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”.