What Am I Doing Here?

I’ve been thinking about that question a lot in the past month. I wish I could say that the extended delay between this and my previous post was due to an over-abundance of work, but the truth is quite the opposite. I’ve been in a rut, puttering around with a variety of English-teaching activities and not much else, quedando (remaining) without anything interesting to relate. For the time being, my Ecuadorian adventure lacks just that. With a bit of good-fortune, things will fall into place this week for my permanent living-arrangement, and I’ll move out of my host family’s city-digs for a place out in the country near the Centro. My hope is that the change of scenery will be more conducive to finding work in sustainable agriculture, and will jolt me back into an ambitious mode of living.

So, what sorts of agricultural work can a civil engineer whose only conocemiento (knowledge) of farming is based on gardening hope to share with a population of life-long farmers? Well, not tons, but more than I initially thought. The results of the community assessment survey I conducted show that very little fertilization of any variety, and no pest control outside of fumigation, takes place in my community. Peace Corps did a nice job of teaching its trainees to make organic fertilizers and pesticides, as well as ideas for pest-control based on integrated planting techniques, so I hope to share this knowledge through two organic community gardens. I won’t pretend to be an organic fanatic, but in my community where family incomes hover around $100/month (I live on more than three times that and am not wealthy by local standards), the cheapness of organic fertilizers and pesticides is very attractive.

One of the gardens I mentioned in a previous post, and it is already fenced in, tilled, and set-up to be a fairly traditional vegetable garden. The other would be new, and my hope is to make it container-based (probably old, halved truck-tires) focused on intensive, micro-scale production. I hope the gardens will serve as hands-on teaching facilities for fertilizer and pest production, and also as inspiration for family gardens that could diversify the overly-starched, rice and yucca diet of the area, while simultaneously providing food security.

I’ve also talked with my counterpart at the Centro about helping out a few days a week with poultry production in order to learn how to go about it. My community wanted the local Parroquia (township, sort-of), to fund a micro-empresa (micro-business) raising chickens, but funding fell through. I hope to get the project going again, and maybe coordinate with two cajitas de ahorro (micro-savings banks) run by women’s groups in the community to provide the loan needed to begin the project. If it goes well, there’s a slim chance I could actually use my engineering background to design and build chicken coops!

Though the view of work from where I sit has been a bit gray, life at my host family’s has been cheered by the arrival of Poleth (pronounced Paulette) and Matthew, host niece and nephews from Quito who came at the beginning of July and are spending the summer with my host parents. In the picture to the right, the niños (kids) are waiting for bus to take them and me out to my community for a picnic to celebrate the end of exams for the students I teach in the campo. They had a blast, and I ate my first salad prepared in un-boiled river water. To my surprise and delight, Montezuma did not exact his revenge, so, apparently, I have a fully-integrated stomach. If only the rest of me were so well adjusted....

The picture to the right is of Poleth helping me make cinnamon rolls. I got an excellent recipe from Emily, a fellow volunteer in Loja Province, and have made them a number of times in a campo oven. A campo oven is just a pot, but I put rocks and bricks on the bottom to store heat, close the lid tightly, and it bakes fairly well. Instructions for its construction came in the literature PC gave out at swear-in, as ovens are rare in Ecuador. In my life of hot water, microwave, and basic cable, I enjoy using the campo oven to feel a bit more like I’m in the rustic Peace Corps of my imagination, rather than the Posh, but isolated, Corps of reality.

Geography / History

I have thus-far neglected to give a decent overview of Ecuador as a country, but this post should rectify the situation....

Geography

Ecuador is on the northwestern coast of South America and is roughly the size of the state of Colorado. It shares a northern border with Columbia, a western border with the Pacific Ocean, and eastern and southern borders with Peru. There are four geographic regions: the Galapagos Islands, the Costa (coast), the Sierra (Andes Mountains), and the Oriente (jungle; also called Amazonia, as the rivers in this region are part of the Amazon basin).

The capital city, Quito, is located in the northern Sierra, less than 100 miles south of the Equator. Many parts of the Sierra are home to indigenous peoples and their cultures dominate small-town life and enjoy a growing influence in the politics of this region, which has the highest population density of the four. The picture to the right is of Shuar people, the indigenous group that lives closest to me. The weather in the Sierra varies from hot and dry in the lowest valleys (like my site) to extreme cold and snow at the highest elevations and on the many volcanoes (six are currently active) that dot the countryside.

The Costa is dominated by mestizo culture, with the exception of Esmeraldas Province, which is home to most of the Afro-Ecuadorian population. It has a humid, tropical climate with a flood-prone monsoon season. The largest city in Ecuador, Guayaquil, is located in the Costa on a natural bay, west and south of Quito. The coastal culture is known for greater openness and boisterousness than either the Sierra or Oriente, but also for higher crime rates. My fellow volunteers from this region assure me that the accent in this region is much harder to understand than that of the other regions.

The Oriente is the least densely populated region of Ecuador, and also the location of most of the country’s oil reserves. There is an ongoing struggle between the indigenous peoples of the region, environmental groups, and oil companies (run by the state) as to how the reserves should be managed. The Oriente has a uniformly humid climate, and the climate is hot, with the exception of the cooler cloud forests that hug the western slopes of the Andes. Many of the volunteers working in this region are promoting the blossoming eco-tourism industry with Peace Corps’ Natural Resources program.

The Galapagos Islands are dry, warm, isolated islands located more than 1000km west of the rest of Ecuador. The wildlife here evolved without humans and are remarkably unperturbed by their relatively-recent arrival. I liked one description I came across that compared the islands’ animals’ response to humans to the way stars deal with annoying paparazzi. These animals inspired Darwin to write his Theory of Evolution, and the islands now attract an enormous crop of tourists interested in swimming with the turtles and seeing a blue-footed booby. There are so many tourists that the Ministry of the Environment regularly introduces new regulations designed to protect the islands from them. They generally achieve this by raising admission prices, making the Galapagos a major splurge for volunteers.

History

Ecuador became an independent nation in 1830. Since then, it has undergone nearly 100 changes in government and 20 constitutions, the most recent of which went into effect in 2008. My Lonely Planet claims that the volatility stems from strife between the conservative, Catholic Sierra and the liberal, secular Coast, and from disputes with Peru. I am yet to visit the Coast, so I don’t have much to add to that first proposed cause, but animosity with Peru is certainly ripe. The Centro I work at was founded after the most recent war with Peru (peace accords signed 1998) with the goal of improving conditions in the border region. I am often told about the dire poverty, crime, and general yuckiness of Peru by my Ecuadorian neighbors (I live in the border region).

Before 1830, Ecuador was part of Gran Columbia, a nation composed of present-day Venezuela, Columbia and Ecuador. Gran Columbia was the united, idealistic dream of Simon Bolivar, a Venezuelan, who led the struggle for independence from Spain. He and his army fought from 1820, achieving the complete expulsion of the Spanish from Ecuador in 1822.

The Spanish, in turn, had concurred Ecuador from the Incan Empire. If you can remember back to your world history class, you may recall (as I did not) that Conquistador Francisco Pizarro led Spain’s defeat of Incan Emperor Atahualpa with greatly-outnumbered troops and a kidnapping scheme. Pizarro’s conquest began in 1532, and by 1534, Pizarro had made his way to Quito. The city had been razed by its fleeing Incan rulers, so Pizarro re-founded it on December 6, 1534, which is celebrated today as the Foundation of Quito. The Spanish Colonial period was characterized by extensive church-construction on former Incan religious sites, flourishing agriculture and the arts, and extreme oppression of the indigenous and mestizo populations.

In truth, when the Spanish ousted them, the Incans had only recently arrived, as they had conquered indigenous groups called the Cañari, beginning in 1463. Though they ruled for a relatively short time, the Inca had a great influence on the indigenous cultures, introducing the Quechua language, which is still spoken by many indigenous people as a primary language, and which peppers Ecuadorian Spanish even outside of indigenous populations. The Incans also changed land-ownership standards and introduced many crops now commonly associated with Ecuadorian agriculture such as cocoa, sweet potatoes (camote, the most common variety is available in my local market and has white outer flesh and a purple interior – see the picture to the right), and peanuts.

Fiesta Time

June is the month for fiestas in my neck of Loja, so this post is about my experiences partying it up in my site!

Reina del Canton

My cantón, or county, elected a new queen a few weeks ago in an elaborate ceremony attended by everyone I know in the town and judged by a panel including the vice-prefect of the Province of Loja. My ticket claimed the festivities began at 8 pm, so I foolishly arrived at a few minutes to eight. The stage was set-up and a few people were milling around, but the pageant was definitely not about to begin. I spent the next hour chatting with people I knew as they arrived and took a seat by my host aunts around 9, though the show didn’t begin until 9:30.

The pageant started, as everything with even a hint of officialness does here in Ecuador, with a longwinded speech in which each and every dignitary in attendance (and there were many) was welcomed individually and the virtues of the cantón were pondered at length. Eventually, though, the long-winded MCs couldn’t come up with anything more to say and the contestants made their first appearances. The pageant had three rounds: dancing in headdresses, swimsuit, and evening gown/message. To the right is a group photo of 5 of the 6 contestants decked out in their headdresses. In this phase, the contestants came out one-by-one to intense cheers from their barrios (neighborhoods), walked about doing pageant-y poses, then came out on the catwalk to do a little dance.

Between the first and second rounds of the pageant, a woman sang a variety of traditional Ecuadorian ballads. She was a decent singer and my host aunts informed me that her song selections were good.

The swimsuit competition followed a very old-school format, giving out each girls’ measurements as she posed. I say girls quite seriously, as five of the six contestants were 16 or 17 years old. The pageant rules state, in fact, that contestants must be between the ages of 16 and 25, but the most elderly contestant was an 18-year-old college freshman.

My favorite part of the evening followed the swimsuit competition. An aging, but engaging Uruguayan band called the Iracundos performed a well-rounded set of songs that the audience knew well and to which they could sing -along. The band’s performance was very polished, and while they did feel the need to give a speech, it was beautifully brief.

The atmosphere was upbeat heading into the final round and the contestants did a nice job with their mensajes (messages). One poor contestant forgot hers halfway through, but the audience was indulgent and an MC kindly commented that the stress of being a contestant can be quite a burden. Listening to the mensajes was the first time I heard Ecuadorian Spanish spoken as elegantly as possible, and it was impressive. Though the mensajes were uniformly about why the cantón is charming and why the contestant was so orgullosa (proud) to represent her barrio, the ‘Rs’ rolled out with incredible skill and the timing was fabulous.

As the clock struck 1 am, the judges turned in their cards and the contestants learned their fate. The runners-up were named the Señoritas (Misses) of this and that, while Reina (Queen) was reserved for the winner. The 1st runner up’s barrio felt she had been cheated and ripped off her Srta. Cantón sash when she went to join them in a bit of amusing indignation. This started chatter among my host family about past problems with rigged pageants and judges in assorted pockets. And considering what a big deal the pageant was in the town, I can imagine that happening.

Though the party apparently went well into the wee hours of the morning, I was tuckered –out, much like my host cousin, Santi, at right, and headed home shortly after the Reina was crowned.

Fiesta at the Escuela

A few days later I attended a different variety of fiesta out at the rural school where I teach English. Classes ended very early and families started pouring in at 11 am weighted down with chickens, veggies and herbs to start preparing the feast in honor of the end of an improvement campaign loosely associated with the Centro.

As soon as I arrived, my students eagerly led me to a spare room where the food-of-honor, a whole pig, was awaiting preparation. I tried to feign excitement, but was actually a bit overwhelmed by the tale, head, and faint smell. The only events I’ve attended in the past that featured a whole pig were pig roasts and I understood that this method of preparation required a great amount of time. I was, therefore, surprised to see the pig completely uncooked, but it turned out that this pig was destined for a giant fritada, or pan-frying (see right), a much quicker method of cooking.

The students had prepped a couple of dance routines to perform at the fiesta and I got a number of adorable photos of them at their final dress-rehearsal. They did a traditional dance to a pasillo, a ballad-like Ecuadorian type of music, and some hip-hop to a reggatone song. Watching the computer teacher instruct the little 8-11 year old boys on how to best dance hip-hop was hilarious. She had them looking like quite the group of bad-boys.

Misstaken that this was an afternoon-only fiesta, I’d made plans to go jogging with my host aunts in the early evening, so I had to go just as the habas of cervesas (cases of beers) arrived, but I’m told that like the beauty pageant, this fiesta also danced its way to the wee hours.

Cantonales

In honor of the 80th or so anniversary of the founding of my canton, a series of small fiestas has been going on for the past few days. The highlights were definitely a caballeros (cowboys) show in which one of my host uncles took part and a multi-day arts-and-crafts fair that features beautiful wooden goods and woven items typical of the indigenous tribes of the Sierra, or highlands areas. The fair also features food J I’m in love with the Ecuadorian equivalent of the elephant ear. Rather than large and flat, this sweet, yucca-based dough is formed into little balls, deep fried, then coated with sugar. It’s called huevitos chilenos, or Chilean eggs.

A Day in the Life

*The following ‘day’ is a compilation of several memorable days in Ecuador *

I got up this morning around 6:30 am and stumbled my way into a few pieces of my uniformly drab wardrobe (see right) before heading downstairs to make breakfast. The domestica, Martita, was already there and we performed our daily too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen tango. I enjoyed my English muffin (they don’t sell them here, but PC gave out a cookbook full of recipes for the stuff you usually buy) with an over-easy egg and tea while I watched a bit of the French Open on ESPNla. Except for the maid and the Spanish commentary, I could have been in the States.


I headed out around 7:30 am and walked the four blocks between my host family’s home and the bus stop. There’s a fountain in the square by the bus stop that is never on, but instead is used as a waiting room, so I nabbed a spot and watched the morning bustle. The highlight of the wait was definitely an open-backed truck that went by around 8 am. It was transporting four large pigs, one of whom had his front feet propped up on the cab to better enjoy the breeze. He looked just like a dog with its head out the window, and I’d swear he even had his tongue lolling off to one side. At 8:30 am, 60 minutes and three buses going the wrong direction later, I got on a bus headed out towards the Centro and the surrounding community where I work.


PC wants all volunteers to do a community assessment survey during our first several months in site, so I hiked over to an as-yet unvisited house and shouted out what I hoped was a friendly-sounding ‘hola!’ An older gentleman tottered out of the small brick-and-mortar house and sized up the freakishly tall gringa smiling down from his gate. He gave me the benefit of the doubt and invited me to sit in one of two plastic chairs next to the house. I introduced myself with my usual speech about how I’m the girl who teaches English at the local school and am from PC’s Sustainable Agriculture program, and would he mind answering a few questions. As usual, he looked suspicious about the survey, but curious about why on Earth I was there, so he agreed.

About two-thirds of the way through my questions, his wife walked out and took over. I asked if migration existed in the area and she said no. Seconds later, she said that she did not know what migration was and that yes , she had family who had migrated. I’d long ago given up trying to make sense of this very common series of responses, so I smiled and went on to ask her what projects she thought I could do to improve the condition of agriculture in the area. She told me that I should help the community get a priest (not allowed by PC), and that I could help with the community garden the Parish (in the Louisiana sense of the word) had started but not completed. My eyes lit-up. A community garden ready to go!? The women led me behind her house to a small school, crossed its courtyard, weaved between the buildings, and popped out next to a lovely garden patch freshly tilled and enclosed with a barbed-wire fence. It was perfect.


English classes at the local school begin between 10:30 and 11 am, so I thanked the woman profusely for her input and made my way to the camino (pathway/dirt road) that leads up to the school, basking in the glory of the new-found garden. I love this hike (even if I am always dripping in sweat by the time I reach the hilltop-perched school). It winds up a hill in the center of a beautiful valley full of semi-arid smaller hills while graceful, dark green mountains look down from all sides. I veered-off onto a steeper but more direct cow path and was spit out onto the final stretch to the school a few minutes and a few hundred vertical feet later.
Blocking most of the path were five cows, one of whom was an enormous bull with horns that twisted menacingly in my direction. The cows stared at me as I approached and made a few grunting noises. I think the bull even stamped a foot, but he might have just been transferring his weight. Panic-stricken, I edged over to the fence along the road and called out towards the nearest house. A young mother walked out to see what the fuss was about.


“Es bravo el torro?” (Is the bull aggressive?) I spluttered. She looked at me confused. I tried again, this time adding that I needed to reach the school and was it safe to pass around the bull.

“La vaca?” (The cow?) she asked. She gently told the cows the Spanish equivalent of ‘shew’ and they moseyed away. As the torro turned to go, I noticed that ‘he’ had a lovely set of utters. Oh. I’m an idiot, what can I say? Who knew cows had horns? Certainly not this former city-chick.

“Oh well,” I thought to myself, “now there’s at least one more person in the community who thinks I’m an idiot. At least they don’t grow potatoes at this low of an elevation, so I can’t confirm my agricultural ignorance by mistaking one for a weed (it’s hard to tell the difference!).”

A few minutes later I made it to the school, having carefully avoided looking the bravo campo dogs in the eyes (thanks for the advice, Holly!), and gave an English lesson to my eager and remarkably apt students. I left at 1 pm with the intention of conducting another interview before catching a bus back into town for a late lunch. The survey went well and I got to meet a set of my students grandparents who were both well into their eighties.

We’re now in the dry season here and it’s been several weeks since the last substantial rainfall, so the path is dusty and loose. Distracted by the beautiful scenery, I stepped on a particularly loose patch of dirt and my foot slid out from under me, and with it, all the hope and good humor I’d collected that day. I landed with a thud on the dusty road. Suddenly my surroundings were foreign and unpleasant, not exotic and beautiful. My work was meaningless and silly, rather than delightfully unstructured, and the people I’d met were uneducated and uninterested in change, rather than welcoming and hopeful. I sat in the dust wallowing for a few minutes until the bought of overwhelming homesickness passed, then picked myself up, brushed off the dust, and started back down the hill. The path is, fortunately, long. I had time to locate a bit of the hope and humor that had slipped out before I reached the bottom.



After lunch in the market and a trip to an internet café back in town, I changed into workout clothes and met my host aunts, Mariuxi and Tania, to go ‘trotando’ (jogging). Mariuxi is in her mid-thirties and Tania her early-fifties and the two are fast becoming my best friends in Ecuador. The fact that they can outrun me by about 6 miles is also shaming me back in shape. We jog on the dirt track that surrounds the local soccer field. Mariuxi and Tania have adorable, pink, matching MP3 players that wrap around the back of their heads, and they always manage to look cute in their running attire. I jog around in the hodge-podge collection of gray, white and black workout clothes that found their way into my suitcase and wear a pair of large, black, mismatched headphones that snake down to my second-hand iPod (thanks Theresa!). Needless to say, I don’t look cute while I’m jogging.

I managed to run diez veultos (10 laps, or 3.3 miles!), then retired to do my abdominals y flexions (sit-ups and push-ups). Tania and Mariuxi each ran 25 laps, or a little over 8 miles, while I walked. On the way home, we chatted about weekend plans, food, and from which parts of our bodies we wanted to lose weight. Mariuxi turned and asked me in all seriousness which part of her body she needed to work on. I burst out laughing, stunned and embarrassed by the question. I explained that that kind of honesty was just not something I was used to. Mariuxi and Tania explained to me that among good friends in Ecuador, that’s exactly the sort of thing you actually say to each other. They said it was good encouragement to look their best. I remembered learning about similar openness among close friends in France and now wonder if this is a romance-language phenomenon. Who knows, but I need to take care. Apparently, I now have two friends who won’t hesitate to tell me if they notice I ate one too many ice creams….

Trotando was followed by a quick shower. On a side note I saw a TV show a few years ago that claimed we wash our hair too often, so, until very recently, I was limiting myself to a maximum of two shampoos per week in a sort-of ‘why not?’ experiment. According to the show, shampooing strips your hair of all its natural oils, thus provoking excessive oil production in a sort of vicious circle. This is crap. After six weeks of limited shampooing, all that happened to my hair was that it constantly looked greasy. I will admit that after about three days of oil build-up, it doesn’t look any greasier, but a three-day build-up is still gross. Needless to say, I’ve terminated that experiment.

Next came dinner with my host parents (rabbit – que rico! (how delicious)), then a little TNT movie-action in Spanish followed by a brief foray into Spanish study before giving it up as a bad job (I get plenty of practice going about life here) and snuggling under the covers (see right). Lights out – approximately 11 pm.

You Might Be in Peace Corps Ecuador If...

... Friends send you texts that say things like, ¨I have fleas¨

... Your travel plans have been interrupted by landslides/floods/indigenous protests

... You are no longer phased by amoebas

... You carefully examine your poo, as you are phased by worms

... You can make your own peanut butter

... Your host mother has microwaved refrigerated Coke because it was ¨too cold¨

... In photos with Ecuadorians, you look like you had an un-checked growth hormone imbalance

... You teach English to Spanish-speakers, but don´t really speak Spanish

... You´ve watched an entire TV season of Weeds/The Office/House/etc. in the past week

... You know that Cuerpo de Paz dice muchas cosas.


If you aren´t in PC Ecuador, you´re likely extremely happy about that fact after my uplifting symptoms of PC Ecuador volunteerism, but actually, la vida ecuadoriana is pleasant enough. I spent a few days last week in Cuenca for PC-sponsored resiliency training (that left much to be desired, but was still a free trip to a UNESCO World Heritage city with great food and a chance to hang-out with 50+ other PCVs). My host family continues to be welcoming, my host aunts/running buddies continue to make me look tragically out of shape, and my Spanish is coming along slowly, but steadily. I had my first PC visitor out at my site on Friday, a fellow Lojano who´d like to bring a women´s group he works with out to the Centro for a yogurt and cheese making presentation. I also popped into Loja for some grocery shopping and a chance to make a fool of myself running a 10k that passed by Loja´s churches. Kayla, another Lojana PCV, kindly went snail´s pace with me and joined in the fun game of ¨find the course¨that was the last several kilometers of the race (apparently only serious runners do the Loja 10k, and the follow-up car whizzed past us at about km 2).

This evening I´ll be occupied in the kitchen making my host family fettuccini alfredo. I made spaghetti with meatballs last week and learned that Ecuadorian kitchens do not have pepper shakers for a reason. I figure bland fettuccini will still be good (since the tastiest ingredient is fat :).

Happy dia de la independencia de Pichincha/Memorial Day to everyone, tomorrow!

Chao,
Alli

Pluckin´ Chickens and Other Campo Fun

Pick-up by feet, insert in hot water for 10 seconds, pluck, pick-up by body, insert feet in hot waterfor 10 seconds, peel feet, repeat.

That´s what I learned as part of a plucking squad that plucked 50 chickens this past Tuesday. I joined a group of visiting high school students at the Centro for the chicken slaughter and processing session, and can say with confidence that you get used to freshly-dead chickens pretty quickly. I don´t think the slaughtering method used at the Centro would meet animal rights guidelines, but it was still fairly quick and chickens just aren´t that cute to begin with. I squirmed and held my breath as I oh-so-daintily plunged the first one into hot water, but by my tenth, I grabbed ´em without hesitation and had the feathers off in minutes. The Ecuadorian high schoolers all had previous experience and were amused by my novice skills. I´ve tried to imagine how a similar American field trip would play out, but every scenario ends in some sort of child abuse lawsuit.

And thus begins the Campo edition of alliinecuador :). If you´re feeling queasy, don´t worry; there isn´t anything else in the post likely to turn your stomach. I arrived in the afternoon of April 24th at my new host family´s house, a few hours west of Loja. My new host parents are Gustavo and Paulina nad htey have a quaint three-story house one block from the Parque Central (Central Square - every city here has one, as the Spanish were into them). My room overlooks a charming interior courtyard from its third-floor perch. Besides my host parents, a doctor who lives in Loja most of the time rents a room for his rounds in the campo, Gustavo´s oldest brother, Lucho, has the room beneath mine, and the domestica (maid - what can I say? I´m in the Posh Corps forthe next 3 months!) has a room nearthe Doctor´s. Gustavo is a veterinarian and Paulina is a biology teacher at one of the two local colégios (middle/high schools). They also own the shop next door, an appliance and housewares place.

My new host-town is small, lively and has a reliable supply of internet cafés and shops. There´s a great produce and basic amenities market on Sundays that I hit-up with Paulina and Martita, the domestica, to buy my breakfast supplies. I´m trying to geta handle on all the varieties of potatoes and bananas sold here, but there are many. My favorites thus far are a small, sweet banana called an orito and a sweet potato whose flesh changes from a white outer layer to a deep purple center. Though potatoes are eaten with gusto, they aren´t grown at the low elevations down here. The fields are full, instead, of maize, caña (sugarcane) and mani (peanut). With all the mani crops, prices are low and I can purchase mani molido (ground, roasted peanuts) fro $0.50. It´s not quite peanut butter, but I´m perfecting my recipe for its transormation. I can buy peanut butter in Ciudad de Loja, but am unwilling to shell-out the gringo price associated with such a gringo food. My host family seemed taken with my peanut butter and I´ll get more feedback tomorrow when I share it with a group of local English teachers.

I´ve been out to the Centro, a forty-five minute bus ride away, several times and introduced myself to the one-room schoolhouse (elementary grades only) nearby where I now teach English classes twice a week. I hope that spending time out at the school will help me get to the know the rural community surrounding the Centro, but it´s been frustrating teaching 6-10 year olds. I knew my calling in life was not elementary education as soon as I quit being an elementary student, myself, but I´m hoping to learn to like it. If you have any advice for classroom management, please pass it along. Seven-year-olds in the Ecuadorian campo are so far not responding favorably to silly gringa requests for individual work and refraining from running out of the classroom whenever a road grater/pig/goat rolls through. And the goat, at least, is bound to show-up at least twice a day....

My official goal hereis to teach about and facilitate the implementation of sustainable agricultural practices in the communities alrededor del Centro, especially as relates to irrigation. As with many Peace Corps goals, though, the likelihood of starting an irrigation project in a community as tiny, poor, and rural as mine is slim. I´m excited to try, but it will be awhile before the community and I are well enough acquainted to start forming organizations capable of building and maintaining an irrigation system. My initial agriculture goals are to start a community garden through my contacts at the school.

Unfortunately, a part of my first two weeks in site were devoted to medical worries, as my host-niece caught pneumonia and was hospitalized at the same time that my grandmother spent a few scary days in the ICU Stateside following a nasty allergic reation to anti-rejection drugs. Both host-niece and grandmother are now (thankfully) on the mend. I visited my host-niece ast the hospital and took the opportunityto survey the local medical facilities. The hospital was small, run-down, and not nearly as clean as one would want, but the nurses were attentive and it was kind of nice to be in a hospital whose entryway couldn´t double as a hotel lobby. I´d love to see a cost comparison between my host-niece´s treatment here and back home.

My first two-weeks in-site concluded with a Loja-cluster reunion in a town just north of Ciudad de Loja. Liz, a Peace Corps Madagascar transplant (PC Madagascar closed recently following a Coup d´Etat) invited us over for a lasagna-filled welcome lunch. It was lovely (and not boring, as the picture of a snoozing Tony and Adam might suggest - they just looked funny on their matching couches). As we waited for the bus back to Loja after lunch, we witnessed the birth of a calf in a nearby valley. The attending farmer actually helped pull the calf out, then let the mother cow lick the newborn clean. Within half an hour, the little guy was stading, albeit shakily, on his own four legs.

Having met most of its members, I´m really pleased with the Loja cluster of volunteers and look forward to occasional fun-filled weekends in town with them. The trip into town is useful on its own merits, too, as it affords me the opportunity to stock up on Nutella (which I haven´t found a way to fake, yet) and check my mail.

The picture on the left is of me standing nextto my host mother, andto the left of her are Danielo and Diana, host-family friends, with their daughter Amelia. We´re out at a river near a town called Las Coches which has a colégio and nice collection of houses, but is accessible only by means of a steep, muddy, lengthy dirt road. As usual, I look collossally tall next to my Ecuadorian hosts.

Hope all is well en sus casas and I would love to hear your news!

Chao,

Alli

Swear In!

It’s official! On Thursday, the 22nd of April, in the shade of a tent erected on the beautiful lawn of the US Ambassador to Ecuador’s home, I became a Peace Corps volunteer. Leading up to today were two months of intense, consuming training, but they’re done and my 52 fellow Omnibus 103 trainees are now the 103rd group of volunteers to serve in Ecuador! On Friday we dispersed to the far corners of Ecuador, but on Thursday we celebrated our new (not-at-all lucrative) jobs.

The swearing-in ceremony took place in the morning and Ross, a Texan and one of my fellow Cangahuans, gave a hilarious speech on behalf of the Natural Resources folks that began, “Qué tal y’all?” The ceremony was followed by a breakfast of bagels from a Quito shop owned by former PCVs. Most of the gentlemen of Omnibus 103 (and Cara, by means of a skillfully drawn fingerstache) sported 70’s porn-star/pedophile mustaches for the event. They convinced Parmer, the Country Director of Peace Corps Ecuador, to join them. On my facebook page are great group shots of the ‘staches, but the picture to the right is closer-up and really does the mustaches justice. I enjoyed dressing up for the ceremony, as it was my first non-REI clothes event since arriving. It’s nice, but odd to have such a casual job after months of business clothes in the McNamara building. High fashion among PCVs is limited to ‘Patagucci’ and ‘Arc’teryx and Gabbana’.

Volunteers from other Omnibuses (Omnibi?) organized a barbeque for us at the Peace Corps office after events at the ambassador’s and served us delightfully American delicacies like cheeseburgers, veggie kebabs and s’mores. Yumm…. In the evening, everyone set-out for Quito’s Mariscal District, a fantastic place to eat, drink and be merry (though the petty criminals have noticed the abundance of semi-intoxicated gringos and wealthy Ecuadorians who frequent the area – the Embassy now bans official Americans from the area between 2am and 6am. We didn’t have any issues, though J). If you’ve seen any of the photos I’m tagged in on facebook from that night, you already know that a good time was had by all. I really should write to thank the Black-Eyed Peas for writing “I Gotta a Feeling” because it is a wonderful (if overplayed) way to get the dance floor going.

Before swearing in were a few days of final medical, safety, and language tests and evenings of great Indian food in the Mariscal. If anyone has a good recipe for Chicken Masala or Vindallo, please send it to me! I fell in love with both dishes at The Last Great Indian Restaurant, Quito. We also did a little sight seeing in Old Quito. The photo to the right is me in one of the churches visited.

Next up: life in the campo.

Alli