Thursday May 20

In each of the governmental agencies with whom we’ve met, the women present a united front in the form of a blue or grey pants suit with a contrasting shirt: purple/maroon in one office, yellow in another, and white in a third. Who is on the committee to choose the style? Does the shirt color change day to day? Do they accommodate for pregnant women? And what if you forget and wear the wrong color some day? Raquel, my guide to all things Ecuadorian, doesn’t know.

Time is another cultural straddle complicated by my difficulty in following spoken Spanish. Meetings are typically set for a particular time. But except for a meeting that we organized at our office (which started an hour after its appointed time), our 3-person team has never gotten to a meeting at the appointed time. If 2 of us are close to on time, the 3rd one is not, or vice versa. Often, we then wait for the official or group we’re scheduled to see – perhaps that evens the score, if there is one. The only person who mentioned anything about our timing (arrival at 4:30 for what I thought was a 2:30 meeting) said mildly “I thought you’d be here earlier.”
“20 minutes” is the standard comment for when you’re on the way and will be there sometime. It could be 20, 40 or 1 hr 20 minutes. My comments are not a put down of the system, just a comment on how differently time runs. I wonder how Latin Americans would react if they were in the US for a series of on-time meetings? Probably cheerfully, but mystified by our focus on the clock. In the case of our 2:30pm meeting, perhaps the arrangement was something like “we’d like to stop by after lunch, sometime after 2:30.” On the other hand, there is a National Commission on Punctuality with the slogan “Finish on Time.” And I read in a travel book about a maker of Panama hats (actually made in Ecuador) that one factory used a time clock for everyone including the manager and paid the workers who came on time a higher wage.
Something else that transfixes me is that everyone I’m in meetings with takes calls on their cell phones during meetings. Once in a while there’s a chorus of them during a conversation, and we all take a phone break.

My Spanish gets in the way when I don’t understand the plan and don’t have my stuff ready to go when everyone else jumps up to leave. Raquel and I now agree to talk each night about the next day’s plan, and I'm braver about making sure I understand her rapid-fire Spanish.

Only a few days remain in my time here, and I’ve put down some ideas on how to use it: more meetings, writing up notes from meetings, thinking about an overall strategy, etc. My own thought has been that getting a record of what we’ve done so far is more important than new meetings, but it’s not the priority for the Observatory. It has been really helpful to have my presence as a calling card with ministries and as of Friday afternoon, we’re still hoping for more meetings Monday and Tuesday. Ben is absolutely right to remind that the Observatory probably knows best how to use my time, and they’re better able to write up meeting notes than I am. I have a PowerPoint on the Boston Harbor cleanup which most people find interesting, especially the point that 40 years ago we had really serious problems in the Harbor, and we have a series of questions about the availability of data on contamination in the estuary. Again, there’s a general comment from ministries that “the other ones” won’t share information unless some higher authority such as the World Bank forces it. Whenever I get fussy about this, I remind myself of the problems the state of Massachusetts has had in getting data from a UMass institute, data which the state actually paid for. As in most public agencies, where employees have little authority or financial reward, information becomes a source of power, and sharing it is tough.

Our most engaging meeting has been with a young professor of aquaculture at the U of Guayaquil who is mounting a 2 year monitoring of water quality and changes in fish species. He invited our participation via information on applicable treatment technologies, which I’m hoping to work on from the US. So far, I’ve heard back from only 1 of my colleagues on this topic. The others may think the heat has addled my brains for thinking we can be of assistance.

Claire