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.