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)