Building a solar drier with the members of my coffee association.
Planting coffee for seedlings with a local family.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Work Pictures
Building a solar drier with the members of my coffee association.Planting coffee for seedlings with a local family.
Monday, July 14, 2008
A Few More
Baby tilapia.
Crawfish for dinner.
Dispulping coffee. Is that a word in English?
Cooking vegetable soup with the kids in the elementary school.
Coffee drying in Fundochamba.
Coffee drying in Fundochamba.
The coffee team.
Gerry and Ursula, my nearest neighbors.
Coffee for processing and export.
Dispulping, washing and fermenting.Recent and Not So Recent Photos
Papayas are everywhere!
Our weekly household plantain and banana supply.
La Victoria Elementary School.
Learning how to identify defects that affect flavor in coffee beans.
Vilcabamba hike.
Cacao
A Zaruma hillside with afternoon fog drifting in.
Light roast, dark roast.
Café Lajense. Our coffee.
The processing plant.
Roasting coffee.
Team Supreme saving the planet from erosion.
Cacao fermenting.
La Victoria from a distance.
One of many roadside shrines to the Virgin.
Talking about trafficking.
The main road in Dos Quebradas, a nearby town.
Riding in Trucks with Kids
These days, a good ride in the back of a camioneta never fails to lift my spirits. Not since I was little, when my Dad let us ride buckled into the big seat he installed in the bed of his blue pick-up truck, have I gotten such a thrill out of so basic a mode of transportation. As a child, such simple things always excited me, but I believe that my renewed enthusiasm as an adult is mainly on account of it being a refreshing break from the miserable bus transit system we have in Las Lajas. Every day, from 5 AM to 7 PM, the ancient fleet of county buses lumbers slowly along the pothole-ridden road that runs between La Victoria and Arenillas, our nearest town. They struggle up hills like Thomas the Tank Engine, choking on their own fumes, and creep slowly around every bend in the road as if they are afraid of what lies ahead. No more than a half hour´s drive in a decent car, the trip by bus takes double the time--that is, if you don´t break down en route. The buses´ interiors aren´t exactly the paragon of stylish travel either. The filth from years of carrying passengers and their various cargo items (chickens and pigs tied up in sacks, dogs, buckets of fresh milk, coffee, live crabs, and dripping pots of food) is enough to put the most phlegmatic of travelers on the edge of their seat, counting down the kilometers to their destination. I have found that the most unfortunate circumstance that one can find oneself in on a trip to town is to be sitting next to a particularly smelly piece of cargo (or its particularly smelly owner) on a hot day, in a row with a dust-covered window that is jammed shut from grime and age. Unfortunately, this is not at all an unusual situation. I am accustomed to these bus rides now, but I live for the fortuitous passing of a camioneta going my direction, regardless of its passengers and their goods.
On a recent afternoon Elizabeth, a fellow volunteer, and I went out to a small nearby community for our first presentation in a series on trafficking of persons we are going to be working on with groups in the area. This year´s unusually bad rainy season had washed out the road to the town, so we had to make our way in on foot. Under the scorching afternoon sun, we trekked our way up to the tiny cluster of houses in the hills. When we finished, we made our way back down again, slipping and sliding in the red mud all the way to the main road. Exhausted and sweaty, we took a seat on the steps of a roadside shrine for our local Virgin and began our wait for the bus. After the first twenty minutes, the only vehicles that had passed were a car bursting with passengers, a motorcycle with a family of four piled onto it, and a truck full of cows whose odor reminded me of the raw milk I was served that morning at breakfast. Then there was a long period of silence. Sitting on the edge of that road, in the middle of nowhere, we strained our ears for the rumble of a bus beyond the tropical afternoon hum of birds and insects. There was nothing. I was really thirsty and actually looking forward to the icy shower that awaited me at home. When would the next bus come? In five minutes? An hour? Four hours? At 9 PM? Then, suddenly, there was a sound. We stopped our conversation and listened harder. It wasn´t the slow approach of a bus, or the Pilsner truck, audible for a good few minutes before coming into sight. We heard it and then it was there; barreling around the curve came a camioneta! We grabbed our bags and stepped to the curb. As our potential ride came closer, Elizabeth let out a groan. I looked closely and saw that the truck´s driver and copilot were two boys from her youth group, ages 12 and 14 respectively. They recognized us and began to slow down. It was one of those moments that I experience more or less on a daily basis in Ecuador, where I am faced with a decision between discomfort, inconvenience, or offending someone, and bending my personal rules a bit to fit the way of life here. In the words of my friend and former Peace Corps volunteer, Grace, sometimes it is easier to just "go native". And I must agree with her that at times it can be wickedly satisfying. If we didn´t get in this truck, how long would it be until the next one came? He seemed like a decent driver, even if he did have to sit on the edge of the seat to reach the pedals. Furthermore, in his Six Pillars of Badness our Country Director, Cisco, says ABSOLUTELY NO motorcycles, and ABSOLUTELY NO 12 year-old boys. But he didn´t say he´d kick us out for camioneta rides with 12 year-olds as chauffeurs. So, we hopped in and as the youngster let the clutch pop, lurching us back onto the road, my mood brightened and all of my worries melted away.
Certainly, the convenience and superior traveling conditions of a camioneta ride are the main factors behind my being partial to it as a mode of transportation. But there is something else—the wild feeling of freedom I get as we race down the road; the sensation that I am flying, as the wind pounds in my ears and brings tears to my eyes; the close-up view of world as it rushes by, making me feel like an integral part of it, rather than a passive observer on the other side of a dirty window.
The world that was rushing past us that day was so unusually beautiful that I am still feeling the high from it. The dark afternoon rain clouds, characteristic of this time of year, had begun to creep into the valley from the south. The muted light that they created brought out every shade of green in the foliage, and made the terracotta clay exposed by erosion glow like the smoldering coals in the distance. A few tiny breaks in the clouds where the sun shone through illuminated patches of the sky and earth like scenes out of a Turner landscape painting. I looked out the back of the truck as we dipped into and climbed out of small valleys. The road and trees in the foreground shrunk behind us, making it seem as if the distant hills of Peru were growing larger and larger, up out of the earth. I closed my eyes, breathed a deep breath, felt the perfect temperature of the air on my face and smiled. Unable to contain my delight, my smile stretched into a silly grin that stuck to my face until we pulled into the center of La Victoria. As I hopped off the tailgate, with wild hair and tears from the wind dripping down my cheeks, I felt happier than I had all week.
On a recent afternoon Elizabeth, a fellow volunteer, and I went out to a small nearby community for our first presentation in a series on trafficking of persons we are going to be working on with groups in the area. This year´s unusually bad rainy season had washed out the road to the town, so we had to make our way in on foot. Under the scorching afternoon sun, we trekked our way up to the tiny cluster of houses in the hills. When we finished, we made our way back down again, slipping and sliding in the red mud all the way to the main road. Exhausted and sweaty, we took a seat on the steps of a roadside shrine for our local Virgin and began our wait for the bus. After the first twenty minutes, the only vehicles that had passed were a car bursting with passengers, a motorcycle with a family of four piled onto it, and a truck full of cows whose odor reminded me of the raw milk I was served that morning at breakfast. Then there was a long period of silence. Sitting on the edge of that road, in the middle of nowhere, we strained our ears for the rumble of a bus beyond the tropical afternoon hum of birds and insects. There was nothing. I was really thirsty and actually looking forward to the icy shower that awaited me at home. When would the next bus come? In five minutes? An hour? Four hours? At 9 PM? Then, suddenly, there was a sound. We stopped our conversation and listened harder. It wasn´t the slow approach of a bus, or the Pilsner truck, audible for a good few minutes before coming into sight. We heard it and then it was there; barreling around the curve came a camioneta! We grabbed our bags and stepped to the curb. As our potential ride came closer, Elizabeth let out a groan. I looked closely and saw that the truck´s driver and copilot were two boys from her youth group, ages 12 and 14 respectively. They recognized us and began to slow down. It was one of those moments that I experience more or less on a daily basis in Ecuador, where I am faced with a decision between discomfort, inconvenience, or offending someone, and bending my personal rules a bit to fit the way of life here. In the words of my friend and former Peace Corps volunteer, Grace, sometimes it is easier to just "go native". And I must agree with her that at times it can be wickedly satisfying. If we didn´t get in this truck, how long would it be until the next one came? He seemed like a decent driver, even if he did have to sit on the edge of the seat to reach the pedals. Furthermore, in his Six Pillars of Badness our Country Director, Cisco, says ABSOLUTELY NO motorcycles, and ABSOLUTELY NO 12 year-old boys. But he didn´t say he´d kick us out for camioneta rides with 12 year-olds as chauffeurs. So, we hopped in and as the youngster let the clutch pop, lurching us back onto the road, my mood brightened and all of my worries melted away.
Certainly, the convenience and superior traveling conditions of a camioneta ride are the main factors behind my being partial to it as a mode of transportation. But there is something else—the wild feeling of freedom I get as we race down the road; the sensation that I am flying, as the wind pounds in my ears and brings tears to my eyes; the close-up view of world as it rushes by, making me feel like an integral part of it, rather than a passive observer on the other side of a dirty window.
The world that was rushing past us that day was so unusually beautiful that I am still feeling the high from it. The dark afternoon rain clouds, characteristic of this time of year, had begun to creep into the valley from the south. The muted light that they created brought out every shade of green in the foliage, and made the terracotta clay exposed by erosion glow like the smoldering coals in the distance. A few tiny breaks in the clouds where the sun shone through illuminated patches of the sky and earth like scenes out of a Turner landscape painting. I looked out the back of the truck as we dipped into and climbed out of small valleys. The road and trees in the foreground shrunk behind us, making it seem as if the distant hills of Peru were growing larger and larger, up out of the earth. I closed my eyes, breathed a deep breath, felt the perfect temperature of the air on my face and smiled. Unable to contain my delight, my smile stretched into a silly grin that stuck to my face until we pulled into the center of La Victoria. As I hopped off the tailgate, with wild hair and tears from the wind dripping down my cheeks, I felt happier than I had all week.
Saturday, June 14, 2008
La Victoria Photos
Cows outside my window.
Mother´s Day lunch with my host family.
Looking down on La Victoria.
Making organic fertilizer with members of the coffee association.
This flower is the size of my head.
Coffee drying on the ground. This method reduces the price farmers can get for it on the market.
The Association´s processing plant.
Thursday, June 5, 2008
La Victoria Photos
The view from a coffee farm in the mountains outside of La Victoria.
Another beautiful landscape.
My room.
Waterfall on coffee plantation.
It´s almost harvest time...
News from La Victoria
Hello to all.
I apologize for not writing for such a long time. Blogging is obviously not my favorite activity and never having access to a computer makes it even harder for me to get my act together and write about what I´m doing. Here is a little bit about my Peace Corps site. I apologize in advance for errors and the very apparent lack of effort I put into writing this. Hopefully, I can get my hands on a computer so that I can type things up from my town and have them ready to post when I come into the city to use the internet.
I hope that everyone is well.
La Victoria, my new home, is a small town nestled among the foothills of the Andes, a few miles from the Peruvian border. It is beautiful, tranquil and somewhat remote, connected to Machala, its nearest city, by two and a half hours of miserable road. Its residents will proudly tell you that La Victoria is the capital of the lovely county of Las Lajas, where the best coffee in Ecuador is grown. And they will brag, with a sense of ownership, about the Petrified Forest of Puyango (the largest on the continent) just miles down the road. Nevertheless, aside from Puyango and the region´s agricultural importance, this part of Ecuador is mainly seen by tourists as a place that they have to pass through to get to Peru.
Two thousand people live in La Victoria. Another three thousand live in the surrounding villages that make up the rest of the county. Appearing every few miles on the roads up into the hills, where coffee is planted on every slope, these towns are made up of nothing more than a cluster of run-down cement houses, and sometimes, a building that is meant to be a church. La Victoria, where all of the local action is, boasts a few tiendas (tiny stores that sell just enough to stay in business); a crumbling health center offering marginal health services (only two of which I will every use: antivenom shots, if I am bitten by a poisonous snake, and an ambulance to get me somewhere else); a church (but no priest because the last one ran off with a local woman, and the one before that got someone pregnant); a municipal building; an elementary school and a high school; two cabinas (places where you can make outlandishly expensive phone calls); a tiny weekend market (on a good day they have some produce, but mostly it’s just meat hanging on hooks); and a lovely central park where the drunks hang out on Sundays. Fortunately, I have found that what La Victoria lacks in services, access to the rest of the world and things to do, is made up for by its gorgeous pastoral setting and its people.
I am once again living with a family for a few months until I move into my own place in August. The Nieves family has a big house on the main road in the town center. As my community counterpart and the supervisor of my work as a volunteer, Alberto Nieves and his wife Eva have been taking good care of me since my arrival. Also living in the house are Alberto´s 80 year-old parents and an agronomist who is also working with the local coffee farmers. I have a nice room in the front of the house, overlooking the town´s little park. I am not living with bugs, chickens and pigs, as I feared, but I do have to put up with the usual developing-world noise—the constant roaring of motorcycles and trucks, dog and cat fights, donkeys, roosters (wakeup calls start at 3 AM or earlier), drunk men, and the neighbour constantly loading and unloading the propane tanks he delivers to people´s houses. At first this chaos seemed unbearable, but I am slowly becoming accustomed to it. Hopefully, I will soon be like an Ecuadorian and not notice it at all. Alberto has a small organic coffee plantation and works a family farm with his parents and a few of his brothers. Eva is a housewife and attends to a video arcade while she cooks and cleans. They have never been able to have children, which in rural Ecuador is considered a monumental misfortune, but they seem happy. Alberto´s parents, after raising nine children and a few grandchildren, still work on their farm which is their only source of income and food. Alberto´s father is a tough old man. Although he is still recovering from his simultaneous bouts with dengue and typhoid last year, he goes to their farm to work at least three days a week. Alberto´s mother, who married his father when she was 14, also helps out on the farm and does the cooking and housework for the two of them. They also do all of the processing of their crops, including drying and shelling peanuts, coffee and cacao, and husking bushels and bushels of corn, by hand.
The Peace Corps has sent me to work in La Victoria with the Association of Organic Coffee Growers of Las Lajas (ACOLL) at the request of Alberto, who is the organization´s promoter and former president. ACOLL has asked for my help with organizational development projects and commercialization of their coffee. In addition, I will be assisting with work on a larger development project that is providing coffee farmers in the region with technical assistance in organic production practices, integrated farm planning and management, and increasing coffee production. During my first few months here I will be spending most of my time going around to the farms, observing coffee production and processing activities, attending training sessions and helping project’s agronomist with anything that I can. After I learn more, and have a clearer picture of exactly what help the association needs, I will start working more on my own.
Peace Corps training prepared me with a broad base of general knowledge about organic agriculture in Ecuador, which I have already applied to my work here. Unfortunately, the tropical agriculture sessions focused mainly on cacao, so Alberto has been spending a lot of time taking me around to all of the coffee farms, showing me the different steps of processing, and answering my never-ending questions. The association is a fairly well-organized group of 23 organic coffee farmers. It has some decent operational systems in place that enable them to pool their resources to produce a high-quality, value-added product. Before, the formation of the association, each of the farmers sold their coffee individually, unprocessed, directly to intermediaries, who paid them very little for it. In addition, even though many of them were producing coffee that was essentially organic, they were unable to afford the cost of the organic certification on their own. Now, as a group they have larger quantities of coffee to offer to buyers, the cost of certifying their farms is shared between everyone, and they have begun to process their coffee themselves. After the harvest, the farmers peel, ferment, wash, hand-select and dry the beans on their farms. Then, in a small plant that they built, the coffee is roasted to perfection with the giant roaster they were able to buy on credit as an association. Afterwards, the packaging of the coffee is done in Alberto and Eva´s dining room. The final product, ready for sale, brings in almost double the price of raw coffee directly off of the trees. This is all a nice start to increasing their incomes and growing their business, but there is no way that ACOLL will survive without some serious organizational development and, most importantly, a consistent market for their product.
More than a month has passed since my arrival in La Victoria and I am just now beginning to feel more settled and at ease. I spent my first weeks here overwhelmed by a roller coaster of emotions that left me exhausted at the end of each day. In a matter of hours, I would go from feeling like an ebullient child, full of enthusiasm and excitement about everything I plan to do and learn while here, to wanting to pack up my bags and go home. These sentiments have not and will not ever go away completely. I’m sure that throughout my service I will have many moments where a wonderful experience or the planning of an activity will fill me with enthusiasm. I also don’t doubt that, even towards the end of my time here, I will still cry in bed at night from loneliness or struggle with misgivings about my work and the impact of my efforts. I´ve found that the best way to approach each day is to focus only on that day, or the week ahead rather than a year, or two years down the road. It´s like what my parents always said and I always hated to hear: one day at a time.
I apologize for not writing for such a long time. Blogging is obviously not my favorite activity and never having access to a computer makes it even harder for me to get my act together and write about what I´m doing. Here is a little bit about my Peace Corps site. I apologize in advance for errors and the very apparent lack of effort I put into writing this. Hopefully, I can get my hands on a computer so that I can type things up from my town and have them ready to post when I come into the city to use the internet.
I hope that everyone is well.
La Victoria, my new home, is a small town nestled among the foothills of the Andes, a few miles from the Peruvian border. It is beautiful, tranquil and somewhat remote, connected to Machala, its nearest city, by two and a half hours of miserable road. Its residents will proudly tell you that La Victoria is the capital of the lovely county of Las Lajas, where the best coffee in Ecuador is grown. And they will brag, with a sense of ownership, about the Petrified Forest of Puyango (the largest on the continent) just miles down the road. Nevertheless, aside from Puyango and the region´s agricultural importance, this part of Ecuador is mainly seen by tourists as a place that they have to pass through to get to Peru.
Two thousand people live in La Victoria. Another three thousand live in the surrounding villages that make up the rest of the county. Appearing every few miles on the roads up into the hills, where coffee is planted on every slope, these towns are made up of nothing more than a cluster of run-down cement houses, and sometimes, a building that is meant to be a church. La Victoria, where all of the local action is, boasts a few tiendas (tiny stores that sell just enough to stay in business); a crumbling health center offering marginal health services (only two of which I will every use: antivenom shots, if I am bitten by a poisonous snake, and an ambulance to get me somewhere else); a church (but no priest because the last one ran off with a local woman, and the one before that got someone pregnant); a municipal building; an elementary school and a high school; two cabinas (places where you can make outlandishly expensive phone calls); a tiny weekend market (on a good day they have some produce, but mostly it’s just meat hanging on hooks); and a lovely central park where the drunks hang out on Sundays. Fortunately, I have found that what La Victoria lacks in services, access to the rest of the world and things to do, is made up for by its gorgeous pastoral setting and its people.
I am once again living with a family for a few months until I move into my own place in August. The Nieves family has a big house on the main road in the town center. As my community counterpart and the supervisor of my work as a volunteer, Alberto Nieves and his wife Eva have been taking good care of me since my arrival. Also living in the house are Alberto´s 80 year-old parents and an agronomist who is also working with the local coffee farmers. I have a nice room in the front of the house, overlooking the town´s little park. I am not living with bugs, chickens and pigs, as I feared, but I do have to put up with the usual developing-world noise—the constant roaring of motorcycles and trucks, dog and cat fights, donkeys, roosters (wakeup calls start at 3 AM or earlier), drunk men, and the neighbour constantly loading and unloading the propane tanks he delivers to people´s houses. At first this chaos seemed unbearable, but I am slowly becoming accustomed to it. Hopefully, I will soon be like an Ecuadorian and not notice it at all. Alberto has a small organic coffee plantation and works a family farm with his parents and a few of his brothers. Eva is a housewife and attends to a video arcade while she cooks and cleans. They have never been able to have children, which in rural Ecuador is considered a monumental misfortune, but they seem happy. Alberto´s parents, after raising nine children and a few grandchildren, still work on their farm which is their only source of income and food. Alberto´s father is a tough old man. Although he is still recovering from his simultaneous bouts with dengue and typhoid last year, he goes to their farm to work at least three days a week. Alberto´s mother, who married his father when she was 14, also helps out on the farm and does the cooking and housework for the two of them. They also do all of the processing of their crops, including drying and shelling peanuts, coffee and cacao, and husking bushels and bushels of corn, by hand.
The Peace Corps has sent me to work in La Victoria with the Association of Organic Coffee Growers of Las Lajas (ACOLL) at the request of Alberto, who is the organization´s promoter and former president. ACOLL has asked for my help with organizational development projects and commercialization of their coffee. In addition, I will be assisting with work on a larger development project that is providing coffee farmers in the region with technical assistance in organic production practices, integrated farm planning and management, and increasing coffee production. During my first few months here I will be spending most of my time going around to the farms, observing coffee production and processing activities, attending training sessions and helping project’s agronomist with anything that I can. After I learn more, and have a clearer picture of exactly what help the association needs, I will start working more on my own.
Peace Corps training prepared me with a broad base of general knowledge about organic agriculture in Ecuador, which I have already applied to my work here. Unfortunately, the tropical agriculture sessions focused mainly on cacao, so Alberto has been spending a lot of time taking me around to all of the coffee farms, showing me the different steps of processing, and answering my never-ending questions. The association is a fairly well-organized group of 23 organic coffee farmers. It has some decent operational systems in place that enable them to pool their resources to produce a high-quality, value-added product. Before, the formation of the association, each of the farmers sold their coffee individually, unprocessed, directly to intermediaries, who paid them very little for it. In addition, even though many of them were producing coffee that was essentially organic, they were unable to afford the cost of the organic certification on their own. Now, as a group they have larger quantities of coffee to offer to buyers, the cost of certifying their farms is shared between everyone, and they have begun to process their coffee themselves. After the harvest, the farmers peel, ferment, wash, hand-select and dry the beans on their farms. Then, in a small plant that they built, the coffee is roasted to perfection with the giant roaster they were able to buy on credit as an association. Afterwards, the packaging of the coffee is done in Alberto and Eva´s dining room. The final product, ready for sale, brings in almost double the price of raw coffee directly off of the trees. This is all a nice start to increasing their incomes and growing their business, but there is no way that ACOLL will survive without some serious organizational development and, most importantly, a consistent market for their product.
More than a month has passed since my arrival in La Victoria and I am just now beginning to feel more settled and at ease. I spent my first weeks here overwhelmed by a roller coaster of emotions that left me exhausted at the end of each day. In a matter of hours, I would go from feeling like an ebullient child, full of enthusiasm and excitement about everything I plan to do and learn while here, to wanting to pack up my bags and go home. These sentiments have not and will not ever go away completely. I’m sure that throughout my service I will have many moments where a wonderful experience or the planning of an activity will fill me with enthusiasm. I also don’t doubt that, even towards the end of my time here, I will still cry in bed at night from loneliness or struggle with misgivings about my work and the impact of my efforts. I´ve found that the best way to approach each day is to focus only on that day, or the week ahead rather than a year, or two years down the road. It´s like what my parents always said and I always hated to hear: one day at a time.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Even more pictures
The ladies, newly sworn in as volunteers.
Swearing in.
This fruit is called a noni! Noni, look!
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