NN was barely 18 years old when she became a Spanish teacher while studying historical and cultural tourism. She was also a military instructor for students completing their pre-military training and the president of her class.
From childhood, she displayed a fierce and strong temperament; one could say she was bossy. She learned martial arts, especially taekwondo, to defend herself against the sexual harassment women face in Ecuador.
While a student at the largest state girls' school in the capital, with nearly 5,000 students, she was not only an athlete specializing in the 200-meter hurdles, but also the leader of a group of girls who admired the Backstreet Boys.
She learned English on her own, without attending language institutes, thanks to her experience of singing in English.
While a tourism student traveling through Ecuador, she learned to guide tourists to the churches and museums of the capital, Quito, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1976. She also visited the Galápagos Islands, the Andes Mountains, and the Amazon rainforest. Her thesis was on the Shuar culture, the most extensive Amazonian culture, occupying territories in Ecuador and Peru, where they are also known as Achuar or Huambisa.
In 2002, Colonel Lucio Gutiérrez won the elections. In January 2000, he led a coup d'état, along with indigenous groups, that overthrew President Jumil Maldad. This coup was financed by bankers, who then looted the country through what became known as the Banking Holiday. This allowed them to flee the country with depositors' money and necessitated dollarization, meaning the national currency, the sucre, was replaced by the dollar. This led to an economic crisis and a wave of migration, with hundreds of thousands of Ecuadorians, especially women, emigrating to Spain, Italy, and the United States. This migration fueled human trafficking and drug trafficking, transforming Ecuador into South America's main money laundering hub, particularly for Colombian drug cartels, and making it the leading exporter of cocaine to Europe.
Colonel Lucio Gutiérrez, who financed his electoral campaign with money from the government of President Chávez of Venezuela, after defeating Álvaro Noboa, the richest man in Ecuador and father of President Daniel Noboa, at a time when there were no limits on campaign spending, betrayed Chávez after his victory. He proclaimed himself the best friend of George W. Bush and the United States, allowed a US military base in Manta, and participated in Plan Colombia, in which the US, Colombian, and Ecuadorian militaries would eliminate the FARC.
But President Gutiérrez and his family seized executive power, controlled Congress, and then attempted to seize control of the judiciary, imposing judges on the Supreme Court. This led to a wave of protests that, for months, brought Quito residents together on Avenida de los Shyris and in Parque de la Carolina, holding torchlight vigils every night.
Finally, after months of protest, Quito residents surrounded the hitmen hired by the president at the Ministry of Social Welfare in the La Mariscal neighborhood. The hitmen went up to the top floor and fired on the protesters, who then set the building on fire from the ground floor. One of the bullets nearly killed an unidentified person (NN), who, like other protesters and onlookers, was standing in the doorway of a house across the street. NN considered it a miracle that she wasn't killed, as she felt the bullet pass very close to her head.
NN considered it a miracle that she wasn't killed. In the following months, Ecuador underwent significant changes, particularly after Rafael Correa won the 2006 elections. From 2007 to 2017, his government brought about a significant transformation of the country.
In 2010, her father, a doctor working on the northern border with the Ministry of Health, won a competition to produce a television series about the health and lives of Ecuador's indigenous, Afro-Ecuadorian, and mestizo communities, and she was the presenter for these documentaries. After a year of working on this series, plus the money she earned giving private Spanish lessons, she managed to save enough to travel to Denmark in search of one of her students with whom she had fallen in love. He welcomed her to Denmark, and they married shortly afterward. Since then, for more than 15 years, she has lived in Denmark, where she is a Spanish and martial arts teacher, but she has experienced unemployment and discrimination firsthand, even though she has also been able to travel the world, since it is much easier to travel from Europe to the rest of the planet, thanks to these trips she has been able to live her passion for photography.
