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.