to buy things from them or go to their store. A great deal of the city still uses the foundations of the buildings left over from Incan times, which you can tell just by looking at the stones which are smooth and placed directly on top of one another without the use of mortar. We stayed at another amazing hotel here, which was a converted monastery, called nothing other than Monastereo. It was a really beautiful hotel but found ourselves slightly unimpressed when we noticed that the housekeepers were cleaning the “oil paintings” with Windex and a rag….

My uncle’s talk at the University of Cuzco that night was received like none other I have ever witnessed. Despite the use of one of the worst translators I have ever seen (and keep in mind I’ve lived in Mongolia), the students were awestruck by him and what he had to say (which was of course drastically shortened and simplified on the fly to compensate for the translator). After the speech/ceremony, they swarmed him, asking for photos and signatures. They were even asking me for signatures and pictures, which I found more than amusing. Just think – “Hey, you won’t believe what I got last night – the autograph of the nephew of the great economist Joe Stiglitz!” Apparently, last year’s economics major had adopted him as the “patron professor” for their class, and having him actually come to speak was more than they could ever have hoped for. The class along with a few professors took us out to dinner afterwards which was very nice of them.

The next morning, we arose bright and early to hop on the Hiram Bingham, which is the luxury train that goes to Machu Picchu. I really love trains, and being on one as classy as this one was a real treat for me. I’ll have to write more about my love of trains at some point, but as this post has gone on for 3 pages already (and not quite close to done yet), I’ll spare any readers from doing it here. The country that we went through was amazingly beautiful though, with steep mountains on both sides; everyone chose to stand in the viewing car rather than sitting at their tables. We stopped at the bottom, and hopped on a bus which was to take us to up the mountain to this extremely impressive spot.

When you get to Machu Picchu, you can immediately understand why the Incans chose to build their city there. We all agreed that while the ruins were beautiful, this place would have been worth traveling to even if there were no ruins there. But, the ruins were there, which made it even better, and it was such a fun day exploring them and imagining what life must have been like for these people who lived there, really, not all that long ago. For a people who had not invented the wheel, their irrigation and architectural feats are quite impressive.

We took a train the next morning about half-way back, and stopped at a village where people were still living in the original Incan huts. We also stopped in one of the huts to see how they lived and were greeted by about 100 guinea pigs (which are a not-so tasty delicacy of the area). There were also a lot of interesting things on the shrine, such as skulls of their ancestors, dried baby lamas, some strange dolls, and, of course, a picture of Jesus. From here we drove back, stopping at a great market and a llama/alpaca farm along the way.

The rest of the trip was mainly getting back at this point. A little time in Cuzco, flying to Lima, and then flying back to the US. I spent a few hours in New York before heading up to Maine for Christmas, where I hadn’t been in about 2 years at this point. I was in Tahoe for New Year’s, and now I’m finally back in Palo Alto. I left out a lot of really amazing things in this post, but with the length being what it is…. I guess I can just list some of them:

-meeting the president of Ecuador,
-going on a date to Burger King with Miss Cuenca,
-going clubbing with Columbian models,
-some amazing dinners with business and political leaders,
-my aunt being offered plastic surgery,
-running into my aunt’s friends and a girl from my high school,
-eating guinea pig, llama, and alpaca,
-etc., etc., etc.

If you have actually read through this far, than you can tell that it was an absolutely amazing vacation. I’ll sign off here with my typical, “I’ll try to write more than I have been,” but in all likelihood, you’ll hear from me next time I have the opportunity to travel.

Quick 6 Months

Well its amazing how quickly 6 months can go by. I've almost been back in America now for as long as I was in Mongolia. I guess I was avoiding writing anything in the blog as I really wasn't sure what I was doing with my life. It was easy to think that in a few weeks everything would be back on track and I could write an update then. Well, I guess a few weeks turned into half a year. Damn.

So, between Mongolia and now... Let's see. The first few weeks were filled with trying to get back to Mongolia. I applied to just about every organization there to find something to do. Although I received several responses, it became pretty clear that finding something that would pay me to do something I wanted to do was going to be pretty difficult.

I also spent some of this time thinking that I would just sign back up for Peace Corps. I eventually decided that if I do want to do Peace Corps again in the future, it would be there. But no reason to rush back in immediately.

Then I spent a while figuring out what to do with my life next. I think I applied to be an entertainer on a cruise line, a programmer at google, a director of greek life and everything in between. I was also beginning to look at a Master's on another semester at sea-like program (thescholarship.com), which I still haven't ruled out as a possibility for some point in the future.

I took a trip to Israel with the Birthright Program, which I would recommend to anyone who considers himself Jewish or who has a mother who does. I've been fortunate to see a great deal of the world, but being in Israel was a very unique experience that was filled with warmth and hope that I haven't felt many other times in my life. It felt akin to going to a family-member's house that you may have never met before, but you feel more than welcome none the less.

As the job search got more and more frustrating with acceptances from places I decided I really didn't want to work mixed in with a lack of responses from places that I really did, I stumbled upon a job posting that excited me enough to respond to immediately despite my mom having just called me to dinner. The job was with an organization that I had actually known about and had been to their website before but they weren't offering a position that interested me. I was excited enough to actually try calling them the next day to ensure that my application would be read, only to get voicemail. After months of job searching, getting next to no responses, and only weeks later if that, QuestBridge called me the day after I tried calling them to set up an interview. I really knew right then that this is the job for me.

However, before I got the job, I had to go through a pretty entertaining interview process. The job that I hadn't been interested in when I had previously visited the website was for a software engineer. Coincidentally, my resume has enough computer jargon in it to trick someone with no programming skills into thinking that I am a programmer, which is what I ended up being interview for. However, I still thought I was interviewing for the Recruitment Associate position. This lead to a pretty confusing few hours that resulted in an email suggesting that the software engineer position at QuestBridge wasn't the right fit for me, but maybe I should consider the Rec Assoc position. Well, a carefully crafted email letting them know that I, in fact, was applying for said position had everyone laughing at the situation when I came back for another interview about a week later. I proved myself capable and am now a proud employee of QuestBridge.

A little about QuestBridge: Michael McCullough founded a program a program called Quest Scholars 13 years ago, and QuestBridge is a venture of that program. Quest Scholars is a 5 week, intensive summer camp for low-income high schoolers to help prepare them for college. Most of the graduates of the summer camp have gone on to either Stanford or Harvard. QuestBridge
is a different program started 3 years ago that helps high-achieving low-income students get into the countries top-performing colleges. We currently work with 19 partner schools, including Stanford, Amherst, Columbia, Princeton, and Pomona, which is where I learned about the program while serving on the admissions committee my senior year (that list of schools might sound familiar to some of you). The program provides a free application that has more room for the students to highlight their achievements and the obstacles they have overcome. They can then choose from up to 8 colleges to be matched with (like when applying to medical school) during the early admissions phase. If matched in this manner, the commitment is binding, so the student has to attend the school, and the school has to guarantee four years of full scholarship. Those not matched can choose to be considered using our application during the regular admissions process, and students admitted this way generally get very generous financial aid offers. Last year, we matched 103 students for the full 4 year scholarship, and over 500 more during regular decision. In total, over $55 Million was awarded to the students who applied through our program last year.

We have other programs as well, namely the College Prep Scholarship which provides mentoring, summer camp tuition, and college conferences. If you'd like you can read more about it on the website at www.questbridge.org. I am really enjoying my job though; everyone in the organization is really outstanding, and I thoroughly encourage you to check out the about the staff page on the website to see the people I'm working with. Also check out the past recipients of the scholarships - the students who have won are phenomenal. There is a cool new website where you can help raise money for a non-profit by searching the internet, called goodsearch.com. I invite you to goodsearch for Quest Scholars (the larger organization), or select your own organization to donate to. Regardless, its a great site, and you should use it and spread the word to others.

So now that I'm working, I've been looking for apartments in San Francisco to move to. I've been there most weekends staying at friends' apartments (or, rather, one apartment that 2 of my college friends rent). So hopefully that will happen soon. I'm sure that between work and living with new people in SF I will have a whole new chapter in my life to embark on. Hopefully there will be plenty of goings ons to have reason to keep posting to the blog.

Pictures

I put some new pictures online. Here they are: http://picasaweb.google.com/jacob.stiglitz/ (or click the link on the banner above).

Good Ol' USA

Well, I am finally back in the USA, which was not the plan, but at least it gives me a moment to actually sit down and talk about what has been going on. I believe the last thing that I talked about was going to IST (In-Service Training), which was held in the Nukht hotel in the mountains north of UB. Training was a lot of fun and very informative, but it doesn’t feel important to talk about it a lot now, in light of what has happened since.

After IST, just about every volunteer stuck around UB for a few extra days so that we could all spend Christmas together. The party, held on Xmas eve, was held at the same place that we did Thanksgiving, and was, once again, a very good time. A live band (of ex-pats and locals) played and then allowed the PCVs to play on own our afterwards. There, of course, was plenty of good food and wine as well. Towards the end there was a gift exchange, Yankee Swap, because ever Xmas needs a little commercialism.

Although most of the PCVs went home on Xmas day or the day after to get back to site as staying longer required using vacation days (of which we get 2 in country and 2 out of country a month, and we can save up as much as we want), most of my better friends stuck around. My friend Rob’s parents and girlfriend were flying in from Atlanta on the 26^th, and we all wanted to meet them. Rob’s dad was a PCV in Samoa back in the 60’s, and it was really interesting chatting with him about the similarities and differences in both cultures and the PC program over the years. Rob’s dad became a anthropologist due to his time in the PC, so he obviously had some very clever things to say on these subjects.

The holidays had been great so far, but unfortunately, my reason for being home at the moment is made clear soon. On the 28^th, two of my friends, Hanna and Hannah, and I got on a train to go to my site where we were all going to spend New Year’s together as my site was in the middle of the 3 and none of us wanted to spend New Year’s Eve alone. However, when we arrived I learned that one of the 10^th grade students that I had been teaching was found dead after being missing for 3 days. As you can imagine, we decided to leave town as soon as we learned this information.

I spent the next few days, until Jan. 2^nd, in Sainshand with my two friends, having no idea about what was going on in Shiveegobi. Mostly, I was worried about the impact of a girl’s being raped and murdered would have a great impact on a town of 2,000. The fact that she was my student made me extremely uncomfortable, and I felt that the incident would affect my teaching. Ultimately, I felt that if I could teach in Shivee, I could teach anywhere, and there was no reason for me not to change my location.

My director and I tried to work to change my site. Unfortunately, I couldn't stay at my site, but I also couldn't change locations. In order to move for safety reasons, I had to move some place safer. In Mongolia, safer means smaller. At this time, there are no smaller sites that were available to place me. I fell through the cracks. It is unfortunate that I had to leave before the end of my service, but I left on good terms, with full understanding why it had to be that way.

After an extremely emotional day packing up my apartment and saying goodbye to all of the friends that I had made, I went back to UB to begin filling out all the paper work in order for me to leave. It’s amazing how fast information can travel, even in a place like Mongolia: I was receiving text messages and phone calls about me leaving even before the final decision was made. I left on the 12^th, and after an evening in Beijing, I was back on American soil, giving big hugs to the folks.

Although wonderful to back in the States for various reasons, it is a little strange being back at the same time. The trip was cut short; I was there only about 7 months when I was planning on being there for 27 months. I feel like my Mongolian was finally starting to pick up. I was finally making some good Mongolian friends in UB, and I was finally getting comfortable teaching and working with my English teacher counter-parts in Shivee.

Now, I’m at my parent’s house in San Jose contemplating whether or not I want to go back to Mongolia to continue teaching (or doing some other sort of work) on my own, whether I want to reapply for the Peace Corps to do a program somewhere else in the world, or whether I want to get some sort of job in the States. And, of course, if I go back to Mongolia, what will I do, if I rejoin Peace Corps, where will I go, and if I work here, what sort of job will I find? These decisions are never easy, but I feel that this list of options is a little bigger than normal. I’m pretty positive about the whole process though, and I’m sure it will work out for the best. As you know, any decisions will be posted here, and as I always say, hopefully more often than before.