Big long illustrated update

I realized as I write this that I am, in fact, almost halfway through my stay in my new site.  I guess it's not my 'new' site anymore, but my permanent site.

Five months has gone by fast, but I still went through the normal cultural adjustment stages.  When I arrived, everything was fantastic and new and nothing could be bad.  Then I sank into confusion about what to do.  Then I missed 'home,' home in the general term for the States.  Since then it's pretty much been up and down on a daily or hourly basis.  I still have some days where I prefer to just stay home and read or make something.  I'm grateful for the days when I have a mountain of laundry to wash by hand, or I have to spend some time forraging for plants for my rabbit.  Sometimes I walk the hour down the mountain to Apuela for internet even though someone in town offers his computer and internet for an hourly fee.  I just like to go. 

I've focused completely on trash management, at first only on accident.  I think it started when I made my recycled art projects on the benches outside one of the two stores in town.  The store owner started making her own folded chip bag wallet, then others picked up on it.  I did just a couple workshops at the afternoon kids' group and more adults began their own projects.  Once I began teaching recycled art in the school, many parents and their families got interested and started their projects.

I've also been helping out in the tree nursery, but so far progress has been pretty disappointing.  I can only convince the other workers to do something if there's a tourism group coming to visit.  We tried moving the workday from Friday to Monday and tried to assign a daily schedule to water the trees (only 15 minutes!) but nothing worked.  Now it's pretty much just me and another American volunteer who are watering the trees every day so they don't die.

The tree nursery is really interesting though.  First, it's a joy to see seeds germinate and near-dead twigs come blooming back to life with the copious water we bring.  And with that comes more wildlife.  One tree, a chinchin as it's known, is host to the larva of a big yellow butterfly.  Its larva are green and spiky and have a colorful purple, green or pink crysallis.  I used to take some home to watch:

I haven't travelled much at all since moving sites.  Technically there's a rule in Peace Corps that says if you move sites, you can't take vacation for three months.  Which was fine because I didn't have any money to climb mountains.  Pretty sad actually.  But I for sure didn't pass up the fantastic whale migration whose hub is Puerto Lopez.  It didn't disappoint this year and we even visited Isla de la Plata to glimpse blue-footed boobies (and red-footed boobies and Nazca boobies).  It was a nice break...

When I returned home, my family celebrated my birthday!  It was a wonderful surprise complete with cake brought in from 'outside'.  As you can see, it didn't completely survive the three-hour car ride:

Last month I began working on a recycling project.  There had been a program before my time but it didn't take.  My plan was to imitate another Peace Corps Volunteer's successful project in Santo Domingo by holding a recycling contest in the school.  My project ended up being a little different than hers as a couple months ago a group of volunteers literally filled my room with donations of toys, art supplies, and school supplies.  I was at a loss for what to do with the stuff and really didn't want to be the one to hand it all out like charity.  Using the stuff as prizes seeing to be the solution.  So a few community members and I finished the small recycling center on the corner of the football field by completely enclosing it with metal screen and finishing it with a nice door and lock.  This was partly because we didn't want anyone taking away the plastic bins, to keep dogs out, and to keep kids from taking materials out to reuse in the contest. 

I was really exited when my host mom Alicia began collecting bottles right away:

Then her pile grew:

And grew:

Not many kids brought in recyclables the first week of the contest, but once it was clear to them that the program was on, they bombarded me with bags filled with bottles.  This was the second week:

The third week, we had to organize the small recycling center.  I invited the kids to earn 10 points per family if they helped me crush all the bottles.  What a BAD bad idea.  Ten kids in a small space stomping on a couple thousand bottles.  I regreted my decision immediately, but a few actually worked and in a couple hours we had finished the work.  The next day I tied up the bags and weighed them out - 80 kilos of plastic and 6 kilos of metal plus a bit of cardboard.  That's roughly equivalent to $21.  80 kilos of plastic represent about 2,700 bottles of various sizes. 

Like I said earlier, I haven't had time or money to climb any big mountains.  I'm for sure aching for the exercise and the adventure though.  When a couple tourists came through and requested a guided hike, the guide invited me along to get to know the mountain above us where our town's water comes from.  I had a bad cold but I pushed through it anyway (mistake, as it then progressed to a nasty sinus infection).  The top is covered in forest and is inhabited by Andean bears.  We didn't see any of the shy creatures, but we saw plenty evidence of their existence.

There have been a number of festivals in the area, including one where all the communities in the area gather with colored torches corresponding to their community (mine was white) and walk down to the town of Apuela for a nighttime Catholic mass.  It was quite stunning but of course that was the time my camera battery decided to no longer hold a charge.

Roughly every Saturday, a few women, their kids and I get together to work on recycled art projects.  Most of them have worked on the folded chip bag wallets but they seem to prefer paper bead making.

One of the women is a brilliant crocheter whose crafts are sold in the Intag store in Otavalo.  After I taught the schoolchildren to make plastic string for knitting, this artisan learned from her daughter and began making all kinds of amazing things.  One of her products was a traditional hat crocheted from black and transparent plastic string.  She likes the material so much that she now wants to buy new plastic bags...whoops...not really the point of reducing and recycling!  What's really ironic, though, is she's a cabuya artist.  She makes things out of a fiber produced from a big agave-like plant called the penca.  The fiber is called cabuya.  Before traffic arrived in Pucara and with it plastic products, these cabuya artisans wove bags to sell.  When plastic bags arrived, they pretty much snuffed this trade out of existence and now the artisans make their crafts to sell as purses and such for tourists.  Now these artisans know how to make string out of plastic and are crocheting that in plastic bags.  Funny...like an inversion.

About it for now...to be continued!

A long overdue update

Well hello, it´s been a while hasn´t it? I´ve been prodded by people to return to the blogging world and update this thing. I´m sorry I´ve neglected it.

First, I´d like to share a video of footage on a not-so-recent climb up the central peak of Rumiñahui in February:

Life in the campo of Ecuador has been up and down but I´m still at it, trying different approaches until things work. I´m focused on one project right now, my Brigada Verde, or the eco-club. One day I went to the school and handed out little slips of paper that were invites to come to the school at 2 p.m. on Sunday for the first (really not the first, but the NEW first) meeting of Brigada Verde. I brought some recycled crafts to show the kids and they went crazy over them. So with all the enthusiasm, I thought I had finally done it and finally had an established project with participation.

I prepare diligently and even bought my own little whiteboard for Sunday (by the way, this was last Sunday). I wrote out some ideas and thought of what I´d say. I was ready to go when Sunday rolled around, and I strolled to the school early to meet the kids. Only... there were none. I looked longingly up and down the street for kids to crest the hill en masse but none came. Then suddenly a girl jumped me from behind - aha, she and her friend were here for the club! We waited, then one girl ran off to apparently find more kids, and the other surprised me by turning on the air raid siren to attract more kids. Then suddenly there were five kids. Then 7. Then 9. The school director didn´t show up to open a room for us so we crouched on the church bench and tried to start, but it was distracting and the kids wouldn´t concentrate (they just want to play). So we packed up and went to the Casa Comunal, the communal meetinghouse. We knew it was locked but we risked it...and it was locked. So we commenced on the steps, only now we picked up more kids, a total of 19! Being a large, squirrelly group, I resorted to the goldmine and handed out membership cards for them to sign and color. It worked like a charm. So - ART is the key to these childrens´hearts.


An intimidating storm approached from the west (that´s backwards for the prevailing winds in my valley) and began thundering and dumping us with copious amounts of rain, so we broke up for the day. On Monday I met my host Maria in Riobamba and we found a place to laminate the cards. It was more expensive than I thought ($6 for 20! yikes) but they look good. I brought them to school on Wednesday to show the kids and told them they had to go to next Sunday´s meeting to get them. More kids asked if they could have their own cards. I think once this club gets established (perhaps, I mean to say, lures kids in with exciting crafts and activities), I won´t have to worry about attendance and kids not showing up.

I´m also working on designs for bread ovens that some people would like to construct. I had to switch mentality from the New Mexican adobe design (made of clay and sand) to a brick and cement-only design. I have plenty of materials now and hopefully the people that were interested are still interested.

In a couple weeks, Maria and I will be taking a journey to Quito for the baños secos (dry toilets) workshop. She seems very excited, and so am I - not just to learn about how to deal with poop, but for her to see some more of Peace Corps life. After that, I think I´ll be climbing Cotopaxi again (attempt 2) with another PCV. Super excited. If not then, then after midservice the first week of May.

And let´s see...what else...oh! I got a very interesting flyer from my grocery store that announced two places in Riobamba (and others in Latacunga and Ambato) are taking plastic number 2 bottles for recycling, and paying 2 cents for each. I really badly want to get my community into a recycling program - maybe as simple as setting out some containers in the Casa Comunal, telling people to deposit their bottles in them, and having volunteers accompany the cache to Riobamba on buses friendly to the cause. The money can go to the community, so 1) no more burning plastic bottles or tossing them in the river, and 2) money!

Ok, enough of work.

For fun, I´ve been following Maria around. Only lately she´s in a fishing mood, so we´ve been going to some really pretty spots. Being vegetarian, I have zero interest in fishing but I still find going out fun. One particularly beautiful day (until it hailed peas) we grazed a slope´s mora (like blackberry) bushes for their sweets. Most were picked over, but Maria underestimated my intense desire to collect berries. It must be a vegetarian thing - all that energy not fishing or hunting diverted to plants. So I threw myself into the bushes and got the extra juicy, sun-ripened berries high on top of the plant out of reach of normal people. Doing this, we filled a milk can with them and I ended up quite cut up and itchy. TOTALLY worth it though for a couple cups of juice. These are my hands, bloodied or juicy, sort of both:


On Tuesday, we got up super early (Maria at 3 a.m., me at 4 a.m.) and trudged up the hill with the local cheese maker Jose and delinquent neighborkid Rebeka. It began raining when we started, making the way muddy. But on we went, determined. I love hiking in darkness and really enjoyed every step. When the sun began subtly illuminating the valley, the mountains backlit so lightly, I got a real feeling of how immense they are and how delicate a perch my site has in them. We stopped so the group could dig up worms, then continued directly up to meet a trail that we followed to a small stream. My reaction was, ¨This is IT?¨ It was tiny. And they wanted to pluck large trout from it? Huh. But sure enough, Maria caught one and it was bigger than I´ve seen - about a foot long. We continued following up the stream but it was very, very difficult going. It was a narrow, incised stream covered on both sides by soft moss and thick plants. Some places were so sketch that if you slipped off the moss, you´d fall 15 feet into a pool, unable to climb back up the waterfall or down below - you would be truly stuck without a rope, and in very cold water.

Rebeka and I foolishly continued following Jose along the stream while Maria climbed out the other side. Eventually we met up but it was ridiculously hard. We kept following the stream and I wondered where it actually went - I thought we were near the crest of the mountains. Oh, how I was wrong. We entered one large basin and saw the stream far in the distance cascading over rocks. And at that cascade, we climbed up into another basin. It was here that we ran out of fish and the group switched to hunting rabbits. They had zero success so we packed it up and hiked on home.

Hmm... what else?

The weather has been unbelievably nice lately. Sort of warmish, sometimes sunny, nothing like the past year I´ve spent in the Andes. Very pleasant and doable. In fact, last night I recorded the warmest temperature EVER in my room: 71 degrees. Usually it´s in the 50s.

Finally, my kitten is a giant cat, and I she always looks happy even when she´s not:


Until next time! I promise to update more. Maybe once a week at most.

A good day

Picture this:

Three gringas running down a steep cobblestone road that descends from a mountain. One is in shorts, another has a headlamp, and the other (yours truly) is galloping in sandals. The bus back to town arrived and apparently we wouldn't miss it for anything.

The day was gorgeous - our first day without rain, and one of the more cloudless days we've had in three weeks. I've been walking to and from class each day (about an hour one way) and that's been a real mood lifter. I love it. Especially today with such spectacular views, though yesterday we did spot nearby mountains with snow on them.

Saturdays, though, are big days for the local outdoors scene. Tons of people descended on the trail with mountain bikes. We had no problem with them, until one spot in the trail where we have to go single file through a few poles. This time, while we were going through, I heard a 'Permiso' but it was too late - behind me was Mandy, who couldn't move out of the way in time before the biker hit her in the leg. What seemed like a split second later, a man on a bike directly behind hit her and fell over. Because he was clipped in, he fell comically sideways, cursing the way down. Bikers were coming from the other direction. So Mandy and I were stuck in the middle, wanting to disappear from this bicycling disaster and at the same time trying so hard not to laugh at the ridiculous situation. I feel pretty sure it wasn't our fault at all, but I do hope not to run into them again. Or them into us...

Anyway, it was so clear, we finally spotted some major glaciated peaks nearby - Cotopaxi, I'm pretty sure? We've even seen Antisana. There are just too many to count...

We worked in our small language/culture groups for a short while before breaking up and presenting our Ecuadorian feast. Each group had a dish to prepare, and ours was corviches. Unfortunately when we went to the local grocery store, they had none for sale. So while I waited outside, my group came out with ice cream. I'm happy to say our facilitator just laughed when he heard the story...

A small group formed to go up the local mountain Ilalo, and we even walked all the way from training to approach it. When we got to town, we decided to hop on a bus to take us part way up the mountain...but it was more complex than just hopping on. It passed us going around the corner so we thought we'd missed it. But there it was - and Abby chased that sucker down like a pro and caught it for us. Took us way up for quite a great start, though it feels a little like cheating. Cobblestone road melted into footpath, into cobblestone road, into dirt road, and finally to footpaths among high altitude farmland.

We kept taking wrong paths but wrong isn't all that bad - these trails wrapped tantalizingly across Ilalo neither descending or ascending, just going straight across with the valley below and sweeping views of the green mountain buttress ahead. For another time, I hope?

Eventually we worked our way to the first cross which we noticed had just been graffito tagged the same day. And then the best reward of them all: getting to ridgewalk. Nothing better. Our tentative plan was to get to the top and descend down the other side to another town where apparently there's some kind of wood...bar...or something. But it was getting late (this is all after class, remember) we decided that no matter how unbelievable the views were on the other side, we had to go down the way we came.

So after walking down leisurely, we spotted that bus.

It was only 6ish, so we celebrated with beer (the guy working there had a White Sox cap and, unrelated to my praise on that or not, he gave us a free bottle...).

Wrapped the day up with my host family who cracked me up. I didn't understand most of the rapid talk but it was still funny.

Yeeah! Good day.