Tech Trip

PC Southern Sierra Ag Tech Trip, or Twelve Days with 2 Pairs of Pants

“To control your cow, give it a bigger pasture.” – Roshi Suzuki. It appears the Peace Corps heads this advice, as they culminated two months of training in the cozy communities of Cayambe with a nearly two-week voyage around Ecuador. I spent the trip with the rest of the Cuenca and Loja area Aggies: Brian, Cael, Jamie (Jaime), Jennifer, Matthew (Mateo), Michael (Miguel), and Tony, as well as three PC staffers. The trip began with another charming eighteen hour voyage from Cayambe to my site near the Peruvian border.

The Centro hosted the lot of us for five days and gave us sessions on everything from cuyes (gunea pigs) to coffee. The most noteworthy of the many sessions were desparacitando (de-paraciting) goats and vaccinating piglets. I actually caught goats by the horns while my compatriots stuck a squirt-gunesque device into their mouths to administer the anti-parasite liquid. It was cool!

The piglets were more of a personal accomplishment, as I have assiduously avoided swine barns for the past 20+ years following a terrifying encounter at the Lenawee County Fair, but the animals were little pains in the neck and it was not ‘cool’. I don’t remember what we vaccinated them against, but the shot was only a subcutaneous one (on par with a flu shot), so it can’t possibly have hurt much. The piglets, however, screamed bloody murder and required two people to hold their legs still and mouths together while a third injected the vaccine. One of the piglets got so panicky that it started pooping and Cael now holds the unhappy distinction of being the first to be pooped on during the trip (although now that I think about it, a cow pooped on Joe and the Cangahua facilitator, Javier, during a one-night trip to a town called Nono).

We also had interesting sessions on abonos organicos, or organic fertilizers, where we saw worm beds, fed dozens of tomato plants through a shredder to make bocashi, a fermented compost, and stirred estiercol (manure) for a very long time to prepare bioles, natural direct-to-plant application fertilizers and pesticides.

After playing in poo for a long while, we cleaned up and went to a session on processing primary products into items that sell better. To illustrate this, be made dulce de mani, a snack-food of peanuts boiled with lots of sugar and a little water, then stirred for nearly an hour while the sugar liquefies, solidifies, and eventually sticks to the peanuts. Stirring the peanuts over an intense flame left me sweatier than I ever remember being, but the dulce de mani was worth it. I hope to try my hand making mantequilla de mani, or peanut butter, while I’m here.

After five long and informative days at my hot, humid site, everyone was ready for a respite, and it came in the form of three nights at the Rendez-Vous Hostel in Vilcabamba. Vilcabamba is a hippie-tourist hot spot just south of Ciudad de Loja and it’s known for its food, hiking, and long-lived population. I think the food was the best part, though my $5.00 manicure, given while I sipped a Cuba Libre (rum and Coke), was highly enjoyable. If any of you make it down here to visit, you should definitely check out the town, and you won’t have to twist my arm hard to get me to accompany you :).

Each morning in Vilcabamba, following a deliciously French-influenced breakfast at the hostal, we set off for a small community near Vilcabamba where two PCVs are stationed. One works in coffee and cuy production, and the other with a women’s group that processes coffee and produces recycled paper products. At the women’s group’s headquarters, after an initial presentation on making recycled paper and processing coffee, Jennifer and I pulled-out the girl card and secured spots making recycled paper picture frames and bookmarks for the afternoon. You can see my handiwork to the right. It was a genuinely fun afternoon.

In the evening of the same day, we hired a truck to drive us a few kilometers south of Vilcabamba to a small resort called Izhcayluma. It’s owned by Germans, and I enjoyed the best Bavarian Stroganoff and Spaetzle of my life. Now I’m wishing I’d brought my spaetzle maker, but somehow, it didn’t make the packing list.

After Vilcabamba came a six-hour bus ride up to Cuenca, a UNESCO World Heritage Site known for its plentiful and well-preserved colonial architecture. We had no technical training in this city, stopping only to wander around the city and break-up the trip back north. Cuenca celebrates Halloween/Dia de los Difuntos (Day of the Dead, for those of you familiar with the Mexican Version) with gusto and I hope to get there this fall for the festivities.

Our final stop was in a small town about an hour south of Quito and fantastically close to Volcán Cotopaxi. This volcano, visible from Quito on clear days, is nicely cone shaped and topped with a Nevado, or snow cap that fades into the mountain’s ridges and valleys. We travelled on the Pan-American Highway and got great views of the volcano from the road, then discovered more views of the mountain over a ridge behind the hostel building. The Northern/Central Sierra Aggies joined us here, and we enjoyed an evening of Cuarenta, an Ecuadorian card game, and Pilsner, an Ecuadorian beer, before a morning lesson on building simple A-frame levels and greenhouses. The trip ended when everyone piled into pick-up truck cabs and beds for the final hour trip into Quito, for swear-in week. The stories from that will have to wait for another post.

Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed, and let me know what you’re still curious about.

Chao chao,
Alli

You may have noticed from facebook photos that I’ve sworn in, and, indeed, I’m writing this from my site. However, I’m rather behind on blog posts, so let’s go back a few weeks to Semana Santa, or Holy Week, with my host family in Cangahua. Isa and Andres, my host siblings, had the week off from school, but the town’s festivities didn’t begin until Maundy Thursday. I went to mass Thursday night with Katy, one of my host moms, and we made excellent pew mates, each poking the other to point out (and giggle at) the sleepers while wiggling uncomfortably in the stiff, wood-plank pews. Also sharing my pew were Reid and Joe. Christina, several inches shorter than the rest of the Cangahua PCTs, sat one pew ahead and towered over her average-in-Ecuador height host-sister. I can only imagine how freakishly tall my pew appeared. I’m going to be the giant gringa for the next two years.

The mass was interesting – I’ve never been to Catholic Easter-time services before and was surprised to see 12 boys and men of Cangahua dressed up as the apostles, and to watch the Padre spend 20 minutes washing each of the “apostles’” feet. The alter area was decorated with hundreds of roses (which are grown in greenhouses all around Cayambe and cost a few dollars for two dozen) and a choir was up in the narthex singing over the congregation. My favorite part of the service though, was leaving (no snickering). The church sits atop a small hill overlooking the central plaza of Cangahua and, farther off, the valleys around Volcán Cayambe. In the darkness, the lights of all the Cayambe communities sparkled.

Along with the kids, the Peace Corps trainees enjoyed a brief respite from the drudgery of training with fours says free from security briefings and Spanish lessons. I took advantage of my free Saturday and visited the market in Otavalo, the best-known market in Ecuador. The streets of Otavalo were covered for blocks and blocks with stalls selling traditional fabrics, alpaca clothing, hammocks, Panama hats (which are made in Ecuador), and a huge variety of handicrafts and jewelry. I purchased a (supposedly) hand-woven belt and a slightly over-the-top, but highly functional hat. You’ll be seeing in it many future photos of my life in the Ecuadorian campo (countryside). The picture to the right shows a fellow trainee, Eddie, descansando (relaxing) in a hammock in the courtyard of a pizzeria that hosted quite a few PCTs.

During the break, I also joined some PCTs in Pesilla, one of the training communities near Cayambe, for a hike into the mountains surrounding the town. It was a beautiful hike, and I discovered that a lunch of panecita with avocado and tomato is exceptionally delicious at 3000+ meters. My out-of-shape and vertigo-prone self, however, decided to go down after lunch, so I enjoyed the thunderstorm that crept up later in the afternoon from the comfort of a Pesilla bar in the company of Reagan, a PCT from Michigan/Washington, who accompanied me down. The rest of the group avoided the thick of the storm, but had to trudge through a bog on the way down, leaving Cara in the condition you see on the right.

My host family doesn’t attend mass often, so Thursday was it for them, but they did observe Easter with a large family gathering of Teddy’s siblings, nieces and nephews, and traditional foods. On Saturday and Sunday, everyone had cake and fanesca, a stew-like soup made with chunks of dried, salted fish and twelve grains, each representing an apostle. It was tasty, but one of the most filling foods I’ve encountered. It left me with food twins.

Next on the agenda (and coming very soon): Tech Trip.

Chao chao,
Alli

First Visit to My Future Home!

Ya sé, hace mucho tiempo sin mensaje. Discúlpame por favor. Era viajando mucho….

Sorry for the delay in posts – these last few weeks have been a blur of travel.

So, I completed my site visit in Loja Province, near the Peruvian border, the week before Semana Santa, or Holy Week. My overall impression is that the site has great promise, but will be really challenging, though in none of the ways I expected. My counterpart organization, from hereon known as the ‘Centro’, is an affiliate of a university in Ciudad de Loja and is actually extremely developed. There are 57 students and about a third as many staff, administrators and farm hands working (and living, at least during the week) at the site, though the surrounding area is extremely rural. The students are doing hands-on study of integrated, ecological farming practices at the Centro’s 50ish hectares of cultivated land and 150 hectares of forest. They study there for three-and-a-half years and have the option to complete another year-and-a-half at the university to earn a titulo, or degree, in applied agriculture.

The Centro is in a barrio, or neighborhood, that consists of the Centro, two tiendas (shops), an elementary school and the odd farmer. After much discussion and shuffling of plans, it appears I’ll be living with a host family in the nearest town, about 45 minutes away from the Centro by bus, for my first three months of service. My task is to work with the Centro’s extension programs, specifically in irrigation systems, in surrounding high schools, and I’m going to look for ways to work with the school and neighboring communities as well. In addition, the staff at the Centro would like me to help with the repair of a failing reservoir (yea civil engineering!) and with AutoCAD classes for the Centro’s students. The CAD classes should be interesting, as I haven’t used the program since junior year of high school. I’m hoping it’s not too different from MicroStation, the program I used now and then with USACE, but I really don’t know. For better or for worse, the docents, or professors, at the Centro seem to have extremely high expectations of me. I hope this will prove more motivating than stressing.

The climate at my site is subtropical, and, as it’s currently the rainy season, extremely humid. I didn’t check any thermometers while there, though they have a very sophisticated field weather station (as I said, very developed site), but I think temperatures at mid-day were in the mid to upper 80s. Afternoon rainfalls were a welcome relief, as they cooled things off to much more pleasant conditions. There is no hot water at the site, but in the heat, that’s ideal. I took at least two showers a day while there. The cold water was the only source of air conditioning :).

I didn’t have a lot to do during my week’s stay, so I spent a lot of time studying Spanish from my 30 Days to Great Spanish book (which is, by the way, awesome. Miles gracias, WCC Conversation Class, for suggesting it) and stumbled across some Spanish words that left me laughing at the names of some well known places in the States. For example, Nevada means snowfall, Las Vegas means fertile plains, and Sacramento means sacrament. I’m convinced that the first settelers of Nevada had great senses of humor, but I can’t figure out what is sacred about Californian politics. Another fun one is Cañaveral, as in Cape Canaveral, which means cape of the cane/reed patch. Does anyone remember if there was sugarcane in the fields surrounding the launch pads?

Besides studying, I spent time chatting with the professors and playing with the Centro’s puppy, Ceibo. A Ceibo is a type of tree typical in the dry forests surrounding my site. I’m writing this from Quito, my location until I swear in as a real, live, genuine Peace Corps Volunteer at the end of the week. After that, I’m off to my site and my host-town has internet cafes!

Hasta luego, y por favor, envíeme sus preguntas!

I’ll write again soon, and please, send me your questions!

Two Weeks of Travel

Hi all! I´m leaving in half an hour for a two-week long tech trip with the other agriculture volunteers from my omnibus (group - who knows why PC Ecuador uses omnibus). We´ll spend a few days at my site, a few in Vilcabamba, then up to Cuenca and back to Quito, the capital. Once in Quito, I´ll have a few days of final administrative rubish, then I swear-in and become an official Peace Corps Volunteer on the 22nd of April. I´ve got quite a few stories to share, but am short on time. Hope you all had a happy Easter and are enjoying the apparently unseasonably warm spring Stateside!

Chao,
Alli