Galapagos Magic: 2 Weeks In
The thing I miss most about home—more than good pizza, more than the wildly efficient superstores where you can get your shampoo and your asparagus and your prescriptions and a pair of socks all at the same damn time—is the sense of having my own physical space. Of having a room (because let’s be honest, in New York, a room was really all I could afford) of my own, a door I could close, a dresser I could clutter, a bed I could sink into and do absolutely whatever I wanted—laugh, scream, cry, hide, eat ice cream in the buff—in. While I travel, the space I occupy is always short-term, usually shared, and never mine. I can never get too comfortable, unpack too much. What’s the point, when I’m moving on in a day, or in three, and will only have to shove everything back in again, sitting on the lip of my backpack to facilitate my wrenching of the zipper all the way around?
It’s a major reason why, after two and half draining weeks of bouncing around Peru, I wanted to find a place that could become home for a little bit, like I’d found at Sara’s in Punta del Este. I decided against continuing my Peruvian itinerary of lesser-known northern towns, ceviche joints, and Incan sites and started planning a fresh start somewhere I could stay for a while and recuperate and reignite my excitement to travel. This is how I prefer to travel, I now realize—sinking my teeth into a place, making it my own for more than a whirlwind 48 hours, figuring out who I am there and what it can teach me. So I reached out to a friend I’d made through exchanging Workaway stories—a rather hilarious bit of travel karma wherein she saw my negative review from my time at Tomas’s in Puerto Natales (aka BedbugGate 2018) and emailed me to discuss it; after hearing the details of my experience, she decided not to work there and to couchsurf instead; of course she ended up being hosted by our very own Jorge2, because this world is palm-sized; I gave her a quick update on his immaturity and tendency to argue when drunk and she and I became bonded through mutual avoidance of unpalatable men—who I knew had volunteered in the Galapagos, and she passed me the contact info of Miguel, who worked in tourism on the island of San Cristóbal, Galapagos, and who I reached out to from the hospital in Cusco.
For a few days, Miguel and I exchanged voice messages in English. His was perfect, thanks to a year living in Canada, though his voice, soft and with a constant upwards lilt at the end of every sentence, did not at all match his Spanish-speaking self, which ended up being an incredibly attractive, arrogant, well-intentioned but constantly mansplaining 21-year-old (when, after I arrived in San Cristóbal, a tall young man with perfect cheekbones and earlobes glittering with cubic zirconia walked up to me and introduced himself, it took me a solid 60 seconds to realize he must be Miguel, and that Miguel was not a mid-sized, middle-aged, pudgy man with a gentle smile, as I’d been assuming). Miguel had been relatively unspecific with me about exactly what kind of hostel work I’d be doing in exchange for room and board, which I quickly learned was because he’s no longer dating my current boss’s daughter, as he was when he first started helping this particular b&b arrange their volunteers, and is thus slightly cut out of day-to-day happenings. That was my first introduction to the extremely small world (not just palm-sized, pinkie-fingerpad sized) of San Cristóbal, where every single person knows every single other person and secrets are rarer than shark sightings.
My daily routine in the Galapagos has evolved to be the following: wake up at 6:30 a.m., eat breakfast—cheese empanadas or scrambled eggs and toast, always served with fresh-squeezed guava juice—and help serve and clear breakfast for the guests, go for a walk through town and watch the sea lions waddle back into the water from the benches and the beaches they sleep on, work a couple hours checking in groups of guests and occasionally helping the cleaning staff strip or make beds, eat a big lunch of ceviche or chicken and rice, head off on a hike to my favorite snorkeling cove and swim with sea turtles for an hour or so, lay on the beach on my way home to read and even out my snorkel tan, run home to rinse off before my evening shift, where I refresh the WordArt-heavy marketing material of this tiny family-run bed & breakfast, water the garden, and write; I climb into bed at 9 p.m., read (sometimes real books, sometimes Twitter) for an hour, find and release any salamanders that have snuck into my room during the day, and go to bed.
Then two things happened.
First, after a week of constant aesthetic fulfillment—nature coming through with fabulous sunsets that I’d sprint up to the roof to watch during my evening shift, under the guise of watering the mega-ferns that thrive up there—and a sane, healthy lifestyle (though the island seems entirely bereft of vegetables, each day includes two big, simple, preservative-free meals, miles of swimming and walking, oversized doses of vitamin D, and 9 hours of sleep; my body hasn’t been less stressed since I was last in the womb), I was bored and alone, desperate for company. Young, normal human company. I’d been interacting with guests, in both Spanish and English, and with José, my boss, in Spanish, and swimming with sea lions and turtles every afternoon, but I hadn’t made an honest, comfortable connection with a new friend in days, and the wifi was too weak to allow me to fill that hole with FaceTime and Netflix.
Second, 20-year-old Maria arrived to start working as a full-time receptionist at the b&b, stripping out the most fun parts of my job—joking around with guests and assigning rooms to the blocks of people on tours with José, which we took as seriously as bomb defusal, hypothesizing that we should give the middle-aged Canadian couple the room that overlooked the park, as they’d be less likely to complain about early-morning playtime noise, and the upstairs penthouse to the youngest Americans, as their knees were probably in the best shape to walk to it, and they were the most likely to leave an online review about the amazing view. Maria is José’s daughter’s best friend, and came to replace that daughter in helping José and his wife Natalia with bookings and guests, before she left the island to go to college in mainland Ecuador (and get away from her ex, the aforementioned Miguel); she took all reception duties on from that day forward.
Reduced to doing easy but mind-numbing gardening, cleaning, breakfast serving, and occasional English translation for guests, and having realized that Maria would not become my bosom buddy—she keeps responding to my Spanish questions in English, and that level of passive-aggression turns me right off—I decided I’d seize my next opportunity to meet people, whatever it was. I had refrained from walking up to the groups of American students I’d seen on the beach, writing them off as overprivileged 18-year-olds I was unlikely to have much in common with (we’ve talked about me being judgmental), but decided I’d do it the next day come hell, high water, or overhead conversations about the right ratio of rum to punch in the ideal jungle juice.
A brief aside: it’s much easier for me to make a romantic connection in Spanish than it is to make a platonic one. My language skills are good enough for the slow getting-to-know-you that happens over a series of early dates, and they benefit from the patient attention lavished by someone who’s interested in me. Making a friend is so much harder. They have nothing to get from the interaction, at least not at first; there’s no sexual attraction that lessons the awkwardness of misconjugated verbs. You have to be funny and engaging from the start, usually about topics like current events and local gossip, and those qualities and subjects are still bumpy in my intermediate Spanish. I knew if I was to make a friend on the island, a real friend, they’d probably have to be an English speaker.
But I didn’t have to try to ingratiate myself to the study abroad cliques! Miguel texted me right after I’d made my decision to find friends, letting me know he’d be bringing a fellow American volunteer by the hostel to meet me. He and Maya came by, and I immediately began chatting with her about travel and island life; she’s volunteering on Miguel’s parent’s farm, chopping down errant plants with a machete (there’s no Home Depot on the island, and there is a general attitude of “why use a machine when a human being can do it just fine, if seventeen thousand times less efficiently?”—all of the municipal workers in charge of park maintenance also only use machetes; my first time driving by a team in coveralls, wielding 24-inch blades and hacking at roadside growth, I wondered if I’d stumbled into a reshoot of Romancing the Stone) for a few hours a day in exchange for her room and board.
Maya’s 19, which seems like it should be so close to where I am in my life but really isn’t; she’s lovely, but I was excited when Miguel suggested we grab a drink at Nativo, a restaurant his friend owns, where we could meet two other English-speaking volunteers. There I met Matt, a misguided 18-year-old from Long Island who was leaving for home the next morning, and Anna, a 27-year-old Brit with fantastic jewelry and biting sarcasm, who became my first friend on the island when we both rolled our eyes in harmony as Miguel explained to me the difference between tú and usted and reminded me to only use the latter with guests at the hostel. I couldn’t hold my tongue, adding something along the lines of “I actually do happen to have a fully functioning brain that I’ve applied to tasks much more difficult than making small talk over a guest registry with nary an issue”; Anna cheered and our friendship was sealed.
Before Anna, I really had no reason to spend money here; my first week saw an expenditure of $0, setting aside the $400 of flights and $120 of tourist entry visas that I’d booked two days before my whirlwind arrival. I borrowed snorkel equipment from the b&b, had all my meals covered, and entertained myself with all that San Cristóbal gives away for free: miles of beaches, shimmering water, showstopping sunsets. But then Anna and I had a day at the beach, which turned into an evening of buying beers at the restaurant she worked at, which turned into a night playing pool at one of the two bars in town, which turned into us tearing up the dance floor at a sketchy club at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday. Which actually later turned into us running away from a few guys who purported to walk us home but ended up just being disrespectful and inappropriate. Which turned into Anna crashing in my room instead of walking across town alone at 3 a.m., which turned into us tearing into the single roll I’d confiscated from the kitchen several days ago, tied in a plastic bag, and hung from a hanger that I’d attached to the defunct 1990s television set mounted in the corner, a bug-proofed snack I’d prepared in case I was ever hungry between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., when the kitchen is locked; this then turned into Anna alternating between praising me for my foresight and roasting me for my choice of food, complaining that the roll was dry and impossible to chew. We tore into it anyways, trying to keep our giggling to a minimum, as José’s room is right above mine, but failed, particularly when we remembered the moment I’d almost lost my balance climbing over some volcanic rocks in the dark and, flailing my arms to regain it, accidentally raked one of the guy’s upper lips with a fingernail, leaving a little nick that dripped blood into his mouth and caused him to have a genuine freak out about whether it’d scar or not. All this then turned into slapstick scenes the next morning: me sneaking toast and eggs down to Anna, hiding the plate underneath my shirt when the housekeeper snuck up on me; me shooing Anna out the back exit after ensuring no one was at the reception desk to watch her hasty exodus on the security cameras. All completely worth the $15 we spent on beers.
For our second adventure, Anna and I coordinated our time off and headed on a hike to our favorite snorkeling spot, Cerro Tijeretas, which is also the first place that Darwin landed when he came to the Galapagos. (I can now say I’ve stood on the same rocks and swam in the same water as a personal hero, which is fairly cool.)
We swam with extra-playful sea lions for a while, but then both of us got a little scared by the higher-than-normal number of jellyfish that would pop into our peripheral vision just in time for us to swim around them; Anna got stung by a baby one and we decided to move on. We hiked up to a mirador, put on my favorite Drake playlist, and started dancing around in sneakers and bikinis, likely scaring at least sixteen different species of wildlife but having an absolutely jolly time in our little balcony paradise. The playlist lasted us through our hike back to town, where we snacked on coconut ice cream, and set back out to Punta Carola, the prettiest beach accessible by foot, to try our luck at snorkeling again. The whole time, we kept up a running commentary on literature (Anna’s reading Murakami’s thousand-page 1Q84 and convinced me to start it), politics, personal principles and ambition and the overlap between them, and the strange breed of machismo found on the island, which we hypothesized came from the fact that the local men have constantly-regenerating groups of young white women coming to the island (to stay for anywhere from a few days to a few months) who the men have come to see just like the commodities brought to the island on big cargo ships—gasoline, flour—something to take, to use up, and then to have replenished, without ever having thought about where they come from or what happens to them after the men are through.
It felt so good to have someone with whom I could discuss the full gamut of things I care about, from the definitive ranking of Kardashian baby names to personal treatises on social responsibility and child-rearing to the trials and tribulations of reading literature in a second language (I just started my first all-Spanish book, y’all, and it’s rough out here) to what feminism in developing countries looks like. We spent the afternoon snorkeling, having a @boyfriendsofinstagram-sponsored photoshoot (for the uninitiated: this means that we took ridiculously overstaged, indulgent photos and videos of each other, both of us relishing the chance to have someone we liked fuss over the lighting and the camera angles, a rarity for two solo travelers, and something that that Instagram account lampoons), and gawking at another Galapagos sunset—this time featuring baby sea lions bodysurfing their way into shore!—before heading back to town.
Our second adventure was also to be our last, at least in Ecuador; Anna was heading out the next day to do a quick trip through Quito and Cotopaxi and then onwards to Columbia, where she’s going to live for a year, teaching English in Medellin. So we had to celebrate appropriately. After trading sand-coated swimwear for slightly less sand-coated real clothes, we sat down at the nicest restaurant in time and took full advantage of their two-for-one passionfruit daiquiri happy hour, cheersing to new friendships, eating fried yuca, and getting just a little bit too buzzed for 6 p.m. Anna still had to show up at work for a few hours (though, it being her last day, no one said a thing when she arrived two hours late); she headed there and I went home to put on makeup for the first time in weeks and to refill my in-room water supplies for what I could already feel would be a relatively oversized hangover the next day.
Anna and I headed back to Maui, home of $3 beers and free pool, where she pointed out a guy she’d had a crush on for the entirety of her 6-week stint on San Cristóbal. I, wingwoman extraordinaire, invited him and his friends to a game of pool, and we spent our last evening together making (and more often, missing) impossible shots, trash-talking in Spanish, and discussing plans for a reunion in Columbia. People often ask me if I get lonely traveling solo, and the answer is that I rarely do—there are lulls, like I felt after my first week here in the Galagagos, but then when I get over myself and open up to the people around me, I’m always impressed by the depth of character and warmth of soul of the people I meet, whether they’re locals or other travelers. My few days with Anna fully satiated my need for human connection along with stoking my faith in the wide world of people I get to connect with.
While I now miss having a friend to laugh with and let loose with, I suffer no lack of contact here at the b&b—least of all with my boss, José.
The patriarch of the family, the word that describes José best is “jolly”; he’s got George Clooney hair and Christmas elf stature, shows up each day in a different pastel outfit (today’s is salmon-colored shorts, a braided leather belt and matching loafers, and a bright sunset-hued plaid button-down), and loves having an audience. He belly-laughs at his own jokes, first pushing his wire-rimmed reading glasses down his nose to see if anyone will be joining him before starting a rolling chuckle so endearing that anyone in the vicinity can’t help but fall in. He calls his wife at least six times a day (she runs the place, but from their other home in Guayaquil, where their two teenage sons are attending school on the continent) and his favorite part of the conversations are when she starts to get agitated at his constant questions, at which point he makes eye contact with whoever else is in the room with him and stage whispers that no one has any patience for an old man anymore. He deeply loves his oldest son, Jaime, a towering heavyset 24-year-old who lives on the island, studies ecology, and is on the spectrum; José will regularly embrace Jaime, latching onto his side like a barnacle to a whale, and never fails to laugh at Jaime’s sometimes beleaguered puns.
He’s extremely proud of his 23-year-old daughter Juliana, particularly of two accomplishments of hers: first, being named Queen of San Cristóbal in some kind of island-wide beauty pageant she entered at 20, and second, for leaving the island this year to study on the continent and getting a job working for a top-notch insurance saleswoman. The way José talks about his only daughter leaves me both uncomfortable and impressed—the former, because he has no problem describing her physical assets like a Girls Gone Wild casting director (“she’s short but she’s round where it counts!”), and the latter, because he’s surprisingly woke when it comes to a women’s right to control her body—he and I had a long conversation about the high rates of HIV and teen pregnancy on the island and the hypocrisy of fathers who encourage their teenage sons to be promiscuous but expect their daughters to remain chaste until marriage, wherein he told me that he gave all of his kids, sons and daughter alike, talks about making their own choices but respecting their bodies and using protection. He also believes in equal pay (and I even got him to agree that the responsibilities for maintaining a household should be shared between husband and wife, and that women have gone undervalued both at home and in the workforce for their contributions to that effort) (though he still believes that gay couples shouldn’t raise children—I’ll keep working on that).
He has an app with which he tracks the location of his 20-year-old son Alvaro, and whenever he catches Alvaro lying about whether he’s spending the night at his girlfriend’s house (Alvaro doesn’t stop doing it, or lying about it, despite knowing about the app’s existence; we think Alvaro is the least intelligent of the four), he leaves him a flurry of WhatsApp audio messages, alternating between worried father (the girlfriend lives in an unsafe neighborhood of Guayaquil, which is in general an unsafe city; the worry is well-founded) and teasing confidant (I will never be comfortable with how normal it is for Latin dads to joke with their sons about sexual conquests).
José’s told me his life story two different times. The first time, I sat at the kitchen table, gamely trying some fried canchalaguas—a San Cristóbal delicacy and kind of mollusk that José used to dive for as a kid; they have a rubbery texture and taste only of the oil and lemon in which they are cooked—that José had had a craving for, leading to a 9 p.m. snack-and-heart-to-heart. He was born on the island, one of seven children, wearing shoes only when forced to at school and otherwise enjoying life on a largely unregulated, undeveloped island paradise. His brothers and he spent all their free time outside, catching lizards and swimming and generally engaging in the stuff of little boys’ dreams; he didn’t leave the island until he went to school, which required a weeklong boat journey back to the continent, where he enrolled in an engineering college and studied civil engineering. He worked on the continent for ten years or so, then married and started his family back here on San Cristóbal, where he continued to work as an engineer for another 15 years (including designing and building what is now this three-story bed & breakfast). His growing business and family of five required more income than he could pull in as an engineer, so he also spent at least three weekends a month on his lancha, his small fishing boat, circling the islands and pulling in langostas, a Galapagan lobster with no claws but a thick, ridged tail, and other mariscos, and selling them to restaurants in town. Then he and his wife bought a pharmacy (I nodded when José told me this, finally getting the context behind the boxes of expired baby shampoo and liquid antacids I found in the storage closet), which they ran for ten years or so before selling it and focusing their attention on building and running their hostel.
The second time, I was supine on the relatively uncomfortable green-fringed loveseat in the reception area, writing and, by all appearances, uninterested in conversation; this did not stop José from pulling up a chair and launching, unprompted, into idle gossip about his niece and her new husband, who were staying with us. I hadn’t realized they were married, having noted no rings, and José told me that most people on the island don’t wear their wedding rings all the time, as they’re easy to lose during activities like snorkeling and also make them a target for thieves. This led to him telling me how he met his wife, seduced her while she was living in her father’s house (him, 33, her, 25), got married so that the two of them could secure a home loan in a courthouse ceremony for which José had to run outside and pay two strangers $20 each to serve as witnesses and sign the wedding certificate, moved her to the island, and then finally had a real wedding ceremony three years later, after they’d already had the aforementioned Jaime and Juliana. He then moved into telling the gory stories of each child’s birth, featuring sketches of the Caesarean scars that were necessary for all four; at this point I deeply appreciated how subpar my medical Spanish is and begged off gracefully.
While José is ostensively the head of household—or households, rather, as he and Natalia co-own four homes: the hostel, the house in Guayaquil, an apartment also here on San Cristóbal, and a farmhouse (and accompanying farm) up in the highlands of the island, which produces sugarcane and bananas and a dozen other crops—the real boss is Marisol. She doesn’t have a clear title, but she’s basically José and Natalia’s right-hand-woman/housekeeper/cook/nanny. Over lunch, I made the mistake of asking her about her children, having seen two young boys as her WhatsApp profile picture, to which she responded that the photo was of Alvaro and Ian (the 15-year-old third son of José and Natalia—or, as José calls him, “our little accident”), and that they, along with Jamie and Juliana, were her children. I apologized and she moved on in her brusque, no-time-for-pleasantries manner, dipping her spoon back into the bowl of octopus ceviche she’d prepared for lunch. Marisol is tiny—she barely comes up to my chest, and I’m only 5’4”—but solid, a wide expanse of belly and hips supported by strong legs; she looks like a well-trimmed shrub brought to life. She’s always swathed in a loose smock and jean culottes and never visibly sweats, even when she’s standing in front of the stove (on a wooden block, so she can see into each of the five pans she has going) on an 80-degree Galapagos morning, frying up 25 eggs for yet another Australian sexagenarian tour group.
From what I can gather, Marisol used to be the sole help for the whole J+N enterprise, but as the hostel expanded, she hired Paula, a Quechuan woman who lives on the outskirts of town, to assist her six days a week. The division of labor now seems to be Marisol: inventory and shopping, laundry (which she does in the apartment that José and Natalia own, which has four sets of washer dryers clustered around it, each covered in custom-made plastic cover to protect them from the elements, such that when Marisol strips them off to put a load in it looks like she’s about to unveil the latest Tesla) and cooking; Paula: cleaning, dishes, and meal prep.
On my first day, after José had given me a grand tour and Marisol had intimidated me by speaking incredibly fast Spanish that she only sped up when I asked her to repeat it (I now have so much empathy for people who have to listen to me talk in English), I volunteered to go with Paula to prepare some rooms so I could see them and see how the process worked. Thus began the makings of an awkward, straight-out-of-Downton-Abbey upstairs/downstairs divide that makes me uncomfortable to this day, two weeks later.
As we were making beds, Paula started asking me about the logistics of my arrangement. We couldn’t understand each other perfectly—both of us were speaking our second language—but I could tell that at that point, she saw me as her equal. She asked me how many days I’d get off (and shook her head when I said two before telling me she only gets one), complained that Natalia doesn’t give her any vacation, and asked if I could maybe cover her for a few days the next month. Confused, and wondering if I had misunderstood something when I arranged my job duties and schedule with José, I gave a noncommittal response and we continued to fold bedsheets in silence.
An hour later, as we sat down to lunch at 1 p.m., Marisol directed us each to our spots: José, head of the table; Jaime, at his left hand; me, his right; herself, two seats down from Jaime, leaving a conspicuous space. Paula sat in the same room as us, but behind the chest-high counter that runs around the kitchen and separates it from the dining area, hunched over at the grey card table that we use to plate dishes at breakfast, able to hear our conversation but not able to participate, invisible to us at the table. Quite literally not seen and not heard.
This first solid example of the striations of class (and race) that delineate the household, this unspoken, physical metering out of space, was further driven home over the subsequent days by the second: the use of tú versus usted, which I’ve talked about at length on this blog, and which is as direct as a division as any. My first few days, I sat at lunch, scooping up soup and doing my best to follow the conversation around the table, noting each relationship:
- Jaime and I use tú with each other; we’re the same age, so we started off friendly
- José uses tú with me; he’s 35 years my senior, so it’s kind of natural, but he could use usted if he wanted to formalize our relationship; I am touched that he uses tú with me
- (Especially as he uses usted with Paula)
- I call José usted as a sign of respect, though sometimes I forget and use a tú command; I don’t think he cares but I’m wondering if I should at some point switch to tú overall to show that I also feel close to him, as
- Jaime uses tú for José, his father
- and Marisol switches between tú and usted for José, I think depending on whether she’s berating him or not
- Marisol started off calling me usted, but now calls me tú, which either means she thinks I’m adorable or incompetent; can’t quite tell
- I call Marisol usted, obviously
- and, most telling of all: when we were cleaning together, Paula called me tú, but after that first lunch, she calls me usted
So, net, some combination of my race and socioeconomic status has me, in Marisol’s exacting eyes, below any member of the family that employs her, but above any other employee (including herself and, when she arrived, Maria, who was seated at the table, but at the end, near Marisol).
It’s not something we talk about, of course. But I’ve been thinking a lot about systems of identity and privilege here on the islands, where it’s incredibly easy to identify foreigners and, from there, to watch the differences in their experiences and access—to see an Ecuadorian couple pay $60 less for a boat tour than what I was quoted, or to watch a police officer let a German group stay on the beach past park closing hours to take photos of the sunset while a Galapagan family was herded off. It’d be nice to think that it all evens out in the end, right, as cleanly as it does in the examples I just gave? That for every darker-skinned person who gets hassled a little more by the police, there’s some network of local favors that makes up for it? That’s not at all how it works, I know that. I know that these blips of bias (both conscious and unconscious) balloon into systematic injustices—including, in the United States, into the senseless murder of black and brown men.
What is my own privilege here, as a well-off white woman? How am I exercising it, how am I aware of it, how I am seeking to fix the injustices that I see and not commit ones of my own? I think about that a lot, particularly when I fuck it up, which I did, majorly, on my second day on the job.
A group of travelers had arrived: two white women, clearly related, both in jean shorts and the older of the two in a very mom-friendly pair of padded velcro sandals, and two Ecuadorian men, one in the khaki shirt that identifies all National-Park-certified wildlife guides and another in a black t-shirt and sunglasses and carrying two duffle bags. The guide identified the name of their travel agency and I looked up the reservation—two rooms, top floor—and brought the group upstairs. Identifying the white women as the guests, I gave each of the a key and told them they could decide for themselves who was in each room. As they debated, I thought what a waste it was that this mother-daughter pair had booked two rooms, each with a huge queen-sized bed, instead of just sharing; I rolled my eyes at the guy I’d assumed was the guide’s assistant, who had carted the bags upstairs, as we waited for the women to decide.
The older woman chose a room and the guide, who wouldn’t be staying with us, helped her get her bags inside and then said goodbye. The younger woman headed into the other room and the assistant followed her. I waited outside their door for a few seconds for him to exit, so I could walk him out.
He didn’t come out. Feeling awkward, I headed back downstairs, where I sat for all of thirty seconds before the older woman called me up to help her with the wifi. When I returned to the third floor, the three of them were sitting around the table on the patio, phones out. I hovered over the older woman’s shoulder, helping her input the password, and saw that the man I had assumed was the assistant had his hand on the younger woman’s thigh. She was leaning into him. They were together. That’s why they had two separate rooms: one for the daughter and her boyfriend, the other for the mother. I later learned that they’d in fact been together for six years, that the daughter had moved to Ecuador, and that they ran a farm outside Quito together.
Why did I see dark skin and assume hired help? I didn’t even think it consciously; only back downstairs, at my desk, mortified and grateful I hadn’t verbalized any of my conjectures, did I slow down my thinking enough to recognize what I had assumed, when, and why.
I’m not bias-free. None of us are. I’m a product of the world I’ve been exposed to, and that world is an unfair, prejudiced place (one of the many reasons why representation matters). But every time that I recognize that I’m making an assumption based on race, or gender, or some other facet of identity, I try to understand why—what shortcuts was my brain taking to lead me to whatever faulty assumption I ended up applying? How can I not do that in the future?
I’m two weeks into my month in the Galapagos. It’s been a magical fourteen days of island exploring, wildlife spotting, Spanish learning, and tan-getting (y’all wouldn’t believe how many freckles I have now). I’ve been adopted into a slightly dysfunctional and entirely sweet Galapagan family, I made (and said goodbye to) my first friend, I’m continuing to confront my personal failings (righteousness, biases), and I’m getting really good at carrying four plates of eggs at the same time.
I have two weeks left. My plans for them include a four-day jaunt around a few of the other islands, lots of snorkeling, and continued conversations with José about social justice. What could be better?
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