La Jungla

Some photos....https://picasaweb.google.com/100931733724063278429/December232011?authkey=Gv1sRgCPz9vd_sqNnxlAE

Engreído

All right so here is the super long update of what I have been up to the past couple of months…

I left site for a long weekend and went to Tena in the Amazon for Thanksgiving.  I left early Thursday morning and got there late afternoon, just in time to check into the hostel and then head out to Thanksgiving dinner.  We ended up having dinner at a TexMex restaurant owned by a German, where the majority of the dishes were Italian and I ordered pizza…so much for actual Thanksgiving food.  It was super nice though because we had a group of about twelve volunteers and we gave toasts and enjoyed each other’s company.  After dinner we went to a karaoke bar and belted out some classic American tunes, annoying many Ecuadorians in the process…whoops.

The next morning a Tena PCV took us to a town where he is working on tourism with a Kichwa community.  We went to the sandy shores of the Tena River and were greeted by a troop of capuchin monkeys hanging in the trees.  Earlier, we had a made a stop to the market where I bought two mangoes.  As soon as I stepped foot on the beach, the most aggressive, angry looking monkey proceeded to climb up my leg to try and steal my mangoes…I was terrified.  Somehow he got distracted though and I quickly ran away and hid my mangoes.  After, we steered clear of that guy, and proceeded to feed the nice looking monkeys ciruelas (little plums).  They were too scared to come down on the ground to get the ciruelas so they would hang by their tails and reach as far as their little bodies would allow to very gently pluck the fruit from our hands.  Afterwards, we boarded a canoe equipped with a motor for a trip down river to the community´s museum/park.  We took a tour through a medicinal garden where our guide told us about the cultural uses for each plant.  We then made our way inside a hut where we saw the traditional dress of the Kichwa and our guide sang to us using a stick and a turtle shell as instruments.  After a few more handicrafts, our guide showed us the different types of traps used to catch an array of jungle animals; they were terrifyingly precise.  After the hut we were led through a zoo of sorts.  They had two ocelots, some macaws and parrots, an awful looking turtle, a boar, a caiman, and a capybara.  The ocelots were super cute and in a not very secure cage, so I walked right up and gave them a little pet.  The boar and capybara were surprisingly friendly as well.  As we were leaving the site, we ran into the community monkey…Lucas.  He immediately saw my mangoes, climbed up my leg, ripped one out of the bag, and began to eat.  Of course this was my opportune moment to bond with a monkey, so I sat down next to him and ate my other mango.  After, we were instantly friends and he began to climb all over me, he even checked my hair for bugs.  As the photo shoot and bonding time with Lucas was coming to an end, I realized that he was getting ready to poop on my shoulder right where he was perched.  I was able to ninja out of poop on the shoulder, but in the process I got peed on.  Thus, I had to ride back to Tena on the bus with monkey pee on my shoulder.  I was later told, however, that monkeys pee on things when they fall in love…that´s right, a monkey fell in love with me in the Amazon.  That night we went to one of the fanciest restaurants in Tena where were told we could order steak and eat it in the presence of a sloth that moseyed around the restaurant.  Well, the sloth never showed up, but I had a delicious meal of filet mignon, chicken Cesar salad, baked potato, and steamed vegetables for the price of $7.25…awesome.

The next day we took a bus about a half hour out of town to visit Jumandy´s caves.  We met up with a guide, were handed headlamps, and entered the caves.  We trekked through the darkness, climbing over rocks, squeezing through small passageways, and emerged in a large cave with the sound of rushing water.  Our guide told us that we were going swimming.  I started wading into the water, when all of a sudden it dropped off and I was in a super deep pool, inside a cave, in the Amazon jungle…too cool.  We got to the other side where there was a waterfall, and some rock ledges to jump off.  We definitely had a lot of trust in the guide, because we all blindly jumped off the rock ledges into what we were told was a deep enough pool.  After, we climbed through some more tunnels and emerged in the mud room and were told to take off our shoes, strip down to our bathing suits, and get in the mud.  The guide then covered us in mud from head to toe in the mineral rich mud that supposedly can cure cancer and other such illnesses.  After we were all covered head to toe, we entered another room to roll around in some more mud.  To get into this room, we had to wade through waist deep mud and then slid through a canyon type place by supporting our body weight with our feet and back against opposite sides of the wall…quite difficult and definitely a little dangerous when you are slick with mud.  After we rolled around in the mud, sin vergüenza, we left as much of it as we could in the room and made our way out to another set of waterfalls.  Under each jet of water, there were deep holes in the rock formed over thousands of years.  There was one that was just wide enough for a person and you could actually propel yourself down through the tunnel of water by hand-walking down the rock.  I eventually reached the bottom (probably about 8 or 9 feet) and shot myself up out of the tunnel and out of breath…definitely a little claustrophobic but definitely exhilarating.  We walked a little further and were greeted with a downpour of water that I thought was another waterfall, but we had actually reached the outside of the cave and had to run back to the park in the rain.  All in all it was a great time.  After the caves we went into the nearby town to eat lunch.  We had a traditional lunch of maitos, chontocuros, and guayusa tea.  The maito is a leaf that they steam local river fish in, the chontocuros are the grub of a large beetle that are fried and served in a maito leaf, and the guayusa is a native leaf with lots of caffeine and super tasty to make tea.  The fish was perfectly steamed and extremely tasty and the grubs were kind of chewy but had a bacon flavor so they weren’t too bad.  After lunch we headed back into Tena, walked around for a bit and rested, then ate some pizza for dinner, and finished the night by sharing a bottle of rum in the park along the river.  The trip was a success and a great way to spend the Thanksgiving weekend.

I left Tena on Sunday to head into Quito for a workshop on ´Food Security´ and ´Food Sovereignty´.  PC Ecuador had to cut a program because of funding stuff, so now Agriculture is a part Health under the term Food Security.  The workshop was interesting because I learned a lot about the nutritional needs here in Ecuador and it will be easy to fit classes in with the garden project.  Although I will still be doing all the same things in site, I now have a new buzz word for development work as my title.  After the workshop a group of us went to another volunteer´s site for a night and broke out a jumble of instruments and had a nice little Christmas sing-a-long.

I was back in site for a week, and had some meetings.  I wrote up a money report for APROCAI because too many different people have all the money right now and nobody knows exactly how much the corporation should have.  Thus, there have been some issues with APROCAI lately in the money department, but hopefully it will all be solved soon…we shall see.  Other cacao news is that we are starting up the Escuela de Campo again and trying to get certified so that the socios can get a better price for their cacao.  I brought back some more seeds from Quito, so after the rainy season I am hoping to start the garden project up again, but this time more organized with planting and fertilizing charlas, a seed bank, and nutrition talks.

My closest volunteer is finishing up her service and going back to the states in January, so she came out to BA for a day and my neighbors and I cooked up some cuy (guinea pig).  We killed three big guys, marinated them, and then skewered them up and roasted them over the fire.  The meat is actually quite good…chicken meets pork.  The volunteer was having some back problems so after lunch my neighbors called over the old lady that lives behind me and apparently knows a lot about massage.  This little old lady was rolling on the ground tugging and pushing and cracking and massaging all kinds of limbs and muscles and bones; it was pretty funny to watch.  She apparently knew what she was doing, though, because the volunteer felt better afterwards. 

I was only back in site for a week before I headed off to Quito again for another workshop.  This one was about starting Eco-Clubs in site.  It was super interesting and I am excited to hang out with my jovenes more and teach them cool stuff about their country.  I also got some more recycled art ideas.  After the workshop, I went into the PC office for a going-away party for our Ag Program Manager.  He worked with PC for 20 years and is now retiring.  There was lots of good food and music.  I got back to site late Friday night and went to an APROCAI party Saturday morning where our partner university came and presented some stuff.  And old man Lopez broke out his guitar and harmonica and played us some tunes.  We have also started the charlas for the certification process.  It took two hours to explain to the socios how to fill out a personal facts sheet and a farm register. 

Pictures of my adventures will be up soon...

Random Thoughts:

·          My neighbors are feeding me non-stop to fatten me up for when my parents come.

·         I was helping organize and fold clothes for a Christmas donation drive, when we decided that would be a great time to dress Milly up in all the baby clothes.

·         A lady that lives down the street from me just used all her cacao money to buy a laptop and an internet connection; she also has satellite TV (illegally programed).  It is like Mini-America inside her house.

·         People hang sacks on tree branches on the side of the road with snakes in them for the snake venom guy to come pick up.

·         I am not allowed to run on the main road on Sunday mornings or afternoons because there are apparently a lot of drunk drivers from the night before that continue drinking all day on Sunday.

·         I didn’t have running water for about 5 days, so I started drinking water out of my wash tank that is coated in algae and slime.  Still haven’t gotten sick…stomach of steel.

·         Women wear platform heels (I am talking at least 4 inches) to go to the market on Sundays.

·         I saw a dog licking the carcass of a cow one day as it hung out in the sun waiting to be chopped up and sold piece by piece.

·         I don’t buy or cook meat here…I only eat it when people make it for me because then I don’t have to know exactly how long it sat out or what has licked it.

·         On the bus to Quito one morning, a younger man hobbled on with a cane and plopped down in the seat next to me.  On the curves through the mountains he kept slumping into me as if he didn’t have control of his upper body.  I allowed this, as I thought he was handicapped.  Even when he leaned up against me and fell asleep I didn’t protest because I thought he couldn’t control it.  About two hours later he got off the bus and proceeded to lift heavy crates from under the bus and walk without his cane…I felt so used.

·         Pepito came tapping on my bedroom window at 5 AM one morning to wake me up and ask me to go pick mangos with him…sadly I was headed out of town that same day.

·         My neighbor’s dog had puppies…they are so little and super cute.

·         Buenos Aires played in the indor championship game in Bucay.  We ended up losing, but it was super fun to cheer them on and show some BA pride.

·         My parents will be here in less than a week to visit for Christmas!

Un Relajo

November 2 was All Saint's Day here in Ecuador.  On this day everybody goes out to the cemeteries to pay their respects by cleaning gravesites/tombs or repainting them, lighting candles, and placing flowers.  My old host family invited me to go with them to the graves of Vito’s parents, and Leonor’s father and brother.  It was super interesting to see the hordes of people in the cemeteries and all the flowers and candles.  The cemeteries are similar to the ones in the south of the US; most of the gravesites are tombs above ground.  Or there are walls with holes, where they put the casket and then cover the mouth of the hole with bricks and cement.  Another tradition is that they drink Colada Morada and eat bread shaped like dolls.  The drink is a mixture of purple corn flour, herbs, fruits, and water…and it actually quite tasty.  About a week before the holiday, people were bringing Colada Morada and kept bringing it until the holiday was over…awesome.  All the kids had the week off for the holiday, so I had lots of people to hang out with and play in the river with.

APROCAI is continuing to buy and sell cacao in baba and the association is making some money off of it while at the same time the farmers are making more money with us rather than selling to an intermediary.  I have been helping with the weighing of the cacao, the receipts, and all the money stuff.  Slowly but surely they are getting themselves more organized and are learning to use the computer to do the computations for the money.  The first couple of times that we bought and sold the cacao were an absolute mess, everybody yelling at everybody.  But since then we have gotten a system worked out that keeps getting better and better.  The president of the organization is an old guy that does not like to listen to suggestions, however, so he is getting in the way of true organization and is also complicating the money situation.  But we are in the process of opening a checking account at a bank so that we can just write checks rather than pay the people in cash…this will solve a lot of problems.  We have been harvesting and selling every week and have weeks with $11,000 and $17,000 to divvy up between the socios.  The average person selling cacao is making about $500+ a week which is huge for them here, as the average family makes $240 a month.  The problem with this though, is that the harvests only occur a handful of times a year, so the people need to learn to save and use their money wisely….that is the next charla.  I am also working on plans for a wall enclosure of the whole facility at APROCAI. 

Random Thoughts:

• It is hotter now, so I have been going to the river more frequently to swim.  I really am surprised I haven’t gotten sick yet, as there are normally chicken parts that float past my legs.  If I am lucky a whole chicken will float by and engulf me in feathers.  Once there were a bunch of vultures crowded around a sack stuck on a rock; the little kids investigated and informed me it was a dead dog (People don’t bury their pets here, they just put them in a sack and throw them in the river).   Although I haven’t had any severe intestinal issues caused by the river, I do have some spots on my shoulders that may or may not be a skin fungus.

• I had to take my cat to the vet one day to get some shots.  So I put Milly in a box, cut a few holes, ducktaped him in, and decided that was how I would transport him to the vet (a man in a pet store with a metal table, some syringes, and some vials).  As I was waiting on the side of the road for a truck to take me into town, Milly escaped through one of the holes and started to run away.  Once I got ahold of him again, my friend Monica (who happened to be watching be chase the cat down) gave me a sack to throw him in instead.  Well, within a few minutes he chewed/clawed his way through the sack and was loose again.  Frustrated, I took him back to the house to repair the box and tape him in really well.  Of course, this is the exact moment that I ran out of ducktape.  The only other tape I had was medical tape and electrical tape, so I used almost a roll of medical tape to secure the cat in the box and left the house once again.  As I am passing through the park, before I even got out to the road, the cat had escaped again.  At this point I am furious at the stupid cat.  I am trying to shove the cat into the box again, yelling at it in English, and making a spectacle out of myself in the middle of the park.  I finally get the cat into the box and then shove the box into the sack and the cat is secure for the time being.  After waiting for about half an hour, a taxi finally passes by to take me into town.  The car was full so I had to put the cat into the trunk.  The whole ride I can hear the box clunking around in the trunk and am worried that the cat is going to get knocked out and die.  We arrive in town (the busy, middle part of town, with lots of people) and I open the trunk and realize that the cat got loose once again.  Well now I have a sack with a large box shoved into it and a loose cat.  I quickly threw the cat head first into the sack, but since the box was in the way there wasn’t that much room for the cat.  Thus, I ending up walking through Cumanda with an oddly shaped sack with a cat tail sticking out the top.  Once I got to the vet, I told him the story and he told me he would come out to BA the next time the cat needed shots…phew.

• There is a bird that likes to fling itself at my window every morning at 6 am.  I have put up coverings so that it doesn’t see its reflection in the window anymore, but for some reason it still likes to hurl itself at the window.

• I saw an iguana run across the water in the river one day…coolest thing ever.

•  I went to a funeral of a neighbor’s brother one day.  There was a procession behind the hearse from the church to the cemetery down the busiest street in town.  We had some very angry bus drivers stuck behind us. 

•  One of the guys in town comes over to my house with veggie scraps to feed my worms in my wormbed.

• It is mango season…mmmmm.
• A lot of the older men are missing fingers because of dynamite fishing accidents.

Aquí Vacilando

It is getting harder and harder to write these blogs because my life is pretty unexciting now.  I am actually quite happy here and really feel a part of the community so my day to day life is not really out of the ordinary.  I went to a cacao farm on the cost a couple weeks ago to learn about national cacao (the variety of cacao that has the better taste and aroma) rather than the genetically altered variety we have here in BA.  It was interesting to see because the national cacao normally doesn’t produce as well as the altered variety but at this farm they really had their act together and the trees were perfect and producing lots.  It was cool to see, but I don’t think that I will be able to convince anyone to switch over to national.  I have been working with the cacao organization in my town.  They are starting to buy and sell cacao so I am helping with the bookkeeping, money, and business side of things.  Although they aren’t profitable yet it is good that they are willing to learn how to properly manage the organization to avoid problems and/or corruption in the future. 

I am still working with the gardens, but I really am not doing that much.  Jefferson is being controlling again and I can’t start my classes until people are less busy he says.  But there are a few gardens where the people really got into it and are producing some pretty awesome veggies.

I started a recycle club with the kids.  So far we have made some super cool wallets out of juice boxes and chip bags.  And we set up an irrigation system with plastic bottles.  The kids in the club have been showing people around town the things they have made, thus lots more people have been showing up to my house asking how to make things.  And I have seen kids around town picking up and saving trash to make more stuff.  It is just a little project but the kids are actually into to it.  I keep hinting that they should make more and more to try and sell, we shall see if they get into that or not.

I met with the muni again about working on the sewage project.  I sent in an oficio for the workspace and did all the official stuff they asked of me but they are still being difficult.  I feel as though they haven’t even started the study like they said and are trying to buy time so that they can catch up to the point that they claimed they were at.  We shall see if anything comes of that, but I am not holding my breath.

Other than that, I have been tubing with the kids in the river on the weekends, helping harvest cacao and corn, and I went to visit another volunteer in her site for her birthday last week.  Sorry that wasn’t the most exciting post, but here are some pictures! https://picasaweb.google.com/100931733724063278429/October182011?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCKuJncfI3svHiQE&feat=directlink

Random Thoughts:

·         BA seemed to be the beginning of lots more fiestas because since our fiestas there has been a number of them in the neighboring communities.  Thus, I have gone to more bullfights and more moto races.

·         I pay about $5 a month for electricity and $1 for water.

·         Bucay has a huge veggie, fruit, and meat market on Sundays and I have my certain people that I go to each week to buy my food.  My veggie lady brings me special zucchinis every two weeks because nobody else has them.  Next week I am bringing her zucchini bread.

·         My cat basically lives with the neighbors now. 

·         The guy that harvests snake venom got my number and won’t stop calling me.

·         New neighbors moved in a couple of weeks ago.  The 50ish year old dad ran with me one day and ran me into the ground.  I guess he used to run for hours and hours every day.

·         My host-mom broke my Kindle with her butt implants.

·         I see a new type of bird in my yard every day.

·         The drunk has shown up at the house a few more times asking for beer money.  I have remained strong and told him no.

·         It has gotten quite a bit colder here.  I actually wear pants and a long sleeve shirt in the mornings.

·         My neighbors joke that they are going to grill my cat for Christmas dinner.

Las Fiestas

For a town of only 200 people, Buenos Aires knows how to party.  Two weekends ago, we had the yearly festivals of Buenos Aires and they really did live up to all the hype they got in the preceding weeks.  At 4 am on Friday morning, I awoke to a band parading through the streets of BA, led by a man setting off bottle rockets.  The theory behind this was for everyone to wake up happy on the first day of fiestas.  Well, waking to a band playing outside my front door at 4 am isn’t quite the happy start to the fiestas that I would have chosen, but maybe I am just not a morning person (fact).  Later Friday morning the elementary school kids had a program.  Some of them recited poetry, others sang, and some preformed dances.  The whole thing was super cute, except for the fact that they kept playing some weird Cumandá propaganda music during the breaks.  It is creepy how much of an influence the mayor and Cumandá have on BA.  That afternoon there were ‘indoor’ soccer games for men and women.  I wasn’t invited to play on the BA women’s team…I am just not up to par with them.  That night was the Reina competition.  This is a big deal in Ecuador and almost every fiesta or event has a Reina competition which is basically like a beauty pageant.  However, I guess there was not that much interest among the girls of Buenos Aires to compete so they just picked the Reina before the night even began.  Thus, the ‘competition’ simply consisted of the four girls being escorted on stage by their dates, then strutting in a circle to show off their dresses, and then the old Reina crowning the new Reina.  Once that was over, there were a few different acts.  A man from Cumandá sang and played the guitar, there was a Michael Jackson impersonator (super good dancer for what appeared to be a 10 year old), a lady who sang, and then there was a comedy group.  The comedians were great and they got a lot of the kids involved which was fun.  They even poked fun at the creepy guy in town that I can’t stand…awesome.  I left around 12:30 at night, but the DJ played all night until the band started up again around 4:30-5ish in the morning. 

The second day of the fiestas was definitely the best.  During the day there was a soccer tournament.  There also was a parade with a band, horses, and some creepy dancers.  I actually happened to be in Cumandá while the parade was getting ready to head into BA.  It was pretty funny to see a whole brass band (10+ people) packed in the back of a pickup truck, playing music as they drove down the road to BA.  Packed in the back of another truck were all of the dancers wearing some strange masks.  When I got back to BA all of the parade members had disembarked from the trucks and were parading around the town into the church with some saint figurine leading the way.  The masked people stopped outside of the church and danced for a while.  Someone told me they were supposed to depict demons…not really sure why. 

After a costume change the dancers emerged again in what can only be described as KKK outfits, however the hoods that they wore were colorful rather than white.  Every person had a white robe and a different colored hood/pointy hat/mask/whatever you call it.  They danced in a circle for a while and then the mass in the church started.  It was all kind of creepy so I went back to watching soccer.  Once the soccer tournament was over the crowds all went over to the bull arena.  The bullfighting was priceless.  First off, to watch, a ridiculous amount of people perched themselves precariously in the stands made from caña.  The particular beam I was sitting on with my old host-family and others was at least 10 ten off the ground and severely bowed in the middle from the amount of weight being placed on it.  At one point during the day a caña beam full of people actually snapped clear in half and people tumbled to the ground.  My host brother said he saw a baby fly up in the air and then land on the ground.  Not sure if that is actually true, but I guess everybody was ok.  Anyways, let me try and describe the ‘bullfighting’ event that I witnessed on both Saturday and Sunday of the fiestas.  To begin the fight the Reina and her court all rode horses into the arena and paraded around a bit.  The Reina was super scared of the horse she was on and that actually caused the horse to kick her off in the middle of the little parade thing…whoops.  After that little incident they brought in the bulls.  The bulls hey used were actually quite small; youngins that were still growing.  They only let in one bull at a time but they must have had at least 6 or 7 that they rotated between.  The bull would come out of the truck and anyone who wanted could climb into the arena to ‘fight’.  This basically meant that a ton of drunken men would hang off the caña into the arena and yell at the bull, but as soon as it came anywhere close to them they would haul themselves back up into the stands.  So, when the bull decided to run in a circle around the arena it looked like a strange version of the ‘wave’ as people frantically hoisted themselves up into the stands.  The really drunk men or the somewhat experienced bull fighters would actually stand in the middle of the arena with one of those red cape things to fight the bull.  Well there was only one guy who clearly knew what he was doing and was able to ‘fight’ the bull without getting hurt.  The other men were not so lucky.  One drunk was trying to run away from the bull and ended up get trapped up against the wall and beaten for a while until he was able to roll on the ground under the beams out of the arena.  He stayed on the ground and passed out in that same spot for the remainder of the bull fight (at least a couple of hours).  At one point a bull actually rammed its way through the caña and starting running away through the streets of BA.  All the people outside of the arena who weren’t ‘safely’ up in the stands started frantically running away and a group of men started chasing the bull.  Eventually they caught the bull behind the school and it took a large number of men to drag it back to the arena.  There were also some professional clowns that came in to mess with the bulls.  The highlight was this ‘T’ see-saw thing that two of the clowns would hang on.  When the bull charged to one end the guy would jump off the ground and hang just above the bulls head until the bull decided to charge to the other end where the other clown was now on the ground.  After the clowns left one particular man decided he wanted to use this contraption too; basically, he would just scurry up the pole and hang there, while the bull rammed the pole trying to knock him off.  This particular man was also the same one that ended the bull fighting festivities for the day.  He ended up getting trapped against the wall and the bull rammed him and impaled him right about the heart.  Everybody started screaming and the announcer guy started yelling for the ambulance.  Well, of course there should have been an ambulance, but this is BA, so of course there was not one.  So as people are yelling for an ambulance, hoards of people are leaving the stands to go crowd around this guy and gawk.  Eventually a group of men carry the man over to a truck, throw him in the bed, and they speed away to the little health center in Cumandá.  People were telling me that he had a huge hole in his chest, and that it was so deep that they could see his heart beating.  It turned out he was ok, and had to get 4 stitches on the inside and 8 on the outside.  He was back at the fiestas later that night drinking some more.  (He actually continued to drink all weekend until Sunday night when he told me his wound hurt badly, so he was going to drive his motorcycle home.  I took his keys away and let him pass out in the middle of town instead.)       

All the Bull Fighters

Dragging the Escaped Bull Back to the Arena

The See Saw

The Guy who was Hurt Later using the See Saw

After everyone dispersed from the bull fighting, people went home to get ready for the grand ball and the fireworks.  I was about to leave my house when a huge group of kids came running to the side of my house to put out a fire.  They were setting off paper globe/hot air balloon things in the park, and one happened to catch fire and land in my yard.  Once we took care of that, I went to watch the firework display.  Ecuador has this thing called the Vaca Loca (translates to Crazy Cow).  It is like a saddle thing that a person puts on their back that shoots out fireworks.  So the man is running around with this contraption on his back while fireworks are being shot out all around him…quite entertaining and quite dangerous.  After a few people participated in that, they set off the Castillo.  It was this large tower of fireworks that was pretty awesome to watch.  And of course there was no caution tape of anything of the sort, so I watched with my neighbors right next to the thing with the sparks showering down all around us.  There were a few actual fireworks in the sky too and that was the firework display.

Afterwards the ban came on.  They were great; it was a really lively brass band from some other province in Ecuador.  They even had a couple of go-go dancers to keep the drunken men entertained.  It was super fun because this was the first time I actually hung out with kids my own age and it wasn’t awkward.  Of course I still hung out with the old men like I always do, but it was also nice to be able to meet some new friends that aren’t either over the age of 50 or under the age of 16.  I got home late, but the music was still going when I woke up around 8.  Sunday was a low key day since most everyone in town was either still drunk or really hung over.  The motocross race was supposed to start around 10 but since nobody was awake until later, it started around 1 instead.  Everybody was allowed to race, there were some older men and there was also a 10 year old boy that was able to hold his own with the older guys.  After the race was the second day of bull fighting.  This day was actually pretty boring because there weren’t that many men that were gutsy enough to actually fight with the bulls, but this was the day I had to give away my colcha.  It was the last prize of the day, so it was a little tough to get men out there since everybody was ready to go home.  But with a little persuasion by the announcer a group of guys went out there to compete for the colcha.  A guy ended up getting pinned up against the beams by the bull and got his pants ripped down the back.  So once he was awarded the colcha, (I chickened out of actually giving it away) he wore it around like a skirt to cover up the large hole in the back of his pants.  As everyone was leaving I was going to go out into the arena to take a picture of the guy with the colcha but he started violently vomiting in the middle of the arena so I decided to forgo the picture and let him be.  Later that night there was another dance with a DJ but since it was a Sunday night there weren’t all that many people there, only the die-hards, like my Leonor and Jefferson.  

Vito with the Colcha

Early Monday morning after the fiestas I got on a bus to head to Tumbaco for our Reconnect workshop.  I have been in site about 4.5 months, so PC has what they call Reconnect where everybody gets together for a week, we present on our projects from our communities and we have some training/workshops.  I had to bring a community representative with me as well.  Jefferson made up a bunch of excuses why he couldn’t go so I ended up bringing another guy in town named Jaime.  We presented on BA and got some good advice from PC and that was that.  It was great to see all my fellow volunteers again and to share stories and to hear that it sounds like everybody is going through a lot of the same struggles.  I got to stay with my old host family which was super nice…Julian is getting so big and is talking now!  After Reconnect I went to Quito to hang out for the weekend.  I ate some great Thai food, went to a soccer game at the US Embassy, went for a nice long run at altitude through the streets of Quito, went to a potluck and played some touch football, and had an amazing tailgate with awesome food at the PCVLs apartment where we were able to watch the Michigan/Notre Dame game (no Iowa, bummer) through the wonders of the internet (and something called a sling box?).  I decided I did not want to head back to site yet, so I went and visited another volunteer’s site on Sunday afternoon, and then headed to Riobamba on Monday.  Tuesday morning I decided I couldn’t procrastinate any longer so I hopped on a bus back to the good ole BA.

It was nice coming back because everyone expressed how it was different not running into me for a whole week and that they missed me...aww.  Since I have been back I have gone to a meeting with APROCAI and realized that they have some major issues that need to be worked through so I will be helping them come up with a large cost-benefit analysis to basically show them that they aren’t going to make any money anytime soon.  The problem with all of these cacao organizations is that they get some money from the government and they build a facility and want to start buying/processing cacao without doing any sort of calculations.  No studies whatsoever were done so now they have this deal/contract with the government that they are going to process cacao.  However, with the tools they have right now, they are not going to be profitable.  Other than that, I am making recycled stuff with the kids in the school, baking/cooking with people in town, and working on the family gardens.  Still no word from the municipality about the sewage plans since Jefferson decided to make them sign a contract with me.              

Random Thoughts:

·         I swam in the dirty Chimbo River with my neighbor kids one day.  We found a natural pool area where there aren’t many rapids.  It was super fun and I surprisingly came back free of skin fungi.

·         I still get tons of food brought to me.  And sometimes they even watch me to make sure that I eat it all. 

·         I went fishing with Pepito one afternoon, we ended up catching four pretty good sized fish and they were actually pretty tasty, although it probably isn’t the safest to eat fish that grow up in super polluted water.  Pero no pasa nada.

·         I have all kinds of things growing in my backyard including oritos, mandarin oranges, lemons, quinces, ají peppers, and cacao.  And soon I will have lots of veggies.

·         When I was gone my neighbors took care of Milly for me.  I came back to lots of stories about how he spilled soup, climbed up mosquito nets, harassed the puppies and chickens, and countless other things…whoops.

·         My neighbors watered my garden for me while I was gone and I didn’t even ask them to.  And Luis came to my house one night with a machete because he thought he heard someone trying to break in.  I really got lucky with such good neighbors.

·         I have gotten used to the two piles of bat poop that I have to sweep up every morning.

·         I was leaving the school one day when a group of chickens got smashed by truck.  Leonor was watching and made me bring her the dead chickens.  She started to pluck the mutilated things and said she would cook them for dinner.

·         A meteorite hit near Bucay a couple weeks ago.  Everybody in town is talking about how it’s the sign for the beginning of the end.

·         An evangelical ‘brother’ came to my house one day to preach to me.

·         I woke up one morning to two rat heads and two sets of hind legs and tail on my bedroom floor.  I guess Milly is a good hunter, but only likes the top half of the animals.