Water, our sustenance. From the mighty power of the ocean, a small trickle of a stream or a glamorous snowflake, it is water in which our life depends. We are at the mercy of water in all of its forms and natural manifestations. We are now reaching a global water crisis which is becoming apparent throughout the world, and more so in nations which do not have the funds to manipulate its nature. We are now well into rainy the season her in coastal Ecuador. It may not seem so traveling down the dusty dirt roads to arrive to the small town in which I live. One may suspect that we are in the midst of September while covering ones eyes from the dust swirling past. “Never in my life have I seen a rainy season so dry, 15 days with out rain when we are accustomed to long downpours every evening.” Don German Quinonez, cacao farmer and President of UOCAQ cacao cooperative. The changing weather patterns are not only inconvenient given that they have coincided with the Carnival festivities but they are also detrimental to the livelihood of the farmer’s in the community and their precious crop of cacao. Every year Ecuadorian coastanians celebrate Carnival by marveling in the plentitude of water. People flock to the beach from all over the country, and a pedestrian is never safe from an unexpected water gun or bucket. The holiday is celebrated through water and all its glory. Those in the campo take shelter from the heat in the local river and dance until the morning. Throughout the world water is a spiritual, cleansing element. Many cultures and religions use water as a sacred facet. This seems very fitting considering water makes up three fourths of the world as well as our bodies. Without water we have no life and we spread the importance of this natural gift into our religious teachings and cultural traditions. “We worship the sources of mighty rives; we erect altars at places where great streams burst suddenly from hidden sources; we adore springs…and consecrate certain pools.” Seneca The Younger, 4 B.C.-A.D. 65. During this last week my necessity of water became ever so clear as no water came from the stream which is its source, my beautiful cherry tomatoes began to dry and sag, and I realized I had been taking for granted this wonderful resource from God.

While living between two large rivers as well as flowing streams it is not so obvious that there is a global shortage of water. It can be easy to take this abundance of water for granted, but when I realize even we are facing this problem, I can only imagine how the lack of water devastates other regions a million times amplified. Not only are we facing a water shortage, but a lack of clean water. Water is being poisoned by humans all over the world on a small and grand scale. We are causing massive oil spills, leaking chemicals into our water sources as well as throwing trash and human wastes into lakes, streams and rivers. Water is a global resource and positive change must be worldwide to thrive. We can not put up boundaries between nation’s water sources so that contaminates from one land do not reach another. To improve water quality, we all must be in this together. While teaching students in Ecuador the water cycle we mapped the path of one contaminated drop of water starting from our small classroom. We saw that this path would flow into the stream behind our class, then into a larger river, to eventually reach a larger river, Rio Esmeraldas, and finally make it to the grand Pacific Ocean. This activity illustrated the interconnectivity of the land and the impact each community and individual makes on a global scale. Though it may be hard for my students to understand the expansiveness of the world, we are all connected in the fight for clean water. It may seem evident that only in a matter of time we will reach a tipping point in which the fight for water will prevail in the struggle for human existence.

Community Banking Workshop

Future Soccer Star

The rainy season has come

Trainning

Blog 1-18-11 …so there has been quite a lapse in my writing, and since we dutifully make our new years resolutions, I figured it would be fitting that mine would be an updated blog. So here we go… I am back in Ecuador after a lovely extended vacation in the states. It was so great to see my family and friends, and be home. Pablo was fortunate enough to get to visit with me. It was great to show him my home and my country, and it was interesting to see his point of view on things, since it had been his first time out of Ecuador. And yes I was a true tourist in my own home, taking pictures of the airplane, Starbucks, Walmart, all the D.C. sights, and Pablo took a lot of squirrel pictures (which pegged us as tourists instantaneously) :P Within my trip I went out to New York, D.C. and saw Miami for the first time. It was great rediscovering all the wonderful things the area has to offer and actually going out and enjoying museums and different places I have not yet been. Favorite things about home: Hot, clean, running water Comfy clean beds Flushable, available toilet paper Crisp winter chill Water fountains Recycling Food variety City public transportation Washer and dryer Libraries and amazon.com So now I am back, partly sad, but on the other hand rejuvenated and ready to really get things going this year and be a much better volunteer than during the last. I am starting to feel comfortable enough with the community and my language skills to really get going on some projects. I just finished a community banking seminar in Quito, and am putting all my efforts into implementing it here in the community. I think the P.C. model is really great and simple, and I have been spreading the word about making a bank for the past week. I hope to have a meeting or two to explain the concept to the community members, and we can move forward from there. So now we are back into rainy season. I do love the sound of rain pounding on the tin roof; the force of nature is both humbling and soothing. This always seems to be the crazier time of the year. Just yesterday we saw a poisonous black and white snake on the road, a puppy chasing a large iguana around the school house, and at night a pond formed in front of my house within an hour and all night I was scared the pond would soon engulf my house and creep inside. Luckily the water hasn’t made it inside…yet. Though don’t worry, if it does everything that could get damaged is raised and I am ready. Other than that I am keeping myself busy during down time by studying for the GRE. It’s crazy to think that I still have a year and three month left of PC but I already need to start planning for my return. Time really is flying, even though there are moments that seem to dragggg on. I am definitely getting more accustomed to the slow way of life out here in the country. At first I had a problem just sitting around the porch passing time, but now it can be rather enjoyable, and even the 5 hour bus rides to Quito seem to pass by in no time. I have been spending a ton of time with the kids, playing cards, coloring, making jewelry, cooking and other things. Though sometimes I can get a little frustrated by their persistent visits, I love them and they and we are learning a lot from each other.

My new room, it kinda turned out Barney colors but hey its probably the last opportunity I will have to have a Barney themed room!

My cana closet and hey I never expected to be a PC volunteer with a tv

John just can´t copy my eyebrow lift, I think it is a family thing

Beet teeth :) after a night of cooking

Keeping it clean, fighting ant takeover

Mi casa

I´ve accumulated a ton of stuff in just 7 months...oops, so much for minimalizm

The community member from my site enjoying some yummy dessert

Amber and I

Reconnect! We have been here in site for about 5 months now, and we just finished reconnect, which is a week long meeting where all of us volunteers get together with our counterparts to plan our goals and objectives for the next year and a half and hype up our motivation. It was really great to see everyone after a long time and share ideas and experiences.

On the 18th I was officially in country for 5 months! Wow time has been flying by, especially since I have finished training and gotten into my site. Tomorrow I will be going into town to meet the two new volunteers who will be starting in about a month. This is very exciting, though sad at the same time because another volunteer will be leaving us next month. He has been so helpful over the past few months letting me crash if I don’t make it back into the city by the last ranchero and answering all the random new volunteer questions I have. Soon I will be moving into a house of my own, this will be a period of many transitions though I am very excited. My friend from the States will be visiting in a few weeks which is also very exciting. I really hope she has a great time in Ecuador and I am able to show her a good time (I still feel like I just got here!) While wandering around the Mariscol the other day while I was in Quito another gringo stopped me and started talking to me (I think I looked pretty lost, which I was since I was looking to find a vegetarian restaurant). Anyway he was from Germany and had decided to travel around Ecuador and Colombia for a few months during his summer break from school, and today was his very first day in country. We had a coffee and chatting with him made me realize I have learned a lot about Ecuador even though I don’t realize it. I must say it is pretty balzy to travel around South America without a plan, that which may be easy with the European train system is not at all how things are down here. Anyhow my trip to Quito was nice and refreshing. I have really been missing being able to explore a city and take advantage of all it has to offer. I was able to wonder around the Old Town district in Quito and check out the Cultural Center and see the art which was displayed there. The weather was also a very nice change, it was kind of like an early April day, it started and ended pretty nippy but warmed up in the day when the sun came out and was beautiful!..and of course there were a few showers to top it off. I had to laugh though when I saw people with big puffy coats and gloves on in 60 degree weather.

Cuentas:

Motherly Love

This past week the testament of a mothers love was displayed in a quite unusual way. There is a new puppy in my host family’s house which is the puppy of the male dog in my house and the mother who is a rotwhiler lives next door. My family would not let the mother near her puppy because they thought she would bite it. So the mother had been trying to get into the house to find her puppy all day. At night my host dad put the puppy in its box and we all went to bed. I awoke in the middle of the night to a laud sound, it sounded like someone was shaking the bars on the door trying to get in the house. This happened numerous times in the night and I realized that is was the mother dog trying to get to her baby. The next morning found out that the rather large mother dog squeezed through the small openings in the window bars two times in the night! Apparently love can overcome the most difficult obstacles.

Belonging

At times I have doubted my belonging in the community…though today I was reassured I am right where I supposed to be and fit in just fine. I sat down to the dinner table this afternoon to find a squirrel in a cage hanging in the window. Though this small event may seem an oddity to the average person to me it was more than just another funny animal in the house. Apparently my “spirit animal” is a squirrel…and animal abundant in the States which I had not yet seen in Ecuador. The whole spirit animal is a long story though I think a squirrel is fitting for me. Living in the rainforest I would never expect to see a squirrel but apparently they are a quite adaptive animal, they seem to be just about everywhere. To the farmers here they are just a pest that eats the cacao so they try to either kill them or they trap them so that they can eat them. I must say if we are planning on eating the squirrel I will have to set a dinner date elsewhere for that evening. Anyhow I think this squirrel symbolizes my adaptation and integration into the community, I think I am finally starting to belong.

A job well done....now if she could just find the one that lives above my bed

Johncito and the new lil pup

Brotherly love

Demonstration about the new law of education

HIV Information session in Quininde held by another volunteer

Ariel :) I love this kid

Visiting an artists house on the coast, he has some great artwork. These are the seeds of the palm tree which people carve into little figurines...chevere

Kids working in their garden

The coop working on a greenhouse to store the fundas of cacao and maracuya

6-25

Today we worked on the elementary school garden in my town. It was really great to see all the kids working hard and getting excited about planting their vegetables. Just in one morning a fence was built to keep out the chickens and animals, we made seed boxes to start the seeds, the kids dug up plots for the gardens and broke up the soil and then finally we planted the seeds! It is very exciting to have this up and going and I hope the garden will be a sustainable community project for the future. I am hoping get a group of students together and maybe have some type of agriculture or gardening club after school. Other than that my house is now having many repairs done right now. Considering the rent will only be $30 a month the fix up costs are sure hefty! Any how it is very exciting to be getting a place of my own in the next month and I can’t wait to get settled. I must say I really love staying here with my family and am not in too much of a hurry to move out, especially when I know I will have to face the snakes, bats and rats alone in night!! Anyhow, I can’t wait, and I think I am going to paint the outside yellow, so bland…though this is a hard decision since it may be the only time in my life where it will be acceptable to paint my house pink, neon green, purple or orange. I also finally started teaching English at the elementary school in my community. It ended up going very well though it was quite a challenge since there were 37 students. I hope to figure out a way to focus my lessons on other topics such as health, environmental issues, agriculture or logical thinking while teaching a bit of English in the meanwhile. It seems like project related things are starting to pick up, and I am just trying to figure out which things to focus my time on. I am also getting better at firing down the many marriage proposals and explaining, that I do not have any children. Next weekend is the 4th of July! And ironically the 3rd is the independence of the three towns around me, including Esmeraldas and Santo Domingo! Apparently they have quite a few festivities for the weeks surrounding this date, yesterday I saw a parade in procession, and I hear next weekend there will be bull fights, the reigning of the queen, parades and a horse parade as well. I will say people sure know how to party here!

The roosters that hang out in the tree outside my window and love to crow at all hours of the day

Zapote fruit....delicious

Making plans in the Centro de Acopio

Organic fruit fertilizer....in the states this would surely be one expensive fertilizer

Pouring in a sugary substance

Chopping up all the fruits and herbs into small pieces

Papaya, granadilla, banana, and more

These are the boxes which will be used to ferment the cacao, the fermentation process takes about 3-5 days depending on what the buyer requests. At the end of each day the cacao moves down to a different box for fermentation.

Hoping this cement wall blocks the water from coming in during the rainy season!

Maybe my future house???

“Deja el machete!,” usually isn’t something one would say during the middle of an English lesson, but today it seemed very fitting. Today I headed down to the Centro de Acopio office where I have been teaching English. The number of children who attend the class has been dwindling and there a few kids in the community I can count on being there when I teach. Today I expected the usual two or three kids. I began reading a little book for beginning english, “The Lion and the Mouse,” to the children. It is a very beginning level book and I helped to explain what the story was saying in Spanish. (Thanks for the books mom, they are great!) The kids loved the book so much they wanted me to keep reading it over and over, though I stopped after the third time around. For some reason more kids started showing up and all the sudden there were like 17 children! I was a little over loaded, so of course I whipped out some songs which always seem to keep them entertained. It was really great to have so many kids come by and seem interested, well at least interested in seeing what was going on… After having to yell at some to stop running around and screaming, playing with the motorcycle and doing scary things with machetes, I called it a good day’s lesson and had to shew them out. Right now I am in the works of finding a house to rent for the next 21 months. So this will be my first time on the other side of the rental negotiation as the tenant, after 5 years as the landlord…Anyway, there really are no places set up for renting here in town but there are a few that are for sale. I have been asking around the community to try to find available housing as well as walking around with my host mom to look at the prospective houses. There are really only a few houses and none are actually ready to be moved into, they will need a bit of fixing up first. The other day the owner of one of the houses came by to speak with me and show me the house she owns. I believe she moved away about three years ago and no one has been living there since. We went into the house and disturbed the family of bats living inside, who began flying all around the room. So it sounds like we made a deal and I will be renting this house. My host dad has arranged for the men in the organization to help fix up the house I will be renting, so we will be buying block and cement and creating a bathroom, fixing up the walls, putting in a sink and maybe making a window to give it some more ventilation. I am a little worried about how the house will hold up during the rainy season, but it looks like I don’t have too many options. I really am hoping that the water won’t pass through the 6 inch cement wall at the bottom of the door….yikes. On the bright side there is room in the back for a small garden! Tomorrow I am heading into the city and then going to teach an English class up the road in one of the other towns on the way to Quininde. Right now there are so many potential projects I could do it is slightly overwhelming! I have so many ideas and resources, but there is only so little time (not to mention I still have a hard time communicating any of these ideas to anyone).

The river in my site

Someone actually got lettuce to grow! very exciting

Convention for Esmeraldas small artisans and businesses

My cacao organization´s booth at the convention

Marimba

The cacao fruit

Making cacao pasta from the roasted and dried cacao beans

The cat in my house had babies

6-1 Tonight I had a great dinner, and I was actually really hungry for dinner, which is unusual because they feed me a lot here! My dinner had like 4 vegetables a small portion of rice and eggs (no meat)….just how I like it. Wow it is already June first! I bet the spring weather at home is amazing right now, though it is probably starting to get pretty hot. I really do miss spring, and I have a feeling it will be hard to live without fall and winter too J Here there are only two seasons, invierno and vierno. Right now it is changing over to invierno which means winter, but here it basically means the drier season. It has been pleasantly nice temperature wise, during parts of April and May it was so hot it was really hard to move at times haha, but now it is quite comfortable. Vierno means summer which is the rainy season and it is also hotter and more humid. Another interesting thing about living on the equator is that the length of each day is the same throughout the year, the sun rises at 6:30 am and sets at 6:30 pm, so there are no sweet long days of summer and ridiculously short daylight winter days.

Land cleared out to start a garden, this was the result of a few mingas.

Preparing the soil...I found 3 tarantulas in this dirt

Sifting a bit

The view out my window with all my lovely goodbye cards!

A little friend on top of my water bin, cutie

Some kids at the colegio celebrating the day of the ninos, they got to have a sweet dance party instead of class, now why don´t we have this holiday in the US?

Some neighbors

Some of the girls in my english class

Yeah, I look silly

Day of the ninos at the escuela, they introduced me as a teacher and they asked me to speak about the rights of children...which I have no idea about. Needless to say it was an interesting speech.

My house in the background and some of the little girls in my community.

Blog 5-24 Cuentos: One day I decided I wanted to go running. I was out at the soccer field about to run when I heard a man yelling, “No you can’t go running it’s too wet.” Well OK…it was wet since we have been having torrential downpours every night. So I went over to greet him forgetting that I had my rock in had (this is my form of protection from the many….many dogs here. If you know me, you probably know I have quite a fear of dogs and here it is common place to throw rocks at dogs if you want them to go away.) I greeted him and he began talking, I really didn’t understand much at all of what he was saying but he invited me back to him house. I went over and he pulled out a drawer of sand and began talking about it and showing it to me, then he brought out some rocks and was explaining many things about them as well. With my limited Spanish and his difficult coastal accent I believe he was saying that there was some gold in the sand, and the rocks were from the Incans who stored water in the holes in these rocks. Just the other day I was walking down the street and he had a new rock in hand and invited me over to see his rocks again. I sadly had to decline since I was on my way to a minga (community work day), but maybe the next time he invites me I will be able to understand about 40 percent of what is going on, hey maybe one day I’ll understand everything J One night I woke up in the middle of the night to the feel of water dripping on me. I realized it wasn’t raining and wondered what it could be. Then I heard a chicken moving around on the roof and smelled the liquid substance, and yes I’m sure you can deduct what it was. I was teaching some children numbers in English one day and there was actually a pretty good turn out. The children were doing a good job shouting out the numbers I had written on a flashcard but some had wanted to write the numbers down. Since I didn’t have a board to write on I wrote the numbers down in one of the student’s notebooks. Then all the kids started coming up and wanted me to write the numbers in their book and they were getting really excited. I figured I must feel like the guy dressed up as Mickey Mouse at Disney Land. I was having a great day, it seemed like the kids had learned a little something in English class that day and I had also spoke with the town president who thought I should do some presentations at the next town meeting ( though he didn’t know when that would be). Then a neighbor greeted me and said I and told me I was looking more gordita than when I got here. “Haha oh really” I said! “Yes, you are,” he replied cheerily. Well I guess that’s what happens when you take a veggie loving girl and feed her rice, plantains and oil. Today I found a bone of I think a chicken or maybe a larger animal. How did it get there? I have absolutely no idea. Mother’s Day here in my town is a big holiday. People start celebrating on Saturday and continue through the night Sunday. Everyone gets all dressed up and ready to go out dancing on Saturday night. I of course joined…thinking this is the moment we all are dreading/waiting for, our debut on the dance floor. I was hoping my previous practice back in DC at Habana Village, in pre-service training and after English classes with the girls would help to give me a few less crazy stares than I would previously have received. Basically this was my moment to pretend I could shake better than your average gringa. The house down the road turned into a dance club since the owners had moved everything out of the main room. We (my 70 year old mother, sister and sister-in-law and their friends and the 9 year old son) headed to this “club”. We sat around in silence for a very long time listening to the music blasting. Then after about an hour a few drunk men came in and began doing some very entertaining dancing. After a while people began to dance and I was really hoping I would have the courage to go try. It looked like everyone was really starting to have fun and finally a woman who lives down the street made me go dance. So I danced with her, and then with others and had a great time. I think I did an OK job but I’ve got nothing on anybody here. Even Ariel the 1 year old boy at my house can already shake it like no other; it’s an inherent talent I presume. 5-27 “Mucho suerte!” Si, I am very lucky I saw that snake outside my bedroom door before it found me! Luckily my host dad was in the other room and yelled for his machete so he could kill it before it got away. Shew, that was a scare, though I wouldn’t have minded if the snake decided to eat the mouse in my room during his visit. The next day while having lunch with my host mother and talking about the snake incident, she told me that the snake last night was and equis….one of the most dangerous snakes in Ecuador. Yikes J Today was baking, take two. I think my chocolate chip cookies were much more successful this time around since I had pretty similar ingredients to those I use in the states. Just when I was about finished my last batch a truck drove past our house and ripped down the power line, oops. So right now just one half of our house has power, luckily there is power upstairs or I may have not seen that snake! When I went down to the tienda to buy bolos (basically a home made freeze pop in a bag) after language class, the lady asked me when I was going to teach her to make cookies. I told her I could try to this week haha apparently everyone here really does know what I am doing all the time. It’s great, the man who sells coco drinks at the ranchero station always points me to the correct ranchero and there are always people stopping the ranchero when they know we have reached my house. So far I have been enjoying living in a small town (around 400 people). Today someone actually asked me for help regarding an agricultural topic, this was a small joy for me. She has seeds from Quito and wanted to know the seeds were for, I told her lettuce, though she really didn’t think it was. Anyhow, she wanted me to try to help her plant them and I said that I would though I wasn’t sure they would grow since they are typically cooler weather crops. Well, I guess it is worth a try. Right now I am super excited because my friend will be arriving in Ecuador in a few day. She is doing a 2 month internship working for a rainforest preservation group. What a small world! Of all places, we are going to be in the same country and even very close, probably just like 4 or 5 hours away from each other (which is maybe equivalent to US travel time of 1 hour haha). I have started to miss home and family and it will be great to see a good friend! 5-28 It is funny which things trigger memories. Today I heard something that sounded like a weed wacker off in the distance and started to get a bit nostalgic for the lovely spring/summer days at home. I have woken many spring and summer mornings to that all too familiar sound coming from the good neighbors sprucing up their lawn. I am starting to miss home, but I know being away is really helping me to appreciate where I come from and making me realize there are so many little things that make it great. Today I had a slight deja-vu moment. While working at the minga on our community garden, I saw a caterpillar on a cacao tree. It just happens that cacao trees and Pawpaw trees (if you know me well then I assume you know what a pawpaw tree is) are strikingly similar. And this caterpillar was bright lime green and looked just like the saddleback caterpillar which stung me while I was picking pawpaws out in Rock Creek Park. So anyhow, it looked just like the caterpillar that stung me just hanging out on a cacao leaf which is very similar to a pawpaw leaf. But this time I knew to stay far far away from it! Since I have been on kind of a bug kick lately I will continue on with the interesting creatures I saw today. As mentioned above I saw a beautiful lime green caterpillar, three (small don’t worry) tarantulas, and a huge flying insect I at first thought was a bird but was mistaken. Today we had our minga with the agriculture institute students and though attendance was a bit low we got a lot done. I passed out my chocolate chip cookies and everyone really liked them. I think try two was much more successful than the first time. I must send out a warning that walking around with cookies is very dangerous, you are lucky if you make it to your destination with about half the amount you started with and you will probably finish your travels with multiple cooking lessons planned for the new week, but hey at least I’m useful for something around here! I was told I should even sell cookies to make a little profit, I wish I could, “April’s cookie bake sale, funds go towards Porta phone saldo.” Today we received an alert from the PC that the volcano in Banos began spewing ash. Our travel is now restricted in a few of the provinces nearby (not that I am allowed to travel yet... two more months). This is definitely a reality check; yes this volcano they have been worried about could actually erupt! I hope everything calms down and it will safe again soon.

One Month Mark! Yesterday marked one month in site. It does seem like this last month went by pretty quickly, though there were days that were slower at times. After three months we are allowed to rent a house of our own, and I must admit I can’t wait. After 6 years of living on my own it is a bit of a challenge. So far I have been trying to get to know the community and improve my Spanish. Apparently, it is a little better but it still is quite bad. I have attended a lot of meetings with the cacao organization that I am working for and have visited other organizations as well to get an idea of how they operate. Students from the agricultural university in the nearest city are working with our community on Fridays doing agricultural mingas. During the last few mingas we cleared out a plot of land and built a fence around the land to keep the animals away. They also plan on helping with a school garden and organic fertilizers as well as teaching children about food security. Within my community I have been teaching English almost everyday to the kids in the community how want to come. Learning English seems to be the first thing on everyone’s mind here when they talk to me, so I figured I should give it a shot. I actually do enjoy teaching, especially to the younger group. This has also given me a chance to get to know many of the kids and teenagers in the town. Making up silly rhymes is now a new past time of mine. Today I talked with the teachers at the elementary school, and they would like for me to teach English there. So now I am going to try teaching a few classes of English there once a week and then continue one day a week with the others who I have been teaching. Right now there are many other possible secondary projects I could work on, though my main focus is working with the cacao organization in my site. These next few months I need to start working on my community interviews. I will be interviewing the families in the community to try to assess the needs and wants of the community and as well as gathering base mark data to measure the accomplishments of the PC goals. I have lately been a bit envious of those who have nine to five jobs, I really do miss mine.

Apparently the best Pan de Yuca in the world....it is very yummy

I went to visit some other cacao organizations in the area to see how they run their organizations. This is where they dry out their cacao after it has been fermented. It usually takes more than 3 days to dry out.

Amber and I, Omnibus 103

These are coffee beans which a farmer had dropped off to the centro de acopio in town

This is my office! Pretty huh :) They are planning to officially open this month once they build the marquesina (which is where the cacao is dried). Right now this is basically where we have meetings and I am teaching english classes.

This is during a minga which our organization was having to clear out a plot of land for planting. There was much sweat and macheting involved.

Children love to play with tires: just an observation

Maybe my future home?!?

The grandchildren of my host parents playing with their pigs

Passing time on the front porch at my house...cuties

Ariel wants to be just like Daddy on the moto

Just helping grandpa fix a flat, he may not talk yet but he sure can work a moto

Aloooo

My host mother and the grandchildren

Ooops I just killed two baby chicks.....the look of innocence

Every Kids Dream…

So I was lucky enough to have cake for breakfast twice this week…I must be dreaming or something. I admit sometimes it still doesn’t feel real. After a quick chat on the internet with family and friends from home I always have to pinch myself back to reality when I’m finished. “Oh yeah, I’m doing Peace Corps and I’m in Ecuador right now!”

We are officially at the 3 week point. Everything has been wonderful so far and time has flown by, though I feel like I have been here forever. Next week we find out our site locations! NEXT WEEK! Then we head off two days later for a week site visit in which we will be living in our site with our host family. This is very exciting but also nerve wrecking because it will be the first time we are really off on our own. Up until this point Peace Corps has pretty much held our hand each step of the way, but at this point they are letting us go to see how we do on our own. This is the beginning of a two year journey and like any change it is exciting, and intimidating.

Today while we were walking back from town we passed by a chicken handing by a foot off a balcony. I personally thought this was a new quilt free method to killing a chicken instead of actually snapping it’s neck, but really it had wandered off the balcony and was tied so that it couldn’t get away. Just another ordinary day.

This was a blog I started during training....I will go back and add pictures and more information about our first week in Ecuador in a bit.

February 20th:

Arrival Training has begun. I must say I am really excited to get training started and start learning some Spanish! The last few days have been jam packed with traveling, new faces and new places J Right now I am in Cayambe, which is about an hour and a half north of Quito. We are up in the mountains in a very high altitude. Today we left Quito which is where we have been staying for the last few days and also the location of PC headquarters. In Quito we had a jam packed day full of shots, paperwork, signatures, language skills test, safety….and more! The city of Quito seemed very nice though we were not allowed to leave our hostel, they didn’t want to release the gringo newbies too soon hehe. So, I am in the agribusiness program and have met about 4 or 5 others with this same job title. Our PC group is made up of 55 in total and about half are agriculture volunteers and the other half are environmental. Within these subsets each person has a more detailed title, which in my case is agribusiness. This week all of us will be together in “the compound” in Quito. Brings me back to college memories, open door policy is key. Here we will have more information sessions and much more language sessions. We have all been split into language groups of about 5 people and they will evaluate our level after the week. We will then be split into groups of 5 according to our language levels. Each group will be placed into a town surrounding Cayambe and we will all be living with a host family there for training. I was really nervous about having the least Spanish background, but there are a few people who have never studied Spanish before. I’m not really sure where my language level is right now, but either way I am sure I will be learning a ton in the next few weeks/months/years! Today we went to the Centro del Mundo (Middle of the World), which is where the equator goes through Ecuador. It was really chevere (cool)! We got to see the water swirl clockwise on one side and counter clockwise on the other. Apparently people weigh about 4 lbs less on the equator as well…good to know after these high carb meals! Our guide also did some other really interesting demonstrations and I balanced an egg on a nail and got a certificate! Sweeeet. After that we had a really great meal at the restaurant next door, and got to try some new fruits.

Home sweet home:This is my home for the next few months. I have already been here for a week and 3 days...hey whos counting? Time really has been flying by though.

I live in a small town (a long dirt road) right outside of Tabacundo, which is a smaller city outside of Cayambe. I am really liking it here so far. The weather is great! The mornings are a bit cold but when the sun comes out it really warms up. We are surrounded by majestic views of mountains and choclo fields (the corn variety grown here). These days I wake up around 5:30 am and get to see the sun rise every morning. Desayuno (breakfast) is at 6am since my host mom has to leave for her job at the flower plant at 6:30. Roses are one of the main industries in this area and there are about 100 rose plants near by. Both my mother and her two daugheters work at rose plants.

So my family is quite large and I am still not really sure how many people are living here. I have a mother (maria), father, two brothers and two sisters. One of the sisters is married with a son Ariel. This family lives on the second floor where my room also is located. I think an uncle also lives upstairs with his family...though I am still not fully sure about this. My room has a seperate enterance which makes it a bit difficult to figure out the family tree.

View outside my window of the family´s corn and potatoes. They also have chickens, a pig, guinea pigs (for eating of course) and a cat. Speaking of chickens tonight is the big day that the big white chicken will be killed...I hope Im not missing the big event!

This is where I wash my clothes, it is not that bad so far but it takes a lot of time and some good muscle.Mi cama (bed)Beautiful full moon outside my window. My mother gave me these roses from the plant, they are beautiful!

Link in spanish to the city outside my town:http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabacundo

Trip to Salinas

Friday and Saturday we took our cultural trip to Salinas which is north of Cayambe in the province of Imbabura.

The day before I had finally gotten my peace corps cell phone and set my alarm for a 4:45am start only to startle awake Friday morning to the calling “Abril, desayuno (breakfast). Aye! Luckily I got myself ready and showered in a whopping 10 minutes and out the door about on time. This was the start of my “cultural weekend.”

We took a bus up to the city of Imbabura and from there took the tourist train up to Salinas. The train ride was beautiful! We weaved in and out of the amazing mountains and could see the Imbabura Mountain for most of the ride.

The city of Imbabura

Beautiful Train Ride

Once in Salinas we were given the cultural background of the community. It is a community of predominantly African decent. The areas main industry had been salt mining (which is where it gets its name) until it gained freedom. Now the main industry of the area is sugar cane. There are beautiful fields of sugar cane grown throughout the area. Sadly though, the farmers themselves still receive little profit from the sugar cane crop.

This is the final salt product once it has been burned and processed.This mudd filter was used to test the salinity of if water to see if there was salt in the soil.Mountain created during the mining of salt in the area. Salt is no longer a large industry in the area because the government controls the industry (i think, every was explained in spanish so I may have missed some important details)

Statue symbolizing the towns freedom.

Next culture moment….pig foot soup! Since being here I have been eating meat a lot. It’s definitely a change though I wanted to integrate myself into the Ecuadorian culture and no doubt meat is a large part of this. So I at my pig foot soup!

A group of women in the community came and did beautiful dances while we were at lunch and after eating a huge lunch (lunch here is always the largest meal, usually a soup and then a main course consisting of rice potatoes and meat) we danced the afternoon away as a local bang played for us. It was a ton of fun.

We then were split of to go to the families which were graciously having us stay with them for the evening. The families which we stayed with all lived together in houses connected to each other with a tienda store in the front.

Everyone was beat from a long hot day…

Once we settled into the room the curious children of course followed and proceeded to ask us all kinds of questions. One little girl gave Inez and sweet hair dew while they were enthralled with my camera and had to take tons of pictures. Later the two little girls took me hand in hand while we skipped through the community hand in hand. Hah I am quickly learning a lot about Peace Corps is being able to make a fool out of yourself, and that I think I am pretty good at!

We all had a wonderful large dinner of potatoes with mayo and ketchup (people put mayo on many things here!), rice of course and chicken it was time for the big futbol soccer match. I wouldn’t recommend eating a ton of rice and potatoes right before running around in a soccer game yikes! So it was the Peace Corps team vs. the chicas of Salinas (who I would imagine have played soccer about everyday of their lives, I can’t remember the last time I played soccer, maybe during recess in elementary school?) So we played an awesome game of soccer lead by our all star Lindsay and had a tied game! Surprisingly I did a lot better than I thought though I need to get myself back in shape (I try to balm my tiredness on the high altitude and plethora of ice creams and candies in Ecuador which I have been very much over indulging in!)

We wrap up cultural trip day two with a morning breakfast of chicken, peas, bread, fruit, and I think more rice. I also think I found my new favorite fruit! I had 5 today…hehe, though I forget the name. We headed off to see a women’s group that makes recycled paper and turns it into cards and other little gifts. We all got to take a stab at making that paper and we found it sure wasn’t easy.

Sweet Granadilla (passion fruit)...Lets just say I had 5 in one day, love them!

We begun the journey back home with all 20 some of us piled in the back of a truck, it was great fun with beautiful views.