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When Stephanie Morillo ’08 (New York, N.Y.) was looking for a study abroad experience, she knew she wanted to travel to a country that most of her peers overlook.
She found her destination in Ecuador, where she studied at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, the country’s only liberal arts institution. Located in the valley town of Cumbayá on the outskirts of Quito, the Universidad San Francisco de Quito is a private university with about 3,500 undergraduate students. Morillo traveled to Ecuador through Boston University International Programs.
“My reason for coming to Ecuador was to broaden my experience and ideas about what it is to be a Latina,” says Morillo, whose parents are from the Dominican Republic. “This experience has really deepened my appreciation for the cultural differences and similarities that all Latinos share.
“Moreover, I wanted to go to a country off the beaten path. Ecuador is a developing country undergoing a huge political transition. It doesn’t have all of the resources we are used to enjoying in the States, and it is a multicultural society struggling to find a definitive identity. Despite the extremes, Ecuador is extremely beautiful; the view from my window was of the AndesMountains. Each region is vastly different from one another as are the people. Ecuador’s many cultures are rich with history and a beauty that I had never before witnessed for myself. The experience was humbling and breathtaking all at once. Where else can you see the Andes, the Amazon, the Galapagos Islands, and the beach in one fell swoop?”
Morillo, who designed her own major of creative media and social justice, took courses in sociology, conflict and resolution, education, and Quichua, the most widely spoken indigenous language in South America. All her classes were conducted in Spanish.
Her Quichua class had a particular impact on her. Morillo explains that Quito is located in the sierra region of Ecuador and is home to many Quichua.
“Quichua allowed me to get to know another culture and to learn a language unlike anything else I’ve ever known,” she says. “My Quichua professor had an unorthodox teaching style that veered away from simply learning grammar; we learned to truly speak and to converse with one another and to get to know each other through asking questions. I knew the names of every single one of my classmates, where they were from, and their majors. The class became a community, not a group of students being led by a professor. The last day of class, he went up to each of us, thanked us individually, and gave each person a chacana necklace, the symbol of the Quichua people known as the Andean cross.”
Living with a host family and briefly having a job at a well-known restaurant helped Morillo dive into local culture. Working at El Pobre Diablo helped her make Ecuadorian friends from a different socioeconomic bracket than many of the students at the university. Her host family took her in as one of their own, inviting her to movies, family dinners, and the ballet.
“I was extremely fortunate; my host family was absolutely amazing,” she says. “I was a part of the family and they were very affectionate and kept me included in family functions. I enrolled in a gym with my host mother and host sister. My two sisters studied in Argentina, and were [in Ecuador] for two of the months I was there. One of my sisters was a trapeze artist and we had a trapeze installed in the house, right outside my room. I was especially close to my host mother, who was very encouraging, genuinely sweet, and someone who I will always care about. My host father is a music producer and sound engineer who has his own studio. He is responsible for creating jingles for commercials and television shows, and wrote the hit song for the Ecuadorian version of Popstars.”
Because the entire country is connected by buses, Morillo had the opportunity to travel throughout Ecuador during the semester. She also visited Costa Rica. Among the places she visited were Tiputini Biodiversity Station, a research station in the middle of the Amazon Rainforest; Mitad del Mundo, a monument on the Equator; and Baños, located on the border of the Andes and Amazon. The volcano Tungurahua was erupting during her visit to Baños. She also traveled to an indigenous community known as Tsachilas in Santo Domingo de los Colorados; Tsachilas are only found in Ecuador.
Morillo’s favorite excursion was to the Galapagos Islands, where she witnessed first hand how the influx in population is throwing the delicate ecosystem off balance. The natural reserve was declared “at risk” by Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa through an emergency decree issued this past April.
“It is truly indescribable, and visiting made me realize why it is so precious and why it is worth the effort to save,” she says. “It was strange to see so many people on the islands, as I had thought no one lived there. Due to tourism, the residents of the Galapagos boast the overall best education, health, and salaries in Ecuador, a reason why so many Ecuadorians on the mainland have been trying to migrate to the islands. It’s a sad reality – more people will mean more harm to the fragile ecosystem of the islands. The economic resources found on the Galapagos, however, are virtually absent from the rest of the country.”
Morillo hopes to pursue a career in music after she graduates and has been thinking about studying opera. She has served internships with the Metropolitan Opera Guild, Penguin Publishing, Inc., and MTV Networks.
She is a Posse Scholar through the Posse Foundation, which identifies, recruits, and trains student leaders from urban public high schools to form multicultural teams called “posses.” Following an intensive eight-month recruitment and pre-college training program, the teams enroll at top-tier colleges and universities nationwide to pursue their academic careers and help promote cross-cultural communication.
Morillo is a member of International Students Association and Hispanic Society of Lafayette and is a resident adviser, writing associate with the College Writing Program, and proctor at the Foreign Language and LiteraturesResourceCenter, a full-service, multimedia facility whose mission is to foster a dialogue between cultures through the appropriate use of educational technology. She will be the public relations officer for Foundation for the Awareness and Alleviation of Poverty next school year.