The following story is about one of the more intense things i have ever witnessed…

So the ¨team¨ headed to Santa Elena to give some Charlas (informative talks). A woman from a neighboring town was to give one on improving family dynamics, a dude was to teach the people how to make gardens and compost, and I was to give a nutrition charla…ie why having a garden would be beneficial. We show up, and as usually no one wanted to come to the charla, so we went around town and attempted to drag the people out of their houses. House to house, shack to shack, person to person…until we hit the jackpot. There were like 30 people crammed into this one room shack. Then we entered, and saw an unconscious guy vomiting and moaning in pain. One woman was supporting him and holding his hair back, and another one was rubbing water on his chest and hair.

Turns out, he had drank a cup of Barbasco cocktail. Barbasco is a poisonous root the Shuar use to fish. They toss the root into the water, and all the fish in the area float to the surface. ¨Did he drink it by accident?¨, I asked. Nope, woman problems. So this guy had tried to commit suicide, and I was witnessing the aftermath, and the community trying to save his life. Luckily, this community was the closet indigenous village to Guayzimi, so an ambulance (pickup truck) was only about half an hour away. A doctor came, put in an iv, and induced more vomiting. The guy recovered, thank god. But when he started to regain conscious, he began weaping and moaning, and everyone started yelling at him. ¨Why the hell would you drink fish poison?¨ Luckily, the doctor was the man, and told them that the physical sickness needed treatment first, and that the patient really didn´t need to be yelled at right then. But you just know that he´s going to get harassed by everyone in the village for the rest of his life. I´m guessing they don´t have the best understanding of mental health issues in the indigenous communities, and the implications of an attempted suicide are most likely poorly understood. Combine that with the fact that this is undoubtedly the most eventful thing thing that has happened in a while, and that the only thing to do at night is to sit around and gossip, and the poor guy is never going to live this down…which won´t help his depression.

My junior year of College I took a class about Feminist Bioethics, taught by a woman named Julia Pedroni. I needed a ¨writing intensive¨ course to fulfill a requirement, and this was the only class that fit my schedule. Plus, my friend Louisa was in the class, and she jokingly told me that a class about feminism would be a great way to meet girls…which turned out to be true enough. I sat next to some smarty pants named Emily who I would always ask what the readings were about before class started. I think that really impressed her.

In all seriousness, I learned a lot in the class. In a class that regularly discussed things like the philosophical implications of vaginal reconstructive surgery with a bunch of girls and one guy, I got used to being out of my comfort zone…which has been helpful down here. I also learned a lot about women’s medical issues that I would have never even thought about otherwise, which will probably end up being more valuable than two semesters of organic chemistry if I end up being a doctor. Now, If I’m part of a situation that propagates a double standard for woman and men, I think WWJD (what would Julia do?).

This happens frequently in Ecuador, a particularly machismo society. Guayzimi just had a 5 day fiesta celebrating the anniversary of when it officially became a city…21 years and still going strong. The first day, they crowned a reina (queen) of the city. It was one of the most gender (and culturally) biased things I have ever seen. WWJD? She´d probably write up a philosophical discussion.

So here goes, if you´re interested.

First of all, they had some really messed up ways to deal with multiculturalism. They had separate (but equal…) competitions for a mestiza, shuar, and saraguro queen. The competition for the mestizos was basically soft core (and underage, mind you) porn while the competition for the indigenous crown was like a trip to epcot. The mestizos got to go on stage twice, once wearing rediclous bikinis and once wearing the most extravagant evening dresses you´ve ever seen. The indigenous went on stage once wearing modest indigenous garb. The mestizos enterered through a smoke screen and walked around seductively, while the indigenous entered to traditional music and danced. The mestizos wore so much makeup they looked like hookers, while the indeginous didn´t wear any. The mestizos were nothing more than a parody of westernized female image, while the indigenous girls were parodying ther culture from earlier years.

So that was ridiculous…to me anyway. Especially because the MC tried to play it off like this was good for the culture. They are a multicultural nation, so why not have a queen from every ethnicity? Imagine in the states not having a Miss Florida and Miss California, but rather a Miss White, Miss Black, Miss Asian, Miss whatever… that would be absurd.

So they have some cultural issues, but those were overshadowed by the obvious (again, to me) gender issues. The fact that the mestizos were so sexualized made it hard for me to watch. Admittedly, there was a time when I truly enjoyed looking at half naked 16 year old girls. But that was when I was 16. Everyone else seemed to really love it. People made signs and cheered. The mother of the winning mom bragged to me as a soccer mom would brag if her daughter had scored the winning goal in a championship game.

In Latin America, a woman´s place is in the bed and in the kitchen, so they definitely had these poor girls trained for the bed part. In a Shuar household, a major part of the woman´s daily duties is to cook Chicha, which is always prepared by women and served to men…the women never actually drink it. To make the drink, they chew up the ingredients before spitting them into the pot to be cooked… So they literally get a taste of this male power symbol, but never actually get to consume it. One of the Shuar girls did a dance where she cerimoniusly carried a bowl of chichi to a male counterpart, thus completing the bed and kitchen service motif in the pageant. When I pointed out the symbolism to Corrie, a female volunteer who had come for the festivities, she laughed and said, ¨I think you´re reading too much into this.¨

I disagree. I think everyone else wasn´t reading enough into the situation. It´s this kind of crap that contributes to my host parents not letting my host sisters leave the house for fear of them getting pregnant. Literally, they can´t leave the house. If they need to do a favor for their parents like buy eggs, the dad will say, ¨You have 10 minutes. 5 for walking to a from the store, and 5 to buy the eggs.¨ And he’s not an ass, he’s actually a really good guy, but he has reason. The culture here is such that 16 year old girls are fair game to dirty old men. I´ve seen it, both figuratively in pageants and literally in the streets, and it´s disgusting.

Ok, I realize that initially my blog posts where whiney, and i made it seem that i had a pretty bad lot. While at first it was difficult to get used to a (slightly) less comfortable life, I now realize what an unreasonable wimp I was being. Seriously, it´s ridiculous.

Here´s why. Ecuador is arguably the best place in the world to get placed in the Peace Corps. The only down side is that its sometimes called ¨the posh corps¨ because life here is so much easier than, say, Botswana. Some of the city volunteers have amazing pads… about on par with what I would hope for in an apartment my first year out of college. My site is one of the least posh sites, but I still have running water, electricity, and I cook with a stove. So within my group of Ecuador PC friends, I get props for being slightly more hardcore than them, but I still have all the creature comforts that volunteers in other countries don´t. Also, Ecuador is a huge tourist destination. It´s nice to look forward to being able to get away and do some really cool things. For example, last month I went white water rafting for a huge volunteer Halloween party, and the weekend after thanksgiving I have to choose between going to the beach and going to Vilcabamba, basically the fountain of youth where everyone lives to be 100 ´cause life is so good there. (also, speaking of Posh Corps, we have TWO volunteers in Vilcabamba for some reason…). I decided to go to the beach, the deal breaker being my friends parents gave him a free week at a time share beach condo, and the fact that Vilcabamba is a lot closer to my site (7 hours versus 18) so i´ll have more chances to go there.

So yeah, don´t feel sorry for me. Ecuador is sweet. On top of being in the best country ever for Peace Corps, I´m in one of the best sites in Ecuador. The rainforest is sweet, just awesome. The weather is great…I live in an endless summer. It rains a lot, but its worth it because it gives birth to so much cool vegetation, not to mention rainbows. While it would be cool to live in the mountains, living in cold weather with no hot water or central heat really sucks, so I have the sierra kids beat there. And the beach is cool, but it’s a lot hotter than here, and the cities on the beach can be pretty violent. Contrast that to my site, which is probably the most relaxed, safe place i´ll ever live in.

And the size is perfect, too. At 1,500 people, its big enough to have all the necisities, but small enough so that I know a ton of people, which is really cool.

The downsides kind of suck right now, but will actually be better for me in the long run. No phone or e-mail is a bummer, but it forces me to be independent and talk to people here. Plus, I didn´t sign up for the Peace Corps to surf the net or chat on the phone…The fact that almost all the other volunteers can is kind of ridiculous. The isolation can be a downer at times, not going to lie. In the Peace Corps literature, it says that they usually try to cluster volunteers, but in extreme cases the nearest volunteer may be a couple hours away… which basically describes my site. But again, it forces me to hang out with locals and make friends here, which i´ve done.

Another downside is quite frankly ridiculous that I can even list it as a downside. I have a really tough time finding work. The organization I work with is really well organized, and provide a lot of services. Whenever I have an idea to improve life in the indigenous villages, the director is always like…yeah where going to do that next week. So right now I feel a bit worthless. But the upside is that I get paid the same no matter what, and the Peace Corps actually anticipates lack of work and tells us not to get discouraged. Some people take a year or longer the actually do anything, and some people never actually get anything done…which is totally ok. The Peace Corps has three goals, only one of which is to help the people here. The other two deal with intercultural exchange, so just by being here and learning I’m being productive…in a way. Plus, if I can´t find work it just means I chill in ¨The Ecological Paradise of Ecuador¨, which is Guayzimi´s tagline. Still, it bugs me not being productive…i´ve always been so type A.

So yeah, Basically I´m one of the luckiest people ever. I live in one of the most beautiful places ever, I get to talk to really nice people and play sports all the time, and my only job is to help people however I feel like…or at least try. The only downsides seem ridiculous when compared to everyone losing their livilyhood in the states right now (another reason why I´m lucky…now is a really good time for Americans who would otherwise need to look for work to be volunteering overseas).

So for all of you who think I’m doing something selfless and challenging and altruistic, stop it. This place rocks, and I’m having a blast.

It has been many moons since our protagonist last updated his blog. He will try not to leave anything out without being long winded…

So I wrote my last blog the morning after returning from the deep jungle for the first time. After I wrote it, I went to La Liga de Deportiva to do some front squats and hurt my back, so I spent the next couple days in bed without anyone to bring me food from Thai Garden. The first day I was bed ridden, my trip to the jungle caught up to me in a big way. Unexplainable chills, fever, and body aches accompanied very explainable diahrea. So that was a fun weekend.
I recovered just in time to go into the jungle again, but this time up a different river. Rio Nangarita splits into Rio Blanco and Rio Negro, and at the juncture of the two there is a really cool line where the white water meets the black. I enjoyed a bio nerd moment when, while reading a book uncle Brian had sent me, I learned that the difference in color was due to distinct soil nutrients present (or not present, more on that later) in the watersheds of the two rivers. Anyway, this time we went up Rio Blanco and had to walk considerably less than the time before. We we´re still in the registration phase of FODI, so we basically just had meetings, the same as the last week.
The final day in the jungle was really cool. We had some free time in Shaime, a cool little indigenous town. All the houses there are fairly ghetto, but since it’s closest of the ¨far¨ jungle towns, so there´s a nice church and school built with Austrian money. It’s weird seeing the juxtaposition of poor indigenous houses with rich, imperialistic Catholicism. An Austrian priest has been living in Guayzimi for 10 or 20 years, and gets a lot of money from the Austrian government for aid. He´s built a really nice church and grade school in Guayzimi, and churches and schools in a few other small indigenous communities. Although I don´t agree with imposing ones religion on others, its still kind of cool that the Austrian government is giving money to these communities for (almost) purely altruistic purposes. It’s hard to imagine a government investing in another country without future oil payoffs in mind.
Anyway, Shaime is a 2 hour walk from caves with Oil Birds, so named because the natives would hunt them for their special bodily oils. We didn´t have enough time to check that out, but we did get to enjoy a rare sunny day by frolicking in the river with about a dozen butt naked jungle boys while waiting for a boat to pass by.
That weekend I made it into the city to run errands and hang out with Corrie. While walking past a bar by the river, we were invited to drink a beer with some locals. One beer turned into many, and before I knew it I was jumping of the bridge into the river. Good idea, bag idea? Anyway, it impressed our new friends, and the dude called me his ¨best friend¨ and gave me his silver ring, and all but offered his girlfriend to me as well. Ecuadorians. Friendly people.
The next day I went fishing with a co-worker and, since it was his town’s annual fiesta, I watched a 4 by 4 jeep race through the mud. Not something I thought I would do in the Peace Corps. Also, I met an Austrailian Gold miner who invited me and my fellow Peace Corps friends to his mine. Zamora-Chinchipe is the most gold rich region of the world (or so they say) with 2 billion dollars worth of gold (again, so they say) discovered but not yet mined. A new constitution just passed here, and one of the articles outlaws gold mining, so the gold miners are stuck twiddling there thumbs (which is a good thing) and hoping for another policy change.
The next day I went back up the Rio Negro. This was by far the most intense trip yet. The river was low, so we had to walk 6 hours in ankle deep mud with ill fitting 7 dollar rubber boots after taking the boat up river for 4 hours. We arrived after dark, and the whole time I was worried about what would happen if I fell down one of the many slippery ravines we were traversing, or if I tripped while walking across a thin, wet, single log bridge. I´d be jodado, that’s what I´d be. If I sprained an ankle or broke a leg, I´d have to find some Shuar to help Bolo carry me to the nearest boat launch, which would probably take all night. Then I´d have to wait a day or two for a boat to pass, then take a 4 hour boat ride to las Orchideas, wait until evening for a 1 hour bus to go back to guayzimi, then take the midnight bus to Loja and the nearest hospital, which is 5 hours away when the roads are open. So basically, it would really suck. I´m ok with that, though. The funny thing is that Peace Corps policy stipulates that if you want to go for a day hike (most likely in a well marked national park with professionally built trails) you need to jump through a bunch of hoops, fill out excursion forms, and get emergency contact info two weeks before your planned hike just to ask permission to go, because it´s sooooo dangerous. And same Peace Corps assigned me this job. I´m fairly positive they have no idea what I do on a daily basis, both because I´m so far out that I´m basically out of the Peace Corps loop, and because if they did there´s no way they would let me do what I´m doing. Obviously, im not going to tell them either. Granted, last week was one of the most uncomfortable weeks of my life, but my work is totally extreme, for better or worse, and therefore very appealing. Here´s the weekly recap:
After the 4 hour boat ride and treacherous 6 hour hike, we got to the first village, where they had forgotten we were to have a meeting. Sweet. So we waited till morning, and then had the meeting. We weighed and measured 4 toddlers to check for malnutrition, then turned around and hiked 6 hours back to the second most remote village. They didn´t feel like having their kids measure that day, so we stayed the night (on the floor of a Shuar house, with mice running over me all night). Then the next day we hiked to another village, where we measured 3 kids, then waited around for several hours for a boat to come. So I had a lot of time to think how aggravating it was to be wet, hungry, and sleep deprived for 3 days all for the purpose of measuring 7 kids, who´s parents, quite frankly, are just going to keep them yucca no matter how malnourished they are. And some kids were definitely malnourished. I felt like I was walking through bizarre world and some points on the trip. There is a really high incidence (due to poor nutrition and lots of pesticides) of deformations and what could probably be classified as mental retardation. Seeing such a high concentration of kids with these problems was a little unnerving. Also, I saw a little boy with horrific burns from an accident involving gasoline, so that wasn´t easy either.
So it was frustrating. But there were some shinning moments. On the last day, in our free time we played with a bunch of kids. Obviously, when the kids first saw me they are terrified of me, but after I played with them and flung them around in the air with my powerful arms they just couldn´t get enough. Then after playing with the kids, we went swimming in the river. I was really disappointed I used up the last of my camera battery tacking a picture of a beautiful double rainbow the day before, because this site was just too funny to go uncaptured on film. Bolo and I stripped down to our underwear and rubber boots, me in my under armour spandex boxer briefs and he in red and white briefs that said ¨ I am a sex machione¨ on the crotch. Obviously he didn´t know what that meant, and obviously I explained it to him. Obviously, we had a good laugh. Ohh, and all the while we we´re swimming we had a crowd of native onlookers. Standard.
This weekend was a good one spent chilling at home with my family. On Saturday I went to Marta´s finca (farm) which was to coolest thing ever. It was basically just pure jungle with some banana, cocao, coffea, and yucca plants in the under story. The whole day we just spent randomly hacking our way through the forest with machetes and exploring. I actually swung on a vine like tarzan…but it broke. The only actually work we did in 5 hours on the finca was cutting two bunches of bananas, which we left by the side of the road to pick up later. So basically, from an efficiency standpoint, our day long trip to the finca was completely worthless. Also standard.
I should also note the difference between farms with animals and farms without animals. This was a farm without animals, and all the plants were incorporated into the forest, completely uninvasive, and the rainforest ecology was unmarred. Farms with animals (especially cows) need to be cleared, usually slash and burn, so the cows can eat the grass. This kind of rainforest descrution results in savannas, and the forest may or may not ever recover. Although growing conditions in the rainforest are ideal, soil in some places is extremely nutrient deficient. Another bio nerd interlude brought upon by the arrival of Brian´s ecology book:
The chemical formula for water (H2O) can be thought of a positively charged hydrogen ion (H+) and a negativily charged hydroxide ion (OH-). If one ion encounters another ion that it has a higher affinity for, the water molecule splits a new bond occurs. When it rains, this happens to a small portion of the water. Positively charged soil nutrients, like phosporus and nitrogen, form stable complexes with the hydroxide ion. These heavier compounds are pushed farther and farther into the ground with more and more rain. When it rains 14 feet a year, they get pushed down pretty far, making them unusable by plants. Additionally, free hydrogen ions accumulate in the soil surface, making it extremely acidic (acidic is nothing more then a logarhymic representation of hydrogen ion concentration). So although the weather is perfect for growing vegetation, the soil is terrible. But, evolution to the rescue! While ecosystems in temperate regions store most of the necessary nutrients in the soil to be taken up by plants when they are needed, nutrients in the rainforest are stored by the plants themselves. Pretty incredible. When one plant dies, the nutrients are immediately absorbed by the extensive shallow root network characteristic of tropical forests, so there are enough vege vitamins to go around. However, if this forest is destroyed (say for cattle farming) forest may never be able to repopulate the nutrient deprived soil.
That being said, the soil directly to the east of the Andes mountains (where is live) is relatively new and therefore nutrient rich, so recolonization of forests is a possibility. Areas farther east into the Amazon basin are older, with crappy soil, so rainforest destruction there is a really big problem.
OK. Sorry about that. Anyway, I’m mostly vegetarian now. I cook vegetarian food for myself, but if meat is served to me by others ill eat it as to not offend anyone. But I´m only served meat a couple times a week, so my carbon footprint is still pretty small.
Sunday was another big day. I helped my host daughter with her chemistry homework, and was absolutely flabbergasted with the way they teach science here. Her homework was to literally repeat the chemical formulates of methane through decane 30 times each. Quite frankly the dumbest thing i´ve ever heard of, and a complete waste of time. All you need to do is memorize what prefixes correspond to what number of carbons, then you can go on to learning things that actually matter. Writing out the chemical formula is completely worthless, but it´s an assaignment that can be easily graded and (more importantly) understood by the teacher who received the same sub par science education. Anyway, it was a challenge, but I successfully explained IUPAC nomenclature in Spanish, and she understood it, which was cool. And I got a great idea for something to do after the Peace Corps, and to push Med or Grad School off for another year. I want to apply for a Fullbright fellowship to research and try to improve science education in Latin America. Improving education, especially science education, is essential when trying to bring a nation into the developed world. Plus I would get to choose another tropical destination where I could live on someone else’s dime. Also, by that time I hopefully wouldn´t have to deal with any of the language barrier issues I’m dealing with right now.
After that life changing moment of insight, I played 3 games of soccer. Yeah, three games. It was bittersweet. I played awesome, but lost all three games and 2 dollars in the process.
After that, I made homemade hot chocolate. My idea is to make a value added product that I can teach the people to make and sell to generate income. I looked up how to make chocolate on the internet, and everyone said it was really hard. The final, toughest step being to temper the chocolate. Now, I don´t really know how to do that, or even exactly what that means, but I thought it would just come to me when the time came. It didn´t, so the chocolate which I intended to make into bars remained in powder form. It wasn´t very good, but the potential is there. I´ll keep working on it.
Monday I went into Zamora for a meeting about nutrition. Between a landslide and road work, the three hour trip took 5 hours going and 4 hours returning. My patience was tested again. But the meeting was actually really cool, the laid back, playful culture here makes for much more enjoyable meetings than in the states. After the meeting was done, I bought a guitar and a blanket. I had been using a sleeping bag, but on a trip into the jungle it got wet, and stuff doesn´t dry here, so it´s pretty nasty and may be ruined. Oops. So I was really excited to sleep with my new, clean, unsmelly blanket. Then it rained really hard. Now, my roof isn´t exactly 100 percent waterproof, but usually its just a few refreshing little trickles on my floor and face at night. But last night it decided to poor like a faucet, directly onto my bed. That was a bummer. Plus its been raining all day, so my sheets and blankets aren´t going to dry, and my mattress will undoubtedly be moldy and smelly. But such is life in the rainforest.
After glancing at my opening sentence, I realized that I have failed at both of my initial goals. I have left stuff out, and still managed to be long winded. Sorry.

I started work with the Patronato this week, and everything is super chévere (cool). For the foreseeable future, here´s my work: Monday through Wednesday (or Thursday if we get waylaid in some manner) I’ll be in the jungle working with health promoters within the constructs of FODI, a government organization that helps promote health and education for children. There are four sectors, all out in the campo but of varying distances from the metropolitan hub of Guayzimi. The plan now is to alternate from group to group, area to area, and work in all 4 zones and with all eight health promoters in the Patronato. Right now I’m just kind of going with the flow and helping them with their projects, but once I get to know the people and the language more I hope to start up some of my own projects as well, in areas where I feel there´s a need.

So the week went like this: last Thursday there was a day long meeting, of which one sentence at 5 oclock pertained to me…namely, which area of communities did I want to go to first? The communities farthest into the jungle, obviously. So on Monday at 7:30, Bolo, Angel, and Myself took a bus as far as buses go (about an hour and a half past Guayzimi), then waited for the daily motorized canoe to leave from a town called ¨The Orchids¨ at 10:30. We rode that as far as it could go (4 hours in a 15 person canoe packed with thirty people and a pig at first, then fewer and fewer until the three of us and the chauffer were the only people for the last hour or so) past beautiful vegetation, cliffs and waterfalls. When the water got to shallow, we got out and walked for two hours in the jungle, arriving at a town of 12 families at 6pm. This place was out there, no water, electricity, or anything like that. The people ate almost exclusively yucca and bananas that they picked daily. It was absolutely beautiful. I could see three houses, the school, a meeting hut, and the building FODI had built earlier that year from the center of town, which over looked some kind of enchanted mountain. I forget the story exactly, but it definitely looked enchanted. Anyway, once we got everyone round up we had a meeting, which consisted of about 10 people. As it was the first week after vacations, we just took care of logistical things, namely what was going to happen in the next year, registering children, and introducing the gringo that everyone was afraid of.

We visited 4 more villages in the next 2 days, hiking on average 2 hours through the jungle (my job is hiking through the Amazon rainforest!) or catching a boat if we were lucky. We went from purely native shuar villages deep in the jungle, to mixed shuar and saraguro, to mixed indigenous and mestizo villages with electricity and almost drinkable water. Side note: even the pure shuar villages have become modernized. Upon arriving at the first village, I was greeted by a dude wearing a t-shirt featuring a popular American wrestler.

So yeah, it was pretty cool. Hiking through the rainforest is just ass bad ass as it sounds, for better or worse. I don´t know if you´ve heard, but it rains a lot in the rainforest…hard. The trails we covered with 6 inches of mud, which made going up and down ravines in ill fitting rubber boots difficult (but not for Angel and Bolo. On flat ground I could smoke them, but I couldn´t keep up on their home turf). When I wasn´t saturated and cold, I was dehydrated and hot. I was told not to bring much water, advice that I followed to lighten my load. MISTAKE!

Science Lesson: Prairie dogs are so well adapted to life in the desert that their nephrons (The millions of tiny blood filtration gizmos that make up the kidneys. Not at all like a radiator, mom) can reabsorb 100% of the water from their blood before the filtrate is passed through the bladder. This obviates the need to hydrate. In fact, if you feed prairie dogs human food, the extra water will mess up their osmotic balance and they could die.

Science lesson over. My point is Ecuadorians are like prairie dogs. They NEVER drink water. With meals they will have one class of liquid only, but never pure water…that’s just weird. The tiendas have water almost exclusively to sell to gringos. The other weekend, while ¨checking out¨ after shopping, the owner looked confused and asked, ¨don´t you want to buy some water?¨ Why yes I did, thank you. I had forgotten.

Anyway, Angel and Bolo packed zero water, but I knew better and packed 2 litters, which was to last me one day until I could boil water the first night and refill. That chance never happened, nor did it happen the next night. In three days I drank my 2 liters of water, a cup of Chi cha, and another cup of muddy water. Bolo and Angel drank less, and seemed to be fine. I was thirsty and borderline dehydrated the entire time. I was going to bring bleach to put in water, but that doesn´t kill the two organisms you need to worry about in river water, and iodine tablets were nowhere to be found, obviously. Dad, if you haven’t already…send me some of those!

The food situation was a little better…I ate 2 meals daily. Again, Bolo and Angel are total badasses and were able to go without. I however, am a wimp (as it turns out) and was hungry for the three days. I had been eating 6 times daily to gorge my raging metabolism, which is a total blessing in a civilized society, but sucks in the campo when food is limited. I kept recalling the maximum amount of time humans can go without food or water, and was dismayed at how mentally soft I was. I wasn´t even close to dying of thirst or hunger, but I felt like I was because we´re so used to being totally satiated at all times.

Anyway, after getting my hair cut by mayor’s wife, I spent today eating, sleeping, reading, and otherwise recovering from the trip. I was overwhelmed by how kushy life is in Guayzimi…

Next week I go with a different group of promoters down a different river. Now that I know what to pack, the journey should be more enjoyably bad ass and less miserably bad ass.

PS- In one of the towns we visited there are a ton of petrified shells. This was one of the closer ones to civilization, and they were extending the road to it and blasting through the hills with dynamite, which uncovered a bunch of fossils. I found two pretty cool souvenirs for my house, one of which is part of what must have been the biggest shell ever.

Time doesn´t exist here. There are no seasons. The weather never changes: it’s always either rainy or sunny, or rainy and sunny (how?). Get up, work, play soccer, go to bed. Every day is exactly the same. You don´t spend time, you pass it. You don’t grow old, one day you just die.

I have learned to happily step aside and let time pass me by. Why worry about a trivial thing that that, anyway? I was even prepared for it. ¨Latin time¨, they call it. I wasn´t, however, prepared for the obliteration of direction I´ve experienced while here. Palm trees stretch up mountains in every direction. There is either no sun, or so much sun you can´t look at it…and when you notice the vibrant pink of a tropical sunset, the sun has already dipped behind a mountain. But you can´t tell which mountain. Seriously, I´ve tried. The sky lights up above the mountains for a 360 degree sunset, so you can´t tell which direction west is. I´m living in a floating bubble somewhere far removed from the space time continuum.

Sometimes, while in the ¨Purple Bubble¨ of Williams College, I would look up on a clear night and see that stars in all of their bucolic beauty, their vibrance unencumbered by light pollution. The infinite expanse and clarity always made me feel uncomfortable. So small and insignificant. Here, I look up on a rare cloudless night, and am even more overwhelmed pinhole illumination piercing the heavens. Only here I feel peace radiating from within rather that anxiety beating down from above. Sometimes its nice to be reminded of just how small and insigignificant you are.

Where to start, where to start…

First of all, I´m starting to really like it here. I realize that all of my problems have arisen due to the language barrier, and I shold be able to break that down more and more as time goes by. All I need is some patience. That specific virtue has never come easily for me, but lord knows I´m getting a lot of practice working in the elementary school (more on that to come). Other than the language barrier, I like the general way of life here better than in the states…my way of life that is. I have more free time, and in that free time I play a ton of sports and read books that I never had time to read in college. I say ¨my way of life¨ because it’s a little different from the way most of the people here live. While no one is ever really stressed out, but they work a lot here…some hard, some not so hard, but they still work. A lot of the guys I play sports with are still in high school, which they attend from 6:30 to 11:00 at night so they can get up and work from 7:30 to 5:00. Then they play soccer from 5:00 untill it gets too dark to see (around 6:30, right when classes start) then they eat dinner and shower, skipping the first period. For this reason, many of my friends are 19 or 20 years old and still have a year or two to go in school.

And what a grand school system it is. Every day I grow more and more frustrated with the incompetence on every level. The teachers are generally lazy. For example, today I went into the second grade classroom to retrieve a class room full of screaming, fighting, and crying 7 year olds for gym class. Their teacher was no where to be found, and hadn´t been in the class room for an hour…an hour! You can´t just leave 30 seven year olds alone for an hour! That’s negligence in the states, but here it´s a daily occurance. Upon seeing a child (one of my favorites mind you) crying after being punched, I had had enough and confronted the teacher. I asked him who was watching the kids (¨no one¨,obviously) and where he was (¨right here¨, unashamedly). For the first time, I stood up to him and the backward system and said, ¨you can´t not just un care to 30 kids are alone. they are crying, hitting, no adults. serious¨. Zing, I got him good.

Apart from the negligence, the kids have never even been taught how to learn. All of their exercises consist of mindlessly copying verbatim everything a teacher has written on the chalkboard. As a result, all the kids have stellar hand writing (you should see the signatures people here have. big, loopy beauties) , and can color code like it was their job. But they never actually learn anything, and original thought is unheard of. The only questions I am asked in class are ¨what color should we be writing in?¨ and ¨This page is full of writing (copying), what should I do now?¨ I tried to do some exercises that required a low level of mental cognition, but the kids not only couldn´t handle it, but the teacher totally nixed the idea before I could even give them a chance to think it though and use their brains a little. ¨That is not how the kids are accustomed to learning.¨ No shit. The kids here aren´t accumstomed to learning at all.

Case in point: I´ve been helping my 18 year old host sister with her English homework, and after 6 years of studying English, she cannot speak a single word. Here, I do not exaggerate. Not a single word. She has a work book full of diagrams of the human body with the organs labled in English, and translated songs by billy joel, but apart from using her optical nerve to transduce the refracted light signals off the chalkboard and motar neurons to tell her hand to write, she has never had to use her brain for anything. Math is the same way. She asked me to help her with Logarithmic functions (which I never learned…we have calculators for a reason) so I had to teach myself. Once I had seen enough problems, I had figured out the basic rules, and once that was done the problems were just applying the simple guidelines to novel sets of numbers. I pointed this out to her, and she then told me that the teacher had given her the rules, but she couldn’t figure out how to use them with the problems. I tried to help her for 2 maddening hours but made absolutely no headway. She’s not stupid, the school system here is just absolutely ridiculous. Its moments like these I´m grateful I went to good schools that, if not actually teaching me any applicable information (believe it or not, I haven´t had to explain the Kreb´s cycle to anyone here yet), they at least taught me how to think. It also makes me want to be a teacher at a progressive public highschool, since I now know how much more valuble experiential learning is: I can communicate enough to get by after 3 months of emersion, compared to language I didn´t learn in the 4 years of Spanish I didn´t study in high school.

So yeah. I never thought I would be stressed out and irritable after playing with kids for 4 hours a day (did I mention that they don´t discipline here, and whining is operantly rewarded?), but after lunch I generally need to lie down and recover. Luckily, I (finally) start work tomorrow with the Patronato, which is what I came here to do. That should be sweet.

Looking back on my my frustrating time spent as a teacher, it actually seems pretty ideal. The Patronato work will be amazing, but it will take me away from town on adventures frequently. While i´ve always loved me a good adventure, staying in town has given me a chance to get to know the people, and I´m going to stay on and teach gym class one day a week, which will give me a chance to stay connected with the kids…who outside of class are awesome. I see myself in a lot of the ones I am continually attempting to discipline…

Besides everything I´m involved with on a daily basis, i´ve learned to embrace the randomness that comes when you move to a place you don´t know, full of friendly people you can´t understand.

Examples:

Last Sunday I woke up with absulultely nothing to do besides wash my clothing, clean my room, and nourish myself. These activities can, in fact, take an entire day to accomplish if you wash your clothes by hand, your roof is made of decaying wood, and you don´t have a fridge. Also, if you’ve learned to reverse your multitasking ways and take as long as possible to to anything and everything. That’s a skill. So I went to the store (why go to the store once a week when you can go twice a day?) and on the way back some guy I had talked to a couple times (Marco) invited me to go to his farm. Another lesson: never turn down an ivitation. Instead of a boring day spent washing clothing, I got out into the campo (in the back of a truck!) and milked cows, witnessed and aborted attempt at bull rape, ate freshly slaughtered chicken and freshly dug up yucca, and contributed to rainforest descruction for purposes of small scale cattle farming with a freshly sharpened machete. Upon returning from the finca, I was invited to dinner and ate freshly made ¨cheese¨ with freshly squeezed juice. I also grew to hate the school system here more. Marco (a teacher) is one of the smartest guys i´ve meet. He can put himself in my shoes and explain things to me in terms i´ll understand…as opposed to my host mom. One time I didn´t know what olla meant, so she explained by saying ¨olla is olla¨. Aggravating. Marco would say ¨you use an olla to boil water or cook soup on a stove¨ then he would make the shape with his hands. Brilliant.

Even though he´s clearly one of the brighter people here, he still managed to spend 8 years on the states without learning the language or culture. I told him it was pronounced ¨mouth¨, not mouse, and it meant boca, not nariz. He also thinks that there are no farms in the states and that everyone eats hamburgers exclusively. One reason for this is lack of resources, as he never had the opportunity to travel outside of New Jersey. I believe the other reason is that the inept school system he grew up with next instilled the importance of learning. Upon moving to Ecuador, everyone in my group instinctively learned everything we could about the culture and language. It had been ingrained in us…why wouldn´t we? Whereas Marco, a bright guy and hard worker, spent 8 years hanging out with other Latinos and buying yucca at the one store that sold it. Why wouldn´t he? Why try to understand your surroundings more when you´re getting by O.K. as it is?

The next weekend I had no planned activities, and the start of the day played out almost identically to the previous Sunday morning that led me to get to know Marco and his family better. This time, I went to the bread store and invited myself to go fishing with the bread makers. We were to be gone all day, but they didn´t pack any food or water…with freshly baked bread sitting right there. I was a little puzzled, but I always try to do as the locals do, so I didn´t pack any food either. After jumping in the back of 2 different trucks to get to the river, we came upon a road that was lined with guyava and guava (no idea about spelling here) trees which we took turns climbing to get the fruit. I´ve always considered myself part monkey, and an excellent tree climber, but these guys put me to shame. Climbing up a featureless trunk, then manipulating a bamboo pole with one hand to reach up and knock the fruit from a high branch. wowy.

The fishing was unsuccessful (we netted the ugliest 3 inch fish ive ever seen) but on our way back up the fruit lined road we ran into some shuar hunting with blowguns, which they let us try. I instantly got mad props, because out of my 5 friends I was the only one to hit the target the first try (si tu puedes!) However, when we started to hunt birds (which is really hard, with any weapon) my friend ¨The Sheep¨, who was by far the worst during target practice, got lucky twice and killed two birds (two darts, not one stone). Nobody else hit anything, not even the shuar. Lucky sheep.

The third, and final, random story. Last night, just walking around, I came across the ¨gym¨ in town that I hadn´t known about. I poked my sunburnt nose in and instantly 3 overweight women invited to join them for aerobics, which I did despite the fact I was wearing sandals and had just drank a liter of whole milk. While gyrating about, the latter made me produce sounds that I blamed on the former.

After I was thoroughly sweaty, for the fourth time that day, a song came on (like the rest, that generic thump thumpy techo beat that makes you want to gel your highlighted hair and fight someone at the same time) that happened to have really dirty English lyrics This was the first time since arriving i´ve profited from the language barrier. I don´t want to come out and say the lyrics (there might be children reading) but suffice to say the singer really appreciated the flavor of either a specific cat or a specific organ of a specific female´s anatomy, as he dedicated the entire song to repeating the same sentence praising the taste over and over again. As the women continued to step clumsily and unawares, I was absolutely dying of laughter.

So the point, if there is one (which there isn´t) is that i´ve learned embrace randomness. Getting out and doing something is always better than staying in a doing nothing, even if you have no idea what you´ll be doing 5 minutes before it happens. Also, the public school system here sucks.

It´s been a while...sorry about that. Stuff´s been a little crazy.

So i finished up training up north in the cold, cold sierra. It was bittersweet. I was totally done with sitting through pointless days of ¨learning¨, and was ready for a change of scenery. On the other hand, it was kind of sad leaving everyone. The first half of training, everyone seemed to be barely holding it together in our their own seperate way. The second half, on the other hand, I actually felt comfortable and made some really good friends, finally moving past the ¨hey...im excited and nervous, your ecxited and nervous...lets be friends¨ stage. My birthday fell right at the end of training, so everyone through me a quasi-surprise party, which was actually pretty crazy. My birthday usually falls in the awkward in between summer and college time when all my highschool friends have left for school but i´m not yet at college, so i´ve never had a really proper blowout...untill now. I also started to bond with my host family, and was hanging out with them more, so it was sad to part with them. But i did, and another milestone was reached. I was feeling a lot of feelings, again...

Then we went to Quito, which was rediculous...

Training always culminates with a final week in Quito, and is always one big party. Peace Corps policy stipulates that volunteers may not travel for the first 3 months of service, so we all new we had to get our party on with each other in a big way...which we did. The Mariscol is a touristy part of town where all the young people hang out, so we spent a lot of time there...first at the restaurants, then at teh bars, then at the discotecks. Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we will be lonily. that was our motto.

Besides the partying, the capstone of the week was the swearing in ceremony at the ambassadors house, a stately manor that overlooks the long, narrow valley that contains the city. We all got dolled up, ate good food, and got our picture taken individually with the ambassador. This picture was taken with our certificate saying we were legitimate volunteers now, and was taken in front of the whole group, much like a graduation picture when the president hands every student their diplomas. I knew this was a big moment, so i was thinking to myself exactly how i would comport myself while having my picture taken. Should i hold the certificate with two hands, or with one? Two hands would look more official, but one hand would allow me to put my other shoulder and arm behind the ambassador in a friendlier gesture. Should I make a serious and subdued smile, or see how much of a smirk i could get away with? I was still thinking about this as my name was called and as i walked up to the front to get my picture taken, which caused me to walk directly into the ambassador, step on her feet, and damn near knock her on her butt. Smooth move Chris. The most important person you´ve met in ecuador and you assault her in front of 70 people.

Leaving Quito...
Corrie (the closest volunteer to me) and I took the night bus from quito to Loja, then from loja to our prospective sites. The trip to Loja took a little longer than usual...possibly because we broke down three seperate times. We final made it into Loja, only to crash on the outskirts. Everyone was fine, and quite frankly it was actually kind of fun. Plus, i learned some good swear words from disgruntled passengers.

Once in my site (Guayzimi...In the foothills of the andes right where the amazon jungle starts) the fast past living of the last week came to a screaching halt. My village is so laid back its rediculous.

My counterpart was on vacation, and I was told that my project wouldn´t start untill october, so i had a little free time. I looked arouind for stuff to do on my own to integrate into the community and to pass the time. Within about 35 minutes, i found myself in 2 different meetings, and before i knew it i was a full time english and gym teacher in the grade school and teaching english one hour a week at a technical school for adults in teh evenings. So that has been good...although i can honestly say that i hate teaching english (the school system here essentially garuntees that the kids don´t actually learn anything) i love teaching gym class, and working at the school has been really good to get to know the town. last week i got back from shopping in the big city and as soon as i got off the bus 2 of the cutest little girls ever ran up to give me a hug...which was pretty cool.

In my free time, i play a lot of sports. Everyday at 5 all the men get together and play either voli (variation of volleyball) or indor (variation of futbol played on concrete under an awning) depending on whether or not its raining...which is does every day at some point. After that, i go home and eat dinner with my family, then lift big rocks over my head at an attempt to get huge. I lost 10 pounds durnig training, which pissed me off. Im determined to gain it back. The weight lifting also serves to get me all hot, which makes taking cold showers easier. Then i watch telanovels with the family, read a little, make up a lesson plan for the next day, and go to sleep.

So school gets out at 1, and sports dont start untill 5. As incredible as laying in a hammock reading and napping sounds, 4 hours a day is a bit much, so recently i went on a search for other things to do. This search took me to the Liga de Deportive, a government sponsered sports ¨complex¨...like i said, theres nothing here to do besides play sports, so everyone does. As a result, everyone is really athletic and fun to play with...i fit right in, its great.

Anyway, so in the liga i learn that theres boxing classes daily at 3...perfect! now i only have 2 hours to kill between school and sports, and napping usually takes up that time, as i box for an hour and a half, play voli or indor, then lift weights...which usually makes me pretty tired. So im learing how to box, and as of right now I´m pretty bad. Theres another 18 year old kid in training whos pretty damn good...he competes around ecuador in championships. I can´t wait to start sparring with him so i can add getting the crap beaten out of me by a teenager from a developing country to my list of life happenings. Also, i just learned that the trainer is an ex ecuadorian national team member, and has competed internationally...so thats pretty cool.

So yeah, for about a week or so i was super lonily...i love my site, but its so isolated. not being able to call people or use the internet when im feeling down also forces me to rely more on myself... a skill that i realize is lacking in our generation. I think i´ve just about got it down now, and should only get better at it once i find more outlets and make more friends. I was finally getting accustomed to the rustic lifestyle when i came into Loja (where im writing this blogpost) to replace a lost bank card (luckily, only 90 dollars were stolen...). The Peace Corps lifestyle in the big cities is so different. theres three or 4 volunteers in and around loja, and they always hang out with each other. 2 of them actually live together, and im staying at their apartment right now. I´ve been watching episodes of ¨the office¨, making American food, and speaking english all weekend in a three bedroom apartment with hardwood floors that is all around nicer than any place id hope to have one year out of college. Contrast that to my less than waterproof roof in the rainforest....

It´s nice to have all those creature comforts, and have the option to consume like any other american if you want, but i wouldn´t trade it for my little jungle village. I am truelly learning to love the jungle lifestyle, and while the people in my site don´t have any money, they aren´t lacking any neccesities. They always hang out with their friends in the afternoons, and families in the evenings. When you combine that with the always close to perfect temperature, in a lot of ways my site resemples a sleapy vacation town not unlike bear lake in the summers, only everyone hangs out as a community more. I tried to explain that villages like this don´t exist in america, and they said something like...¨yeah, here we don´t ahve any money and americans are all rich!¨
i replied that although a lot (but not all) americans have a lot of money, our quest for individuality and success has led to an entire culture of isolation. I consider myslelf very blessed to have many close friends and family members, and my best days at home are spent hanging out with all of them...just kicking it and playing sports. But those days are few and far between, as excess work makes free time scare and big houses on big lots make it hard to socialize as a community in the free time that we do have. Here, almost every day is like a great summer day of simple recreation in the states. I am really starting the aprechiate that as a concept, and hope that someday soon ill be integrated enough to really feel like a part of it all. My one regret is that ill never be as involved as any of the community members here...I´ll never have brothers, sisters, cousins, a mom, dad, uncles, aunts, godparents, etc all living on my same block. While the people here may never have the the amazing opportunities for individual exploration that i have, the very culture that values this individual exploration has made this type of close knit social network impossible. trade offs...which lifestyle is better? ill tell you in two years.

OK...as a side note, i just read over this post and realize the writting totally sucks. That annoys me...i want things i post for the world to see to be of at least decent quality, but frankly my time in the cities is to valuable to be spent editing...hopefully i can find a computer to use at my site so i can write up better posts, then upload them to teh internet when i come into town...

thats all for now

peace,
chris

hokay, so...

first of all, new photos are up.

I just had my final LPI (language proficiency interview) today, and totally rocked it, so i feel pretty good right now. When i came in, i had no idea how to conjugate verbs, but i looked up the regular present and preterit tenses at the last minute (as is my costume) and therefore barely escaped the begginer level and tested into low level intermediate by the skin of my teeth. I just tested into the lower level advance speaking level, skipping a couple steps and making ¨the biggest jump in recorded history¨. I attribute my success to the fact that i read a lot of english books instead of doing my homework.

couple cool things, i guess.

I did a handstand on teh equator, only to realize it wasn´t the REAL equator...there was a museum and everything!!!

had another dance party in teh pizzeria cum discotechque, only this time the columbian owners took us out to real discos afterwards and professed their love to every girl in our group. they tried to explain that girls in america hang out iwht many guys just as friends without wanting sex. the friendly columbians couldn´t quite grasp this issue. Another strappingly buff young male friend of mine and myslef let them hummiliate themselves and our girlsfriends for fun, but we keep a watchful eye, just in case.

really awesome hike up to some mountain lagoons. really breathtaking views. we hiried a camioneta to take us up this mountain, then we hiked around for a bit then started the 10 mile treck down the mountain. the diahrea and strep throat didn´t help, especially because it was so dusty two of my friends (the mature, married type) wore dust masks.

im starting to really like my host family. i can now laugh with them and have fun, bummer i have to leave in a week!

i slaughtered my first chicken yesterday. I grab it by the neck and slit its throat. slit, meaning i sawed at it with a dull blade. then i yanked out its feathers and cut it open to pull out the entrails (which my family ate). its weird, i never thought about how egs work. they get spit out every day, and the gestation period is like 2 or 3 weeks, so that means that theres about 20 eggs inside a chicken at any given time, at varying levels of development. they range from almost fully developed all teh way down to the smallst which is the size of a grain of rice. obviously these were left in the chicken and cooked along with it. they taste just like regular eggs, my host mom said. i beg to differ.

sorry these blogs are so rushed. in the future, i may have access to a non-payment computer so ill be able to spend more time on my entries.

i just published some photos to snapfish.com. I have a lot more, but it takes forever to upload them here. Hopefully these will suffice untill i can post more.

http://www1.snapfish.com/thumbnailshare/AlbumID=226586155/a=140470539_140470539/t_=140470539

that should work, you may need to sign up, which is rediculously easy.

So the last couple days have been pretty sweet. On thursday, some of us decided that we needed to blow off some steam, so we went to a tequilla bar in the city. The combination of really cheap beer, high altitude, and the fact that we haven´t really drank in a while all combined to make the night really interesting. Lets just say the night ended really late (about 9pm) with us taking over a hole in the wall pizza joint and asking the owner to blast his brittany spears and backstreet boys compilation album while we had a dance party. Passers by were amused and or horrified. We got back to our town by, how else, riding in the back of a pickup.

Aparently the steam wasn´t fully blown off, because the next night we decided to hit up a kareokee bar in tabacundo... The OC of the cayambe region. That was pretty rediculous also, and ended with us hiking back along the highway and hoping a taxi would come...which it eventually did.

Yesterday, a group of us went to Otavalo, the biggest outdoor market in South America, to consume shit. Which we did. The crowning jewel in my back was a brightly colored, extra large hammock. I rigged that up last night, using a couple cow poop stained ropes to hang it from my rafters and read while jammin to some tunes.

Today, we were planning on going on a bad ass hike up to some mountain lakes, but the weather turned fowl so were going to stay in and try to find a place to watch the olympics. I also plan on learning how to make tortillas today. Given my propensity to eat tortillas and the fact that they´re hard to find here, this may be the thing i am most excited about all week.

Ohh yeah, I´m also learning some stuff, too. But the technical knowledge required to save the world is a bit tedious, really, so i haven´t been boring you with the details.

Also, i´ll try to put up some pictures soon...maybe, if i feel like it.

T minus 21 days untill i enter the jungle for good.

The other day i learned how to castrate a pig with a bic razor blade.

Chris Beeler PCV (for volunteer) or PCT (for trainee)
Cuerpo de paz
Casilla 17-08-8624
Quito, Ecuador
South America

ok. So its been a while since i last posted...sorry.

anyway, a lot of cool stuff happened, but ill try to be brief.

Two weekends ago we split up into groups to go on a day adventure. We had an option of a couple possible places to go, and the most popular destination was otavalo, the shopping mecca of South America. The urge to consume is strong with us Americans. I chose to go to a giant waterfall instead, and wasn´t dissapointed. It was a little touristy and busy, but we hiked up higher and saw some really cool views, as well as a more secluded waterfall that we frolicked in. a good day was had by all.

The next day about 9 of us went to these volcanic hotsprings WAYYYY out in the middle of nowhere. We paid a guy with a truck to drive us all the 2 and a half hour round trip, which was in and of itself incredible. On the way there, the mountains were shrouded in an eerie fog that sparayed us as we sat in the truck bed. In contrast, the way back was brilliantly clear as teh sun was low on teh horizon, and we got a view of Cayambe (the 20,000 foot beast) from the other side. sweet. The hotsprings were cool too. You´re supposed to get really hot, then get out and jump in teh icy cold mountain river, then repeat three times. If you do that once every year, you supposedly add 10 years to your life. Considering the average lifespan is 75 years, going one time should add about 49 days to my life. i plan on ejoying those days, too.

Anyway, so the reall meat of my post. I got my site assaignment! I just got back from my week long visit...forgive me if i don´t make sense, im a little tired from the 24 hour bus ride. So yeah, i´m way down south, almost in peru, and im in the jungle at an elevation of 900 meters on the eastern edge of the Andes. My site is totally bad ass. Super tranquillo. The weather is perfect, and there is so much plant life all around. People play soccer and volleyball everyday, and they are all pretty athletic, so playing with them is fun. Everyone is super nice, too. My home wasn´t ready yet, so i actually got to spend the week in the mayors house, which was cool.

I also spent a day hiking in the (semi) nearby podacarpus national park, which was really ugly. not. There were a bunch of different orchids in bloom, and tons of cool birds.

And my job is really cool to. Ill spend every monday through wednesday going up and down the river on a canoe spreading the good word of health to the villagers along the way. Theres two rivers, so ill alternate weeks. In the dry season, i have to get and and walk half way, so it will take another day. Then, i get back to my city of 1500 and work in the office for a day and prepare for the next week. I´m also going to teach english in the evenings when in in my village.

So yeah, it should be a pretty sweet two years. My only source of stress is that im going to run out of good books to read or music to listen to. If anyone feels like sending a book book my way or a burned cd (in audio or mp3 format) that would be much appreciated. As awesome as my site is, the only drawback is that its the most isolated of all the Peace Corps sites, so obtaining new liturature and music might be challenging.

So today I was walking down the road, saying hi to everyone i passed. Most people just smile and say hi back, while some of the more outgoing people engage you in conversation. This particular elderly couple did just that, and we got to talking. Turns out, they´re a retired couple that moved to the the United States from Bolivia for a better life. After working multiple jobs for 20 years, 9-11 happened. At the time the woman was working at the world trade center as a cleaning lady and was so traumitized they decided to move...to Worthington, Ohio. For those of you who don´t know, thats about 5 or 10 minutes south of where I live. I could hardly believe it. So they still have the house in ohio, as well as a second house in my village of 800. We hopped in the back of their truck in a bunch of workers and animals, and had coffee and bread at their house and talked for a couple hours. At the end of the conversation, i got all their contact information. I plan on getting together with them stateside when i get back.

Small world, huh?

so things are on the up and up here. I´m starting to really have fun. I just had to readjust and look for new forms of athletic and creative outlets. My preconseived notions of what i would be doing for fun ( ie running and playing a lot of futbol) turned out to be unrealistic. I haven´t played futbol once, and running is a rare treat. I´ve started to read a lot more, and just chill with the family. We have 4 puppies that just started to walk, and there so cute i could just explode...so i end up playing with them a lot. Also, i think im going to start milking cows a lot more. The milking itself isn´t that fun, but the hour walk in the mountains to get to the cows is fantastic. It also offers some one on one time to bond with my host mom. Then, after we finish milking, i find myself a realitively crap free zone to sit and look out over the valley in the the andes mountains. Its phenominal, especially when the sun is setting. Im going to try to get out of (boring, tedious) class early everyday so i can help my host mom milk in the afternoon.

So yeah, good times.

On friday I went on one of the most amazing hikes of my life. My friend´s host dad invited us to take a ride up to the woods in his truck, then walk around a little to experience nature. Sounded cool to us. However, no one was prepared for the 5 hour romp through the andes that ensued. Luckily, i had worn my hiking boots by chance...but others werent so lucky. We´re right at the end of the rainy season here, and the half made trail was about 6 inches deep with mud...which i absulutely loved. Needless to say we got filthy, and one girl who wore tennis shoes was less than a happy camper. I was just high on life though. The forest was dense, and i had to do a lot of scrambling. Every once and a while, the leaves would open up and offer a totally breathtaking view of the valley. Near the summit, i climbed a ´´puma paw´´ tree. Then on the way down, after walking past a billion horses and cows, the guide (a host brother) pointed out a tree with brilliant red and yellow flowers that apparently makes you trip your balls off if ingested. None of us tried it.



On Saturday I went to a surprise birthday party for a fellow volunteer in a nearby town. After defying death to figure out how to light the stove, we made empanadas and cookies. After surprising him and chowing down, we went to another bullfight. I again participated, jumping into the arena and running from the bulls like a drunken campesino. Only this time, there were much less people in the ring, so the only three gringos participating were rather conspicious. I wonder how many people in the crowed were rooted for us to get gored...

After the bullfight, we comenced to dance into the we hours of the morning...9:30 pm to be exact. After that, 4 of us commisioned a camioneta (a dude with a truck that may or may not have been as drunk as we were) to deliver us to our homes a little over an hour away. There was myself, another guy, and two gals. We let the gals ride up front, so we sat in the back and just watched as the mountains zoomed by us as the stars pierced the sky above us.

So that was a pretty amazing experience.

But its not all fun and games folks. There still are trying times. I´ve just learned to except that. Just like anything else, you have to endure a little discomfort to experience some really amazing stuff. It just so happend to be that down here, the two extremes are exagerated a little.

ok, with all the excitement returning from a sweet trip i left some stuff out.

I´m able to write again because we need to pay our families 228 bucks this week, and the atm is in the big city. It only lets you take out 100 usd at once, so we all need to go back three times. So Peace Corps pays us, then we get the money and give it to our families...in three trips. Pretty efficient.

Anyways...
bullfight on friday. Rather, mess with the bull and have it chase after you, then dive into the front row stadium seats for cover. I know. I was in the mix, along with about 200 drunken latin machos.

I saw two ritualistic kichwa bad spirit cleansings. In the first, the woman rubbed an egg all over my friend and then broke it and alalyzed the yoke. aparetly my friend was fine. thank god. The second was even more rediculous. They brought out a live guinea pig (cuy) and beat the shit out of it all over my friends body, untill the poor thing died. But only after releasing its bowels all over her. The medicine woman then cut the thing open and examined its innards and guts, which she took out and rolled around in her hands. She determined that my friends back was slightly sore. She said she say a high concentration of blood in the animals lower back region. I think she saw her arrive wearing her huge camping backpack. we also me a medicine man at the same health center.

Apart from that, it was nice to be warm for once in the past two weeks. Yesterday i returned to the land of perpetual drizzle, clouds, and 40 degree weather. However, im begining to deal with the cold better, and i can now have basic conversations with my family, which is cool. also, i plan on turning into a huge book nerd. so if you have any good ones, send them my way. BUT:

DO NOT DECLARE A VALUE ON A PACKAGE IF YOU SEND IT TO ME!

The more you declare, the more i have to bribe the post master. If you must, put down like a dollar.

thats it for now

peace and thanks

Chris

So this weekend was sweet.

Fourth of July party...WITH AMERICAN FOOD!

and i could eat it because i took Cipro, which is a really hard core antibiotic and KOed whatever it was that i had.

On saturday we left for our tech trip, where we visited some AfroEcuadorian populations. I loved the towns, everyone was Really cool. And it was warm, and the people played soccer...two things I´ve missed thus far in my latin american experience.

Anyway, the entire weekend was awesome, but the coolest thing by far was the camioneta ride through the andes. We hired a truck driver to take us to a remote site, and for 15 minutes each way I was in a state of pure bliss. Definately the most fun i´ve ever had in an automobile. As we sped along, we stood up in the back and let the wind hit our faces. We were cruzing through the andes, up and down widing roads with 1000 foot drop offs 4 feet away from the truck. Basically the definition of exhilirating.

Then we went to the biggest market in all of South America in Otavalo. Everyone was pretty stoked, but it was just a bunch of stuff. Come on people, we have that in America. Apparently the urge to consume is just too strong. That being said, i did buy a hacky sack. And if im in a site with trees im gonna go back and get a hammock fa sho.

Shalom yáll. Here´s another one for ya.

So after we last parted, I went to a fesitival in a town way up in the mountains called Cangouya. It´s so high up, that their next door neighbors are inca fortresses. Pretty sweet, I know. And a bunch of drunken american archiologists were there to tell me all about the history, which made it even better.

Anyway, the party was a bunch of fun. Dancing into the night, and eveyone wanted a piece of the exotic gringos. And by everyone, I mean a drunken homeless guy just couldn´t stop dancing with my attractive blond friend. That, and this little girl couldn´t get enough of me picking her up above my head. I have as way with kids, you know. Either that or i was the tallest person she has ever seen, and the novelty was just too much. Anyway, it was super fun, and at one point this guy wearing some kind of pre incan devil mask came up to me and offered me a drink of the foulest smelling stuff i have ever come across. Anywhere else in the world, and i´d not only deny that in a heart beat, but also probably kick him in the shins and run home, then cry alone in my room. However, this behavior is not acceptable here, so i basically had to try it. It tasted even worse than it smelled, and the texture was even worse than the taste. So I braced myself, along with the little girl on my shoulders, and just kept dancin.

By the time the party was over, there were no more buses, so my friend and I had to pay some guy in a truck to take us home. We paid 11 bucks, wich is a fortune, but the place was about an hour away up in the mountains, so i guess it was worth it. After we dropped my friend of in her village, the driver turned and told me he didn´t know how to get no mine. No problem, i had walked back and forth a bunch of times. The hour walk should only take about 15 minutes, right?

Turns out, walking in the day and driving at night are 2 vary different things. We got real lost. After about half an hour of this crap, the driver had had enough. He yelled something in spanish, then slammed on the brakes and got out of the car. Sweet. I said to myself, im about to get thrown out of the truck, and possibly robbed. Luckily, he just took the longest piss i´ve ever even heard of, which at this point made me question his sobreity. Luckily i hadn´t paid him yet, so if he wanted his money he was going to have to stick it out and drop me off.

Which he did, but he was pissed. He wanted more money, which i didn´t have. I had him drop me off at my corner, figuring it was better to risk the crazy dogs than to have this guy know where i live. I think the decision was worth it, but only because i´ve taken to talking witha big rock after dark do defend myself against crazy dogs.

Anyway, that was saturday, and sunday was fun as well. Everyone in my town got up and danced all the way to Cayambe, which to them about 3 hours. I use the term dancing loosely. They definately favor quantitiy over quality here. For the 6 hour round trip they did the same 2 steps. I didn´t have the requisite attire (for example, my host dad wore a clown costume) so i just toke the bus. suckers.

anyway, remember that nasty drank i tried? We´ll it turns out its called chicha, which is kichwa for ´´this is garunteed to give gringos diahhrea´´.

And it did. In fact, i´ve shit twice since starting this blog, which is 6 days after the fact. I´ve been going strong since sunday evening, every hour on the hour for most of the time. You could set your watch to it. The pooping itself isn´t so bad, just the fact that its so frequent i havn´t really been able to sleep at all this week. Combine that with the fact that i couldn´t eat for three days, and you´ve got yourself an unhappy camper in one of those character building situations.

I did see a couple cool things this week though.

one. In the campo, fireworks are crazy. They don´t shoot them up in the air. They just build this big structure out of balsa wood, to which they attach about a billion of the home made wonders. Then they light them, and this guy runs around and spins the structure by its bottom. All the while, he is (along with most of the closly packed crowd) showered with sparks and shrapnel. I think the tall people get most of the bad stuff, which explains whey no one here is about 5 feet 2 inches.

two. crazy dog sex. The dogs here get it so regularly that they have to resort to crazy positions to keep themselves entertained. It´s like their gloating. Bastards. And it´s not only couples. The other day my friend saw an all male doggy threesome.

Anyway, as far as mental health goes, i´m doing better now. I´m not going to lie, crapping 60 plus times within a 4 day period in a third world country isn´t exactly the best pick me up ever, but all that time on the john has given me a lot of time to think.

I realize that comparing my living situation with others is kind of stupid. Even though i definatley have the worst living situation out of anyone in my training class, im sure somewhere there´s someone in a hut that has floors made out of broken glass and doesn´t have enough money to buy shoes. He probably also has dengue fever, which is a hell of a lot worse than pooping every once and a while.

I also realize how childish complaining is. I really can´t stand it when I hear someone who I know has it better than me complain. Imagine how the guy with glass floors feels when he hears me complain. He´s probably pissed to, so i should probably stop doing it. I bet you he has a pretty short temper.

That being said, i´m doing everything I can to get myself in a better mood, and I think its working. I realize that I´m not going to do any good here, or be any fun to hang around with if i´m down all the time.

Looking forward, this weekend is a cultural trip. It should be really fun. I wish i could tell you where it is, but i have no idea. Right now I´m focusing all my attention on not crappy my pants on the bus ride there.

A special thanks to

Jon
Mack
Carolyn
EMILY
mom
dad
brian
and tommy gill

Your emails really help. Keep them coming. And Tommy...just try to keep your head up, and thanks for reading my blog.

hasta luego,
kleece (which is chris in spanish)

Heyo. Time for my weekly post.

So my last day in quito was pretty sweet. We did all the touristy stuff, and hit the bars at night with a vengance. The next day we took the two hour bus ride to Cayambe, where we arrived in the middle of Inti-Rami, a 2 month long indigenous festival dedicated to the sun. I was loving cayambe. It´s a midsize city with character, and lots of cheep stuff. After hanging out for a while, we split up into our smaller groups and headed to our communities. My community is realy, really rural...or campo in ecuadorian.

Things we have in the campo:

Children going to the bathroom everywhere. The other day my 5 year old host brother just whipped it out and started peeing on his porch in the middle of a conversation. This kind of behavior makes life in daycare interesting.

Dogs. puppies. more dogs. lots of them. and they´re nuts. The other night all the dogs in the village got together and had a late night rumble right outside my door. They stopped barking and fighting at about 2am , which is right when the roosters start to crow. I could hear it all clearly through my open air (but not supposed to be) bedroom. That was a fun night.

Hot water...for about 27 seconds. Which is exactly 14 minutes and 33 seconds less than what I require as a avid long shower taker. This remaining time is spent shivering in ice cold water in a bathroom which open to the 40 degree weather. Although, if there´s reggaeton playing i can generally get my groove on, which helps fight the cold.

Short people. I feel like a giant. All the doorways are about 5 feet 6 inches tall. The shower head is at my nipples. Which makes the whole cold water shivering, reggaeton dancing, midget shower stooping all the more comical. I felt like i should have been videotaped for some sort of life affirming indie film about overcoming cultural differences.

Beatiful mountains everywhere. Last night I went for a run, which lasted about 5 minites. The combination of the thin air and the knowledge that the more i sweat the more i need to shower limits the amount of running i can do. Anyway, I ran (read: walked) up this mountain and watched the sunset...which was pretty sweet. To get up the mountain, I trespassed like it was my job. I jumped fences and dodged cattle. No campesinos were out, so it was ok. However, on my way back down they were out in force for the evening farm chores. They all looked at me pretty funny: some giant redheaded gringo hopping their fences and running in the tiniest shorts they had ever seen. Both running and wearing shorts are generally considered social unacceptable here. Anyway, considering how much this town gossips I´m sure i´ll hear about it over rice and potatoes tonight. I´m also sure i won´t understand what their saying, and just smile and say "si".

Cows. I got up at 4:45 today walked 45 minutes into the mountains and learned how to milk them

On a more serious note, it´s definately been an experience. There have been a few flashes of brilliance, but the overall tone for the first week has been one of misery. It´s been a lot harder to adapt than I thought it would. Also, my particular living situation is pretty dismal. I feel like got the short end of the trainee stick in a bunch of different areas. I wish i had one thing to hold onto, one comfort zone to crawl into...but i just don´t. At night, I go home and attempt to speak with my host family, but it doesn´t really work. After dinner, I go right to bed where i freeze my culo off and pray that i´ll have a good dream.

Maybe I just need an attitude adjustment. I´m trying to do that...hopefully it does the trick. I just remind myself that my situation now will only make me stronger after training. I hear life as a volunteer is way better than life as a volunteer.

Untill next time, send me some good vibes, and i´ll continue to fight the good fight.

Love,
Chris

Hello all. First off, some administrative stuff. For the next couple months i´ll only have internet access on the weekends. If you check here on sunday night or monday, hopefully i´ll have a new blog. Also, every volunteer who has a blog is supposed to speak with some administator about what can and cannot be said. Knowing how politically correct I am at all times, that shouldn´t be a problem. However, if you notice anything less than kosher, message me and i´ll edit it. Finally, I can´t figure how to get spell check off of spanish, so my entire blog is currently highlighted as a spelling error...so if there are some spelling mistakes, just deal with it.

ok, so...(wanted to use a dash there, but couldn´t figure it out)
I spent two days in miami getting to know everyone and learning a little bit about the Peace Corps mentality. Meetings were long and tedious...words like perserverence, flexibility, and acceptance were thrown around quite a bit. No one had opened up yet, and after keeping my guard up all day i was annoyed and exhausted. On the second day, after 9 hours of conferencing, I took a wicked nice siesta to cleans the anxious soul. I was feeling a little homesick, and all the emotional stressors were making me miss all the people I loved...namely those of you reading this blog. At this point, we had already lost one would be volunteer due to boyfriend woes. Anyway, I woke myself up and shook of the mal aire. I ended up having the best last night in the states ever. After eating sushi and doing saki bombs, we hung out in the hot tub of our swanky hotel. As we watched a tropical storm coming in off the ocean, we told stories, each more rediculous than the last. The best story came from Jimbo, a rich gold mining executive (yeah, we tore into him for that) from Arkansas. I wont tell you the details because there might be children reading, but hearing him speak Spanish with an Arkansas twang only added to the hilarity to his tall tale. Before long, the tropical storm that we were watching was upon us, and it began raining buckets on us as we swam...which was really fun. We continued hang out, moving to the pool and playing sharks and minnows untill a shocked security guard came to kick us out.

The next day, the tropical storm delayed our plane by three hours. When he finally got to Quito(where we will be untill sunday...forgot to mention that before), we were hustled through a special line in customs by a PC agent. The airport was one big party. Hundreds of latinos were cramed in, waiting to meet loved ones coming off the plane. The shouting, dancing, and hand made posterboard signs made the venue feel more like a soccer stadium than an airport. I remember waiting in a line where everone had documents ready. Some latin offical came up to me and said something in spanish, which needless to say i did not understand. After motioning for a while with some kind of paperwork in hand, he got frusterated and moved onto someone else...i was suposed to wait there and find my paperwork, which i didn´t do. im not in jail right now, so i figured it wasn´t important.

After being greated by equally crazy current PC volunteers, we got into a bus, which proceded to pull off a masterfull 12432452352363 point turn to get out the the tiny parking lot. no joke...it took us 40 minutes to get out of our spot, pulling up and moving back 6 inches at a time. The streets here are far too small for buses, so each one has two operators. One to drive, and the other to get out and help navigate corners.

The next day in quito was a long one. Lots of initial training. I don´t think i´ve ever been so physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted in my life than i was on that day. The combination of being at altitude, getting three shots at once, no sleep, and straining to understand a new language all day long definately took it´s toll. However, I will say that even after only a couple days of training in quito I´ve really improved my Spanish. I tested into the lowest level of intermediate speakers, which was a huge accomplishment for me. It´ll be tough though. Im definately the lowest of the low in my language group of 5. After speaking only spanish for a couple hours for the first time in forever, I felt like my brain would explode. It´s fine though, i´ve never shyed away from a challege before. Plus, im learning a ton. So much in fact that last night while playing pool with a PC friend and a local, I had the confidence to say ¨we are bad¨to describe our abilities after missing several shots in a row. Everyone laughed...turns out what i actually said was ¨we are naughty girls¨. Ahh, the first of many.

Today, I explored the city for the first time. During the day, I took in the sights. The city itself is rather typical. Dirty and cramped. Whats extraordinary is the juxtaposition of that with the giant and beautiful mountains just beyond the city limits. The sprawl is only limited by the steepness of the terrain it runs into. At night, a few of us went to the bar district where all the young american backpackers go. It was a lot of fun, but you can´t really let your guard down. All the current volunteers have stories of getting robbed in that area. Walking around past 8pm is out of the question, too. I felt rediculous, but we took a cab the 5 blocks home from the bar area. However, I did manage to retain some of my machismo. Earlier today, a group of six of us were walking back to the hostel from the mall, which was a full block and a half away. It was just after 8, and the only only other male in our group of six decided to take a cab, which he hailed at the corner and took him the remaining half a block home...no joke. I puffed out my chest, and safely escorted the women the remainind 80 feet all by myself.