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.

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.