Another Day

On the 18th I was officially in country for 5 months! Wow time has been flying by, especially since I have finished training and gotten into my site. Tomorrow I will be going into town to meet the two new volunteers who will be starting in about a month. This is very exciting, though sad at the same time because another volunteer will be leaving us next month. He has been so helpful over the past few months letting me crash if I don’t make it back into the city by the last ranchero and answering all the random new volunteer questions I have. Soon I will be moving into a house of my own, this will be a period of many transitions though I am very excited. My friend from the States will be visiting in a few weeks which is also very exciting. I really hope she has a great time in Ecuador and I am able to show her a good time (I still feel like I just got here!) While wandering around the Mariscol the other day while I was in Quito another gringo stopped me and started talking to me (I think I looked pretty lost, which I was since I was looking to find a vegetarian restaurant). Anyway he was from Germany and had decided to travel around Ecuador and Colombia for a few months during his summer break from school, and today was his very first day in country. We had a coffee and chatting with him made me realize I have learned a lot about Ecuador even though I don’t realize it. I must say it is pretty balzy to travel around South America without a plan, that which may be easy with the European train system is not at all how things are down here. Anyhow my trip to Quito was nice and refreshing. I have really been missing being able to explore a city and take advantage of all it has to offer. I was able to wonder around the Old Town district in Quito and check out the Cultural Center and see the art which was displayed there. The weather was also a very nice change, it was kind of like an early April day, it started and ended pretty nippy but warmed up in the day when the sun came out and was beautiful!..and of course there were a few showers to top it off. I had to laugh though when I saw people with big puffy coats and gloves on in 60 degree weather.

Cuentas:

Motherly Love

This past week the testament of a mothers love was displayed in a quite unusual way. There is a new puppy in my host family’s house which is the puppy of the male dog in my house and the mother who is a rotwhiler lives next door. My family would not let the mother near her puppy because they thought she would bite it. So the mother had been trying to get into the house to find her puppy all day. At night my host dad put the puppy in its box and we all went to bed. I awoke in the middle of the night to a laud sound, it sounded like someone was shaking the bars on the door trying to get in the house. This happened numerous times in the night and I realized that is was the mother dog trying to get to her baby. The next morning found out that the rather large mother dog squeezed through the small openings in the window bars two times in the night! Apparently love can overcome the most difficult obstacles.

Belonging

At times I have doubted my belonging in the community…though today I was reassured I am right where I supposed to be and fit in just fine. I sat down to the dinner table this afternoon to find a squirrel in a cage hanging in the window. Though this small event may seem an oddity to the average person to me it was more than just another funny animal in the house. Apparently my “spirit animal” is a squirrel…and animal abundant in the States which I had not yet seen in Ecuador. The whole spirit animal is a long story though I think a squirrel is fitting for me. Living in the rainforest I would never expect to see a squirrel but apparently they are a quite adaptive animal, they seem to be just about everywhere. To the farmers here they are just a pest that eats the cacao so they try to either kill them or they trap them so that they can eat them. I must say if we are planning on eating the squirrel I will have to set a dinner date elsewhere for that evening. Anyhow I think this squirrel symbolizes my adaptation and integration into the community, I think I am finally starting to belong.

A job well done....now if she could just find the one that lives above my bed

Johncito and the new lil pup

Brotherly love

Demonstration about the new law of education

HIV Information session in Quininde held by another volunteer

Ariel :) I love this kid

Visiting an artists house on the coast, he has some great artwork. These are the seeds of the palm tree which people carve into little figurines...chevere

Kids working in their garden

The coop working on a greenhouse to store the fundas of cacao and maracuya

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.