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Facts & Arguments

Jumping the career track and uprooting your family to South America is a trying ordeal. Abandoning your cultural biases when you arrive might be even more difficult, Kathryn Anthonisen writes

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My family and I did something that many think about, perhaps even dream about, but never do. We packed up our stuff, rented our house and set out on a seven-month adventure in South America.

When we first broached the idea to family and friends, we received a mixed bag of responses; everything from "How fantastic!" to "Why would you do that?"

Mostly, we wanted to expose our children to a new culture, a new language and a new rhythm of life. Our daughters, at 11 and 13, were on the cusp of adolescence – just the right age to learn some meaningful lessons about the wider world and our place in it.

But they were not enamoured with the idea of living in Ecuador. Our middle-class life held numerous pleasures and, while my husband and I could imagine all the amazing experiences and adventures we'd have, our girls could only envision missing their friends. We had many difficult conversations.

But my husband and I run an enlightened dictatorship. In the end, we rented the house, sorted out the finances, booked the flights and made our way to Cuenca, in southern Ecuador in the Andes mountains.

Our adopted hometown was a lovely colonial town nestled in a broad valley surrounded by green Andean peaks. But the transition was difficult. We felt disoriented, displaced, discombobulated. It took a few months of residency and Spanish lessons before we felt even mildly in the groove of Ecuadorean life. The country is spectacularly beautiful, with the Amazon jungle, high Andes, Galapagos Islands and Pacific coastline, and the Ecuadorean people are unfailingly polite and fiercely proud of their heritage, but it was tough going at times. There were many, many nights when we all fell silent, each homesick in our own way.

Day-to-day local customs were the most jarring. We had to put up with fervent, high-volume sales pitches while riding the bus (everything from religion to herbal remedies to new condominium developments). We observed that Ecuadoreans have a high tolerance for noise – barking guard dogs, car alarms (the unofficial national anthem) and mobile vendors who communicate proximity by blasting their horns or screeching vintage speaker systems. The process of extending our visas was an exercise in bureaucratic uncertainty and randomness. And there is often a relative nonchalance regarding safety: police tape, not a permanent barrier, at the cliff edge; ragged iron bars sticking out of the wall at a public pool; and cars that blithely pass buses around blind corners on mountain passes.

But we have felt welcomed. Ecuadoreans are extraordinarily warm and helpful and family comes first. Parks come alive in the evening and many are host to a nightly combination aerobics class/flash mob dance. Western and Ecuadorean pop pumps up the crowd, but we were too nervous to join in. But it was fun to watch. Eating is a central and social event. Our family learned to enjoy meals at a leisurely pace and we took time to relax and reconnect. Sunday chancho (whole pig roasted slowly on a spit) is a beloved Cuencan tradition.

Our girls came around and fell in love with Ecuador in the end. Both slogged through the thin air and steep trails on the slopes of the Cotopaxi volcano without complaint, they even dug enthusiastically into a traditional indigenous meal: fish, white coca beans, green plantain, chicha and the local delicacy, grilled grubs. One daughter's determination to overcome her arachnophobia and make it through an Amazon jungle hike led to a remarkable interlude with a troupe of spider monkeys. The challenges of learning another language made our younger daughter think about how hard it would be to be an immigrant.

They both faced new and frightening experiences (a night walk in the jungle), learned how to deal with our family's 24/7 togetherness (and managing the inevitable conflicts) and saw how some children have to live, tending herds and selling snacks at traffic lights.

My husband and I found we had to drop some of the biases we brought along with us. Early on, we were worried about our safety, warning our children not to flaunt their electronics in public. But everyone had a smartphone, including the Quichua farmers at the market and the nuns on their nightly constitutional. Theft is relatively rare. During the Christmas season in the central shopping district, a man who had shoplifted was identified, surrounded by the crowd, publicly shamed and sent on his way.

We were embarrassed by our assumptions, but truly unsettled by becoming, for the first time in our lives, the minority, the outsider. However well we managed the language and the daily norms, we were always conspicuous, slightly out of place and acutely aware of it. While we thought we could empathize with the plight of minorities in Canada, being outsiders in Ecuador highlighted the shallowness of our understanding. It was a wake-up call, both enlightening and humbling in equal measure and, perhaps, the most enduring lesson of our family's time abroad.


Kathryn Anthonisen lives in Ottawa.