Blog Post – Hannah Reynolds – 7/19/09

The thing about foreign countries with foreign food and foreign bacteria is that, inevitably, you wind up sick.

I woke up at 3 in the morning, spent an hour curled up on the bathroom floor, before dragging myself back into bed and back to sleep.

The other thing about foreign countries? Sometimes, you’re not there very long. So even if you are sick (and during our time in Ecuador, everyone on the project has had food poisoning, altitude sickness, or parasites) you’re still going to try everything you can.

The next morning, we went to the hot springs at Oyacachi. The bus ride was long, comatose, and damp at the end. The town of Oyacachi- recent closed to visitors due to a local, several week-long roadblock- is at a lower, wetter altitude than our own. We were freezing as we tumbled off the bus, freezing as we striped to our swimsuits and eyed the three murky brown pools, and boiling an instant later as we senselessly slipped into the hottest spring there.

And it felt amazing.

It’s hard to imagine how dirty we get at field school, unless you’re actually here. But there’s dirt under our nails and in our ears; grit in our and and tans made by soil .And it’s rare to be warm and HAPPY about it, either we’re freezing at night, huddled in layers, or dying of heat stroke under the mid-day sun.

So it may have been cold and drizzling in Oyacachi- but while we were in that water, we were warm, and happy, and relaxed.

And when I came home that night, I was sick again.

But at least I was clean.

-Hannah Reynolds