The Equator: Mitad del Mundo

Meetings continue to go well with space and time to both record Ecuadorian SL data and conduct informal interviews through time just to "chat". Here's a young deaf boy sending his greetings to you (How cute is he?)

Today we visited a small deaf church in town and worked with them following the service. We've now successfully gathered our goal of SL data here in Quito (helped by the fact that we decided not to test ASL intelligibility in country as planned - quite simply, although there is definite ASL influence, this is definitely NOT ASL...so why spend the time testing it? We'll increase the number of questionnaires, dialect mapping, and wordlists we can gather (our other tools) by omitting a tool that would only confirm what we can see with our bare eyes). We have one more very important meeting tomorrow afternoon with the national federation of the deaf (FENASAC) before we pack up and leave the city.

It looks like we're headed to Ambato on Tuesday morning for a couple days before heading the rest of the way to Riobamba. Ambato is about 2.5 hours south of Quito, by bus, and Riobamba another 2 after that. We hope to meet with the president of FENASAC and he lives in Ambato; Ambato is also home to a deaf association and a deaf school which we'll try to connect with in some shape or form.

I really have loved Quito - it's a beautiful city and being at high altitudes makes me deliriously happy (I have a hypothesis that it has to do with the lack of oxygen - or it could be that I am biologically wired to love mountains, cool weather, and warm sun). When we can, we have our team meetings and check Internet or do other web-work up on the rooftop terrace of our Casa Bambu hostel:

Yesterday, after an unsuccessful attempt to find a group of deaf people who reportedly play soccer at a major park in town all day on Saturday, we accepted our "losses" and got on the bus to head to "Mitad del Mundo" - the equator! Here's Jason and me jumping in the northern and southern hemispheres (marked by the yellow line - Jason's on the northern side).


And here we are with the sign marking the equator. This is my favorite photo because, as you can see, it indicates that we have zero attitude (which most of you know, is simply not true).


Thanks for your prayers as our movement through the country picks up in coming days.