No Pasa Nada

This past week and a half have pretty much been vacation.  I had a Tech Trip to Puerto Quito (transitional zone between the mountains and the coast) and I went to my family’s farm in the Oriente for Carnaval.  All in all it was a pretty good time.

I’ll start with the Tech Trip first.  Originally all of the Ag folk were going to the Oriente to one of our PCVL’s sites to see hands on how a site functions, who the people are, more technical stuff, etc.  Well, the site is super small and PC thought 21 people showing up there would be a little too intense, so they split us in half: one half went to the jungle and the other (my group) to the coast.  We left early Monday morning and arrived in Puerto Quito a little before lunch.  Taking a crowded smelly bus down through the winding roads of the Andes was quite the adventure, but the scenery was awesome.  I started sweating as soon as I stepped off the bus onto the dirt road that led to the school we would be staying at.  The sun is super intense in Ecuador and with high humidity and scorching temperatures, the climate was quite a shocker compared to the perfect weather in Quito.  We all piled into the back of a pick-up truck and headed down the road to the school.  When I say school, I really mean resort; this place was pretty awesome.  It is an integrated farm that serves as a teaching ‘school’ for students around Ecuador.  It was a lot like a jungle resort/summer camp.  The rest of Monday consisted of lunch, tours around the grounds/farm/river/island, learning about various plants, harvesting yucca, and lounging by the pool. 

Tuesday we walked down the road a little ways to a family who lives on their own integrated farm.  Here the wife showed us around her large property in the middle of the jungle.  All her water comes from the mountain above her in a little spring/stream and all of her crops have been planted in the forest without disturbing it.  She has also been planting more native trees in the forest because Ecuador offers ‘oxygen money’ (similar to the carbon credit program).  She has everything on the farm including cacao, coffee, corn, Jack fruit, sugar cane, various bananas, tons of citrus, yucca, a veggie garden, a fruit garden, and a lot of herbs and other flowers and lots of others that I’m forgetting.  At one point when we were stopped listening to a spiel about cacao, the lady stops talking mid-sentence, instructs us to not move, and begins to machete chop the ground right next to my feet.  Turns out it was an extremely poisonous spider/tarantula thing that was crawling by our feet…awesome.  After we found out about all the deadly spiders in the area, she informed us that a 10-ft anaconda also lives on her property.  In the afternoon we constructed a worm bed, learned about tilapia and caught a couple, checked out her organic fertilizer tank, and learned about the organic pesticides she uses.  I got to check out the one-street town of Puerto Quito that evening and during the ride found out that I’ll most likely be on the coast in a town a little more arid and about three times as big as Puerto Quito, but Eduardo, my training instructor, wouldn’t tell me anything else, so who knows.

Wednesday morning we went to the other farm again and learned about Nivel-A terracing/contouring.  We basically made A-frame levels with branches and a rock pendulum to measure out contour ditches for drainage.  It’s a super simple but super helpful tool when you have crops on a slope.  We also planted bamboo along the ditches to help control the erosion.  The afternoon was an interesting one.  The theme of the afternoon was small animals.  The beginning was fine, we collected chicken eggs, cleaned the coops, messed around with the chickens, feed/bathed the pigs, and then we went and visited the guinea pigs and rabbits.  Two rabbits were thrown in a bag.  We headed back to the kitchen of the school and were told the rabbits were dinner.  One of the girls in our group, Elizabeth, decided she would kill the white rabbit.  We had been told by our PC instructor that you should break the rabbit’s neck first so that it doesn’t feel anything when you cut its throat.  Well, the Ecuadorian workers told us that we didn’t need to do that so they handed Elizabeth a knife, pinned down the rabbit and told her to cut.  She starts to cut and cut and apply more pressure but nothing is happening and the rabbit is just sitting there, eerily calm.  It turns out the knife was really dull.  After a thorough sharpening, she begins to cut again.  The bunny then opens its mouth, bares its teeth, and lets out the most awful scream that I have ever heard in my life.  At this point I think everyone turns away and wants to cry.  But poor Elizabeth has to keep going to put the poor bunny out of its misery.  When I worked up the courage to turn back around, the perfectly white bunny was stained bright red with its head half off.  Next, someone had to kill the black bunny.  This time we knew that the neck had to be broken first, so the guys struggle to yank and pull at the poor black rabbit to break its neck.  Well they do it and then another girl in the group cuts its neck, cuts off its head, and then they start to skin the rabbits.  At this point I’m already extremely traumatized, but the fact that two bunny heads are just sitting on the blood soaked concrete makes it seem like I’m in a horror movie.  Long story short, they skin the rabbits, remove the insides, wash them, and then hand them to the cooks.  That night at dinner I ate one of the white bunny’s legs.  It was actually quite good, but I don’t think I’ll ever come near a bunny again.  And, I’m trying really hard to repress that awful scream.    

Thursday we got up super early to go milk the cows.  I could barely get any milk out and really have no interest in ever getting under a smelly cow again to try and milk it.  After, we headed out to the other farm to learn about pruning cacao trees.  Basically, this meant a morning of sawing, machete hacking, and snipping branches off trees.  After lunch, we went back to the farm and learned how to make yogurt.  The family makes their own yogurt and cheese, packages it, and sells it around town.  They are also expanding to make other things like jellies, and they want to bottle water.  They recently constructed a huge water reservoir and were researching what type of filtration system.  They have sedimentation tanks for the irrigation water, and a small RO system in their kitchen for the drinking water.  Apparently, RO is the system of choice down here, which is strange because it is so super expensive.  They think that they are going to put in a larger RO system for the bottled water and expect that and the tank construction to cost around $20k.  That night and the previous night a couple of the sons from the family farm came over to hang out, as well as their German volunteer and her brother, mother, and friend.  It was pretty interesting and fun to hear English, Spanish, and German and the translations between all of them.  Friday we got up and finished the yogurt process and then caught the bus back to Quito.     

I woke up Saturday thinking that we were headed to the family farm in the Oriente early, but when lunch rolled around and Sylvia made fun of me for already having my bag packed I realized we weren’t going for a while.  Sylvia came in my room around 3 and told me that Edison told her that we’d be leaving ‘ya mismo.’  This phrase has been used a lot lately and basically just means, ‘eh, eventually.’  Looks like I’ll need to get use to things not being on time.  We left around 4.  Packed in a pick-up truck was Edison, his wife, their 7-year-old and newborn baby, Sylvia, Johana, Julian, and me.  It was quite the interesting ride up including lots of crying, laughing, spilt breast milk, tight curves, squished bodies, and close calls when passing cars.  We stopped in a larger town called Baeza before the farm to meet up with Fausto and the others.  After we picked up some last minute goods and watched a ton of kids get silly stringed for Carnaval, we continued on to the farm.  It was dark when we got there but I could still see the house and it was quite large and fancy compared to the workers’ shack a few feet away.  Sylvia showed me to my ‘room’ (it was a bed in the middle on hanging blankets at the top of the stairs, very fort-esque and cool).  I still don’t know how everyone fit in the house because there were four bedrooms, 9 adults, 5 kids, and 1 bathroom.

The next morning everyone was up by six and off to milk the cows.  I of course forgot my rubber boots so I trudged through mud and cow poop in my TOMS.  They have about 15 cows, 1 bull, and 7 or so calves (one was born the same day we were there) and automatic milker suction things…pretty interesting, if you’re into cows.  They kept asking me to compare their farm with farms in the US and I kept telling them I have no idea what milk/cow farms in the US are like because I’ve never seen one and they just couldn’t understand that.  We brought some of the fresh milk back to the house and yours truly drank it for breakfast and am still feeling fine.  We went to town (Cosanga) to the little Carnaval fair they had set up.  It was a cow competition.  It basically consisted of lots of cows being dragged around, a guy critiquing them, and some crowned women in high heels walking through the mud to award them ribbons.  I’m sure they have these somewhere in the US too…county fairs maybe?  We went back and I was told to rest, the usual.  When I woke up Sylvia was cleaning chicken carcasses in the kitchen and I told her I was bummed I didn’t get to see her kill them, so she went into detail about how she killed them and then showed me how to properly open the stomach/gizzard, get rid of the grains, and cook it.  While the food was cooking, Sylvia realized that she had locked the keys in the truck and didn’t have a spare set…uh oh.  When Fausto showed up a few minutes later she had to tell him, he let out a round of swears, and then stomped off to his cows (typical move).  So Sylvia, Johana, and I brainstorm how we’re going to break into the car.  The windows are manual and I luckily hadn’t rolled mine up securely when I got out of the car so we were able to lower it just enough to stick some wire in.  We made a loop and somehow, after a struggle, I was able to move the crank enough to lower the window so we could stick our arms in and open the lock.  We didn’t tell Fausto right away when he got back, so he stomped around some more until he saw the truck key on the kitchen table.  The power went out around 7:30 that night so we sat around with candles for some time before we all just decided to go to bed.

The power still wasn’t on in the morning so the cows had to be milked by hand.  Of course I had to try milking.  After a couple minutes I had had my fill…the hot milk coming from a cow creeped me out.  After breakfast we all piled into the cars and headed further into the jungle (I should note that the farm was described to me as in the jungle, which I assumed meant hot…definitely cold on the farm but warm the further you go in) and stopped at a zoo.  It was a typical small zoo, except that you could go up to any cage you wanted and stick your hand in and touch the animals.  Also, one of the most popular cages was the squirrel.  They don’t have any here and apparently they are really cool if you’ve never seen one before.  This squirrel wasn’t even that great because he was missing most of the hair on his tail.  After the zoo we drove a little further to a river where we swam.  It was here that Sylvia kept using my favorite phrase so far, ‘no pasa nada.’  Dama, the 7-year-old, kept saying she didn’t want to go under water because she might swallow the water and get sick.  Sylvia just kept saying no pasa nada, basically ‘eh who cares, nothing bad will happen.’  After swimming we drove to find grilled and skewered chanchurros.  Sylvia tried to explain to me what they were before, describing them as an animal with no hair, feet, or hands, so of course I ask if it’s a snake or worm or insect but the answer was no.  She kept saying they only live in this one tree and eat this one type of fruit.  Well when she showed up with the skewer I realized she was talking about grubs/maggots.  I didn’t really want to try them but she just said, ‘no pasa nada’ so I tried the thing and it tasted like dirt.  Luckily right after that we went and got some real lunch.  We then drove back to the farm, packed up our stuff, and got in the car to head back to Tumbaco.  The drive back was the most ridiculous amount of close-call passing, super-fast tight curves, and even a pull-over by the cops because of the ridiculous driving.  The cop asked where we were coming from, where we were going, why Edison was trying to pass on a curve when there were police cones, and then asked if we could take some hitchhikers back with us.  Luckily, the bed of the truck was full of bags/suitcases so we went on our way and made it back to Tumbaco safely without any hitchhikers in tow. 

Random Thoughts:

·         Surprisingly no one here is a backseat driver.  The only thing that someone may say super calmly is, ‘car’ when one is quickly approaching and we’re in the wrong lane.

·         My host-family is really into the fact that I’m a gringo.  Every time Fausto introduces me to someone he says I’m his daughter, pulls up his shirt sleeve to his paler shoulder and holds it up to my arm saying, ‘see, we’re the same color.’  They even named a cow gringa because she had a white face.  Also, when we went swimming Sylvia said we could have used my legs the night before in the power outage as lights.

·         Everything ends in ‘ito/a.’  They take a word and then add that ending making it hard to understand things at times.  I do, however, like that I’m Sarita.

·         After a cow gives birth, it produces milk that is high is proteins and a really gross yellow color.  When you boil it, it curdles, and people like to eat that here.

·         I surprisingly have not seen any llamas yet.

·         There are a lot of Volkswagens here, especially pick-up trucks.