Since his first trip to Guaranda, Ecuador, Dr. Scott H. Beck has had a passion for the people and culture of this impoverished town.
Beck, a professor of sociology at ETSU, speaks fondly of his eight or nine trips to Ecuador. In fact, he keeps mementos of his trips in his small office – a small, brightly colored clock; the map of Ecuador on the wall; an organized bookshelf is half full of books from graduate and undergraduate classes he teaches. To tell the history of Guaranda, Beck leaned back in his chair, gazing out the window.
“Since the 1960s, Johnson City has been ‘sister cities’ with Guaranda through a program from Sister Cities International,” Beck said, pointing to the city on a map of Ecuador. “Over time, this program had fallen by the wayside, but in 1990, Dr. Cavender, a medical anthropologist here at ETSU, went to Guaranda to start the relationship again.”
Although both cities have a university, Johnson City and Guaranda differ in population size, with only around 20,000 residents in Guaranda and nearly 56,000 in Johnson City.
In 1991, Beck, along with Cavender and two other ETSU professors went to Guaranda to meet with university faculty. “The name, roughly translated, is something like State University of Bolivar,” Beck said.
Through the trip, the schools informally became “sister universities” and, in 1994, Beck and Cavender went back to Guaranda to do research. “While Dr. Cavender investigated the folk medicine practices in and around the town, I became interested in the new civil rights movement for the indigenous people,” Beck said.
Through his trips to Guaranda, Beck developed a passion for the people in Ecuador. “After a few trips, I sincerely became interested in the various social and political changes and challenges that were going on there,” Beck said. “I have always been concerned with discrimination, minority rights, inequality and similar issues and I guess I have just applied those concerns to Ecuador for the past 10 years.”
In 1996, Beck returned to Guaranda with Dr. Ken Mijeski, a professor of political science who focuses on Latin American politics. The two began their research on the political movement of indigenous civil rights in Ecuador.
“Either Mijeski or I have gone back to Guaranda every year since then to do research,” Beck said.
Cavender and Beck jointly published one article and Mijeski and Beck have had numerous articles published on their research together. “For me personally, the most interesting part of my trips has been in travels outside town,” Beck said with a faraway look in his eyes. “If you want to see real poverty, you can see it there, like a child that looks four or five and finding out that they are 8-years-old.
“You can read it in books, but when you are squatting in a hut and can barely see because your eyes find it difficult to focus in the dim light and you can smell the earth of the floor and the pigs penned next to the house, you can really understand how little some people have.”
Beck’s adventures with his colleagues have been equally memorable. “On one of our first trips to Ecuador, Dr. Beck and I shared a room,” Cavender said. “He was suffering from altitude sickness. While some people develop nausea or lightheadedness, he developed a case of extreme laughter. I said, ‘Do you have any toothpaste I could use?’ and he said, ‘Toothpaste!’ and was hysterically laughing. He was like that for two days. I was the funniest man alive for two days.”
When Beck is not in Ecuador, he is making a difference in people’s lives at ETSU. “Dr. Beck is a very helpful and friendly teacher,” said Ashley Souther, a 20-year-old sociology minor. “He has an easygoing personality and goes out of his way to work with his students.”
Beck is also respected by his colleagues. “Dr. Beck is very professional,” Instructor of Sociology Betsie Cole said. “He is a good boss and has a wonderful, quick sense of humor. More importantly, he really cares about his Latin American studies. He has worked hard to increase the awareness of his students about the problems of poverty in other countries.

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