I have been visiting with a young lady, Micaela Vallejo, from Ecuador every two weeks for over three years for conversational practice using Spanish. She is a little north of 30. How far I do not remember. She is unmarried, a fact I find remarkable given all she has going for her, but she seems quite content with her status. Micaela lives in Coca, a small town of around 45,000 souls in the northeast corner of Ecuador, close to the border with Colombia. It is located in the Amazonian rain forest at the confluence of two large rivers and a smaller third. According to the web and Micaela it is a petroleum town and a jumping off point for tourism into the Amazon rain forest. I have a fantasy that someday Señora and I will visit the Galapagos Islands then afterwards tour a bit in Ecuador, visiting Guayaquil, Quito and Micaela in Coca. However, Coca is not necessarily an easy place to get to; a flight in a small plane seems to be the best option.
Micaela is a real master of what seems to me at times to be a dying art, the art of conversation. Frequently, though, she plays Devil’s Advocate to whatever point I am trying to make. It reminds me a bit of my son who always seems to take the counter point to my point. However, with Micaela I have not figured out if this is her personality or a method of keeping the conversation rolling.
If I were in a confessional mood I would have to admit to being a little enamored with Micaela’s mind. She is very intelligent, has a wide ranging curiosity, and with the advent of the Internet, even though she lives in a remote area, she is well versed on current affairs and other countries. Not infrequently our conversations go past the allotted hour as we are so involved with a subject. How nice.
One very interesting fact about Ecuador is that their official currency is the US dollar. Micaela once told me that the Sacagawea dollar – that everyone, except me, here in the United States hated – is very popular in Ecuador. This probably stems from the lower prices there and the coin lasting better than a dollar bill. Hang on to the fact that the Ecuadorian currency is the US dollar.
Along my language learning journey with Micaela have been a few cultural differences that have left her scratching her head. I have had a few cultural head scratchers myself, but I will reserve those for another post…someday.
The first head scratcher for Micaela that I remember was when she discovered that we had more than one car. She seemed to have a bit of a hard time understanding why a family would need more than one vehicle. I tried to explain to her that it is very common in the United States for each adult in a household to have their own vehicle. Our neighbors across the street have two adult children in college and have four vehicles. Then Micaela discovered that we have three cars for two people! Admittedly one of those is an older two-seat sports car that I only drive when the weather is nice, but three is three everywhere outside of the novel 1984.
The next head scratcher that I remember centered on the fact that we use a machine to wash our dishes. I sometimes wonder why myself, with just the two of us. Señora has a tendency to hand wash the dishes while I will almost always load the dishwasher. If you believe the manufacturers, this is actually more energy efficient as it uses less water. I do it because I have washed far too many dishes in my life. Just thinking about it, though, when I lived single all those years, I generally hand washed my dishes… it took too many days to fill the dishwasher and the food dried on the plates and pans.
The most recent shock came around the US dollar, Micaela was under the impression that our money was backed by gold, that you could trade in your American money for an amount of the shiny metal equal in value to your currency. Nope, not true. The United States has gone on and off the gold standard several times in our history; the last time was in 1971 as an inflation fighting measure and to keep foreign governments from redeeming so many dollars in gold. Silver has a similar history. Of course, there always seems to be a group of people advocating that we go back on the gold standard. Economists generally state that this is not a good idea.
Our conversation then moved on to how does the American dollar have any value, always an interesting and perplexing topic. We humans, throughout history, have agreed at various times that different items had value as methods of exchange. Of course sometimes we have also agreed that it suddenly has no value. I have read several articles and economic chapters on the theory of money, and it still seems a very strange proposition to me. With the US dollar what it boils down to is that we as citizens, as well as other countries, have faith in the government and economy of the United States. Hallelujah??
Micaela’s response to that was twofold, first that I was lucky to live in the United States. Most of the time I feel that way too, but not so much lately with the hard swing to right wing politics.
Secondly, she explained to me that Ecuador had to put gold into reserve somewhere to obtain US Dollars. How Ecuador and other countries could use the US dollar as official currency is something I have always wondered about, but not taken the time to research. I really do not know if her statement about Ecuador having to deposit gold is true or not. I spent 30 minutes or so looking for the answer on Google. One source said that Ecuador obtains dollars from tourism and the export of various products like bananas, oil, flowers, etc. I did find an article from 2014 detailing how Ecuador had deposited half its gold reserves with Goldman Sachs to obtain liquid funds: Central Bank of Ecuador deposits half its gold with Goldman Sachs. Probably the actual answer and methodology is way over my simple head.
All I know is the more I learn about the theory of money, the less I know.
To sum up, my Spanish may still be a head scratcher to native speakers (and others), but I am having a blast learning about other countries, other cultures, and visiting with such delightful people as Micaela. Oh yeah, and my Spanish is slowly improving, poco a poco.
And so it goes.
Some links relating to this blog posting:
Micaela’s profile on Italki.com which is a language learning platform: Micaela Vallejo
Countries Using the U.S. Dollar
More than two dozen countries and territories use the US dollar as currency
Interesting article on dollarization in Ecuador: Two decades of the U.S. Dollar: Ecuador’s experience
Another interesting article: Ecuador’s one and only official currency is the US Dollar