Personally, I love economics, the graphs, numbers and charts are right up my alley. However, many don’t have quite the same love for graphs as I do, and that’s what today was for. The two themes of the day were Global Business and Aid and Development.
The day started off with a hearty debate of the usage of oil in Ecuador. Unsurprisingly, the boys versus girls discussion heated up, but who doesn’t like to start the morning with a good old hot button topic? We had a few guest speakers come to the hostel for a workshop about food consumption and its impacts in Ecuador. They covered variety of topics from food labeling and typical Ecuadorian diet to GMOs.
Next, we had a field trip to a local market, where we had a scavenger hunt in the masses of the surrounding fruits and vegetables. We talked to some local vendors who were pretty uncluttered when we asked them how much an apple casted and didn’t buy any. To contrast that experience, we went to a supermarket which reminded me of Trader Joes. The two experiences, both involving purchasing the same food, were drastically different in atmosphere.
Back to la primavera for some skits to demonstrate the pros and cons of aid and development in foreign countries. Public service announcement: developing nations typically want medicine and resources to build an economy, not one million t shirts. We had a little more discussion on our two market experiences before going to school for our penultimate English lesson. Most group’s lessons went well. My students were not entirely pleased with my super realistic and artistic drawings of firetrucks, I can’t imagine why…
We had two special surprises at dinner. First, cuy, or as most of you know it as, guinea pig. Most of the group went right for it, but personally I passed. The second surprise was dining with Azucena, who we are working with to rebuild and repair La Casa de la Mujer, for our community action project.
For even those who are repulsed by thru graphs of econ, today was still a really great day. It’s a really important question to ask yourself “where did this product come from?” before purchasing. Today’s activities, seeing where our food comes from and different ways it’s sold, questioning how effective our typical donations to charity are, add perspective to our consumer choices.
Personal shout outs:
Mom and dad, hey. Enter the theme song to p&r here. Love you
Steven: hey buddy, I might beat your Australian PICS…
KDR: woof
Zoe: Do not spoil GOT for me
Andy – Great post! It’s very informative…learning and experiencing some things about the economics of Ecuador will help transform your view of the world. Enjoy this week — we will see you soon! Mom and Dad.
Winter is here and I am very disappointed that you didn’t eat the guinea pig, but it’s a sunk cost.
I am quite eager for you to come back so you can tell me all of the different negative and positive externalities that you discovered in Ecuador and also so we can run an experiment on whether or not the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility applies to GOT.
I sent you a bunch of snap chats of my reaction to GOT but don’t worry, they don’t spoil anything.
Watch out for Stagflation, and the inevitable doom of our world by the Chia Pets.
The North Shore remembers.
Very very funny Zoe!
Hey Andy,
It sounds like you’re having a great time! I can’t wait to hear about it.
-Steven
cb i stole your charger- xoxo big sis