Before I took off for Ecuador, I did everything I could to ensure that I'd be a part of the political process, even if I would be on another continent on November 4. I arranged for an absentee ballot, checked and double checked that my request had gone through, and was very excited to receive the ballot via email in mid-October. I had suspected that receiving the ballot would be the hardest part; getting it back should be easy. Interestingly, the reverse was true. Who would have known that not all computers in Ecuador are outfitted with Adobe Reader or are capable of making pdfs, or that, to Morris County's discredit, the return email address provided by the county clerk would malfunction all of the times that I emailed my ballot in?
I didn't let the challenges slow me down, and I'm happy to report that I did vote in the 2008 election...by emailing, snail mailing, and telephoning my way to the ballot box. And like most Americans, on November 4 I was incredibly excited to hear the election results. Just as voting had been quite the challenge, finding out the election results was one too. I spent most of the day glued to a computer, catching up on election news, hoping to hear the results the second they began to come in. Unfortunately, that started at about 9 pm...just half an hour before every single internet cafe on the island closed down for the night. Despite my best attempts to interest the internet cafe workers in the American political process, my hopes were repeatedly shut down with the computers. I spent the late evening hours wandering around a sleeping port with two other volunteers (who weren't even Americans!) trying to find out who my new President was.
After an hour or so of walking around with my iPod touch searching for unsecured wireless signals, we stumbled upon the office of an electrical company. It was showing a locked wireless signal, but the lights were on inside and the door was open. It was 11 pm, and for some reason there was a man still at work...on a computer! Desperate for news, we peeked our heads inside and with broken Spanish asked if he could check cnn.com. I daresay he looked confused as to why we were so desperate to know the results that night, but recognizing our eagerness, he logged onto yahoo.com (of all news sites!), to reveal a homepage that said 'America's First Black President.' I will save my observations about the news title for now, but can report that I jumped up and down in that office, smiling, feeling like there was a new light turned on in the US that night.
Though it was one of my most exciting moments in the Galapagos, it was also one of my most homesick. I remember all of the fanfare that accompanied the 2004 election, and was really sad that I wasn't able to be a part of it in my own country, on the night of the election. The next morning as I watched Obama's acceptance speech on YouTube, I got even more homesick, knowing that I wouldn't be able to watch the news for every second of the excitement, but gigglingly satisfied at how I'd always remember searching for a computer and finding out from yahoo.com that Obama had won.
I was a bit surprised to find that more people didn't ask me about the election results in the days that followed. Several people did, but I didn't hear the port generally buzzing about it. I suppose it's true that Obama's election doesn't immediately and visibly touch the lives of people living in the Galapagos archipelago. I did have an interesting interaction with a waitor the other night, which made an unfortunate and disconcerting impact on me. It started when the waitors asked where I was from, and then proceeded to give me an unsolicited opinion of Barack Obama and the plethora of problems he thinks that the US has. (This on the week when I was feeling particularly proud to be an American.) He told me he didn't like Obama, because he didn't want a black man to be president. Think of all of the things I was ready to say back to this guy to this point. But for several reasons, I kept my mouth shut. Logistically, I didn't have enough Spanish to say what I wanted, so I had to let my eyes do the talking for me. Clearly no one had ever told this guy not to talk politics at the dinner table. Luckily, this interaction and opinion was the only one of its kind that I have encountered in Ecuador.
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