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.