Cabanas Yankuam

My little corner of Ecuador has been trying to improve tourism for a while. It’s one of their goals to generate some cash flow. That being said, there is no tourism in my site. Since I’ve been here, I’ve seen two tourists. And as far as I could tell, the only money they brought into the town was for the 10 bucks they paid to rent a two person room for the night. They didn’t even buy dinner. I was so excited to see other gringos I invited them to dinner. Tuna tacos. Mmmmmm.
The only tourism thing we have going on for us is one little cabin in the jungle. And the cabanas have a truck, so they usually pick up tourists from the city and bring them straight to the cabanas, bypassing all of the little towns along the way that could use the gringo money.
Anyway, I’m trying to help develop tourism as a little side project of mine. This weekend I went to the cabanas to speak with the owner to bounce ideas off one another. I got there just in time to hop on a jungle tour boat with a total bird nerd and his wife (Bryan: I would love to see the two of you engaged in a mental fight to the death using only knowledge of Orange Throated Tanagers) and a 60 year old hippie on a 6 year (yes YEAR) backpacking trip through south America.
We went to “the Labyrinths” to hike and look for rare birds. The hike was cool, but the dude never saw his bird. That didn’t stop him from making us wait a buttload of time to try and encounter it. During this time, I managed to swing on vine like Tarzan, then a little while later I caught a wild boar with my bare hands. Yes, it’s true, I did. Never mind that it was about 2 days old, and only needed a bare hand, not hands, to catch it.
This is how it went down. It waddled across the path, the guide and I got really excited, and we ran after it to try to catch it. We didn’t think about the fact that baby wild animals usually have mother wild animals nearby, and that these mother wild animals are usually pretty pissed off. Luckily, the mother wasn’t nearby, and as I held the cute little piglet in my hand, it dawned on me how lucky I was to NOT have a 300 pound tusked animal disemboweling me.
At this point I was ready to release it back into the wild. The only reason I wanted to catch it was to saw that I caught a wild boar with my bare hands. And I did say that…twice now. Mission accomplished. Anyway, a different tour group came by, and one of the women decided that she was going to take the boar and raise it. We tried to argue with her, but she was an idiot, and wouldn’t listen. When we got back to the boats, we found out that they also thought it would be a good idea to take a baby bird and one of those giant centipede things from the jungle. They lost interest in the bird as soon as they stole it, so as the only person living on the continent in my tour group the charge fell on me to take care of it. Which I did. I named him Mordachay (or however you spell that). He died 2 days later. I tried my best to rear him, but his life ended by me shoveling him to death after he quit eating and turned all stiff on me.

The other day Marisol and I went to a little town to do some “work”. We had 6 kids to measure and weigh, and we had just less than 7 hours to do it. I was worried we wouldn’t have enough time, but everything turned out to be O.K. Activities to kill time included playing voli, having political conversations, and playing on the swings with the kids. This proved to be the most interesting.
So kids here basically run crazy, which I think I’ve mentioned before. The three women who worked in the FODI center (essentially a dare care center for kids aged 2 to 5) were inside gabbing with Marisol while the kids were outside, swinging out of control 2 to a swing, on a rickety homemade swing set. I figured I’d go outside and look after the kids to make sure nothing happened. I turned out to have exactly the opposite effect.
About 20 minutes after I started playing with the kids, one went flying off the swings and started to cry. This is really common, so I wasn’t too worried. Plus, it gave me a chance to pick up a cute little kid and comfort him for a while. He hadn’t even peed his pants recently, so that was a plus.
About another 20 minutes after that, one of the kids vacated a swing. When no one rushed to fill it, I started to swing. Higher and higher I pumped. One moment I was in the air, and the next I was on my back, and kids were crying all around me. The top beam of the swing set had broken Into 3 pieces. Luckily, none of these three pieces fell on any of the kids, and everyone was ok. All of the FODI workers rushed out. I said something funny and self humiliating and everyone cracked up. For some reason, after that everyone just loved me. Destroying playground equipment and almost killing children usually has that effect. Plus I got to pick up and coddle more cute, relatively pee free children.

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.