Hello, Ecuador!
By Joelle Cheeseman
September 2, 2026
Today was the first day that the full EWB team was all together after Elena and Paisley arrived the night before. Diego arrived at the hotel around 2am, after four flights to get to Quito! Camila, Emily, Wilson, Srinath, and I toured the sights of the city the day before along with Pablo from our partner organization, La Fundación Ingenieros en Acción Ecuador (FIEA Ecuador). We walked around the historic center of Quito, seeing the 41m tall Virgin of Quito statue from afar and visiting the Iglesia de la Compañía de Jesús, a 400+ year old church with a spectacular interior completely covered in gold.
We had our first lunch in Ecuador near the President’s Palace in the Independence Plaza before climbing 10 floors to the top of Basílica del Voto Nacional, giving a beautiful view of the city of Quito.
We ended our day yesterday by visiting the Intiñan Museum and Center of the World Monument at the equator where Wilson stepped into the Southern Hemisphere for the first time! We received a tour that taught us about the biodiversity (saw a giant preserved python, -teenage- tarantula the size of your face , 6m anaconda sheds) and indigenous cultures of Ecuador, including the Shuar Indigenous nationality and their historical head-shrinking ritual, touring a hut built by Native people, struggling to lift a very heavy wooden blowgun used for hunting, and learning the traditional burial practices.
We also learned during our tour through a series of interesting challenges that it is harder to balance at the equator. Our favorite (or maybe most hated) activity was a challenge to balance an egg on a nail. The tour guides made it look easy, but we all failed the initial challenge to balance the egg in under 25 seconds. We ended up going back after the tour and the women of our team all successfully balanced the egg (better luck next time, Srinath and Wilson)! Emily’s egg-balancing definitely had us on edge…
We had a wonderful dinner at the hotel where we were joined by Elena and Paisley, concluding Day Zero! We all headed to bed quickly as we had an early start to our day this morning (but not quite as early as our upcoming week). We had a simple and delicious continental breakfast accompanied by a tart and sweet glass of blackberry juice. We had another member join us for breakfast this morning but we unfortunately had to leave her behind at the hotel:
After breakfast, we left our hotel and headed to the FIEA office where we completed our orientation covering statistics, awards, regions, traditions, and safety in Ecuador! Quito and the Galápagos Islands were the first ever World Heritage Sites, ordained by UNESCO (which we clearly saw why yesterday!). Ecuador is one of the most diverse countries in the world, and is also the home of Mount Chimborazo whose summit is the farthest point from the Earth’s core. The country has four regions: the pacific coast, Andean region, Galápagos Islands, and Amazon region, as well as 14 indigenous nationalities with unique languages, most of which are derived from the Kichwa language.
After our visit at FIEA, we continued our acclimatization activities by riding the TelefériQo cable car to 4000m elevation. It was chilly at the top (Srinath was okay since he is from Minnesota) but we were able to warm up with some coffee and Emily tried a chocolate covered banana. After a short climb, we reached a gorgeous lookout that also had a scary, but very fun set of swings that everyone took turns riding. We were scared that we almost lost Wilson on the swing set but our team members were very attentive to his safety!
After descending down the TelefériQo, we all enjoyed visiting the gift shop and bought an assortment of coca leaves, alpaca scarves, and other souvenirs to help us remember our time in Ecuador.
We then embarked on a long drive from Pichincha to Cotopaxi where we stopped for a late lunch around 4pm at Rondador Cotopaxi where a lot of people enjoyed the fried trout along with trying the coca leaves. It was another couple of hours until we reached our new hotel in Riobamba where our vanpool was entertained by Wilson’s stories of learning Gen Z slang from his intern (or from unknown sources–Okurr!).
After arriving at the hotel around 8pm, we had a wonderful dinner together with our full EWB and FIEA team. The highlights of the meal were the delicious glass of sweet chamomile tea and mousse for dessert made from taxo, a passionfruit/banana-like fruit native to the Andean regions of Ecuador. Many of us were preoccupied during dinner with Stanford course enrollment and feeling particularly stressed as the wifi went out right as enrollment opened for our seniors but everyone was able to successfully enroll in their courses! Our day ended with some last-minute finalizations for our plans to meet with the community of Peltetec tomorrow and begin our surveying!
We are all excited to begin working, so please follow along with our blog to read about our trip progress. Good night, from Joelle!