Census Day

In the United States, the Census takes several months to complete. It involves the hiring over 650,000 temporary enumerators and costs billions of dollars.

In Ecuador, the Census is essentially taken in a day. For that day, the entire country is at a stand-still as volunteer census takers, mostly high school juniors and seniors, go door-to-door collecting statistics.

That day was today.

From 7:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m., it was illegal to be out of your house.

Soldiers and police officers were patrolling the streets to make sure that nobody was milling about. Domestic air travel was shut down, but international flights arrived and departed on schedule (except that you had to be at the airport before 7:00 a.m. because there were no taxis to take you). As part of keeping order during the Census, consumption of alcohol has been prohibited since Friday at midnight.

It was pretty eerie to look out my door at 7:00 this morning to see nothing but a few soldiers doing their patrols. Luckily, I didn't have to wait long until the census taker arrived at my door. The volunteer came by at 7:30.

Apparently, everybody in the country must participate in the census, whether or not they are citizens. So I answered the questions like everybody else.

One of the questions asked about my principal method of waste removal. I either recycle or compost almost all of my waste. Neither of those was an option. So I selected "other", but the census taker had trouble comprehending my response.

Another one of the questions asked about where I was born. It is clear that the census takers were not trained to survey people born outside of Ecuador. Although one of the responses to the question read "other country," my census taker was insistent that we should not fill in that blank because that is not what she was taught. I insisted. Then after conferring with her supervisor, she got permission to say that I was born outside of Ecuador.

It was also hard for the surveyor to understand that I work more than 60 hours a week, but that I am volunteer and am not making a salary.

After the forty-minute interview, she put a "counted" sticker on my door frame and moved on to my neighbors.

That left me with more than nine hours before I could leave my house. I tried to make them as productive as possible.

I started off by listening to a podcast before reading a hundred pages of my book. I went back for another podcast before lunching on leftovers from Friday night's dinner. Then I picked up my book again but only advanced another thirty pages before I got restless.

This is when I decided to "clean." I started with the floor. But as I picked up dirty clothes to clear it, I realized that I had a large pile of laundry to do. Considering it was a sunny day and I still had four hours to kill before the lockdown was over, I resolved to do all my laundry. By the time that, I only had a half hour left.

At 5:00, there was a collective exodus after everyone was cooped up all day in their homes.

Although I'm not quite sure what I would have done with my Sunday if it had not been Census Day, I was quite pleased with how productive I was. Maybe I should treat every Sunday as Census Day?