t Hi all, sorry for the long delay in posting. Exciting things are happening here, we're doing a ton of repairs on the canal! The photos are not exactly chronological, but I'll explain as I go. This is the truck we use to haul people and materials, an old Ford 350 that is at least as old as I am and requires special tricks to open and shut the doors. The white gas can on the roof is the gas tank

Every time I turn on the radio, seems like I hear one more thing about the international crisis of rising food prices. It's happening here too, prices for cooking oil, rice, corn, potatoes and other staples have gone way, way up. And I'm not entirely pleased with the explanations, which are mostly just that we're making too much ethanol and China is eating too much meat (grain-fed, presumably).

I haven't really written much about normal stuff lately, but I had a great morning so I thought I'd share. I went and visited 2 people who wanted me to help them figure out how much hosing they'd need to water their land. I'm currently doing a project to get hoses and etc. subsidized, so this is a reasonable request. The very Ecuadorian thing was that it took all morning. I got to Mr. Arturo's

Well, this is a little after the fact, but better late than never, right? Semana Santa starts with Palm Sunday, except the native palms are becoming endangered, so it was more like "laurel" Sunday...people brought twigs of laurel (not sure what this is in english), with rosemary, etc. The church smelled great. The priest went around after the service blessing people's branches with holy water.

Just in case you guys are seeing scary pictures of floods here in Ecuador, I am fine. It's muddy here and some roads are washed out, but I can still get to town (obviously, since I'm posting this). And the volcano is far enough away that all I get is annoying ashfall. That seems to have quit for now, so it's just the regular water rain. Annoying, and not great for crops, but up here nothing too

I thought that since lent started on Ash Wednesday, all partying would be more or less over until Easter. Well, no. Last Sunday was the "burial of Carnaval," the last chance for a party. Basically it was games day. There was a greased-pole-climbing contest, with prizes at the top of the pole for whoever got there. There was a blindfolded catch-the-cuy contest, with the guinea pig as the prize.

The festivities started Thursday with pig-butchering. Never knew that could involve a blowtorch. Me scraping hair off Cleaning the pig. This big gap is where my hands were too dirty to take pictures do to being involved in the removal of intestines, etc. Maria Elena is rendering lard, I'm turning the intestines inside out and cleaning them to make sausage. So that was the beginning, Thursday

My Christmas was great, mostly because my family came down to visit me! They showed up on Dec. 21 and we were in San Lorenzo Dec 21 through 26. The 27th we headed to Riobamba and went (in the back of a pickup truck) to a market in a little town called Zalaron the next day. Katherine got a hat like the indigenous folks there wear, which was pretty entertaining for everyone. We spent the 30th

Well, it's been a while since I've posted, so I guess it's about time! Jeff was down here to visit, which was quite a lot of fun. We hung out mostly in San Lorenzo, with side trips to Riobamba (where I had a conference on environmental issues and waste management...which wasn't as helpful as I'd hoped), Quito, and Otavalo, the famous crafts market. I had a dentist appointment November 5, which

Since it's raining for the first time since approximately June, maybe July, and I had very little to do at home and a couple things to do in town, here I am updating twice in a week! Yesterday Andrew, the volunteer nearest me, came over and we went exploring. I wanted to see what the river did above where it feeds the canal, and wanted more or less just to see what was up there. Since people

So today I was supposed to be planting tree seeds with a guy named Rodrigo from the Ministry of Environment. Since by Wednesday I hadn't heard a word from the man in something like 2 weeks, I went to track him down. Turns out he can't come today, but he said he was going just past Chillanes (which is maybe an hour and a half from San Lorenzo) on Thursday and asked me to come along to collect some

Well, I guess I'm overdue for an update, it's been almost a month! I have made 2 trips to Quito since the last post as well. Once for my teeth--turns out I had to get a root canal--and once for reconnect conference with dentists appointments on both ends. The reconnect conference was good--we had about 3 days of a workshop on design and management of projects--basically how to write grants, but

Well, wheat harvest in Ecuador doesn't involve anything like a combine, that's for sure. It's a bit of a process, starting with cutting the wheat by hand with a curved, serrated knife called an oz, and piling it up in a part of the field a truck can get close to. Then you bring in the threshing machine. We set up a sort of bucket brigade passing the wheat from the pile to the machine, where it

Three weeks, two trips to Quito. Two weeks ago I was here turning in things to PL480, funding documents and the like, then checking prices on drip systems and hoses and buying jars for our mermelada de Sambo. Then back in San Lorenzo a lot of the usual stuff, some more arguing and stalemate with the canal, some more abonos, etc. I'm also thinking about grant proposals for a couple of projects.

Well, since my last post, the Ecuadorian government has given away free seeds--alfalfa, oats and vetch, peas, and vegetables. And we spent several days running around getting people to sign up for reduced price fertilizers, courtesy of the governments of Japan and Ecuador. It's interesting. Instead of giving out subsidies the way the US does, they're doing these things. In other news, I have

My garden, from the patio of my house. I currently have planted cilantro, carrots, radishes, brocoli, zucchini, swiss chard, onions, lettuce, and beets. Today's job is planting spinach and garlic, and Maria Elena and I are going to try planting quinoa. Some pictures of my greenhouse. I finished it last weekend and got the plants (tomatoes and basil) in this week. The inside view Me by the "

Chimborazo, in the middle of the photo, the view on my walk to Amapolas. Well, I guess it's time for an update. Things are still going well and I'm still keeping very busy. I guess it's been 2 weeks since I posted...well, I went to visit Patricio in Riobamba with a couple guys, which was good, and got some tomate de arbol seeds from him to plant here, as well as seeds for a sort of alfalfa bush

I'm back in Guaranda, already. I left my USB drive in the computer yesterday and realized this fact only several hours later, back in San Lorenzo, and with not enough time to go back and forth before my meeting at 5. So I came back today, and amazingly enough, the woman at the internet place had found it and saved it for me! So that made me happy. Which is good, because yesterday was not such a

Nothing exciting to report at the moment, just another week in Ecuador...I planted some green manures that hopefully I can figure out how to water in Sauce, because it looks like we really are entering dry summer. I moved mud around at another canal minga, I worked on the fence at the school, I went and looked at gardens in Marcopamba, I weeded my own garden. One of the gardens in Marcopamba I

Well, the photos are going to come first I guess, since the computer won't let me move them to logical spots. Corpus Christi parade with cows, horses, band, etc. Lots of cows Where one side of the canal ended up after the derrumbe (landslide?) The whole landslide. For scale, if I was standing on the road, I'd come about 2/3 of the way to the green patch in the middle. It's a really big

I am in the unusual position of sitting at an internet cafe waiting for an email to come in. Maria Elena and I are getting started on a project making sweet squash "jam" and sent some samples to Quito so an ingeniera could do nutritional tests, etc. She had a list of things we should record, and Manuel, who is either related to Maria Elena or a friend of a relative or something, is in theory

Well, it's been a pretty full week--I spent the weekend weeding my garden and Monday transplanting brocoli between "scattered showers," so yes, it is still raining. We helped the school in Marcopamba get their garden started, but the director of the school didn't want to let us help beyond being extra pairs of hands to break up the really packed clay they were transplanting carrots (yes, that's

Here's the canal minga photo-story: The first day of landslide clearing. Two things to notice: that's a LOT of dirt (the canal runs all the way to the right of the photo), and that is in fact me, getting my hands very, very dirty. The second day, we split up and some of us were just cleaning out the canal. Dredging mud, fun! The landslide is still not totally taken care of--at the end of the

Please excuse the nerdy title... I spent 6 hours on Tuesday with 31 other people with hand tools clearing heavy clay mud the consistency of cake batter away from the irrigation canal. We're going back next Tuesday because we're still not done. It was good though, I got to talk to some new people, including a woman who asked me to come look at her tomate de arbol (tree tomato) plants, which are

Wow, it's been a while, huh? Here's some pictures of my house, for those of you who are curious. It's awesome. Bedroom My kitchen--I should be getting a kitchen sink today! My living room: The bathroom's nothing special except that it's just mine and it's inside, both of which are really nice. There's theoretically an electric hot water heater on the shower, but the guy who was fixing up my