Saturday, April 26, 2008

Training Trip

I’m catching my breath after returning from a two week technical trip to the lowland and coastal regions of Ecuador. The diversity that exists in this country—among its people, plant life, cultures and climates, continues to amaze me. It was just a four hour trip from Cayambe to our training site in Puerto Quito, but it seemed like we had hopped on a plane and flown to another country. The entire drive was a steep, winding descent out of the Sierra, through the transitional zone and into the tropics. Just west of Quito, the green peaks of the páramo and eucalyptus-covered slopes of the Andes began to turn to smaller mountains and lush forests. The cool, dry mountain air mixed with the stifling coastal temperatures creating dense clouds that drenched the valleys and wrapped themselves around the hills. Driving through these tropical cloud forests of the transitional zone made me feel as though I was floating through a fairy land. The plant life was a mix of the gnarly, low-lying highland species and more tropical vines, ferns and seductive flowers. As we descended further, leaving the mountains behind us, the clouds finally dissolved and the road straightened itself out. The early evening sun was suddenly so strong that it stung my forearms and face through the windows of the bus. Our first night in Puerto Quito it was immediately apparent to us all that life on the Costa is totally different from what we are used to in Sierra. Instead of the peaceful sound Andean folk music, salsa and reggaetón blasted out of every open doorway; the beer was served ice-cold, not at room temperature; rather than being driven into bed early by the cold, people stayed up late talking and enjoying the somewhat cooler evening temperatures; we no longer heard the clear, sing-songy Spanish of the Sierra, with its excessive use of diminutives, but the rapid, muffled speech of the Costa. I loved it.
Our whole group of forty-three agriculture and natural resources volunteers spent the first week of field training together. We stayed at a field school belonging to the university and spent our days in classes, or visiting farms and current volunteers’ work sites to learn about their projects. The days were tough and long (lots of manual labor, dirt and sweat), but we thoroughly enjoyed our free time playing ecua-volley, ultimate frisbee, going for walks in the jungle, and swimming in the river and the pool. Our training covered everything from organizational development and conflict resolution, to killing chickens, castrating pigs and digging infiltration ditches. The second week of the trip, we were divided up depending on our area of work and the region that we will be going to. Eleven of us, all agriculture volunteers who will be living in coastal areas, were lucky enough to spend two incredible days in the Tsáchila community of El Poste, in Santo Domingo de Los Colorados. The Tsáchila are one of Ecuador’s many indigenous groups that still maintain their traditional customs, dress and language. Unlike much of the highland indigenous population, the Tsáchila managed to avoid being conquered by the Inca, therefore, they speak Tsáfiki rather than Quichua. Unfortunately, even in their remote communities the group’s numbers began to dwindle with the arrival of the Spanish and now their population is only about 2000. Our first day in El Poste, we learned about the Tsáchila language and culture. Nowadays, many men no longer dress in their traditional woven skirts and after a law barring nudity was passed by the province, the women wear tops. The practice of the men painting their hair with natural dye from the achiote plant for protection from evil and illness is also still very common. The Tsáchila are also very well-known for their shaman, or “curaderos”. The last night of our visit, our host, who is a shaman, performed a ceremony with us called a “limpieza” (cleansing). The entire ceremony was conducted in Tsáfiki, and involved a curious combination of Catholic practices and more traditional rituals with a variety of medicinal plants, music and chants. These ceremonies are used often to rid people of bad energy that makes them or those around them more vulnerable to illness, evil or misfortune. While in El Poste we also learned about the production and commercialization of cacao and other crops common to the coastal region, and we built a solar drier for cacao seeds.

We spent the rest of the week traveling to other areas of the hot, lowland region preparing for the work we will be doing in our sites. It was a nice break from rainy Cayambe and all of the classroom training we had been doing. We are now all excited to get out to our communities and begin work on April 19th.

More Pictures

The trail around Lake Cuicochi.

End-of-hike picture before it started to rain.


Hiking around lake Cuicochi in Cotacachi. I still wasn´t totally used to the altitude, so breathing was tough.

Lupines in the Andes!! Who knew?


Doing laundry by hand in the cold in between rain showers. I miss washing machines. But I miss driers even more! I can´t wait to go to the coast!


Our beekeeping seminar.

Delicious honey.

Some Pictures


Me and my Cayambe host family in Otavalo at the Peguche waterfall.

My neighborhood Ecuavolley team. I was Señorita Deportes! Apparently, in Ecuador they have beauty pagents at athletic events--so sleazy and latin.

Volcán Cayambe. The morning view from our training center.


A cloudy view of the páramo on the way to Oyacachi.

The green is decieving--it was super cold there.

On a cliff overlooking the town of Oyacachi with my Ecua dad, brother and sister. Oyacachi is known for it´s hotsprings. We spent all day soaking in the water and then had a cookout of guinea pig and duck. Luckily, I was a little sick that day from some mystery soup that I ate the day before so I was able to put off eating guinea pig a little longer. I´ll do it, I promise. I´ve got two years.





Sunday, April 6, 2008

Peace Corps Training in Cayambe

In Cayambe the sun’s path through the sky never changes and you can tell time just by looking at your shadow. Sadly, during my first month here, I have certainly not felt like I am living directly on the equator. The city’s location nestled next to the snow-capped volcano Cayambe (Ecuador’s third-highest peak at 5790 meters), in combination with this year’s everlasting rainy season has kept me chilly since my arrival. Despite its altitude and cool temperatures, my Andean home during Peace Corps training is Ecuador’s flower production capital. As you drive north from Quito, the rolling farmland lined with eucalyptus trees suddenly turns to oceans of white greenhouses where millions of roses are grown for export, mainly to the U.S. and Russia. The flower industry, which has grown a lot in the past fifteen years, has provided employment for 60,000 people in this region of the highlands, but at a great cost to the environment and worker’s health. In keeping with Latin American tradition, flower farms douse their precious roses with tons of pesticides (some that are banned in the U.S.) and safety standards for their application are low. Sixty to seventy percent of flower industry employees are indigenous women, who I often see heading to work with their babies strapped to their backs. From now on, I won’t be able to buy roses without thinking of what went into their production.

Two members of my current Ecuadorian family are lucky enough to be employed by one of the big flower producers. My father, Pablo, transports workers from the famous indigenous city, Otavalo, to the farms for work. My brother, Andrés, processes and packages roses for shipment. I spend most of my time with my Ecuadorian mother, Susana—she is a homemaker who does not like to cook or clean and I love her! The first day of our language and culture class we talked about how, in Ecuador, men seem to have all of the control but women are really the ones who run things behind the scenes; they are always more organized when it comes to managing small businesses or making a profit on the family’s crops. This is true of my family. My father has a full-time job, but somehow doesn’t seem to bring in as much income as my mother does with her little corner store and the apartments she owns and rents out. The fact that my mother is more financially secure than my father can probably be attributed to Ecuador’s lovely culture of machismo. Ecuadorian men have many more privileges and freedoms than women, including freedom from any sort of responsibility they don’t want to have. Of course, if a husband is drinking away money that should be going to feeding his children the neighbors will talk, but they will be much faster to pardon him than they would the mother if she left him for a man who is not a drunk. As an hombre, Pablo can run off whenever he wants, have a few other girlfriends (or children), go out and drink away his paycheck at a soccer game, or buy a TV that he can’t afford on credit. He doesn’t have to worry as much about the image of the family, feeding the children healthful meals, or having enough money set aside for emergencies. Susana, because she is aware that she can really only depend on herself, works harder than ever to make sure the family has enough to get by. To everybody but Susana it appears that Pablo has the final say on family decisions and disciplining the children (which he is failing miserably at). But, since she has succeeded in becoming financially independent, Susana has the power behind closed doors.

Since my arrival in Ecuador, Peace Corps training has taken up almost all of my time. Every weekday and some Saturdays we have classes or training activities from 8 AM to 4:30 PM. I leave home every morning at 7 to join the other 42 trainees for classes in the areas of language and culture, safety and security, health, small business topics, and sustainable agriculture. Some interesting things I have learned about so far include the following: how to tell whether I have dengue or malaria; how to make yogurt; how to start and run a community bank; how to build different types of greenhouses; how to avoid, or reduce my chances of suffering from bacterial diarrhea, food poisoning, dysentery and cholera; integrated pest management (no pesticides); travel safety in Ecuador; how to bake using a “campo oven” (basically a big pot on top of a fire); crop rotation and companion cropping; organic remedies as substitutes for pesticides and herbicides; the development of small businesses; how to remove a niguas egg sack from under my skin; conducting community needs assessments; the use of value-added processes; medicinal plants in Ecuador; accounting for campesinos; how to prick my finger and prepare a malaria slide for lab analysis; how to kill and prepare a guinea pig to eat; how to get along with my amoebas; tree nurseries; how to play ecuavolley; the names of fruits that I have never seen or heard of before; marketing of agricultural products; how to dance to cumbia; how to teach our communities about HIV/AIDS and Avian Flu; how to bargain with vendors in the market; what getting robbed on a bus is like; Ecuadorian gender roles and how they will impact my safety; composting Rudolf Steiner-style; oral rehydration therapy emergency recipes; grafting cacao trees to increase productivity and resistance to disease; how to build a solar drier; all about coffee; how to build infiltration ditches and terraces for soil conservation; how to use a machete to do ANYTHING; and much, much more.