Things I like

• Honey Bunches of Oats. Are they the perfect cereal, or is my perception skewed from two years of off-brand corn flakes?

• That my niece Genevieve says "no way!" when she feels particularly strong about something.

• My niece Genevieve, even when she's sick.

• My brother's Michigander friends. "I was in Ecuador once on a missions trip," says one. "They said we could either dig ditches or organize books. I said, 'Heck yeah! I'm going to go catalogue, baby.'" He now works in the Calvin College Bookstore.

• Rhianna's "Hate How Much I Love You," the version with Spanish d.b. Davíd Bisbal. Yes, it's true. More about my lifelong love-hate relationship with very, very bad music, coming soon.

• Grand Rapids' best coffee at its coolest coffeeshop, The Sparrows. Please ignore that the link is to a myspace page; sometimes greatness and early adoption of technology don't coincide.

• Bulkagov's The Master and Margarita, which I finally found at a used bookstore in Grand Rapids. I have an inkling that this book is newly popular for some reason or another. Anybody else besides Seth, Dunc and Chris read it recently?

Learning to Roadtrip

I've never roadtripped before. No, really.

I get pegged for a real tramp sometimes, but I'm convinced it's due to the same sort of relative judgments that has caused my Louisiana-born but mild-mannered brother to become the class clown in his otherwise tranquil Michigan office.

So I'm learning how to roadtrip on the fly, or at least learning how I like to do it. A handful of useful suggestions:

1. Bring an atlas
Smart phones are nice, I imagine, but sometimes Google's just wrong. Atlases, peace be upon whoever their authors may be, are not. An atlas does not run out of battery, get stolen, go on the fritz or cost $100 a month.

2. Snacks!
I'm still figuring this out, but got a couple of pointers recently. First, in Ecuadorian Spanish foods are called either de sal (savory) or de dulce (sweet). When you're hungry you generally want one or the other. Second, my high school buddy Ryan informed me that chewing on something keeps you awake. Connecting the dots, I went to Sam's and picked up a giant box of sunflower seeds (de sal), chewing gum (de dulce) and two dozen Cliff Bars or protein It didn't hurt that the first two make me think of Little League baseball. The case of green tea has proven more diuretic than useful, but I haven't had to eat fast food yet.

3. Visit people, not places
They're what matter anyway, right? Carry small gifts and big stories for the folks kind enough to open their homes.

4. Use technology when you feel like it
I've used facebook to remind myself who's where, and been happily surprised along the way. There's also CouchSurfing, eRideShare.com, Google maps and podcasts - oh man, podcasts. I say "when you feel like it" only because I get irritated by (other) techno-evangelists.

5. Get lost
Lock yourself out of your friend's apartment, run your car battery down, get stuck for 45 minutes in the black hole that is Granville, Michigan. Think: "This might make a pretty good story once it's over."

If all you have is a hammer

"I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."

- Abraham H. Maslow (1962), Toward a Psychology of Being

How to find facebook friends by geography

On the eve my Great(ish) American Road Trip, I suddenly discovered that facebook had removed the ability to search for my friends according to location. I spent some time with Mark's girlfriend - what my friend John has decided to call the internet from now on - and discovered how.

From your own profile, scroll down to your 'Friends' box in the left-hand column.


In the window that pops up, click on 'Browse,' and then pick 'By City.


Voila!

Things I haven't seen in two years

Some everyday stuff that - when you haven't experienced them for two years - don't seem so everyday:

• Squirrels - gross.
• Baby strollers
• Front lawns with crabgrass instead of walls
• Enormous, not-for-professional use four-door trucks
• Casual conversations in English
• People over 6'6" tall
• Microbrews and good beer on tap. Heck, good beer generally
  
• Restaurants serving tap water
  
• People waiting in line for tables at restaurants
• LSU football, Rangers baseball, and the Saints!
  

Two years later

A final letter to my donors, which should be arriving by mail this week (if you don't get one, please let me know!):

After two years in Ecuador with Manna Project International, I’ve hung up my cleats. I have landed safely in Shreveport, had my first (and tenth) Southern Maid Donut, my first encounter with an old Magnet High schoolmate in Barnes and Noble, and begun slowly to relearn the rules of the American road. I leave my work in Ecuador in the capable hands of Bibi, a former Peace Corps Volunteer and Tulane public health graduate who replaced me as Ecuador Country Director last month.

At the close of this two-year journey, I want to thank you and your family for your gracious support of a project you may have understood only in vague terms when it began. Admittedly, when I first asked for your help in the summer of 2007, I had only a rough outline of how I would spend the next two years of my life. Your confidence inspired and challenged me to make these two years count and pushed me along in more difficult moments.

I would like to take the opportunity to describe how your donations and my time in Ecuador were spent. Upon first landing, MPI-E’s founding team inherited a skeletal mission: to create a community of young volunteers who would live in service to a "community in need" in the developing world. We were invited to work in a valley southeast of Ecuador’s capital, Quito. We began slowly, with an after-school program and English courses.

Very quickly, we had to discard many of the assumptions we brought with us to Ecuador. This was a lower-class community, to be sure, but children were not starving. The neighborhoods of San Francisco, Rumiloma and Tena were full of people already working to better their own communities. What constructive role could a handful of young, eager, Spanish-learning Americans play here?

Our answer was simple: we could build up, connect and support those Ecuadorian institutions, networks and people already in action. We set to work connecting a locally owned cooperative to microfinance training; we began talks with a school/foster home to open a health clinic; we helped a teacher and entrepreneur develop his English curriculum. The shift from talking about communities in terms of ‘need’ to talking about them in terms of assets and resources allowed us to see people as actors rather than clients.

Missing in our grand new scheme, however, was a sensitivity to the valley’s edifices of trust and power. After a year and half, we were still an unknown quantity: the nice gringos who taught kids’ classes in the community center, but little more. In communities where traditional ideas of trust (confianza) and authority run deep, the library and teen-center which we launched in March of 2009 granted us the presence necessary to approach larger institutions, provided a platform for building personal relationships, and created spaces in which to experiment with educational programming.

The library and teen center have met enormous success, even as Bibi’s new crop of volunteers determines their role in the valley’s development. For my part, I leave Ecuador having learned how to be a plumber, mediator, volunteer coordinator, librarian, US embassy warden, disciplinarian, and entrepreneur. My own path remains an open question. I’ll be traveling in the US for two months to visit old friends and am looking toward graduate school in 2011. The last two years have prepared me for just about anything, an opportunity for which I thank you all dearly!

Un abrazo (A warm embrace),

Mark Hand

To stay in touch with MPI-Ecuador, head to openhandsdirtyfeet.blogspot.com.