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.