Chocolate trees, black gold, and platanos

Well, hello there. It’s been a long, long time. But alas, I have come to tell a story, one about the first three months of my Peace Corps service in-site. When I last left you, I hadn’t even finished training in Tumbaco yet, but now I have nearly reached the psychological milestone of half a year in Ecuador. Only 21 months left in service, not that anyone is counting.

But honestly, I am loving life. Every day, although monotonous and languid at times, at some point reaches out and hits you in the face with an epiphany of new learning and utter wonderment. One of our trainers told us that it never hurts to try anything at least once

(given your Zen understanding of the virtues of enduring anguishing stomach pain, nausea, and vomiting resulting from the questionable food delicacy), and I have sought to incorporate that as much as possible into my cultural assimilation and appreciation.

Among the interesting experiences I have participated in so far, I have:

· Willfully sought out a quiet, lush agricultural village away from the dry, choking city I was originally assigned, arriving by open air bus with nothing more than the names of three people in my hand and have since come to be known by name by hundreds whom I don’t know;

· Picked coffee beans, then roasted them in a clay pot over an outdoor fire and drank the thick, black elixir only two hours after it parted from the branch. Talk about a fresh cup of coffee!;

· Lost myself in an undulating labyrinth harvesting corn with the village men, which then gave the pueblo something to talk about for weeks on end and single handedly scored me more acceptance points than anything else;

· Milked cows, improving my technique and speed each time;

· Butchered a chicken;

· Attended a cock-fight, which honestly is pretty damn entertaining no

matter how tragic and Cretan it may be;

· Uncomfortably been introduced more than once as some god-like North American who will save people’s livelihoods and deliver them to the promised land of prosperity and renewed agricultural bounty;

Performed guitar on stage in front of 200 village people singing in Spanish ‘Mi Quincieñera ‘, at the request of the family of the girl whose 15^th birthday party it was, followed by Bob Marley’s ‘Stir it Up (Little Darling)’;

Learned to do simple construction with bamboo, including making a greenhouse and an awesome outhouse with a view of the ocean;

Spotted a pod of 12 dolphins swimming majestically in the turquoise abyss that is the Pacific;

Been offered lunch and fed by complete strangers only minutes upon meeting them;

· Learned to eat rice as a part of breakfast, lunch, and dinner;

· Been surprised by the presence of someone’s pet capuchin monkey on their porch;

· Learned to eat and perhaps come to love platano (plantain, a more hearty and energy containing cousin of the banana) in its many forms;

· Drank glasses of juice from fruits I have either never seen nor heard of before like starfruit, badea, chonte;

· Drank unpasteurized, non-homogenized cow milk accustoming myself to the odd texture of the creamy fat that congeals on the surface;

· Stopped trying to identify the body parts of the animals which I find in my soups;

· Rode a horse into the far reaches of verdant, rolling hills to visit with farmers eager to show me their crops or to collect rich forest soils for use in seedbeds;

· Attended a series of mourning ceremonies for a deceased neighbor;

· Come to accept insect bites as a natural feature of the human skin (Dengue and malaria please stay away!)

What else? Perhaps you may wonder what saving-the-world work-related things I have been occupying myself with. Well, I have been working a fair bit too, but the Peace Corps actually emphasizes not trying to initiate many ‘projects’ the first three to four months of service, rather they encourage community assimilation and the performance of a community assessment study completed through family interviews. The study serves as the information base from which in the future the volunteer will promote the projects that reflect the community’s interests and needs. This approach, while slow, is quite effective as it avoids development work that is imposed from the outside by outsiders with little knowledge and connection to the people who will participate.

The Peace Corps methodology also emphasizes organization and empowerment of communities over the gifting of resources and equipment, something which does not look nearly as productive on annual reports in dollar-terms, but in the long-run proves for real development progress.

So yeah, what have I been doing?

Well, I am becoming a quasi-expert on composting as I have done four demonstrations in front of audiences ranging from a handful of family members and neighbors to a group of 50 high school students and teachers. For those out of the know, compost is the key source of soil improvement and nutrients for successful organic gardening and farming, and a great way to recycle organic wastes that are either being needlessly tossed to rot in plastic bags in landfills or tragically burned in the post-harvested fields. It also serves as an awesome science experiment for all ages as audience members witness over time the transformation of previously thought of wastes into sweet, fertile soil, or what I like to call black gold. The best part of the experiment happens just days after constructing the pile as people’s eyes light up in dazzling astonishment when they hastily withdraw their probing hand from inside of pile due to the intense heat of bacterial activity which can reach up to 80 C, or roughly 170 F.

I am also involved in a couple of community and school gardens that serve to promote food security, improved diets, community leadership, youth development, and to exemplify organic growing methods. In the Bellavista neighborhood of my original site location in Bahia de Caraquez we started with a composting project and have been slowly trying to improve the soils with manures and cover crops after having picked up a ton of rocks from the poor soil.

In San Miguel de Piquigua, my new primary site location in the countryside, we began preparing five long beds before realizing a weakness in the fencing which pigs have been exploiting and are now on hold until fixing it.

Going forward, I have been studying the chocolate tree, more commonly known as Cacao, and plan to conduct several workshops with local farmers to demonstrate how to do proper annual pruning which can significantly increase production of this abundant resource that is cropped all over the land, but due to mismanagement produces little income. I also plan to do demonstrations of making biol, a fantastic organic fertilizer made from manure (another abundant local resource) and leguminous leaves, for use on crops, trees, and pastures. I even foresee assisting in some small business ventures and teaching some environmental education in the local schools and community, especially regarding waste management and water source protection.

In my free time, I lose myself on a daily basis in a mental orgasm of melodic guitar playing; read a lot of books on plants, farming, and history; admire sunsets; listen to birds; fall asleep to the sound of insects vibrating in harmonious choruses; walk to where-ever I may be going; pay extremely little attention to what time of the day, or which day, it may be; watch a lot of soccer; and when the tranquil ocean decides to swell a bit, attempt my best at surfing, so far to little avail, but hey, I got two years! And starting next week, I will be able to participate in my life’s desire of building my own house as we begin cutting trees on the family farm where I live to construct my own casita hut!

Lastly, some people may wonder at this point what it is that I am missing terribly from the USA and what it is that I might love about Ecuadorian life. Well, clearly I miss my dear family and friends significantly, but I look forward to sharing my experience with them as they visit me. Otherwise, my most cherished longings are for disc golf, live music, frothy craft beers (oddly enough I am finding Budweiser to taste exceptionally good in relation to the scant choice of light Ecuadorian beers), and snowboarding. I also miss the changing of seasons, as due to the lack of them here on the equator (plus an extremely unstructured work environment)

I tend to feel as if I am living in some kind of time vacuum by which few indicators exist to measure the passing of time (one reason I believe there exists the mañana attitude in Latin America).

Of course, there are plenty of things I thrive on here in Ecuador that I do not miss at all about the USA. Primarily, I love the freedom of being a pedestrian again, exploring on my own two feet, noticing the small things in between my point of origin and destination, and feeling liberated from the confined prison of congested highways, vast parking lots, and addictive gasoline stations. I felt the same when I lived in Europe, and it was the single most difficult part of repatriating back to the USA the first time. I also do not miss the soulless corporate retail chains and box stores that white wash the entire US into one seemingly uniform strip mall, robbing states, cities, and towns of small businesses and the local character that grant people an identity and sense of pride. Here in Ecuador, I believe the independent shopkeeper is one of the most common forms of employment and ‘brand’ differentiation in retail typically comes down to which neighbor you like chatting with the most.

I also used to wonder what it would have felt like to live before the age of the automobile’s complete transport dominance, and at least here in the campo (countryside), while many people now do shuttle about on a motorcycle (sometimes up to four members of a family at a time) most are content predominantly to make their world the one in which they can reach on foot, donkey, horse, or when necessary to reach the next largest town, by the open-air chiva (basically a flat bed truck with a large carriage with bench seating and no doors)which comes along once every half hour to hour.

Lastly, and perhaps most refreshing is that while my understanding may still be superficial, people hear by and large do not seem obsessed with money nor material goods. One evening while sitting around a fire that I made with one campo women to boil water to disinfect our garden’s seedbed, I began to talk philosophically of the differences of cultures. Specifically, I mentioned how as a whole people here seem incredibly more happy than most people in the USA, even though annual incomes could be 20x greater in the latter. My reasoning being that here people are surrounded by the love and support of generations of family members, are not slaves to mortgages since they can construct their simple houses out of local materials with the help of neighbors, spend the large part of their days outside, and are able to grow a significant amount of their calorie intake off of their land. In response, the woman told me with a far-reaching smile that, “when there is money, life is good, when there is no money, life is still good”.

Funny how time slips away...

Well, its funny how time slips away…and no I am not just referring to a great Willie Nelson song. I have now been in Ecuador for two full months and just as I have become very comfortable with my life here in Tumbaco, I am only two and a half weeks away from moving to my future two year home in Bahia de Caraquez on the Pacific coast.

Yes, a lot has happened since my last blog post about a month ago, including an amazing technical trip to the Amazonian province of Morona Santiago in early March, a meeting with the US Ambassador to Ecuador, a week long trip to my assigned site of Bahia de Caraquez, and a quick weekend trip to visit the farm of my host mother’s parents in El Chaco in another Amazonian province called Napo.

In summary, my first agricultural tech trip took a group of ten of us to Morona Santiago to the towns of El Tesoro, Sucua, and Macas. We visited the site of one of our Peace Corps Volunteer Leaders and learned a wealth of knowledge about pruning cacao trees, producing liquid organic fertilizers, creating compost, farming tilapia, operating municipal vermiculture projects, making relations in county governments, giving lectures in high schools, building school gardens, managing cattle pastures, and raising pigs and guinea pigs. It was a ten hour bus trip from Tumbaco to Sucua, but I had the fantastic opportunity to view a good stretch of the central Sierra including impressive views of the volcanoes of Cotopaxi, Chimborazo, Tungarahua, and Illiniza. Entering into the lush jungle region of Ecuador made me realize how deforested and dry the Sierra appears in relation.

Shortly after returning from the tech trip we had the honor of receiving a visit from the US Ambassador to Ecuador to our Peace Corps training facility. I found myself playing the role of MC during an entertainment program that our group performed for the Ambassador, including a couple dances and songs. For one of the songs,’ Mi Lindo Ecuador’ I made my public guitar playing debut along with a few other players and a chorus of several volunteers. It was a slightly

rusty performance, but quite fun nonetheless.

A couple days later, in a frenzy of emotions and anxiety our omnibus of volunteers found out our site locations for the next two years.

As it turns out, I have been assigned to a city of about 20,000 people called Bahia de Caraquez, which rests on a peninsula jutting out into the Pacific Ocean on one side and the River Chone on the other. Along the coast, rolling hills and cliffs meet abruptly with stretches of sandy brown beaches. From Tumbaco, it took about 9.5 hours to arrive to Bahia by bus, descending down through breathtaking transition cloud forest and passing through undulating coastal countryside seeded with plantain farms and cattle ranches.

It is certainly a paradise in many respects, but it is still rusty around the edges as it bears the scars of poverty, economic busts, and environmental damages. Most challenging for the region though, is that it is extremely dry and receives rain only from January to April. While some parts of the county have irrigation from rivers, good sections of agricultural lands are entirely dependent on the ephemeral rainy season. Most farmers seem to concentrate on maize (corn), beans, plantain, and passion fruit.

My counterpart organization is the Agricultural Center of Sucre County, and I will spend the first several months in my site visiting with farmers around the county, working with and learning from them in their fields, and investigating what opportunities for projects might exist. At this point, I imagine I will be focusing on researching a variety of ways to improve the organization and increase the services provided by the Agricultural Center to the regions farmers. A couple examples might include trying to organize farmer-to-farmer best-practices sharing workshops or setting up a direct farmer-to-consumer market.

During my site visit to Bahia, I met my amazing host family, with whom I will live with for the first three months, and organized meetings with several members of the board of the Agricultural Center. I visited the farm of the president one day and learned how to milk a cow, teach a new-born male calf how to take milk from its mother, and make fresh cheese. I also visited the farm property of my host father which is nestled in a beautiful valley a few kilometers walk from their house in the town and was entertained at the site of him killing an Equis Cruzado, which is a small highly venomous snake. For this reason, I have taken note to always wear my knee high rubber boots in the campo. I also learned that my host father is extremely knowledgeable about agricultural, is highly connected in the town, and has a pet project of trying to introduce some Indian species of leguminous forage for cattle that grows well in dry regions.

I also participated in reforestation project another day which took place near a beach accessible only at low tide. There, I met an interesting farmer who invited me for lunch at his coastal hut as we watched the waves, discussed his farming operation and techniques, and I began to chuckle at the reality that this region would be my home for the coming two years. I spent that evening with the other gringos who participated in the project and played ultimate on the beach, picked the guitar, and admired the sunset while I waited for the low tide to return so I could get a ride back to town.

This most recent weekend I went with my host mother to visit her parents’ farm in the bucolic town of El Chaco located in a mountainous zone of the Amazon. At their farm I learned how to vaccinate cattle and had practice on about 60 bulls which were crammed in a line in a narrow wooden chute so as to prevent their movement. While as interesting as that was, I found more fascinating our visit to the bewildering San Rafael waterfall which I estimated to be about 600-800 feet tall.

The diversity and mind-blowing beauty of this country has not yet ceased to amaze me…and tomorrow I leave on my second technical trip to the coastal provinces of Guayas and Santo Domingo.

Café con toronja! Coffee with Grapefruit!

Busy. Think of a cup of instant coffee blended with some grapefruit or the tantalizing tree tomato. That is how I would summarize my time so far here in Ecuador: buzzing by at a frenetic pace while simultaneously being amazed at the juicy elements of learning the fascinations of life in a new country, a tropical one at that. I figure that to be a sound way to begin this first post in nearly three weeks, but perhaps it will become only too often going forward as the reality of life here in Ecuador begins to set in.

I am living in Tumbaco, a middle class town literally a valley down from Quito, whose skyscrapers lay nestled into a mountainous wrinkle to the east of my window. I am definitely not roughing it yet, as I am staying with a wonderful host family in a comfortable house that features a few acres of beans and avocados growing out back. My host family includes 38 year old mother who runs a knitting business in town and her seven year old son who has reminded me of the joy of playing Super Mario on Super Nintendo. They have been extremely gracious in welcoming me to Ecuador and showing me around. I have already done a couple trips with my host mother to Quito exploring its impressive historic center, enjoying indigenous street dances, and strolling through packed parks and gorgeous botanical gardens. I even took my host mother on a five hour hike over Cerro Ilalo, a spectacular mountain on the edge of town that tops out at a little over 3100 meters.

Peace Corps Training has also done a fantastic job of keeping me well occupied and has ensured the frustration of anyone looking forward to a blog entry on a weekly basis. I spend Monday through Friday from 8am to 5pm and Saturdays from 8am to noon at the training center. I often take the 15 minute sardine can of a bus ride in the mornings but tend to opt for the bucolic 45 minute walk back home in the evening. I can say, however, that so far I have found it to be a very pleasant experience as the program is well varied among topics that aim to prepare us for service. My training classes have been roughly divided between technical agriculture themes, safety and security, health, community development, and language and culture.

The agriculture trainings have been the most enjoyable as we have been involved in several hands-on activities. The most amazing day so far took us to visit a nearby master organic farmer in the nearby town of Puembo. There, we learned many of the principles of integrated farm management including effective methods of composting, the role of small animals and the gold that is their manure, harvesting algae as a nitrogen source from irrigation ponds, intercropping, cover crops, enhancing farm biodiversity, fomenting microorganism growth as the farm’s productivity engine, and weed control management. This farmer exhibited to us his knowledge of 28 years of excellent vegetable production without pesticide or herbicide use.

Our agriculture group has also begun cultivating our own small vegetable plots at the training center and begun raising chickens (which we will harvest, ie kill, at the end of training). We have also had small workshops on vermi-culture (worm composting), biol (an organic fertilizer brewed from a tasty mixture of animal manure and other inputs like ash, hay, etc.), raising guinea pigs (a traditional meat in the Andes), starting seedbeds, creating community banks, and doing community needs assessments.

The safety and security training has centered largely on common sense tactics to avoid being a victim of theft, robberies, and taxi kidnappings. The health training has taught us the variety of intestinal worms and skin diseases we are likely to contract at some point during our service, how to recognize and deal with a bout of dengue fever, and strategies to avoid getting malaria. Lastly, my language training has been fairly enjoyable as I have swung back into the rhythm of speaking Spanish on a daily basis. After three weeks, I am pretty comfortable expressing myself on nearly any topic, however, there are always those days or hours of the day in which my mind becomes lazy and I begin to feel a bit burnt out.

Going forward, things are going to grow in intensity as next week our agricultural group leaves on a five day technical training trip to the Amazonian town of El Tesoro in the southern part of the region known as El Oriente. The weekend we return will be the Carnaval, a large street festival lasting four days in early March. Shortly after, we will learn of our assigned site locations and leave on a week-long visit to these communities on our own. This trip will prove to be perhaps the greatest climax of all as we will discover firsthand what will be the basis for our Peace Corps experience; the one that we have all imagined about for possibly years or more.

At this point, based on a very rough deduction, I figure I have a 40% chance of ending up in the Amazon, 20% in the Andean highlands, and possibly 40% in the Pacific coastal region. I would lie if I didn’t say that I think have a preference for the Andean highlands given my spiritual obsession with majestic mountain ranges, but I am otherwise very open to whatever destiny is meant to be. I think there will be great joys, challenges, and elements of beauty in every region of this fascinating country….

Por fin he llegado a Ecuador! Empieza la aventura!

Hola! Bienvenido al blog de mi aventura ecuatoriano en los Peace Corps!

Hi there friends! Welcome to my blog about my Ecuadorean adventure in the Peace Corps! This is my first entry as a Peace Corps trainee, and the aim of my posts going forth will be to inform those of you interested about my experiences, adventures, and other random thoughts during what will be a two year chapter of my life.

For those of you unaware, I decided to apply to the Peace Corps last March and in mid-December, after a daunting list of medical examinations, interviews, legal clearances, and essays, I received an invitation to serve in Ecuador as a Sustainable Agriculture volunteer with a specialization in Agri-business.


The application process was a long one filled with uncertainty and endurance, but after less than 48 hours in country, I am filled with a great sense of knowing that I am in the right place. As I have actually considered joining the Peace Corps ever since I was in high school, today during an introductory lecture from the Ag specialists, I felt at home breathing the reality of a long dreamed about destiny.

I departed my mother's home on February 2nd early in the morning on a perilous journey creeping across highways coated in ice on the way to the airport. After a safe arrival to DFW and a non-eventful flight, I found myself in Washington DC facing the first realities that indeed I have decided to become a Peace Corps volunteer. I began to meet the 40 other volunteers departing as apart of our agriculture and natural resources group to Ecuador during the orientation and paperwork marathon at the hotel.

I immediately became bolstered by the idealist and adventurous spirits shared by many of the other volunteers. Orientation as a whole was a straightforward introduction into the Peace Corps and simply a formal meet and greet among strangers steeling themselves for one of the biggest adrenaline rushed of their lives.

That day, I must admit though, I found myself nearly more eager to reunite with one of my best friends from my college days in Finland, whom I hadn't seen in a year and a half. In many ways it was a perfect way to begin this adventure; consulting, sharing, and enjoying the presence of a dear friend whom I had only made because of a prior ambitious decision to leave the US before and embark on a unknown journey into a foreign land. Now it appears I have an addiction. Should I fulfill my full Peace Corps service, I will have spent six of nine years since turning 18 abroad.

Anyways, my friend and I had an amazing night exploring DC. In fact, I was extremely delighted that we stumbled upon a bar with a live bluegrass band. I got to introduce him to a great American music genre and witness one of the things I love most about the States before leaving it for two years.

Anyways, this first post is running longer than I intended, and I haven't even begun telling about Ecuador yet. Perhaps, I have already lost some of you readers for good. Alas, I promise the adventure will come, but for now I should say things have been straightforward and the landing has been soft. After the late night out without sleep was followed by a day long journey on planes and in airports, our Omnibus 105 arrived in Ecuador on February 3rd. As our plane sank casually from the limitless blue skies shared by the whole world through the dispersed whipped cloud cover, Ecuador began to reveal itself...a glaciated peak piercing the clouds was the first to be seen. Then, lush green valleys with dramatic folds and cultivated fields rolled themselves out below. We landed amidst the illuminated valley that Quito is cradled by and were welcomed immediately by Peace Corps staff. They courted us to a delightful little retreat center in an area near a Quito suburb called Tumbaco.

Today was our first day at the training center and we found ourselves filling out more paperwork, receiving vaccines, opening bank accounts, learning about safety (which had many of the volunteers scared stiff), meeting the wonderful staff, and being introduced into our program areas.

Tomorrow, we finish our in-country orientation and will meet our host families for lunch before leaving with them to their homes. These strangers will be our hosts for the next 11 weeks while we train in Tumbaco. The homestay will serve as a cultural and language immersion which has me less worried than the swath of volunteers whose Spanish is more rusty and limited than mine. Tomorrow will be the first day we begin interacting with non-Americans outside the Peace Corps and begin to understand what we have gotten ourselves into....