Looking Back

Mitad del Mundo (Middle of the World)

Yummy fruit selection we had at lunch, tomatoe de arbol, babaca, large lemons...(once during spanish class I incorrectly called said tomatoe de Abril...these are the daily comedies one goes through while learning another language)

From above a large monument, the city on the equator

Straddling the equator

A lovely meal during our first week of training (I love taking food pics)

Some of us in the dinning hall

In the airport on our way to Quito

Last morning in DC (and the US) for a while

More paperwork, med kit with everything you can think of and a lovely rose given to each of us from the current peace corps volunteers, it says "put your ecua-googles on"

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

February 20th:

^Arrival

Training has begun. I must say I am really excited to get training started and start learning some Spanish! The last few days have been jam packed with traveling, new faces and new places J

Right now I am in Cayambe, which is about an hour and a half north of Quito. We are up in the mountains in a very high altitude. Today we left Quito which is where we have been staying for the last few days and also the location of PC headquarters. In Quito we had a jam packed day full of shots, paperwork, signatures, language skills test, safety….and more! The city of Quito seemed very nice though we were not allowed to leave our hostel, they didn’t want to release the gringo newbies too soon hehe.

So, I am in the agribusiness program and have met about 4 or 5 others with this same job title. Our PC group is made up of 55 in total and about half are agriculture volunteers and the other half are environmental. Within these subsets each person has a more detailed title, which in my case is agribusiness.

This week all of us will be together in “the compound” in Quito. Brings me back to college memories, open door policy is key. Here we will have more information sessions and much more language sessions. We have all been split into language groups of about 5 people and they will evaluate our level after the week. We will then be split into groups of 5 according to our language levels. Each group will be placed into a town surrounding Cayambe and we will all be living with a host family there for training. I was really nervous about having the least Spanish background, but there are a few people who have never studied Spanish before. I’m not really sure where my language level is right now, but either way I am sure I will be learning a ton in the next few weeks/months/years!

Today we went to the Centro del Mundo (Middle of the World), which is where the equator goes through Ecuador. It was really chevere (cool)! We got to see the water swirl clockwise on one side and counter clockwise on the other. Apparently people weigh about 4 lbs less on the equator as well…good to know after these high carb meals! Our guide also did some other really interesting demonstrations and I balanced an egg on a nail and got a certificate! Sweeeet. After that we had a really great meal at the restaurant next door, and got to try some new fruits.

My New Abode

The market in our town

The girls in my group and I before meeting our host families

Home sweet home

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

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

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

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

This is where I wash my clothes, it is not that bad so far but it takes a lot of time and some good muscle.

Mi cama (bed)

Beautiful full moon outside my window. My mother gave me these roses from the plant, they are beautiful!

Link in spanish to the city outside my town:

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabacundo

Getting Cultured

Trip to Salinas

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

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

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

The city of Imbabura

Beautiful Train Ride

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

This is the final salt product once it has been burned and processed.

This mudd filter was used to test the salinity of if water to see if there was salt in the soil.

Mountain created during the mining of salt in the area. Salt is no longer a large industry in the area because the government controls the industry (i think, every was explained in spanish so I may have missed some important details)

Statue symbolizing the towns freedom.

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

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

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

Everyone was beat from a long hot day…

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

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

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

Sweet Granadilla (passion fruit)

...Lets just say I had 5 in one day, love them!

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

Now that I´m actually here in Ecuador I haven´t had a chance to post till now.

So I am now living with a host family in a small town around Cayambe. I just got here yesterday and it has been quite a change of pace from "summer camp" which was what the first week of training was like....now this is the real deal!

My host family is great so far, we spent most of the evening trying to communicate which is always interesting. They have hosted a few other volunteers before though, so I think they are used to our lack of spanish skills.

A few days ago we took a trip out to an integrated farm and learned a few techniques for sustainable farming which we may implement into our communities.

So much has happened in the last few weeks I don´t even know where to start! So far everything is going well. We are having spanish overload every day and I really hope I am learning something haha.

I will go ahead and update the blog at some point when things settle down a bit...and I have tons of pictures :)

One more day....so excited/nervous that I can't even sleep! Typically I sleep like a baby through the night but last night my body (or mind) decided it was time to wake up at 3:30 am after 4 refreshing hours of sleep :/ Well, this time will come in handy considering I have not yet actually tried to pack anything into a bag, much less see if I am any where close to my 100 lbs limit. I guess I have procrastinated on that issue as long as I could. Preparation and goodbyes are quite stressful and sad, it will be nice to finally get this started :)

I have the greatest friends and family and have really enjoyed seeing everyone this weekend. It is very hard to leave people you love so much, but even though I may be far away I'm sure we will be able to stay in touch. Much love to everyone!

Trip to Honduras...getting warmer....

To start off the New Year, I headed down to Honduras with my friend and roommate Kate to visit her old site and friends. She is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer about 9 months out of service. She invited me along with her to visit, which I am sooo grateful for because it was a wonderful experience and I learned a ton...not to mention had plenty of time to practice up on my Spanish skills (which I must admit need a lot of practice!).

Our first adventure was out to the campo in Buena Vista. Kate had worked on engineering plans for a water system to bring water into the town and to the houses. She worked with members of the rotary during this project and we met them and they drove us up to the community from the city of Santa Barbara.

It was verrry muddy, its a wonder we made it a few hours up a windy steep muddy road....

We were invited in for coffee after Kate had met with the men working on the pipe lines. This is a picture of the coffee mill which de-shells the coffee beans which grow in this area.

We stayed a few days in Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara. This is where Kate was during her Peace Corps service. All the people were overly hospitable and invited us in for coffee and cake usually. Everyone was truly excited to see Kate, and you could see that she was loved and respected by her community. We went by her host family's house and they invited us in and we all chatted a while, we were then invited us to stay in one of their apartments for free while we were there, which was great!

This is our lovely morning breakfast...yummy coffee cookies given to us by a girl's mother Kate knew in the community. Cornflakes with milk in a bag, pancakes and our freshly brewed coffee sock coffee.
Here Kate is in the room on the roof where the family makes their tortillas and there's me having my morning coffee and looking out on the beautiful view of Santa Barbara below.

After a day of adventures through the city we came back to the apartment. I went to use the bathroom and was surprised to find a little furry friend frantically running around the rim of the toilet trying to stay above the water. So I told Kate, though she didn't really think it could be true. She checked, screamed, then flushed...which just gave the mousey a lil bath.
So we told the owners and in comes our rescue with a piece of wood, which she proceedes to kill our furry little friend with :( Well at least it gave the lil kiddies a good scare which was funny hehe, and I think the cat enjoyed the find.


We visited with Kate's old co-workers. Everyone there was great. I tried to have a conversation with some of the guys for a while in which I managed to embarase myself to no end...I think I'll be laughing at myself a lot more than usual these next few months!

This is the central park in Santa Barbara which had recently been renovated. They had a nice little bridge with tortugas turtles and a large nativity scene (common in the area for Christmas). To the left is Oscar a boy Kate had taught English to, we all went to the one vegetarian restraunt in town which was quite delicous!

We went down to the southern part of the country on a 7 hour bus ride to Lange to visit Laura a friend of Kate's. While we were there her host dad took us on a hike in the mountains. When we got to the top we could see a Volcano in El Salvador and Nicaragua across the water. Seeing 3 countries at once isn't something you get to do everyday, it was beautiful up there.

Two Weeks...Two Days...Too Ironic

Only two weeks and two days left.... The smallness of the world hit home on Saturday night as my friends and I braved the snow to have a farewell dinner at Bus Boys and Poets in DC. During the course of the evening my friend Meredith said she had a friend also leaving soon for Peace Corps, who she then contacted to ask where she was going and voila..she is leaving for Ecuador in February as well! I also found out that that waiter we had has a friend doing PC in Ecuador right now, so I took down her name and maybe I'll be seeing her soon. I love these moments of synchronicity.

So I have a plan ticket and an itinerary for our staging event...which happens to be in DC, my stomping ground, how convenient. We all meet up for the day then ship out bright and early the next morning!

I thought I would give an update, so at this point I know I will be heading to colder mountainous area near the equator for training. I have also received a big (kind of like a frat/sorority) who I can contact with questions...which is very helpful knowing I love to be over prepared for everything ;P She lived in the DC area for a while, its nice that we will have something in common.

We have a facebook group for Omnibus 103 (this is the name PC has for our training group). There are quite a few of us there and it is a great place for us rookies to spout out questions to the current volunteers who have been super helpful.

So its time for me to really focus on packing...a 100 lb limit for two years and numerous possible climates makes it quite difficult! So far I have a light warm temp sleeping bag, a small netbook, a GRE study book, binoculars...hehe I hope I can get some bird watching in :), a few pairs of cheap back up glasses, loads of sunscreen, two books from Jim at the office (Returned Peace Corps Volunteer)...one: 1491...two: a fake book with the pages hallowed out to secretly hid things..so MacGyver, love it! Shout out some packing advice if you have any!

So with only two weeks left I still have a week of work..painting to do to get the basement apartment rented..a car to sell and a pimped out rim to find..things to buy and pack..and going away party 75.6 to attend. I'm sure it will all come together as always.

I plan on posting about my trip to Honduras soon, with pictures!