Sorry I haven't written on this in a really long time. My life in Cebadas just got to be normal to me, and I didn't feel like anything really special happened to me, or special enough to write a blog post about. Really though, every day I spent in Cebadas was a new adventure, I just felt I didn't want to bore you with my every day life.

However, I am in the middle of a site change and will finish out the last 8 months or so of my service living in Quito. I don't exactly know what I'll be doing yet, and I will be sad to leave Cebadas early, but I'm also excited to experience the more urban side of Ecuadorian life and I'm sure Peace Corps will find a great organization for me to work with.

I'll write another update once I know more about what is happening, but in the mean time I'll just post this link to my friend's blog (hope this is ok Leah!). She came and helped out at my water project, and wrote a great description of it.

http://leahandersonsmith.blogspot.com/2012/01/engineers-without-borders.html

After being a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador for a little over a year now, I have finally determined what my main long-term project will be. I have seen first-hand that clean water is a big priority, how easy it can be to provide, and yet how difficult it can be to negotiate with the bureaucratic government of Ecuador, who has bigger issues to deal with.

I have been working with community members of Yakuñay, a small village located at about 9,800 feet above sea level, just up the hill from Cebadas, where I live. It takes about 25-minutes to travel there by car, or an hour and a half walking as there are no busses. The population of this village is about 80 (28 families), all without access to clean water. They are currently drinking the water directly as it comes out of the spring, and their potable water system needs many repairs. The municipality constructed a water capture system about 15 years ago, and it has gone without repairs or maintenance since its installation due to lack of funds and knowledge. Yakuñay is too small to be recognized as a “community” in the Ecuadorian governmental organization system, so they are not eligible for government assistance.

For the immediate future, I’m looking forward to being the project coordinator to replace certain sections of PVC tubing leading to residences; install buoys and shut-off valves for repairing the pressure breakers; install a plastic tank for chlorination and improved water quality; and see that water meters are installed at homes so the village can begin to collect fees to pay for future maintenance and repair. I am really excited about being able to help the people of Yakuñay through this project, because it will be one thing that will remain after I leave.

I have been in contact with a group of students from Kansas State University who are involved with Engineers Without Borders (EWB). They will be travelling to Ecuador in January, 2012 to assist with my project. I am hoping KSU’s EWB team will commit to making improvements to Yakuñay’s water system for at least five consecutive years. I am also eager to show the EWB team how people in Ecuador live, and to have the locals here interact with some other Americans. The people I have met during the past year have been so welcoming and accepting of me, and I am glad I will be able to reciprocate their generosity with this worthwhile project. The community leaders in Yakuñay are currently enlisting other residents to work alongside the EWB team.

I wrote and received approval for a Peace Corps Partnership Program (PCPP) grant that is posted on the Peace Corps website at http://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate. By entering project number 518-371, you can read more about my project and have the opportunity to electronically donate as little or as much as you would like. The amount needed to make this project a reality is $5500.00 US. In order to have time to purchase the materials before the EWB team arrives in early January, my self-imposed deadline to raise the funds is November 30, 2011

I hope you will seriously consider donating to this worthwhile endeavor to provide clean water to the residents of Yakuñay. It would also be greatly appreciated if you could forward this letter to others who would be interested in helping to create a healthier quality of life for those less fortunate.

Thank you for your time and consideration. If you have questions, please email me at kknthomp@gmail.com. I do not have regular internet access, but will respond to your questions as quickly as possible.

I think this is the first time I have written a blog entry so soon after the previous one! My day today was just so random that I had to tell you all about it, although it wasn’t the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me. In this entry you will get to see what a typical day in my life is like.

So today was my first day back at “work” from my vacation to the Galapagos with my Uncle Shaun and Aunt Tammy and my cousins McKinley and Patrick. We spent 5 days there, and although it was different from what we expected, it was still really cool. We saw all of the endemic plants and animals, and learned a lot about the formation of the volcanic islands. I am proud to report that I didn’t get sea sick once while we were there! We used some scopalamine patches that had some kinda weird side effects, but worked very well. So today I came into the office of the Junta where I’ve been working the last 2 months or so, and pretty much no one was there. I brought my laptop to do some work revising the budget for my water project, but I finished it in about 30 minutes, and then just sat there writing emails to send later and playing games. I was by myself in the office for a while, which I don’t really like because I have no idea what to say to people when they come in needing help with something, I just tell them to wait for the secretary. So later the secretary and the guy in charge of agriculture came back and said “let’s go to a wedding” so of course I said OK; why not? We went to the store next door and bought 6 2-liter bottles of Coke to bring with us as a gift I guess. We walked over to a vacant lot next to the church that had some chairs set up in it, but they were full so we dropped off our Coke and sat on the ground. Then they started handing out the food. A few ladies were coming around with buckets of corn and beans that we just grabbed with our hands, also one lady was handing out rolls and a whole assembly line of people were passing out bowls of soup – chicken soup with carrots, peas, potatoes and rice; pretty much the same food they eat every day. Each person was sitting there in the blazing sun eating this boiling hot soup with a plastic spoon, then picked up the chicken with their hands and ate it before the bones to one of the dogs wandering around. I of course did the same, and after this one bowl of soup I was pretty full. They passed around some pop too for the drinks, and I thought it was pretty much over, until I saw the assembly line form again to pass out the main course. I was not really surprised when I got my plate half full of white rice, a scoop of yellow rice and a scoop of noodles with a little bit of tomato sauce. I don’t know how they do it, but most people were able to eat the entire plate. They even were talking about it while we were eating, saying “Ecuadorians have their stomach’s from their head to their feet” but I couldn’t finish as hard as I tried. It’s really rude here to give back your plate still with food on it, but luckily my friend couldn’t finish his either and so we put one plastic plate on top of the other to bring it back with us. We ran into some other friends right around the corner who hadn’t eaten lunch yet so we gave it to them. This was nothing like a normal US wedding, and they were asking me about our weddings. I told them that my cousin just got married on the beach and he had a video so we could watch it on the internet, and they thought that was the coolest thing ever. The friend who I went with is the guy who everyone thinks I should marry just because he is 26 and single, so then they started talking about our wedding and how it could be on the beach here in Cebadas down by the river. Then I don’t know what they were saying because they were talking in Kichwa, but I know they kept talking about the two of us getting married. It’s annoying but I just have to put up with it, and I know it annoys him too, but we don’t really talk about it with each other. So that was my first experience of a “wedding” in Ecuador, which was pretty much just a lunch with friends, and was actually really similar to the funeral I went to once. I heard that in November my host dad’s brother is having a real wedding in the church, so then I’ll see what it’s like. Most people just get married like in the courthouse first without a real wedding, and then later when they have enough money they have a real ceremony.

Later after doing a little more of nothing in the office, I left and went to visit the nurse who is my BFF in the Subcentro. She kinda just complains all the time about the other people who work there, which is annoying but also I understand how they could make her angry – for the same reasons they made me want to not work there anymore, but she’s not a volunteer and can’t just quit working there. Later I went to a store to have some documents scanned and saved on my flash drive, then tried to use the internet to send them, but it was too slow that the attachments never loaded. I left and went to sit on the sidewalk with my host mom and my neighbor for a while, but they were pretty much only speaking Kichwa and I got bored so I left. I went to change my clothes to go for a jog, which I haven’t been doing since our attempt at Cotopaxi. As I was walking up the hill to the road where I usually run, I passed a little boy who was just staring at me. He was also walking up the hill, and I started talking to him asking where he was going. He was on his way home, which was just a few meters up the hill. We said goodbye, and I kept walking up the hill, putting my headphones back in and listening to my music. I turned around a few minutes later and he was running behind me to catch up. He asked if he could come with me, so I said sure. I just turned off my iPod and kept walking up the hill. We ran a little bit, but then he got tired so we just walked and talked, getting to know each other. I learned that my new friend is named Luis, he is 8 years old, he has 3 dogs and 3 sisters and 3 brothers, but they are older and some live and work in Quito. He has been to Quito once to see them. He asked me how old I am, what is my name, where does my dad live, what are my parent’s names, are there cows in the United States, was I afraid of that bird cawing? Have I ever seen a “fuco”? Apparently its like a big cat but it has really big wings and lives in the forests up in the mountains. What kind of animals eat humans? He has 3 bears in his house – but they are teddy bears. One of them attacked him yesterday. How many friends do I have? Do I have friends who live in Cebadas? He told me there is a boy who lives here who is my friend, and I asked who is that, and he said me! So now I have another new friend in Cebadas.

On August 20 I will have been in Cebadas for exactly one year – my official half way point of my service since the two months of training don’t count for the two years. Still have some good days and some bad days – sometimes I wish I could stay here forever, and sometimes this next year can’t seem to pass fast enough. Overall I’m still enjoying it here, trying as hard as I can to actually get some work done which is harder than I thought, but I know I’m growing and learning something new every day which is a personal benefit even if I don’t help the people here as much as I had wanted to. I like to think that through my daily interactions the people here are benefiting from it as much as I am. My favorite thing about being here is just walking down the street and almost every single person says hi to me. Some are young men my age who bother me just because I am a gringa, but really aren’t confident enough to say anything more than buenos dias. Most are children who yell my name as I walk by, but a lot are mothers and older men too; I’m kinda a celebrity in Cebadas.

Wow – I have been in Ecuador for over a year now; pretty much exactly half-way done with my service. I have “enseñada” or gotten used to it as everyone still asks me almost every day, and I really feel at home now in Cebadas. Another volunteer told me that the second year is way better than the first, and I can already see that that is going to be true in my case too. Since January I´ve just kind of been organizing activities all on my own, going to do sex-ed at the high school or doing a lesson about nutrition and the food groups at random events, but just recently I changed my counterpart and am now working with the Junta Parroquial, kind of like the town hall. I am the “técnica de salud” working with 6 other people here in the office. I am pretty much the only person in the health area, but now since I´ve been here for a year I feel prepared to take on this position. I already have lots of other community contacts and I´m still doing some activities on my own but now I have the Junta to back me up too. I am excited about my new job here and I know the second year will be better than the first. I could reflect on this even more, but I think that would just be boring so instead I´m going to write about a recent trip I made with another volunteer to attempt to summit Cotopaxi.

We met our guide Diego and his brother in the town of Machachi, just near the base or Cotopaxi volcano. They totally looked like mountain climbers, with their indigenous facial features and long black ponytails. They were close to our age, and have pretty much grown up on the enormous mountains in Ecuador, having climbed Cotopaxi more times than they can remember at only 25 years old. They did some shopping for food and stuff while Krista and I got lunch in anticipation of our climb later that day, then we headed off to the park entrance all stuffed inside the truck because it was starting to rain. Arriving to the parking lot, we got into the back of the truck and put on almost all of our layers, including our rented boots that were almost like ski boots. We only had a shirt hike up to the refuge where we would stop to fully prepare, but with the wind and blowing snow it was so cold. About an hour later we arrived to the refuge to drop off our sleeping bags and rest a little bit. Even though we were inside we didn´t take off any layers because it was still freezing. We grabbed our cramp-ons and ice picks and headed up the hill a little bit with Diego while his brother stated cooking dinner. We walked up to where there was snow, trudging through sandy soil and gravel that looked like the surface of Mars to get there. He taught us how to put on the cramp-ons and how to use the ice pick in case we were going to fall. We sat there just talking for a while about the plan for the next morning and how everything was going to work. Watching the sunset, it started to get a lot colder, so we went back down to the refuge and put on even more layers of clothes.

Dinner was ready when we got back: soup with rice and noodles, and then spaghetti noodles with ground beef and veggies. Lots of carbs to last us through all the next day. There were lots of other people in the refuge that night, mostly other foreigners except for the guides. We only counted 3 or 4 other women, who were in groups that had men too – we were the only group of just women, and some of the guides were giving Diego a hard time about it, which just motivated us even more to make it up to the top. About 8 or 8:30 we went to lay down in our sleeping bags to sleep for a little bit, wearing almost all of our clothes for the next day – 2 pairs of long underwear, one pair of sweat pants, 3 pairs of socks, a t-shirt, long underwear shirt, and fleece jacket. Even with all these clothes and inside the sleeping bag inside the refuge, it was still the coldest I have ever been in my life. The cold temperatures plus the anticipation of our adventure in the morning made it really hard to fall asleep, and I kept waking up all night but finally I think I slept a total of 3 hours or less. Around midnight we woke up from hearing people walk around, and made our selves get out of the sleeping bag to get ready. Got our hats, scarves, gloves head lamps, and boots and grabbed our backpacks with our equipment, a lunch they had packed for us and lots of water. Headed down to have breakfast – bread with jelly, yogurt and granola, and hot chocolate. Put on our outer layers, waterproof pants and a jacket, our harnesses, and about 1:30 AM headed out.

It was completely dark, and we had no idea how they even knew where they were going. We just trusted them and followed along behind. At first it was just the sandy gravel, and every step I took I just slid down a little bit. It was really windy and cold, but we were walking so steep uphill that it kinda warmed me up. We caught up with another group of about 5 or 6 climbers with only one guide, zigzagging up the mountain who we followed for a little bit. They were going a lot slower than we had been, so it was a nice break to follow them, and made us feel good about ourselves that we could go faster than them, but it also made me feel colder again. Finally, we passed the others, and got to the snow line where we sat down to put on our cramp-ons, and they connected all 4 of us together with a rope. We sat for a minute resting and we could see the lights of Machachi below us, and all the stars above us. Also you could see lines of lights on the mountains, the head lamps of the other teams who were climbing that day. Starting off after that first break was when the real climb started for me. I was right behind Diego, with about 8 feet of rope separating us. He obviously is in better shape than I am and more used to the extreme altitude, so most of the time the tension was pretty tight on the rope because he was pulling me up the mountain. It was actually good though, because if I was not connected to him I probably would have gone slower, but by him pulling me at his pace it made me realize that I could do it and I was stronger than I thought. We kept on hiking at a decent pace, taking short breaks every once and a while. It started to get really windy and snowy as we made our way crisscrossing up the mountain. I looked forward to a break from the wind every time we turned away facing so the wind was more at our backs. Everything began to be covered in ice; the hood of my jacket was more like a hood of ice, and sometimes I couldn´t open my backpack to get out water because the zippers had frozen shut. The ends of my hair sticking out from my hat looked like noodles made of ice crystals, but we just kept walking. There was a really steep part that we pretty much climbed straight up and I almost thought I couldn´t make it. I was using my ice pick as a walking stick to support myself, and every time I stuck it in the ground I thought it was going to be the last step I would take. But that rope kept getting tighter from Diego trying to pull me behind him, and I felt like I couldn´t let him down, or myself or Krista, so I kept going.

At the top of the steep part, we stopped and rested and talked with the guides, although we could hardly hear them because of the wind. It was just starting to get light, probably about 6 in the morning. Diego said that now that the weather had been like this for a few hours, it would not improve, so we probably should not keep going. It wouldn´t have been impossible to summit, but with the wind and snow it would have not been very enjoyable, and once we got to the top we wouldn´t be able to see anything anyways. We were at about 5400 meters above sea level and decided that we wouldn´t go any further. However, we still had about 2 hours before we had to start heading down, and we were at a really cool place where there were lots of crevices and icicles, so we hung out there for a while exploring. They set up a little rope system so we could jump over the crevices, and we walked around this place that looked like nothing else I had ever seen. We climbed up a little wall that we had to use our ice picks, and then at the top sat and rested behind a snowdrift out of the wind. We drank some water, but I wasn´t really hungry. It got cold pretty fast just sitting still so we started heading down after not too long.

Going down was definitely faster than going up, but it was still pretty difficult. After a while your thighs start to burn and you have to sit just to rest your legs. The hillside didn´t seem as steep going down than climbing up. We were still all connected with the rope, but now I felt like I was being pulled both directions – we had just turned around so now Krista was in front of my and Diego was behind me. My cramp-ons kept falling off and Krista´s harness as well, so every once in a while we had to stop to fix them. Luckily the guides usually did it for us because it was so cold once you took off your gloves.

We finally arrived back to the refuge, where we just took off our backpacks and jackets and set them by the door to thaw out for a little bit while we ate some Oreos and Doritos. We packed up our sleeping bags and got everything ready and hiked down back to the parking lot. It was so cold that Diego´s dad´s old truck that we had borrowed didn´t start. He was looking under the hood while his brother was trying to give it some gas and turn the key. A few minutes Diego was pretty much sitting under the hood trying to heat up some tubes or something, and finally the car started, scaring him and ripping the sleeve of his jacket that got stuck in something. He hopped in the car with us, all four of us squished in there. Slowly made our way down the mountain, stopping a few times to check something out in the car, and to take off layers of clothes. We finally made it to the highway where they dropped me off to catch a bus home, and at this point it was only about 10:30 AM, but it felt like it should have been almost sunset since we had already done such a long hike that day. I finally got home at about 4 with a backpack full of wet clothes and empty water bottles, took a shower, and went to sleep. I was not as sore the next day as I expected, but just tired. Makes me feel like I could have exerted myself harder, and next time we attempt we are going to make it!

Since that Cotopaxi trip I´ve just been hanging out in Cebadas, sometimes just sitting in the office reading my book, washing my clothes by hand on sunny afternoons, but also doing some really cool work too. One workshop that was particularly successful was in the community of Puka Totoras on the topic of gender equality. This community is the farthest away, way up high in the mountains, and with very traditional, indigenous habitants. I had Dr. Silva and his secretary go with me to help me out. At first I just was thinking of asking the secretary because she is an indigenous woman with a successful job, so she´s a great example of the things we would be talking about, and she speaks Kichwa so she could help me translate sometimes because especially some of the older women don´t understand Spanish too well. We asked Dr. Silva too so that he could ask for transportation to be provided by the Ministry of Public Health, so the three of us headed out early in the morning to get there. I was especially tired because I had told them I would bring snacks and was up till 11:30 the night before making multiple batches of banana bread muffins in my one muffin tray, and then I had to leave at 5 AM just because it’s so far away. We had almost arrived, just one more big curve of the road when we found that there had been a landslide. Since we knew we were close we just left the driver there with the car, and started walking towards the center of the community, arriving about 30 minutes later and warmed up from walking in the cold and windy weather. The past president saw us walking and came and joined us for the last part of the walk, then he opened up one of the classrooms of the school because there is not a meeting house or anything else in the community. Luckily the kids are on “summer” break now, so it wasn´t an interruption. We waited for a while before people started showing up, and then finally started the workshop with almost the whole population of the community – about 9 male participants and 20 or so women. After the obligatory words of “bienvenido” and short introduction, I explained the first activity that was called Differences and Similarities of the Genders. We separated the group into men and women, Dr. Silva with the men and Anita the secretary with the women, leaving me to just roam around observing and take pictures. Each group had a poster where they had to answer 3 questions: What do I like about being a woman (or man)? What would I like about being a man (or woman)? and What should men (or women) know about being a woman (or man)? Anita and Dr. Silva wrote down what they were saying as the participants discussed the questions, and then after about 20 or 30 minutes one person from each group had to present what they had discussed. The women said they liked spinning yarn and knitting, being leaders in the community and helping with the education of their children. They would like having more freedom, more education, and the opportunity to work in the city if they were men, and they wish that the men understood all the responsibilities that the women had in the home. The men said they liked being men because they had more freedom, education and opportunities to work. If they were women they would like cooking and cleaning and washing clothes. They wish that the women understood that they are working for the benefit of the whole family. After each group presented, Dr. Silva and I each talked for a few minutes, pointing out a few key points that each group had said. He talked about the fact that the men all leave to work in the cities or even in other countries, and asked why the women don´t go as well. They responded that they have to stay there taking care of the animals and the plots of land they have for grazing (because at this high elevation nothing else really grows except for grasses). He asked the women if they got married to spend time with their husband, or to spend time with their animals. Obviously not to just stay with the animals, so he offered the idea that both the man and women could go work in a different city when they first get married to make twice the money and then come back to the land their parents have left them to buy animals and raise the children they have in the future in their own community. They seemed receptive of the idea, but the fact is that men leave and women stay, proven by the participants in attendance (9 men and 25 women). That is something that will just take time to change their perspective, if they want to of course, but the fact is that the more developed countries and areas are those where women have more power in the society. I talked after him and pointed out some similarities I saw in the two presentations, for example that men like their freedom and education, and women wish they had more freedom and education. We talked about the fact that starting with their kids, girls and boys both should be sent to study in high school and to university too if possible. I explained to the men that if there is something that I like, I´m not just going to keep it to myself, but I´m going to want to share it with others. One suggestion I made was maybe they could send the woman to do the shopping in the city for the day while they stay at home with the kids. This all started some great conversations because in this reserved culture they never really talk about things like that; they just get married when they´re pretty young, have kids, and live their lives like all the other families in the community. It was cool too because it wasn´t me saying that women should have the same rights as men to study, or these other things we talked about, but the women of the community were the ones who said those things and it was a great way for me to strengthen and explain a little more the ideas that they themselves came up with. For the second activity I had taped papers on the wall on each side of the room saying “I agree” and “I don´t agree”, and “???” in the middle. I read statements, and if they agreed or disagreed, they were supposed to move to stand on that side of the room. I got this idea from a manual Peace Corps had sent me, and it had statements on the list like “sometimes women should pay for movie tickets of dinner on a date”, but no one in this community even knows that movie theatres exist, so I changed it to things like “women cannot cut their hair” and “only men can drink alcohol”. This one didn´t go as well as the first activity; I think the men were a little offended and kind of just stood at the back of the room not really participating, and the women all just moved together, saying they all agreed or all disagreed, no one wanted to be by themselves. Overall though it went really well, giving the community an opportunity to talk about these things that affect their everyday lives but they never really talks about. A week later I went with another volunteer to talk to the newest group of trainees and we repeated these exact same activities with them, so they can see how they work and possibly repeat them in their communities after they’re been there for a while. I think if I had done this activity right away it wouldn’t have been successful, but now that they know me and feel more comfortable with me, they were able to be more honest knowing that I was someone they could trust.

Well, that’s a little update of my life here lately. I’m still loving it here, although sometimes I do miss things like washing machines, Target, milk and cereal, and of course my friends and family!

About two weeks ago Cebadas got its first police officers. There are three of them, but they usually just work alone or sometimes two on the same shift. I don’t really know how long the shifts are, but they have a little house that they are renting or something and then a little office in the same building as the market on the main plaza. They don’t have a car however, so I don’t know what they would ever do if there actually was an emergency or something that they had to respond to. Also there is not a very good dispatch system here; apparently there is just one for the whole country so its takes forever. One of the police officers gave me his cell phone number in case I ever needed to reach him, but also because he was just being kinda creepy. Luckily a few days after that I had to change my cell phone number anyways and so now he doesn’t have my number anymore. JAJA This guys is just weird too, the first time I ever saw him he came up and said he had been looking for me, and talks to me every time he sees me and always tells me he wants me to teach him English. Once I was just sitting in the plaza waiting for something to start and reading my book, when he came over and was asking me how to say all these words in English. He took my book from me and was trying to read the words that he knew, not really even seeming to realize that when people are reading it usually means they don’t want to be disturbed. He isn’t always a creeper though – sometimes he walks around town and tells people to pick up the trash in front of their stores which is something that actually needs to be done (everyone just throws trash out the bus window and just wherever they want). However, you can see that there is not much for a police officer to do here. Recently, maybe in the last 2 months or so this lawyer office also appeared on a corner in Cebadas. I have only seen it actually open twice I think, but I guess its good that its there.

This last weekend Cebadas celebrated its 150th anniversary with 3 days of fiestas. Saturday there was a fair where they judged animals and stuff and the school kids had little cultural and science displays set up. Then in the evening was the election of the Sumak Warmi – the queen of the fiestas. There were 5 contestants from the ages 18 to 24 and they had to wear casual clothes, typical traditional clothes and fancy clothes (but pretty much they were all just the same – at least the long skirts they wear called anako’s) and answer a question. That ended at 12 and after that a concert started, there were supposed to be two musical groups but I went to bed and I assume the party lasted till like 5 or so. Sunday was the finals of a soccer tournament followed by bulls in the afternoon. Again just the kind of bulls where drunk men run around out there with their red ponchos, although some of the high schoolers and young adults are pretty good at it I guess. In the evening there was a concert of Christian music and kind of like a church service on the stage, but they were just talking all in Kichwa and it was really boring for me. The religious spirit didn’t stop people from drinking though and there were a few guys laying on the ground out there Monday morning. Monday there was a parade with the bands from the school and the high school and lots of other groups of people – the teachers, the people who work at the bank, the people who work at the Subcentro (including me!) and after that was a session where all the authorities spoke, some kids recited speeches about the history of Cebadas, and then the president gave kind of a “state of the union address” kind of speech, just talking about all the big things that are going to be happening this next year – opening a center for senior citizens, working on getting a sewer treatment system, possibly a paved road out to the farthest communities, and that people don’t throw trash on the ground.

I wrote this blog entry a while ago, but it was saved on my flash drive and I lost it. It’s still an interesting topic, so I’m just gonna post it anyways.

Holy week is a bigger deal here than in the US, but in Riobamba this year it coincided with the annual independence celebration of the city, so there was stuff going on every day. I don’t actually live in Riobamba, but it is my closest city, so I made sure to attend some of the events. One of the most interesting was the bullfight. There were actually 2 nights of bullfighting, each with 3 matadors from various countries and 6 bulls which each weighed 500 kilos minimum. The matadors all had really interesting clothes – very intricate detailed jackets and capris with pink socks and a Princess Lea-esque hat. They didn’t come out till later though. When they first let the bull out, there were about 5 or 6 of the matadors helpers waving pink capes at the bull, and then running behind this protective wood thing. I think that was mostly to tire the bull out, and maybe to let these guys practice because they kind of seemed like matador apprentices. After a few minutes of this, 2 guys on horses came out with long spears. They make the bull ram the horse while the guy riding it stabs the bull in between the shoulder blades. Apparently in the past, the horse usually died too, but now they wear protective armour. This would make the bull start bleeding from his back, and you could tell he was getting weaker. Next two more helper guys came out with these long sticks covered in colorful crate paper with one pointed end. They did a little scorpion jump move and stabbed them into the bull’s back. Finally the matador came out and waved around his little cape, trying to make the bull charge him and stuff. After a while, he got out a sword which he used to stab the bull in the upper back to get right to the heart. Sometimes the bull just layed down and died, and sometimes this other guy with a smaller knife came out and stabbed the bull right in the brain and it died right away. The matador then walked around the ring with some helpers as people threw him flowers. Some people threw their hats or scarves and he threw it back to them, and some people threw flasks for him to take a drink of. During this, they brought out 2 horses hooked up to a little metal bar to pull the dead bull out of the ring. These particular horses did not want to pull the bull and some men ended up having to pull it off. One guy always grabbed the tail which was entertaining. Sometimes before they took the bull away though, a guy in a hat with a huge white feather would come out and cut the ears off. There were some judges and if they said the matador did a good job, he got to keep the ear as a trophy. One guy got to keep 2 ears he did such a good job. One of the other guys didn’t kill his bull – he stabbed it but not in the heart, I think just in the muscle because as the bull was running around the sword kind of came back out. They eventually sent the bull back where he came out of, and I don’t know what happened to him back there. Overall the whole culture surrounding the bullfighting was really interesting, and we had so many questions the whole time. For example – what do they do with the dead bull carcasses? What is the scoring system to decide if they get the ear or not? How does one train to be a matador? I guess we’ll never know. There is an upcoming election, and outlawing bullfighting is one of the ballot issues, so this might have been the last bull fight ever in Riobamba.

Another weekend that I spent out of my site was in the southern province of Loja in a town called Vilcabamba. I met some other volunteers there for a GAD meeting (Gender and Development). It is a little town that is known for its residents living over 100 years old, but now its kindof been taken over by hippies. There are also a number of retired gringos, and some Ecuadorians, but tons of Dreadlocked hippies from all over the world. It was pretty much the best place for people watching I have been ever. We had a productive meeting, but also just sat there for a few hours one afternoon talking to a random American guy we met and watching the people in the park.

Things in Cebadas are going well – pretty much done with the toothbrush project, and now I’ve been working a lot with my youth group project. We did an activity in our last meeting where they had to say if they could go to any country in the world where would they go? Some said either Peru, the US, or Spain, but mostly they said other places in Ecuador that they had never been to. It makes me want to take them on a trip so they can see Quito or somewhere else that is only actually a few hours away in car. They’re still not very talkative overall, but some really do participate. I picked who I think were the 6 most participative, and I want to send them to get more training on sex-ed and then they are going to teach the other kids, and I can help them. They seemed really excited when I explained this to them, so hopefully everything will work out. In a week or so some kids from Alausí who do that same thing are coming to Cebadas to talk to my kids about it. They are also sponsored by World Vision, where another volunteer works.

We get this e-magazine written by other PC volunteers here in Ecuador, and one of the articles in this last issue was about blogging. My compañera was commenting on the fact that we just post about big events, like how recently I have written about when I had visitors in my site, new projects I’m trying to work on, or the festivities of Carnaval. What really makes Peace Corps though is just the experience of living in a different country. So many times every day I find myself thinking “how did I get here?” because every day is so different from the day before and just so random. This blog post will be dedicated to those moments from my everyday life.

There was another concert last weekend in Cebadas for the end of Carnaval. I wanted to just see what it was like, and also it was so loud I probably wouldn’t have been able to sleep anyways, so I found Elvia, my little 10 year old buddy, and made her go with me. Her dad is a bus driver, and he had parked the bus in the plaza and we went and were sitting on top of the bus. Down in the plaza everyone wanted to dance with me, mostly the old drunk men, so I enjoyed it a lot more sitting on the bus. Elvia left me to go do something, and didn’t come back for a long time so I was just sitting up there by myself. I think some people noticed me and probably thought I was crazy for sitting on top of a bus by myself watching a concert. It got kind of cold so I went and walked around for a little and stood with my host mom before going to bed. I wish I had more friends here that could have gone to the concert with me; with Cebadas being so small pretty much everyone knows who I am, but we’re not really “friends.” Most people my age already have multiple children, or else they don’t live in Cebadas anymore, so I haven’t met people I could just call over to hang out, or go watch a concert with.

Bus rides. Something I had to get used to here. Since I was 16 I’ve had my own car and I remember going to get my license with my mom on my 16th birthday. Here that is completely different. In my little town of Cebadas, I would guess that maybe 15 families have personal cars, and most are trucks that the neighbors borrow all the time. They don’t really need cars though because there are busses that go almost anywhere at almost every hour of the day. Between Cebadas and Riobamba there are busses from 5:30 AM to 8:30 PM and it only costs $1 for the one hour trip. I have kind of lost my tendency for motion sickness taking that bus trip maybe once or twice a week, and every once in a while the 4 hour trip to the terminal in the south end of Quito. Bus rides are always an interesting experience…once I got on the bus and all the seats were full, or people had their backpacks saving seats for friends or family. This little old lady asked me if I was going to Cebadas, and when I said yes she scooted over and let me share her seat with her while we chatted on the way home. She still had her shopping bag on the seat too and so I just had a half a seat squished right up to my new friend. It was so hot with so many people on the bus and no one likes to open windows, so I took off my sweatshirt and was still really hot. As we got closer to Cebadas, people had gotten off so there were more empty seats, so I went and sat in a different seat and opened the window all the way to stick my head out for a minute. As I was sitting there enjoying the wind in my face, someone from behind me reached over my seat and shut my window. Not cool. Another time on the 6:30 PM bus going to Cebadas (which is always really busy) I got there right as it was leaving so of course I didn’t get a seat. I was standing up towards the front behind some bare footed old ladies who were sitting on the floor, leaning over them because there were so many people I couldn’t even move my feet from where they were wedged between other people’s feet and I couldn’t stand up straight.

The other day I was walking back to my house with these two high school sisters I have befriended and their mom and aunt. They were going to a funeral and I was just going home for the afternoon, but when we got to the funeral which was actually at my next door neighbor’s house I told them bye, but they made me come with them. It wasn’t actually the funeral service, but the part where the family of the person who died has to give everyone food. We were sitting on the roof of my neighbor’s house with probably about 100 other people (not kidding) and they came and served us potato soup, rice with veggies, and finally came around later giving out juice to everyone in the same 5 cups so you had to drink fast and then give the cup back. This was about 2:30 in the afternoon, and I had just recently eaten lunch, but it is rude to refuse food here, and especially at a funeral, so I ate as much as I could. I sat there with Rosa and Celia, the high schoolers, and their mom and two other women from Cebadas that I have seen around and I say hi to all the time, but haven’t actually had a conversation with. When I first arrived one of them said “the gringa came?” in Kichwa, but I understood that so then it was kinda awkward. We started talking and they asked me all the usual questions like how did you come here, how long are you staying, how old are you, are you married, what if you marry an Ecuadorian will you still go back in two years, what are your parents names, what are their jobs, how old are they, how many siblings do you have…the same conversation I have with every new person I meet pretty much. Then they were speaking to each other in Kichwa about my hair and asked me if it was natural and said how pretty it is. I said that if they would go to the US people would say the same thing about them, it’s just because I’m so different looking. They asked if I put some cream or something on my skin to make it white, and I explained that I was born like this, but I do have to put on sunscreen multiple times a day so the sun doesn’t burn me. They had never seen sunscreen in their lives, even though you can buy it at any pharmacy in Riobamba.

The last few weeks the little group of kids who come to cook with me has expanded to include some new members. The other day there were 9 kids there from 8 to 18 years old and we made pretzels. It was fun because each person could make their own in the shape of letters or stars or hearts or whatever. We have one big cookie sheet in the kitchen, but it was missing, so we baked the pretzels on the lids of some big pots we have. They kind of stuck, but after scraping them off I thought they were pretty good, just missing rock salt and cheese sauce. I have become more resourceful here, probably rubbing off from the Ecuadorians. They just don’t have lots of things, but they can do pretty much anything with the stuff they do have.

I was sitting on the corner waiting for the bus, because even though I have been here 7 months now I still haven’t figured out the schedule. It was later in the afternoon and the gate to the school was locked but I noticed some sheep inside. It’s not so uncommon for people to take their animals to public places to graze so I wasn’t even surprised to see them; not until I sat there for a minute did I realize that was kinda weird. Across the street there was a turkey shut inside the gate of the kindergarten. I had never seen that before, only a few people have turkeys.

Now to write about some more big events… on March 21, we celebrated the Andean New Year and Pawkar Raymi. The Department of Intercultural Health organized it all, inviting lots of people, school kids, and the general public. It was in a place called Tulabug, a hill that is considered a sacred place for the Andean culture, that is about 45 minutes away from Cebadas. They hired a bus to bring people from Cebadas, and I was in charge of finding people to fill it. They wanted to invite all the high school kids, so I gave invitations to the directors of the 6 high schools in the area and told them they could each send 4 students and 1 teacher. That way there would still be space to bring 8 midwives. Well as things happen in Ecuador, the director of only 3 schools got back to me, and I was only able to find 4 midwives. Monday morning we were waiting for the bus at 7:45 AM because it was supposed to leave at 8 for the event that was supposed to start at 8:30. Only students from 2 schools were there, and one midwife. Rachel and Ambrocio, the high schooler doing an internship at the Subcentro also were there hanging out. The bus wasn’t there anyways, so we just sat there doing absolutely nothing. Called the driver a few times and he said he would be there soon. Finally about 9:30 the bus shows up and we are on our way. My host dad also came in the bus with us because he is part of the band that was going to play. He directed the bus driver there because he didn’t even know where we were going, and we ended up out on some country roads, otherwise we would have gone to Riobamba and back up. The last few days it has been raining in the afternoons, and we had a little bad luck on one of the dirt roads and got stuck in the mud. Some random women who had gotten on the bus went to the neighbor’s house and asked to borrow a hoe. Everyone had gotten out of the bus and some people were helping throw dirt in the mud to dry it up, along with branches and rocks. Somebody threw a big rock in a puddle and splashed everyone with mud. One of the high school girls took charge along with my host dad telling the poor driver what to do, and eventually we got out. We slipped and slided our way the rest of the way there, with another small detour to push another car out of the ditch. I think next year the organizers should make sure the roads are in better conditions before sending thousands of people up a big hill in large busses and old trucks. We finally got there around 11, and just our luck – the event was just starting! Perfect timing! There were a few music groups playing, but of course the doctor booked his group to play for the majority of the time. The officials spoke a little, welcoming everyone to the event. Later my buddy Espiritu, the shaman, started the ritual thanking the sun and the moon, making everyone repeat after him some Kichwa words that I didn’t really understand, then he makes everyone face each of the 4 directions with their hands raised while he talks in Kichwa and sometimes Spanish. After the ritual, there was more music and a few dance groups doing traditional dancing. There was typical food for everyone to eat, and afterwards there was a lunch as well. We didn’t end up going to the lunch because it started to rain and with the road conditions we wanted to get out before they got worse. We arrived back to Cebadas around 3 after an interesting and exciting day.

Right after getting back I got on the 4 o’clock bus back to Riobamba to pick up the first shipment of toothbrushes. Some students from Cornell got here on Sunday and brought about half of the donations. I decided I am giving 700 to the health promoter who works at World Vision Cebadas. She recently bought 1000 toothbrushes and toothpastes, but there are about 1700 school kids so I told her I could give her the rest. I haven’t decided what to do with the others; I will probably donate some to MedLife and also to the dentist who works in the Subcentro. Thanks again everyone for your help with this, and finally it’s getting started, so look for pictures soon!

I am sitting here in my room on a rainy afternoon with pink and black powder in my hair and wet clothes on the floor, curled up under the covers. I just ate like 5 pieces of delicious Ecuadorian chocolate; I may have developed an addiction. I am burning some coffee-scented incense that I picked up at a store in Riobamba that sells the most flavors of incense I have ever seen in my life.

Well now that you have a mental picture of my life at this moment, you may be asking why do I have pink and black powder in my hair? Carnaval has arrived here in Ecuador. Since last Monday kids have been throwing water balloons at each other, and sometimes at me, and on Friday the real dirty stuff started when people bought aerosol cans of spray foam and little bags of colorful powder. The foam works great to spray really far, but at $2 a can it’s pretty expensive and doesn’t last long (but yet people still buy it instead of giving fruit and veggies to their kids…). The powder works best when the person’s face is already wet and then you go throw it right in their face. I have been doing my fair share of participating as well in the carnaval activities. Thursday I went to the house of my host cousins who live a little more out in the country on the main highway. That is the big market day in the nearby town of Guamote, so in the afternoon there were lots of pick-up trucks coming back with tons of people sitting in the back, so we just sat and waited for them and then threw buckets of water at them as they passed by. We also ended up throwing water on each other, so then we laid down in the middle of the highway to warm up from the asphalt. Luckily it has been sunny this week, so it’s not that bad when you get wet and it actually kind of feels good. Friday there was a program in the plaza and groups of kids from all the schools in the area sang typical carnaval songs. Some boys dressed up like girls, and they all had on their best clothes even though they knew they were going to get dirty. I was just standing there with Rachel (another PCV) watching the performances when some kids started throwing water balloons at us, and from that moment on it was war. Rachel and I each bought a can of spray foam, but then in a few minutes we were left defenseless so we bought a bag of powder and some water balloons. We sat with some neighbor kids filling up some water balloons, and then a group of high school boys came walking around the corner – they were our enemies. I walked closer to them to throw our balloons, but then they stole the whole bag of balloons from me and threw them all at me instead. Rachel and I went up to her roof which overlooks one of the main streets in Cebadas and threw buckets of water on people walking past down below so we got them back, kindof. Later Friday afternoon I went back to the community where my host cousins and the grandparents live and watched them kill a pig. They stabbed it right in the heart because that is how it dies fastest. They laid it on some logs and used small branches to burn off the hair and toast it up a little bit, then washed it off and peeled off the skin to eat which they love (they always give me the biggest piece, but I don’t really like it as much as they do). Then we cut it down the middle to remove the organs, and hung up the pig on a rope from the roof of the house. I was helping the two aunts clean out the intestines, while an uncle and the grandpa were cutting off the fat to be melted down. Other family members were helping with other jobs preparing the food while the kids were running around spraying each other with foam. Later I helped make sausage, stuffing the intestines with a rice and cabbage mixture. Finally we ate some fried fat with corn, and a soup with the sausage, and meat from the heart, lungs, and liver and the extra intestines we didn’t use for sausage. We all split some big pieces of grilled meat which was the best part for me. The soup was actually probably one of the grossest things I have eaten here so far, but they served me first and we were sitting in the kitchen with about 15 people (and there’s only probably 10 bowls and spoons) so I had to eat it all because they were pretty much all just watching me. Pretty much all day all the adults were just speaking in Kichwa so I just sat there quietly not participating in the conversation, but it was still really nice that they shared their family tradition with me. I also really like hanging out with the kids, especially these twin girls who are 5 – they always comment on how white my skin is and tell me that my hair looks like doll’s hair. Saturday I went to Riobamba to meet up with my counterpart Dr. Silva who now works in the city, and we randomly were in a parade which he knew about before but didn’t tell me. There was a group of a few midwives, a truck decorated with medicinal plants and balloons that had speakers playing an announcement they had recorded about preventing maternal death, and then the employees from one of the health centers dressed in traditional outfits dancing. I was just wearing my regular clothes and was originally in charge of the camcorder. It was kind of pointless to record the whole parade because it was just the same thing over and over for a few miles, and because it started to get real messy when random people would just throw water or spray foam at me. Everyone always seems to want to get the gringa more than everyone else. But this time I was prepared with my own can of spray and would get everyone who sprayed me first. We also handed out some flyers encouraging people to give birth in the hospital, or at least to have a car ready to go and an emergency plan. Saturday night there was supposed to be stuff going on in Cebadas, but I was walking around about 9:30 and didn’t really see anything, but I think there was a beauty pageant that started later, but you had to pay to get in so I wasn’t really planning on going anyways. Sunday was the biggest day in Cebadas for carnaval activities. First starting around 10 there was a parade, with a band and different groups of people, mostly students, each doing a different typical dance behind a truck with speakers. I ate lunch with one of the nurses in the Subcentro, and hung out there for a little bit, but there weren’t many patients. I went walking around the plaza a little to say hi to people and came back to the Subcentro soaking wet and covered in foam and powder, then it started to rain and was really cold. I went to change my clothes and by then it had stopped raining and we went to watch “the bulls”. There was this little stadium made of wooden planks and tons of people sitting wherever they could find room, including on top of the busses parked nearby. A fair amount of men from the community were waiting inside the bull ring for when they let them out and they acted like matadors with their red wool ponchos. Most are young men, some in high school, but they’re pretty agile and its actually kind of fun to watch them. Some are drunk, and that number increases as the hours go on, but surprisingly not too many people get hurt. I have heard of people dying, but only one guy that I saw got seriously injured from the bull. There were a lot more injuries when 2 sets of the wooden bleachers collapsed with people on top of them and standing below too. An old man broke his arm and I splinted it because the doctor was just gonna leave it, and we called the ambulance for him. After that happened, people started leaving because I think they were afraid of standing on the bleachers. A while after the bulls were over everyone met up again in the plaza to wait for the musical performers who were coming. By this time there were a lot of drunk people, mostly middle aged and older men, and they just had a great time dancing to the music they were just playing on the speakers before the artists came out. I ended up dancing with my host dad’s brothers and the cousins and everybody – I was the only girl in our little group, but I had fun. This one cousin was opening beer bottles with his teeth which I thought was pretty impressive, then he poured it into cups to share with everyone. I left at 11 to go shower to get all the powder out of my hair, and went to bed, but at that point only one of the groups had sung so I think it went on at least till 2 in the morning.

As far as work goes, lately I’ve been just being a nurse pretty much, helping look for patient files, weighing and measuring kids, taking blood pressures – but the other day I talked to the doctor and now he understands that that’s not what I’m here to do. There is also a high school kid that just started an internship at the Subcentro so he does pretty much the same thing I do, but I can leave whenever I want to do other things and he has to stay as long as the doctor does till about 3 in the afternoon. So for my other activities, we had the second meeting of the youth group I’m helping run with World Vision – it was a workshop on leadership skills. They hired this man whose a lawyer to give the workshop, and I think it was kind of ineffective because he just talked to them pretty much, and when he did put them in smaller groups they hardly talked at all. Next time we’re going to do public speaking activities, and I hope that they will let me actually run it, with the help of the World Vision staff. I want to do some improv acting type of activities, and I will save them money because I’ll do it for free. I also am still trying to get organized all the stuff for the medicinal plants project. My counterpart has kind of taken over which is good, but at the same time not because it leaves me with nothing to do. Hopefully within the next month or so we will get all the plants to the community leaders or midwives and do some sort of workshop on the uses, and then it will my job to go around to all the communities seeing if they are actually using the plants or not. I have also been coordinating with other volunteer organizations, and for a week in February I went to another little community in Chimborazo with a group called Builders Beyond Borders. They are a group of high school students from Connecticut who were building some toilets and some other small construction projects around the school and community meeting room. I helped translate and did some of the construction work too, and spent lots of time just helping organize meals and helping figuring out other details too. There was another volunteer organization called New Horizons based out of Quito that provided the building materials (so BBB just had to provide the labor and their food and lodging). There was another American volunteer with New Horizons helping out that was actually from Colorado too so we helped each other stay sane that week that we were treated like slaves. It wasn’t actually that bad though and was interesting to get to see how other NGO’s work in the communities. Maybe I inspired some of the kids to join the Peace Corps someday, although they were talking about what food they missed the most and I had to remind them they had been here 6 days and I have been here 8 months, so I don’t know if most of them could make it. At least they got a glimpse of how people live in other countries. One of the things they were most surprised about was the lack of meat in the diet – they were always asking for more, and also the lack of showering, but when its cold out and you don’t have a hot shower you’re not gonna shower. Planning on meeting up with more Americans when the first group of MedLife volunteers comes at the end of March. The director came to Cebadas to meet with the director of the Subcentro to try to coordinate, and he kind of made it difficult for them, but we are going to bring vaccines to add to the services MedLife will offer. They have more volunteer groups coming from May to September during summer vacation for the college students, so hopefully in April they will meet again to plan better for the other brigades.

Although sometimes I feel like I am not really making an impact here and usually don’t have enough work to keep me busy, I really love it here and the whole situation really. I doubt there will be another period in my life when I can just do whatever I want pretty much every day, living in a beautiful mountain town with a really relaxed culture. I have been reading lots of books, watching movies I buy at stores in Riobamba for $1, and listening to some of the 17000 songs I have accumulated from other volunteers. I love having a (semi)real job during the week, and being able to be a tourist when I want to in a beautiful diverse country. I love it when little kids call me by my name even though I don’t recognize them at all, just because my town is so small that everyone knows who the gringa is. Although I wish I had more friends my age (there aren’t many here because they leave to go to college or get jobs), I love talking to little kids and old ladies who I walk past every day to go to work. When I had my birthday here last month it was weird to think about the fact that I’ll have another birthday here, but I have made it this far so I can’t see myself going home early – why would I want to get back to a stressful environment where I would also have nothing to do?

I just came in from watching a parade from my roof – January 22 must be a holiday here but my family doesn’t really know what it is. Ecuadorians will find any excuse to have a parade though. I spent most of the evening patching up holes in my clothes. I heard another volunteer say once that Peace Corps is where clothes come to die, and I totally agree. My clothes are already worn out from wearing them so many times and washing them on a cement slab. Today I also went to a minga with my host sister. This is any time when the community needs to get something done so the leaders make all the members contribute. Some examples would be all the families of the kids at the school have to come on a Saturday and paint a few desks, or more like the one I went to today which was a construction project. In Cebadas they are building a new coliseum, apparently for musicians and maybe soccer games or bull fights; I’m not exactly sure. Anyways, they are doing it with a huge minga. Each family is assigned 3 Saturdays where they have to send at least one member of the family to help out, and if they don’t they are fined so it’s a pretty big deal and lots of people show up. It kind of reminded me of working at Habitat for Humanity because there were a few people who knew what they were doing, but other than that there were just lots of other people doing random jobs. However, the process and tools used were very different than what I have used for construction in the US. The building is brick and cement, and today we were laying the cement on a stair or seat of the bleachers I guess. First we put up some wood planks and leveled and secured them, then filled in the area with big rocks on the bottom and smaller rocks on top. We then carried 50 KG bags of cement and mixed it with sand, gravel and water with shovels and hoes. It was carried by wheelbarrow on top of the rocks on planks of wood, then we threw more rocks in it and put one more layer of cement on top that was smoothed out. It is going to take forever to finish the building at this pace with that technique, but it will never fall down filled with all those rocks. I definitely think I will be sore tomorrow from carrying rocks and mixing cement all day, but it was cool to see how the construction process and the mingas work, and they got to see that not all Americans are lazy – they actually said we were good workers and Ecuadorians were lazy. Its easier for us though with cement trucks and power tools.

Since I last wrote on my blog I have had some visitors come see me – my sister Shannon and my best friend Sarah got here on Christmas day to spend 3 weeks in Ecuador. I spent Christmas traveling to Quito to meet them at the airport, but my family didn’t really even do much here, and my host sister went with me because she had only been to Quito when she was really little. We stayed in Cebadas for a few days over New Years which was an interesting celebration. They make this big paper mache kind of dolls and burn them and the men dress up like women. There was a contest for the best doll and the best woman costume (although there was only 1) and the president of the community asked me to be a judge. We also spent a few days in the Subcentro where Shannon and Sarah were pretty disgusted with the lack of cleanliness and privacy. It made me realize that I’ve just gotten used to that now, which is maybe not a good thing, but they also gave me some good ideas on how we can improve. I wanted them to go to the communities with us and we were supposed to, but then stuff just came up like it always does and we didn’t ever get to go. Another day in my site we went to another little town outside of Riobamba that has some hot springs; it was actually New Year ’s Day so there were lots of people there and it was pretty gross. You could rent a swimming suit for 1 dollar and there was one lady who had hers on backwards and it was really awkward. We also had to check out the market in Guamote on Thursday. The time we spent outside of my site, we went to Cajas National Park near Cuenca but up in the mountains. It was pretty cold and rainy but we got to do a cool hike and then we spent the night in the refugio in our sleeping bags. Shannon and I went to Tena for a weekend while Sarah went back to Quito to visit people she used to work with. Tena is in the oriente/Amazon area, so it was pretty hot and humid there. There are some really pretty rivers in that area, but actually last April the whole town pretty much flooded. We went to a little zoo thing that was being repaired because it was ruined in the flood and some of the big snakes and crocodiles were swept away in the water! From there Shannon went with me to a Peace Corps conference that I had to go to (I will write about that later) but I’m glad she got to meet the other volunteers and see kind of what Peace Corps is actually like. We went to the equator (the real one and the fake tourist one) and took a quick trip to go visit my host family from training then spent one day in Quito before they left to go home.

After my vacation time with my visitors it was time to get back to work, which has been as interesting and random as always. In the beginning of January I went to a conference called “Project Design and Management” with my counterpart Dr. Silva. We finally sat down and talked and worked on planning a project on medicinal gardens of native plants. However, last week he got a promotion after 14 years in the Subcentro and is now the Provincial Director of Intercultural Health and will no longer be working in Cebadas on a day to day basis. I think this is a good thing because I think he will love his new job and he will be a great resource if I still do the medicinal plant project, it will just be more difficult without him being there every day. I still feel obligated to work in the Subcentro though, but lately they have all been busy with a new nation-wide project going door to door looking for pregnant women and children under one. In order to achieve zero malnutrition, they are going to pay the women a certain amount for each time they come in for a checkup. I am not totally supportive of this idea, because it leaves me in the Subcentro with one nurse having to tell everyone that there´s no doctor here who can help them. Also they aren´t even finding all the pregnant ladies because they leave to go to work or whatever and aren´t always in their houses, then they come to the Subcentro asking about it saying no one visited their house. It is important that they come in and take advantage of the free medical care, but I think they should do it because they understand why it is important not because someone is paying them, and also there should be doctors available to see the patients that they say have to come in. Last week I went to visit another volunteer near me about an hour and a half away in Alausí who is working with World Vision in her town. There is also an office in Cebadas, and so the Health Promoter who works there and I chose 5 teenagers to come with us and we went to a workshop the youth group in Alausí because we want to start something like that in Cebadas. The idea is that the kids come down from the communities (and these are the kids who study only on the weekends) for a workshop about some topic of sexual and reproductive health and then they have to go back to their community and repeat the workshop for all the other teenagers. The original group receives training on sex-ed topics obviously and also self esteem activities and tips on how to be a facilitator. In Cebadas we want to start this with the teenagers who don’t go to school at all because there are quite a few who just don’t continue after elementary school, and I think they are the ones who need this information the most because they just end up getting married and having kids. I hopefully will start working more with World Vision in Cebadas once we get this group set up. I have also been working on the toothbrush project still, but its been difficult figuring out how to get them down here, and now we might have to go through the embassy or something.

I have now been here for 5 months and 4 days in my site, which sometimes seems like a long time, but I am still enjoying pretty much every day of this experience. Working with a huge national organization has become increasingly frustrating, but it would also be difficult working with no community connections so I’m doing the best that I can. Overall though this experience has made me realize that I don´t know what I´m doing and neither do the people who are in charge, so I’ve been looking into grad programs in public health, and especially ones that have Peace Corps fellowship scholarship programs.

Also new pictures on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2456613&id=19227721&l=6cf6897deb

Tis the season for company Christmas parties and other holiday traditions, and here in Cebadas that is one thing that is the same…and yet so different. Dec 15 we went to a community about an hour and a half outside of Cebadas with all the staff of the Subcentro and the shaman to do a ritual called Kapak Raymi (raymi means fiesta but I still don’t know what Kapak means). I am still not positive, but I think it has something to do with the winter solstice maybe; I think it is supposed to bring harmony. Anyways, I didn’t really understand the meaning behind it obviously, but it was pretty cool. There were about 5 local people from the community as well – the others were watching the bulls that they had for Christmas I guess (meaning drunk people trying to fight bulls, not like professional matadors) and probably no one from the subcentro told them we were coming anyways. There was a blanket set in the middle of everyone standing in a circle with fruits and medicinal plants and musical instruments and other stuff on it, and each person put an object on there as well – I put my cell phone to get blessed. Each person was given a stick of incense, and there was also a little bowl of burning wood setting next to the blanket. The shaman went through the whole process of recognizing each of the four directions, so we had to do that too and repeat what he was saying – in Kichwa. Then each person took a handful of sawdust or something and walked around the blanket putting it on the fire when they returned. Then we all walked in a circle around the blanket together while one woman, a midwife, handed out the fruit to everyone to eat. It was cool to get to see that, and the doctor actually gave everyone a DVD copy of what we filmed on that day for a little Christmas present. I’m not sure what the patients thought who came to the Subcentro that day just to find that it was closed because everyone was at the ritual, but honestly the people are kind of lazy and just unorganized and also really busy with lots of activities the public health ministry makes them do, so the people are kind of used to the Subcentro being closed. It was also cool to get to see the community where we did it because it is the farthest one and is where the trail starts to climb one of the nearby volcanoes, Sangay, however its about a 7 day hike to get there. There are some cool little cabins where tourists can stay before or after climbing, or just to spend a weekend or whatever. The only problem is that there’s not really regular transportation for normal people to just go there, and the road isn’t in the best of condition so if you don’t have a truck or if it rains hard no one would be able to get there.

Dec 16 we had a little get together in Riobamba at one of the nurses houses to eat a Christmas dinner with the staff. They bought a turkey that we ate with a prune sauce and there was rice and potatoes and salad, and I made sugar cookies and gingerbread with cream cheese frosting to bring for dessert. Everyone had to do a little toast and then we ate and sat around talking. The food was different, but it was kind of like a Christmas dinner in the US. I ended up spending the night at the nurses house because they said they were going to do it at like 2 in the afternoon and didn’t end up meeting until about 6 and the last bus leaves at 8 – I didn’t have anything with me, but I’ve kind of gotten used to just sleeping wherever even when I’m not prepared for it.

Dec 17 was the Christmas program at the hospital for all the Ministry of Public Health employees – about 118 were invited but not everyone showed up. I went in the same clothes I wore the day before since I had spent the night, and they were all dressed up, but they think I’m weird usually anyways just because I’m a gringa so they probably don’t expect me to wear nice clothes. This party was very different than a normal company Christmas party in the US. It took place at the hospital on a Friday, they just put a sign up that said they would only attend emergencies and everyone came in to the little auditorium/meeting room. This year the farmacy and dentistry personel were in charge of planning everything. It started at 9 with a mass – a pastor came in from a church I guess. It was only like the 3rd mass I’ve ever been to in my life, and the first one in Spanish! After that there was a parade with a group of doctors and nurses dressed in traditional clothes dancing around in the streets followed by people dressed like Mary and Joseph carrying a little doll and then all the rest of the employees walking all around town. Then we came back into the auditorium to eat mote (hominy-ish corn stuff) with potatoes and pork at about 11:30. Then they did a toast few door prizes and then started dancing. The dancing lasted for about 20 minutes, then they took a break to do more door prizes and hand out more drinks (whiskey mixed with sparkling water). This cycle of dancing and drinking and gift continued all afternoon. Everyone got a little bag of candy and animal crackers, and then they just kept dancing. Around 2:30 we ate again – rice with potatoes, chicken, beef, salad, pop, and blackberry mousse for dessert. Then more drinking and dancing…we left at 4, but we were supposed to stay till 4:30 because that is the normal work hours and the party just replaced a normal work day. I’m guessing it went until after 4:30 though because everyone seemed to be having a good time, and at this point they were pretty tipsy with a few drunk people falling down while they were dancing crazily.

I’m glad everyone here has been sharing their Christmas traditions with me, because without winter weather and seeing friends and family and having a break or finals it doesn’t really seem like Christmas. Some people have put up lights and in Riobamba there’s sales and stuff in the stores and they are all decorated, but it still just doesn’t seem right. I still don’t know what my plans are for Christmas Eve and Christmas – maybe do a white elephant with some other volunteers or see if my host family is doing anything (but I asked and they said they don’t really do anything special). Christmas day I have to go to the airport to get Shannon and Sarah, and everyone has told me that tons of people travel on Christmas so I should leave early because all the busses will be full. I’m excited to see them though, and for them to see where I live, and everyone here is excited to meet them too!

Today I was supposed to go to this community with the nutritionist from World Vision to help give a nutrition workshop, but then we just ended up talking about the fact that they aren't gonna work there because the government is already doing a nutrition program there. I feel like this is the story of my life in Ecuador for so many reasons.

First - we were planning on leaving at 9 to get there, but the nutritionist went and to go to talk to the doctor really quick, but he just wanted to talk for ever (instead of attending to his patients) so then we were late getting to the community. However, once we got there we just ended up waiting for like an hour and a half until we talked to the people. I know everything here runs on "Ecuadorian time", but a lot of times it feels like everyone is always so busy and in such a hurry just to sit around and wait. Another example of this is when you are getting on or off the bus, lots of times they don't even stop all the way for people to get on or off, but then the bus is always running late anyways.

Second - so many times people plan meetings or other activities, then just completely forget about it and make other plans. When we got there the parents were all in another meeting planning the activities for Christmas and almost left right when we got there to do the nutrition thing even though we told them a long time ago we were coming today. This has happened so many other times too, which was frustrating but now I've kind of gotten used to it. It just doesn't make sense how everyone says they want to work on this or that project, but then when we actually are gonna do it they don't show up.

Third - there were 3 organizations that were going to work in this same community all pretty much on the same topic, but they weren't coordinating at all and didn't realize until today that there are other communities where no one is working. Between the large number of programs run by the basically socialist government, and all the NGO's and other organizations here, you'd think there would be more progress than there has been, but with the lack of coordination it's just not gonna happen.

A while ago I remember someone asked me "why are the people there so poor?" I thought about it, and I couldn't really come up with an answer. However, now after situations like the one that happened today and after learning more about how things work here I think there are lots of different reasons why there is so much poverty here. First (and most basically), there are not many jobs that pay well (hence why so many people go to the cities or emigrate to other countries leaving their families behind) and also the land isn't as good as it used to be so they can't even depend on agriculture. Also though, I think all the bureaucracy in the different ministries of the government is a factor because they all have good objectives of helping the lower class, but there are just too many and they don't coordinate with each other like they should. Again with the NGO's and stuff too, the people have gotten used to having stuff given to them and a lot of times they don't even seem to care about improving their own quality of life because they think other people should do it for them. When they show up late to meetings or don't show up at all, that doesn't show me that they are actually interested in whatever type of assistance they were going to receive. I also think the poverty has a lot to do with the lack of education. You can set up as many meetings as you want to give out information on nutrition or whatever, but when the parents can't read and didn't go to school and can't really even understand new concepts like that, its hard to teach them new things. I think the people realize that, but they still don't put much importance on their own education. (For example - classes at the high school were cancelled today so the band could rehearse for the parade we are going to do for World AIDS Day later this week. It's important for them to practice, but I don't know why they can't do it after school so everyone doesn't have to miss out on classes. There have also been so many times where the teachers just don't show up so classes are cancelled, but usually no one seems to do anything about it.)

I've kind of just now gotten a hold of the reality here that as much as I want to change something, if the people don't want to change it they are not going to. I haven't lost motivation and I still hope to do something in these two years that means something to the people here, but it's not going to be as easy as I thought. Not that I was expecting it to be easy - otherwise it would have already happened and I wouldn't be here at all. I'm just starting to realize that there are so many people involved in development work, but the most important people are the ones "being developed" and how important it is that it all starts with them - but often they don't even know how to start which brings us back to where we started. Such a difficult cycle to break.

In happier news, it's been a rainy afternoon here today so I have just been sitting in my room in my new bean bag chair watching movies and drinking hot cocoa. It's been a good day overall.

Quick note about the toothbrush stuff - we are going to have to go through customs with official forms and stuff, so I have set the date of Dec 31 to be the last day of collection because then we have to fill out a form with exactly how much stuff is being donated. If you would like to participate, again let me know by email at kknthomp@gmail.com and you can send anything in the mail to my parents: Scott and Karen Thompson, PO Box 4294, Estes Park, CO 80517. Make sure it´s not UPS because they won´t deliver to PO Boxes.

Last week we had a Peace Corps conference called Reconnect in the town of Cumbaya – how typical to meet with a bunch of hippies in Cumbaya right? Everyone had to do a presentation of the results of the surveys we all did. It was supposed to be practice for when we present it to our organizations, which I did on Tuesday when I came back. Anyways, we had the conference in a convent so we were kind of all trapped in there, but I thought it was actually pretty fun because we played some games in the evenings and it was raining all week so I didn’t really want to leave anyways – I would just have spent money unnecessarily. On Friday afternoon after the conference finished a bunch of volunteers went to see the new Harry Potter movie in Quito. We spent the night there and with 6 other volunteers I went on a little weekend trip to Mindo. The trip didn’t start off well because I got robbed on the bus on the way there. Someone cut my bag open and took all the money out of my wallet. It was the first incident that I ever had, and at least they didn’t take my phone or camera or any important documents. The rest of the trip was really fun though. Mindo is pretty much halfway to the coast, so it was hotter there and more green and humid. There are lots of touristy things, like zip lines, hiking to waterfalls, rafting, stuff like that. We just spent about one full day there before going back to our sites. I got back to Cebadas on Monday afternoon, then Tuesday got back to work. I helped with a demonstration on first aid for the 5th and 6th graders in a school in one of the communities – we did triage with the example that there was a bus accident. If there were injuries we treated them with stuff like pieces of cardboard and scarves because honestly a lot of emergency medicine is just learning how to use the equipment but if you can improvise you can do a lot. Tuesday afternoon I presented my Diagnostico Comunitario to the Subcentro staff – I made a pesto chicken casserole too. After eating I started the slide show but I said I wanted it to be more like a conversation and there was a lot of good dialogue that came out of it. We decided to prioritize nutrition as my main project – but I don’t really know where to start. They want to focus on teenagers because then they get pregnant and without good nutrition they will have malnourished kids with congenital problems. First I think we need to find the baseline data because in reality no one has correct data on the prevalence of malnutrition. I guess I will first start working on that and then hopefully we will think of some way to start the classes or whatever. I still feel like I haven’t really found my niche in the Subcentro or in the community in general but I think presenting my survey results helped me get started. I still want to coordinate with other organizations as well, including Rotary, World Vision, and the local government so that will fill up my time when I don’t have nutrition stuff to do. Also on Tuesday afternoon a woman gave birth in the traditional birthing room in the Subcentro! I got there just right after it happened, which sucked cuz I have never seen a live birth before. The couple and the grandma were there, and they decided just to spend the night in the Subcentro. Since everyone else lives in Riobamba they asked if I could help out, so I stayed there hanging out with them till like 8:30 then came back early in the morning just to make sure everything was ok. Wednesday I finally got to move into my new room! Right now I just have a bed and a table and everything else is on the floor, so this weekend and next week I’ll have to do some shopping for other furniture and stuff. It is weird to think that I will live in this room for more time than I ever lived in the same place during college – stuff like that makes it seem like time is going slowly, but other days it seems to pass by so fast. Today is Thanksgiving so I’m going to spend the night in Riobamba and have a potluck dinner with the other volunteers. That’s all for now!

Recently I had an idea that would greatly benefit the Subcentro where I work, but it requires the help of all of my friends at home as well. We have one dentist who works in the Subcentro, because of the poor dental hygiene most of her work consists of pulling teeth with a few fillings in between more pulling teeth – pretty much no preventative cleanings or checkups. She always tells people to brush their teeth 3 times a day in the hopes that they will at least do it once a day, but there’s also the fact that some of the people really are so poor that they can’t afford toothpaste. I went to a dentist at home right before coming here and was talking to her about my upcoming plans, and she said if I came back for a visit to come in and she could donate some toothbrushes and toothpaste. Thinking of that gave me the idea to donate toothbrushes and toothpaste to the dentist in the Subcentro to give to all the patients who come in just like in the US, and possibly in the schools too if I can find enough. My request of all of you is to talk to your personal dentist and ask for any donation that they can possibly give for the people of my community. My sister Shannon is coming to visit at the end of December and has agreed to bring down any donations, but my hope is that there are too many that you have to send them to me in the mail! I know it’s kind of short notice with less than 2 months to look for donations, but if each person goes to just one dentist it won’t be too time consuming.

If you are interested in helping me with this little project, email me at kknthomp@gmail.com and I can answer any questions and help arrange to get the donations down here. Please pass this simple idea on to any friends who might also be willing to participate. Hopefully soon I will be able to post pictures of smiling kids with their new toothbrushes, and share statistics of decreased dental problems!

This weekend I went to Cuenca for a Halloween volunteer reunion. Cuenca is the 3rd biggest city in Ecuador, and the city with the most Americans/foreigners in general living there – it’s a big retirement spot. It was really surreal that I was still in Ecuador because it could have been Europe or something, its just so different from my site and even from Riobamba. There are 2 malls with movie theatres, cafés that serve real coffee, hookah bars, and pretty much everything you would find in the US except maybe Starbucks or Taco Bell. It was fun to see all the other volunteers again and do something American.

Monday I went to my host-aunt’s house to make bread to celebrate Dia de los Difuntos – I’m not actually even sure what the translation is for Difuntos, but it is the day when they go visit the graves of dead family members and stuff, like Dia de los Muertos in Mexico. That is actually on Tuesday, but on Monday all the family got together to make bread in the shape of babies, and we also made empanadas filled with cheese, rolls, croissants, and I made some cinnamon rolls. We made a ton of dough in a big trough kind of thing, and then just made bread in lots of shapes until there was no more. We also ate guinea pig, grilled chicken, and potatoes, and drank colada morada which is a drink made of blackberries and pineapple and other fruits with cinnamon and cloves. It is kind of like Ecuadorian Thanksgiving because the whole family got together, the kids were playing outside while the adults were cooking, I sat for a while talking to my grandpa, and then we all ate together. Kind of makes me a little homesick, but I’m excited for Shannon and Sarah to come visit me on Christmas so I can look forward to that.

I thought I would now tell a story of my bus ride back from Cuenca, which to me is not that abnormal, but it is probably a good way to describe my everyday life here. I got on the bus and sat down in a seat by the window just waiting for it to leave, and then a man sat in front of me and leaned his seat all the way back so it was touching my knees and shut the little curtain on the window. I kind of pushed it forward but he didn’t do anything, so I moved seats. I’m guessing the person who ended up sitting behind him said something to him but I didn’t want to have to deal with it. (This is a cultural thing I have noticed that people are just kind of rude sometimes, but here its just considered normal) So we started on our trip up the Panamerican Highway which is currently under construction so we had to stop quite a few times to wait for traffic to be let through from the other direction on the one-lane road. The times we were moving were quite bumpy and I was sitting in the second to last row because people had made me move from my other seats, so it was not the smoothest ride. Then this guy who was also a passenger got up in the front of the bus to talk to us all. This is not uncommon for people to sell things like fruit, drinks, ice cream, potato chips, and stuff like that, and there’s also people who come on to beg, and others who are pretty much begging but they are selling cookies or candy. First they make a little speech, thanking the bus driver for letting them on and thanking the passengers for their attention, then they will give every person a candy or whatever, and talk some more saying for just “50 centavitos” you can keep the cookies then go around and collect the money or the product that the people don’t want. So anyways on this particular bus ride I thought this guy was gonna do that, but he actually started explaining how he was an art student in a university and then he started asking questions about what he had said and gave out prizes to people who participated. Turns out he was selling these gemstone necklaces that he and his art classmates had made, which was the most interesting thing I had ever seen sold on a bus. Of course I had to buy one, and it was only $1 anyways. So then I was just sitting listening to my music and being really bored, when the bus stopped and turned off. I thought it was because of the construction again, but then the driver came running back to the back of the bus, and opened up a little thing in the floor that allowed access to the engine or whatever. He did some stuff with some wrenches and we were sitting for a while with the fumes of gasoline coming up into the bus, but eventually he closed it up and we were on our bumpy way again. We went over speed bumps so fast that we all bounced out of our seats. There was a woman sitting next to me with her baby, not really crying but just making loud baby noises. There were also people leaning on the side of my seat because they had to stand in the aisle since there were no more seats left – some of them were going to be travelling about 10 hours total and just had to wait until other people got off and there were seats available. About 4 hours into the ride, they started playing some movie with Sylvester Stallone – the menu and stuff were written in Russian but then they put on the Spanish translation, but I couldn’t really understand it because the bus speakers kept going out, but also because they just record the translation and its not always matched up to the picture or of very good quality. I just tried to sleep some more, then finally arrived in Riobamba where I went to a store to buy a drink and break a $20, but they had to run over to the gas station next door to get me change (another typical thing in Ecuador is that no one ever has change, so sometimes even $5 bills are pretty much worthless). I took a taxi for about 15 minutes to get to where the bus for my site leaves, and then got on another bus for an hour to get home. That 6 hour ride was the longest I have done by myself. Some other volunteers have to travel 15 hours in bus to get to their sites, which is hard to believe because it’s the size of Colorado and there’s no way it would take that long to drive across half the state. So there’s a story of my everyday life in Ecuador…might be boring but maybe it will be interesting.

Last Thursday there was a big protest/attempted assasination/nobody knows exactly what happened in Quito. Here´s what I can gather from my understanding of technical words in Spanish that they´ve been talking about on the news.

The police are angry because I think the President cut their pay but not the pay of the Army. They attacked him, and were attacking people on the streets and just causing lots of problems. A bullet flew like 50 cm from the President´s head. They gassed him and he almost passed out, so they took him to the hospital, but he was taken to the hospital of the police – he was kind of held hostage there, but they claim that he wasn´t, but he was in custody of the police doctors. About 9 at night the Army went in and escorted him out while under fire and one soldier died during the process (4 other people died earlier in the day). They took the President back to the Palace where there were a gajillion people waiting and cheering, and he gave a speech about that he has helped the police more than any other government in the past, and that they are being hypocrites but attacking people when they are supposed to be providing security. Now they´re saying in the news that the previous president was behind this. In Cebadas, school was cancelled the day after on Friday, but other than that nothing was really different, seeing as we don´t have police here anyways. I went to Riobamba for an afternoon to do some shopping and everything seemed normal there too, however I think that the day it all happened there were some small protests in Riobamba too.

My schedule continues to fill up – next week we have the inauguration of the kitchen/nutritional education room, and we´re celebrating global handwashing day and global nutrition day on October 15. Later in October there is another meeting with the midwives, and I´m trying to get all 28 of them to come because I´ve only met about 12. The day after that meeting we´re doing a workshop on organic compost for some women who are interested in it, and then November 6 I´m doing a nutrition workshop for 12 women who work in daycare centers in the communities, and November 8 or 9 I´m doing a little 2-hour sex-ed talk to some high schoolers in another community! Then pretty soon after that I have to go to Quito on Nov 14 for Reconnect, a conference with Peace Corps and all the other volunteers and their counterparts to talk about how the first 3 months have gone and our plans for the rest of the time. Hopefully this will help my counterpart understand better what is the Peace Corps and what I´m capable of doing because sometimes he still mentions things like making this juice called chicha and selling it in the US, or writing a letter to Colorado and asking them for and ambulance. I´m glad he has all these ideas, I just want him to be more focused, and hopefully Peace Corps can help me explain it to him during the conference.

On TV lately there have been two beauty pageants, The Worldwide Queen of Bananas (with participants from North, South and Central America, and Germany) and the Queen of Guayaquil. People are actually interested in watching them, but I don’t know why. I watched part of one for a little bit and it consisted of the women walking on stage in their bathing suits, the announcer announcing their measurements and hair/eye color, and then they announced the winner. Not very profound, but its entertaining to the locals. Another reason why I’m excited to move into my own little apartment so I can get a TV and watch the news.

Sunday for the adolescent pregnancy prevention thing, not many adolescents actually showed up but lots of adults were actually interested in the birth control methods too. We had some keychains that everyone wanted, so I made them demonstrate how to use a condom in order to win one. They are interested in the pills and injections and stuff as well, but HIV is an increasing issue nationwide, and although there have not been any cases in my town, it’s still important to educate them about it. The majority of new cases of HIV being detected are in housewives who have most likely never even heard of HIV before. The government provides anti-retroviral treatment for free, and there is a group of 16 volunteers that are working just with HIV to promote testing and treatment and break stereotypes of people living with HIV (people think you can get it by mosquitoes or if someone coughs on you). In my community I just want them to know first what it is and how to prevent it. I’ll teach more in depth about it in the high school, but every chance I get I try to briefly explain it to people, especially the women who have husbands working in other cities which is pretty common here.

I hung out with some teenagers on the street this afternoon and ate some chicken organs that they were cooking. They always have weird questions about the US that I wouldn’t even think of, but because of things they’ve seen in movies or on TV they think that’s what it is like. For example, they asked what is a tornado and why does it occur, or why do I only have one sister. A few people have asked me about the Twin Towers too or if everyone is really tall in the US.

So I did about 8 surveys last Sunday, and maybe 4 or so on Monday, then probably over 50 on Tuesday! There were a ton of people in town to receive food donations from a government program so I took advantage of that and set up next to the table where they had to register and people were begging me to fill out the survey. I got a lot of people from other communities which is good because my goal is to get at least 5 or so from each community if I can. I don’t think I’ll be able to work in all 28 communities, but I’m trying to find out where people don’t have any sort of toilet or latrine so I can help them with some ecological dry toilets (which are really cool and I want to build one in my house when I go back to the US) and where there are women’s groups working so I can give them training on birth control methods. There are some that are already really well established and doing community bank projects, so hopefully I can work with them a little and then just talk about that to women from other communities to encourage them to do the same thing. I think the birth control “charlas” will be really important too because its not uncommon for families to have 8 kids and make $100 per month, and the women don’t use birth control just because they don’t even know what it is. It’s all free in the subcentro, so hopefully if I just talk to them about it they’ll take advantage of it. I’m finding from my surveys too that everyone is interested in home gardens, so I’m planning on doing something with the agriculture volunteer who is already in my site. Now I just have to go through my surveys an make a spreadsheet or something to analyze them, so that should be lots of fun hours sitting at the computer.

Sunday is the Worlwide Day of Prevention of Undesired Adolescent Pregnancies – I bet you didn’t even know that existed did you? I made some little posters and hand outs to give out and next week I am starting to teach at the high school. I will be doing sex-ed stuff, but I want to start out with self esteem stuff and then later talk about STDs and general anatomy and stuff, but I invited all the high school kids on Sunday and am making some of them do a homework assignment of 2 things they learned and 2 questions they have. Hopefully the teaching stuff will go well; I’ll have 2 classes of 14-15 year olds, about 30 minutes with each class every week.

That’s all for now, I’ll write more after classes start!

I never know what to write on here, so here’s just some random stuff:

• I have fleas in my bed that I can’t get rid of. I haven’t tried very hard I guess – I put some powder in my covers, and I should put them out in the sun and the mattress too, I just don’t want to in case it rains. The bites are really itchy.

• I met my great grandma who is 95 and takes care of her daughter who has rheumatoid arthritis. I also met my great uncle who is a guide on Chimborazo – now I have a goal to climb it before I leave.

• I haven’t really done any projects yet, obviously since I pretty much just got here, but I feel like just being here stuff has kind of happened. For example I met a youth group and then I told the doctors about it, and they set up a meeting with them so now they’re gonna do something together and I didn’t really have to do anything. We have had 2 meetings now with the midwives since I’ve been here, and I don’t think they really met that often before. I did say I wanted to meet the midwives, but I didn’t have to do much work for either of the meetings. It kind of seems like in some ways my presence here makes everyone more motivated. Also I mentioned I wanted to have cooking classes and I needed to clean out the kitchen, and one day when I wasn’t there they cleaned it out for me! Today when I got to the subcentro they were writing a letter to the president of Ecuador asking for an ambulance. They don’t think small!

• I have made pizza 4 times in the last 3 weeks; everyone wants to learn how to make it. Next week I have planned two other cooking dates with some other people. But it never turns out just right, of course they don’t know the difference though. I don’t how I’m going to do these cooking classes because I want to teach nutrition along with it and make things with ingredients they can actually find here. SOOO many people are interested in these classes and I don’t know how I’ll buy the ingredients or if I’ll charge a small fee for people to come to cover my costs.

• “No sea malito” is a phrase they use a lot here. Literally it means don’t be a little bad person. For example if you ask someone to do a favor for you you always say that after you ask them.

• Another interesting cultural aspect is that if you are eating food and someone else comes over, you pretty much have to share with them. The other day I was walking by my neighbor who was eating an orange, I just asked how she was doing today and she gave me some segments of her orange.

• I went to the market today and spent $2.65. I got some fresh oregano, some nabo (a local cabbage), 2 heads of broccoli, a bunch of beets, a bag of melloco (a small root veggie), and a bag of habas (kind of like really big beans). What a deal! Also you can get like 30 oranges for a dollar.

I finally started my surveys today, and I got lots of mixed responses. Some people said they couldn’t help me because they were busy even though they were just standing there. A few were very interested, one woman in particular talked with me for like an hour while I sat with her in her booth at the market helping her husk peas (is that what you do to peas?). She is part of a group of women who just started meeting 3 weeks ago and are working on a gardening project. She is going to talk to the president and see if we can maybe do some projects together – they already have the gardening stuff down but maybe I can teach them about birth control options or talk about pap smears and stuff because lots of people just don’t know. There was one woman who I asked if she had a few minutes to help me with this survey, and I kind of briefly explained why I was doing it which is just kind of awkward, but she said no she wouldn’t help because she went to the doctor once for a checkup for her son and they told her he was malnourished but didn’t give her any vitamins for him. There is a program here where they give out this baby food mix that has lots of vitamins and stuff, but because she didn’t get pills she didn’t like the services in the subcentro. I asked if she had received some tips on nutrition so she didn’t need to give them vitamins they could just get it from the food they eat, but she said no. Everyone has a little nutritional guide on the immunization record so I know she has heard something about it if she has taken her kids to get them vaccinated, she just has this idea that without pills you can’t fix anything. Some other people I met asked if there was a plant or something that could work to “not have more kids” because they don’t want to take any pills or get injections, so it’s just interesting different people’s perspectives on health.

NEW PICS ON FACEBOOK : http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2398407&id=19227721&l=44ea1a5527

This weekend I finally got to see the shaman practice – for some reason he wasn’t working the last 2 weeks. His first name is Espiritu. First, I observed a cleaning with eggs. These are just normal eggs that the patient actually has to buy, and I’m not sure yet why they use eggs, but the shaman takes them in his hands and just rubs them all over the patient and sometimes he blows on them. After a few minutes he drinks some special water with medicinal plants and spits it on the eggs and stores them to burn later – however on one adult patient he spit the water actually on the lady, but the other cleanings were on kids. Someone had requested a cuy cleaning and actually brought their own guinea pig, but that never happened because while the yachag was examining it he found some fleas so if it’s not healthy he can’t do it. He gave everyone prescriptions too of plants they should put in water to take a bath or to drink, with very specific instructions like “bathe in this on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons for 2 weeks.” Apparently some of the plants are really hard to find too – and I thought it would be cool to plant a garden somewhere near the clinic, but some of the plants only grow at really high elevations or in a certain ecosystem called the páramo which is kind of a high elevation wetland I think. I also watched a midwife perform a manteo, which is done when the baby is in a weird position and they try to move it back to normal. In this case, the baby was upside down with its arm ready to head out first. The pregnant woman was laying on the ground and first the midwife rubbed oil and bengay stuff on her stomach. Then she put a cloth under the pregnant woman and lifted her up shaking her all around to try to reposition the baby. At one point the mother of the pregnant woman was holding her legs up while the midwife was shaking her around – the whole thing just looked really painful, even if you weren’t pregnant. That’s another shocking thing about pregnancies here is that almost all of them give birth at home with no anesthetics or anything! Maybe some of the medicinal plants they use have anesthetic properties…I think it would be really cool to analyze the plants to find the active compound, and compare it to the drugs we use – I bet they’re pretty similar, and a lot cheaper just to grow yourself!

Things have picked up lately, well I guess they never were slow to start with really. However these next few days are gonna be pretty busy. Friday I went to a meeting in the local government office about the baby that was abandoned under the tree. Saturday I went to a youth group meeting with some high school students who work in the area of rights of youth to prevent child labor and child abuse. They have some little skits they do and are in the process of recording some radio programs. Saturday evening I’m going to a goodbye party for my dad’s brother who lives and works in Spain and came back to visit for about a month. (I would say the majority of the people here have a family member living in Spain or the US and working because they couldn’t make enough money here) Sunday there will be a lot of people in the subcentro, and I think I’m gonna give a presentation about Colorado a ne what is the Peace Corps. Monday I don’t think I’m doing anything important so far, but Tuesday will be the big meeting with the midwives. I’m going to do my presentation again and give them a survey for my community assessment that I have to do. It will more likely be an interview because apparently a lot of them can’t read or write. Wednesday I’m going to the high school with the obstetrician to see when we can give health classes; we want to do it once a week. Then the next Saturday is a get together with everyone from our “cluster” which is all the other peace corps volunteers who live near Riobamba.

Now instead of feeling overwhelmed with so much projects to do in so little time, I feel kind of useless now. I have been learning more about the projects the nurses and doctors at the clinic are already doing, or planning on doing, and besides these I don’t know what else I can do and I don’t know why I’m here if they already have all these plans. I know they are really understaffed, so maybe I can go out to the communities and do the projects that we plan together while they stay in the clinic, but this won’t be sustainable after I leave. They told us in training that right away when you start thinking of a new project you should start thinking about your exit strategy. Also I’ve been finding out about these other groups, for example the youth group and other NGO’s and government organizations too that work with children and stuff, but yet there is still so much poverty and health issues in the communities. For now I’ll just keep going to the clinic every day to get to know more about what they do on a regular basis and what kind of people come in to see the doctors. School starts next week and I think then everyone will have a more set schedule and I’m hoping I will too – I want to start a youth group and teach in the schools maybe a few times a week. I also need to work on my community assessment, however they have already done that too. There was a comprehensive one done last year by a doctor who used to work there; it’s a Word document that’s 79 pages. I also got a copy of the thesis that the obstetrician did this year for her master’s on undesired pregnancies, and one of the nurses is currently working on her thesis on prevention of maternal death. These projects all make my diagnostic seem silly, but I’m still going to do it so I can get out in the communities and personally talk to people, but it’s a good thing I’ll have all these other resources to fill in gaps in my research.

NOTICE – MAY BE A LITTLE GRAPHIC On Wednesday I went to my other grandparents house whom I hadn’t met yet – the parents of my host mom. They live in a community about a 10 minute bus ride and a 20 minute walk away. They only have running water from a faucet outside and they only cook with firewood like the other grandparents too. They were still out working when my sister and I arrived so we went to check on the animals first, then went to the house and harvested some potatoes for dinner. We peeled them, then caught some guinea pigs (cuyes) from their pen – she thought 3 should be enough for the 6 people who were going to eat dinner. I held a bag open while she threw them in, then we took them into the kitchen to kill them. She just snapped their necks and later cut their eyes out with a knife then I held them upside down over a bowl to collect the blood because her grandma likes to eat it. Then she would take them and dunk them in boiling water so we could peel the fur off. I helped with this too, but I wasn’t as fast as her. Pretty soon our parents arrived and the mom helped us butcher them to remove the organs, but she kept them too to put in the soup. We also put noodles, onions and salt in the soup with the potatoes and the cuy. It was an interesting experience!

Some interesting observations of Ecuadorian life:

• They play indoor here, not fútbol. This is like indoor soccer except on cement covered with sand and dust. Some people only wear converse-like shoes and no one wears shin guards. The game may be delayed for a number of reasons, including a truck driving through the middle of the field, or a dog or an elderly couple walking right through the middle of the game.

• I made pizza for my family with home-made sauce and they loved it! (So did I!) The next day we ate spaghetti with the extra sauce, but my sister put ketchup on it also, and my brother ate it with lime juice. We all ate with spoons because we don’t even have any forks in the house. The oven had never been used for anything but storage before I used it, so I guess there is no need for forks if you just eat soup for every meal.

• Monday we drove for about an hour and a half one way to go to a community to do some pap smears, but when we got there there were no women there. They hadn’t called and said they were coming, but apparently that was because there is no cell phone signal there. They told me to play with the kids for a while and give them a charla while they looked for some women, so I talked to them a little bit, but then we just ended up running in circles and they loved it. Overall, it was a pretty big waste of time, but this community was in a different province so it was in the transitional zone between the sierra and the oriente – almost rainforest area – so it was cool to see a new ecosystem I guess, and be warmer for a little bit, and I saw lots of pretty waterfalls.

• My brother thinks that if you take a shower every day you will get cancer and your hair will fall out. (they have lots of weird explanations for why people get sick here so I wasn’t really surprised when he said this.) I told him that my parents shower every day, and he asked how old they were. He said that they don´t have cancer because showering every day is only good for old people.

I should carry my laptop all the time to write about the weird things that I see every day because now I can’t really even think of other interesting observations even though I know I see them all the time. Maybe these things are just becoming normal to me. I am really starting to enjoy myself lately; when I walk around I always see people that I know, or at least recognize, and I am never bored, which was one of my biggest concerns moving out to the campo. I have really bonded with my siblings too, we always have fun together and joke around, and my dad has started making fun of me sometimes when I try to speak Kichwa or something so that makes me feel at home like it was my uncles making fun of me!

My work stuff is picking up too – the other day I wrote a formal business letter to the president of the midwives asking for her to set a date for a meeting where I can introduce myself and meet all of them. I also met some teenagers who have a group mainly working with children’s rights to fight against child abuse and neglect and prevent things such as teenage pregnancy and child labor and I am going to their meeting on Saturday. I’m bringing banana bread which I have already made like 3 times for various people. Everyone wants me to teach them how to cook American food, and I actually just found out today there is a oven/stove in the clinic so I might start doing cooking classes on Sunday afternoons when everyone comes down from the communities.

On a sadder note, this morning someone informed us at the clinic that last night someone gave birth to a baby and left it under a tree with the placenta still attached. The baby was still alive and was taken to the hospital, but we went with the doctor to see and the placenta was just sitting there and we don´t know who the mother was so tomorrow we´ll probably try to do some investigation.

That’s all for now! Love you all!

Sorry I haven’t written on here in a while; actually as I sit at my laptop in my room I can’t remember the last post I wrote. Training ended up well – I was glad it was over so I didn’t have to listen to Power Point presentations every day, but also nervous to move all alone to my site and not have anyone to speak English to, and all the other responsibilities of course. During training I was sooo excited to just get to my site and start working and stuff, but now I’m here (and granted it’s only been 3 and a half days as I write this) and I feel overwhelmed. Malnutrition is a huge problem, but me just giving “charlas” to the mothers in the communities probably won’t help this. They grow all this nutritious food like quinoa, corn, lots of other veggies native to this area, but then they sell them to get money to buy rice, potatoes, and noodles. The clinic actually does cooking classes as well, I’m hoping to attend one on Monday, so I don’t know how I can make an impact in this area. Maternal health is also a huge issue, mostly related to the nutrition aspect as well, but also due to the fact that many of the mothers are very young and now no longer attending school. There’s a ton of other problems that I feel like I should try to address with my projects, but I just feel really overwhelmed and I don’t even know where to start. Peace Corps has given us an “assignment” to do a community diagnostic analysis using surveys to get a better grasp on the current situation in the community, so this should help me decide what I actually want to do for the rest of the time that I’m here. However, this is also challenging for me because I don’t know how I want to define my community exactly. I live in the main little town of this area and there are 28 smaller villages surrounding it. If I can I would love to give the surveys in all of the communities because that is where the poverty is stronger than here in the central town, but I don’t know if that is too ambitious. Peace Corps recommends having local coworkers or other community members to help with this, but everyone who works in the clinic is already very busy and they won’t have time to go to all the communities with me.

Enough with my preoccupations, now I’ll just write some about my first few days in my site. I arrived in the afternoon with my 2 huge suitcases which was actually easier than I had anticipated, but after a long bus ride which included me sitting in the front seat puking, I just wanted to sleep. I ate dinner with my family later, and went to bed. Friday, I went to the clinic in the morning just to observe to daily functions. The doctor who is in charge, and who is my counterpart, doesn’t work on Fridays, but there was one nurse and one doctor. Usually there is also a dentist, but she wasn’t there that day. Earlier in the morning, before 12 or so, was when most of the patients came in. Many people came to have rotten teeth pulled, but we had to turn them away and tell them to come back in a week, the next day the dentist will be in the office. A lot of the other patients were little babies brought in by their mothers, some with colds or diarrhea. There were some women who came to get birth control pills, a few people with sore throats, a man with an infected burn from a motorcycle exhaust, and a man who had stitches on his foot from some injury last week and I got to help take them out! After a while, things slowed down and I had more time to just sit and talk to the nurse and doctor since there were no patients. I went home for lunch that my sister had cooked for us. I watched a movie with my brother in the afternoon, and in the evening sat in the cabinas with my sister – this is our families business, they sell cell phones and minutes, and have some phone booths. I actually cooked dinner for the family because I was hungry and everyone was gone except for my sister who had to stay in the cabinas, but this was a kind of difficult because there was no running water all day, and actually now it’s still not working. Cooking could have gone better, my family here doesn’t eat as many veggies as my family in Paquiestancia, so there wasn’t much in the kitchen for me to work with. Also, I’ve gotten kind of used to having the garden outside if we need some herbs or any veggies really, but I made do with what I had and they said they liked it. This morning I unpacked my bags finally – I’m living in a bedroom of the house because my little apartment isn’t done yet and might not be for about a month, so I just rearranged the stuff in my bags and put them under my bed. Because of the construction on my room there has been no running water to our house since Friday afternoon.

Sunday I went to the subcentro again; Sunday is the market day here and there are tons of people from all around the communities, so they open the clinic to let the people come in while they’re already in town. There is supposed to be a shaman on Sundays too, but he wasn’t there this week. There were a ton of patients that came in, and the only people working were the doctor, the obstetrician, a nurse who spent all day giving vaccines to kids, and another nurse who is also the pharmacist. That left me to check in patients, meaning I had to search for their clinical history in the semi-unorganized office, then weigh and measure them and take blood pressures. I didn’t expect to be given so many responsibilities on the first day I was helping out, but it was interesting to get to see who all came in. I didn’t really introduce myself to anyone – no one really asked where I was from or anything and I didn’t want to just start talking about myself while they were telling me their problems, but hopefully next week I’ll personally meet some more people here.

One more thing quickly, Sunday also there were a ton of men playing volleyball out in the plaza. Here pretty much only men play, but girls will play just with their friends or siblings or whatever, but on Sunday everyone is watching the men playing. They play 3 vs 3, and the net is probably 2 feet higher than it is in the US. They were really serious about it, I’m not exactly sure how it works but I saw money being exchanged after the matches. Its been pretty cold here the last few days, but they were still out there, some without shirts on even!

I put up new pictures on Facebook too:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2384509&id=19227721&l=a303982b64

We just got back Saturday from a week long tech trip. I was in a group with 11 other volunteers and 3 Peace Corps volunteers. were gone for a week, staying in hotels in the cities of Latacunga, Ambato, and Riobamba. During the day we would go out to visit sites of other volunteers to see what projects they’re working on.

I feel like this is a really boring summary, so I’m just gonna tell a funny story instead.

We were in a bus station looking for the bathrooms and went up to a man and asked where the bathrooms. He told us to take a taxi up to a different bus stop so we were really confused. Then we realized there is a touristy town with some hot springs called Baños and he thought we were looking for the bus that goes there. Its annoying that everyone just thinks we’re tourists here, when really we’ve already been here a few months and we know when they’re ripping us off.

For my last week here I am going to make mexican food one night and also lasagna another night. I can’t believe this is already the last week of training, and I’m excited to move to my site, but also obviously kind of scared to be there working all by myself pretty much.

My life here feels normal to me now, and I will be leaving in about 2 weeks to go to my site, but if you have ideas of something I should write about just let me know! I am willing to answer any questions, and we can make it an interactive blog!

Here´s a little summary of my site after my visit for 4 days!

The people speak Kichwa and Spanish, I know the older generation prefers to speak Kichwa and I probably speak better Spanish then they do. The kids don’t learn it in schools, just in their homes. I learned a few words last week – Imanalla = Hola, como estas – and had plenty of offers from people to teach me Kichwa if I teach them English. The people here I can tell are more conservative, the personalities match the general indigenous “stereotype.” For example, when I ask my parents a question, my dad always answers even if it was directed to my mom. That’s ok with me though because my mom is really hard for me to understand most of the time when she is speaking. My grandma is interesting I guess – I don’t think my family really told anyone that I was going to be coming before I just showed up so everytime my grandma sees me she says “What a miracle” (this is the same one who doesn’t speak Spanish very well). Then she and my mother will talk about me for a while in Kichwa, I only realize because every once in a while there will be a spanish word thrown in like “Estados unidos” or “dos años”. I do know she cares about me already though because the other day I cut my finger while husking corn so she chewed up some clover leaves, ripped a piece off of her sweater, and made me a little bandage, telling me that it will heal really fast now. My sister is 17 and is about to start attending the university in Riobamba to study nutrition and public health, so when she comes home from school on the weekends hopefully she can help me with some projects. I have a little brother that is 12 and then my dad. Even just during the last week I had lots of conversations with my dad about the importance of sustainable projects, and I know he’s going to be a great resource.

I will be working in/with the Subcentro de Salud in Cebadas most of the time. The doctor has been working there for about 15 years and has tons of ideas on how to improve the community. He is also in a music group with my padre and is very interested in the local indigenous culture. Some of his ideas are pretty “out there” like having a cultural fair and inviting all my friends from Colorado to generate income for the community. I don’t think this is really sustainable, but when I return I’m gonna talk to him more about things that I would like to do.

Our subcentro is really cool because it’s the only one in the country with a practicing shaman as well. Sundays are the market days so the town is packed and apparently there’s also a health fair or else there’s just lots of people coming to the doctor too. This is also the day the shaman is there, and after seeing the nurse to tell her the main problem, get weighed, get blood pressure taken etc, the patients can choose if they want to see the shaman or the doctor. I didn’t get to see the shaman at all, but the doctor told me I should plan on being there every Sunday because they will always need more help since its so busy. We also have a dentist who pretty much pulls teeth from every patient who comes in – the bad quality of the water causes dental problems, along with the lack of general oral hygiene. There is one doctor and one nurse who travel to the communities Monday through Thursday to do home visits or just set up somewhere in the community. I know the other doctor travels some too to the communities, we went one day while I was there to a nursery to give out vitamin A and weigh all the kids.

The county of Cebadas is the 3rd poorest in the country, but there are already lots of other organizations there working, including World Vision, some other organization for development, PLAN Internacional, and there’s a group of indigenous organizations, but I’m not sure what they do. When I go back I just want to learn more about what they’re all already doing, if they work together at all, etc.

Finally on Friday we found out where we will spend the next 2 years. I will be living in Cebadas, in the province of Chimborazo. It is in the sierra, in fact Chimborazo is the tallest mountain in Ecuador at over 20,000 feet. The elevation of my town is about 9200 and the average temperature is between 45 and 60 degrees F. (I converted this for you all but I’m gonna have to start thinking in meters and celcius!) My counterpart is the doctor who works in the clinic in Cebadas, Dr. Geovanny Silvas. I will staying with a family, but I don’t know much about them except that they have at least 1 daughter because I talked to her on the phone when I called to remind them I’m coming. On Tuesday we will leave to visit our sites for about a week before coming back to the Cayambe area to finish training.

When the doctor wrote a proposal to the Peace Corps, he had to list some possible projects ideas, here is what he asked for:

1. Health promotion

2. Prevention of maternal death

3. Strengthening traditional medicine

4. Projects with medicinal plants in indigenous communities

5. Medicinal gardens

6. Create brochures about signs of danger for pregnancy, tuberculosis, hygiene practices and family planning

7. Promote cultural events (festivals of folkloric dancing, artisan fairs)

8. Work with a group of traditional midwives to strengthen maternal and infant health

9. Work with students to build a trail, promote ecological protection in Sangay National Park

The last one doesn’t really have to do with health obviously, but I think it will be pretty cool! I have about a 6-7 hour bus ride total to get to Riobamba, the nearest city, and the doctor will pick me up there and take me to my house. It says that I have my own little apartment with a bedroom and bathroom. I’ll write more and post pictures when I come back on Saturday!

Also this weekend, I went on a little hike to some waterfalls nearby and it was probably the coolest thing I have done so far in Ecuador. The trail was so steep and slippery and muddy that we were using roots and trees to pull ourselves up basically. We only saw 2 waterfalls, but we heard from various people that there were 7 or 10 or 12, no one really knows I guess, so we just kept going and eventually got to the top of this ridge where we walked a little ways down the path. One friend was waiting for us down at the bottom so we couldn’t take the trail on the ridge home since we had to go back and get her, so we had to go down the steep muddy trail too. We thought it would pretty much be impossible, but it was so much fun! I was facing backwards most of the time, just swinging from vine to vine like George of the Jungle style. I was really sweaty and muddy when we finally finished, but it was so fun!

I wrote a blog post a while ago, but my flash drive broke so I couldn’t post it. Now I have a new one, I’ll just highlight a few events since last time I posted on my blog. I have more pictures to post as well, but I haven´t found an internet cafe that is fast enough and has Flash, so I´ll get to it soon enough!

- I have now washed my clothes twice on a rock. I haven’t washed any jeans and I only wash half of my other clothes at a time because if it rains I never know how many days it will take for them to dry. They are a little stretched out since there’s no dryer, but they actually feel really clean.

- I made pizza from scratch for my family, with one of their favorite toppings – hot dogs. These are even nastier than regular hot dogs because they are bright pink and don’t look like meat at all, but they liked it. I also made peanut butter cookies and PB and J sandwiches. I am planning on making hamburgers with sweet potato fries sometime this week or next week.

- We are still in fiesta season – I went to a “bull fight” in Tabacundo (really just whoever is brave enough and has a red jacket or something jumps in the ring and yells at the bull to chase them). Then afterwards there was a parade of dancing and singing down the street – there’s a few people with big water bottles of unidentified liquor walking around sharing shots with everyone, and somehow I became that lady which was better because I was giving it out and not drinking as much myself and I got to meet a lot of local people.

- Last Friday we went on a cultural trip with about 20 other volunteers, my group went to Salinas de Ibarra. It is a community of 90% afroecuatorianos who are descendents from slaves brought by the Spanish. In the past their main source of income was salt mining from the salty dirt, but now they grow sugar cane and are trying to promote tourism. We rode back to a city to catch a bus in the back of a truck and got stopped by the police once, but we saw some condors flying and it was way better than a crowded bus ride!

- This Friday we had a soccer tournament between all the different language groups. There was also a beauty contest so each group had to have a queen. Luckily, another girl in my group wanted to do it so I didn’t have to, but the whole day was pretty fun because everyone went all out. We had uniforms made – our group had the design of Argentina with a condor printed on the front and Paquiestancia. It only cost $11 for the whole uniform including printing on the shirt, and shorts and socks!

- Tonight my family was making fun of me for being tall and calling me an Amazon woman. Its weird being tall here, I am just about the same height as my dad.

- We find out our sites this Friday and next week we have a site visit! Time feels like its moving so fast!

I feel like my English is getting worse as my Spanish is improving, so I apologize for grammar errors but its hard to switch my brain back and forth so often!

We are now done with the first official week of CBT (community based training). We’ve had sessions on Safety and Security and Health which were surprising – they make it seem like you WILL get robbed and you WILL get amoebas, both of which are very likely, but hopefully with our training we will know what to look out for and how to avoid certain dangerous situations. We also had a little more language and technical training, but the first week I think moves a little slower than the others; they finally gave us a schedule for training and told us about the tests and interviews that we had to pass in order to officially become a volunteer. It was a little overwhelming, but I’m sure that if we just take it one day at a time we will get everything done. We have some homework to do a community analysis and then present it to the other groups next week in a creative way so tomorrow we have to talk to the president of the community and interview people on the streets to find out more information about the town and get their opinion on certain topics.

The other day my little sister Rubi got kicked in the face by a horse. She was riding her bike and it scared the horse. She apparently lost consciousness and her brother who got kicked in the shoulder brought her back to the house. She had a popsicle thing on it to keep down swelling, but then the mom put some herb on it that is supposed to help with swelling, so we’ll see what it looks like tomorrow. I am really interested in the traditional medicine and apparently the current minister of health is trying to promote collaboration of traditional and western medicine so it is possible that my placement could be in this area.

Yesterday I helped my mom and sisters make “humitas” which are basically tamales. We took the corn off the cob and ground it ourselves so everything was from scratch. We cooked them over a fire because my mom thinks its faster, and she also wanted to warm up the cuyes (guinea pigs) so we put a fire in the little room where they live. I gave them some chocolate chips as a gift because they are really expensive here ($10/bag) so we made some sweet ones and put the chocolate chips in them. The salty ones had cheese ad onion.

Today we went to Cayame like we do every Sunday, but this weekend there are fiestas in Cayambe so I got to see part of a parade. They are for Dia de San Pedro and to celebrate the end of the harvest so its kind of a combination of catholic and indigenous beliefs. People dress up in traditional clothing, do traditional dances, and I’m not really sure what else. It all lasts for a while; I think it started on Thursday and then on Tuesday people from the communities surrounding Cayambe will dance/walk down into town, then on either Thursday or Friday the party is here in Paquiestancia and apparently there will be a castle built out of fireworks that will be lit. I’m excited to take pictures of that!

I put some pictures up on my Facebook page, you can go to http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2369300&id=19227721&l=556e35d7f4 to see them!

I just spent my first weekend with my host family. Here is a long summary of their lives and mine for the last few days. The mother stays at home while the father is working in construction building houses, mostly in Cayambe. He also built their house. They have 4 kids – Marta 16, Angel 14, Flor 12, and Ruby 7. I have a separate entrance to my room – it has a cement floor and they put a chair, dresser, table and bed in here for me. They put 5 blankets on my bed which is good because its actually pretty cold, especially at night. I didn’t have a pillow though, maybe they just don’t use them here really, so I’m using my sleeping bag for a pillow. I am about the 14th volunteer that has stayed in their house; there is one each February to April, then June to August of each year and they had the first one 7 years ago. The community has about 1000 people, and they are mostly all farmers. My family has some land up on the hill about a 15 minute walk away where they keep their 7 cows. At 4:30 every morning they go milk them, and then again in the afternoon they walk up with their 2 dogs to move them to a different field for the night. They get 40 liters of milk each day that they sell. Besides these animals they have a cat and 2 kittens, chickens, 2 pigs, a horse (that is kept in the forest near the cows not in the yard) and I think that’s it. In the yard they grow sooo many fruits and vegetables that I can’t even list them all – I know they have “tomato of tree,” uvillas, 2 types of quinoa, blackberries, corn, cabbage, green onion, and lots of herbs including anise, chamomile, oregano… They also have a little store in the upper level of their house. They sell candy, pop, other snacks and stuff as well as rice, flour and other grains in bulk. There is a doorbell on the door to the store and when it rings – at any hour – one of the kids usually runs up the stairs outside to go sell something. Last night apparently someone rang at about 1 AM wanting to buy some alcohol so my dad didn’t get to sleep very well. The parents sleep in a room with the youngest daughter, which is also the room they all sit in to watch TV. The two girls share a room and a double size bed, and the boy has his own room, but only the parent’s room has a door. The bathroom also has a door, but no shower curtain for the shower. They do have hot water, but there are wires on the ceiling connected to the shower head that somehow heats the water. They only have one bath towel. Today was Father’s Day, so the mom made an orange cake, and we melted some of the chocolate chips I gave them and used it as frosting. We also had “consume de pollo” which is a soup they make for special occasions that has chicken feet and heads, as well as potatoes, carrots, peas, onions and another local vegetable in chicken broth. They also made it so I could try all these new foods while I’m here instead of getting out to my site and not knowing anything about the local food, so I’m interested to see what else they will make for me. The first day we had quinoa soup for lunch and a type of chicken noodle soup for dinner. We ate leftover soup for breakfast and had an egg sandwich too and oatmeal with guayaba in it. They feed the leftover soup to the cats, the bones and any meat scraps (basically nothing though because they pick the chicken up from the soup and suck the meat off the bones) to the dogs, and potato peels and banana peels etc to the pigs. I guess they buy corn or something for the chickens, but it’s cool how they have pretty much no trash. It’s also good because they only have a small refrigerator in the parent’s bedroom that they keep raw chicken in, and maybe some other things, but there usually are no leftovers. We spent this weekend playing lots of card games with the kids, watched some movies and soccer games on TV, went to Cayambe this morning to buy some stuff to sell in the store (they go to the market every Sunday) and played some games outside after walking up to the cows and taking the scenic route home. Tomorrow morning I start my Spanish classes in the house of another volunteer, and then we are all coming here for lunch. We are supposed to buy our own lunch, but there are no restaurants in the area so we might be doing that every day and give my mom some extra money. By the way, we pay our families from the money that the Peace Corps gives us, and I paid $96 for 2 weeks which covers breakfast, dinner, and my room and everything else they help me with. They are very nice, although at times Ruby is a little too nice and always wants to hang out with me. I really like living here and I think my Spanish will improve a lot just spending time with them because we seem to be talking all the time. I have a picture of them, but right now the internet connection isn´t working or something...

For the last two days we've just been sitting in the Peace Corps office in Quito having sessions on safety and security, the goal of our general assignment (community health), the overall Peace Corps philosophy, and some other stuff. I felt pretty overwhelmed before I got here, but I feel like although these first days have been kind of boring at times just watching Power Point presentations, I already feel a lot more prepared. Now I know the 3 main goals of the community health program (child/maternal health, reproductive health/rights, and environmental health), and know a lot more about the principles behind the Peace Corps. I thought it was interesting that as soon as we start a project in our communities we are supposed to be thinking of an "exit strategy," meaning that the project is sustainable and the development in the community can continue without the help of a volunteer. We are supposed to be focusing on developing people, not things, so that they realize the capacity they have to develop their own things.

Today we finally found out where we will be living for training (which is actually only 9 weeks, I thought it was 3 months). I will be in Paquiestancia, a "suburb" of Cayambe with 4 other volunteers. We will each be with our own host family which we will meet tomorrow and spend the whole weekend with. I'm excited to meet them, so I don't really have anything else to write until after that!

Well, here's my first post of my blog for Ecuador. I leave in 4 days and I will be so relieved because everything I've been preparing for will be done. I have had so many doctor's appointments, filled out so much paperwork, bought lots of stuff to take with me, and packed it all to fit in my bags. I've put my packing list below, just in case you're interested!

Sleeping bag

2 sheets, 2 pillowcases

2 towels

5 books

Ecuador travel book

photo album

Colorado postcards, peanut butter, chocolate chips (gifts for host family)

Journal

paper and envelopes

7 pairs of shoes

cardigan

2 hoodies

raincoat

fleece jacket

2 other lightweight jackets

2 dresses

3 pairs of jeans

3 other pairs of pants

3 skirts

2 shorts

2 capris

9 T-shirts

4 long sleeve shirts

6 tank tops

20 pairs of underwear

20 pairs of socks

6 bras

winter hat

mittens

surge protector

solar charger

laptop

camera

iPod

flash drive

headlamp

deck of cards, Uno, Apples to Apples

toiletries - including 8 toothbrushes and 5 deodorants!

markers

scissors

duct tape

Nalgene

sewing kit

ziploc bags

pocket knife

sunscreen

Think that's about it...

So I leave Denver on Monday evening, have a orientation session in Washington DC for an afternoon, the leave for Ecuador on Wednesday morning. The first few days we will spend in Quito, the capital, going through more orientation and training. Then we will all travel to Cayambe, a town a little north of Quito, where will we stay for the rest of training. We will all live with host families in communities surrounding Cayambe for the first 3 months. Every day will consist of language training, as well as training in health and safety, culture, and technical training for our jobs.

I don't really know too many details about what happens next, or really even during the training. I'm not really even able to have expectations which could be a good thing because no matter what happens I won't be dissapointed!