Independence

Community minga making fundas to plant cacao trees
Ants... The ants go marching two by two...

Organic pesticide
The garden at the middle school

The kids at the middle school playing cats in the craddle, brings back memories

A successful backyard garden of a neighbor in town

6-25

Today we worked on the elementary school garden in my town. It was really great to see all the kids working hard and getting excited about planting their vegetables. Just in one morning a fence was built to keep out the chickens and animals, we made seed boxes to start the seeds, the kids dug up plots for the gardens and broke up the soil and then finally we planted the seeds! It is very exciting to have this up and going and I hope the garden will be a sustainable community project for the future. I am hoping get a group of students together and maybe have some type of agriculture or gardening club after school.

Other than that my house is now having many repairs done right now. Considering the rent will only be $30 a month the fix up costs are sure hefty! Any how it is very exciting to be getting a place of my own in the next month and I can’t wait to get settled. I must say I really love staying here with my family and am not in too much of a hurry to move out, especially when I know I will have to face the snakes, bats and rats alone in night!! Anyhow, I can’t wait, and I think I am going to paint the outside yellow, so bland…though this is a hard decision since it may be the only time in my life where it will be acceptable to paint my house pink, neon green, purple or orange.

I also finally started teaching English at the elementary school in my community. It ended up going very well though it was quite a challenge since there were 37 students. I hope to figure out a way to focus my lessons on other topics such as health, environmental issues, agriculture or logical thinking while teaching a bit of English in the meanwhile.

It seems like project related things are starting to pick up, and I am just trying to figure out which things to focus my time on. I am also getting better at firing down the many marriage proposals and explaining, that I do not have any children.

Next weekend is the 4^th of July! And ironically the 3^rd is the independence of the three towns around me, including Esmeraldas and Santo Domingo! Apparently they have quite a few festivities for the weeks surrounding this date, yesterday I saw a parade in procession, and I hear next weekend there will be bull fights, the reigning of the queen, parades and a horse parade as well. I will say people sure know how to party here!

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

Zapote fruit....delicious

Making plans in the Centro de Acopio

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

Pouring in a sugary substance

Chopping up all the fruits and herbs into small pieces

Papaya, granadilla, banana, and more

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

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

Maybe my future house???

“Deja el machete!,” usually isn’t something one would say during the middle of an English lesson, but today it seemed very fitting. Today I headed down to the Centro de Acopio office where I have been teaching English. The number of children who attend the class has been dwindling and there a few kids in the community I can count on being there when I teach. Today I expected the usual two or three kids. I began reading a little book for beginning english, “The Lion and the Mouse,” to the children. It is a very beginning level book and I helped to explain what the story was saying in Spanish. (Thanks for the books mom, they are great!) The kids loved the book so much they wanted me to keep reading it over and over, though I stopped after the third time around. For some reason more kids started showing up and all the sudden there were like 17 children! I was a little over loaded, so of course I whipped out some songs which always seem to keep them entertained. It was really great to have so many kids come by and seem interested, well at least interested in seeing what was going on… After having to yell at some to stop running around and screaming, playing with the motorcycle and doing scary things with machetes, I called it a good day’s lesson and had to shew them out.

Right now I am in the works of finding a house to rent for the next 21 months. So this will be my first time on the other side of the rental negotiation as the tenant, after 5 years as the landlord…Anyway, there really are no places set up for renting here in town but there are a few that are for sale. I have been asking around the community to try to find available housing as well as walking around with my host mom to look at the prospective houses. There are really only a few houses and none are actually ready to be moved into, they will need a bit of fixing up first. The other day the owner of one of the houses came by to speak with me and show me the house she owns. I believe she moved away about three years ago and no one has been living there since. We went into the house and disturbed the family of bats living inside, who began flying all around the room. So it sounds like we made a deal and I will be renting this house. My host dad has arranged for the men in the organization to help fix up the house I will be renting, so we will be buying block and cement and creating a bathroom, fixing up the walls, putting in a sink and maybe making a window to give it some more ventilation. I am a little worried about how the house will hold up during the rainy season, but it looks like I don’t have too many options. I really am hoping that the water won’t pass through the 6 inch cement wall at the bottom of the door….yikes. On the bright side there is room in the back for a small garden!

Tomorrow I am heading into the city and then going to teach an English class up the road in one of the other towns on the way to Quininde. Right now there are so many potential projects I could do it is slightly overwhelming! I have so many ideas and resources, but there is only so little time (not to mention I still have a hard time communicating any of these ideas to anyone).

The river in my site

Someone actually got lettuce to grow! very exciting

Convention for Esmeraldas small artisans and businesses

My cacao organization´s booth at the convention

Marimba

The cacao fruit

Making cacao pasta from the roasted and dried cacao beans

The cat in my house had babies

Invierno

6-1

Tonight I had a great dinner, and I was actually really hungry for dinner, which is unusual because they feed me a lot here! My dinner had like 4 vegetables a small portion of rice and eggs (no meat)….just how I like it.

Wow it is already June first! I bet the spring weather at home is amazing right now, though it is probably starting to get pretty hot. I really do miss spring, and I have a feeling it will be hard to live without fall and winter too J Here there are only two seasons, invierno and vierno. Right now it is changing over to invierno which means winter, but here it basically means the drier season. It has been pleasantly nice temperature wise, during parts of April and May it was so hot it was really hard to move at times haha, but now it is quite comfortable. Vierno means summer which is the rainy season and it is also hotter and more humid. Another interesting thing about living on the equator is that the length of each day is the same throughout the year, the sun rises at 6:30 am and sets at 6:30 pm, so there are no sweet long days of summer and ridiculously short daylight winter days.

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

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

Sifting a bit

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

A little friend on top of my water bin, cutie

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

Some neighbors

Some of the girls in my english class

Yeah, I look silly

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

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