I´m not a blogger I just type a lot

Hello world! This is my first time blogging, so let me preface this all by saying I don't really know what I'm doing or who is going to read this... two weeks ago I got off a plane in Guayaquil, Ecuador, where I'll be volunteering for the next year. This blog is my attempt to share as much of this experience as I can with YOU--family, friends, and I guess the whole internet. I think you can comment, so if at any point in my rants you feel like saying something, asking a question, whatever--feel free to chime in.

I guess the best place to start is to explain who I am and why I'm here. My name is Mark Perlite, I'm 27 years old, and I am a recovering Accountant. I graduated from Santa Clara University in 2005 with a degree in Accounting and a job with PricewaterhouseCoopers. I worked there for 3 years, learned more than I wanted to know about business, got my CPA license, met some awesome people and had a great time living in San Francisco. After 3 years with PwC, I needed a change and joined the Corporate Accounting team at PG&E. I worked at PG&E for the past two years, and again, I met some great people, learned a ton, and had a great time doing it.

pants optional

After 5 years in the accounting game, though, I decided to hang up my 10 key and try something new. I can't put my finger on exactly where it came from, but at some point in the past 10 years or so, someone or something planted a little seed of idealism in me that I couldn't ignore any longer. It could have been growing up around all those former hippies in San Francisco, or maybe those damn Jesuits and their social justice rhetoric, but something was itching at me to try to make the world a better place.

Ever since college--maybe even high school, I'm not exactly sure--I had wanted to spend time volunteering in the developing world. All through my education I read about developing countries, and it always tore at my heart. The day I was born, I was richer than billions of people all over the world. I hadn't accomplished anything, earned anything for myself, and just by being born in America I had more resources at my disposal than the majority of the world's population. I've studied economics, history, politics, etc., and logically I understand why things are the way they are, but it still doesn't make sense to me. As much as I read and try to be aware of all the injustices and inequalities in the world, it is always just words and images on paper, T.V. or the internet--distant concepts, both physically and emotionally. I didn't really KNOW what it meant to live on the margins of society. Poverty is an every day reality to billions of people, and for me it was maybe a 60 second clip before the sports and weather on the nightly news. Maybe living and working side by side with these people could help me understand things better. I've always seen the world from the eyes of a white middle/upper class American male. I can't change who I am, but maybe if I change my perspective a little, I can see things in a different light.

alas, no tacos in this cyber =(

So here I am, 27 years old, sweating my ass off in a "cyber"cafe in Durán, Ecuador. I've been here for 2 weeks and I don't know what the year ahead of me will hold. I want to make a difference, but the reality is Durán will still be here in a year. I hope to make some impact, but odds are I will be the one most changed by this year--not the people of Durán. There's a bit of selfishness in that reality, but I guess I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

So there I went and rambled on for way too long about who I am and why I'm here. There's obviously way involved in my decision to come to Durán, but hopefully that will come out over the course of this year. Since I tend to ramble, I've decided to end each blog with some cheap Ecuadorian reality. So if the rest of my blog is crap, at least this might be interesting:

DOGS HAVE BALLS--I'm not sure what's more sad, the fact that there are stray dogs EVERYWHERE, or the fact that I'm so used to emasculated male dogs that dogs with balls look weird to me. Bob Barker, PLEASE COME TO ECUADOR!