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>> Betty Smith: It's one of those trips
that will change your life, you know when
you come back, things are never the same.
You see yourself differently, in the world you see our country
differently, how we fit with the rest of the world.
Marlalynn Yourell: I would tell the student
to expect an adventure.
One of the beautiful things about Equador is it's a
relatively small country with many different environments and
so you have the high mountains with snow capped peaks.
Right on the equator you have valleys, the interandian valleys
where many of the cities and towns are located.
Of course the Amazon rainforest which is of
course one of my favorites.
We also go out to the galapogos islands, located 600 miles off
the coast of equador, which is absolutely fascinating.
Well the study abroad opportunity is a short-term,
faculty led, study abroad opportunity.
It's very good if you don't want to be gone for a whole semester
for study abroad, if you have family, maybe job, maybe you'd
like to have an international experience, but you don't want
to be gone for real a long time.
We go down for three weeks and it's at the end of the summer,
and I schedule it that way intentionally so that if
students would like to take classes in the summertime they
can do that, there's plenty of time in there to do your summer
classes or if you have a job you can do that and then the last
three weeks of the summer we go down.
It's like an adventure of exploring and learning, so
you're going to run into different environmental changes
in the weather, in the land, as far as food that's available,
some of it we saw a lot of poverty but I learned that the
people are able to live and go on and still have a very good
spirit about being content with what they have.
And that's one of the things that I picked up, that they
don't have much but they're content with what they have, and
they have one another.
>> Betty: The trip is kind of
divided into three parts I would say.
We have the Andes mountains, we have the Amazon
rainforest, and the Galapogos Islands.
When we're in the jungle, we're traveling by boat, and on foot
primarily because we're in a very remote place.
When we're in the Andes mountains, we have our own
private bus and we go and visit Lake Kilatowa, which is an
ancient volcano that has a caldera that
has a lake inside of it.
We hike down to the lake and then ride mules back out, we
usually bring along a lunch.
And that's, we're up at about 11,000 feet elevation there,
it's beautiful clear skies and the local people come and talk
to us and they also have little things to sell and their hand
paintings on sheeps skin that they do
that their quite famous for.
And all kinds of hand woven, hand-made
crafty kind of things to buy.
And we also visit another volcano mount [unclear
dialogue], is a major major volcano, depending on the
weather, we just never quite know how it's going to be but we
go up as much, as high as we can, we usually bring our bus up
to about 14,000 feet, and then from there we walk up as far as
people want to go or if you don't feel
up to it you can wait in the bus.
And that's true of most of our physical activities, I don't
want to make it sound overly difficult.
>> Marlalynn: The Amazon rainforest
that, before we went, I was terrified.
I didn't know what to expect about going to the Amazon
Rainforest being in the middle of the jungle
and staying for about five days.
I didn't know what I was going to do, I didn't think I was
going to make it, I'm kind of like one of those people that
likes to chew on ice, and I know that we couldn't do anything, we
couldn't have any ice, we had to have bottled water and I just
didn't think I was going to make it, and
the Amazon rainforest it surprised me.
I learned so much about plants, medicinal plants.
I learned so much about the indigenous
people that live in the area.
I walked across the catwalk, which was almost a hundred feet
in the air, I don't believe it, across the top of the trees and
looked and I got a chance to see so
many beautiful species of birds.
And toucans, I watched a family of toucan's
play together in the top of the trees.
I learned how to survive in the jungle.
>> Betty: Well you know it's surprising,
but it's not quite as hot as most people expect,
it's almost, they call it fresh, fresca.
And it can be warm, but often times it rains, rainforest of
course by definition has a lot of rain and
just cools things off.
And it'll rain just a little hard for 10 or 15 minutes, then
the sun comes and it's a beautiful day.
But I would say the mud is something to be contended with.
And forturnately they have boots, rubber boots, knee high
rubber boots that fit everyone's various shoe sizes.
And we all must have our river boots for when we go walking in
the jungle, partly because of the bug, but also the little
critters that are crawling around on the ground and so
that's quite an adventure going walking in the jungle.
But I would say for the most part this trip is out in the
country, we're out in the countryside, in agricultural
areas, small towns, down in the jungle, down to the galapogos
and we don't spend too much time in the city.
We do in between when we're sort of changing venues, we do spend
a night when we're in Quito in between a lot of different parts
of our trip, and when we're in Quito I should mention that we
stay at the Sheridan hotel, so this is probably the most
adventurous of all our study abroad trips here
at Eastern Illinois University.
But I like to say it's a first class adventure, because
we stay at such nice places.
When we're in Quito we stay at the Sheridan Hotel, beautiful
breakfast buffet, fantastic food, lots of security, wi-fi,
and you know check your email you can get email up in your
rooms if you like.
So, yeah it's a first class adventure I would say.
About a third of the grade is keeping the journal, so you keep
a daily journal of your geographic observations, and I
collect those about a week into the trip to give you some
feedback about how you're doing, suggestions for improvement and
what I'm looking for in the journals,
and that's about a third.
And then we also have activities we bring along hand-held GPS's,
global positioning systems.
We have topographic maps of four or five of the different regions
that we visit, and you don't need to have any mapping
background but we show you how to use the GPS and how to plot
your latitude and longitude and talk about projections.
We have a number of lectures in the process.
I would say some of our lectures we do have a room at the
Sheridan for a few of our lectures, but a lot of them are
at the lodges where we're staying, or out in the jungle,
or on the bus, or on the side of the road as we're traveling.
So we have the journal and we have some activities involving
maps, and we do have a test at the end.
>> Marlalynn: It's made me more
appreciative, actually, of where I live.
I've actually been asked a couple of times to come and
teach in the Galapogos.
They were basically begging for me to come and teach English and
also there's an area called the Chilkat Valley where the
African-American decendants of the slaves still live, they're
called Afro-Equadorians, and I actually did a
report on going to that area.
They wanted to me to come back also to teach English, and so
I'm seeing possibilities for myself opening up in different
parts of the world and that is so exciting.
>> Betty: Well I always say, it sort of feeds the soul.
I think when you interact with other cultures, the food, the
music, the language, the friendships, for me I alway say
it feeds my soul, or something in me, and it's not intellectual
development necessarily, it's more of a
human spiritual thing too.
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