This Can Be You Too... (hint, hint)

Alright, alright... Enough complaining about no blog entry for a while! I’ve received at least five formal complaints, so I figured it was time for me to hanker down and get something online.

A few weeks ago I received my first visitor from the States for a 2 ½ week stay in Ecuador. You all should start planning your visits as well since I know all of you want to relish in the presence of roadside Virgin Mary figurines in every direction, an endless supply of arroz con pollo (rice with chicken), and the satisfaction of feeling tall if you’re 5’6” or more.

Matt, or Mateo as he’s called in our circle of friends (or pain-in-the-ass as he’s called behind his back... just kidding (sort of)), arrived in Quito, the capital of Ecuador a few weeks ago. Like the self-sacrificing person I am, I endured the winding 14-hour overnight bus ride through the Andes to meet him at the airport. We checked into a nice hotel in the old section of the city (which is a United Nations World Heritage Site) and then set out to explore the sites. We passed through a couple of nice plazas complete with 10-year-old shoeshine boys trying to convince you that it’s possible to shine your Nike’s, and checked out a few churches including La Iglesia de la Compañía de Jesús, which was constructed between 1605 and 1765 and has an insane amount of gold leaf covering just about every surface in the place (supposedly seven tons of gold was used). On the main plaza we randomly bumped into another Peace Corps volunteer and her visiting mother, and then things went downhill. Actually, we were walking uphill a couple of blocks away from the main plaza when Mateo felt a tug at his waist. It took a few seconds to actually process what just happened, but some delinquent (this is the PG version, but feel free to replace delinquent with more “potent” vocabulary) ripped the camera off his belt buckle that was hanging on his side with a carabineer. Mateo shot off after the guy but having just landed at 9400 ft above sea level from about 100 ft above sea level in NY, he was thoroughly out of breath after 4 blocks, and now his camera likely sits in the storefront of some electronics store in Quito. Needless to say, Mateo wasn’t in the best of moods after the incident, but we went to have a beer and some empanadas at a cool (and overpriced) restaurant up on a hill overlooking the city. Alcohol and fried food didn’t seem to make him any happier so we decided to head back to the hotel to relax for a bit before dinner. On the cab ride home we were stopped at a light in a crowded section of the city and we saw some crazy guy wearing eye shadow walking along the sidewalk. Mateo was still on full-alert after the camera incident, and quickly reached over to lock the two back doors in the car. Unfortunately, the front passenger door was still unlocked and guess who decided to get into our cab? Yup. The nut job started waving a $5 bill in the cab driver’s face while the cab driver tried ever more aggressively to get the guy out of the car. Finally the guy got out, the light turned green, and we continued down the road. But wait, what happened to the music that was playing in the car? After a block or two, the driver hit the steering wheel and cussed. Apparently the hijo de puta (look it up) stole the face off the cab driver’s radio while he was distracting the driver with the $5 bill. Unreal. At this point, Mateo’s really loving Quito. So I think to myself, what will make him happy?

Cheese.

Mateo is composed of at least 40% cheese (primarily blue) so I start thinking back to the days when I took the SATs. Italian Food = high percentage of dishes blanketed in cheese. High percentage of dishes blanketed in cheese = Happy Mateo. Therefore, Italian Food = Happy Mateo. And I think after his 6000 calorie 4-cheese and bacon/pool-of-oil pizza he was in a much better state of affairs (even though the pizza probably robbed him of a couple months of life).

The next morning we were both happy to hightail it to the bus station and get out of Quito. In fact, the Peace Corps has made Quito off-limits for all volunteers for the entire month of December because it seems like almost everyone that goes there gets robbed.

So, we walked to the bus station passing the women enthusiastically selling food from miniature storefronts and screaming MOROCHOOOOOO!!!! (a kind of thick, hot drink made from corn, milk, cinnamon, cloves, star anise, and most likely some other items that are probably best left sans identity). From Quito we planned on heading to an eco-lodge high in the Andes at about 13,000 ft above sea level in an area consisting of almost all indigenous people that speak Kichwa in addition to Spanish. The lodge, called the Black Sheep Inn, was recently rated by Outside Magazine as one the top 10 eco-lodges in the world. On the way there, we changed buses in a small city called Latacunga where Mateo experienced his first $1.50 almuerzo (fixed lunch), which consisted of chicken soup (with lovely bits of chicken neck and foot), tree tomato juice (which has nothing to do with regular tomatoes), and a big plate of rice, rotisserie chicken and shredded beets. It was actually one of the better almuerzos I’ve had. From Latacunga, the $2, 4-hour bus ride up to the town of Chugchilan where the lodge is located was an adventure in itself. The bus was probably from about 1960 and was decorated in full Virgin Mary gear complete with pink fuzzy fabric outlining the rear view mirror and faux-mother-of-pearl accents. The contrast between us two gringos and the remainder of the bus dressed in full Andean-indigenous outfits was striking. Some women sat on sacks of rice and corn in the aisle while everyone else squeezed into the miniature seats for the journey. The scenery was spectacular and the road got narrower and bumpier the further along we traveled. At one point while I was silently fighting with the 80-year old woman behind me (I was hot and kept opening the window, while she was cold and kept closing it even though she was wearing thigh-high thick wool stockings and six sweaters), the driver’s helper, or ayudante, had to get out and direct the bus around a large chunk of missing road so we wouldn’t tumble down the cliff to our right. Finally, we got to the lodge and checked into the bunkhouse (which was a big mistake since Mateo snores like a Hoover and kept everyone up all night). We had a nice vegetarian dinner around a big communal table and then relaxed by the wood burning stove for a while. The next day, we headed out with some others at the lodge for a hike around the Quilotoa Crater Lake, a neat lake inside a dormant volcanic crater with eerie green alkaline water. Pregnant women sometimes bathe in the lake, which supposedly has some magical properties. The 5 hour hike was really nice, passing through some small indigenous villages along the way. The lack of oxygen at this elevation probably made everything seem a bit dreamier. Back at the lodge we relaxed with some beer and brownies, got light-headed in the wood-fired sauna with some other guests, enjoyed the panoramic views from the lodge’s composting toilets, and then called it an early night since the only bus out of Chugchilan leaves around 5AM.

The next day we headed to a town called Baños, located at the foot of the active Tungurahua Volcano. The town is quite the tourist trap but nice nonetheless. We had lunch at a place called Café Good (which should be renamed Café Bad), and then decided to go on one of the many hikes around the town. This hike was actually a lot more enjoyable than the hike near Quilotoa since we weren’t freezing our asses off the whole time due to the much lower elevation. Along the way, we passed by the Hotel Luna Runtun (http://www.lunaruntun.com), which is apparently one of the nicest hotels in all of Ecuador (the series of small pools overlooking the surrounding mountains looked amazing), and made our way to an overlook to check out the volcano. Unfortunately we were facing the wrong direction at the overlook and the cloud-shrouded peak we thought was the volcano was actually just another mountain. On the way back to the town we stopped for food at the beautiful glass-enclosed restaurant perched on the side of the mountain at the Hotel Luna Runtun. I had the chocho ceviche (lupine beans in a lemony broth with red onions and tomatoes) and a glass of fresh strawberry juice, and regretted it for the next 36 hours. I don’t actually know if it was the chocho ceviche that gave me the enjoyable diarrhea, fever and chills for the next many hours, but it sounds like a dish that could potentially be tainted, so I'll continue to place all the blame on those little malicious beans. After enduring hell for the entire night I decided to call the Peace Corps nurse in a cry of desperation. She got me started on some antibiotics (which Mateo will proudly point out that he suggested the same thing hours before), and I started feeling a bit better after another 5 or 6 hours.

From Baños, we were intending to do a supposedly spectacular 60 km downhill bike ride to the town of Puyo located in the jungle to the east, but because of my ghastly state of affairs we canceled that idea and hopped on the bus in the same direction. The road between Baños and Puyo is called the Ruta de las Cascadas, or Route of the Waterfalls since there are about a dozen big falls along the way, some of which you can swing past on a cable car over 300 ft above the gorge floor. We met up with another Peace Corps volunteer from Puyo (also Matt) in the town of Rio Verde to check out the massive Pailon del Diablo waterfall, had some empanadas with a bunch of Germans that Mateo met while I was making friends with the toilet seat in Baños, and then headed the rest of the way to Puyo, where I went to sleep in Matt’s apartment at 6PM and didn’t wake up until 8 or 9 in the morning. The next day we checked out the orchid garden just outside of town that Matt’s been helping out, which was very nice, and then headed to the city of Ambato where we were lucky enough to catch a 10-hr overnight bus back to Loja. The windows on the bus didn’t open and it was 500 degrees in the cabin – a truly pleasant experience, especially since we got seats right next to the fragrant bathroom with blue disinfectant liquid sloshing around all night.

After the week and a half of traveling, Loja was nice and relaxing. We had some decent food, checked out the botanical gardens, headed to the town of Vilcabamba for a cheap full-body massage, and spent some time in Loja’s Jipiro Park. This park is considered by some to be one of best in Ecuador, and it’s certainly the most unique, resembling a giant-sized miniature golf course complete with somewhat cheesy replicas of Russia’s St Basil’s Cathedral, a Japanese Pagoda, the Eiffel Tower, and other famous international buildings. Mateo also came along to the orphanage twice and it was nice that I could take a break as human jungle gym for a while!

We were also able to check out the amazing Sunday morning food market here, which has a phenomenal rainbow of hundreds of kinds of fruits and vegetables, fresh eggs brought in by local farmers, and other goodies. I convinced Mateo to try the local horchata as well. Horchata is a tea that’s made from 28 herbs and flowers that grow in the region around Loja with a bright red, almost Kool-Aid-like color. You can make it with just the herbs and flowers, but the real thing can only be found in the local markets. Women squeeze the thick juice out of giant aloe vera leaves and heat it up in a big pot with some sugar. They fill half your glass with the horchata tea and then add a big ladle of the aloe-sugar liquid, which has a striking resemblance to thick, clear mucous. The way they pour it into the glass from about 3 feet up in the air really highlights the mucous-like consistency of the stuff. But, if you can get past the slick texture of the resulting drink, it’s actually really good (and good for you).

When Thanksgiving came along, volunteers started filtering into Loja (almost 40 in all) for a big potluck dinner at my apartment. It was quite the event and my landlord even opened up the private disco for us on the floor above my apartment (containing a light-up robot and star-painted ceiling, of course). There was a ton of food, but luckily a lot of people had a second wind around 11PM and we ended up with surprisingly few leftovers (other than the untouched store-bought Barney cake that someone thought was a good idea to bring!).

And so that concludes Mateo’s two and half week visit. The Friday night after Thanksgiving he rode the night bus back to Quito to catch his flight back to the States on Saturday. Slots are filling up quickly for other Kreiselman Vacations, so book yours now!

Happy Holidays to all and Live Well in 2009!

Enjoy the pics and as usual click a few times to enlarge. Then click "slideshow" to view full screen.

A visit with the Shuar

The Shuar are one of several indigenous groups that still inhabit the Upper Amazon region of Ecuador. In the past they were actually known for shrinking the heads of their enemies, but that practice has since ended (lucky for me!). The organization I work with helps Shuar communities develop sustainable forms of income in addition to helping them to secure legal land titles in an effort to prevent outsiders from claiming land rights. The Upper Amazon region is extremely rich in biodiversity and indigenous cultures that date back many hundreds of years, but at the same time it’s also rich in minerals that wash down from the Andes and over time accumulate in these lower elevation areas. This brings mining companies, and oftentimes conflict, environmental damage and cultural degradation, which is why my organization is trying to assist these cultures; if they’re making a good living off of sustainable activities that don’t harm the surrounding environment, they’ll be less prone to sell out to the mining companies that want to excavate on their land.

A few weekends ago, one Shuar settlement, El Kiim, was having its annual festival so I headed out there (about 4 hours from Loja) with a few coworkers of mine. It was the day after my birthday so I was operating on 4 hours of sleep in a chuchaqui (hung over) state, which made the ride on the primitive unpaved roads very enjoyable! I was expecting the community to be a bit more “indigenous” with people wearing traditional clothing, banging drums, and dancing around a fire pit, but instead people were wearing Adidas shorts and T-shirts, playing soccer and volleyball, and dancing to Madonna remixes. So much for stepping back in time 500 years! The day was still interesting, with older members of the community telling stories (of which I understood about 5%), a wood chopping and a blow-dart contest for the men, a platano roasting and chicha (see below) making contest for the women, a lunch consisting of yucca, chicken and bits of wild fern wrapped up in a big leaf and steamed, and later in the day some traditional dances. There was also a chicha drinking contest, which one of the directors of my organization from California (Mike) decided to enter. Chicha is an alcoholic drink made from smashed yucca root. In the past the women would chew pieces of yucca and spit them out into a big pot. They’d then let this mixture ferment for a few days and then everyone in the village would drink it. Today the spit is left out of the equation, which I was thankful for when I had to try the stuff later in the day! However, you drink the chicha out of a big communal clay bowl (which I don’t think it washed very often) so you get a little bit of everyone’s spit instead. Yum! In the contest, Mike had to drink a whole bowl of chicha. He did it in 1 minute 40 seconds, and then proceeded to tell me the same stories 6 times over for the rest of the afternoon since it was a pretty strong batch. The Shuar guy after him drank the whole bowl in 18 seconds!

The next day, most people from my organization went back to Loja, but Mike and I wanted to check out a more remote Shuar community so we headed another 2 hours into the jungle until the road ended. Then we hopped in a motorized canoe for another 2 hours until we got to a community called Shaime. The boat trip there was spectacular and we squeezed through an amazingly lush canyon with waterfalls, and tons of birds and plant life, which unfortunately I wasn’t able to get any good pictures of since there wasn’t enough light for the camera. This community was a bit more “rustic” but there was still electricity so it didn’t exactly mesh with the “indigenous” images I had conjured up in my head. Luckily, there were festivals going on here so a bunch of people were dressed up in their traditional clothing, which gives this area 10 points over the first village in my mind’s authenticity scale! (Apparently if you go way out into the jungle (i.e. days in a canoe) you can find the “real thing”.)

In addition to the village, a Shuar guide took us for a walk in the forest which was pretty neat. Huge, buttressed trees, Tarzan vines, “authentic” jungle bird sounds, medicinal plants, strange roots hanging down from the sky and sweeping the forest floor, and knee-deep, boot-swallowing mud. We walked for a few hours and then headed back in the boat to where we left the car, picking up random folks along the riverbanks along the way. One family that got into the boat consisted of a mother and father and two small kids all wearing mud-covered rubber boots and holding nylon satchels of freshly picked wild berries and huge golf ball-sized wild grapes. They all smiled intently, greeting everyone else on the boat with a kiss on the cheek or a lighthearted handshake, and the kids leaned over the side of the boat trying to reach the light spray of water that danced off the worn metal hull of the boat. The sun was low in the sky, gently reflecting off the water and highlighting the trees along the riverbank in a pinkish shade of orange. The mother and father stood arm and arm at the front of boat looking out to the horizon and it was as if time stood still for a brief moment. Mike looked over at me and the corners of our mouths lifted ever so slightly forming subtly appreciative smiles. No one spoke. At this very moment on the Nangaritza River the complexities of the world seemed to fade away amongst the delicate ferns lining the riverbanks. Everything was good, and in this simple moment the world was at peace.

Enjoy the pictures below and as usual click a few times to enlarge. Then click slide show to view full screen.

"The Problem is the Corn"

A few months ago, a couple of US board members from my organization were visiting Ecuador with a video camera. While in a remote village in southern Ecuador, an old woman suddenly approached them in distress. At one point she was frozen in tears and couldn't speak. This is one of the poorest areas of Ecuador with an average income of under $50 per month. There are no social services available of any kind. No one was able to help her, not even the local priest.

So they decided her story must be told.

Yours truly, along with the help of another volunteer, translated pages and pages of country Spanish to potentially use in the video.

The old womans name is Lastenia Correa Aponte. This video is HER STORY.

• This video shows a tropical forest in Ecuador with the highest biodiversity in the world with over 800 bird species. Unfortunately it could be gone in a few years.
  
  
• The video wasn't intended to be focused so much on corn ethanol, biofuel, renewable energy, E85, or congress' energy policy but thats where the story led us. It seems that when we burn food to run our cars it affects the whole world! (for more info see Energy Policy Act 2005, HR6 Energy Independence Security Act 2007)

Here's a link to the video: http://ethanol-lie.com/

It's a Bird, It's a Plane...

But it's not Superman.

It's Jason flying off his bike at 20 miles per hour...  Unfortunately gravity took hold of me and I made a crash landing on the dirt trail.  But I'm ok (mas o menos).  Scraped up forearms, scraped up and bruised knees, and a scraped up stomach. (All good excuses to stay home yesterday and watch movies all day.)

This past weekend about 10 other bikers and I headed to Zapotillo in the far southwestern corner of Ecuador for a mountain bike trip from the town of Pindal to Zapotillo, which unbeknownst to me until about 30 minutes before the start was actually a race.  The map said that the route was 50 km, but using my GPS it actually turned out to be closer to 70 km!  I flew off the bike after hitting a patch of sand on a downhill about 10 km into the journey, and then after walking it off I was able to go about another 30 km before having to be carried to the end in a van.  I wasn't alone though... three others shared the van with me, one of which was a marathon runner that told me he's never had to quit a race before in his life and this was the first one.  It was super tough and the initial ascent of over 1000 ft really tires you out for the rest of the route which consists of lots of little uphill portions which wear you out over and over again as time goes on.  Over the course of the route, the total climb is about 4300 feet! Below is an elevation profile of the route.

The route passes through several tiny towns where kids and parents were out sitting on fences, cheering people on and handing out bananas to passing cyclists.  I have to say, I was definitely the oddball in the group, since as Mr. Fluorescent would pass little kids would be like, "Look mommy, a gringo!".  When I stopped for the medic to wash out my wounds, 'tween' girls were standing around taking pictures of me with their cell phone cameras like I was from another planet!  It was quite the experience, since in the city of Loja there are plenty of other gringos so I'm not that much of a novelty. :)

The race was part of Zapotillo's fiestas (every town in Ecuador has fiestas for between a week and month every year to celebrate the town's foundation) and it's purpose was to raise awareness of the Bosque Seco (Dry Forest) ecosystem that exists in the area and the importance of protecting it.  (There are only two or three other dry forests like this in the world.) There was a big trophy and medal ceremony at the end.  I got third place in the "Master's" Category (even though only 1 of the 4 people in the Master's group actually finished the race), and then the mayor treated us all to a traditional meal of Chivo al Hueco, which was delicious.  Chivos, or goats, are about the only animal that can survive in this super dry region so it's about the only meat that people eat here.  The chivo is seasoned and then placed in a hole in the ground with hot coals, buried and left to sit for a few hours.  Then it's dug out and served.  Super tender and delicious.

The worse part of the whole adventure was not the accident, but the 7 hour midnight to 7am bus ride back to Loja from Zapotillo.  I was still covered in dirt from the race, my leg and arm was throbbing, and the whole bus smelled like rotten feet!  Needless to say, my own shower and bed felt really good after the whole journey.  Hopefully I'll be back on the bike in another week or two.

Arctangents & A Miniature Queen

Growing up, my sister Elyse would often refer to me in not so favorable terms. “Uch… you’re such a nerd Jason,” she’d say in a typical Long Island accent.  Well after this post, I’m sad to say that I think I may have provided enough evidence to support that claim.

For the past several weeks I’ve been building all my own living room furniture since the Peace Corps doesn’t exactly provide a six-figure salary (or even five-figures for that matter).  Just 4 blocks from my apartment there’s a place called Placa Centro, a Chilean company that sells big sheets of particleboard covered with a wood-looking finish just like the furniture you can buy at Ikea.  Hmm.. I thought.  Could I build an entire living room from 2.5 meter by 2 meter particleboard sheets? Of course!  So, like a good nerd I broke out some 3D modeling software and started to design.  I measured the heights of some chairs in my office and a sofa at a friend’s house and even found out that through a lot of research, Herman Miller, the company that designed the famous $700 mesh-backed Aeron office chair, determined that the most comfortable seatback angle is 25 degrees.  After about a week (and after several passionate uses of the arctangent function to determine the best locations to mount the seatbacks), I had models of a chair, a side table, a coffee table, and – most challenging – a working futon, all made from 1.8 centimeter thick particleboard (a tad less than 3/4 inch for those of you still stuck in the Stone Ages).  I then broke apart all the models to create a list of all the pieces I’d need to build all the furniture.  At Placa Centro, you give the list to a woman at a computer, and after entering all the dimensions the computer optimizes the layout of the cuts on the board to minimize the amount of wasted wood.  The computer then prints out a diagram of the board with all the cuts on it, which then gets passed on to the guys that operate a big wall saw.  Here, they cut the board into all the rectangular pieces you need for free.  They’ll even glue a wood-looking border on the sides of the pieces you request so you don’t see the particleboard innards.   Most people get a few big cuts, so I think the guys cutting the boards wanted to kill me when they saw my list of lots of tiny cuts. Usually it takes an hour or two… I was told to come back tomorrow by a guy clenching his jaw and shaking his head back and forth. :)  The next day I headed back there and immediately spotted my order resembling a giant-sized pile of cards during a game of 52-card pickup.  Back at home I began the construction process, and three weeks later after installing well over 300 screws I had my very own living room.  I even used the scrap wood from my order to build a floor lamp complete with a 99-cent paper shade supported by 4 strings.  Coming soon to an Ikea near you… the latest line of flat-pack furniture by Kreiselman Designs.  There may be an ounce or two of dork in me, but for $150 I’ve got a pretty damn cool living room!  Check out the pics at the bottom of this post.

Besides my venture into the world of furniture-making, this past week was a BIG one for Loja.  All the offices closed at noon on Wednesday and many people didn’t come to work at all.  Why? Because The Queen was coming.  Not the type of queen you typically think of though.  This one’s less than 3 feet tall, made out of wood and lives in a glass box.  She’s the Queen of Cisne, or La Reina del Cisne. All throughout the province of Loja in southern Ecuador, you see stickers, shrines, pendants, figurines, and business names all dedicated to this Virgin Queen.  (I’d imagine it would be pretty hard for her to have sex trapped in her little glass box.)  Even the stadium here is called Estadio Reina del Cisne. Most of the year she sits in the town of El Cisne about 45 miles from Loja in an enormous, Gothic-style church, but from August 16 – 20 she’s carried from El Cisne to Loja by an enormous procession of 500,000 people (yes, half a million people!) from southern Ecuador and northern Peru.  This is by far the largest religious procession in the country.  According to local lore, the ancestors of the people in this area made the long and difficult journey to Quito in the late 16th century to find a fitting religious statue.  They returned in 1594 with the carving of La Reina del Cisne, and since then she’s been the ‘Queen’ of the people here. (Thank you ‘Lonely Planet’ for filling in the blanks in this story!) When she finally arrives in Loja, there’s a lot of fanfare to say the least.  Dancing troupes, military salutes, marching bands, fireworks, thousands of rose petals released from balconies, doves released from paper mache bells, a concert and a huge outdoor mass on the main plaza in the city.  I didn’t do the whole 3 day walk, but I did walk against “traffic” for an hour or so and then turned around and walked with everyone else back to Loja, which was good enough for me to get a feel for it!  The number of people walking was astounding and there were tons of people selling everything from sunglasses and umbrellas to freshly grilled pork skin and bags of cotton candy, each stuffed with a fake $100 bill.  It was definitely something to see!  On November 1st, the whole process is repeated in reverse and the Reina will rest in El Cisne again until the following August.

 Enjoy the pictures below and as usual click a few times to make them bigger.  Then click “Slideshow” to view them full screen.

Unshackled

For the first three months of service, the Peace Corps wants you to stay in your site (more or less) and become familiar with the town and its people.  So, as soon as we hit the 3-month mark, nearly half of my group converged at Mompiche Beach in the province of Esmeraldas in northern Ecuador for a little break from our sites.  The place is very “tranquilo” as they would say here, consisting of two sand streets and a handful of open-air bars and restaurants serving about 40 different types of batidos, or fresh-squeezed juices mixed with ice and milk, and all kinds of seafood that the local fisherman pull out of the Pacific Ocean early each morning.  The coast of Ecuador in general is a lot more laid back than the Sierra, or mountain areas, where the people tend to be a bit more conservative (and work a lot more!).  It was a nice change from the “big city” life in Loja.  There aren’t many places to stay at the beach, but we lucked out and were able to get a big thatched roof cabana that was able to fit a bunch of us.  There’s not much to do here except relax, which we didn’t have any problem with!  A few of us arrived early and paid some fisherman to take us out to an island that we had heard about.  After about 30 minutes of flying (literally) over some huge swells we arrived at the island which didn’t really have much to offer except an unbelievably wide beach, lots of birds and tons of giant-sized sand dollars covering the sand.  We hung out here and talked with the super-friendly fisherman for an hour or two, and then headed back to Mompiche. On the way back we stopped to watch some surfers do their thing for a while which was pretty impressive.  Mompiche is known to have some of the best/longest surfing waves in the world, and a bunch of international surfing competitions have taken place in the area.  Back at Mompiche, we didn’t do much but swing in the hammock, sit around a campfire, wade in the ocean and sip Caipiriñas at the bar.  Speaking of which, the electricity here isn’t too reliable!  We lost power about 3 times during the weekend and one night at the bar, the blender wasn’t working so well so the bartender proceeded to unscrew the two light bulbs and turn off the CD player so that more juice could flow to the blender!  (and it worked!)  One of the coolest parts about the beach was going into the ocean at night.  There are lots of tiny organisms called bioluminescent dinoflagelettes (say that 10 times fast) in the water here, and whenever you swing your arms through the water they light up like little stars.  Very neat!  There’s also a black sand beach within a 20-minute walk from Mompiche with silky smooth pitch black sand that was pretty cool too.

After 3 relaxing days at the beach I decided to check out two other volunteer’s sites in northern Ecuador.  The journey started with a bus from Mompiche to Atacames, a bigger city on the coast a bit north of Mompiche.  The ride is only an hour and a half, but of course the bus driver and his ayudante (or helper that does everything from collecting the fare to hanging outside the bus and washing the windshield with powdered laundry detergent and his hand) had to stop for a sit-down lunch mid-way through.  Why they couldn’t wait the 45 minutes to have lunch in Atacames is beyond me!  From Atacames, we were able to hop on a chartered bus to the city of Ibarra that would get us there in 6 hours instead of 8 on the regular bus.  The only catch was that the five of us heading that direction couldn’t sit in the regular seats with the folks that chartered the bus.  Instead we were relegated to the front compartment with the driver and his ayudante, Pepe, who proved to be quite the character and liked hanging out the door train-conductor-“All Aboard!”-style and informing us of the areas where it was and wasn’t safe for the bus to stop for us to take a leak on the side of the road.  Ari and I sat on the sweltering seats above the engine compartment, while Chris manned the dashboard and Shelley and Gaby sat on the floor on the top step.  And of course the people that chartered the bus had to stop at every roadside stand selling everything from mamacita's coconut candies to strings of grapefruits in yard-long mesh bags. When we finally made it to Ibarra, we ended up spending the night at another volunteer’s house before continuing on our way.  In the morning, Ari and I continued further north to her site in the province of Carchi, adjacent to the Colombian border.  This was another nice 4-hour bus ride, but at least we had seats this time around!  Ari’s site is located at the end of a painfully bumpy dirt road that any bus driver in the States would refuse to drive on.  The Ecuadorian bus driver, however, navigated the hair-pin turns with streams running across the road with ease.  Ari’s village is an Afro-Ecuadorian community of a few hundred people with a nearly perfect climate.  I think my initial reaction to the site was, “Wow this is a real Peace Corps site.”  It couldn’t be more different from Loja.  All that was there were a few houses, a volleyball court, an overgrown soccer field, and a tienda selling a few drinks and snacks that opened a month or two earlier.  Ari’s host family’s house was rustic to say the least, complete with newspaper wallpaper.  There was electricity but the only running water was an outdoor pipe diverted from the river for washing dishes and clothing.  The kitchen looked like something out of colonial times in the US with a wood burning fire inside for cooking and walls coated with black soot.  It was a gathering place, not just for Ari and the family, but for the three dogs, one cat, two ducks, and the plethora of chickens and chicks that roamed the property.  Thankfully the pig had to stay in his pen outside.  Armadillos are pretty common here and outside on the rafters of the porch was the family’s armadillo shell collection from all the ones that they’ve eaten recently.  The difference between this place and my host mom’s “palace” in Loja was shocking.  As rustic as the place was though, it was kind of nice to live the “simple country life” for two days.  All the kids were a ton of fun (and were pleading with me to stay another day… I think I gave them too much attention since they were a novelty and Ari was sick of them already!). 

After two nights in the world’s most uncomfortable bed, I headed 4 hours back to Ibarra, another hour to Cotacachi and then another half hour to Shelley’s site.  Her site is a small farming community in the mountains with neat views of the Imbabura volcano.  Many of the people at her site speak Kichwaa, which was/is the language spoken in the Andes long before the Spaniards arrived.  Most of the women and girls dress in traditional clothing as well.  I only had time for an hour or so here, so I just got a quick tour of the town and her house, which like Ari’s is also pretty rustic compared with my posh Loja life!  

From here, I really wanted to spend some more time on a bus so I headed back to Cotacachi, on to Otavallo (one hour) and then to my old host family’s house in Cayambe (1.5 hours).  It was good to see them and this was the first time I felt that my Spanish had improved tremendously.  When I left there three months ago I could still only understand about 50% of what was going on.  Now I think it was up to 80 or 90%! 

After a night in Cayambe, I headed back to Quito (2 hours) and then toured around the city for a few hours (the center of which is a United Nations World Heritage Site) before heading back to Loja on the always-enjoyable 13 hour overnight bus ride (which turned into 14 hours because of the landslide we hit along the way that some of the bus/truck drivers collectively shoveled a path through so that vehicles could pass).   It was awesome to see some other parts of the country and a bunch of other volunteers from my group, but I was pretty happy to be back in my own bed after the countless hours of bussing watching dubbed jackie chan and steven segal movies and listening to hours and hours of bachata music about everlasting love and aching "corazoncitos" (little hearts). And just remember, next time your toaster-oven isn’t working too well, all you need to do is unscrew a few light bulbs and all your problems will be solved! 

Enjoy the pics below and as usual click a few times to enlarge.  Then click “slideshow” for the full screen pics.

Jungle Juice and Cheese Doodles

To protect the sort-of-innocent, some information in this blog post has been modified...

Two weekends ago, my host mom invited another Peace Corps volunteer and me to an Inti Raymi ceremony to celebrate the summer solstice. I had no idea what I was getting myself into! Because the Incans were sun worshippers, the summer solstice is a pretty huge affair. I thought it was going to be a big parade/festival type event, but it turned out that there were only 8 of us plus a shaman.  The ceremony started at 9:30PM when all of us crossed a gushing river on the sketchiest suspension bridge I've ever seen and hiked up the side of a mountain to a small cleared area. The shaman had set up a a small circular seating area and in the center was a firepit with hot coals arranged in all sorts of patterns.  North, south, east and west were marked off around the circle and the shaman sat on a ceremonial lion-shaped stool in front of the fire. In front of him was a blanket on top of which he had laid out all kinds of rocks, crystals, herbs, powders, drums, bells, flowers, and bottles of interesting looking liquids, all of which were used at some point during the night.  We got up to the cleared area at about 10:30PM and the ceremony lasted until 10AM!!! Unfortunately pictures were not allowed.  A (very) abridged list of events if as follows:

• 1" diameter tobacco pipes hand rolled in corn husks passed around the circle all night long
  
• Drinking a thick green bitter drink called San Pedro made from a cactus in the area that's supposed to cause hallucinations and allow you to talk to the gods (my friend and I decided to sit out on this one)
  
• Having to listen and watch everyone else in the circle gagging and vomiting from the hallucinogenic drink that apparently affected them quite a bit
  
• The shaman drinking firewater (100 proof) mixed with jungle herbs and then walking around the circle and spraying it out of his mouth all over us
  
• Having to see my mom sit on a ocelot skin in front of the fire, lift up her shirt exposing everything and then watch the shaman encircle her with burning branches. This was followed by more alcohol mouth spraying on her stomach, and body slapping with branches and grasses.... all in an attempt to cure her gastritis.
  
• Watching others pour alcohol mixed with tobacco juice into their nostrils from a conch shell and then gagging and puking some more to 'cleanse' themselves (we politely declined, once again)
  
• Burning corn, fruit, and flowers as an offering to the gods
  
• Being pelted with colored sprinkles in the morning
  
• Laughing uncontrollably after being awake for 28 hours when I saw a white carnation in the back pocket of my friend's jeans and thought she was wearing a bunny costume
  
• Sneaking a banana and cheese doodles out of my backpack at 3AM and trying not to crinkle the bag so the shaman wouldn't scold me
  
• Being asked to return to my "place" in the circle when I went to stand on the other side of the fire to avoid passing out from excessive smoke inhalation
  
• Lots of drum banging, bell ringing, conch horn blowing, and chanting
  
• Freezing my ass off since it was drizzling half the night
  
• Getting 6 mosquito bites on my forehead
  

The guest list only made this event even more interesting:

• One Shaman, age approx 40, fond of hand rolled tobacco
  
• Two Ecuadorians, mid-20's, nearly mute
  
• One host mom, age 60, needs to reduce white rice and cheese intake and increase fiber consumption
  
• One 6'5" skinny German guy, age approx 58, claimed that the Finnish are so drunk that they fall over while pushing their kids in strollers
  
• One English guy, age aprox 50, did way too much acid and shrooms in his life and now speech is permanently slurred. chronic chain smoker coughing up phlegm all night long
  
• Wife of English guy, age approx 50, ex-PeaceCorps volunteer, chain smoker, strong believer in the power of the woman
  
• Two Peace Corps volunteers, age 23 and 28, freaked out
  

The next ceremony is for the fall equinox... not sure if I'll make it to that one!

Aside from this experience I've decided to move out of my host mom's house and get my own place.  After looking at about 10 places I finally came across a good one.  It is by far the strangest building I've ever seen in my life, complete with robot statues in the fence, an observatory on the roof, lighting bolt doors, and hexagon-shaped windows.  I'll probably be moving over there this weekend and I'll let you know if there's an alien dissection room in the basement.  A few pics are below.  Hope everyone is doing well!

The Spaceship

Inside

The View From My Hexa-Window

Over the Hills and Through the Woods

Things are still going really well down here and I spent the last two weekends in Podocarpus National Park, one of the most biodiverse places on the planet! The first weekend I headed into the western entrance to the Park which is only 15 minutes south of Loja. This area is at almost 10,000 ft above sea level and is mostly small trees and paramo, or highland grasslands. I recently bought a bike from a guy named Rodrigo and he and I are going to be working on the bike trail project I mentioned in my last post. We headed up to the park early on a Saturday morning to map out one of the potential bike trails and enjoy the awesome views. On the way down we saw an incredible rainbow, which was definitely the highlight of the trip.

Last week a bunch of volunteers and two of our Ecuadorian friends headed to the eastern entrance of the park near Zamora, an hour and a half bus ride east of Loja. Zamora is much lower than Loja and the area is a mix of cloud forest and thick jungle. The plant life, birds, butterflies, waterfalls, rivers, etc. here were pretty neat. (check out the pics) We got rained on pretty heavily, but that only added to the atmosphere. We spent the night in the park and then on Sunday crowded into one of the bars back in Loja to watch the Ecuador-Argentina World Cup qualifier soccer game. Ecuador was predicted to lose 0-4, but they came through with a 1-1 tie so it was pretty exciting. They would have won 1-0 if Argentina didn't score in the last 50 seconds of the game. The bar had girafas (giraffes) of beer which are basically really tall beakers on stands with spigots at the bottom, which made the game even more fun.

Outside of our adventures in the park, I’ve had a couple of urban “adventures” as well. The first was when I came home the other day for lunch. I opened the front and back doors for some ventilation and then went out front to fix something on my bike. Then all of a sudden a gust of wind blew the front door closed and of course my keys were inside the house. So now I was trapped in the little courtyard in front of the house, and I couldn’t get out to the street since you need a key to open the door in the gate as well. I didn’t feel like sitting in the courtyard for 6 hours for my host mom to come home, so I put my MacGyver skills to the test. Luckily there was a pile of paper clips, some nitroglycerin tablets, a Q-tip, a chewing gum wrapper and a coffee can in the courtyard which I used to create a small bomb to blow a hole through the side of the house just in the nick of time before the organized crime agents attempted to assassinate me. Well, not actually… But I did finally figure out how to remove the metal bar security door from its hinges and then use it as a ladder to climb onto the roof of the house. I then managed to climb over the house across the piping hot clay tiles and then jump 8 feet down into the back courtyard of the house using one of my host mom’s flower pots to break my fall. Luckily the back door was still open and I was able to get into the house. Unfortunately I couldn’t get the security door back on the hinges so I ended up having to pay some handyman $5 to get it back on.

Other than the house traverse, I had a great time picking up a package at the post office the other day. Who knew it would be such a process! First I waited on line at the post office window and then they told me I had to go to the back entrance. I waited on line there and after typing on the computer for 5 minutes he asked me to go make two copies of my passport and one copy of a customs form. (There’s no copy machine there so you have to find a store to make copies for you.) Then I went back to the post office and gave him the copies and a dollar (not sure why he needed that... maybe lunch money) and then another guy opened the package and sorted through it. Then he re-taped it and I thought I was set. But no. He gave me another form that I had to take to some municipal building 6 blocks away which of course was closed from 12 -3 for lunch. So I bought an ice cream and looked for new sunglasses for 45 minutes since mine cracked. Finally the building opened and I went to the 5th floor (after signing in with the security guard) and sat down with a woman at some Customs company that the government uses to collect taxes on imported items. After she pecked at her calculator for 5 minutes she told me that the tax would be $6.50. So I started to get out my wallet, but no... she gave me three more forms and told me I have to take them to the Banco Bolivariano to deposit the money in Ecuador's bank account (more or less). So I walked another 6 blocks to this bank, waited on line for 10 minutes and paid the $6.50. I got a nice stamp on one of the forms and then walked back to the post office and finally (after then having to look for the package again) got the box! Next time you get home-delivery of a package from UPS think about how lucky you are! :)

Enjoy the pics and click a couple of times to enlarge. Once enlarged click slideshow on the right side of the screen for full screen photos…

Preservativos

Hi all,

It’s been a while, so I thought I’d post something up here.

The past couple of weeks have been great, and I think my Spanish is slowly starting to get better. I was actually able to have a conversation about social security and US taxes with my counterpart in Spanish.

My work at Nature and Culture has been picking up a bit and I’ve written a couple of articles and press releases for them about everything from Ecuador’s first place science project winners, to the Podocarpus National Park, to a cherimoya (a type of fruit) project that the organization is working on. In the next few weeks, I’ll be starting to work with the environmental education department to help develop some new programs and help out the city’s Eco-clubs. Outside of NCI, I started working at an orphanage in the city with another volunteer, which has been a blast. So far, we’ve just played a bunch of games, but in the upcoming weeks I’m going to start doing some basic science projects with the kids (like mixing vinegar and baking soda to make volcanoes… Ooo!) The kids are super fun and it’s definitely a nice change from my work at NCI. My arm hair is a novelty for them and, like the kids in my family in Cayambe, they all love pulling on it!

In food news, I experimented with making some whole wheat English muffins from scratch, and they actually came out really good. Holly (another volunteer) and I made pizza the other night together which turned into a fiery experience… You have to light the ovens here with a match, so I did and let the oven preheat for about 20 min. When we opened the oven to put the pizza in, the inside was still ice cold. Apparently a breeze blew out the flame (the oven is outside) and the gas had been filling up the oven the whole time. We let the oven air out for a few minutes to let all the gas escape, and then I lit the match to light her up again. Well, apparently all the gas wasn’t gone and a huge fireball exploded out of the oven. Now I’m lacking arm hair on the first couple of inches on my right arm. At least the kids at the orphanage will have less hair to pull this week! :) Finally, in more food news, a bunch of volunteers met up in Vilcabamba at the Hosteria Izychaluma (highly recommended!) for dinner two weekends ago. I decided to splurge and get the bacon wrapped filet mignon. For $5.80, you can’t go wrong and it was super tasty!

Life in Loja is still going well, although the weather was a bit chillier the past couple of days. I went on a little hike this past weekend which was pretty nice. A 20-min walk from my house and you can be up in the mountains. I also met up with the “bike guy” in Loja who is pretty hardcore, and I think I’m going to buy a bike in the next couple of days. We also got talking about how there are lots of trails surrounding the city of Loja but there are no maps, brochures or signage anywhere. So, I’m thinking that another side project could be biking all the trails with a GPS and then creating some bike maps and brochures for the tourism office here. My counterpart here at NCI thinks it’s a good idea too and we might even make it into a book with all the plant and animal species you can pass along the way on each trail. Being able to go mountain biking for half the week will definitely be pretty cool!

The end of last week was an unexpected funeral for the father of one of my coworkers in Catamayo, about 40 min outside of Loja. It turned out to actually just be the wake, so we basically all just sat around for a couple of hours and chatted. I was talking with some coworkers, including the director of the organization, about how funerals are different in various cultures and religions. They asked me how Jewish funerals are different, and I said one of the differences is that Jews don’t get buried with preservatives (since I didn’t know the word for embalming fluid) or, “Los judíos no van al suelo con preservativos.” They all made the strangest face and then started laughing hysterically. I had no idea what was going on. Were they making fun of Jews? I don’t think I said anything funny. Well, it turns out that I should have said “preservantes”. Apparently, preservativos are condoms in Spanish… not very useful when you’re six feet under! My face turned a shade of red that upstaged any stop sign in the city of Loja and the laughter continued for another 5 minutes. And, of course, everyone else in the office now knows the story and continues to make fun of me. :)

PS: Check out the following link to help provide scholarships to young Ecuadorian women and combat sexual exploitation and human trafficking. Peace Corps Ecuador is selling raffle tickets for only $1.50 and the prizes are awesome!

http://kidsatartnyc.com/PC/GADTIPS.htm

Enjoy the pics and as usual click a few times to enlarge. Once the large picture size loads, click "Slideshow" on the right-hand side of the screen to see the images at full-screen size.

Peace Corps??

More like Posh Corps! They say every Peace Corps experience is different, and my case is certainly not an exception. I came to Ecuador expecting to live in a bamboo hut in the jungle and carry my water from the river each morning, and now I’m living in what seems like Beverly Hills. The “barrio” I’m living in (called Zamora Huayco) is pretty high-end and instead of the broken glass on top of the walls like in Cayambe, many of the folks here have electric fences! My host mom’s house is pretty nice, complete with marble and parquet floors, a gas water heater, great shower pressure, washing machine, etc. (Other volunteers reading this, please don’t kill me! :) ) Some of the other houses in the neighborhood are ridiculous as far as Ecuadorian standards go (check out the pictures). The climate here is beautiful too. We’re at about 6900 feet above sea level and the weather has been about 75 degrees and sunny virtually everyday. There are two rivers that run through the city, a bunch of parks, a supermarket, movie theater, several really nice squares, and to top it off they even sell my favorite cookies and cream ice cream at several scoop shops around the city (a cone is 80 cents!). The city is surrounded by lush green mountains, and there was even an article in a local magazine today titled, “Loja casi un paraíso,” (Loja, Almost a Paradise). As far as Ecuadorian cities go, this place is definitely nice. All in all, I can’t say I’m having too tough of a time living here!

The organization I’m working with (www.natureandculture.org) has kept me busy over the past two weeks or so, and some of the projects they’re involved with are pretty interesting. Unlike national parks in the States where the mindset is to keep people and development activities out, my organization is trying to preserve both the amazing natural resources found in the region and the culture of the numerous indigenous peoples that live within the reserves through sustainable small business activities. The thought is that if the people living in and around these areas can sustain themselves through environmentally friendly, yet profitable, practices they’ll be more prone to protect and defend these areas while preserving their own centuries old cultures at the same time.

One of the first events I went to was a meeting at the Banco del Estado. This bank invests in many of the activities of the local governments in the region, and my organization was giving some presentations stressing the importance of investing in land preservation for watershed protection, erosion control, etc. The next day, we went to a huge event within the El Carmen watershed, which was attended by the mayor, close to 1000 school kids and university students, and a slew of other important folks. Nature and Culture Int’l (NCI), using money primarily from donors in the States, purchased all the land that encompasses this watershed to ensure that it’s preserved in its natural state hence helping to protect the city’s water supply. At this event, NCI was signing the land over to the city to manage and protect, since NCI likes to empower local people and governments. It was quite the event (complete with marching band), and was followed by a huge tree-planting campaign by the school kids. Unfortunately, the tree planting ended pretty abruptly when some kids knocked over a giant wasp nest and the thousands of swarming wasps sent the kids screaming and running down the road! The other big event these past two weeks was a trip down to Zapotillo in the southwest corner of the country. The scenery along the way was amazing, and it was super neat how much the climate and vegetation changed as we headed from 6900 feet down to about 500 feet in Zapotillo. This area is super hot, and for a good part of the year pretty dry. The notable feature here is something called a Tumbesian Dry Forest that extends from southern Ecuador into northern Peru. There are only four of these types of forests in the world, and NCI has purchased large areas to protect. Many of the trees here actually lose their leaves during the hot, dry summer to preserve water, and some, like the extremely weird looking Ceiba tree, have green, photosynthetic bark. NCI will be helping to strengthen local capacity and manage the use of natural resources to benefit about 30 rural communities. Some of the projects currently underway are the commercialization of the fruits of the Palo Santo tree (whose essence is now being used in a new perfume - "Amor America"), and the production of a bunch of goat’s milk products, like cheese and yogurt. (There are probably more goats than people in this region!)

There are two other volunteers working with NCI in Zapotillo from my group (Levi and Mandy) so it was good to see them. Zapotillo is a pretty small town (about 1500 people), so it was a big change from Loja! The city is located on the banks of a river, and on the other side of the river is Peru. There’s a bunch of illegal smuggling that goes on between countries here, especially when it comes to gas. The Ecuadorian government highly subsidizes gas here and the cost of a gallon is fixed at $1.48 for regular. On the other side of the river, however, Peruvians are paying $5 to $6 for a gallon. You can see why the Peruvians are always trying to sneak gas across the border from Ecuador to sell at home! Besides gas smuggling, they have some really good ceviche (fish “cooked” in lime juice and cilantro) in Zapotillo, and it was also nice to just sit and sip some coconut milk from coconuts freshly opened with a machete. Levi and Mandy ended up coming back to Loja with me (Levi and I got to ride in the back of the pickup truck with a beer for the 5 hour trip back, which was pretty nice) since there are no ATMs in Zapotillo and they needed $. They also have to travel all the way to Loja to pick up their mail!

Other than work, the weekends have been a blast spending time with the other volunteers and their Ecuadorian friends. Last weekend, a few of us headed down to Vilcabamba for a few hours (40 min south of Loja), which is the massage and facial capital of Ecuador. The place is very tranquilo, as the locals would say, with some awesome scenery. A 75-minute full body massage can be had for $18! We also went to a salsa/reggaeton club in Loja to dance and sip some Espiritu Lojana, a really strong, hot, yellow, spiced drink made with sugar cane liquor (I think). It’s pretty gross, but it’s only a dollar so people drink it! And to finish off the past weekend, we went to a U2 cover band concert (how Ecuadorian!).

Enjoy the pics below and as usual click a few times to enlarge...

I'm in!

Hi all,

It’s been a while since I last posted, so I thought it was time to throw something up here. The last two weeks or so were pretty action packed so I won’t bore you with all the details! I’m finally in Loja and I’m now officially a Peace Corps Volunteer!

We all said goodbye to our host families on the 14th after a family appreciation day party the day before. Everyone was a bit emotional but I’m going to try to visit sometime in the next couple of months. After leaving Cayambe (and happily escaping the incessant cold and rain) we all headed to Quito for some final presentations, including the much-talked-about Breaks and Escapes class with some US Marines where we learned some techniques for getting out of hairy situations! On the 17th we all headed to the US Embassy / Ambassador’s Residence for our swear-in ceremony. The house was super nice and the weather was awesome. We had a clear view of the 19,000 ft Cayambe volcano from the backyard. After some speeches, we all took the PC oath and finally became Volunteers after the 10 weeks of training. After swear-in, it was a non-stop party until about 2AM. We started with a party bus that drove around Quito for 2 hours. About half of us were on the roof with a band that played the same song over and over again the whole time. The roof was “interesting” as well since we had to duck 10 or 20 times to avoid being decapitated/electrocuted by wires that ran across the street! The bus also decided to go through a tunnel where we literally had to squat down to avoid hitting our heads! After the bus, we rented out a place and had an all-night party that a whole bunch of current volunteers came to as well.

The next day was kind of sad as people slowly left for their sites and the size of the group dwindled one by one. Luckily the Peace Corps gave us all cell phones so it’ll be a little easier to keep in touch. Andy, Katie and I took a 13.5 hour night bus from Quito to Loja which was insanely long but luckily I slept for most of it. The 4 hour stretch between Cuenca and Loja though was a mess with tons of potholes and landslides so that part was definitely not comfortable! When I arrived at the bus station, I met my new host mom (Ruth) who I can only describe as a little Italian mother (even though she’s Ecuadorian). She loves to sing in the kitchen and I have no idea what she’s saying half the time. The place I’m in now is pretty different than the place I lived at in Cayambe since it’s just me and her without 3 kids running around and throwing couch cushions at me all night. :) It’s kind of a nice change to have some time to myself, but it’s definitely not as fun. The neighborhood I’m in is super nice and looks like a high-end neighborhood in the States, so this is definitely not what I expected PC to be like! I’ll be living with Ruth for 3 months and then I’ll find a place of my own (at that point I expect all of you to come visit!). I haven’t been able to take many pictures here yet, but in my next post I’ll try to post as many as I can.

On Monday I headed to the office of Nature and Culture International (my counterpart here) to see what it’s all about. It’s definitely a well put together organization (with offices in several countries and even one in San Diego), which is definitely not what I expected PC to be like! For the first few hours I waited for my new “boss” to show up and then he finally asked me to come into the conference room. The whole company (about 30 people) was in there and I was asked to give a presentation about Peace Corps, my background, etc. in Spanish. Whoa! Not fun! The past few days here I’ve just been reading some literature and trying to get a better feel for the place. I’ll probably be working in the area of Communication (website stuff, outreach, press releases in English that can be released in the US to try to get more donors, etc.) and Environmental Education (school programs, eco-clubs, program development, etc.). There’s also a UNESCO Biosphere reserve here (Podocarpus – El Condor) that they’d like me to help promote as well. We’ll see how things pan out since everything is still pretty new.

Last night I met some of the PC volunteers that live in and around Loja. It’s a pretty fun group so I think the next two years will be a good time!

That’s it for now… more about Loja and the job in the next post. My new contact info is below so feel free to send goodies / call anytime :)!

Jason Kreiselman
Cuerpo de Paz
Casilla 11-01-211
Loja, Loja
Ecuador

Cell (from the States): 011-593-9-795-6226

Enjoy the pics (click a few times to enlarge)

Bussing Around Ecuador

Hello!

So... the past two weeks involved a lot of time on buses (over 40 hours total!), but the travel time was well worth it, and I was able to see some other incredible areas of the country. Two Fridays ago was Good Friday so we all had the day off from training. Everyone in Ecuador makes a dish called Fanesca for Good Friday/Easter so most of the day was spent making this chunky soup. It contains 12 different types of grains/beans (all of which must be peeled individually = super time-consuming), some type of broth, milk, pieces of hard boiled egg, and optionally pieces of salt cod, which my family luckily left out of the mix. The Fanesca is served with an enormous mound of pura de papa (mashed potatoes) and a few cut up vegetables. Arroz con leche (rice with milk) is served for dessert, which is basically like a drinkable, hot, rice pudding with clove and star anise flavoring (and a ton of sugar). It doesn’t sound like much food for a holiday feast, but after ingesting the bowl of fiber followed by the lead weight of potatoes (and the seconds that are usually forced upon you), you’re lucky if you can get out of the chair.

Our first Fanesca meal was lunch on Good Friday. Then, at the last minute, my family decided that we were all going to Quito for dinner with other members of the family, and that we’d be sleeping over. Since all the trainees were leaving for Puerto Quito on Saturday at 2PM, I was a little leery that we’d be back in time on Saturday for me to pack and get to the bus in time. They assured me, however, that it wouldn’t be a problem. When we got there, a ton of family members (like 40 – 50) were playing “Coco” in the street. I think it’s similar to Baci in that everyone has a metal ball and you try to hit other people’s metal balls that are lying in the street. Every time you hit someone’s ball, they’re out of the game. The basic goal is for your ball to be the last ball in the street. It was 5 cents to enter the game, and whoever wins gets all the money in the pot. I lost 4 times in a row. :) The family was really into the game and kept yelling, “Matale, Matale!” (Kill him, kill him!). Once it got dark, we all headed inside to have another meal of Fanesca, mashed potatoes and arroz con leche. It’s very common for extended families to live together here, and all 50 family members had small apartments in the complex. I’m not sure if they all always eat together, but tonight everyone piled in the grandparents place for dinner. Four guys were watching the Passion of Christ on TV, there were three groups of people playing Rummy and the plethora of kids were running around like mad. And this was just my host mother’s side of the family (she has 8 sisters)... crazy! That night I bunked up in the grandparent’s bedroom. I was in one bed, they were in another about 2 feet away from my bed, and the entire perimeter of the room was covered with Virgin Mary and Jesus statues. The sleeping arrangement was a little weird, but the 4 hours of Rummy tired me out so I slept pretty well. In the morning, we had breakfast (twice – once at the grandparent´s apt and again at what I think was one of the brother-in-law’s apts downstairs). I thought it might be a good idea to start heading back to Cayambe, but instead I was handed a pair of really short shorts and an Argentinean soccer jersey – It was time for futbol. The trip back to Cayambe is about 1.5 hours without traffic and it was already 10:00, so I was a bit concerned. We played for about an hour trying to avoid the two pigs that were sifting through a pile of garbage next to the right goal post, and then we finally ended up leaving Quito at 11:00. On the way out, however, my host father asked if we could stop at his mother’s house at the opposite end of Quito just to say hello. Oy! I reluctantly agreed, and long story short we ended up arriving in Cayambe at 1:30PM. I packed in about a minute and a half and then my host father rushed me back to the training center to catch the bus with 5 minutes to spare!

The bus ride to Puerto Quito took about 5 hours and we dropped quite a bit in elevation as we headed down the western slope of the Andes. The vegetation changed dramatically, and the scenery was much more lush and tropical. The place we stayed at for the week was really nice. It had a bar, two pools, a bunch of hammocks, soccer, volleyball, a river, etc. We had the weekend off, which was great, and a couple of us headed into the town of Puerto Quito and had some really good shrimp ceviche. The climate here is totally different that in the mountains, and it was about 85 degrees everyday and super humid. The training activities during the week were pretty good and included a conflict resolution workshop, a value-added products workshop (i.e. instead of selling raw fruit, turn it into jelly and sell it for 4 times the price), how to best work with NGO’s, how to build irrigation systems and terraced farming areas, a trip to a cacao processing plant, a visit to a small town where a Peace Corps volunteer had started a jewelry workshop with the women, and a trip to a cloud forest reserve called Macchikapuna. The jewelry workshop was located in a super small town where the school kids collect local seeds and then the women transform the seeds into necklaces, earrings, bracelets, etc. It was a neat little operation. At the cloud forest reserve we got super lucky and spotted a spectacled bear in one of the trees. This is the only type of bear in South America (it has white rings around its eyes, hence the name), and the guides at the park said they only see them once or twice a year. At the end of the week, we had a big party and a talent show which was hysterical. I imitated one of the trainers in a fake dating game skit where we poked fun at all the quirky characteristics of the trainers.

At the end of the week, after a lot of pool/river time, the trainees split up into groups, and I went with the three other IT trainees down to a small 1500 person town in the southeast of the country called San Juan Bosco. Since the total trip is about 20 hours from Puerto Quito, we broke it up into two legs and spent the night in the city of Cuenca, which is really nice and historic. On the Quito to Cuenca leg we hit a big landslide at about 5AM and ended up having to wait 3 hours for some guys with shovels to clear a path. It was pretty crazy and buses were sliding all over the place. A bunch of guys were trying to push the buses in the right direction, and the whole scene was somewhat comical. After a nice night in Cuenca we started on a 6 hour bus journey to San Juan Bosco on a super narrow dirt road with a cliff on one side and no guard rail. The town was really nice, and I think the people there receive quite a bit of money from family members that are living in the States. The climate was perfect here and was much less humid than in Puerto Quito. In this town, we spent the week working with the IT guy from the Peace Corps office and two locals named Angel and Carlos that set the town up with Internet via a radio signal. It was pretty interesting to see how different things are in such a small town. We spent some time checking out problems with a cable drop in the municipio (county offices), checked out the computer lab in the school, attempted to use a Linux box to place bandwidth limits on each computer in the municipio, etc. We also piled in a Toyota 4Runner one day and headed an additional hour into the jungle on an extremely bumpy dirt road with several stream crossings to a 150 person town called Pananza. It took two attempts to get there since in the morning there was a landslide that blocked the whole road. Finally, when we arrived in the afternoon the people there thought we were miners wanting to dig on their land and it took a bit of work to convince them that we were only there to help network four of their computers that Angel had sold to them a month or two prior. On the second to last day, the mayor invited us to have lunch at his house. His wife served rabbit, which we were all a bit leery of but it was actually really good. I lucked out and got what I think was the rabbit ass since it was a lot more tender than the legs that everyone else got! Finally on the last day, after tinkering with some computers, we headed out to the local river to go “fishing” with Angel. Fishing here entailed throwing a piece of dynamite in the water and then harvesting the dead fish that float down stream after the explosion! Unfortunately we only caught two fish that were about 3 inches long, so the fishing experience wasn’t too fruitful. Instead we ended up grilling up some T-bone steaks next to the river along with some plantains, potatoes, yucca, and veggies – all of which were really good. The steaks were huge and were 10 for $18 – not bad!

Finally after an action packed week, we headed back to Cayambe on yet another 20 hour bus ride where we sat through 3 painfully bad Antonio Banderas movies. My host family was excited to see me and said the two-year old was saying my name the whole time I was gone. We had some potted chicken and potatoes for dinner and that was the end of the two week adventure.

I’ll be here in Cayambe for another week, and then I’m in Quito for one week before I finally swear in as a volunteer. By then, I’ll hopefully be ready for another super long bus ride to Loja!

Hope you enjoy the pictures below (click to enlarge - you may have to click a few times).

Ladrones!

Hola,

All is well here and it looks like this Saturday we’ll be able to head to Puerto Quito for our week-long technical training session. Afterwards, the IT folks will be heading to San Juan Bosco in the southern rainforest area of Ecuador for another week of training. We’re all looking forward to a change of scenery from the training center in Tabacundo.

This past week we had to give our first presentation in Spanish, which actually went pretty well. We also had another oral language proficiency exam and I moved up a level to Intermedio-Alto (High Intermediate), so I guess I sound better now than a month ago!

In other news, there were a couple of incidents with “ladrones” (robbers) recently. The first (and most interesting!) was when some thieves tried to steal the car computer out of our around-the-block neighbor’s car which is also where two other trainees live. The father heard some noises, so he opened the gate and the three robbers pointed guns at him. He quickly closed the gate and called the police. He also called my family. After my father hung up he was like, “Hay ladrones, ladrones! Vamos!” (Robbers, robbers, let’s go!). I was thinking to myself, “Oh man this is going to be interesting.” He then pulled a rifle out of the closet that looked like it was from WW I and the two of us ran down the stairs to his car. On the way down, he put a stick in my hand that’s about 2.5 feet long and about an inch thick. I’m thinking, “Right… I’m going to defend myself against 3 armed ladrones with a palo flaco (thin stick).” On the car ride there I was getting ready to duck down to avoid the crossfire, but luckily when the neighbor had called the robbers had already run away. When we got there, a bunch of other neighbors were there and we helped push the family’s car into a gated area. The police came but couldn’t do much, and that really was the end of incident. The second incident was super sad. The Internet store that I’ve been sending all these blog entries from was robbed of all their computers, so now I’ve had to move to another store that’s not nearly as great. We had all become friends with the owners of the place and had even interviewed them for a small business project the day before the robbery. They had only been open for 2 months and had taken out a $6000 loan to buy the equipment (which is huge when people in my neighborhood make $500 a month and oftentimes much less). Hardly anyone has insurance here for something like this so now the owners are in bad shape. :( We’re trying to help them out somehow, but it looks like the chances of them being able to reopen are pretty slim.

Besides the robberies, things are going well here. This past weekend I went with the family to the market since they wanted to make crabs. However they were 10 for 6 bucks which is super expensive so they ended up making some seafood soup instead with octopus, calamari, conch, and some other mystery seafood pieces. We bought a cherimoya at the market as well which is probably one of the best fruits I’ve ever had. It tastes kind of like a cross between a pear, a banana and cotton candy. Highly recommended! We also went for a boat ride on the Laguna San Pablo north of Cayambe and attempted to go fishing as well (which was unsuccessful). Sunday night was a big two-hour episode of “Bailando por La Boda de Mis Sueños” (Dancing for the Wedding of My Dreams). One “famous” person (none of which I’ve ever heard of) dances with their fiancée and the winning couple after many weeks of competition wins the wedding of their dreams. The dancing is pretty shoddy, but people are pretty obsessed with the show here and the results are even recapped in the news every night. My family claims that the dancing gets better as the show progresses, but we’ll see how it goes!

On Tuesday, we all headed to Lake Cuicocha near the town of Cotacachi to hike the 15 km around the crater. The weather turned out to be beautiful and it was a nice change from the daily grind at the training center. There’s an active volcano beneath the lake, and 3000 years ago when it last erupted, the lava formed two islands in the middle of lake. The water in the lake is an awesome turquoise color, and in certain areas you can see bubbles floating up from the steam vents way below the surface.

I probably won’t be making any posts for the next two weeks, but I’m sure I’ll have lots of stories when I get back from two weeks of traveling.

Enjoy the pics below and click to enlarge.

Cancelled!

Just a quick update... because of the nonstop rain in the country there have been several hundred landslides which have closed many of the roads in the country. Since over half of us were not going to be able to reach our sites because of the road conditions (including me), Peace Corps decided to cancel all the site visits. :( Now, we´ll be in Tabacundo all this week instead. We should be able to head to Puerto Quito next week though, which is good since we´re all looking forward to see some new places.

I'm a Lojano!

Hello!

Today we got our site assignments and I’ll be living in Loja, Ecuador starting April 20th! The site assignment presentation was great, complete with music, cheering, and cheesy PowerPoint animations. Although this site probably won’t be as adventurous as working with the Shwar tribe in the jungle, every site is what you make of it so I think it’ll be great. I’ll probably have better living conditions compared to most of the other volunteers so I’m not going to complain about that! Everyone keeps telling me how beautiful the city is, so I’m pretty excited. My host family and someone else told me they eat a lot of dog in Loja, so I’m not sure how psyched I am about that! One of the language facilitators said they eat donkey down there too... whoa. I guess both options are better than the capybaras (pig-sized rodents) that people eat in the jungle!

This coming Sunday, I leave for my site visit to meet my counterpart (Nature & Culture International) and to get a feel for the city. I think it’s close to a 16 hour bus ride from Quito so hopefully the bus will stop for a bathroom break or two! I’ll be in Loja all next week, and then next Saturday I head to Puerto Quito, which is located in a transitional zone between the Andes and the coast about 2 hours northwest of Quito (so probably 18 hours on the bus). Here, everyone reconnects and we have some technical training day trips (i.e. trips to a cloud forest, an aquaculture facility, a trip to the coast, etc.). After that week, we split up again for another week-long technical training trip. The four IT volunteers will be going to a place called San Juan Bosco which is in the jungle to the east of Cuenca (another super long bus ride!). We’re heading there with the IT guy that works in the Peace Corps office in Quito. There, we’ll be meeting a marginally-crazy current volunteer that is now entering his 3rd or 4th year of service named “Jungle” Dave. He just married an Ecuadorian and we’ll probably be arriving during his honeymoon! He has a foot-long goatee and that’s as much as I know! We’re all pretty excited. After the trip to the jungle, we all head back to our host families for about another week. Then we head to Quito for the week before we swear-in on April 19th.

In other news, this past week we spent a bunch of time learning about non-formal education techniques and some other safety and security info. On Saturday we had a full-day session to become certified in Project Learning Tree, which is an environmental education program put out by the American Forest Association. A lot of the lesson plans are really geared for a US-based audience but can be adapted to the Ecuadorian culture pretty easily.

On Thursday, we had a nice break from language classes and had an EcuaVolley tournament at the training center. EcuaVolley is similar to volleyball, but it’s 3 on 3, you can almost catch the ball before hitting it, and the ball they use is basically a soccer ball so your wrists get nice and sore if you bump a lot! Each of the 11 community groups formed a team and played each other for most of the afternoon. Before the tournament began, each team paraded around the "princess" of the town (one of the female trainees) and then the judges voted on the best EcuaVolley princess. We then sang the Ecuadorian national anthem, and afterwards the tournament began complete with Reggaeton music playing in the background. Apparently the parade and princesses are commonplace at Ecuadorian sporting events. On Sunday, even though I had some major stomach issues, I forced myself to get out of bed and go to my 8-year old Ecuadorian brother's soccer game. This was the first game, and he was super excited about his new uniform so I couldn't pass it up. Like at our EcuaVolley tournament there was a long parade with a princess on each team, speeches, and the singing of the national anthem. Jordan's team ended up winning 2 - 1.

This week we also had some more mystery meat called “molleja” (mo-ye-cha), which I tried and politely declined! I’m not sure exactly what it is, but it’s some part of a chicken that has something to do with digestion. The taste wasn’t horrible (probably because it had lots of salt on it), but just the look of it wasn’t for me!

I’m not sure how much web access I’ll have for the next 3 weeks, so if you don’t hear from me I’m likely still alive!

Enjoy the pics below…. (as always click them to enlarge)

Macas or Loja??

Hola,

Things are still going well here and on the 6th of March I will have officially been in Ecuador for a month – 26 more months to go! This week was rainy again, but we’re all getting used to it. Standing out in the rain and laundry that takes 5 days to dry on the line somehow seems normal!

Last Monday, the Natural Resources group took a trip to Pifo to visit a tree nursery where we got some hands on experience with plant propagation, grafting, seed beds, etc. My group ended up having to stuff soil in plastic bags or “fundas” for an hour and we were happy we didn’t have to do the 1200 bags that the workers there fill everyday! Even though it was pretty monotonous we had fun learning some jokes in Spanish from some of the facilitators. As a follow up later in the week we learned about a bunch of organic remedies for crop pests that you can make at home using everything from garlic to beer.

The crazy nurse paid us a visit again later in the week - dressed in a chicken suit - and spoke about the avian flu for a while. When the roosters outside the classroom saw the chicken suit they got a bit excited and started cock a doodling like mad. Of course, the nurse played along and flapped her wings, which was interesting to say the least! We also went over a bunch of first aid information, discussed some case studies (i.e. your foot gets run over by a tractor – what do you do?), and talked a little bit about poisonous snakes in Ecuador even though there’s never been a Peace Corps Volunteer bitten by a snake in the country. At the end of the day, the language facilitators hooked up some speakers and we had a blast putting our dancing skills to the test, trying out merengue, salsa, cumbia, and a bunch of other common local dances.

On Friday, Ambassador Jewel visited our group at the training center and talked a bunch about US-Ecuadorian relations, which was pretty interesting. In the afternoon, we learned about starting up community banks at our sites, which is a pretty neat and easy to implement concept. Every week, the bank members would meet and would all deposit the same amount into the safe (i.e. one dollar). Members can take out small loans (to buy raw materials for their products, for example) at a 10% interest rate and the loans need to be paid back by the end of the month. 10% sounds like a lot, but it’s not that much on a $30 loan, and is especially worth it if it allows the borrower to produce products he/she otherwise wouldn’t have been able to produce. At the end of a specified period of time – usually a year – all the money in the safe (deposits + interest) is distributed to the bank members. The members can then decide if they want to start the bank over again.

We ended the week with a language simulation test where we went to 5 stations and chose a card at each station with a different scenario that we had to talk about for 5 minutes. I did pretty well and had fun fighting with the “bank teller” when my ATM card got trapped in the machine.

This past weekend was pretty low key. A bunch of us hung out at another trainee’s house on Friday night, and I went to the SuperMaxi (supermarket) with my family in Ibarra on Saturday. We made pizza both Saturday night and Sunday night, since the family is now obsessed with my dough. Saturday was a flop since the fire wasn’t hot enough, so on Sunday we used the oven for the first time since I moved into the house! On Sunday, I went to Café Aroma (AKA Gringo Café) for breakfast with some other trainees, and then walked around the town of Ayora just north of Cayambe, which was nice.

On March 11th, I officially find out where my site will be. Right now, the two natural resources IT sites are Loja in mountains or Macas in the jungle. Loja (pop about 120,000) is one of the oldest cities in the country and was founded in 1548. This site would be the most city-living of any of the sites available to volunteers. The city sounds pretty nice and is known as the “Garden City”. It’s also supposedly the cleanest city in Ecuador, and the people speak the best Spanish. It’s located at about 7300 ft above sea level so the weather is a bit warmer than where I am now. My counterpart at this site would be an organization called Nature and Culture. Some activities I’d be involved with include promotion (radio and mass media), upkeep and management of some kind of Biosphere declaration, website design and maintenance, environmental education in local schools, school gardens, eco-clubs, and assistance with the design of a hydroelectric project to the south of Loja. Macas is located in eastern Ecuador in the jungle. It’s a smaller town of about 15 or 20,000 people. Here I’d be working with the Amazonian Forest Service. Although I’d be living in Macas, most of the work would be way out in the rainforest and I’d get to work with the indigenous Shwar tribe (formerly famous for shrinking heads!), which sounds pretty neat. Some activities I’d be involved with at this site are sustainable forest management, zoning of farms for forest management, elaboration of materials and curriculum for forest management techniques, and a bunch of GIS and GPS work, including teaching the Shwar tribe GPS skills so they can better manage their land and make more informed decisions when, for example, an oil company approaches them wanting to drill on their land. Let me know your thoughts as to which job you think is better!! I have the ability to lobby for one or the other, but the decision is up to the tech trainers in the end.

Click on the pics below to enlarge...