Friday, April 23, 2010

Coastal Tech Trip

I am currently in site and once week into my service and have been quite busy, which is a relief for me. My spanish is still horrible so that is my number one priority right now, communication.

I have been told by my mother that I need to keep my blog updated ( which I have been pretty bad about). So I only have a few minutes for a brief overview...more to come on my next trip to the big city...with internet :)

Below I have posted some highlights from my technical trip with Peace Corps. We had a great time and were able to see some wonderful farms and meet great knowledgable people as well. We went to Puerto Quito and stayed in a agricultural school for students from the city, then we went to Santo Domingo and Elempalme and visited various sites around those areas including current volunteers.



Making Chifles, fried plaintain chips


Worm bed demonstration in a current volunteer´s community
Rice cooked with a banana leaf....amazing
Making yogurt, yum, I would love to do this at home
Visiting a volunteer´s site and we cleared out the land and build a fence for a school garden
Relaxing in the beautiful agriculture school
Hard at work pruning cacao trees
Creating stacks from highly productive cacao trees
Machete in hand and ready to work!
Skinning a rabbit...which we later had for dinner




We saw many many pigs and small animals







Thursday, April 1, 2010

Just a taste

Pictures of My site!
Ranchero, this is how I get out to my pueblo from the nearest city
The soccer and basketball fields
Beautiful waterfall

The house of my host family who I will be staying with for the first 3 months

Catching rain water in the night in on of our wonderful storms to use to flush my toilet and take showers

The waterfall where people gather water, bath and wash clothes. Yup I bathed in the waterfall one day :)


The kids in my neighborhood helping me out by drawing a map of the community with sidewalk chalk


My new room, mosquito net safe haven

Beautiful fruit trees outside my window



I just visited my new site for 5 days and this was the first time I was starting to feel more like a PC volunteer. We still have have 22 days left of training and I has been going by fast. Next week we will have a 12 day technical trip where we will be recieving technical training for our specific region. I am really hoping my spanish level and technical skills improve a lot during this trip...because I really need it!


My site is great, though I did have some challenging times during my stay my family and community is wonderful and I really hope to be able to integrate into the community and assist them to my best ability. I am in the province of Esmeraldas which is in the northern part of the counrty. I will be living in a predominantly Afro-Ecuadorian community working with value added processing and commercialization of cacao (chocolate). I am actually located in a rain forest which I must say is a surprise after having lived here in the Sierra for the last month and a half, but it will be nice to live somewhere that is climatically different from Maryland.