Last weekend we took a trip to a little resort town called Baños, which is famous for its hot springs. It was a wonderful way to unwind after navigating the city streets of Quito, but what sticks out in my mind was the bus ride there.

Baños is nearly four hours away from Quito, and halfway through our ride two young women carrying babies boarded the bus. Our bus was already full, so they stood in the aisles. I kept waiting for someone to stand up and give them a seat, but no one budged.

Finally I couldn’t take it anymore. It was outrageous that in a bus full of people, no one would give up their seat for a young mother carrying a baby. I walked to the front of the bus and offered the women my seat. One of the women squeezed past me with her baby and sat down. A few moments later, a few people got off the bus, and the other woman (who turned out to have a second child in tow) sat down on a plastic stool crammed in the last row of seats.

The polite Westerner sitting next to the young mother offered me his seat. The mother had her arms full with the baby so her young daughter sat on my seat with me and I held on to the little girl as the bus jostled us along the bumpy road.

In my broken Spanish we tried to strike up a conversation. It hit me like a tidal wave when she said she was the same age as me – 24. Except unlike me, she had three children and had been married since she was sixteen. She was on her way to visit her husband, who is stationed in the army three hours away from her hometown. She makes the 6-hour trip every two weeks to see him. When I asked her for how much longer he will be in the army, she said, For life.

I’ve noticed tons of women with babies in Ecuador so I asked her how many more kids she wanted. She looked at me with the tired eyes of a weary young mother and admitted she didn’t want any more kids. She told me she lived in the campo, the countryside, and then explained that she already didn’t have enough money to send her three children to school.

I asked her how many kids a typical family has and my jaw dropped as she replied, Seven, eight, ten kids. Talk about a lack of family planning. And perpetuating the cycle of poverty.

The little girl on my lap had fallen asleep and I half held, half cradled her so she wouldn’t slide off the seat. She was the size of a toddler, but her mother told me she was five years old.

The woman next to me could have been me- if I had been born in Ecuador instead of California, if fate had rolled a different set of dice. We had compared birthdays (she’s a month older than me), and as we sat in silence for a few minutes I knew we were also comparing our lives.

She asked me how many kids I had, whether I had a husband, and when I told her I had neither, she asked why not. All I could say, and it pained me to say so, was that I was too young, that I wanted more time to do the things I want to do.

Baños