academics

I've been thinking a lot about how lucky I am to have this academic experience here in Ecuador.
I've certainly had a love-hate relationship with this Masters program. I love most of the classes that I'm taking, I love how diverse my classmates are and the richness that it adds to the experience, and mostly I love how accomplished my professors are. I hate that I don't have any free time and constantly feel guilty if I want to cook something yummy or if I want to spend a single day not thinking about schoolwork. I hate that even during vacation times I have to be studying or writing essays or planning my thesis defense.

But I'd like to focus on my professors. I've been thinking a lot about how lucky I am to study under them. Probably because the academic scene is smaller here in Ecuador than in the US, I have some of Ecuador's top scholars teaching here. At Puget Sound my professors were definitely outstanding- truly- but few of them were considered top scholars in their professions (something that never bothered me, and still doesn't). Here, one of my professors is a Asambleista- an active congressman who ran for president semi-recently. Another is the founder and top negotiator for the Yasuní ITT conservation project.* That same professor has worked as an investigator for the World Bank, UNICEF, the Int'l Development Bank, the UN Development Program, and Int'l Labour Organization- among many other high profile international organizations. He is considered the best professor in all of Ecuador. Others have worked with the current government doing investigations (or criticizing it, in the case of one), and almost all have published works that are consistently cited in important pieces of Ecuadorian literature.

I've been thinking about this because I met a local celebrity yesterday. Well, celebrity in the world of Ecuadorian academics. Celebrity for me. I've read something by her in pretty much all of my classes- her works outlining the Ecuadorian history of concentration of wealth, failed agrarian reform, and volatile economic plans are required reading everywhere. She co-authored a book about rural development and neoliberalism in Ecuador that at least half a dozen people recommended to me before I finally bought a copy. And I met her yesterday! Thanks to a key meeting with my professor (Señor "top" profesor ecuatoriano), I was privy to her home phone number and office number to set up a meeting with her while she was visiting for a few months before returning to her home in Canada. I was very nervous about meeting with her- I practiced what I would say in front of the mirror in the bathroom, and fretted about speaking in Spanish versus English and proper greetings- handshake vs. typical kiss on the cheek. In the end, she was phenomenal. We chatted for a long time about my visit to Salinas de Guaranda (she wrote a case study in the rural dev't/neolib book about Salinas) and about Ecuador in general. Finally, I brought up my (carefully worded, well-practiced) questions, and she immediately provided me with several authors to look into, including giving me the personal email of one of them. She loaned me a book and forwarded me an article in Spanish that she had requested from a famous author who generally publishes in Portuguese. She was great!

I've been rambling a lot, but the point is that I've been really pleased with my professors here. I've been lucky to meet them. They've also been generous- it was nice of my professor to give me the local celebrity's phone number, and I later learned that he phoned her asking her to meet with me. While this Masters has been anything but easy for me, it's been worth the journey for sure!


*Yasuní is a national park in the Amazon, the ITT region has the top biodiversity IN THE WORLD and they found oil there. The conservation project is an attempt to get the world community to stand behind their rhetoric of environmentalism- the Ecuadorian government is saying that they won't extract petroleum from that site if they receive 1/2 of the profits that they would have received. NGOs, state governments, the EU and private donors have gotten behind the project to protect the biodiversity and to support development projects in Ecuador- the money earned from not extracting the oil is required to go towards human development or clean energy R&D.