Sections of wonderful papers written by past students:

"The experience of living in the rural areas and of meeting the people was incredible. I see the years of difficult lives in the faces, hands and feet of the people. The color of the skin in the face reflects the sun, and the wrinkles tell a history of hard labor, pain, joy, and survival. The hands that they offered me were rough and strong, saying again a history of labor with the land. The naked feet also have a history. They are broadened, thick and with calluses like the hands, they climb and descend the mountains easily everyday with the weight of food. The people live very close to the mother earth, and are written in their bodies.

The land is the best friend and the worst enemy. The people in the rural areas live closer to the soil, and more than others, their lives depend of the natural resources. Mother earth gives life. The people there eat, take and dream with maize. Each day the people work with the hands and the oxen to cultivate the means of subsistence. I never reached to see the plants in such steep mountain slopes. Sometimes, when mother earth rains, it drains the soil. The people loose the soil and part of their lives. I have never seen people working so much everyday of their lives and returning to the same house, with one room, holes in the roof and the walls, and with a floor of dirt. It seems that nothing changes, in spite of all the work”.

Alma Cárdenas, Western Washington University,

“The time I spent at CIMAS and with my host family, is all wrapped up in my head as one of the milestone experiences of my life… I draw on what brought me joy and sorrow there, the differences that were enlightening, and the experiences that taught me happiness in ways I had not imagined before. Being in Ecuador makes you think twice about how we approach problems, relationships, and opportunities in the United States. More, it makes you reconsider the value of these and the time you give each of them.
I slowed down in Ecuador, was forced to slow down, to a pace that was almost back breaking at times but as I adjusted, it allowed me to look deeply at some of the larger American cultural schisms that had been bothering me – how we Americans are obsessed with time, how we devalue our family in the U.S., how mechanized we are, how obsessed we are to get to the next item on the “to-do” list, and how our ability to check those boxes provides us with an impoverished sense of self, i.e. our perceived societal value. It made me nervous to slow down so much but then, it made me whole and real. I feel like I failed in Ecuador at what I usually achieve at – checking the boxes, securing the goal, and doing it the best. But, now, I think that that failure was actually my biggest accomplishment. For once, for a long time, I stopped and listened to my heart and simply heard what I had to say to myself, “slow down, life is not a line you walk for the sake of getting to the end, it is an experience that happens each day and you need to be apart of that experience, an active responsible involved human, not a little single minded robot.”

Ecuador, CIMAS, and the experience of living with my host family gave me a cultural reality that allowed me to feel, not just think, what it was that is missing from my culture …I learned more about what it means to be American when I was in Ecuador than I did about being Latin American. That understanding helps me everyday realize where as Americans we are broken, strong, kind, and stingy and what we could do better and what we could just not do. Having all three of us together today made this very clear to each us and each one of us are very thankful for our time with CIMAS”.
Wendi Pickerel, University of Washington
After a conversation with fellow students Matt Walsh and Gretchen Severson