Abril...more than just a month: May 2010

Blog 5-24

Cuentos:

One day I decided I wanted to go running. I was out at the soccer field about to run when I heard a man yelling, “No you can’t go running it’s too wet.” Well OK…it was wet since we have been having torrential downpours every night. So I went over to greet him forgetting that I had my rock in had (this is my form of protection from the many….many dogs here. If you know me, you probably know I have quite a fear of dogs and here it is common place to throw rocks at dogs if you want them to go away.) I greeted him and he began talking, I really didn’t understand much at all of what he was saying but he invited me back to him house. I went over and he pulled out a drawer of sand and began talking about it and showing it to me, then he brought out some rocks and was explaining many things about them as well. With my limited Spanish and his difficult coastal accent I believe he was saying that there was some gold in the sand, and the rocks were from the Incans who stored water in the holes in these rocks.

Just the other day I was walking down the street and he had a new rock in hand and invited me over to see his rocks again. I sadly had to decline since I was on my way to a minga (community work day), but maybe the next time he invites me I will be able to understand about 40 percent of what is going on, hey maybe one day I’ll understand everything J

One night I woke up in the middle of the night to the feel of water dripping on me. I realized it wasn’t raining and wondered what it could be. Then I heard a chicken moving around on the roof and smelled the liquid substance, and yes I’m sure you can deduct what it was.

I was teaching some children numbers in English one day and there was actually a pretty good turn out. The children were doing a good job shouting out the numbers I had written on a flashcard but some had wanted to write the numbers down. Since I didn’t have a board to write on I wrote the numbers down in one of the student’s notebooks. Then all the kids started coming up and wanted me to write the numbers in their book and they were getting really excited. I figured I must feel like the guy dressed up as Mickey Mouse at Disney Land.

I was having a great day, it seemed like the kids had learned a little something in English class that day and I had also spoke with the town president who thought I should do some presentations at the next town meeting ( though he didn’t know when that would be). Then a neighbor greeted me and said I and told me I was looking more gordita than when I got here. “Haha oh really” I said! “Yes, you are,” he replied cheerily. Well I guess that’s what happens when you take a veggie loving girl and feed her rice, plantains and oil.

Today I found a bone of I think a chicken or maybe a larger animal. How did it get there? I have absolutely no idea.

Mother’s Day here in my town is a big holiday. People start celebrating on Saturday and continue through the night Sunday. Everyone gets all dressed up and ready to go out dancing on Saturday night. I of course joined…thinking this is the moment we all are dreading/waiting for, our debut on the dance floor. I was hoping my previous practice back in DC at Habana Village, in pre-service training and after English classes with the girls would help to give me a few less crazy stares than I would previously have received. Basically this was my moment to pretend I could shake better than your average gringa. The house down the road turned into a dance club since the owners had moved everything out of the main room. We (my 70 year old mother, sister and sister-in-law and their friends and the 9 year old son) headed to this “club”. We sat around in silence for a very long time listening to the music blasting. Then after about an hour a few drunk men came in and began doing some very entertaining dancing. After a while people began to dance and I was really hoping I would have the courage to go try. It looked like everyone was really starting to have fun and finally a woman who lives down the street made me go dance. So I danced with her, and then with others and had a great time. I think I did an OK job but I’ve got nothing on anybody here. Even Ariel the 1 year old boy at my house can already shake it like no other; it’s an inherent talent I presume.

5-27

“Mucho suerte!” Si, I am very lucky I saw that snake outside my bedroom door before it found me! Luckily my host dad was in the other room and yelled for his machete so he could kill it before it got away. Shew, that was a scare, though I wouldn’t have minded if the snake decided to eat the mouse in my room during his visit. The next day while having lunch with my host mother and talking about the snake incident, she told me that the snake last night was and equis….one of the most dangerous snakes in Ecuador. Yikes J

Today was baking, take two. I think my chocolate chip cookies were much more successful this time around since I had pretty similar ingredients to those I use in the states. Just when I was about finished my last batch a truck drove past our house and ripped down the power line, oops. So right now just one half of our house has power, luckily there is power upstairs or I may have not seen that snake! When I went down to the tienda to buy bolos (basically a home made freeze pop in a bag) after language class, the lady asked me when I was going to teach her to make cookies. I told her I could try to this week haha apparently everyone here really does know what I am doing all the time. It’s great, the man who sells coco drinks at the ranchero station always points me to the correct ranchero and there are always people stopping the ranchero when they know we have reached my house. So far I have been enjoying living in a small town (around 400 people).

Today someone actually asked me for help regarding an agricultural topic, this was a small joy for me. She has seeds from Quito and wanted to know the seeds were for, I told her lettuce, though she really didn’t think it was. Anyhow, she wanted me to try to help her plant them and I said that I would though I wasn’t sure they would grow since they are typically cooler weather crops. Well, I guess it is worth a try.

Right now I am super excited because my friend will be arriving in Ecuador in a few day. She is doing a 2 month internship working for a rainforest preservation group. What a small world! Of all places, we are going to be in the same country and even very close, probably just like 4 or 5 hours away from each other (which is maybe equivalent to US travel time of 1 hour haha). I have started to miss home and family and it will be great to see a good friend!

5-28

It is funny which things trigger memories. Today I heard something that sounded like a weed wacker off in the distance and started to get a bit nostalgic for the lovely spring/summer days at home. I have woken many spring and summer mornings to that all too familiar sound coming from the good neighbors sprucing up their lawn. I am starting to miss home, but I know being away is really helping me to appreciate where I come from and making me realize there are so many little things that make it great.

Today I had a slight deja-vu moment. While working at the minga on our community garden, I saw a caterpillar on a cacao tree. It just happens that cacao trees and Pawpaw trees (if you know me well then I assume you know what a pawpaw tree is) are strikingly similar. And this caterpillar was bright lime green and looked just like the saddleback caterpillar which stung me while I was picking pawpaws out in Rock Creek Park. So anyhow, it looked just like the caterpillar that stung me just hanging out on a cacao leaf which is very similar to a pawpaw leaf. But this time I knew to stay far far away from it!

Since I have been on kind of a bug kick lately I will continue on with the interesting creatures I saw today. As mentioned above I saw a beautiful lime green caterpillar, three (small don’t worry) tarantulas, and a huge flying insect I at first thought was a bird but was mistaken.

Today we had our minga with the agriculture institute students and though attendance was a bit low we got a lot done. I passed out my chocolate chip cookies and everyone really liked them. I think try two was much more successful than the first time. I must send out a warning that walking around with cookies is very dangerous, you are lucky if you make it to your destination with about half the amount you started with and you will probably finish your travels with multiple cooking lessons planned for the new week, but hey at least I’m useful for something around here! I was told I should even sell cookies to make a little profit, I wish I could, “April’s cookie bake sale, funds go towards Porta phone saldo.”

Today we received an alert from the PC that the volcano in Banos began spewing ash. Our travel is now restricted in a few of the provinces nearby (not that I am allowed to travel yet... two more months). This is definitely a reality check; yes this volcano they have been worried about could actually erupt! I hope everything calms down and it will safe again soon.

One Month Mark!

Yesterday marked one month in site. It does seem like this last month went by pretty quickly, though there were days that were slower at times. After three months we are allowed to rent a house of our own, and I must admit I can’t wait. After 6 years of living on my own it is a bit of a challenge.

So far I have been trying to get to know the community and improve my Spanish. Apparently, it is a little better but it still is quite bad. I have attended a lot of meetings with the cacao organization that I am working for and have visited other organizations as well to get an idea of how they operate. Students from the agricultural university in the nearest city are working with our community on Fridays doing agricultural mingas. During the last few mingas we cleared out a plot of land and built a fence around the land to keep the animals away. They also plan on helping with a school garden and organic fertilizers as well as teaching children about food security. Within my community I have been teaching English almost everyday to the kids in the community how want to come. Learning English seems to be the first thing on everyone’s mind here when they talk to me, so I figured I should give it a shot. I actually do enjoy teaching, especially to the younger group. This has also given me a chance to get to know many of the kids and teenagers in the town. Making up silly rhymes is now a new past time of mine. Today I talked with the teachers at the elementary school, and they would like for me to teach English there. So now I am going to try teaching a few classes of English there once a week and then continue one day a week with the others who I have been teaching. Right now there are many other possible secondary projects I could work on, though my main focus is working with the cacao organization in my site.

These next few months I need to start working on my community interviews. I will be interviewing the families in the community to try to assess the needs and wants of the community and as well as gathering base mark data to measure the accomplishments of the PC goals.

I have lately been a bit envious of those who have nine to five jobs, I really do miss mine.