Exciting news – I’ll be spending the majority of the next two years in Loja Province at an education center. The center is the working branch of the University of Loja and an agreement with Peru to do training exchanges, I think. The Peace Corps Ag Program director is very excited about my site, and I am too. It´s considered a new site, but I think a volunteer was there several years ago. I’ll find out more this week, as I’m heading for Loja tonight! I’m told it’s a 2.5 hour trip from Cayambe to Quito, then 12 hours in a night bus from Quito to Loja, then another 2-3 hours from Loja to my sitefor a total of 17 hours of travel!

The gentlemen of Cangahua left early this morning for their site visits in the Oriente and Costa in the center (north-south) of Ecuador. Christina and I, the ladies of Cangahua, are both in the south and leave for Loja from Quito tonight. We´ll all return to Cangahua/Cayambe next Saturday or Sunday, and remain there for a week. After that, we have a two-week long tech trip travelling with the other people in our area and program, so I will be with the aggies in the southern sierra. The final step of training is a week in Quito before the swearing in ceremony at the Ambassador´s residence. (The ambassador, Heather Hodges, came to speak to us last week and was very interesting. I hope I get the chance to hear more about our embassy, but PC likes to keep its distance.)

For the past 3 weeks, I’ve been living with Teddy Caladera in the apartment above her restaurant in Cangahua, a little Pueblito about 30 minutes outside of Cayambe. Cangahua is high up (over 3000 meters), but not terribly cold. The days usually make it into the 70s and the nights are around 50 F.

Teddy runs her restaurant with the help of her friend Katy Diaz who lives here part time (I lucked out, foodwise :). Katy is from Salinas, near Guayaquil, on the coast and has two children named Isabel and Jean Andre. She´s divorced and her ex-husband lives in New York, NY. The shop next door to Teddy´s restaurant sells shoes, and Teddy’s brother Orlean, his wife, Silvia, and their sons, Jaime and Emanuel live above it. The two houses share a staircase with a half bath in the cubby under the stairs. We have our language classes in Teddy´s living room, and the guys have gotten a good chuckle out of the difficulties of peeing under a slanted roof. I´m hoping for a toilet seat in my next location :) Teddy’s restaurant is on the northeast corner of the town square, and around the corner is the house of her mother, who died about two months ago. The house is now rented by a group of engineers who are working on a large irrigation system about an hour east of Cangahua, near the edge of the Oriente, or jungle. In a courtyard between the restaurant, shoe shop, and mom’s house is a courtyard with a lavadoria (concrete clothes washing thing) and a “spa” bathroom. “Spa” here means big shower with a gas-powered hot water heater, but I must say it’s been lovely.

The other aspirants in Cangahua (Brian, Christina, Ross aka Arroz, Reid aka Rigo, and Joe, aka Tío) and I have hiked up into the surrounding hills a couple of times and gotten fantastic views down to the valley of Cayambe and Rose farms, and occasionally of the volcano Cayambe, though it spends most of its time shrouded in clouds. We took a terrifying, but beautiful busride out to a hot-springs town called Oyacachi last weekend for a good soak. Oyacachi is in the Oriente, but it´s quite high up and is colder than Cangahua. The agua termale caliente was a very welcome contrast to the air.

Spanish is coming along; though, of course, I still sound like a two-year-old and have to ask ¨mande?¨every two seconds. I´m looking forward to getting out on my own in a month and studying the things I need work on (grammar!). Talking with my host family is great for learning to listen in Spanish, and they´re very good about correcting me, as I´m the 8th aspirante (Peace Corps Trainee) to stay with them, and they know what helps.

I hope all is well with you and would love to hear from you via comments to this blog, email, or facebook!

Hasta luego,
Alli

On Sunshine and Cynicism

"There are two kinds of light - the glow that illuminates and the glare that obscures." - James Thurber


The light in Ecuador, at least according to my beleaguered skin, is of the obscuring glare variety. The E cuadorian sunshine puts the harshest June light in Michigan to shame. To date, I hve burned a necklace around my neck (twice), the tops of my feet, the radial (for all of you current and future medical professionsals) side of my left wrist, my right knuckles, the place on my scalp where my hair swirls, my lips, left earlobe, and a strip on the inside of each arm. And this was with what I considered assiduous sunscreen application. Essentially, it´s pretty incredible what a little time in the Ecuadorian sunshine at 3100 meters can do.

Act I: Scene I: (The O´Leary family sits around a dining table at an Ann Arbor restaurant)

Alli: What´s the opposite of cynical?
Dad: (Without missing a beat) Stupid.
Alli: (Dissolves into peals of knowing laughter)

So - cynical, pragmatic, cultural sensitivity under-rating individuals don´t make up a significant portion of PCVs, incredibly enough. Since I am such a person, I´ve found myself baffled, at times, by the idealistic, optimistis attitude of my PC colleagues. The fact that I don´t secretly hope to change the world and live in the developing world for the rest of my life seems to depress some of them. Others inform me that all PC volunteers are idealistic; that it´s necessary.

I´m curious about this assumption. A dedicated pragmatist, I´m not much for idealism, and my fall of pop-econ reading (yea Malcolm Gladwell!) certainly didn´t make me any more inclined to it. I do think Peace Corps is an excellent opportunity for the people who serve in it, and the countries we serve in are getting a crop of enthusiastic volunteers, but I wish the attitude among volunteers was a bit more about cultural exchange, and less about escaping rampant guilt over being from the first world.


(I realise this is a very pondering post, and many of you would like details about la vida ecuadoriana. My prepped post on that is long, and the slow computer I´m on won´t copy and paste. I´ll try to find a way to upload photos soo, too! Thanks for reading, and please excuse the typos - I´m trying to go fast!)