(4/2011) Moving Our Lives To Ecuador

The time came for us to move our lives to Ecuador.  So my husband and I went back to San Diego to get our stuff out of storage and on the ship. It was going to cost around $7,700 to do this; so many Americans will just sell everything and buy new things here. But I wanted my library of 1400 books.

We felt like we were back in the USA as soon as we got on the plane. Toilet seat covers, what a novelty! We had managed to live without them for seven months without getting any strange disease.

Now back in the consumer capital of the world, my mission was to fill up that 20-foot container crate! And I had precisely two weeks to do it. This meant shopping for 12 or even 14-hour days! I felt like I was in some sort of game show where you are challenged to fill up your shopping crate in X number of hours.

The Ecuadorian rules were that you can’t ship anything new (unless you want to pay 50% duty on it), so I dutifully used everything, even if it meant wearing shoes just around the block.

Did I ever have fun! I didn’t even have much time to see all of my friends, though I did try to squeeze in a daily walk on the beach at one of the world’s most gorgeous beaches in Del Mar. Nearly every day I went to huge malls. I went to movies. (These are things we have here in Ecuador, but they are very limited.) I went to Starbucks twice a day. Some of them even now mark the calories their goodies contain! This happened at a movie theater, too, where I was shocked to learn the large popcorn had 1,000 calories. “But these are good calories,” the refreshment guy assured me. “It’s popped with coconut oil.” Coconut oil, I knew, remains stable in heating and doesn’t turn to the toxic trans fat.

When I went to Bed, Bath and Beyond to look for a bed comforter, I was so overwhelmed with the number of choices that I could actually feel pain—or was it joy?

And there was driving. So much driving, in fact, that my husband and I had to rent separate cars.  What fun to go 80 miles an hour down the freeway while listening to smooth jazz on the radio!  I actually feel safer doing that in the USA than going 30 miles an hour in Ecuador, which I haven’t even ventured to do.  Here in Ecuador, things are a bit haphazard. Rules such as stopping at a red light or a stop sign are treated as suggestions.

After a whirlwind shopping tour, it was back to Ecuador. About three weeks later, our ship came in. But someone in the USA had a wrong digit on my passport, so this delayed our receiving it for a few days. Later, we were unable to access it because someone at Guayaquil, where the crate was, had switched some numbers. We had heard horror stories of people’s crates getting held up there for weeks, even months, while storage fees accumulated. Some friends of mine who had their crate held up four months had to pay storage fees of $4,000 in order to receive it. They never got it till they hired a lawyer.  I was thinking of hiring a lawyer to get my stuff.

But the team we had hired, Charles Barrett and Paul Wilches of Relocation Services of Ecuador (http://relocationservicesofecuador.com), went down to Guayaquil and got in their face. They got the job done—the crate was set free in one day! I can’t recommend them highly enough.

Finally we got our stuff! And it happened on my late mother’s birthday. I could feel her winking at me from the Other Side. She always loved to give other people presents on HER birthday. And opening all those boxes that had been in storage for 9 months (not to mention all the new books, clothes, and household furnishings I had bought) was like Christmas!

Now, we really feel at home.

Susan Schenck is Author of The Live Food Factor

and Beyond Broccoli: Creating a Biologically Balanced Diet When A Vegetarian Doesn’t Won’t Work

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