Pepinos y Pimientos

There was a dengue outbreak in Buenos Aires.  Nothing too major, but about 5 adults and a few kids were stuck in bed for about a week with the sickness.  Leonor freaked out when she first heard and started yelling at me about how I have to go get someone to fumigate for them.  Now, I realize that the white-American card can work in my favor sometimes here with the higher-ups but she tries to use it a little too frequently for my liking.  It turns out they didn’t need my help anyways, the medical center had to get the positive results from the people with dengue and then I guess they are required to come out and fumigate.  I don’t really know what I had in mind when they said fumigate, but I definitely was not expecting a thirteen-year-old boy with braces to show up with a motorized backpack sprayer.  The whole thing was a really strange experience.  I was napping when I hear a banging at my door and Lizbeth thrusts my cat in my arms saying to keep it in my room so it doesn’t die of fumes.  I’m still half asleep and don’t really make much of it but keep the cat in my room and go back to bed.  I wake up to the sound of a lawnmower, which is strange because they don’t have those here (except for when the municipality brings in one to mow the soccer field every month), in the house.  I feel as though I’m dreaming it but I decide to get up and investigate.  I open my bedroom door to a child with a huge backpack sprayer on his back walking in the house spraying his chemical concoction.  I freak out close the door, throw open my windows, and try not to inhale too deeply.  Pretty soon my eyes and nose start to burn and I decide I need to get out of the house into some fresh air.  I go out to the porch and am greeted by the same fumes, fog, and a drizzle.  Parked in the road in front of the house is a truck marked as Malaria Prevention and there are men in silver hard hats with clipboards walking around putting chalk marks on the houses across the street.  The mixture of having just woke up and the toxic fumes is making my head spin and I’m not sure if any of this is real.  But then Leonor shows up with a large grin of satisfaction on her face and tells me then just got done spraying the whole school.  It begins to rain harder and I shrug and tell Leonor it was a waste for them to fumigate today, and she smiles and assures me that all the chemicals will stick because they mixed them with diesel.  I just shake my head and she says well it’s better than dengue.  A few days later, the concrete floor in the house still shines with diesel and the puddles outside have that wonderful rainbow film of gasoline on the surface.

I have had a lot of free time and have been reading a lot of books lately.  But eventful things that I have done in the past couple of weeks include starting a garden at my host family’s house.  Leonor kept nagging me about the garden and I kept telling her we don’t have seeds yet.  So she tells me to get the ground ready and she will buy the seeds to plant.  Well, I spent two days clearing the remnants of years of burning and dumping trash into the area she wanted to be her garden.  I added what was left of my compost pile (the chickens got into it and destroyed/ate most of it) and sweated through all of my clothes.  When I told her the ground was ready, she hands me two old packets of cucumber and bell pepper seeds that her son had brought over from Germany.  I asked where the rest of the seeds she told me she would be buying were.  This is when she decides to tell me she ran out of money and couldn’t buy the seeds.  She couldn’t have told me this while she watching me sweat buckets preparing the ground for a garden? Nope, that would be too easy.  So, right now she has some beautiful raised beds that are growing weeds. 

Since the chickens destroyed my compost pile, I decided to make a wormbed.  Pepito dragged some lumber from the fields and we spent a morning building a large box with rotting wood and rusted nails.  I got some red worms sent to me and now I have a wormbed.  Except, Leonor will not let her organic stuff rot a little before she puts it in the box so currently the box is swarming with gnats.  Hopefully, she will figure it out sooner or later since she won’t listen to me.

The guy in charge of the canal project showed up at my house one day to drop off AutoCAD plans for me to look over.  It was so satisfying to unroll the sheets on the kitchen table and stare at them.  Efrian, the canal guy, told me that these were project plans.  In reality, it is just the location of the proposed canal and the existing ground profile.  There are no calculations whatsoever.  There was a meeting later that day where BA asked the Secretary of the Ministry of Water to come and look over the project and discuss funding options.  The Secretary almost laughed in their faces as he asked where the calculations, material list, and costs were.  Apparently, Efrian had no idea he needed such things, he just thought he could estimate the canal project at a couple million dollars and go from there.  So the Secretary basically said actually come up with a project plan and then call me up and we will talk money.  This is promising for me because I hope to help with the project plan since they have no money to hire Ecuadorian engineers…woohoo.  Things are super slow moving here though (it took 2 years to write a study on the need for irrigation) so who knows if I will actually get to do much in the 2 years that I am here.             

Random Thoughts:

• Turns out my family lied about my cat breaking the chick’s leg.  The little girl that lives across the street stepped on it accidently.  This does not explain why they cut off the cat’s whiskers.
• We are confused about the gender of my cat.  Eventually I’ll take it to the vet and he’ll figure things out.
•    Danny left.  Leonor locked Vito out of the house one night on purpose (the poor kid is emotionally and physically abused on a regular basis).  I stepped in and opened the door for him because I was sick of how Leonor treats him.  Danny was just coming out of his room and must have agreed with me and starts yelling at Leonor.  I take this as my cue to go in my room and shut the door.  From what I could make out between the sobs and screams, Leonor expects to be treated with respect from an adult like Danny and that she is super hurt that his is questioning her parenting skills, etc.  The argument ends, I hear Danny go into his room and pack his things.  He was gone before anyone got up in the morning.  It’s been about a week and he hasn’t come back yet.
•  My program manager from the Peace Corps came to BA for a general site visit to fill out some more papers to send to good ole Washington DC.  He told me after the visit that I do indeed live with the devil.
•  Patricia and I have been bonding over the new house she is building.  I went with her to a tile store in town and we spent all morning picking out the tile for her kitchen and bathroom.  When we got home though, Leonor said the colors were ugly.  I have also helped Patricia pick up other odds and ends and arrange her furniture in the house.
• The kids and I picked up trash around town one day.  We cleaned all of the school, the park, and part of the soccer field and it looks a lot better now, but there is still a lot of trash in town to pick up…I might make it a weekly thing.  And most of the town has built their platforms trash.
•   I am getting pretty good at being sarcastic in Spanish.
• Pepito has been going out to hunt wild boar lately.  He carries this super old shotgun around and claims he always hears the noises but has get to see the boar to shoot it.

Olla Número 40

There are councils/groups for everything in my town.  There is a general town council, a school council, a church council, a men’s group, two women’s groups, an agriculture group, an irrigation canal council, and two different potable water councils.  On each of these different councils there is a president, vice president, secretary, treasurer, and a head vocal.  Most people in town currently have, or have had at least one or two positions on the councils.  Leonor used to be the treasurer for one of the potable water councils.  This meant she was in charge of the money, as well as the tangible items the council owned.  This included a stove, rope, a couple of knives, and a large pot.  These items were used in the past to cook meals for the workers that were digging the well for water.  A couple of weeks ago the current president, secretary, and treasurer of the water council came to the house to collect the items that Leonor still had in her possession.  She forked over the stove, rope, and knives but was missing the pot.  She claimed that the last president had borrowed the pot and never returned it.  The council members argued with her for a little bit but then accepted the excuse and left. 

The next day there was a water meeting.  The meeting began as every other meeting does; there was a list of topics to be covered and each topic was discussed in turn.  The meeting was coming to a close when the last topic came up; the missing pot.  This is no ordinary pot, this is a pot of size 40, and apparently that is a big deal.  The current president begins with the fact that they recovered the stove in bad condition from Leonor.  Well, Leonor is conveniently not at this meeting and Pepito is there in her place.  Thus, Pepe is put on the spot and asked why the stove was in such awful condition and asked where the pot is.  Well, Pepe runs through a slew of excuses about how if you don’t use something for a long time it is going to rust/get damaged/etc.  And that the old president took the pot.  At this point all the attention turns to the old president.  Keep in mind that this is a large meeting of about 85 people who are all wondering the whereabouts of the pot, size 40.  The old president is caught off guard and claims he never took the pot.  At this point a lot of people start arguing and yelling and it’s hard for me to catch everything but I’m pretty sure he changed his story and said that he did use the pot, but that he returned it.  The meeting is in absolute chaos.  Finally, one wealthier and slightly crazy farm owners speaks up.  He yells out, “I’ve got lots of pots.  What size pot is it again?”  The group responds, 40.  He says, “Well, alright I’ve got tons of 40 pots.  I’ll just give you a size 40 pot.”  You have to know this guy to truly appreciate how comical this was.  But basically it was just this old guy saying, “Enough already, you want a pot?  I’ll give you a damn pot.”  Some people tried to protest saying the person who took the pot had to give it back, etc.  But finally someone changed the subject and the meeting ended normally.  Still though, two weeks later people are talking about the pot.  I was walking back from a cacao farm just the other day, when Jefferson and another lady starting discussing the whereabouts of the pot.  I have never seen a size 40 pot, but, geez, it must be something.             

Random Thoughts:

• My cat broke the leg of one of the chicks in the house while I was gone for the day.  Luckily my host family did not kill my cat, but they did cut off half of his whiskers.
• All the people in Guayas (a province of Ecuador) got together to grill at a pool in Bucay a couple of weeks ago.  It was great to meet new people and eat some great food next to the pool.
• While playing soccer with the kids the other day I was told that I run too fast for a girl.
• We are approaching summer right now which means cooler temps.  And by cooler I mean that I can now eat my soup at lunch without sweating into it.  People are amazed and extremely grossed out by how much I sweat.
• People normally ride 4 people to a motorcycle.  Sometimes women in skirts ride on the motorcycle sideways with a baby in their lap.

Habla Serio

WARNING…the first two paragraphs of this post are a vent session about my host family here.  I have calmed down since writing this about a week ago and have come to terms with the fact that I only have to deal with them for about 6 more weeks.  Feel free to skip over them. 

I cannot stand my host family.  Granted there are some good days, where I actually feel as though we get along but usually it is just when I’m hanging out with Vito, the only cool/relatively sane member of the family/ 13 year old.  When they all get together, that is a completely different situation.  First of all, there are now ten of us living in this little house.  Patricia and her two kids moved in about a week ago because they were kicked out of their house.  So, now I have Patricia and Leonor ganging up on me about everything.  Half of the time I feel like they don’t listen to anything I say and the other half of the time they are contradicting what I am saying.  None of my ideas or inputs are every right with Leonor…she knows all.  She is never at fault for anything and always yelling and making up excuses.  An example: She convinced the county to come and pick up our trash.  In order for the truck to come we had to cut down some branches and build platforms for the trash.  We had about 3 weeks to do this.  I pestered both Leonor and Jefferson a lot about having a minga to build them.  Well, no one did anything.  The trash man came when he was supposed to and there was no trash and no platforms.  He stopped by the house, yelled at Leonor saying the community was unorganized, etc.  When I said, I told you so to Leonor, she flipped out and came up with a whole slew of reasons why is wasn’t her fault (the trash man drove the route backwards, he went too fast, the other people in the community didn’t build their platforms either, etc).  She also constantly contradicts herself.  Another example: She has a family plot of cacao near a fellow volunteer of mine (this volunteer happens to be a 50-yr-old male).  She wants this volunteer to work with her cacao and teach her things.  I told her that he would appreciate that because people in his community don’t trust him with cacao.  I then went on to say that people here don’t trust me with cacao either.  She says well, you don’t have cacao in your country, and haven’t worked with it before, so why would we trust you.  I agreed with that but then I asked why she would trust the other volunteer when he is from the same country as me and doesn’t have experience with it either.  She didn’t know how to respond to that and made up some excuse that I didn’t even bother to understand.  I am sick of her thinking that I am a dumb child.  

Most of the time I feel like she is lecturing me like I’m a ten year old and telling me all of the things that I should know how to do at this point in my life, like giving people injections for example (because that is totally legal in the US and definitely useful).  They are constantly criticizing me on my appearance, how I’m fat, ugly when I don’t wear makeup or my hair down, how all of the mosquito bites on my legs are hideous, how the new pimple on my face is really red, etc.  I realize that this a cultural thing and I put up with it, but it gets old when one person in the family makes a comment and then the 8 others make the same or a similar comment soon after.  They also say that I don’t know anything about the US because I don’t know all facts of Mike Tyson or Michael Jordan’s lives.  The whole Danny issue is getting really old as well, I am sick of going places with Leonor and them asking her if I’m the new daughter-in-law.  And then there is the whole issue with my ‘love kitten;’ the kitten that Danny gifted me.  The kitten likes to meow a lot and I can’t control it no matter how much I give it to eat or refuse to feed it.  In return the family likes to yell at me about my annoying cat, and they constantly ask me what I would do if they were to kill it or if the dog were to eat it or if a car were to run over it.  At first I just thought they were joking but then I found out that they killed four cats in the past with rat poison because they were annoying them.  I’m concerned for my poor kitten.  I’m concerned for my sanity.  I’m concerned that I am going to snap one day and just freak out and start screaming at all of them in English like a crazy person.

Other than issues with my family everything is going alright here.  I’ve been doing a random assortment of things to pass the time.  I harvested corn (they let it dry before they harvest it…you basically shuck the cob from the stalk) and de-grained corn (taking all the kernels off the cob to sell by the pound) by hand one week.  They brought in an old rickety machine one day though to finish the de-graining job.  In the end we had 107 quintales (100 lb. bags) of corn to sell.  I’ve gone to some APROCAI meetings and pruned some more cacao trees, but haven’t gotten to work with it too much.  We had a minga to weed/landscape the park (everyone landscapes with machetes…pretty cool to watch them perfectly trim a bush with a machete), a minga to lay hosing for water in the school (they actually accepted an engineering idea I had about the part of the hosing under the road), and built the trash platform in front of my house (nobody else has built theirs yet).  I have harvested and sold coffee (it is $30 for a 100 lb. bag of mixed ripe/unripe).  I run with a group of kids in the afternoons and then we play Frisbee or soccer after (the women I had running with me are now conveniently washing their clothes every time I come by to get them).  I have a pretty good following of kids in the town; they see me with the Frisbee and they head to the soccer field.  I’m still teaching English in the school two times a week.  After an awful week where a kid left crying, chaos in the classroom, and multiple headaches, I managed to keep them under control this past week and think that I have found a good balance of teacher and friend with the kids.  I got MAGAP (the ministry of Ag in Ecuador) to donate seeds for family gardens so we’ll hopefully be starting those soon.  I went with Jefferson and some other APROCAI members to an entrepreneurship class (a 2-week certification class set up by a government organization here) two days.  The class was interesting because I have never been to an adult learning class in the states or in Ecuador.  The teacher liked to pick on me a lot since she remembered the name of the Gringa.  It was, however, kind of fun to be able to answer questions and participate in class just as well as all the others, even though it was all in Spanish.  I’ve also gone to countless other meetings of all of the random groups in my little town.  I am amazed by how many different councils they have for a town of less than 200 people. 

I went to Riobamba one day to go to a ‘rally’ of sorts for the support of my provincial governor.  I am technically part of the province of Chimborazo which is mostly sierra; BA is one of the only coastal towns.  Thus, most of the people at the rally were indigenous Quechua speakers of the Sierra.  Most of them were dressed in their brightly colored ponchos and shawls, ornate jewelry, and bowler hats.  It was a really cool experience to be surrounded by literally thousands of indigenous people and see how much support they had for this governor and the projects he was supporting.  Mayors from certain regions gave speeches about all kinds of development projects that the provincial government was helping them with and everyone would cheer after every project.  Most projects were fairly simple, helping to better the most crucial things, such as health.  Then, the mayor of Cumandá got up and started to give his speech and talked about the millions of dollars that were used for the highway project in town and the millions more that they were going to use to get the irrigation project started.  The crowd was silent.  It was refreshing to see how the people were unimpressed by numbers/money.  And it kind of made me sad that I wasn’t placed in the Sierra in an indigenous community.  People in Cumandá are mostly mestizo and are super into status and money.  Some people in BA are like this too, especially my host-family.  I thought leaving the states I would get away from the brand names and technology, but people here can’t get enough of it.  My family says they don’t have enough money to buy fruits and vegetables regularly but after the next corn harvest they said they are going to get DirecTV.  It blows my mind how their priorities are so different from what I think they should be.  I think this will be an issue that I’ll have over the next two years.

Random Thoughts:

• My neighbor (who I have only seen once) likes to blast music at 5 am every morning.

• When men take a break from working or from playing soccer they like to lift up their shirts to expose their stomachs, rub them, and walk around like that for a while.  I guess it is their way of cooling off. 

• Most of the kids in my town have nicknames and most happen to be animals; my favorite kids are Cat and Frog.

• My cat has fleas.  I brought a flea collar from the states (bought it at the Dollar Store) and decided since it was too big for my kitten I would just rub it all over and hopefully that would kill the fleas.  Well she proceeded to lick herself after that and then went absolutely crazy for the rest of the night…I woke up to her dry-heaving and throwing up on my bed.  I think I drugged the poor cat.

• It is really easy to tell the men of Cumandá and Buenos Aires apart.  The men in Cumandá wear button up short sleeve shirts that are only buttoned up a little ways so that their chest hair is exposed but their beer bellies are covered up.  And the ‘v’ part of their chest is also normally sun burnt. 

• We go through a liter of palm oil every 3-4 days.

• Pepito bought me an empanada while watching the Saturday soccer match in BA.  I got violently ill the next day and could not keep water or food down at all…I have never thrown up so much in my life.  In the morning my family told me that I was exercising too much and that made me sick.  Later in the afternoon, my little host brother said I was pregnant.  In the evening my family finally accepted that I must have eaten something bad.  Leonor sits me down and begins to rub an egg all over my face and body and she keeps blessing me with it.  She then breaks the egg into a glass of water and ‘reads’ it.  Apparently my egg was clean so I wasn’t really sick…ok did she want to see my vomit in the toilet or outside of my window?  Regardless, I will not be eating any more empanadas.

• I used animals to teach the kids the alphabet.  Two kids got into a fist fight after class because the one kept calling the other Pig…whoops.

• I met a guy after a meeting one day that lived in Chicago for 30 years, retired, and moved back here.

• My ten year old host sister has a Freudian oral fixation issue.  When she is upset she wants to breastfeed.  I have witnessed her actually do this with Leonor…disturbing. 
•  People in BA know a select number of English phrases that they like to use frequently, normally at incorrect times.  They include ‘Let’s go,’ ‘Shut up,’ ‘Thank you very much,’ and ‘One moment please.’

• I have absolutely no table manners anymore.  Every meal I have a spoon in my right hand, a piece of meat in my left hand, both elbows on the table, and a wide open mouth to shovel in the rice.

•  Sometimes I feel like I am in a horror movie in the mornings when everyone heads out to the farms.  It is still kind of dark, normally misting a little, and everyone is walking down the street with a machete in hand, a Ghostbuster-style backpack sprayer on their back, and in large rubber boots.