Ecuadorian Superstitions

[Disclaimer: I should point out that this is my blog and these are just my interpretations of things, and you should not take my observations as fact.]

I love other countries and different ways of looking at things. And one thing I really love about Ecuador is their many superstitions.

One that we keep running into this trip is whether we are having a boy or a girl next. First our taxi driver in Quito told me that surely it is a girl, because I am still feeding Harmon without any problems. Today a teacher at the orphanage told me he was wrong, and that it was surely a boy, for the exact same reason.

If you have a cold, or sore throat, you are not allowed to have anything cold to drink, for fear you may get even worse. Pretty much cold drinks are outlawed because they could get you sick on their own.

Shots in your behind seem to be the preferred way of medicinal healing here. Maybe because it’s such a big “muscle” or because any random person at the pharmacy can give you one because it’s an easy target, but either way, what happened to good old shots in the arm? I don’t know if that’s really a superstition, but kind of.

One we learned about last year was curing sad/sick babies with eggs. Not by feeding them, but by rubbing an uncooked egg all over their body. This will draw out all the evil spirits (or something) and if you do it long enough the evil spirits will all end up in the egg and the egg will become hard boiled!!! We witnessed this and when the egg was cracked into a glass of water we were told “see, the yolk didn’t crack” (it was suspended in the water, as any raw egg could be) and then told if they mom would have done it longer it would have been even harder.

I vaguely remember a way to cure fussy babies used by some in the orphanages when I was here the first time. Something along the lines of getting water in your mouth (maybe special water?) and then spitting it on the baby’s face. That sounds kind of bad, but it’s more like a misting of the face based on how you spit it out. This kind of startles the baby who then stops crying because they wonder what the heck is going on. There may be some more reasoning behind it, but that is all I was able to gather/remember.

I already mentioned how when the temperature drops below 70 (like 68) if you don’t have a hat and sweater on your baby, and a sweater and scarf on you, you will likely die from catching a cold. This is probably more an issue of it never gets really cold here, because lots of people in lots of countries believe you will get sick from being in the cold/rain/etc.

There are lots more, and wanting to think of them prevented me from posting this blog two weeks ago when I wrote it, but it seems silly to not publish it for a couple more I won’t remember.