Contradiction

At times I am amazed by the contradictions of Ecuador. My writing is inspired by the death yesterday of the Ecuadorian minister of defense in a helicoptor accident that is still extremely mysterious and confusing, with hopefully more details available after the investigations.

However, the point of this story is that the Ecuadorian minister of defense was a woman who was never in the army. This in the country where the first acceptable questions to ask someone you just met are: are you married? and, do you have kids? For everyone in Ecuador, but especially women, it is an extremely big deal if you are not married by the age of 25, let alone 30. In general, the stereotype of the genders are the norm here, the men are the breadwinners who do very little around the house, with the women cooking almost all of the meals and cleaning all of the clothes by hand.

My spanish teacher, who considers herself progressive, asked Erin and I to write recipes as a practice to using commands in spanish. Then, completely serious, she told me that if I wanted I could write the recipe to a sandwich. This was not even to cook the recipe, you don't need to know how to cook to look up a recipe in a cookbook, but this is simply what is expected of men in Ecuador. Needless to say, she was stunned when I came in the next day with a real recipe, a little more than putting two slices of bread together with something in the middle.

However, in this same country it is possible to install a woman defense minister. In fact, it was just announced that the replacement minister will also be a woman. Compare that to the United States, which in many ways is far more progressive, yet where it would still be extremely difficult to imagine a women Secretary of Defense in a position dominated by aging white men. Does that mean that Ecuador is more progressive than the United States, no absolutely not. Instead, I see it as a symbol of the contradiction of Ecuador and as a statement of the fact that the United States still has a fair way to go.