Tired and discouraged

It´s been a very rough couple of days, and I haven´t much felt like updating. From Baeza, Julio and I went to Tena, and stayed in the ever beautiful Shangri-La jungle lodge. As great as that was, we barely got any mosquitoes due to rain and then equipment failure. It was very depressing. On the long drive back to Quito, we decided to get some little coolers and look for dry ice, in order to improve our trap catches, as carbon dioxide attracts mosquitoes. I felt kind of depressed and frustrated with the whole thing, and really just needed a day off of work to step back and take in what needed to be done.

When we got back to Quito... more terrible news. Santy got denied his visa to visit Canada next May... which affects our long term plans. I realize that there are many sucker women who bring Ecuadorian men to Canada through sham marriages, but it seems utterly unconstitutional to deny a visit to other couples on that basis... the few that are real relationships. What it means is that it might be many years before Santy is able to visit me in Canada. I honestly feel like the government is patronizingly accusing me of being a stupid woman. Immigration Canada is a nightmare with no way to contact anyone with questions or comments. They are not responsible to anyone, it seems. The whole thing reminds me a little of the department of homeland security. It is terrifying that they control our borders this way... and more than a little shameful.

I took a day off on Saturday to collect my thoughts, and spent the day with Santy. He had to give a city tour in the evening, and I got the chance to tag along. Sunday, I was hit with a bit of a stomach illness. Even so, we went out for a nice breakfast of pancakes - something plain - and spent a nice day together organizing my field equipment and fixing traps. This morning we had planned to leave to go south, but the plans fell through as my stomach had gotten worse. We have some suspicions that it is a parasite infection, so I´m sending a stool sample to a lab tomorrow to check.

I´m not feeling too bad anymore so we are going to leave tomorrow. I changed my mind completely about Peru and now we are going to spend those 2 weeks more in Ecuador. I need to collect many more specimens in different locations if I hope to put together a good distribution map for different Anopheles species in Ecuador. I hope we can get some dry ice.

All for now, wish me luck tomorrow!