Bridie´s Ecuablog

Long Time No Post - 5 Months Left!!!

2009-11-01T08:09:00.000-08:00

Gardening

Passion Fruit Flower

Passion Fruit on the Vine

Juicy Passion Fruit

Talia Harvesting Oranges

Rosa, Don Wilfrido, Talia and Me

Almost Ripe!

Perfectly Ripe!

Some things that I love about my life in Ecuador:

2009-04-25T11:52:00.000-07:00

1. Sleeping under my mosquito net

2. Early to bed and early to rise

3. My community’s generosity and hospitality—sometimes a week goes by where I barely buy any food because friends and neighbors give me things from their farms or cook me meals

4. Fresh, local food and meals from scratch

5. Lots of alone time

6. An endless supply of fresh-roasted coffee

7. Where to this weekend? The mountains, the jungle, the beach, Peru?

8. You can get almost anywhere on a bus (though it’s not always the safest ride in the world—ask my mom).

9. Seeing kids that are growing up just fine without play dates, video games, toys, full body uv-protection gear, movies, Harry Potter, iPods, summer camp, Nike sneakers, organized extra-curricular activities, and limited parental supervision.

10. Passion fruit!

11. Humitas!

12. Heating up water in a pot and pretending that I am taking a bath at the Hilton, rather than in a bucket in my bathroom

13. Sunrise in La Victoria after a night of rain

14. Being constantly surrounded by incredibly diverse natural beauty

15. Ecuadorians’ amazing ability to find any excuse for a celebration and their impressive resourcefulness in coming up with the funds, food and drink for the party

16. Peoples’ curiosity about my country, culture, family and life back at home

17. Three o’clock downpours after a blazing hot day

18. Being able to get a tan in 15 minutes

19. The custom of always greeting and saying goodbye to everyone with a handshake—no matter where you are, what you are doing (even if it interrupts a meeting), and whether you know the person or not—rather than casually acknowledging or even ignoring people like we do in the States.

20. My fellow volunteers who have become great friends and are the only ones who will ever really understand how this experience has changed me.

21. Getting really excited about things like Diet Coke, brownie sundaes, riding in air-conditioned cars, wine, hot water, and going to the city

22. Riding in the back of a truck (obviously)

23. How a meal cooked for five can always be made into a meal for seven, eight, nine, or however many people show up at mealtime. Although, I always hate to be one of those last minute guests because, from my observations, it just means that the kids get less meat and more rice which is the last thing they need.

24. Always knowing the score of the soccer game, even if I am reading in my bed at home where there is no TV or radio. When Ecuador scores the whole town cheers and honks car horns. GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLL!!!

25. The sound of my tin roof creaking when the sun is getting high in the sky and how the pounding rain obliterates all other sounds during a storm.

26. Killing cockroaches, spiders, ants, tiny scorpions, and things with too many legs; and chasing frogs, toads, chickens, and dogs out of my house. I am one with nature…

Ecua Life

2009-04-17T13:30:00.000-07:00

Making Humitas - putting the ground corn into the husk to cook.

Making humitas - adding salt, cheese and butter.

Making humitas - my neighbor, Esperanza, cutting the corn off the husks.

Making humitas

My neighbor´s son fixing out roof in a storm. It´s been raining like this most afternoons.

My backyard.

Nathalie, Jacob and me.

We got very stylish sunglasses and wear them everywhere--as if we

don´t stand out enough already.

St. Patrick´s Day party in Machala.

Planting coffee.

Eating dulce de leche with Rosita

Alberto´s mom stretching out for a nap at the farm.

Grilled sweet plantains with cheese!

Valentine´s Day ceviche lunch in Peru with Nathalie, Eva and Alberto.

Cold on the bus. We aren´t used to air conditioning.

Stirring the dulce de leche

Why?

My fish had sharp teeth.

Our anti-trafficking in persons presentation.

Our coffee

My car...I wish.

Mom and Doug´s Visit

2009-01-05T10:07:00.000-08:00

gringo tourists
too much bus travel

Cuenca decorated for Christmas

Ori!!!! They know her here too?!

The Devil´s Nose train ride. See my white skeakers?

Chimborazo. It´s peak is Earth´s closest point to the sun (equatorial buldge).

Quilotoa hike.

Quilotoa volcanic lake.

So green.

The three travelers. They look happy, but are all suffering from Ecuabelly...I think it was the market in Quito.

I love llamas! I´m going to get some when I move to the country in my next life.

The Chugchiglan cheese factory.

Chugchiglan.

Decorating the church for Christmas.

The Black Sheep Inn.

Common Fund for Commodities visit to Las Lajas.

Alberto and Eva.

Eva´s garden.

Alberto´s parents.

Kids in Chugchiglan.

Mom on the zipline!

The Basilica in Quito.

Quito´s old town.

My bedroom.

The kitchen.

Pretty nice for a garage....

Work Pictures

2008-07-29T10:43:00.000-07:00

Building a solar drier with the members of my coffee association.

Planting coffee for seedlings with a local family.

A Few More

2008-07-14T10:42:00.000-07:00

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.

The coffee team.

Gerry and Ursula, my nearest neighbors.

Coffee for processing and export.

Dispulping, washing and fermenting.

Recent and Not So Recent Photos

2008-07-14T09:47:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-14T09:40:00.000-07:00

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.

La Victoria Photos

2008-06-14T10:01:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-05T09:57:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-05T09:47:00.000-07:00

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.

Even more pictures

2008-05-01T11:48:00.000-07:00

The ladies, newly sworn in as volunteers.

Swearing in.

This fruit is called a noni! Noni, look!

A view of Cayambe from the Abassador´s home.

Tsáchila woman weaving a traditional skirt.

Cacao!
Swearing-in.

Grafting cacao.

Swearing-in as volunteers at the Ambassador´s home.

Camioneta ride.

Our hut in El Poste.

Painting hair with achiote.

Training Trip

2008-04-26T15:35:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-26T15:11:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-26T14:26:00.000-07:00

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.

Peace Corps Training in Cayambe

2008-04-06T13:30:00.000-07:00

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.

Disclaimer

2008-03-21T15:39:00.000-07:00

The opinions found in this blog are my own, and do not reflect those of the Peace Corps.