Ciao 79

home again

2009-05-13T08:41:00.003-05:00

Well, I'm home. I've been home for a little while now. I have avoided blogging about it...for complicated reasons. On one hand, I have just avoided being on the computer. I am enjoying being outside, digging in the dirt and planting a huge-onic garden at my parents' farm. On the other hand, it is hard to describe all the weird emotions whirled into one ...happiness (seeing family and friends!!!), overwhelmedness (SOOO many choices of everything. Supermarkets are just sensory overload), joy (hot showers and clean drinking water), revulsion (how morbidly obese Americans are. I had forgotten.), sticker shock (seriously, you want $4.50 for a latte? That's, like, half a day's pay... That's 3 Ecua almuerzos!...that is just wrong!...) embarrassment (I need "potty trained" again. I keep throwing toilet paper in wastebasket. Sorry mom!), relief (not having to deal with Ecua meetings that start an hour or more late), blownaway (I forgot how much wind there is in Northwest Ohio!), sadness (I am already missing some of my Ecua friends, PC buddies and fresh avocados and chocobananas), unstressed (man, everyone in the U.S. seems to be competing for who can be most stressed out), annoyed (with the political psychobabble on both sides. Stop blabbing and actually DO something) and proud (despite all the b.s., I still feel kinda proud to be from this crazy country). So, in reviewing my list, it might appear that I am not happy to be back, but that is not really true. We were ready to come back. We are happy to be back (but please don't ask us if we are happy to be back "in civilization." Argh! Is that really the only question you can think to ask me?). We are having fun being back. We are spending the summer gardening, traveling, hanging out with family and friends and figuring out what we want to do next. Unemployment and homelessness is working out well for us so far. Who knew it could be so fun.

Introducing: Amazon Partnerships Foundation

2009-02-12T15:10:00.008-05:00

No, I am not suffering from a contaminated Clifbar-induced coma. Just writers block. Actually, that is a lie, I don’t have writers block: I just haven’t had much motivation to blog lately. I admit I have a lot on my mind as I try to wind up my Peace Corps service and transition back to life stateside.

So, one thing that has kept me busier of late (and a topic that I have been meaning to blog about is) Amazon Partnerships Foundation. I am proud and honored to be part of the Board of Directors for this incredible new organization.

A really amazing woman that Jer and I have had the opportunity to work with, Mary Fifield, founded the organization and has asked me to serve in an advisory capacity. Amazon Partnerships Foundation provides small grants and project management support for initiatives designed and implemented by local communities here in Ecuador´s Amazon region. Some of the projects include the construction of rainwater catchment systems and dry composting toilets. Some of my faithful readers will remember that Jer, Mary and I have worked together to install the tanks and toilets in Kichwa and Waorani communities. These are low-cost, environmentally friendly initiatives that provide basic drinking water and sanitation—things that you and I take for granted, and are a basic human need—to remote indigenous communities.
Be sure to check out the website (look for the cameo of yours truly on the dramatic and inspiring flash intro) and please consider making a contribution to this critical cause via the website. I am trying to help raise $5,000 to support the first year’s operations and am hoping my faithful and generous blogstalkers will help me out. Click here to donate (POR FAVOR!!!!).
Keep reading for more about APF:
Amazon Partnerships Foundation is based in the Ecuadorian Amazon province of Napo. The Napo River, one of the largest in the country and a major tributary of the Amazon River, traverses this rainforest region. Widely recognized for its biological diversity and importance to the global climate, the Upper Napo basin is also a popular destination for year-round kayaking and whitewater rafting.
Over the years this area has suffered from two simultaneous crises: severe environmental damage and disempowerment of the indigenous Kichwa people, whose traditional practices for maintaining a balance between human activity and nature played a critical role for generations in conserving the watershed and rainforest. Through global economic pressure and the influence of Western culture, large areas of Napo province have been overhunted, much of the primary rainforest has been cut down, river levels are dropping, and the watershed is threatened with run-off pollution from mining and oil operations. At the same time, the Kichwa people, who make up nearly half of the population, have been systematically discriminated against, marginalized, and impoverished.

Executive Director Mary Fifield and others (like me) saw an opportunity to reverse this trend and founded Amazon Partnerships Foundation in 2008. Our mission is to empower indigenous Kichwa communities that value environmental stewardship through expression of their nature-based culture. We provide small grants and project management support for projects designed and implemented by communities. Through the exchange of ideas between Kichwa and Western traditions, we envision a new awareness for sustainable living based on equality among people in harmony with the natural world.
Inspired? Please support Amazon Partnerships with a gift today!

Peanut Pact

2009-01-26T09:56:00.003-05:00

If you are ever around more than, say, three volunteers at any one time the conversation will inevitably revolve around food we miss from home. Sour cream, good cheese, Guiness, Chipotle burritos and bratwurst were just a few of the foods that were making us salivate this weekend. PCVs can literally go on for HOURS talking about food. So, when parents of Peace Corps Volunteers come to visit, they come bearing gifts of joy. Because they have to. Months before coming down, we send them long lists of things to bring with them. More often not, they are food related...because, well, hot showers just really are not that portable. When my parents came down in December, they brought me a case of Take 5 candy bars among many other delectible delights. Parents also take us to dinner at fancy places that are normally out of the budget of stingy volunteers. So, when my friend Casey's dad came down to visit recently, he took us out to eat at the all-you-can eat tapas restaurant which (wait for this) also features all-you-can wine for a set price (which is roughly the equivalent of 4 days of our salary.) Let's just say it was a glorious time. He is my new BFF. Casey's dad also brought down two suitcases brimming with other goodies, including no less than 100 Clif bars. Dozens and dozens of delicious mounds of healthy soy energy to power us through our jungle adventures. Let the good times roll! Lucky for me, Casey is a very generous person and usually shares the wealth. Clif bars for her, meant Clif bars for me. So imagine our conundrum when we learned that Clif bars were being recalled---something about a peanut poisoning that is plaguing the U.S. of A. Huh? Her dad, being a doctor, texted her and recommended she throw them away. So, what is a poor, hungry Peace Corps Volunteer to do? Do you just throw out 100 Clif bars?...which, is almost one month's salary here and just goes against every grain in your body to waste food? Or do you eat them anyway and risk certain death by Salmonella?

Five PCVs assembled to contemplate this very question. We had just stocked up on boxed wine because the Ecuadorian government just enacted some really rediculous new limitation and taxes on the importation of certain products including shoes and booze. So, instead of guarding our stockpile, we started to deplete it as we debated death and disease and salmonella. We all concluded the following: if we were in the U.S., we would definitely dump the Clif bars. But we are not in the U.S. We are in Ecuador. Where we are surrounded by super germs and giardia every day. Matt reasoned that he lived in China for 4 months, and he was much more likely to get food poisoning or die from salmonella there, than from a silly Clif bar here. He said he would eat it. Her MPH backround kicking in, Case was more cautious. She texted her family to find out just how many people had died from the peanut contamination. 7. Maybe even 8. Humm.... Quite a dilemma. Matt said he was definitely going to eat it. The rest of us decided we couldn't eat the Clif bar alone. So we made a solumn Peanut Pact: We would each eat one of the peanutty Clif bars and risk salmonella together. So as part of our Peanut Pact we slowly and cermoniously ate our Clif bars together.

During our conversation, Jer had been reminscing about Barnyard Busters at TeeJays. He just loves those things. So the next morning he decided to make homemade buscuits and gravy to celebrate being alive. He also made bacon. As Casey would say, it was a "sheer delight." Good ole greasy diner food! Deelish.

Later, Casey took off for Quito. Her parting words, "be sure to text me every 5 minutes to let me know you are still alive."

So far, so good. So, if anyone wants to send some more Clif bars down south, we will happily accept them, fresh or recalled, we don't care. Just don't send more than 2 kg at a time, as we don't want to have to pay taxes on the package. Yes, we're hungry...but we are also cheap.

Fine dining adentro

2009-01-21T15:48:00.005-05:00

I recently got back from a trip to the Waorani community of Tepapare (my favorite of the dozen or so I have visited). The purpose of the trip was to work on a the chambira palm nursery. We had planted seeds months ago and it was time to replant them. This last trip adentro was a gastronomically unique experience. There seems to be a lot of fruit...and other products...to gather in the rainforest at this time of year.

Below is the truck we loaded up with 7 passengers, 20 sheets of sheet metal, a half dozen gas cans and 100 pounds of food and other supplies.

This is a morete. The outer covering is sort of like scales. It first has to be boiled, then peeled, then you kind of gnaw at the fruit inside. Pretty tasty, actually.

Chontacuros. Yes, these are worms. And yes, I even ate one!!! (and no, I didn't even get any dare money for it.). Thankfully it was cooked (they are commonly eaten raw...LIVE!). The flavor was unmemorable...the texture was too much for me to take. Too chewy on outside. Locals say that eating them is good for fighting colds.

Here is Manuela eating guaba. We ate LOTS of guaba over the course of the week. They are long green pods that contain large black seeds covered with sweet, white stuff that you suck on and then spit out the seed. Pretty good, actually.

Here is a guy climbing a tree to harvest more tasty treats.

A very Ecua Christmas

2008-12-29T11:07:00.006-05:00

On Christmas Eve I went with my scholarship girl, Janeth, to her school's Christmas program. It was dominated by elementary school kids lip synching to poppy Christmas songs, but also featured some lively renditions of Silent Night played on their recorders.

The costumes were fantastic. There lots of pretty little angels, and cutie kids dressed as sheep and cows and chickens in the stable. The shepherds even had goatees.... although this poor kid below is going to have his on for at least a week, as it appears he applied it himself... with a sharpee marker. My favorite part, hands down, was the LIVE baby Jesus. (see here in lower right hand corner). No baby dolls for this crowd! Nothing but a real screaming pooping hungry live baby for this show! I had my hands full with my own baby (okay, not really, it is my friend Silvia's daughter). I somehow successfully held the baby while eating a plate of bbq chicken, rice and yuca with a flimsy plastic spoon. Quite a feat, I must say.

Here I am with my crew.

By the time I got back to the apartment after all the festivities, Jer got home and our friends Casey and Roger had come over for a little Nochebuena Christmas Eve dinner. I was pysyched to be able to hang out with two of my bestest Peace Corps pals for the holiday.

The next morning we had a Christmas Day breakfast extravaganza which featured bacon, a rare and expensive commodity here in Ecuador (which is weird, considering how much they love other pork products). After gorging on good food, we headed out to take a hike on a trail about a 10 minute busride from our house. It was a nice day and we encountered exactly 0 people on the trail. As we hiked along, we stumbled across the perfect little place to take a dip.

So we did.

It was our very own beautiful little swimming hole in a bend of an emerald green river...surrounded by steep hillsides swathed in in ferns. It was awesome.

So, all the sadness about being away from family for Christmas was washed away by the refreshingly cold current of the river. So as past Christmases seemed to blend and blur one into another in our memories, we all agreed that we would always remember Christmas 2008 where we played in the river in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Joy to the world!

Merry Christmas

2008-12-24T10:26:00.002-05:00

Merry Christmas blogstalkers!

So, what am I doing this Christmas Eve? Actually, Jer and I have competing activities. He has a dinner with his co-workers and I have accepted an invitation to attend a high school Christmas program with my scholarship girl, Janeth. When I say scholarship girl, I am referring to the Peace Corps Ecuador Gender and Development (GAD) scholarship program that I was raising money for earlier this year.

A little about Janeth: Janeth is an orphan whose father, Amo, was an important Waorani leader who died under mysterious circumstances when Janeth was just an infant. (Amo was featured prominently--and photographed--- in the book Savages by Joe Kane). Janeth lives here in Puyo with her aunt. Her family is from Tepapare, my favorite Waorani community. Janeth is the first Waorani girl to receive one of the GAD scholarships. The funds cover her school matriculation, supplies, transportation costs, uniforms and misc. other school fees (there seem to be quite a few).

Here is me helping Janeth with her English homework.

I have really enjoyed mentoring Janeth and helping her with her English homework (and wow, is their curriculum horrible here!). A great ripple effect from this is that now that because Janeth has a GAD scholarship, her aunt is now able to able to sponsor another student (Janeth's cousin) in order to finish high school---whereas before she couldn't afford to pay for both.

My work with GAD has definitely been one of the most rewarding parts of my service. So, on this Christmas Eve I give thanks to all my friends and family who have supported me and Jer in our decision to serve in Peace Corps and thanks especially to those who so generously donated to the GAD scholarship program. Thanks!

I was recently working on a fact sheet on the scholarship program, so I will recycle some of it for additional blog content:

Peace Corps Ecuador’s Gender & Development (GAD) Committee aims to enhance gender equity in all sectors of Ecuadorian society. In collaboration with host-country counterparts, we promote the advancement of women in their homes, places of work, and communities. We assist our fellow Peace Corps Volunteers in their efforts to implement sustainable, gender-inclusive development projects.

In 2008, GAD provided more than 60 scholarships to financially underprivileged, yet highly motivated Ecuadorian women so that they can finish their high school education. Working in partnership with Club Kiwanis Chuquiragua in Quito, GAD Ecuador's scholarship program is one of only a handful worldwide. Scholarships are awarded to girls entering their last three years of high school based on good grades, economic need, and leadership potential. The financial assistance that GAD provides for these young women is vitally needed, as high school is not free and a mere 56% of Ecuadorian women receive their high school degree. Poor Ecuadorian families sometimes choose to send their boy children to school before their girls, thus the scholarship program is an important tool in combating this inequality.

The Peace Corps Ecuador Gender and Development Committee also organizes an annual three-day Leadership Conference for all the girls currently receiving scholarships. The conference brings girls from all corners of Ecuador together for leadership training as well as sessions on small business development, self esteem, and sex-education among other important topics.

Camp ALMA (Spanish acronym for Activism and Leadership for Ambitious Girls) is organized bi-annually for non-scholarship girls nominated by the GAD committee as well. It consists of three-day retreats that enhance leadership skills and raise self-esteem through outdoor adventures and group activities.

I had the opportunity to help out at the last two camps and it was a really rewarding experience--as much for me as for the girls. Whereas summer camps are part of every American girl's childhood, they are not common here in Ecuador. The girls absolutely loved it.

So, that's my blogpost for the day. I didn't want anyone to think that after my last few posts that I traveled more than I worked. Not true. It is just the travel tends to be more fun to blog about... Anywho, if anyone is interested in making a donation to the GAD scholarship fund and camp, please let me know. Happy holidays!

I give up

2008-12-23T08:47:00.004-05:00

So I have decided to just give up trying to blog about my Inca Trail trip. As much as I loved, loved, loved it, I just don’t have time to blog about it. I think I would need a solid week of doing nothing but writing to capture it all and do it any justice. I do not have said week, so I just give up. Plus I figure that the few people that read my blog (Mom, CTgoBucks) also read my hubby’s and mi sis-in-law’s blogs and they and are thus likely not interested in reading the third iteration of the same story (then again, who doesn’t want to hear the story about the iguana who power pooped on my brother’s head). But, really, read their blogs. And check out the full photo documentation of the travel extravaganza which includes Guayaquil, Salinas, Puyo, the Banos-Puyo Bikeride and Otavalo in addition to our Peru trip. The photos are awesome. An employee of the month prize plaque awaits anyone who looks at all 900+ photos.

Expectations

2008-12-22T09:11:00.002-05:00

I will admit that I was very anxious about hiking the Inca Trail. As we loaded up into the minivan that would take us to the trailhead, my stomach churned and my palms started to sweat. I had flashbacks of my failed attempt at climbing Mount Quandry, one of Colorado’s famed 14’ers where I was sucking wind so hard I had to turn around. Plus, I was moderately intimidated by my super-sporty sis-in-law who regularly engages in adventure sports including a 24 hour bike race, a 12 hour desert hike and various other hard core outdoor activities. I was just worried I wouldn’t be able to keep up. I didn’t want to be “that” girl who was holding everyone up. Also rattling around in my head was the voice of someone who described the Inca Trail as “a death march.” So, as you can imagine, I was nervous. I love hiking…but I don’t do death marches. So, in preparation for what I thought would be a most unpleasant four-day debacle, I decided that I was going to shift into the auto drive mental mode that I have found that keeps me alive (and mostly sane) on my many marathon fustercluck trips to the jungle. I would push through it. It may not be fun, but I would get through it.

Then, as were queuing up in the intense Andean sun to go through the first checkpoint, something changed. I got this burst of adrenaline. The first few hours of hiking were cake. Then I cruised up the first big hill on pace with the rest of our group (Jer, my bro, sis-in-law and guide). At the top, I recovered quickly while hikers from other groups were gasping for air. We kept moving on and cruised right past them. We didn’t bother to take a break, because we honestly didn’t need one. The pace was great and we kept cruising. We were hiking so fast, in fact, that we were the first group to arrive at the designated lunch spot where the porters put up mess tents and cooked up a steamy hot meal. We actually had to wait quite a while because we got there so fast. On the following days our guide later had to amend the meal plans in order to accommodate our fast pace. It turned out we were one of the fastest and fittest groups he had hiked with (or so we say in the retelling of this story).
So, as per usual, I totally overfretted the hike. What I thought was going to be a death march ended up being one of the coolest experiences of my life. It may have been helped by the fact that I thought I would be miserable and instead was euphoric. The psychology of expectations.

So, we later decided to apply this lowered expectations theory to our bus ride from the Ecuadorian coast (over the Andes) and down to the jungle. I told Tom & Hannah that they were going to HATE the night bus…that it was going to be really hot, then really cold, really loud, uncomfortable, scary, incredibly long and overall miserable. I tried to make them have such dismally low expectations that they would think that the bus ride was actually good because it wasn’t actually that bad. (How’s that for some psychology?). Well, this little mind trick almost worked….were it not for the fact that Hannah had stomach issues, we had to get off the bus twice for security checks—including an intimidating full body pat down, and the bus route was not direct (we thought it was…and instead stopped in Guayaquil and Ambato) so instead of taking approximately 9.5 hours, the total trip took 12 and included all of the other qualities I previously described. So…the bus ride was pretty miserable, as expected. Which, I argue, is better than expecting a luxury ride and instead get a typical Ecua bus experience. Right? Cuz THAT would have been even MORE miserable. Like I said, it is all about expectations.

2008-12-19T10:39:00.001-05:00

Am stuck in an office now. Wish I was back on the Inca Trail...

vacation from vacation

2008-12-18T11:15:00.003-05:00

O-H-I-O representing!

I need a vacation from my vacation. I know, rough life. Two once-in-a-lifetime trips done back-to-back. Machu Picchu and the Galápagos. (Thus the gap in blog entries.) Until I get caught up on my blog writing, I will punt you over to La Chaser's blog for her take on the first part of the Machu Picchu trip.

The Inca Trail to Machu Picchu

2008-11-30T07:54:00.003-05:00

One word: absolutely freaking amazing. Okay, that is three words, but whatever. 4 days, 45 km, 13,000+ foot mountains. Incredible. One of the coolest things I have ever done in my life. No time to write now, just wanted to let my blog stalkers know that we all made it. Many stories to tell some day. Gotta run. Ciao for now.

2008-11-21T17:37:00.002-05:00

So...I had planned to enchant you all with stories of my recent adventures....my stellar halloween costume, our not-so-stellar performance in the white-water rafting competition, the gathering with hundreds of other gringos in Quito to watch the election results (and my solo OH-IO cheering when the buckeye state went blue), my traveles to Cofán territory with my women's group to learn more about the impacts of the oil industry, helping out with camp ALMA---a leadership camp for Ecuadorian teen girls, my latest adventures on a bus... and much more....but somehow there just are not enough hours in the day. And now I am headed to Peru with my little bro and sis-in-law....wooohoooo!!! To top it all off, we think we will be able to catch THE game tomorrow....and no, NOT via Skype webcam pointed at someones bigscreen t.v.... It COULD be the first game we see in two seasons...this could be the best vacation yet. Go Buckeyes!!!!

beauty school

2008-11-19T13:48:00.009-05:00

Yesterday my friend Noemi and I decided to stop by the local beauty school that advertised free manicures, pedicures, haircuts, etc. I like free. On a a Peace Corps budget, free is very good. The students can practice on me for free, no problem.

So, as the young lady is painting my nails a perky pink, we strike up a conversation. Unlike the typical topics you might hear in a salon (about ---fill in the blank---movie star's sex lives, drug problems, etc) we had quite an interesting little chat about politics and global warming. Yes, these are topics that obviously interest me. But I did not bring them up. She did. But besides her interesting insights on our new president-elect, the most interesting part of the conversation was about our common link to Ohio:

SHE: "So what part of the U.S. are you from?"
ME: "The state of Ohio"
SHE: "Oh, that's where my brother lives."
ME: "No way! Do you know where?"
SHE: "UM, I can't remember the name of the town. something -ville"
ME: "That is really interesting. Most Ecuadorians I have met who have family in the states mainly live in New Jersey or New York. What does your brother do in Ohio?"
SHE: "He works construction. He is also a poet. He is very well educated. He just wrote a book of poetry that he is trying to get published."
ME: "That is really neat. Does he like it there?"
SHE: "No, he says that because he is undocumented, his bosses will often not pay him for work that he has done."
ME: "May I ask how he arrived into the States?"
SHE: "He paid a coyote $15,000"
ME: "Wow. That is a lot of money. How long has he been there?"
SHE: "Since 2005. He wants to come back home to Puyo. He is saving up money to buy a house here. He is ready to come home. He also says that the people there are very racist and they discriminate against Latinos."
ME: "Oh..... Yeah, unfortunately, that is a problem in my state...and other areas too."
SHE: "I don't understand. We Ecuadorians treat foreigners very well. We are welcoming. Yet, when we go to other countries we are treated bad."
ME: "That is very true. It pains me to hear that. It isn't fair, is it?"
SHE: "No."

After that, I didn't know quite what to say. Do I offer some sort of apology for my racist Buckeye brethren? I couldn't quite find the words in English, much less Spanish. So I didn't say anything. She continued painting my nails in silence.

jugo con Hugo

2008-11-13T10:06:00.006-05:00

Okay, so continuing on with the theme of random stories from the last few weeks…a big news story was that Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa was hosting a regional development summit with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez…in Puyo of all places!!! The day before they were to arrive, Puyo was hopping with Venezuelans, press, and paparazzi. The day of the summit, it felt like the town was under siege, as there were helicopters buzzing the city all day. The two leaders spent the morning sequestered in El Pigual, the high-end finca resort owned by our friend Doña Maura (who I shared a tent with on one of my trips adentro). They were supposedly signing agreements for some sort of education initiative to support a network of agricultural high schools among other things. In the afternoon, there was to be a public rally so to speak. The Waorani were invited to dance for the distinguished guests. Given that my entire workplace was going, I was not about to be left behind solita. Plus I admit I was moderately intrigued in getting a chance to sneak a peek at Correa and Chavez…I mean it’s not every day that they come to town…and I doubt either will be making appearances in Ohio anytime soon. The program was supposed to start at 1:00. At 1:05 I was still waiting for my compañeras to get their poop in a group so we could walk to the Pavelón de deportes, the new multi-sports complex. I was worried we wouldn’t get a place to sit, as people had been lining up since 7 a.m….or so the rumor mill went. Well, it was one of those great hurry-up-and-wait moments. We get to the Pavelón and enter with a large throng of other Puyenses. I was expected there to be some security…bag checks, metal detectors, dogs…but there was nothing…not even or at mean looks from the automatic rifle-sporting military police. I figured that being from the same country as “the devil” himself would subject me to additional security checks. But no. We just sashayed right on in and grabbed a pretty good seat. Maybe that should have been my clue. It was just too easy to get a seat. Half the crowd was wearing t-shirts that had photos of Chavez, Correa and the mayor of Puyo Oscar Ledesma. They were pretty funny, actually. Was hoping to get my hot little hands on them just for the novelty of it all…but no dice. I also saw some people wearing bright red shirts with Chavez’s face with beret…a la Che Guevara…but mucho más feo. Well after waiting for over 3 ½ hours in a hot, stuffy, airless complex with thousands of my newest best friends who were invading my increasingly smaller personal space …I was ready to leave. The “magic” was gone. But, just as I was about to call it quits, the music is cranked up and in walks Correa and Chavez in the flesh. The crowd went wild. I can’t really tell you much about what either of them said, because I admit by that point I didn’t care, was starving (skipped lunch because I thought we were running late) plus their accents garbled by the microphone and bad speakers made their Spanish virtually impossible to understand. Something about viva Simón Bolivar y la revolución ciudadana, down with capitalism, blah, blah, blah. It was hard top ay attention. Also distracting me was a group of protesters who were sitting uncomfortably close to us. They were environmentalists protesting additional oil drilling on indigenous lands. Interestingly, they were not indigenous. Quiteños probably. European possibly. Anyway, they were blocking my view half the time…and then I got really paranoid that one of the many t.v. crews would capture my face, I’d be on the evening news, my Peace Corps bosses would see me, assume I was protesting, then kick me out of Peace Corps and out of Ecuador. Yes, I have an overactive imagination sometimes… So, after the short speeches, the Waorani did their dance, then the Kichwa came to do a cultural presentation, then President Correa interrupted and said something about having to leave to go to Quito because they had to take off in the plane before it got dark. Umm…ok. So they left. And then we all filed out. And that was that. End of story.

In random other news.
Am getting ready for our big trip to Lima...as in Peru, not Ohio. Actually, Lima is just a stop over on our way to Machu Picchu with Jer, my bro and sis-in-law. Am soooooo excited. Just joined the the South American Explorers Club, which seems to be a pretty cool organization that provides travel advice, discounts on trips and hotels, and a bunch of other cool services. 9 days and counting till the fam starts to arrive. Look out Lima, here we come!

2008-11-09T12:32:00.000-05:00

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On a 3-day Ecuadorian holiday weekend in October, the Puyo crew went to check out the Oriente town of Macas, the home of two of our compañeros, about 3 hours south of us. The town was not unlike Puyo, just smaller, cleaner, more tranquilo and a lot hotter. It is also more scenic, as it had beautiful vistas of the Pastaza River and mountains. Okay, now that I write that, maybe it isn’t THAT like Puyo. Our friends had a “frat” party complete with drinking games and a dance-off. Was having serious flashbacks to college. In the middle of the party, the Macas duo strolled out sporting shirts that they had specially made that had a thumbs up for Macas on the front and on the back they had a thumbs down for Puyo. Okay, fine, your town is cooler than ours. But we got …we got… okay, we got nothing on you.

The next day we took a pretty cool hike up to one of the scenic overlooks of the city. It was a fairly steep incline uphill in the blazing sun. At the top, we climbed up on top of a partially built base for a religious statue that would eventually overlook the city. The spiral concrete stairs led to a platform with a nice view of the river valley. As we were there, a lone worker methodically chipped away at a concrete footer with a sledge hammer. Our friend struck up a conversation with the guy and it turns out that they had to tear the whole thing down, because it wasn’t built right. At the current rate of deconstruction using one handheld sledgehammer, the tower just might be torn down and rebuilt by 2136. I have often wondered just how bad something has to be built here before some inspector of some kind says “nope, sorry dude, this won’t work. Do it over.” Cuz we have seen some seriously screwed up construction sites in our adopted country. I know next to nothing about construction, but you don’t have to be an engineer to see some of the buildings that are not structurally sound. I’m talking construction (or lack thereof) sites that would be a multi-million dollar lawsuit waiting to happen in the U.S., but generally seem par for the course here. On one hand, it is refreshing to live in a society not obsessed with litigious inclinations …on the other hand it can be a little disconcerting to see such disregard for public safety. I’m sure there is a happy medium somewhere…not sure where, but somewhere. We bade farewell to our construction worker friend, wishing him luck, and then made our way back down the hill, hugging the shady side of the dirt road as much as possible.

After a traditional Ecuadorian almuerzo, Jer and I took off in the late afternoon back to Puyo. Our bus trip was one of the less pleasant ones we’ve had. The bus left 20 minutes late and we were forced to sit in the hot sweaty steamy bus sitting idly in the hot equatorial sun next to another bus that belched black diesel smoke directly into our windows…so our feeble attempts at getting fresh air were negated by the plume of pollution. When we finally pulled out of the station, the bus crept through the streets of Macas at a snails pace. I could have very easily walked faster than the bus. Sometimes buses do this in hopes of picking up other passengers before leaving town, but we had never seen one this extreme. It took another 20 minutes just to leave town. Then when we finally were going at normal speed, the bus stopped mysteriously at the bridge crossing the Pastaza River. Instead of having the ayudante helper guy collect the tickets and busfare en route, the driver stopped the bus to do it. We had never seen this before. And of course he didn’t have change. It was a painful process to watch. When he finally finished collecting the fares and we were ready to go, some douchebag kid decided that THEN would be a good time to go buy something at the little tienda store on the side of the road. So he hops off the bus and we wait. We watch him buy a six pack of beer and not-so-stealthily “hide” it in his shirt then pass it through the window to his friend before re-boarding the bus. Classy. What never ceases to amaze me is that the Ecuadorians don’t complain about it. They don’t yell. They just deal. Meanwhile, Jer and I are incredibly impatient and annoyed with this ridiculousness. Even with the new levels of patience we have acquired through living here, this latest stunt did get on our nerve. We should have just left him. Buses leave passengers for lesser reasons…why not now. Over the course of the next 3 hours, they started and stopped THREE—count em 3-- different movies…one of them just so happened to be Cliffhanger with Sly Stallone. They of course stopped it JUST as the woman’s safety harness broke and she was about to fall into the abyss… Ahhhhh…. Rather than re-start the movie, they put in another pirated DVD…an old one with Arnold Schwartzenegger and a very young Alyssa Milano. Very bad acting and very violent. The Ecuas love that genre for some reason. But, of course, it too was cut off before the exciting ending. About this time, we pass through a Shuar community that was having a big party. Young girls holding babies, old warriers and everyone in between crowded the aisle of the bus. Our long distance bus was suddenly transported into a local bus, stopping every 100 meters or so to drop someone off and pick someone up. Ahhhhhhh….Ecuador. How we love you so.

Happy Hour. Jer and I decided to invite our co-workers for a little happy hour party at our house one Friday night. I of course was caught in a late afternoon nightmare pointless meeting that ran late…very late. I couldn’t escape. When I finally did, I got home about 2 minutes before the slated start time of the party. Luckily everyone was running on Ecuadorian time, so I was able to get a few last minute things done (although, as per usual, Jer did all the heavy lifting on the food prep). Oh, and we had no power. The whole city was out of power. Yay! We lit every candle we had, and decided that our happy hour would have a decidedly romantic theme. One of my friends called to see if we would still be having the party. She wanted to come, but would have to wait till the power came back on because she couldn’t find her jeans. Hummmm…. Well, miraculously, the power was only out temporarily. Soon after, swarms of people came swooping in our door. The directors of my women’s group had evidently invited every other Waorani in Puyo to our house. It was packed. Waorani in one corner, Jer’s coworkers in another corner. Unlike our last attempt of a party for our Ecuadorian friends, we made the point of explaining that you had to come up to the counter to get food—gringo style---…that we would not be serving food to them. I tried to explain the concept of grazing…like cows…to the Waorani. I’m not sure the translation worked well, because they still didn’t move from their chairs. I ended up bringing them food anyway. Jer introduced our Ecuadorian friends to Sloppy Joes (try translating that!) and deviled eggs (easier translation, but evidently unsettling concept to some). The former was much more popular than the latter. Jer also offered a taste of Guiness to some of the attendees. Our friend Frank had brought a few bottles and Jer was gracious enough to share the wealth (I, on the other hand am more apt to hoard such luxury gifts for myself, especially since they, predictably, would not necessarily appreciate the extravagant treat) with his peeps…. While the few gringos in the room all got excited to have the smallest sip of Guiness, the Ecuadorians generally scrunched their noses at the taste. I mean, it is already somewhat of an acquired taste for Americans, but for Ecuadorians who have only drank one flavor of beer their entire life (Pilsener is roughly equivalent in color and taste to Miller High Life), the full bodied black richness of Guiness was a little too much to handle. All in all a good par-tay and “cultural interchange.” After most everyone cleared out, our friend Casey whipped out a piñata for an early birthday celebration for Jer. She had bedazzled it and adorned it with a picture of a certain person whose identity will be withheld for security purposes. Jer had fun taking his frustration out on the piñata. We had fun eating the candy that spilled out. We also played a creative alternative rendition of pin the tail on the donkey also involving said person…the specific details of which will also be withheld from public consumption at the present time. Oh how we laughed and laughed…

Well, that’s all I got in me right now. Promise to have more updates this week. Lots of other stories to tell. Stay tuned. Same bat time, same bat channel.

GO VOTE!

2008-11-04T16:47:00.003-05:00

No, I'm not lost, hurt or dead...just busy, thus the delay in blog posts. Sorry bout that. Got lots of good stories (read my friend Jason's account for a partial explanation of recent adventures: http://jason-desaparecido.blogspot.com/ ) but just no time to write. It is weird being in Ecuador on U.S. election day. I'm at my final Gender and Development meeting in Quito and we are all very distracted and finding it hard to concentrated on the tasks at hand. I cannot even concentrate enough to post a paragraph... so I guess I'll just give it up and go tune into election coverage. I'm outta here.

Seeing the light

2008-10-23T11:32:00.006-05:00

One of the coolest and most rewarding experiences I have had lately was helping my friend Roger distribute prescription glasses in the small mountain village of Garcia Moreno. A volunteer medical brigade of eye doctors from the U.S. had visited the community previously to provide eye exams. They returned to the states to process the prescriptions then sent the glasses to Roger, who was responsible for getting them to their new owners. When we pulled into town around 10:30 a.m. we were mobbed with people. It felt like being surrounded by paparazzi! An old woman said she had been waiting since dawn for us to come. Feeling a little overwhelmed and pressed for time since we were delayed by our eating extravaganza in Las Lajas (see previous post ), we tried to get organized as quickly as we could. Unable to get into the community building, we set up shop on the steps overlooking the concrete fútbol field. Working off a handwritten list, we divided the men and women into two groups and then laid out the glasses in clear plastic bags on the steps. Frank and I coordinated with the women while Jer and Roger worked with the men. One by one we called the women’s name from the list and matched her with her new glasses. It was like each one won the lottery. The women hugged and kissed me and said “God bless you” over and over. I felt totally undeserving of their genuine heartfelt appreciation. I was just helping to pass the glasses out and I could not take credit for any of the other goodness…a fact I tried to explain but this didn’t seem to matter to them. They were just sooo happy. Some of the oldest women had tears in their eyes as they looked out through the lenses to see the world more clearly for their first time decades. One of them remarked that they never knew what that sign they pointed to off in the distance said. Others joked that they may not like their husbands so much now that they can actually see them clearly.
Roger and one of the men from Garcia Moreno with his new glasses.

As I said, it was one of the most rewarding things I have done here, even if I did very little to deserve the appreciation of the people. It definitely reminded all of us how much we take for granted our good optical , dental AND medical care. Yeah, yeah, the U.S. healthcare system is really screwed up, but it is hard to complain about the quality of care and the ease of access to doctors (meaning no half-day trips on a bumpy bus just to get to a city). And you don't need new glasses to see that.

web

2008-10-21T16:58:00.003-05:00

One of my recent activities has been helping the Waorani Women's Association create a webpage. We have funds to hire a professional designer (porque no sé nada de esto) and so I am just sort of shepherding the process (getting text and photos ready, etc.) I just googled "artesanía Waorani" to see what, if anything, was already out there and came across this site. Last year I had submitted a brief written report and some of my photos to Save America's Forests, who helped finance one of our workshops...but never realized they posted it on their website!

Las Lajas--now with photos

2008-10-20T14:35:00.002-05:00

Wow…I have been really recalcitrant on my blog entries. Once I get so far behind, it makes it even that much harder to motivate myself to get caught up. Here are a few highlights of the cool things and/or interesting things I have done the last few weeks:

Visit from Frank. Our friend Frank came from Northwest Ohio to Ecuador for a visit. He came bringing gifts of joy including Guiness and two GPS units for Jer’s project, and granola bars and Take 5 bars for me. Yay! Together we did some exploring around Puyo. We hiked to the Hola Vida waterfall (see previously posted photos) and took another hike down to the Pastaza River. I translated for him on a visit to the local orchid garden/park. Over a 3-day weekend we went up to Otavalo and checked out the market. There we helped him bargain for some cool gifts including alpaca blankets, cotton hammocks, tablecloths and sweaters.

Visit to Las Lajas. From Otovalo, we traveled on a crowded slow-moving bus to Las Lajas, a small community of about 400 people located high in the mountains where our friend and fellow Ohioan, Roger was doing some work. Our host, Norman, opened his house to us and invited us to dinner with some friends in a small brick house that was built with support from the Ecuadorian government. We had a fascinating conversation about farming practices, global warming and geography over a hearty and tasty Sierran meal of chicken, potatoes and rice. Most of the families in the community have small plots of land where they graze cows or grow potatoes and other vegetables. Everything we ate was likely grown or raised within a few hundred meter radius of the house. In addition to sharing our knowledge about live fences, windbreaks and nitrogen fixing cover crops, we also learned a lot from them. For example, we learned that about six years ago a Russian tycoon purchased an entire valley for $10 a HECTARE. There, with financing from the Russian government, he installed irrigation and constructed a 70 hectare greenhouse for growing roses. Approximately 1000 Ecuadorians work in the greenhouse earning $6 per day to spray, prune, cut, and package roses. The roses are then shipped to Quito where they are flown in jumbo jets to Russia where they sell for up to $5 a stem. We of course had lots of questions about their working conditions, the use of pesticides, recent strikes, etc. We also asked if we could buy land for $10 a hectare. Evidently the price has gone up a bit.

Las Lajas happened to be celebrating their annual festival in honor of their patron saint. Not unlike many other small towns in Ecuador, Las Lajas honors said saint by having a mass followed by lots of drinking, dancing and fireworks. But mostly drinking. In the community house the church ladies were serving up and selling “hervida” which was basically moonshine mixed with hot water, lemon, sugar and spices. Norman bought a bottle for the 5 of us to share. It was $1. Whether it was the temperature of the drink or the booze itself, the hervida did help to warm us up as we watched the most bizarre “firework” display I have ever witnessed. The town had spent weeks and untold amounts of money building a massive tower of sequentially lighting pyrotechnics. The words escape me on how to describe this contraption. Think of the game Mousetrap…now envision it made of strictly bamboo, masking tape and superpowered sparklers. And imagine it three stories tall. Now picture lighting one part of it, and as it spins, it sets off several other huge sparkler in the shape of an animal, which when fully lit then sets off a line of fireworks on the second level. It was surreal. The fact that no one lost an eye, finger or entire hand or limb is no small miracle. This was probably helped by the fact that about 22 seconds after lighting the contraption, it started to rain. Everyone crammed into the doorway to the community house seeking shelter from the rain to watch. Because we are tall, we could stand near the back of the crowd and see over most people’s heads. But as Frank moved forward for a photo moment his 6’4” frame topped by a cowboy had blocked a few people’s lines of sight. It was quite a sight. After the pyrotechnics, everyone’s attention was directed to center stage where a series of musical acts performed. One of the leading acts was a pleasantly plump woman with big 80’s bangs and super-tight clothes topped with an oversized sombrero who seductively sang Mexican rancheras. The men in the room were mesmerized and cat called to her in between songs and costume changes, which was basically taking off one layer after another, as the costume got skimpier and skimpier. I sat with some of our new friends on a chair with a thick wool blanket spread across our laps. Norman came around periodically to offer more hervida and say how happy he was to have new friends. As the night wore on and the acts got increasingly worse (or better, depending on your perspective) people started getting really sloppy drunk. They had to stop the show at one point as some superdrunk guy kept wandering onstage to pry the microphone away from the performer to do karaoke. The guys were getting tired of being peer pressured to keep up with the locals’ drinking, so we eventually decided to call it a night and head back to crash on Norman’s cold concrete floor. They guys had sleeping bags and I curled into fetal position on the very short pleather loveseat. Thank god for the alpaca blankets we just bought or I would have been a popsicle. I got up to go to the bathroom (er, yard, as there was no bathroom) around 4 a.m. and the bass was still thumping from the party up the hill. Here, here to the patron saint!

Norman had already finished milking his cows by the time we got up. Around 8:30 we walked together to his neighbor’s house for breakfast. As we walked up the hill, we passed a number of villagers who continued to party…or had passed out en route home. After we ate our hardboiled eggs, bread with homemade cheese and instant coffee, our hosts expressed deep disappointment that we were planning to leave so soon. They said they had already started making lunch for us. Feeling guilty for the effort they went to cook for us, yet time pressed to get to the neighboring town for another event, we asked if we could maybe eat lunch early or take it with us. Then, in some mis-communication or poor translation, we found ourselves being served plates mounded with fritada (fried pork) and mote (hominy)…just 15 minutes after finishing our breakfast. We all quietly moaned as we eyed the enormous amount of food we were being essentially forcefed. Okay, not really, but it would be rude to refuse. So we ate as much as we could physically be forced down. Yes, we ate breakfast and lunch within the period of 45 minutes. We waddled out of the house then bade a grateful farewell to our new friends and headed down the road to the next town.

compost

2008-10-14T16:44:00.002-05:00

So, our attempts at a mini container garden have been officially dashed. Smashed, to be exact. Lacking a piece of dirt to grow our own food, we started a humble compost pile on the flat concrete roof of our apartment building. We had started some seeds with mixed success. We simply get too much rain (on the order of 5 meters per year). And after our landlord asked us about our “trash pile” on the roof, we read between the lines and decided that it was time to officially abort our veggie mission…and dismantle our compost box. Today was the day to dismantle our failed gardening project. Jer marched upstairs and started scooping the compost into a rice bag. He had half of the bag filled when an ant attacked him and stung him on the hand. Ticked off, he came back down to the apartment, grabbed the rubber gloves and asked for my help. I grabbed my garden gloves and followed him upstairs. “I’ve decided I’m just going to launch it off the roof,” he said. “Are you serious?” I asked incredulously. “Yep. Grab the other end of the box.” So, after securing that the coast was clear and then on the count of three, we launched the heavy (jer says 50 pounds, but it felt like more) wooden box filled with compost, partially decomposed papaya peels, pineapple tops and assorted other produce remains (as well as a small army of stinging ants) into the air. The box went flying off the roof of our building and crashed into the adjacent abandoned lot. The box broke apart and the compost scattered over the boards and weeds. Mission accomplished. We looked down and admired our handiwork. We agreed that you actually had to know what you were looking for to even notice it, because it blended into the weeds. Normally I wouldn’t condone such acts, but given how fast things decompose here, it is unlikely anyone would even notice. Who knew launching compost could be so satisfying!

Quehueri'ono part IV...the finale

2008-10-09T14:56:00.000-05:00

So most of my blog stalkers have undoubtedly given up on me by now…I don’t blame you…I mean, the cruelty of it all. Making you wait weeks for one lousy story…the nerve! While I cannot promise it will be worth the drive to Richmond (sorry for oblique slogan known to few outside a 150 mile radius of Fort Wayne Indiana) I do promise to conclude my recollections of this trip so that I can eventually move on to tell the tale of other interesting misadventures.

Around mid-morning on the second day of the handicraft workshop, my compañero, Antonio and a small group of women from the stranded group walked into the classroom, totally drenched in sweat. It turns out that because of the perpetual shortage of canoes, they had ended up walking to the community. At some time around noon, the last of the group and the food supply showed up. The group looked hot, haggard, and hostile. And rightly so. Most of them had left Puyo on Tuesday morning…and were just now getting to the community on Friday afternoon. Quite a commute. Those that came by canoe loaded down with the food and supplies actually arrived after the walkers because the river was so low and the canoe advanced at a snails pace as it maneuvered around the many logs and tree limbs. Their trip was really quite ridiculous. It turns out they had spent the entire day Wednesday by the bridge waiting for canoes. When none came, they camped on the side of the road for a second consecutive night. On Thursday two canoes came and transported them only ¾ of the way to Quehueri’ono…(as far as the river level and the daylight hours would allow) and then they spent the night on a sand bar on the side of the river. Another half day of travel later, they finally arrived at their final destination. Only one of the two canoes made the final trip to the community; this displaced a subgroup of people who were then forced to walk. Incredibly, some of them had walked the entire way from the bridge to the community.

Meanwhile, back at camp, I had recruited a couple ladies to help me with lunch duty. We were at least an hour into the process when the food supply arrived. We incorporated lentils and the produce that hadn’t gone bad en route into the menu…but somehow this was unsatisfactory to my counterpart. After 2.5 hours around a wood fire in the hot, mid-day equatorial sun I was not in the mood to hear critiques about what we prepared. Everyone was edgy. I was annoyed. She was frustrated. But I guess I would be cranky, too, after such a ludicrously long trip. Nonetheless, the chemistry of the group changed from a happy-go-lucky small baby boat contingent …to a mass of hungry, tired, moody mujeres.

The final day of the workshop actually went fairly smoothly. I gave a presentation which included a report on the store’s sales, an explanation of my mini-census of the artisans (i.e. tracking who knows how to make each type of handicrafts sold), the importance of quality and the need to produce handicrafts pictured in our new catalog, and finally, a brief explanation of the webpage the Waorani Women’s Association will be launching. The latter topic required me to be extremely creative considering my audience was women who live in jungle communities largely without electricity.

In between sessions, talk turned to just how exactly we were going to get out of the community. There was only going to be one canoe available on the day we planned to leave. It would fit 12 people. There were over 40 of us. Uh…yeah…. THAT will be interesting…But we had received word that a group of tour operators from Great Britain would be coming in to check out the new Eco-Lodge. Smelling a potential sales opportunity, I helped the women prepare their handicrafts for sale to the tourists. It was somewhat improvised but in the end adequate effort. I had large sheets of butcher paper that we use to wrap up the handicrafts to transport back to Puyo. On each sheet I wrote the artisans name and then organized their wares on top of it. The papers stretched around the entire room. The women changed into their traditional dress, painted their faces, donned their feather crowns and continued weaving while we waited for the distinguished guests. Meanwhile, some of us had packed up our stuff in hopes that we could catch a ride on the plane that would be transporting the tourists in and otherwise flying back empty. But the sky was gray and a rain shower had passed through (and sent my stomach sinking with despair I wouldn’t make it out on the plane).

Somehow all our luck wasn’t bad. We soon heard “Evo, evo, evo” the Waorani word for airplane. The plane touched down on the grass landing strip. It happened to be a spacious 5 passenger plane AND it turned out that the plane would be returning with another load of passengers immediately after dropping of the first load. Score! Five women jumped into the plane and took off down the grass runway. This landing strip happened to have the skeleton of a plane that had crashed there years ago. Incidentally, it was the plane that my counterpart had been a passenger in. She and the others onboard miraculously escaped with minor injuries. Even with this knowledge, the sight of the wreckage was a little unsettling.

While the plane was shuttling the first load of passengers back to the Shell airport, I was helping to translate for the British women tour operators who were checking out the wares. I was able to explain to them the entire process of making the handicrafts, which added value to their experience and in the end I think it helped to encourage them to buy more items. They seemed like very hip, interesting people. I would have liked to have talked with them more…but our conversation was cut short by the sound of the plane returning.

As the second batch of tourists unloaded their backpacks we pushed past to quickly load ours onto the bright yellow plane. Because I was the tallest passenger by a good 8 inches, I got to sit in the co-pilot seat. In no time at all we were taxiing back down the runway and then were up, up and away. The view below was stunning. I was totally mesmerized by the sea of green below…until we flew into a very dark rain cloud. Water started bubbling around the area where the windshield meets the dashboard of the plane… hummm… that didn´t seem normal. Then all the sudden we hit a patch of turbulence and the plane suddenly and violently bumped downward. One of my compañeras screamed. I grabbed my seat out of sheer terror. We made it through the cloud and touched down in the rain at the airport in Shell without further problems. We chatted with the pilot afterwards and he admitted that he, too, was scared by the bump. Then he confesses, “but that´s mostly because I ´m still jittery from when I wrecked a plane two weeks ago. But I only got scratched.” Hum…that´s comforting. So, all of the sudden I was back in Puyo, just 35 minutes after being deep in the jungle. I think that stark transition is in some ways a more difficult dose of culture shock than going from Ecuador to the States.

Anyway, there you have it my friends, my final chapter of our trip to Quehueri’ono. My apologies again for dragging it out so long. I promise to try to post shorter, more timely posts in the future. The operative word being “try.” Chao for now.

diversions

2008-09-29T16:27:00.002-05:00

So I hate to drag this long convoluted story out even more...but I am going to anyway. Over the weekend, instead of typing up the dramatic conclusion of my latest tale, Jer and I went with some friends on a short hike to the Hola Vida waterfall.

We also took a hike down to the Pastaza River where we saw some cool wildlife including monkeys, walking sticks, crazy cool spiders and beetles and this cute little guy.

Quehueri'ono Part III

2008-09-24T16:06:00.004-05:00

We pick up today’s post where we left off yesterday…recounting my recent trip adentro with the Waorani Women’s Association. Our protagonist was stuck on the side of the Via Auca oil road with 30+ women waiting around for our ride (canoes) to the community of Quehueri’ono…. At some point in the morning a canoe finally pulled up to the bridge and the Waorani leader Moi gets out. Notice I said ONE canoe. After some negotiating with Moi (he claimed he didn’t know anything about our trip and only came to the bridge to make a phone call from the guard station…) he agreed to take a boatload of women to Quehueri’ono. Of course everyone was jockeying to get on the first canoe. They decided they would send all the women with babies first. “Hey, anyone want to lend me a kid for the day?” I joked. It turns out, there was one seat left on the baby boat. Manuela motioned for me to get in. I turned to my friend Noemi who I know really wanted to get moving and offered her the spot. Manuela then overrode her and said, “No, I send Susan.” Ok. She’s the boss. I quickly grabbed my backpack and slid down the slippery bank and into the front of the canoe loaded down with Waorani women, each with a baby in a sling around their shoulder or small child by their side. Although it didn’t feel like it at the time, I was really lucky to have got that last seat…

We ended up taking off around 10 a.m., leaving the other group behind to find their own way. The first half hour of the trip we motored past colono (colonists, mostly Shuar) settlements along the river. Although the houses weren’t visible from the river, I could tell that we were not in Waorani territory because of what was planted in their chacras (gardens). Finally we entered Wao territory, which was actually marked with a sign, part of a project to delineate the borders of their territory. Over the course of the next 5 hours or so, we motored up the Shiripuno River, making stops at a few Waorani houses along the way to say hello and to eat their food and drink their chicha. I goofed around with these two kids who were sitting behind me. The girl was at first scared of me, but eventually warmed up. When I wasn’t playing with them, I was scanning the banks for critters. I was excited to be able to see some cool wildlife, including a caiman, an agouti and a sunbittern. Always happy to see wildlife actually alive…rather than on a plate in front of me… It was slow going. The river level steadily dropped throughout the day and by the end of it we were having to go really slow to avoid hitting logs. One of our stops was at the new Huaorani eco-lodge outside of Quehueri’ono operated by TROPIC in cooperation with the Waorani community. I got to peek around a bit. It looked very nice, but it didn’t look very new. The wood had a time-worn look to it… a testament to how quickly things erode in the rainforest, I guess. We finally pulled up to the community in the late afternoon, unpacked our stuff and hung out in the school building waiting for the canoe to come back with some food that TROPIC had donated for our workshop. After we unloaded our stuff, one of the women said that there was a boa by one of the houses and asked if I wanted to see it. YES, of course! As long as I can keep a distance… She led me through a wooded area to where some of the houses were located…and there in a grassy by the house was a huge boa constrictor. And it was not happy. Evidently one of the men came across it while he was working in the chacra and brought it up near the house so others could gawk at it too. A group of kids kept throwing sticks at it, and one of the boys had a red t-shirt on the end of the stick and was taunting it. I got to witness the speed and the force of its jaws (and just how wide it can open its mouth) when it went after the t-shirt. I took another step backward. The comical part was watching the Waorani try to call a chicken that was wandering dangerously close to the boa. Meanwhile, one of the same boys came over to the house where I was loitering outside of, and showed me his gigantic pet rhino beetle. I know it was a pet and not just some straggler because he actually had a string around its leg. A beetle leash, so to speak.

That night I helped make dinner for our group, which consisted of rice, pasta and tuna. For breakfast the next morning we made rice with sardines and oatmeal drink. That’s all we had to work with. Cooking took forever because it required wood fire cooking…which required walking really far to get firewood. The women gave me a huge basket of wood to carry. I think they did it just to watch me struggle with it. The basket had a strap to put across your forehead, with the basket balanced on the small of your back. I walked like that for a couple hundred meters until it felt like a vertebrae was going to be compacted and crushed in my neck. I then grabbed the straps to take the pressure off my neck and continued walking until I saw some teenage boys who were willing to carry the wood for me. Whew! Quite a workout, really. The next challenge to the cooking spree was the fact that we did not have any spoons OR cups. Like any good Peace Corps Volunteer I improvised. I made a makeshift spoon out of a drink box, while the women just used their hands. For cups, I washed out the sardine cans and then filled them with the oatmeal drink to offer to the women, yelling “sardine juice, sardine juice, get your sardine juice for only 25 cents,” which they thought was hilarious. (They are an easy audience.) We made an extra large batch of rice and sardines in anticipation for the other group to come. They never came. So for lunch, we ate MORE rice and sardines and drank more oatmeal drink out of sardine cans. For dinner we ate more rice and canned seafood, again making extra in hopes that the other group would show up. They still did not show up. I was starting to get very worried about them.

During the day, I had tried to organize the “baby boat” group to have at least a mini-workshop (the trainers were among the group that were left behind waiting for the other canoes). I led what I thought was a good session with them where we talked about the importance of good quality handicrafts and we rated some of the things they had made. I also worked with them to collect information for a project I’m doing to document the natural materials (bark, leaves, roots and nuts) they use to dye the fiber. Interestingly, I have often found that my Spanish flows when I am talking among other non-native Spanish speakers for some reason. I am embarrassed to say that my wao-terero is still non-existent, however.

So, despite the transportation challenges in getting to the community, and the fact that we didn’t have much food or utensils… and the fact that I did not having any of the materials I needed, nor were the trainers there… despite all this…I was actually having a good time.

But things changed the following day (to be continued).

Quehueri'ono part II

2008-09-23T09:55:00.001-05:00

(continued from my previous post, below. Read it first if you haven’t already. It is more entertaining, anyway.) After the worst movie ever made ended, we stopped in the community of Meñepare in order to pick up women who had walked from other villages to this meeting point. This was the same community where we had built the plant nursery. The plan was to take advantage of the little time we would be there to do some maintenance on the nursery by installing special screening to block some of the harsh rays of the ecuatorial sun. Plus, I was anxious to see how many of the seeds we planted were still alive. Of course when we get there it is during a seriously hard downpour. I threw on my rubber boots and jumped out of the bus and made my way to the nursery and was pleasantly surprised to see that almost all of the seeds we planted were sprouting and had grown quite a bit. Only a very few seedlings that we transplanted had bit the dust. Success! It was raining so hard that we couldn’t really do much of anything. So, we basically looked around, then headed back to the bus. Our hour-long stop to do a little work turned into a 20 minute pit stop. It was a little surreal…leaving BEFORE we had scheduled to. I was starting to get a little dizzy. This never happens.

We continued on to Tena to stop for a late lunch. More than 30 women, approximately half of which carried babies in sheets slung across one shoulder, got off the bus and piled into our usual spot, the Galpón (which means, literally, chicken coop) restaurant for an overpriced lunch (now $2.50—previously $1.50---and it didn’t even come with soup!!!Yikes!). After lunch I slipped away to stock up on some supplies for the long trip that still lay ahead. Chocolate bar, chocolate cookies and peanuts. Check. Once we got back on the bus and started to pull away I realized that I had meant to buy a couple DVDs for the next leg of the trip lest we tempt fate and let anyone put the worst movie ever made on for an encore. Against my own rules, I made the driver stop the bus. Two of the other women jumped out and helped me pick out movies. We wanted a comedy. The lady at the store made a few recommendations and we made a hurried decision and walked away with Game Plan and What Happens in Vegas. Because we were rushed, we didn’t try the DVDs out before hand, as is normal custom (to make sure they worked). By some stroke of strange luck (for me that is), both movies were good quality and ONLY in English. Not even Spanish subtitles. The Waorani were disappointed. Meanwhile, I was trying to disguise my glee. So, I sat back, munched on my cookies and watched two not-great-but-not-awful (and thus good enough for me) movies. It made time fly by. I didn’t even hardly notice that we had to stop twice because of tire problems. Once to inflate…the other to completely change the tire. I also was so absorbed in my little world that I didn’t notice that we evidently kept driving into gas stations, but not stopping for gas. As I said, I was engrossed in my movies and didn’t pay much attention. Before we knew it, we were in the city of Coca. I did a double-take at my watch. Wait a minute, we are still early! How can this be? Then I realized, wait, my butt doesn’t hurt nearly as much as it should after sitting on a bus all day. Hold on…I don’t remember being bounced around for 7 straight hours on a bad road. Woah. They must have done some serious road repair or opened a mostly paved shortcut…whatever happened, we got there crazy fast.

As we sat down for yet another plate of chicken and rice and French fries, I was told of our newest transportation challenge: we needed to get gas (for the bus) and none of the gas stations in Coca had any, hence the reason we went to all those gas stations but were waved on because there wasn’t any gas. Huh? Oh. Coca, of course, is one of the bigger oil towns in Ecuador. Large quantities of heavy crude that is pumped out of the Ecuadorian Amazon passes through Coca toward the coast. Very little, however, returns in the form of processed gas needed to fill up the car, or in our case, bus. Humm… this presented quite a dilemma. Thankfully my friend Noemi is pilas (smart) and she negotiated with the bus company (which happened to have an office in the town) to simply swap one of their buses that had gas in their tank, with ours, that was on empty. So, what could have been a major crisis, ended up being a very temporary delay. Even after unloading all of our stuff off of bus and re-loading it onto another and even with all the normal delays with managing any large group, we got on the road ON TIME according to the itinerary we had planned. Incredible.

Once back on the road around 11 p.m. or so, I drifted off to sleep…and then woke up when we the bus was stopped and the lights went on. I looked at my watch: it was 1:20 a.m. We had arrived at the bridge. Early. Very early. The trip that used to take 3.5 hours had been dramatically reduced to a little over 2 hours because of this crazy thing called asphalt that had been put on the road. We weren’t supposed to leave in the canoes (that would take us to the community where the workshop was to be held) until around 6 a.m. But instead of sitting in the bus and catching some zzzzzz’s until sunrise, the bus driver kicked us out of the bus. Yep, he dumped us and all our stuff on the side of the road by the Shiripuno River bridge at 1:30 in the morning.

It was cold and damp and awkward. No one knew what to do. It basically sucked. The only good thing was that it wasn’t raining. I donned my headlamp and started to put up my tent. As relieved as I was to have a tent and a foam mat, I simultaneously felt bad for the women, because they didn’t have anything but a change of clothes. I started digging around my stuff trying to find plastic bags at least for them to sit on and invited a couple of them to stay in my tent. Even with a foam mat the ground was bumpy and uneven with rocks and not comfortable at all, but I would never think to breathe a word of complaint. At 6:30 or so, we finally crawled out of the tent and looked at the scene around us. Hungry faces, big bags of food, but no way to cook the food. Oh, and no canoes. So, there we were, more than 30 people standing by the bridge, tons of supplies and gear, the sky threatening rain… and no canoes. (to be continued)

Quehueri'ono part 1

2008-09-22T08:31:00.002-05:00

(typed Saturday) I’m reclined on pillows, relaxing, eating bonbons in bed as I type this. It is true. Now before you start getting grandiose ideas about the rough life of a Peace Corps Volunteer, let me explain. I am “relaxing” in bed because I have no energy. I am eating chocolate Ecua bon-bons because I am hungry...and mostly because I am trying to get this awful taste out of my mouth. You see, I have giardia. Yep, I ate or drank something very contaminated recently and those nasty little protozoa have attacked my intestines. Before I received this diagnosis, I was convinced I had worms. More like a colony of worms. I was certain that two opposing factions were warring over who was going to take over my small intestine. Let’s just say that there were many strange sensations, sounds and odors emanating from my body. But, it turns out I don’t have worms...I have giardia. Whew. That’s a relief... I think. Actually, I don’t know which would be worse. Worms sounds worse to me. And Giardia is supposedly very easily treatable. One dose of Fasogyn and it clears it all up by killing all the bichos. Yesterday afternoon I picked up the meds at a local pharmacy and eagerly took the dose recommended by the PC nurse. On my walk home I bought some bread because I realized that I should probably not take it on a totally empty stomach...and because I started getting a metallic taste in my mouth. The stale bread didn’t help. Neither did the plantain chips I bought at another store. I got home, made some soup and drank some Sprite. The taste remained. It tasted like I had been licking the dirty door of a stainless steel refrigerator. That’s the best way I can describe it. It was disgusting. I kept drinking more sprite to try to get rid of the taste. No dice. Nothing seemed to work. I plopped in our hammock and started reading some of the recent Columbus Dispatch articles Jer’s mom had sent us to try to take my mind off my stomach...and now mouth...issues. Then the power went out. I scrambled to find a flashlight and light some candles and then grabbed my headlamp to continue reading. The power went off and on several times before finally being restored. Then I peuked my guts out. Damn. There went all my meds down the drain. I was wiped of energy by this point, so I decided to crash in bed and watch a movie. (I happened to pick up a few new ones at my new fave dvd store in town. The lady sold me 4 movies for 5 bucks...and even guaranteed that if I didn’t like one of the movies that she recommended I could bring it back no problem. Deal!) So, I started watching In Good Company (I have a mini-crush on Dennis Quaid). All was going great...until with 5 minutes left in the movie, the dvd grinds to a halt and the screen is blurred on the final scene where Topher Grace is jogging and gets a phone call...and then I don’t know what happens...I don’t know how it ends! Argh!!!!!!!!!!!!!! So disappointing. Damned pirated dvds...

Okay, so I have been putting off my telling of the story of my latest trip adentro. I have been living in Procrastination Nation this week. Not that I am obligated to share with the world my misadventures... I just don’t want to disappoint the three of you that are actually interested in what I am doing and the other two of you that are just killing time surfing the web while on the clock.

So...here goes. Last week I was travelling with the Waorani Women’s Association to the community of Quehueri’ono (also sometimes spelled Keweriuno...and pronounced roughly “Kay-where-eee-uuu--no” ) where we were to have the last in a series of workshops aimed at improving the quality and consistency of handicrafts made by the women. Quehueri’ono is home to arguably the most famous Waorani, Moi, who’s photograph is on the cover of the book Savages by Joe Kane and he once graced the cover of the New York Times Magazine (I think that was the one) in the 1990’s when the Waorani were fighting against U.S.-based Maxus oil company. (Fast forward 17 years and you find Moi still living and working in Quehueri’ono on a recently opened Eco-lodge...for details check out www.huaorani.com).

It was going to be a long trip to get to the community. We were scheduled to meet at the Women’s Assoc office at 7 a.m. As per usual, I was the first one there and the only one on time. Despite this, we managed to get the gas and the food without much delay and we left town within 15 minutes of the ETD. Remarkable. The average delay prior to this trip was easily 1.5 hours. I had a glimmer of hope that things maybe, just maybe, would go according to plan...

Once we were on the road, the bus driver put in a movie. As the opening credits began to roll I had this sinking feeling. “No! It couldn’t be... I CAN’T be... Please tell me you’re joking!!” Oh, no. My worst fears were realized. The bus driver put on the worst movie ever made: Little Man. I have ranted about this movie in previous posts. It is just inexplicably popular on Ecuadorian buses. I just don’t get it. I have seen it no less than 5 times here. Wait. Correction: It has been played on no less than 5 buses in which I happened to be a passenger. It is kind of comical, really. Every volunteer has a movie that they claim they’ve seen many multiple times on Ecua-buses. My friend Elliot once told me that he had seen the movie Shooter with Mark Wahlburg no less than a dozen times on buses. He proceeded on telling me where he was going on each of these bus rides to prove it to me. He was so outraged by it. Meanwhile I was just incredulous to the fact that he a) had been travelling so much; and b) was complaining about watching Markie Mark. Then again, I have a mini-crush on Mark too (right SMK?). I also had the bad luck of sitting below one of the speakers and had to really concentrate on not being distracted by the bad-dubbing job. Instead I focused on reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. It was a book that my RPCV friend sent to me...saying that it is something that should be read in Peace Corps or something like that. Thankfully I was only about 400 pages into the 1069 page behemoth when it was still moderately interesting and before it teemed with anti-government and anti-public service rants. To be continued...

Prophetic paranoia

2008-09-16T16:50:00.003-05:00

I am totally, utterly distracted. I can’t get any work done…and it is not just because I now have internet access at the office and can finally catch up on emails, friends’ blogs, the news, and get distracted into other time-sucks on the web….although that is largely the case. I’m distraught….because I just learned that my fellow Peace Corps volunteers in Bolivia have been evacuated as a precautionary measure in response to the recent political unrest and violence there. I understand that some of the volunteers will be sent here to Ecuador, others to Peru, but most will be sent home. I am really kind of freaked out about it. I never wanted my paranoia about U.S.-Bolivian relations to actually be prophetic...

You see, Jer and I were originally invited by Peace Corps to serve in Bolivia. Despite the fact I wanted to serve in Latin America, my initial reaction was disappointment. We contemplated the invitation for almost a week. Peace Corps put a lot of pressure on us to accept the invitation, alluding to the fact that there was no guarantee we would get another…or that it may further delay our already extremely long application process. In the end, we made the very difficult decision of declining. We did so for a variety of reasons, but largely because in my gut-I had serious doubts about the relations between the current occupant of the White House and Evo Morales, the first Indigenous President of Bolivia. I remember saying to Jer something like “But…of all the countries in Latin America where Peace Corps serves, I believe Bolivia is the one that is at the greatest risk of being booted.” I just didn’t want to go through the whole process of quitting my job, selling the house, selling the car…and going off to Bolivia and not be able to finish my service…. But now, for whatever reason, I feel bad for saying that…

I’ve already received a text from a friend congratulating me on making the right decision. Yet, why is it I feel like crap? On top of the outrage I feel about the recent killings there and feeling exasperated by what sounds like a bungled job by the U.S. diplomatic corps, I just keep thinking about all those volunteers I was originally invited to serve alongside…and trying to imagine what they must be going through...by being told to leave their communities abruptly without much chance to say goodbye to anyone…to not have any type of closure… I feel like I need to apologize or something. So, to my compañeros who served in Bolivia, I want to say: I’m sorry that you were forced to leave the country you love. I’m sorry that violence and war interrupted your service in the name of peace. I’m sorry I can’t do more to help. I’m just so sorry….

nontraditional pets

2008-09-15T17:13:00.000-05:00

Still don't feel like writing much, so instead I'll post another photo from my trip to Quehueri'ono. Enjoy.

I´m baaaaaaack

2008-09-14T11:30:00.003-05:00

I´m back from my lastest adventures in the Waorani territory...and it involved the usual mix of logistics blunders, drama and other random absurdities... ingredients included gas shortages, sardine juice, roadside camping, watching the worst movie ever made, and wildlife encounters. Will tell the full story later...but will post the following photo from the trip as a teaser....

A big day

2008-09-08T17:20:00.003-05:00

Today, Monday September 8th 2008 will be a day in infamy. Okay, not really. But it is a big day for me. Today was the first day I was able to use that crazy newfangled concept called the "internet" from my computer at the Waorani Women's Association!!! As a bonus, I ALSO now have the ability to print documents, too! Que emocionante. Seriously, it is a big deal. For the past 17 months I have operated in my own little closed circuit system. Truly my own world. If I wanted to print anything (which I often do...crazy I know) I used to have to close all my documents, save the document to a flash drive, go to another office to boot someone off their computer, insert flash, print...blah, blah, blah. I realize this sounds kind of whiney, but it got really annoying really fast. I was always interrupting other people and causing problems. You see, my flash drive is pretty sleazy. It has been hooking up with dozens of internet cafe computers around town...and well because it didn't use protection, it now has viruses and worms (or ETD's as I call them). Well NOW I have "broad band" banda ancha (or "mancha ancha" as my counterpart calls it in her broken spanish....which translates to broad stain). It is fast for Ecuador, fo' sho.' Oooooohhhh I am so giddy with glee. I have internet access and printing ability!!!! Yippy skippy! This may even mean more frequent blog updates...or it may mean proivide major distraction and time suck (uh, hello, facebook?!?!?!). Only time will tell. And well, it will be at least a week until we know...because tomorrow I leave on a loooooooong trip adentro to the community of Quehueri'uno (home of Moi, of Savages fame) for a workshop with my women's group. Will be going on a looooooong bus ride then getting in a motorized canoe; will staying in a tent, bathing in the river. And no, definitely no internet access or printing ability there.

Camisetas Waorani

2008-09-06T12:58:00.004-05:00

Camisetas en tella "strech" a solo $8.

Tallas para mujeres y niños S y M (puperas)L, 34, 36, 38

Colores: tomate, negro, blanco y plomo
Tienda de Arte Étnico Waorani "WEMA"

Puyo - Pastaza Ecuador

By popular demand I am including details of the new t-shirts for sale at the Waorani handicraft store. The oil company donated the shirts, but for some mysterious reason they only sent small sizes...and half of them are belly shirts. Men are out of luck. I bought the largest one and it is still a little tighter than I prefer (but hey, that´s popular here).

back to work blues

2008-09-02T17:59:00.002-05:00

Well, we´re back from a great R&R trip to the coast. Jer and I left the PH (sniff, sniff) on Saturday around 3 in the afternoon and rolled into Puyo at 7 a.m. on Sunday. Despite the fact that it was a looooong and annoying bus ride and despite the fact that our backpacks were wet and muddy (thanks to bus no. 2) and smelling like fish (thanks to bus no. 3) it was all worth it. Now we are working our tails off trying to make up for the time that we were gone...and we just got hit with the sudden realization that it is September already and ¡yikes! there is a lot of work we want to get done before the end of the year. Today I helped the Waorani Women´s Association put up a display of new T-shirts for sale, helped hang stuff from the hooks in the ceiling (because I´m always the tallest in the group) in the store...and drafted a 2 page workplan of all the stuff I want to do ---and think I can reasonably get done with the women here before the end of the year. We´ll see. La jefa viene mañana...y veamos...

In other mundane news, our new sitemate just arrived in town after swearing in as a volunteer on Friday. She is staying with us until her host family gets her housing situation worked out (lots of drama). Have had to turn down two other international couch surfers because we haven´t been around or couldn´t accomodate so many guests at the King International B&B. Am excited that my folks finally (!) pulled the trigger and bought tickets to Ecualand to visit us in December. Am SUPER stoked to show them around P-town and hear my dad use his 12 high school spanish phrases. : ) Sorry, don´t have anything very witty to post. For humor, I refer you to CT Go Bucks Blog (warning: for adult audiences only). I especially recommend the recent posting about top tailgating moments in history, which recants our mis-adventures in the parkinglot outside the greatest football game of all time. I laughed so hard I almost peed my pants reading his post...and it really made me wonder if the government makes travel pee bags for women pilots or Peace Corps Volunteers (hey, I would argue that long latin american bus rides are equally--no, actuall more---arduous than the long flights of Air force pilots. ) Advice before reading: go to the bathroom first. : )

the PH

2008-08-28T10:22:00.004-05:00

Jer and I are taking some much needed vaca time to chill at the beach with some Peace Corps pals. One of our friends who used to work with Jer at CODEAMA gave us the keys to her family´s condo in Bahia, a resort-y town on the coast. The condo happens to be the freaking´PENTHOUSE suite on the top floor of a 10 story high rise right on the beach. For us volunteers used to roughing it, it is a little overwhelming. Four balconies, three bathrooms, enough beds to sleep 14. Yikes. It is awesome. We all utter a little evil laugh every time we get in the elevator and push the PH button.

Our pal Akul chilling out on one of the balconies.

View of Bahia from across the bay

recent photo moments...

2008-08-23T21:43:00.004-05:00

Neighborhood kids making homemade kites

I don't understand people who think putting skirts on dogs is cute...

Beer break at the Dique de Mera (basically a dammed-up river made into a shallow swimming area)

Akul: "Dude: you have got to work on that campo tan..."

This girl came up to me and asked in the sweetest little voice, "Have you seen my friend Kelly?"

agouti soup

2008-08-21T13:12:00.003-05:00

Well...I survived my latest trip adentro. And, as always, it was a bit of an adventure. The objective was to work in the chambira palm nurseries that we started in May. The Waorani utilize the new leaves of the chambira palm in their handicrafts. They actually hand-make every last centimeter of string before they even begin to weave anything. It is an incredibly labor-intensive process. Soooo...the idea is that we are constructing the nurseries in order to start thousands of chambira palms and other plants that produce seeds used in necklaces which will later be transplanted in and around the Waorani. Thus, the prime material of the handicrafts is not depleted, and then the women don’t have to spend hours searching for the prime materials. That’s the idea, anyway...

Rather than organizing a big expensive production, a small team of five of us from the Waorani Women’s Association was scheduled to work in the communities. Yet even though it was less people to coordinate we still left Puyo on the hora Ecuatoriana...about 3 hours later than we had planned. We had to drive around picking up stuff that people forgot (oh, like, little things like their backpack of clothes for the weeklong work trip). Then we had to play tetris to get all of the food, supplies and people crammed into the double cab truck.
This meant that by the time we got to the community of Menepare there wasn’t much we could do besides check the status of our previous work sites, and set up camp, and by then it was dark. The promising thing was that the place we were staying had a gas cosineta, which is a four burner stovetop, in which to cook. This made food preparation much quicker than having to build a fire. Even so, we got zero work accomplished the first day.

The following day we spent all morning chopping down the vegetation that had grown up around the plants we had transplanted. They say things grow fast in the rainforest. I am a witness. Finding some of the plants was difficult as everything was really overgrown. And everything is so green...and quite difficult to differentiate what is what to the untrained eye. I was constantly having to ask my companeras if a particular plant was a weed or something we wanted to keep.

After a half day of machete-ing a large area in the intensely hot equatorial sun, we took a much deserved lunch break. The last time that I was in the community was in May and the weather was dramatically different. At that time, it was constantly raining. No, I take that back, it was constantly pouring. For this trip, the sun was out in full force. Any movement made you sweat, thus after machete-ing for just a few minutes I was soaked. I am proud to report that my machete skills have vastly improved as a result of this trip. I have the blisters to prove it. The bigger accomplishment was that I didn’t hurt myself, either with my own machete, someone else’s...or by falling on it...or any number of the branches and logs that I had to be constantly stepping over. Despite my disappointment with how run-down everything looked from the last time I was there, it was weirdly satisfying to do some serious manual labor. Moreover, it was good to escape the office, which, due to some personality conflicts, has become a rather stressful place of late. Our plan was to visit two communities...but based on the amount of work we had left to do, but also because of the fact that the river was low (oh...and a small detail of there not being any motorized canoe available) we decided to stay in Menepare the entire time. It was a lucky move for me...as I will get to later.

Over the next three days, we weeded, staked, planted, transplanted, and re-planted previously transplanted plants and trees. We hauled hundreds of pounds of sand in feed sacks at least 450 meters from the river to the nursery, filled hundreds of bags with a mixture of dirt, compost and sand, planted seeds (after I went on a 4 hour hike with two of the women to collect the seeds) and then put tags on all the plants. It was a lot of work.

One day while we were out working one of the waorani men from the community went fishing. He came back with a bunch of fish strung up, what looked like a drowned rat, and a live turtle tied to the same line as the dead animals. The rat-like animal turned out to be a black agouti, called a watusa in Spanish and pëne in Wao terero. Those of you that know Spanish will probably notice that a similarly pronounced word in español, pene, means penis. This made our dinner conversation most interesting when my host served up agouti soup. A fun loving group, no one could resist the wordplay of saying, “te gusta el pëne?” and inserting the word pëne into every sentence. Ahhhh what fun...talking about who likes, who ate, and who is going to get more pëne...

Okay now moving from a linguistic to a biological note: black agoutis are in fact in the Order Rodentia...along with two other interesting rodents found in these parts, the paca and capybara (which is the world’s largest rodent.) And, no, the latter two are not (yet?) part of my growing list of bush meat consumed. Agoutis are cool (alive) because they are important seed dispersers in the rainforest. I guess they gather seeds that fall from trees and then take them different places to bury them to essentially hide or store them, then promptly forget where they put them, thus providing wider dispersal of seeds through the forest.

The story of the turtle is almost as interesting as the agouti. Sadly, the man who caught it had drilled a hole in its shell in order to tie it up so that it wouldn’t escape (this sucker was fast! I’m not sure what kind it was...a yellow spotted Amazon river turtle, perhaps). It tried to escape several times. At one point it was literally pulling all the dead fish and the dead agouti with it across the floor until someone tied up the menagerie of dead and live animals to a post. It was hard to witness, really. It was such a beautiful animal. I wasn’t quite sure if its destiny was going to be the soup pot or the illegal animal trade, but it was clear that it wasn’t going to be a family pet there. Anyway, one afternoon we went back to the house where we were staying for lunch. As we were slowing preparing the food (by this point we had run out of cooking gas, so we had to resort to the woodfire method, which greatly slowed down the whole process) I noticed that the turtle was gone. Tied to the string where the turtle had been just a few hours earlier were two pieces of paper. My colleague Antonio (the newest member of the Waorani Women’s Association technical team) picked them up and read them. One said, “Los turistas no pueden llevarse animals vivos de la selva o de los rios para afuera.” (Tourists cannot take animals from the rainforest or rivers). The other paper read, “ademas: hacer huecos en el caparazon de las Tortugas y charapas: les deule como si estuvieran hacienda huecos en los huesos” (plus, putting holes in the turtle’s shell hurts them as if you were putting holes en their bones). Wow. It turns out this very young German tourist/student who was hanging out at the house waiting for her ride had decided to “take the turtle for a swim” a not so thinly veiled excuse to liberate it. It was a seriously balsy move on her part. A part of me certainly empathized with her, I mean, I hated seeing the poor thing tied up. But, at the same time, it was, well, rude, and not so culturally sensitive. An ethical dilemma fo’ sho. One I have found myself in countless times here…trying to balance my strongly held beliefs that have been formed from a Western point of view…with the reality of a culture that has very different norms. This girls actions were clearly outside of those norms…and the Waorani were pissed. The guy spent a good part of the day fishing (WITHOUT using barbasco poison…so I can only imagine he was spear fishing) and brought back enough to share with the entire group, and then this chick messes with it and tries to make a political statement or something. I don’t know. Maybe those reading this from the comforts of an air conditioned office will think my logic is wacked (especially those that know me at all). But, life in the jungle is…different. In so many ways. It it has f’ed with my head, that’s for sure.

Around mid day on the last day we were in the community, I started feeling sick to my stomach. I took a break to lay down in my tent, which I think made me feel worse since it was so miserably hot. So I got up and walked to the ecological toilet that we built in May, which was at least 250 meters away…clear on the other side of town, essentially. Let’s just say that I used it more that day than the entire community had in 3 months. By late afternoon I was alternating between peuking and shitting (sorry, TMI!) Not a pretty picture…. Especially since the house I was staying in was basically an obstacle course. So, when I had a bathroom emergency, I had to unzip my tent, grab some t.p. walk across a wood plank from one elevated house to another, the climb down a steep, unattached ladder, and then dash off into the bushes (as there was no toilet at the house where we were staying)…all without trying to attract an audience. One time I didn’t quite make it and I projectile peuked in the bare dirt patch outside their house, which if it were in an American suburb would constitute the area we call a front yard. Nice. My crew kept fussing over me, asking if I wanted them to call to have the car come early to pick us up. I was determined to tough it out. But after the 6th time they asked me if they could call I gave in and handed them my phone. They walked off to the spot down the path where there is a rebar post where we could catch a faint cell phone signal. I went into my tent and passed out. The next thing I know, I hear a horn honking and a vehicle approaching. I scramble to find my headlamp and my watch. It was 12:15 a.m. The truck was there to take us back to Puyo. So, in the middle of the night, literally, we packed up our stuff and headed back. But not before my final peuk. Miraculously, I was fine the next day. But I decided—definitively-- that I did not like the pëne.

Meals on Wheels

2008-08-18T18:14:00.003-05:00

Yes, I'm back from my latest adventura adentro...and I will have a more detailed post of my adventures when I find the time to write. Until then, I urge you to read the recent New York Times article on fine dining in Ecuador. A must read. ¡Buen provecho!

Movie recommendation

2008-08-10T14:59:00.002-05:00

I watched the documentary "Death of Two Sons" this week (thanks to Rick & Mel who sent it to us!!!). Wow. Highly recommend it. Don´t want to give too much away...so just watch it! (and be sure to watch the special features interviews---especially the interview with the NY police officers´attorney.) Wow. That's all I can say. Wow.

off to the jungle

2008-08-09T13:10:00.002-05:00

Well, I am about to embark on another trip into the jungle...so no posts for the next week. Should be an adventure. They always are. Hasta pronto.

gracias

2008-08-07T14:53:00.002-05:00

Here's a big shout out of thanks to my pals at Dick's Den and the CHHF band who put on a kickass benefit show for us last night. You guys rock!!!! Half the funds will be put towards my better half's environmental education project here in Puyo. I will be putting my portion of the funds raised towards scholarships for Ecuadorian girls to finish high school.

Here's some background: many large Ecuadorian families cannot afford to send all their children to high school. Too often families will choose to send their boys over their girls. Thus, the scholarship program is really vital to gender equity here in Ecuador.

I just nominated a Waorani girl to receive a scholarship. She is an orphan and is living here in Puyo with her aunt. (Her father was Amo, a Waorani leader who was featured and photographed in the book Savages.) I am not sure how long she has been living outside the territory, but her Spanish isn’t very good so I imagine it hasn’t been very long. She seems to be still adjusting to life in a Spanish speaking city (all the while studying both English and Kichwa in her high school.) She is very shy, but very sweet and is excited to receive a scholarship so that she can continue her studies.

So, on behalf of my scholarship girl Janeth and all the other girls and me...THANKS!!! Cheers to all my dear friends who rocked out last night at Dick's!!! Miss you all muchisimo!!!!!!!!

the photos I couldn't post yesterday

2008-08-05T17:09:00.003-05:00

King International B&B

2008-08-04T17:37:00.006-05:00

Jer and I now officially run a B and B. We had no less than four guests stay with us last week, including one that stayed an entire week. This week we will have four more guests, from at least three different countries.

Here’s the breakdown: last week we had a young couple from Spain doing work with Jer’s organization who crashed on our floor. In exchange for the floorspace, they cooked us an authentic Spanish tortilla. Jason, a PCV from our group in town to work on a fish pond project also stayed one night. We put him to work doing dishes after dinner. He crashed in the hammock. Finally, Casey, a Peace Corps trainee, stayed with us all week in our guest bedroom. She will be working in Puyo starting in September doing work with the Ministry of Health on a malaria prevention project. We were of course a little nervous about sharing Puyo with yet another volunteer (we Peace Corps volunteers get territorial) but our worry was all for naught. She is awesome. She is smart and witty and she can deftly drop quotes from all the best movies into any conversation. We are going to get along swimmingly. In fact, while she was here we organized our first “Craft Night” Ecua’style. We made a bunch of wallets and change purses out of recyled drink boxes while we watched a movie. Our creations are rad. I am already looking forward to many more nights hanging out drinking wine and making crafts.

This week the King International B&B will hosting a girl from Bulgaria, a guy from Poland and two girls from Switzerland. Our guests from Poland and Switzerland contacted us through CouchSurfing a website which networks people looking for a place to crash while they are traveling, with people like us who like to meet new people and are willing to host backpackers from across the globe. It is what us Peace Corps Volunteers do…we host wandering souls. We have already hosted a couple of other people…one from Michigan and one from Ireland. It was kind of fun. In fact the girl from Michigan and I stayed up late chatting like we were old friends from elementary school. I hope to take advantage of being the guest when we travel to other parts of South America…

Speaking of couch surfing, last weekend Jer and I decided to take a little trip to see our Peace Corps pal, SBC (the other Susan). She has come to visit us numerous times, yet we had yet to visit her in her town of Guaranda in the Sierra. With one other volunteer in tow, we explored her cute town, played Speed Scrabble, watched Juno (again) and then had a slumber party (all four of us crammed in her room). The next morning, we headed to Salinas de Guaranda, a tiny town in the mountains famous (at least in Ecuador) for its cheese, chocolate and hand knit wool sweaters. What’s not to love? Sign me up! It was waaaaay up in the mountains…walking up the steep, quiet streets took my breath away (“Jer, macchu pichu is going to kill us” I kept saying). Even though it was cold and the air was thin, it was a refreshing change from the jungle. It is just so incredibly different. One of the really amazing things about Ecuador, really---that in a few hours you can leave the sweaty jungle and be bundled up with a scarf and hat gasping for breath in the mountains. Salinas was very tranquilo. Very pretty. Lots of striking images. Campesinos and their llamas and donkeys loaded down with shiny steel milk cans walking from the countryside to sell their milk to the cheese factory. A little girl in red rubber boots and a big pink hat walking with her equally cute black and white fluffy dog using a thick blue rope as a leash.

At the women’s weaving cooperative, I tried on at least a half dozen sweaters. They were gorgeous. I was prepared to buy two, but of course having that good taste that I do, I chose the hand-knit ALPACA sweaters, which were twice as expensive as the wool sweaters. I couldn’t afford both so I was forced to choose just one…and even that was difficult, as it was a lot of money on a Peace Corps budget. But, I rationalized (with the peer pressure of my pals) that it would be a good memory from Ecuador…plus a hand-knit alpaca sweater in the states would cost three times as much and very little would actually go to the artisan who labored for days on it…so I sucked it up and bought it. So far, I have zero buyers remorse. If anything, once I get home I will probably regret not buying more when I had the chance.

The ironic part is that we ended up spending almost as much on cheese as I did on the sweater. Good cheese I should add. Never will I ever take for good cheese for granted again. So... I donned my new alpaca sweater and we left Salinas with a backpack full of cheese and chocolate. A good day indeed.

the exciting conclusion of Adventures in Bameno (part II)

2008-08-01T12:25:00.002-05:00

(continued from two posts ago...)

Like so many overproduced tv show promos, the conclusion to my cliffhanger story is not nearly as exciting as the leadup. It turns out, that our little tangle with the logs was shortlived. Granted, it was a little hairy for a couple of minutes, but we eventually got unstuck, with the help of several Waorani jumping overboard and helping push the canoe. When the sun went down, it got really cold, and we kept motoring along. By some stroke of good luck, it was a full moon, and we were able to continue canoeing after sunset. It was a clear night, so the moon’s light was like a huge flashlight beaming down on the river. Because the river was wider and deeper further downstream, there were very few logs to dodge. So, what could have been a scary situation, actually was fine. At around 8:00 p.m. we stopped in the Waorani village of Boanamu to set up camp for the night. We were all relieved to get out and stretch our legs. The riverbank was extremely steep and muddy, which made unloading our bags in the dark challenging for uncords like me. We set up our tents inside one of the big, open buildings and I immediately crashed. Some of the Waorani stayed up to cook something (they are constantly hungry). I just wanted to pass out. Which I did. Very quickly.

The next day we had a lazy breakfast of ant sandwiches (ants got in our bread bag) and oatmeal drink before we continued our journey downriver another 3.5 hours until we reached the village of Bameno. We pulled up around noon. The sun was out and the heat was pretty intense, making the unloading a sweaty experience. I wasn’t feeling 100%, so I tried to take a powernap, but sleeping in the tent indoors was hot…very hot. I basically just sweated. I caught a couple minutes of sleep then spent the afternoon setting up camp and then the women had a brief meeting in the open air classroom on the banks of the Cononaco River.

The workshop was held in one of the school classrooms which was essentially an elevated wooden floor with a tin roof. The open air design made it nice for catching breezes. The building also had a nice view looking out onto the river. Before each lunch break we had to clean up everything we were working on because there was an industrious monkey that liked to raid our work area and steal stuff.

The workshop, like many of the others I have attended and helped with consisted of two Waorani women teaching the other women assembled how to make various types of handicrafts. For my part, I presented each of the women with a copy of the catalogue that I made which features a photo of each of the different types of handicrafts that are sold in the store. The women who live waaaay adentro were fascinated by it. Some seemed excited to learn how to make some of the different things they don’t already know how to make. I also gave yet another short presentation on the importance of making high quality handicrafts. I brought examples of good and bad quality items that I took from the store and showed them to the women and explained what was wrong with them (bracelet clasp was too loose, seed was damaged or put on backwards, etc). Finally, I also did some icebreaker activities with the women which was fun, albeit a little chaotic.

During the workshop, I took up my usual post distributing supplies to the women…mostly in the form of drill bits and needles…and coordinating the use of the cordless drills. Ciara, one of the Duke students who stayed on for the summer doing additional research came along for this trip along with two of her research partners and parents. Her dad was really helpful in making a little drillpress contraption out of a block of wood. It was great because it allowed us to drill the seeds more easily and safely than holding them between our fingers...which is tiring, not to mention dangerous.

For two of the days we were joined by two guys from Kansas City. They are backpacking across South America and are currently volunteering to help build tourist cabins in another Waorani community. I put them to work drilling seeds. They were great sports about it and spent many, many hours drilling away in the “sweat shop” as they called it.

Bameno touts itself as being the most traditional of all the Waorani communities. And I guess, in some respects that is certainly true. For example there was more than one “casa tipica” (traditional house) and there were a high percentage of community members that had the traditional perforated earlobes and wore tipica and some of the men still hunt with blowguns (although guns seem to be more commonly used). One of the last/only Waorani shaman live there, too. We went to his casa tipica one night to hear him tell stories and channel the jaguar spirit.

There were also many things that were far from traditional. For example, after their cultural presentation where the women and men wear their traditional dress (which is to say almost au natural) and dance and sing/chant, they decide to crank up the gas generator in order to power a radio which blasted horrible techno-cumbia music (which comes from other parts of Ecuador and the Andes and is arguably the worst music ever made) while the little kids gather round the t.v. to watch silent music videos of yet another genre of music which feature scantily clad Latinas grinding up against the moustachioed male singer. It was quite an image, really....the big boombox, t.v., dvd player set up in traditional thatch house with a dirt floor... The most annoying part of it was that they blasted the music until waaay past my bedtime, making sleeping difficult...especially considering we were sleeping in the same room as two dozen other people, including babies and chronic snorers.

The community of Bameno receives a fair amount of tourists. While we were there, at least two small groups passed through…including one that had a dramatic exit via helicopter. They were not on just any tour, they insisted: they were on an “adventure tour.” We of course thought that was funny and cynically remarked how our 12 hour bus ride followed by a 12 hour canoe ride was much more of an adventure than an hour helicopter ride.... Of course while we were making snarky remarks like that, we were each secretly jealous of their luxury ride and almost wished we could go with them.

Let’s see...other highlights of my stay in Bameno... I ate lots of huancana, which is peccary. It wasn’t bad. The Waorani also ate lots of monkey, but I got out of being offered some, which was a relief.

One morning I got attacked by a macaw while I was eating breakfast. The domesticated bird wanted some of the empanada I was eating and came after it/me. Those birds can really bite if they want to, but I got away unscathed by the bird, but burnt myself with the hot oatmeal drink I spilled on myself trying to get away from the damn thing. I am sure that it was a very funny scene to have witnessed from afar.

I was going stircrazy from sitting so long, so I asked some of the Waorani to take me on a short hike. Not 10 minutes into it, I slip off a log and submerge my leg in water up to my hip. No injuries, besides my ego. 10 minutes later we hear a noise that sounded like a tree falling. Both the Waorani man and the woman I was with stop in their tracks...both independently saying “tigre!” (which they tend to use generically for any of the cat species...ocelot, jaguar, jagarundi, etc). Holy shit! A tigre! My heart started to pound. We contemplated which way to go. We went a little ways on, then decided to turn back around and go back towards the way we came because it was getting dark. As we pass through the area where we heard the noise we see a newly fallen tree crossing the path where there wasn’t one before. So the noise really was a tree, not a tigre! I was disappointed

I also took a nice 3 hour hike with the Duke students and while they were taking GPS points for their community map. It was a really easy hike over mostly flat land. The only trick being having to cross some narrow logs that crossed high over a couple streams...yeah, those were scary.

Bathing while in the community was interesting. The big river had a pretty good clip to it, was chocolatey brown and said to be polluted from oil spills downstream. Two of the non-waorani in our group tried to bathe and wash their clothes in it, only to have a couple of their shirts get swept away by the current. I decided to forgo that option. The only other option for bathing then was between two rather stagnant shallow “springs” which was basically a small pool of water about shin deep. Here was my routine: I would strip down to my underwear and bra, dump water over my head and body to get wet, wash my dirty clothes on a board in the water, put on my wet (but “clean”) clothes, then try to get my boots back on without sliding in the mud and making the whole routine all moot. Once back to my tent I would hang up my wet clothes on a clothesline and change into dry clothes. I used to try to take my clean, dry clothes to change into after bathing but too often would get them dirty or wet during the process.

The last night we were there, I skipped out on part of the final despedida (goodbye) speeches and pulled up a student desk outside the classroom to gaze up at the night sky. It was an amazingly clear night, with no cloud cover. The sky was absolutely incredible. I don’t think I have ever seen so many stars in my life. No artificial light to pollute the night sky. Few places where you can find that anymore it seems. Within the first 30 seconds of stargazing I saw a beautiful shooting star sweep across the sky. I made a wish. I stayed out there stargazing with one of the students chatting, eating chocolate and sipping tea until the almost full moon rose and the clouds started to move in. We saw several shooting stars over the course of the evening. I made the same wish each time, after confirming that it wasn’t bad luck to repeat the same wish. We snuck in the back of the meeting just in time to give our obligatory speeches…thanking the community for hosting us, sharing their culture with us, …etc… After the speeches, the Waorani cranked up the radio and played music again pretty late…too late, because our alarms were going off at the ungodly hour of 2:30 a.m.

Yes, 2:30 a.m. I had turned my phone on in order to use the alarm to wake up our motley crew. We needed to get up at 2:30 in order to hit the river early, travel by canoe all day in order to get back to the bridge in Tiwino before sundown that same day. I had everything pre-packed, so that all I had to do was throw my clothes on, pack up the tent and go. The goal was to be on the river by 3 a.m. in order to get to the take out point at the Tiwino bridge by 6 p.m. The river is much narrower, shallower and loggyer…meaning lots of logs to dodge. Not something you want to navigate in the dark. I had been polling some other community members to see if that was possible and everyone assured me it was. In fact, they said that we didn’t have to leave as early as we did, but that was the plan that we had made (read: I) and we (I…and the other gringos) felt better leaving earlier rather than later. Packing the canoe was of course more complicated that anticipated. We thought that because we were not hauling the two tons of food that we would have more room in the canoe. Somehow, maybe because more people climbed on (not sure) it was still packed tight…and many of the benches (with backs) were gone. I was in the front of the canoe with the gringos and shared a wood board with three other people. After one false start, we pulled away from the banks at exactly 3:52 a.m. The first few hours were really cold and uncomfortable. All we wanted to do is sleep…(I mean it was 4 in the morning after all!!!)...yet there was no way to get comfortable. I was hugging a lifejacket just trying to find a place to rest my chin and catch a few zzzzs. Then I would lean forward trying to use the lifejacket as a pillow on my own lap. In the meantime, it was soooo chilly and I kept getting splashed, making me both cold and wet. When the sun came up we were more comfortable. We passed the hours bird watching…and chatting about our favourite books…travel recommendations…news from home. But more often than not we sat in silence, taking it all in.

I still had my emergency stash of food which I shared discreetly with my benchmates. I felt greedy hoarding it, but if I shared it with one Waorani, I would have to share it with all of them, which meant I would get basically zero of whatever it was I had. I learned that the hard way when on the way out I started snacking on a bag of peanuts mixed with raisins. One of the Waorani asked for some. I passed the bag back only to never see it again. I don’t mind sharing…I just didn’t have enough to share with everyone… We eventually dug the group food bag out and passed around crackers and cans of tuna. It wasn’t much, but it got us through the day.

We made only two stops to pee the whole day. Well, three if you count the time the motor died and we drifted to the side of the river and a few of the women hopped out while the motorista was fixing the motor. I successfully kept myself from freaking out about potentially be stuck on the river with a broken motor…talk about being up sh#t creek without a paddle… but we eventually got going back upstream. It was slow going…considering we were going against the current, with an outboard motor on the smaller size, given the size of the canoe and the weight of the cargo.

The highlight (good one, that is) of the return trip, hands down, was seeing a tapir in the river. It was only about a dozen few meters away from our canoe. I saw its head come up out of the water and we wizzed by. It was awesome…and incredible considering that I saw it, and others did not (that never happens!). Sooooooo cool.

The hours dragged on. Around 6 p.m. we started to wonder anxiously if we were getting close to the bridge…as we had well less than an hour left yet of light. When we asked the Waorani, we received a wide variety of responses from 20 minutes to 2 hours. 6:40 p.m.: the sun has set. We hand the puntero (the guy in the front of the canoe looking for logs) a flashlight. Despite the many obstacles in the river, the motorista kept going full speed ahead. We bumped a couple of logs, one pretty hard, and got brushed by some overhanging branches. 7:00 p.m. : it is now very dark, especially in the areas where it is densely forested. We can’t see anything. We keep going full speed. Finally, we spot the light on the tower near the oil installation in Tiwino. We all exhale seemingly simultaneously. We are no more than 50 meters from the take-out point…we can almost make out the shape of the tourist hut, when BAM!!!!! We crash into a log. Hard. We are stuck. The log was submerged, thus it wasn’t spotted. The middle of the canoe is firmly lodged on the log. Chaos ensues. Everyone has a different idea of how to get us unlodged. People are shouting and arguing about what should be done. The engine keeps revving, trying to back us out of the situation. We don’t move…we only start to spin. It was kind of sketchy. No, it was super sketchy. As Ciara’s dad commented, if the boat were to flip in this shallower water we would be in a world of hurt because the boat is so damn heavy. So, after about 10 minutes of arguing, the consensus was, finally, that anyone not carrying a child would get out of the boat and help push. So, we jumped ship. The water was only about hip deep and pretty cold with a pretty good current. We all gave a push and ungracefully dislodged the boat. It started to drift back downstream. The motorista fired up the motor to propel it back towards us, where we were then faced with the problem of not having an easy way to get back in the boat. It was super sketchy because we were doing all of this with the aid of a few small flashlights (including mine which was a crank one, that needed re-cranked every few minutes). We finally climbed back in the boat to go the final 50 meters to the sandy take-out point. As we unloaded our gear, we realized that the bus that was supposed to be there waiting since 6 p.m. to pick us up…wasn’t there. I wasn’t at all surprised. Thus commenced the blame game. It was a bad scene. The upshot is that Manuela—and many of the Waorani for that matter---have a very bad sense of time and dates. I had previously overheard her telling some people what day we were leaving the community and she was 3 days off. I sensed that this was what happened this time. We heard no less than three versions of what happened. One person said that there was a strike and the bus couldn’t pass (totally wrong). Another version was that the women in Puyo had called via radio to confirm the time we would be arriving and were told by someone (again, stories vary) that we would wouldn’t be getting in until the next day (this was closer to the truth). So, we were soaking wet, and stuck in Tiwino overnight. Thankfully, I had one pair of clean, dry pants to change into. Some of the other women were not so lucky. I felt bad for them… especially those that didn’t have tents or anything beyond a sheet or thin blanket in order to sleep on. The group was famished and went to order some food at what looked almost like a restaurant. They weren’t prepared for a large group so late at night, so they said it was going to take at least an hour to prepare (which meant longer) I bought a piece of stale bread and a tomato and made a sandwich and then went to pass out in my tent. I am glad I didn’t wait around, as they said it was only chicken foot soup. Cold at that.

The next morning there was a little more drama. The details really aren’t worth mentioning, though. The bus pulled up around 8 a.m. Those that were still loitering around the tourist hut loaded up...but half the group was out wandering around or something. We drove 5 minutes to the neighbouring community of Bataboro to pick up a few stragglers. We got off the bus and I was shocked at the changes that have occurred in the year since I had last been there. It was awful. I didn’t even recognize the community. The oil company appears to have extended its operations further south into the Waorani territory. The lush foliage that once enveloped the dirt road into the community was all cut down. The road had been widened and a bridge built over a river and a bunch of new houses…from ramshackle wooden houses to brand spanking new concrete castles were scattered along the road. Oil trucks and construction vehicles flew up and down the road. It was disheartening to see. Evidentally a bunch of Waorani from another community have moved to Bataboro to work for the oil company or just look for handouts. They say that the company is going to open up another big well much deeper into the forest, chopping and clearing or bribing everything and everyone standing in its way. The feeling in this community was just sooooooo different. The community is irrevocably changed. It was suddenly an extension of Tiwino which I always thought felt dirty, slimey, sketchy. Anything but tranquilo. Evidently there was a murder in the community while we were gone. There were no less than four different versions of what happened so who knows what the real story is. Lots of people were upset, though. Lots of speculation. I didn’t even try to sort through the gossip. I just got back on the bus and zoned out.

So, in hindsight, although the bus was a day late picking us up, it at least offered me a decent nights sleep laying down…versus trying to sleep in a bus on a very bumpy road. The rest of the trip was uneventful…and actually shorter than I had steeled myself for. I got off the bus in Tena and skipped the 6 hour detour. On the last leg of the bus I got sucked into a Japanese soap opera that was playing on the bus. Then they put on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. It has been years and years since I had seen it. Ahhhh…the famous dinner party scene where Indy and his girlfriend are served a variety of insects as well as monkey brain soup. I remember I was horrified and grossed out when I saw the movie as a kid. Now I think it’s funny. And I don’t know what that says about me…

Writer's strike

2008-07-31T14:18:00.007-05:00

I have been too unmotivated/lazy/stressed to finish my last story. I apologize to leave you all hanging... I have it almost done, but am just having trouble motivating myself to finish it.

So, I will instead post a public service announcement for the upcoming benefit show at my old stomping grounds: Dick's Den. Our pals in CHHF will be on the "big" stage and Noel will be behind the bar slingin' drinks and donating her tips to benefit our projects here in Ecuador. I am truly humbled by the generosity and kindness of our friends back home. You guys rock!!!! I miss you so much!!!!

Here's the details: Wednesday (my old shift...sniff sniff)
AUGUST 6TH FROM 7-9 p.m.
Dick's Den
2417 N. High Street
Columbus

They even made a flyer. Here 'tis:

so, if you live in the greater C-bus area, you MUST stop by and have a Labatt's Blue and a shot of George Dickel for me... and leave Noel a big fat tip.

Adventures in Bameno, part I

2008-07-26T13:47:00.003-05:00

I am back from my latest trip adentro and true to form, it was an adventure. Because you are now reading this means that I got back in one piece. Not to say that I am not totally exhausted and dealing with a particularly virulent sore throat and cold…but I am back…and I am happy to be back.

‘So, how did it go,’ you ask? Well, that is a somewhat difficult question to answer. Traveling and organizing anything with the Waorani is always challenging. See any post from my trips with them for exhibits a-q.

As with any of my stories of traveling adentro, more than half of the story is just getting there. True to form, this was the case this time, too. On the flip side, I lucked out and got to go with the taxi that was taking the gas for the canoes. So instead of leaving at 8:30 a.m. and spending almost 20 hours on the rented bus (which was making several stops, plus a 6 hour detour to pick up other women), I got to leave at 7:30 p.m. and go directly to the community, which was only about 9 hours (notice I say only 9. My perspective on time will be forever changed after this whole experience. Suddenly a 4 hour drive to our cabin in MD sounds sooooo amazing). Anyway, this was huge both for my body and my mental well being.
So, Edison our taxi driver friend picks me up at my house, we drive into town to look for Manuela (who was temporarily missing) and pick up the drill bits needed for the cordless drills for the workshop. We get out of town basically on time (30 minutes late constitutes on time here). As we were leaving Puyo, we get stopped at a police checkpoint whereby the taxi driver is asked for his documents. Just a routine check. A few hours into our trip, however, we are stopped again by what looked like military police. They wanted to know what we had in the back of the truck and where we are going. Edison answered that we had gas (true) and that we were going to Gareno (false). It was an innocent enough of a lie, as it was the closest Waorani community where canoes are used frequently…it just didn’t happen to be the community where we were headed. It wasn’t a big deal, it just made for a little less hassle from the police. Okay, I should back up a moment and fill you in with important background information that would make this little lie more relevant: there is a new micro-enterprise/problem where people are smuggling gas from Ecuador (where gas is subsidized and the price fixed at $1.48 a gallon) to Colombia (not subsidized = more expensive) where it is resold at a big profit. The government is trying to crack down on the gas smuggling in the northern part of the country by basically prohibiting sales of gas into gas cans unless you have a mountain of paperwork signed by the provincial governor himself. This evidently wasn’t an option for us. So, for our merry band of travelers, this meant buying gas in Puyo, hiring a taxi to drive our gas for the canoe motors 9 hours to the town of Tiwino. Sound crazy? Well, it is. (No, we couldn’t buy it in Tena and shave 2.5 hours of the drive. Why not? Because we don’t have credit there. Why couldn’t we pay with cash? Because, we don’t have it. Funding agencies do not send a check at the initiation of a project to spend as expenses arise. The Waorani run credit at certain stores and businesses, then have to turn in the bill to get it paid for by the funder. No credit, no dice, or in this case, no gas. It is a maddeningly inefficient, and in this case, expensive system.)

Okay, back to the road trip. I manage to curl up in the backseat of the cab and catch some zzzzzzzz. Then I wake up and we are at yet another military checkpoint. This time the cab is surrounded by three military police and they tell us to get out of the car and show our identification. This is about the time that Manuela remembers she doesn’t have hers. I am slow moving trying to dig out my ID, put my shoes back on, find my glasses. I finally hand the very unfriendly guy gripping the large automatic weapon my ID and he starts grilling me with questions, “what’s in the back of the truck? Where are you going?” Reflecting on our situation> we looked so sketchy. A taxi from Puyo with two huge barrels of gas covered by a tarp headed north in the middle of the night. Hummm… I started to panic, because a different military dude was simultaneously grilling Edison and I wasn’t sure what Edison was saying…if he was going to tell them the name of the actual community where we were going or some other random name or story. I was really fearful of contradicting whatever he said and risk getting us into some type of trouble, so I played the dumb gringa card and pretended to not understand what we was asking. No speak espanol. Thankfully I didn’t have to play this game very long because Edison had quickly completed his interrogation got back in the drivers seat and said “vamos.” No problem. I understood that. We all got back in the car and took off. Turns out Edison happens to be retired military. And, it turns out that they were searching for weapons not smuggled gas. Deep breaths.

At around 4:30 a.m. we stop at the newly installed military/Environment Ministry checkpoint. The station is new and is charged with trying to stop the flow of valuable tropical hardwood illegally logged from the Waorani territory (the flow of wood, incidentally, is headed to Colombia where it is processed and then too often it makes it to the U.S. as various final products). We asked if the busload of Waorani women had already passed on their way to Tiwino (our plan was to meet up with the bus at the bridge around 5 a.m.). The guys at the station didn’t seem to know what we were talking about. What? This was very worrisome, because that meant the bus had problems or something happened. We decided to push ahead. When we drove to the Tiwino bridge, we saw the big red bus parked along the side of the road. So if a huge red bus full of Waorani and a few random gringos passed through the checkpoint without notice without them noticing, how easy was it for the cunning illegal loggers? I don’t know what this says about the checkpoint system…but in their defense, there was a “shift change” at 4 a.m. and the previous guys might have dealt with them…but still……..sketchy.
At dawn, we unload the two tons of food and baggage from the bus and carry it down to the area where we would be loading the canoes. Except the canoes weren’t there. We took over the cute thatched tourist cabin adjacent to the river and hung out while we waited…and waited …and waited. About 5 hours later, the big wide steel canoe steered by Penti pulled up. No explanation was offered as to why he wasn’t there at dawn, as we had agreed. These are just one of the things that you just have to deal with in this line of work. Because a lot fewer Waorani women came than expected, we were able to cram into one canoe…which was great because there wasn’t another canoe. As gringos, we were offered the prime seats (with backs!) while the Waorani willingly piled in on top of bags and one another. We’re all set to go and then we are forced into yet another holding pattern. Evidently there was a part to the motor missing. Deja vous hits me again from my last trip where we were missing a critical part. Very luckily, this part was able to be found somewhere close…and we were finally off…at the crack of 11:30 a.m.
The plan was we were going to leave at dawn and go straight to Bameno, our final destination. The estimated travel time was 12 hours, which, if we left on time would put us there right at sunset. The late start put a bit of a kink in this plan. We didn’t want to be on the river after dark, and we didn’t want to have to camp on one of the beaches…which happened to be in what is called the Intangible Zone of the Waorani territory (mom & dad don’t freak out) which has been set aside for the Tagaeri and Taromenane, two “uncontacted” indigenous groups who live in voluntary isolation. Not unlike how the Waorani were before contact with missionaries, these groups are fiercely defensive of their territory. So, basically, camping on the beach was not a good option.
So, without really discussing any of this yet, we just pushed off and motored downriver. The weather was actually quite perfect. Yay! I’m not completely cursed with bad luck! It was partly cloudy, so the sun was not beating down on us. And there was no rain. The wildlife viewing was awesome. We saw a Harpy Eagle (very rare) several pairs of Scarlet Macaws, lots of parrots and tucans, Currasows (also very rare), lots of monkeys (mostly squirrel monkeys), turtles, Amazon Kingfishers, trogons, and lots of other birds we couldn’t identify. I am sure we would have seen a lot more animals had the loud canoe motor not scared so many away. Had it been raining, the trip would have been quite miserable. The hardest part was just getting comfortable. Despite the cushioning offered by my sleeping pad, my ass was aching after just a couple hours. There was just no way to get comfortable.
We kept motoring away, only getting hung up once when the engine cut out and we drifted into some branches and then got hung up on a log...

Can the canoe be unlodged from the tree?
Will the group be attacked by vicious caimans and boas?
Will our hapless heroine make it to Bameno and avert nightime attacks by the uncontacted tribes?

Tune in tomorrow for the exciting conclusion of Adventures in Bameno!!!

random ramblings

2008-07-14T18:01:00.002-05:00

A big thank you to all my friends, family and blogstalkers that bought tickets for the Peace Corps Ecuador Gender and Development Committee raffle! Thank you, thank you, thank you! I am excited to report that with your help, we raised over $12,000 which will provide more than 70 scholarships for Ecuadorian girls so that they can finish their high school educations. The funds raised will also support leadership camps as well as an important campaign to combat the increasing problem of trafficking and sexual exploitation of persons—particularly women and children. It was an amazing fundraising effort…with almost $1,000 coming in through a last minute push.

I wish I could say that someone I knew took home the grand prize of roundtrip tickets between the U.S. and Ecuador…but sorry, no dice. That prize went to Anne Nooney. But, Anne, if you’re reading this, please contact me! Let’s chat. : )

So, if you “didn’t get a chance/forgot/were to late/” to support our scholarship program through the raffle, you can ease your guilt through supporting another great project close to my heart: an Environmental Education guide for teachers that my hubby is writing (and I am providing critical moral support, editorial review and refreshing beverage delivery service while he works on it). It’s a great project…as the teachers here are desperate for these types of educational materials…and certainly the environmental ethic is lacking among large segments of the population here. He’s tailoring it towards the specific environmental challenges in the region, getting local teachers to review it and then will be providing training workshops to roll it out. Anyway, check it out support it with a donation, porfa!

Okay, enough of the ads. What have I been up to lately that I haven’t been too busy to blog…. Let’s see. The last few weeks I have been occupied with my work with the Gender and Development Committee. I had a lot of legwork leading up to the big raffle as well as dealing with budget and meeting planning issues for our little group. There were a few bumps along the way, but in the end, everything went swimmingly. My work with the committee has been one of the most rewarding parts of my Peace Corps Service. The group is great. Another VERY rewarding part of my experience, while I’m mentioning it, is my interaction with my World Wise Schools teacher and class at Unioto High School in Chillicothe, Ohio. The class has been learning about Ecuador…both studying on their own, and communicating with me through emails, letters, skype and even a Peace Corps sponsored phone call (we were one just a handful chosen worldwide to participate in the call). A cool experience for both all involved. A big public shout out of thanks to Mrs. Knipp for the awesome carepack!!! Awesome!

In other news, Jer and I snuck away for a (way too) short trip to the coast for a combo 4th of July/birthday/going away gathering for one of our PC Pals. BIG NEWS: I SAW A WHALE!!!! Yes, my friends, I went on a whale watching trip and actually SAW a whale. Not just one. I think I must have seen 50… or the same two whales 25 times…either way, it was SPECTACULAR! At one point they were only about 20 meters off the side of the boat. It was an awesome experience. I saw one do a huge jump/breach. Others seemed to be waving their flippers in the water like synchronized swimmers. It was mating season, so we saw lots of pairs swimming together and surfacing to spout their water at the same time. Okay, that description is less than eloquent, but I’m rushing to write this, so cut me some slack. We also went to Isla de la Plata, also known as the “poor person’s Galapagos” as you can see some of the same wildlife there as you can on the Galapagos, for about 1/10 the price. WE SAW BOOBIES!!! Blue-footed boobies, that is. And lots of frigate birds…sea turtles, a snake, some lizards… We went snorkeling off the island and saw brilliant Nemo-like fish as well as dozens of other unusual other-worldly looking sea creatures. It was a cool experience…just way too little time to spend in a place that took so long to get to…

So…speaking of places that take a long time to get to…I will be going to the Waorani village of Bameno this week. I don’t even want to think about how long this trip is going to take, or how many gray hairs I will get as a result of dealing with the logistics of this marathon trek. Let’s just say it is going to be by far my longest and deepest trip adentro yet. The Waorani Women’s Association is hosting another handicraft workshop... So, if this trip is anything like my last few trips adentro, I should have a 15-20 page blog entry...and will need another dye job. So, you’ll have to sit tight and wait till I get back…which won’t be until the 24th or so…to hear my latest exciting tale from the jungle. Wish me luck.

Zipline

2008-07-10T13:45:00.004-05:00

bus stop buddy

2008-07-03T18:36:00.005-05:00

Walking home from town the other day I ran across two little girls playing by themselves on a bench at a bus stop. Something compelled me to stop and talk with them. One of the girls, Jennifer (she pronounces it YENeefer) was five years old. She was precocious, friendly…in that nosey yet innocent way of asking a zillion questions (Where are you going? Why? Where do you live? How far? How old are you? How many brothers do you have? and on and on and on…). She had a high pitched squeaky voice. Below the hem of her jean skort, were two dirty, knobby knees. Her friend whose name I can’t remember was four years old. She was striking not so much for her light skin, but for her short, caramel-colored curly hair and wide set brownish-hazel eyes. It turns out Jennifer’s mom works at a local restaurant. Her sidekick’s parental unit works at the car seat re-upholstery place next to it. Evidently, the sidewalk and bus stop in front of the businesses was their self-managed daycare center. I played with them for a while, but, having grand plans of going for a jog, I said goodbye and started to walk on down the sidewalk... Or tried to, anyhow. The girls had other plans. They each grabbed one of my arms, dug in their heels with all their strength (which was significant considering their size) pulled me back towards the bus stop. They begged and pleaded for me not to go. After several unsuccessful attempts at detaching them from my arms and legs, I walked (with them still attached) back toward the restaurant where Jennifer’s mom was working, hoping for maternal intervention. No such luck. The owner of the local laundry mat who was chatting up the young mother, urged me to just take them with me. I jokingly asked them if they wanted to go with me to the U.S. (usually kids here are terrified of this suggestion) but these two readily agreed.

“But you don’t have your suitcases packed,” I said.

“We don’t need suitcases,” they replied.

“Well, you’ll at least need a coat, because it gets really, really cold in my country during the winter. We have snow there, you know,” I say to them teasingly.

All the sudden the little one detaches and takes off running down the sidewalk the other way. Jennifer was hot on her heels. Did the thought of snow scared them? This was my chance to make a break for it. But... I hesitated just a moment too long and both girls came racing out of some storefront towards me again. Each of them had a little sweater in their hand… ready to go with me...

piñatas and tarantulas

2008-06-30T17:15:00.002-05:00

Sorry for leaving my blogstalkers hanging. I haven’t had much time or energy to write of late. Let’s just say it has been a bit of a rollercoaster of a month. I will spare you the lowlights and instead recap some of the unusual or otherwise noteworthy (at least for me) highlights.
· My birthday. Gift #1: A HOT SHOWER! My hubby treated me to a night at a hotel in the quaint town of Rio Verde. It was the first hot shower I had had in quite a while and it felt GREAT. So great, in fact, I had to take two showers. Because I could. Gift #2: An hour long massage in Baños. Ahhhhh. It was awesome. To: me. From: me. Thank you very much. Gift #3: A penis shaped piñata. This was among the creative, funny and random gifts given to me by 15 Peace Corps pals who surprised me with a big party in Ambato (the revelers included my dear friend Andrea who traveled 10+ hours just to get there). It was an elaborately laid party plan that also involved a “Sra King Jeopardy” game. Three teams competed fiercely to answer deep questions about my life, like, what night of the week did I used to bartend in Columbus? (Wednesday). How many of my friends or family have gotten pregnant or had a baby since I’ve been in Ecuador (15). What candidate did I switch political parties to vote for in the 2000 Ohio Primary (McCain). What was my first car? (1979 Pontiac Grand Prix: the Green Pepper, pues!). It was a hoot. Gift #4: A 27 candle on my birthday cake. Complimented by multiple happy “27th” birthday signs decorating the house. It was awesome! I think I successfully convinced my pals that I was turning 27, rather than…well, rather than my actual age. Or at least they were kind enough to entertain my delusion that I am 27 again. I just love those guys!!! It was a great party and a great time. I was reminded why I am doing what I am doing: even through the really rough patches of my service I can count on my fellow volunteers to lift me up. They are all amazing people and I adore them all and am grateful for their sense of humor, their generosity…and their gullibility. : )
· Lazy Sundays. Anyway, after a late night of celebrating my “27th” birthday, the next morning we pigged out on Pumpkin Pancakes (the last batch we had been guarding for a special occasion) and watched a good part of season six of Sex & the City where I kept saying “they totally didn’t show that scene on TBS”. I was a late convert to the show since we never had HBO at home. I did catch a few rerun episodes on TBS, however, but it had to be censored so much for its lude content that it edited out too many pertinent plotlines and one liners more than anything. The SATC marathon got us (okay all the women and only one of my guy friends who was man enough to admit he liked the show) excited to buy the movie that just came out in theatres…and our friendly neighborhood pirated dvd store. No worries CT, we bought Indiana Jones, too, just to even out the estrogen and testosterone balance.
· Loja Province. Jer and I made our first trip to the southern part of the country last week. He was collaborating with two volunteers on the creation of an Environmental Education guide. I was tagging along to meet with my Gender and Development Committee Co-Prez to prepare for our next meeting where we will hold our raffle. Have you bought your tickets yet????? http://www.friendsofecuador.org/ (hint). The town of Catacocha where we stayed was really great. Clean. Quaint. Great Climate. Colorful, colonial-style buildings with small balconies. Beautiful views of the mountains. It happened to be the town’s fiestas , so we got to take in some local flavor while we were there. We attended a baile (dance) that took place in the street. It was sort of like a big block party. We befriended a group of middle aged ladies that were cutting a rug and forcing mini shots of Zhumir on everyone in our dance circle. We danced for hours on end…into the wee hours of the night/morning. The next day we all complained of sore legs from our gringo-style salsa moves (among other things). See the scienceking blog for more detailed information about the baile.

Two of the big events for the fiestas were motocross and a road rally…neither of which interested me much, but we watched for a little bit just to see what all the hype was about. We learned the motocross moms are every bit as intense as soccer moms. The PeeWee category (yes, they use that word in Spanish) of motorists consisted of what looked like 8 year olds. (8 year olds on motorcycles, god help us!) And men were drinking Budweiser at the race. I never know that was such an international sport either. Interestingly, the most popular spot to watch the rally was sitting on gravestones on the hillside above the road where little Mitsubishi or Suzuki or (heck I don´t know what brand) hatchbacks with souped up mufflers careened down the city streets. Hummmm… yeahhhhhh….

The highlight of the trip was taking a hike out into the countryside to try, albeit unsuccessfully, to scale one of the mountain peaks that overlooked the town. Once we got off the main dirt road and onto a narrow trail, we saw only one other human being: a lone campesino who plodded slowly on his horse across a wide green field in order to check on his cows. The scenery was strikingly beautiful…bright green pastures framed by dark green densely wooded mountains contrasting by a brilliant blue sky and occasional wispy bright white clouds. There was no official route to this peak, so our ascent involved crossing some fences and staring down some one-horned cows. As we dodged cow pies (some more successfully than others: Jer) we ran across a very large, very hairy tarantula. Whooooaaaaa. It was BIG. We of course whipped out the cameras to chronicle our wildlife encounter. Our friend Akul threw a coin next to it in order to provide prospective of how big it was. In his haste to capture the photo moment, he reached in his pocket and tossed the first coin he found. He happened to toss a Sacagawea dollar rather than, say, a dime. Possibly hoping to pocket this tip, the tarantula immediately moved towards it until it was basically on top of the coin. “Hey, you b*stard, I want my dollar back,” cried Akul. So, Jer, always the gentleman, grabbed a short stick and tried coaxing the tarantula onto the twig. Rather than casually crawl onto the twig, however, the tarantula jumped toward it, and him. Jer reflexively jerked his hand and stick away, throwing the tarantula through the air…and straight toward Akul’s crotch. We all let out a collective scream and quick stepped back away from the creature before doubling over in laughter once we were safely out of reach of the tarantula. Thankfully, Akul’s spidey senses were honed and he was able to jump back fast enough to avoid a pretty nasty bite to the balls. After its little flight through the air, the tarantula landed in the grass and immediately reared up on its back legs, baring its fangs, set poised to strike. Seeing a window, Akul darted around him and quickly grabbed his Sacagawea. The whole thing was captured on video…well, sort of. Andrea jerked the camera off the tarantula when it—and she--jumped, and mostly just got shots of the grass plus great audio of our screams and howls of laughter. Even so, it is good You-Tube material. Working title: the stupid things we do for a dollar.

Another highlight of the trip was experiencing my first real zipline. There is a little zipline park just outside of Catacocha that features a series of lines, some whizzing over the canopy of the trees. Other lines buzzed over some grazing cows. It was a very inexpensive adrenaline rush: incredibly, it was only five bucks. We got some awesome photos of us flying through the air on the zipline (to be posted later)

So, all in all, a great trip.
See photos!
share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=8AbOHLhy0cNGny

Jer and I were able to refresh our batteries after an otherwise draining and discouraging month. I also got to finish two really excellent books that I would recommend to anyone: Into the Wild (Thanks Toni, you’re the best!!!) and Water for Elephants. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome.

In more mundane news I thought I would report that …
WATER! WE HAVE WATER in our apartment! And lots of it!!! Yes, after almost 6 straight weeks without water, our landlord actually had some sort of tank with a pump installed so that we have a steady source of water (albeit cold, but I’ll take it! It is wet!) at all hours of the day and night…well, at least so far. I even had to turn down the pressure in the kitchen sink because it was gushing so hard it was splashing me. Never thought I’d see that happen. But, oh how exciting!!! (hey, it’s the little things that get me through the day!)

NEW LAUNDRY LADY! So on the domestic front, I now have a new laundry lady…and I LOVE her! She washes, dries, sorts, folds and wraps my clothes in plastic bags so they don’t get wet…all in one afternoon! And all without pestering me to go to her evangelical church with her, as my old laundry lady did. Plus, my new laundry lady is just at the end of the street…and she only charges 30 cents a pound…and my clothes smell good. I realize that this is cheating, that a real Peace Corps volunteer would wash their clothes by hand…but screw that. It is a little luxury that I am happy to indulge in.

PAVED ROAD! Yes, for some reason the local government decided to pave our road…not with asphalt, mind you…with nice octagonal pavers! Why they would choose our lame street waaay outside of town, when say there are streets in the center of town that aren’t even paved…well, that is just another mystery of this place we call Puyo.

photo moments

2008-06-29T11:56:00.007-05:00

Since I can´t post my written blog as I had hoped...I will instead post some photos from our trip to Tepapare (thanks to Ciara for sharing th pics)

Quiz: can you identify the Peace Corps
volunteer?

I hate windows 2007

2008-06-29T11:27:00.002-05:00

I typed up a nice long blog offline and then came to the internet cafe to upload it...but I evidently did it using Word 2007...and the internet place doesn´t have Word 2007.

So, when I tried to open it-- it looks like this: (/&%$·"¨Ç*^ Thanks a lot Microsoft.

(/&%$·"¨Ç*^ actually sums up my month pretty well. Hard drive on laptop: totally gone. New camera: broken.

(/&%$·"¨Ç*^

Tepapare part 2.2: the final exit

2008-06-15T19:33:00.002-05:00

Okay, here is the much anticipated and exciting conclusion of Susanita’s adventures in Tepapare! (warning: if you are viewing my blog for the first time, or haven’t read my previous few entries, this next post might not make a lot of sense, as it is part of a much longer drama. So, you’ll either want to go back and catch up on all the fun…or move along to a more interesting blog to stalk.)

So, let’s see, before I interrupted my tale to post a fundraising plea (thanks to the two of you who donated!), the storyline was going something like this: the Duke students and PC Volunteers were participating in a traditional Waorani dance on the last night in Tepapare. A good time was had by all. Sleeping that night, however… not so fun. Or not sleeping, I should say. It started raining really, really hard in the middle of the night, and once again my insomnia combined with my mephloquine muddied mind made my imagination go into a wild, weird hyperdrive. I started having visions-nightmares about the rising river level… seeing our projects being totally flooded…feeling my sleeping mat was wet because I thought the river had rose and flooded the house…then I started worrying that it was so flooded we would be stuck in the community for three more days and all the students would miss their flights (and so on and so on). My dilusions/nighmares were totally irrational…and completely and utterly exhausting. I didn’t really sleep at all.

When I finally got up at dawn and looked out towards the river, it actually looked lower than the day before—even despite the 6 hour steady downpour. I went and checked our projects and sure enough, they all survived. I breathed a deep sigh of relief. Wow, that was a lot of ulcer-causing worry for nothing.

We skipped a full breakfast and opted instead for a quick cup of coffee in between trips hauling gear to the riverbank. On my last trip carrying tools and miscellaneous gear, I see one of the canoes take off half full with Jeremy and Jeff and a random assemblage of Waoranis onboard. What?!?!? Why did they leave? Why did they leave without taking more gear and passengers? Why did they leave before the other canoe was ready to go? The canoes always travel together, right? There were no answers, however, because the only ones that could answer them were on the canoe that was already beyond the first bend.

After the first canoe abruptly left, we tried to finish up the final packing. It was all we could do. It was slow going, however, because there were soooo many people and sooo much stuff still left to load. As we were seated on our little wooden plank seats, I remember looking up and noticing that the Waorani watching us from the safety of the banks all had what looked to be concerned looks on their faces. This was not a good sign. About this time, my counterpart mentions that we are riding very low and that there is a greater chance of tipping…oh, and that it was going to be really dangerous. So, what was her recommendation? Ready for this?... To take out one of the metal cooking pots. What? Like, taking off one cooking pot is going to prevent an overloaded canoe from tipping ???!!! (Incidentally, the pot was the source of a previous stand-off and lingering consternation when one of the community members claimed that we donated the pot to them. We did not. They wanted us to give the cooking pot to them. We did not, as we could not: it belonged to the Waorani Women’s Association. They use it for all the workshops. Anyway, this overloaded canoe controversy offered my counterpart a convenient way of saving face and leaving the community with another gift). While this helped her political problem, the extraction of one metal pot from the canoe was not very pragmatic. It didn’t lighten our load in any meaningful manner. Yet, soon after it was unloaded from the canoe, my counterpart said that we would be fine. That was right about the time I started to get really stressed. I tried to get a straight answer from her: I mean, one minute she is saying it was too dangerous, the next she said it was fine. There was much confusion as to what to do next. Incidentally, I was sitting next to the one student who didn’t know how to swim. Raw fear was radiating off of him…and it was, quite frankly, freaking me out. Meanwhile, some of the bravest in our crew started voicing their own safety concerns. I finally made the executive decision that some of us would simply have to stay behind. We would just have to wait for the canoe to make an extra trip to come back and pick us up (I didn’t haul those gas cans all over Pastaza and Napo provinces for nothing!). The bus could go ahead and we could call my new friend Ricardo to pick us up in Meñepare and take us to the first public bus stop to get back to Puyo from there. It just wasn’t worth the risk of tipping the canoe (and Tyler too. sorry, that was stupid. Just couldn’t resist) and risking the unspeakable. My counterpart was very much against this plan…and this led to a strident exchange of words. I stood my ground. I got out of the canoe and I asked for volunteers who were willing to stay behind with me. I told the students who had flights the next day that they had to go, but anyone that had the time to spare and wanted to stay should stay. At least one (maybe two) Waorani, two students and three PC volunteers (including myself) got out of the canoe with a handful of gear. I figured we relieved the boat of probably 1000 pounds of weight. We got out, walked back up the riverbank and waved goodbye to our compañeros...silently wondering when or if we would see some of them again.

Those of us left behind took stock of what we had with us. A half dozen chocolate bars…3 cans of tuna… several packs of crackers… around $125 in cash…life jackets…a bunch of bananas…three cell phones (two of which belonged to guys that went in the first canoe)…and one book of matches. Well, at least we had the chocolate!!! So our motley crew settled back into the profe’s house to wait out the rain, snack on our food…and to wait for our ride. Thankfully, the students who stayed were super laid back about the whole thing, which was awesome. The last thing my stomach and stress level needed was to deal with some high maintenance students. Because it was raining, we holed up in the profesor’s house and plotted the two students’ trip across Ecuador.

Incredibly, the canoe came back to pick us up in less than four hours. I was prepared to wait most of the day, so the fact it got back so soon was a good sign and no less than a miracle. We asked the motorista if everyone got back to Meñepare ok. He enthusiastically said yes; that everything was fine.

Because we had so few things to with us, loading back into the canoe was quick and painless. By this time the rain had stopped and it was actually a beautiful day. Clearly staying behind and waiting was the better choice. I know I had previously made fun of the fact that the Women’s organization bought a ridiculously large 40 hp outboard motor to power a canoe. But given we were traveling at high water and against the current, the big motor was awesome. It was smooth and steady. It actually felt like we were on flat water, not a rapidly flowing river.

Not long after pulling away from Tepapare, we get the full story of what had happened to the first wave of travelers. It turns out, the motor on the first canoe (the one that left early and only half full) broke down. Seriously. We were told that canoe pulled over to the side and was slowly poling its way upstream, waiting for the second canoe to rescue them. Somehow all the gringos in the first canoe got in the second canoe (that my group had debarked from because of concern of overloading) and continued on downstream. All the Waorani and a bunch of the bags, however, were still in the stranded canoe somewhere along the river. Hummmm… interesting.

So, we were totally cruising back upstream. Well, we were cruising along until we came to the other canoe. There, it once again got a little hairy. The challenge was trying to get two canoes back upstream with just one motor (insert joke about being upstream without a paddle here). First we tried to, to borrow Roger’s phrase, “just make a catamaran out of the two canoes.” Uhhh…yeah. That didn’t work. By tying the canoes together side by side, they wanted to tip toward each other, threatening to dump all the passengers and contents in the watery wasteland between the two. Plus, they kept wanting to crash into one another, threatening to smash the fingers and hands and other body part caught between them. So we ditched that plan and we tried to tow the crippled canoe behind ours. That was even scarier, as the trailing canoe fishtailed all over the place, almost tipping the lead canoe. Plus, making any type of turn, even a wide turn, was next to impossible, and, well just plain dangerous. We finally settled on a hybrid type towing set-up whereby one of the Waorani guys was literally straddling the somewhat staggered canoes (such that we weren’t quite side by side, but not totally towed either). It actually sort of worked. With the added weight and navigational challenges posed by the canoe towing, however, our travel speed slowed considerably. Like, to a crawl. I remember looking at the side of the river and thinking that if only there was a clear path along the bank we could have easily walked faster than the speed of the canoe caravan. This made the rest of the trip really drag on, especially since we were zipping along so fast at the start.

The minutes dragged into hours. At one point, the motorista confidently shouted to us,“We’ll be there in 20 minutes.” Roger and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes. Yeah right. Ya mismo. That started a very serious bit of bantering on when we would actually see the bridge where the bus would be waiting for us. We stared intently at my watch and decided to make a wager. The bet was big: not one, but TWO, ice cold beers to the person who guessed who was closest to the time we would spot the bridge. Roger guessed 1:55. Someone said 2:25. I said 2:16. One of the students said 2:22… We all stared ahead. Every bend in the river looked like the one that would be the one that led to the bridge where the bus and the rest of the group would be waiting. Then all the trees and all the bends started looking the same. It felt like we would never make it back. Then, at 2:22, a full 40 minutes after the “20 minute warning” we spotted the bridge. A cheer went up among those of us on the canoe, and those assembled along the river bank and on the bridge. We made it! We finally made it onto dry land! Hooray! I thought the rest of the crew was going to hug us. Instead, they buzzed past us and went straight for the food bag, as they were all starving.

So, in the end, even after all of my stress and worries and fretting, we completed our projects, nothing was destroyed in a flood, no one was bit by a snake (or a penis fish), no one was left behind, the canoes didn’t capsize, no one fell out, AND we all actually fit on the mini-bus that drove us out of the jungle back to Puyo. We were piled on top of one another, of course, but we wouldn’t have it any other way.

pardon the interruption

2008-06-11T12:25:00.000-05:00

For those of you who are visiting my blog to read the exciting conclusion to my adventures in Tepapare…well, you’ll just have to hold on tight (but it will be worth the wait, I swear!). We are interrupting this irregularly scheduled program for a public service announcement: PLEASE SUPPORT THE PEACE CORPS GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE by purchasing tickets for our raffle…With your purchase not only will you be helping deserving Ecuadorian girls finish high school, but you will also have a chance to win FABULOUS prizes like AIRFARE to visit me in Ecuador! (I also helped to line up some pretty fantastic prizes here in Puyo!) I’ve had a little advertisement on my blog for quite awhile (many thanks to my personal blog engineer Hannah) but precious few of you have actual donated to this super duper worthy cause (I get the list of who’s donated, so I know who has helped the sisters out!) Donate now at: www.friendsofecuador.org!!!

Here’s the deal gang, I’m Co-President of the Peace Corps Gender and Development Committee. I can personally attest to the amazing work this group does and put my good housekeeping seal of approval on its activities. 100% of the funds go straight to the girls. We are trying to raise $15,000 to provide scholarships for over 80 Ecuadorian girls to finish high school (p.s. it is not free!) and to hold an amazing leadership camp for the girls (see my previous blog post about Camp ALMA). I really need help from ALL my blogstalkers to meet this goal. So please don’t let me down. Puuuuuhhhhhhlease donate! Go to www.friendsofecuador.org ASAP and make a donation to the GAD-Anti-TIPS raffle. It is a secure site sponsored by Returned Peace Corps Volunteers who are helping to support development work in Ecuador. Thanks in advance for your generosity.

So, in lieu of that belated birthday package you were going to send to me, I will happily, eagerly, and graciously accept your kind donation to GAD. As much as it pains me to turn away Take 5 bars, I really do want you to donate to GAD instead. Seriously.

Oh, and I promise to provide ya’ll with the exciting conclusion to my Tepapare tale tomorrow (or after you donate to GAD). Plus, the more my blogstalkers donate, the more time I’ll have to devote to blogging instead of fundraising for GAD. Gracias!

part 2.1

2008-06-07T11:20:00.005-05:00

Well, we all survived the second trip adentro with the Duke students. It, of course, was an adventure with a fair amount of outtakes, bloopers and of course a little bit of drama. It just wouldn’t be a trip to the jungle without these critical elements. I’ve debated how many of the details I will share to the world, and I guess I am still not quite sure how much will actually make it to the blog. It likely will depend on how much time I actually have to devote to chronicling all the craziness. So, strap yourself in, this is going to be a wild ride.

So, like every major trip, the adventure starts with loading the bus. We opted for a full sized bus for this trip because we were hauling in a lot of supplies, food, and of course gringos and their oversized backpacks. The student loaders showed up on time and we got the first round of loading done fairly smoothly. We were not hauling a concrete bathroom floor this trip, so that helped. However, my counterpart decided that we were going to haul the new outboard motor to power one of the canoes. A 40 horsepower outboard motor, I might mention. The thing was huge…and freaking heavy. It took at least three guys to haul it down the three flights of stairs and load it into the back storage compartment of the bus. After it was loaded we started bickering about whether it was necessary to take the stupid styrafoam that cushioned the engine in the box (my vote was vehemently no, as it would inevitably get destroyed en route and break off into a million pieces that would litter the road, community or river). Then someone realized that the cuerda roja was missing…basically the key to the damn motor. Meaning, without it, we couldn’t use the motor. This redirected attention from the Styrofoam to the fact that we couldn’t use the motor without the key. Accusations flew about what had happened…that the company that sold them the motor didn’t include it, that the guys who hauled the motor to the office took it…blah, blah. All the talk wasn’t getting us any closer to getting to the community. I direct the bus to go and pick up the gas for the motors and the food for the trip before swinging back by the office to pick up the Waorani stragglers. While the office was calling the company that sold it and other businesses around town who might have the part, I hedged our bets and called my friend Mary to see if she could help locate the part in her town of Tena. Two hours after starting the loading process, the bus swings by the hostal where the students were staying. And, of course they were not ready yet. Their stuff was strewn throughout several rooms and they were sitting around singing and playing guitar. At least one of the Waorani griped about the fact that they should have met everyone else at the office. Wow. That was a role reversal. Anyway, we waited around for them for a while, then had to circle the block downtown as they rushed around getting last minute things. In the meantime, I am passing my cell phone to our motorista (canoe driver) so that he can talk to a taxi guy in Tena who is driving my Peace Corps friend around looking for a red cord key to our motor. At one point a cheer went up at one point when we thought the Tena crew had found the cord key…but it turned out to be a false alarm. The store simply knew what they were talking about, they did not actually have the part in stock. So, almost exactly 3 hours after the bus loading began, we began our trip. 15 minutes out of Puyo and I lose my cellphone signal, and all contact with my cord key search crew. About 2 hours later, we arrive in Puerto Napo (aka choco-banana land) and meet up with the last two members of our crew, who were unsuccessful in finding the cord key. So, we go to plan C: drive to the town of Misahualli to see if they happen to have a cord key. My friend Mary happened to have a contact there who she thought might be able to hook us up. Sure enough, we find Carlos, and he happens to have the part we need. $15 and 15 minutes later, we were on our way again. Well, almost. We first had to herd the students away from the central park where monkeys were roaming around and get them back on the bus, only to go about 10 meters to where the bridge crosses the wide and high Napo River. It was there that we realized that our bus with the big 250 liter water tank on top was not going to clear the overhead electrical wires. We stop and some of the guys get out to eyeball the clearance. It was clearly not going to happen…so a couple of them climb on top of the bus to untie the water tank so we can carry it across the bridge, and then re-tie it. As they are doing this, a police car comes up and tells us that we all had to get off the bus and walk across the bridge, as it was overweight. Uh, no problem. I was already going to volunteer, as I was not entirely sure buses were even supposed to use this bridge. We scoot across the bridge before the bus and wait on the other side. The bus barely crosses onto the other side before it stops and the driver gets out and starts to re-tie the water tank. Meanwhile a truck is stuck behind the bus on the bridge, waiting for us circus clowns to get back on the bus. Then…all the sudden, the bus starts rolling backwards toward the bridge and the truck waiting on the bridge. The students start pouring off, clearly freaked out. The bus driver yells down, “put some rocks behind the tires.” Uh, yeah…as if some puny little pebble is going to stop this big bus and all its weight from rolling backwards… Then, quick as lightening, our friend Roger puts his skills as a former firetruck driver and schoolbus driver to work and sets the emergency break. Crisis averted. So, Mary helped saved the canoe motor and Roger saved the bus.

The rest of the bus trip was mostly uneventful, save for the surreal showing of the movie on the bus about the Waorani made by the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Once we unloaded the mountain of stuff in the community where we would be spending the night we realized that we had too much crap to fit into two canoes and would thus have to make one extra trip to send our stuff downriver to the community where we would be working. This meant we had to load a bunch of our stuff BACK onto the bus (much to the bus driver’s delight) and take it to the bridge over the Dayuno River and load it into a long dugout canoe. The whole process was labor intensive. The Peace Corps crew did the bulk of the heavy lifting while the Duke crew set up camp and started the arduous task of cooking over a wood fire. We then took a field trip to survey our work sites to see how they fared during the intervening week (conclusion: it rained a LOT this last week). After dinner the crew hung out together and munched on chocolate bars (we learned the hard way after the first trip to bring more sweets) and listened to the guys sing and play guitar before calling it a night.

I was on breakfast duty the next morning which involved boiling water for hard boiled eggs, coffee and oatmeal. Getting the big aluminum pot of water to boil over the wood fire takes at least an hour. In the meantime, the president of the community invited us over to at first see, and then later taste his catch from his late night fishing expedition en route back from dropping off our supplies. When the cry first rose up to see a caiman, I had naively, but genuinely hoped to see a live caiman. But, like so many other rare animals I’ve seen in Waorani territory, this one was not viewed from a safe distance in its natural habitat…rather, it was very dead and being prepared to be consumed. The group was both intrigued and grossed out. But not enough to not at least try a piece, which one of the students described as “ficken,” meaning sort of like fish and sort of like chicken. From snout to tail, it was probably two meters long. First the caiman was placed intact on the fire. Later it was chopped up and boiled and then served on leaves with plantain and manioc (yucca). Some of the guys went back for seconds. Others ate one bite just for bragging rights. Like so many times over the past year, I felt a little conflicted. On one hand, the Waorani (and in this case Kichwa) are hunting to eat and essentially survive. On the other hand, I don’t want to encourage overhunting or killing any species that is threatened by consuming it myself…and then there is the cultural element where it is considered rude to refuse to eat at least a little bit of what we are offered… Ahhhhh the conflicts in my cabeza….

We loaded up the canoes and got off on the river without any major hitches. I was worried that the river was high, but the Waorani actually prefer to travel when the river is high, as it means you don’t have to worry as much about logjams because they are all submerged. It started to rain just about the time we pushed off. Sarita, one of the women from Meñepare sat in front of me, a plastic bag covering her infant boy that she held in her arms. At one point, I worried that she had it on too tight and that the makeshift poncho would suffocate the poor baby. Incredibly during the entire two weeks we were around her and her baby, I can’t ever remember hearing him cry. He was constantly at her side. She traveled with him, worked with him, cooked with him while he was tucked in a sheet that crossed her body and tied at her shoulder.

The trip to Tepapare in motorized dugout canoe took under two hours. It was relatively quick, yet still enough time for our asses to go numb from the pieces of wood or plastic buckets we were sitting on. Tepapare sits on the banks of the Dayuno River (as the Wao call it) and is made up of just a handful of thatched roof houses, a one room school building and a small wooden, tin roofed house for the teacher. The community is the epitome of tranquilo. This trip definitely confirmed it as my favorite Waorani community I have visited. One of the reasons I like it so much is because the centerpiece of the community is not a noisy oil road or the imposing gap of a long pista (runway) carved out of the jungle: its “centerpiece” is a bend in the river.

The Dukies took over the schoolhouse and the PC crew took over the profe’s house. Sadly, the teacher (or profesor, as they call them here) had not shown up, so, there just weren’t any classes this school year. It is hard for all of us to fathom this fact. That these kids would lose an entire year of education because the teacher simply didn’t show up. Pero, asi es la vida en la selva.

The rain had cleared out and we had a beautiful partly-cloudy afternoon to set up camp. Some of the Dukies started to work on the installation of the water tank that would hopefully capture the rainwater for drinking purposes. In the meantime, we had to haul a lot of water from the little stream to the kitchen area for cooking purposes. We also had a bucket brigade to haul a lot of water from the big river to a tank by the school’s bathroom, which consisted of a porcelain god, but no water source, thus the need to have water in order to flush…likely right back to the river, as who knows if any type of treatment or septic system was installed in the clayey soils of the amazon…

We also scoped out the area where we would like to build the composting toilet and traditional Wao house. We found the perfect spot where a house used to be, so it already had a flat cleared area. It even had a small live fence of bright red plants framing the back part of the site. It was absolutely perfect, as it was just off the main path to the small stream and would require little to no clearing (which is what was so labor and time intensive—and controversial in Meñepare the week before). The women showed me where they had started a seed bed for the nursery. It was a little far removed from the construction site, but not a bad start.

While the PC guys started to mix some concrete to pour the floor of the composting toilet, we had a little community meeting to introduce the students to the community and to explain more about what all we would be doing during our minga work trip. The students had hauled a bunch of wooden desks out of the school building to make room for their tents, so we moved the desks into a circle on the grass outside the school for our discussion. It was a cool scene: a mix of wide-eyed gringo students and wide-eyed waoranis. One of the things I love about the Waorani is their ability to laugh. They are laughing, and seemingly happy, all the time. This of course cuts both ways, as sometimes that means that they are laughing at us. But, even so it is refreshing (and to be fair, we do some stuff that I am sure is ridiculously funny to them).

One of the best things I did for this trip that I had wished I had done for our previous trip in Meñepare, was to make a kitchen duty list. We quickly found out in Meñepare that some people bore the brunt of the cooking duties, while others skated by without helping prepare food or clean up. There were more than a few food tensions in Meñepare. As I have mentioned before, cooking in the campo is freakin’ hard. It easily takes two full hours from start to finish to make enough food for around 40 people using a wood fire. It kind of sucks, actually. But, we were working up serious appetites, and nothing is worse than a hungry, grumpy gringo. So, the kitchen duty list helped to spread the responsibilities around more equitably and ensure that food was actually prepared.

The first full day of our minga started a little slow. It was sort of like herding cats. No one could stay in the same general location long enough to get instructions and get organized. Tensions briefly flared between my counterpart and me, but we eventually worked through them by essentially working separately. She led a team that was transplanting palm seedlings. I led the team that was working on preparing the beds for the plant nursery. It required clearing a little space, hauling sand from the stream, scraping topsoil and digging organic matter from composting treetrunks, mixing the soil, filling the bags for the chambira palm seeds. I had a good team of Waorani women working with me and we had a good time. I really enjoyed hearing all the parrots and other birds flying overhead and flittering around the trees while we worked. It was hard, but gratifying work. I led them in a made-up cheer-chant: “equipo vivero! ¡equipo vivero!” that we belted out periodically, often after small victories, like finishing off another bag of nursery bags. The women were funny, they joked around and flirted with my PC pal, Jeff, who was suddenly Ñahuare’s boyfriend. Ñahuare is a grandma, and Jeff is in his early 20’s, but whatever.

Jer led a team that was constructing the composting toilet. He had modified the design so as to be able to pour the concrete in the community, allow it to dry several days while he built an alternative bamboo base where the floor would later be placed. That team struggled a bit with locating wood pieces that the Waorani would let them use or cut…and that they would not later say that it wasn’t good wood that would rot easily.

Another minidrama was the fact that one of the Waorani guys was hurt and required a trip to the hospital. We weren’t sure what he had…his arm had tensed up and his hand was clenched in a fist and he was in excruciating pain. It was a difficult situation to be in, because the students wanted to help him and just collect vital stats, but we knew we had to be careful, as despite basic EMT and wilderness first aid training, we couldn’t treat him for a variety of complicated cultural reasons. So, we sent him on a canoe with a couple other Waorani guys to seek professional or shamanic medical care. Watching the only canoe with a motor pull away from the banks of Tepapare made me a little nervous. The canoe would be coming right back---with the back up gas---but it still was a little unnerving. I cautioned the kids to be careful wielding their machetes over the next few hours. After observing them over the last few weeks, I concluded that they were definitely more susceptible to self-inflicted injury than anything a snake or the widely feared (at least among the Duke guys) “penis fish” could do to them.

The second full day in Tepapare, one of the students woke up feeling sick. He had been feeling crappy for a few days, but he had basically said he had had enough and wanted to leave. Given that we had made two extra unplanned trips in the canoe (one for delivering supplies, the other for getting the Woarani guy out). We had bought lots of extra gas for such potential unanticipated issues… but another round trip meant we would be cutting it uncomfortably close on gas supplies for when the entire group was to leave on Monday. This was complicated by the fact that when the first medvac left, the Waorani couldn’t open up my lock that was guarding the gas reserve in Meñepare. I guess it entirely wasn’t surprising. The guy had never used a combination lock before that. I had explained the process slowly two or three times and wrote the numbers on a piece of paper, but he didn’t get it. I had flashbacks to seventh grade and the sweaty hands and elevated heart rate when trying to quickly open the narrow hallway lockers in the three minutes between lunch and Ohio history class. The canoe had returned without the extra gas, meaning there was enough for one more round trip in one canoe, not two. Meanwhile, the radio in the community wasn’t working…and the kid wasn’t grave enough to warrant trying the emergency satellite signal. So, the options left basically boiled down to: A) everyone leaving with the gas we had left, ditching our unfinished projects and cutting short a trip that the students had been planning for more than six months; or B) me leaving with the student in the one canoe, traveling to Meñepare to unlock the combination lock, sending the canoe back to Tepapare with the reserve gas, hitching a ride from Meñepare past the oil company control gate to the first bus stop, riding the bus back to Tena (2 hours) or Puyo-Shell (4 hours), cabbing it to a hospital, translating for the student, getting him settled and then buying more gas and supplies, contracting a truck to haul them back to the river, hiring a canoe driver to take me back to Tepapare…just in time for the group to pack up and leave to come back out.

There really wasn’t much debate. I chose Option B. So, we mobilized quickly to get the student’s stuff packed up and the canoe ready to go. I steeled myself for the long, arduous trip ahead of me and bid farewell to my pals. I checked my watch. It was 9:32 a.m.

The canoe seemed so empty. It was just four of us: the student, me, the motorista Nenquimo, and a boy about 10 years old who was serving as the puntero spotter at the front of the canoe. The water level had dropped dramatically and it became immediately obvious that getting back to Meñepare was going to be very slow going. Once we decided on plan B, we had rushed around to load the canoe in hopes we could make it to Meñepare in time for the oil company truck to pass through at noon. Once we were on the river, however, those hopes were quickly dashed, as Nenquimo had to slow the motor every other minute to navigate the canoe to avoid hitting a log or other tree snag. At several points he had to hump the motor up out of the water to avoid hitting the rocky streambed. We were going against the current, and as soon as the motor was cut, the canoe stopped its forward progress and sometimes started floating back downstream. At a particularly shallow point, Nenquimo got out and started to push the big, heavy canoe and its 40 horsepower engine and passengers against the shallow yet swift current. At the same time, the boy in front got out a long pole and dug it into the riverbed, putting all 60 pounds of his body weight against the flow, lurching the canoe ahead a few inches. We were going nowhere fast, so I grabbed the other pole, braced my bare feet against either side of the canoe, balanced myself, and then plunged the pole into the riverbed. I leaned into the pole with all of my strength, inching us forward. It was no small miracle that this normally clumsy, gangly gringa didn’t fall in. I think I actually helped get us through not one, but two very shallow runs on the river. After each effort, I collapsed on my seat, out of breath and exhausted. It was incredibly hard work to move the boat a few meters upstream. Oh what a photo moment it was…but we left the freelance photographer back in Tepapare. Oh well, the memory will be forever etched in my brain.

I think we all breathed a big sigh of relief once we had our feet on dry land. We got off the river around 12:30, too late for the 12 noon truck. But as I was climbing out of the canoe, I hear an engine. I scramble up the riverbank and flag down a beat up purple chevy nova-like car that somehow survived the 1970’s. The guy was not eager to give me a ride, but I charmed my way into getting him to drop me off at Fausto’s house (president of the community, aka caiman killer) at the end of the oilroad. Fausto wasn’t there, but was going to be back ya mismo. Great. The creepy guy in the purple car disappeared. Then, before I could freak out, a big truck comes by carrying Fausto, his wife, and a truckload of lumber. It just so happened that the truck would be driving past the first public bus stop on the oil road and we could catch a ride and I wouldn’t have to try to make a one-bar signal cell phone call in order for this same dude to make an hour long round trip taxi ride to pick us up and take us to the bus stop. We were crazy lucky with our timing. Days could go by without any cars driving by. Two vehicles on the road within 5 minutes of each other meant a veritable traffic jam in Meñepare. As the men unloaded the wood, I did some quick thinking and plotted my return trip. I negotiated for the same truck driver to bring me back to Meñepare on Sunday morning, and then for Fausto to give me a ride in his canoe from Meñepare to Tepapare. It was going to cost a pretty penny for one person, but it was at least doable. The student and I hopped into the truck and we were off. Ricardo, the truck driver, was somewhat aloof at first, but warmed up once we got chatting. I had a lot of adrenaline flowing which made my Spanish flow, too. It turns out, Ricardo knew some former Peace Corps Volunteers back in the day. In fact, a volunteer named Daniel is the godfather to one of his kids. Wow… just another one of those crazy cool small world things. He turned out to be very nice and very insightful. We had a very interesting conversation on our ride. He drives the truck every Friday into the Wao territory and takes them to the market in Santa Rosa. The Waorani men usually carne de monte (bushmeat, including endangered species) they have hunted to sell at the market where they can also buy a variety of food. The Waorani have few other sources of income. That’s why the artesania project is so important, as the women at least have some way of making some money—mostly for medical treatment and clothes for their kids. Meanwhile, the men too often proceed to spend all their money from bushmeat sales to buy a bunch of booze, get wasted, then (as some of the Waorani women will attest) go back in the same company-sponsored truck to the community and proceed to be belligerent and sometimes beat their wives and kids. This is another big difference between the Waorani communities near the oil installations, and those that are still fairly remote, like Tepapare.

Once we get to the first bus stop where there also happened to be a strong cell signal, I called my Volunteer friend in Tena to see if I could crash at her place, and at least give the truck driver a specific location in which to pick me up on Sunday morning. Done. The bus stop had a small store by it, and the student and I bought refreshingly ice cold water and then baked in the hot Amazonian sun waiting for the bus. We must have been quite a sight. My Crocs and lower pantlegs were covered with mud and my arms were adorned with black painted designs that the women did…war paint, so to speak. The student had no less than 3 big bags and I had 3 big empty gas cans. When the bus rolled up, it was overloaded with people and cargo, a common occurrence along these campo routes. They tied the gas cans on top of a pile of other goods headed to the Tena market. The bags were piled on a bunch of produce in the front part of the bus. Thankfully, and no less than miraculously, the student got a seat. I was forced to stand for the first hour of the long and bumpy journey, which I was okay with. As I said, I had steeled myself to deal with a long, uncomfortable trip. I have found that I have adapted the ability to put myself in a zone to just deal with whatever comes my way…well, sometimes. There are a few notable exceptions, which I’ll get to later.

Around 4:30 or so, we arrive at the bus station in Tena. We debated going to the so-so hospital in Archidona, just outside of town or to get on another bus to go another 2.5 hours to Puyo to the good hospital in Shell. We decided to go to the closer one and see how it was, and if we didn’t feel comfortable with the care there, we would head back to P-town. Oh, if only there was a camera to chronicle us pulling up to this hospital with all our bags and gas cans. I left my gas cans outside the entrance to the hospital. Okay I just cracked myself up after typing that last sentence. I laughed so hard I have tears in my eyes. Who in the history of the world has ever written that, much less lived it too? If I tried to do something like that in the U.S. I would have been arrested on terrorism charges or something.

Okay, so the hospital felt eerily like a movie set of a hospital in 1967. Metal hand crank hospital beds. Mercury thermometers. Nuns in full habit roaming the halls. Nurses still wearing white hats, skirts and shoes rather than colorful kittycat and balloon patterned scrubs. It was surreal. The student got immediate care by both a nurse and a doctor. The doctor suggested that he stay and get an IV put in because of his dehydration. Rather than immediately go that route, the kid decides to call his parents, and I call the PC medical office to get some advice. Peace Corps said unequivocally to go to the Shell hospital, as it was the best in the region…which basically left us to fill in the blanks as to how stellar this particular hospital was. The ‘rents concurred. So, we got our bags and our gas cans and left. Incredibly, we were in and out of the hospital in less than 45 minutes, and were not charged a penny for the “services.” Now that is something would never happen stateside.

Back at the Tena bus station, I have the brilliant idea of leaving my beloved gas cans with one of the companies in order to pick back up tomorrow. I buy tickets from the same company and then make my way to the bus. The student throws two of his bags in the storage compartment then says he has to hit the john. I hesitate because the bus was to leave any minute, but because the kid was sick and I would be sharing the adjacent seat over the next 2.5-3 hours, I tell him to go, but “run like the wind.” I climb the stairs to the bus and find that the bus is totally packed with people. Every seat is taken and there are people in the aisle from front to back. I had bought a ticket, which is supposed to entitle me to a seat…which happened to be the next to last row. I immediately feel cheated, as sometimes bus companies have the less than cool practice of double selling seats. I take a chance, and push my way through the aisle to the back of the bus, earning quite a few scornful looks and spiteful comments. I get to seat 34 and ask the guy in it if he had a ticket. He didn’t. He reluctantly gets up and gives me my seat. I sit down and then the bus revs its engine and takes off. Shit!!! Where is the student? I yell towards the front of the bus asking if anyone sees a gringo…he’s tall, pale, probably looks lost. I freak out and worry that he is still in the bathroom and will miss the bus with all his stuff and his translator. Then I worry that he is hanging onto the door at the entrance to the bus wondering if he has a seat and too timid to push his way back. Eventually someone spots him, and he makes his way past the same disgruntled people to his seat beside me. Whew. Made it. In an effort to make peace with some of the displaced riders, I offer some up some of the student’s snacks (100 calorie packs of Lorna Doone!?!? Never heard of ‘em. Been gone too long I guess). The bus ride was long, stuffy and bumpy—especially since we were in the back. We roll into Puyo around 9 p.m. and then jump into a cab to the Shell hospital. We roll up to the darkened building and ring the bell to the ER and a nurse opens the door to let us in. I had managed to be patient during this whole 12-plus hour travel adventure, but it was waiting in the ER where I started to become a little unraveled. A tiny old woman was gravely ill across the hall. She was vomiting and moaning and crying. The door to her room was open and every sound that came from her room echoed down the empty hallway. I heard the doctor come in and deliver the bad news: that she had something seriously wrong with her pancreas…that she needed surgery immediately…that they couldn’t do it there…that she would need to go to Quito…that it would probably cost over $2,000…easily the life’s savings of this poor woman. It was excruciating to hear all this go down. As this is going on, a nurse is fending off a drunk from entering the ER. She tells him to go sober up. Then an entire family comes in with a little girl who had fallen and cracked the back of her head open. They barged in the room where we were waiting for test results. I got an up close look at the bloody matted back of the head of this poor little girls. She was clearly in worse shape than my guy. Eventually, the medical staff ushered the student and his bags out of the room, handed him his prescription, and then brought the crying girl in. The hospital kindly called a cab for us, and before the student could take a bathroom break the cab was waiting for us. I offered the kid our extra bedroom, but he opted to stay at a hostal. Probably for the best. I get to the apartment and am greeted by two extra large cockroackes in the kitchen. I smash them with a force that was clearly excessive, undoubtedly waking my downstairs neighbors. I pour myself a big glass of wine and go to fill up a pot of water to heat up to bathe, and… surprise, no water! I stare down at my mud encrusted bare feet and the mysterious jungle fungus that has spread across my left hand and I belt out a cynical laugh. I grab a bucket and trapse down to the water spigot near the street. No water. Ahhhhh…the cruelty. I go back upstairs and take another big gulp of wine and start to cry out of frustration and exhaustion. And then I pass out…but at least it was in my own bed.

I slept like a rock that night and woke up refreshed and ready to tackle the tasks at hand. I took a long, hot wonderful bucket bath and then I jumped on my bike and pedaled into town in search of miscellaneous supplies that we needed, including a multimeter, and big water bottle top that we would use for the composting toilet urinal (that the students, incidentally, forgot to buy), I stopped to get cash from the ATM, updated my PC bosses on my status, stopped by to see the patient, brought him food and juice, and bought some treats to take back to the workers in Tepapare. After several hours of hurried errand-running, I was a sweaty mess, so I took another shower. It was cold, but I didn’t care because at least there was water available.

I caught a 1:30 bus back to Tena. The road between Puyo and Tena is still my least favorite road in all of Ecuador. No, make that my least favorite in the entire world. The fact that I would have to travel it 6 times in a span of two weeks did not make my ass happy. Once in Tena, I was reunited with my beloved gas cans, talked with a guy with a glass eye until the rain let up, then grabbed a cab to the nearest gas station where I bought 30 gallons of gas, 4 bottles of oil and then went to my friend Mary’s house. We treated her to a nice dinner and then she helped me buy some more water and supplies to take back to Tepapare. I divided stuff into different bags---some stuff for the students, some stuff for my Peace Corps pals (Rocklets and Grants!) and some stuff to bribe people if I had too. It was actually just a bag of salt, candles, soap and matches to give to Fausto’s wife. It felt like a bribe though, and, well it makes for a better story.

That night it rained and rained and rained. I woke up around 12:15 a.m. and never went back to sleep. The mephloquine –the malaria prophylaxis meds-- mixed with my over-active imagination made me a little manic. Okay, a lot manic. I tossed and turned, sweating and panicking about my return trip to Tepapare. My imagination went into hyper-drive and mixed with a quasi -nightmare induced semi-sleep made me panic. My mind went over every worse-case scenario in painful detail. That the truck driver wouldn’t pick me up. That the road would be out. That the river was too high to travel. That the students would be trapped there and miss their flight to the states. That the group all got sick from drinking river water because their filters weren’t working. That they ran out of food. That someone got hurt while Nenquimo was taking us to Meñepare. That I would get to Meñepare and Fausto wouldn’t be able to take me to Tepapare. That I would get stuck there. That the canoe would tip. Oh, how my imagination went wild. I couldn’t turn my brain off and just rest. I just sat up and worried. At 4:33 a.m. I got out of bed, got dressed and started taking all my supplies down to the street where the truck was to pick me up. It was still pouring down rain. At 4:55 I called Ricardo to confirm that he was picking me up. He was 10 minutes away. Wow. On time. Cool. I put on my brave face, said bye to Mary and climbed into the truck with Ricardo and his whole family. I guessed that his wife must not trust him driving some random gringa around by himself. About 15 minutes outside of Tena we see a truck that had wrecked into the side of a bridge, hanging precipitously off the edge of the bridge and partially blocking passage. Ricardo stops and we all stare in silence, not sure what to do. We weren’t sure if this was something that just happened and maybe the driver was still in the cab…maybe alive, maybe dead. We inch across the bridge and stop on the other side. As Ricardo moves to get out of the truck, a guy approaches us and says he is the owner of the truck, that he fell asleep and wrecked and that he was fine. He asked us for a ride back to town. Ricardo said that he had a job, then looked at me. The guy pleaded for a ride back to Tena, offering Ricardo $20. Ricardo looked at me again and I signaled that it was ok. The guy gets in the back of the truck and we drive back to Tena and drop him off. I didn’t feel right leaving the poor guy on the side of the road in the rain, especially if he might be minorly injured. After the detour we were back on the road to Meñepare once again. It continued to rain. With each bridge we crossed I grew more anxious, as the rivers were running at flood levels. Several small streams had already breached their banks. At one point we were driving behind an oil company pickup truck. Suddenly, the pickup stopped and a group of 4 men in yellow rubber boots and ponchos jumped out and started to move some rocks off the road in front of their vehicle, as the bossman in clean clothes and boots looked on. Then, all the sudden, we see this huge rock the size of a car come tumbling down a hill toward the road in front of them. Landslide!!!!!!!!!!! Holy shit!!!!!!!!! To our left was a steep cliff face covered with lush vegetation. To our right was a driveway toward one of the oil camps…but the pickup truck was blocking our passage to this higher ground. Ricardo was clearly nervous and wanted to move the truck out of harms way as quickly as possible. As we waited for the oilmen to get a clue and get in their truck, we see a big tree fall down the hillside toward the road, followed by a constant stream of rocks and mud. I have to say, it was one of the scarier moments in my life…watching this freaking landslide in action. Finally, the pickup moved and we were able to drive to a safe spot. We got out of truck and just stared at the landslide in silence. These crazy oil workers kept running out to and moving rocks, then run back when it looked like the next wave would roll down the hill. It was absolutely nuts. Crazy dangerous. We waited for a little while, but not that long in the big scheme of things. Ricardo’s mujer and kids and I walk past the affected area and down the road. When the oil workers got a path cleared and the rockslide seemed to subside for awhile, Ricardo zipped through, we jumped in and were off down the road again. Once in Meñepare, I find Fausto’s wife, give her the “bribe bag” and wait for them to pack up to hit the river. I asked them if they thought the river was too high to go and they seemed to think that was a silly question. That was the way they prefer to go. Before we loaded up, Fausto asked me if I could help him with something. I laughed to myself thinking that there was little I would be able to do to help this dude. “I need help loading a cartridge into my printer.” Say WHAT? “You have a printer?” “Yep. Here I’ll show you. Let me fire up the generator, first” I climb the stairs to a small wooden barn-like building and there in the center is a brand new LG computer with a printer, scanner and a flat screen monitor. Whoahhh. So, with the whir of the generator in the background, we fired up the computer, inserted the print cartridge (which still didn’t work for some reason) and then I showed him a few features of Microsoft Word…and Solitaire. Yes, there we were in the jungle playing freaking computer solitaire. It was freaking bizarre! Absolutely surreal. I was afraid to ask him how he got the money to buy it, because I probably didn’t want to know. I asked him if it was for his business (not sure what that is, thus offering an opening), for his kids, or to write his memoir. He laughed at this latter idea and said he got it so that his kids could learn to use it. I warned him that solitaire could be very addictive, so be careful. He could waste a whole gas can of gas playing that game without realizing it.

The whole situation was just plain bizarre. It just seemed so weird having a computer in BFE without regular access to electricity. Getting gas to run the damn generator to power the computer was a chore in and of itself. Buying printer cartridges or getting any technical help when he inevitably will get stuck by some feature… fuggedaboutit.

So, after the great jungle solitaire game, we load into the canoe and buzzed downstream. Five minutes after taking off, it started to sprinkle, so Fausto spun the canoe around and pulled up alongside the bank so that his teenage daughter could pluck a couple huge leaves to use as natural umbrellas for her mom and to cover our bags. Another incredibly memorable moment.

The trip went really smoothly and really quickly. We got there in just over an hour. I am now a convert to motorized canoeing the river at flood level, as it was a helluvalot easier (and yet, no matter how illogical it sounds, it somehow seemed safer) than at low level… I got to do some birding en route. Saw some really cool toucans and toucanettes as well as a bunch of birds I could not identify…as in most of them.

When we pulled up to the banks of Tepapare, I was greeted almost like a hero, even though I did nothing heroic at all. Everyone hugged me like it had been a year since they had seen me, even though it had been only two days. None of my nightmare fears were realized. They had plenty of food. They didn’t run out of water. They made a decent amount of progress on the projects. No fights broke out. No one was sick. Everything was fine. It was such a relief.

As soon as I got there with the gas and supplies, the Waorani wanted to take a field trip. We all piled back into the canoes and went further downstream to one of their hunting grounds that also featured a big black lagoon. They wanted to go piranha fishing, but they forgot the fishing line. Duh. Instead we walked around a little bit…and then all chaos broke out when a Waorani spotted a monkey. They all started running through the forest tracking it, with a wild bunch of gringos following suit. It was really exciting. I really, really, really wanted to see the monkey. Though, I was also realistic in that if any megafauna is around, I would be in the group that would miss it (see spectacled bear blog entry). The Waorani said that it was a female monkey and that it had a baby on her back. I did get a glimpse of the leaves moving and a flash of fur, but not enough to know what it was. I didn’t understand what species they were saying it was…I likely wouldn’t recognize it in any of the three languages being spoken there in the forest. I had followed one of the women, Crazy Dayo to another area of the forest where she claimed the monkey had gone. We were all craning our necks to scan the canopy…then I see something furry moving. Dayo yelled something that I thought meant monkey (she doesn’t speak Spanish). I looked through my binoculars towards the moving leaves and see clearly that it was not a monkey…it was a sloth! I had an awesome view of it moving oh so slowly along a branch before stopping and being obscured by leaves and taking cover from the wild Waorani that were beating on the trunk of the tree trying to get it to move for us. Nothing like a little wildlife harassment… Anyway, I was super psyched to have been the first to spot and identify the sloth. Maybe my luck really is changing…

The mini-hike and canoe ride was a definite highlight of the trip. It was beautiful….and it was a lot of fun. Lots of laughs. I got caught up on all the mini-dramas of the last few days on the canoe ride…lots of chisme that is not fit to print. But oh how good it felt to laugh.

We had a late lunch that ended up being our dinner. I watched Jer and Kris put the finishing touches on the composting toilet, as the community brought out their artesania to sell or trade things for (clothes, tools, food). It was an entertaining process. We then had a short community meeting where we explained the construction, use and maintenance of the composting toilet and water capture and solar purification systems that were installed. It was cool to see some of the women explain it to each other in their own words. A couple of the men said that they were going to build their own toilets just like the one the group built with the community. If that is actually happens, that is a huge success in this wild, difficult world of development.

The PC crew chilled out in the profe’s house until it was time for the despedida—farewell sendoff—dance. The Waorani had roped the three female students to put their traditional dress on (over bathing suits). The girls were such great sports about it and totally got into it. The Waorani women sang and danced and the gringas (who towered over them) followed along. Then they called the guys up…ALL the guys. They peer pressured them into at least taking their shirts off (but not going totally tipica) and dance around. Everyone was roaring laughing. Some of the guys got really into it. It was pretty funny.

Okay, I´m out of time and out of steam...If you read this far, you are either truly bored, a serious blogstalker, or a family member that feels obligated to read my missives. In that case, you know today is my birthday and so if you haven´t already sent me a carepack, here’s a wish list of things I need-want. : )

- water filter for next adentro trip. Something small..only need it to filter what I will be imbibing. Have heard good things about the UV light types. Have no idea how much these things costs, so feel free to blow me off and make me drink bichos if it is super spendy.

- pocket knife. Mine was appropriated from me and I miss it. Doesn’t have to be very fancy.

- Granola bars or protein bars.

- Blister bandaids. I have normal bandaids, but those specialty blister ones are better...and boy could I use them today. I got some serious rubberboot rub going on.

- More candy. Can never have enough. Reeces and Take 5 porfa.

Thanks in advance for your generosity/pity.

adentro part I

2008-05-26T13:41:00.004-05:00

I spent a good part of the day yesterday looking for a new apartment...one that has oh, say, more than 14 drops of water coming out of the faucet per day. After several hours of riding my bike up and down every freaking street in town rubbernecking for handwritten se arrienda un departamento signs, stopping and asking random old ladies and store owners if they knew of any apartments in the neighborhood available, getting lots of vague directions to where a sister-in-law was renting a place, and staring down mean dogs.... I had seen a grand total of 4 (four) apartments. None of which I would ever willingly choose to live in, even if it did have water. There are slim pickings in Puyo these days. Not only are there few apartments currently vacant, the ones that are vacant all seem to have the same funky moldy smell.

Feeling defeated, I returned to our pink waterless apartment building in the midafternoon only to find the landlady fixing the waterline to the building. A new meter had been installed and an hour later we had water gushing from our faucet. She had seen me out looking for other apartments and while I would like to humor myself by thinking that my apartment search expedited the long overdue waterline repair I am not sure that is really what catalyzed the action. In any case, I am happy to have water in our pink palace. We´ll see how long it lasts...

This morning we woke up to the sound of dripping water. Evidently, someone had left the water on in one of the apartments on the third floor (all of which are vacant, as those tenants had the sense to get out of dodge months ago) and water was flowing out from underneath the door, across the landing and down the steps towards our floor. Lovely. I just love this place sometimes.

Okay, enough griping about our pink prison (this is a gross exaggeration, as our apartment is actually fine. Just having no water makes life, well, difficult). I still haven’t talked about my big trip adentro…and it will be hard to ever distill everything we did and experienced during that week in Menepare, but I will try. First, the preparation for the trip was an adventure—lots of supplies and food to find and buy. The students divided up into teams and got a lot done. They were well organized and efficient. We had a plan for loading the bus and picking up all the supplies we needed. On the morning that we were supposed to leave, however, I get a call saying those three words we have learned to loathe: no hay paso. The recent rains had damaged a bridge and we couldn’t get past it to the community. The Duke guys didn’t know this of course show up to the office early with all their gear, ready to roll, only to find out the trip would be postponed. As the hours dragged on and the rain continued to pour it became more and more clear that we wouldn’t get out of town that day. This delay definitely put a damper on the group’s spirits. The next day we finally got the green light to go. But somehow even though we had an extra day to get everything organized, it was almost like we were less prepared for some reason. Mentally, maybe. But the morning we left was a little wacked… first, the bus and the Waorani showed up EARLY, while the gringos showed up LATE. I think some of the students were chuchaqui, as they were very slow moving and slow reacting. They were supposed to help load the bus with all the construction supplies, but by the time they finally showed up, we were done. Manuela suddenly decided that we needed to leave that second, never mind the fact that all the kids weren’t there yet and she had previously said we didn’t have to rush. This then forced me to (as my mom would say) get snippy with both her and the students… I hated being put in that position, but someone needed to crack the whip and tell them (to borrow another one of my mothers phrases) to get their poop in a group. This of course catalyzed the proverbial “hurry up and wait” phase whereby we rushed around to load up the bus, only for it to stop for someone else to get off to buy something random while we sit around and wait. Probably the most interesting step, however, was telling the bus driver to go down my street (which is currently under construction and littered with large piles of stone, rock and sand interspersed with potholes) to pick up a 250 pound piece of ferrocement which was the floor Jer and I poured for the composting toilet. You should have seen the drivers face when I asked him if we could put it on the roof of the bus… yeah, I had failed to mention that we would need to load that particular piece of cargo on the bus. Small detail. After separate stops for food, gas, phone cards, more mesh screen, rope, the floor, and then the students and their gear, we finally hit the road. En route, we watched the movie the 11^th hour which was a little surreal. Once in Menepare we unloaded the bus and began to set up camp. The sun was beating down on us as we unloaded all our gear, materials and food. That night a small group of us met with Fausto, the President of the community (who is, ironically, Kichwa) drank some chicha and learned that he would not be available for most of the next day, as he was preparing for a big belated Mother’s Day celebration in the community. This put a bit of a kink in our plans, as he was to lead the casa tipica (traditional house) construction team.

Well kids, I am out of time and out of steam. Will have to finish this titillating tale next week. Tomorrow we head to Tepapare to trabajar (sorry, just needed a little more alliteration to end this post). Wish us luck.

Keepers of Eden

2008-05-23T10:57:00.003-05:00

One of the many memorable moments from this last week was when Manuela, the President of the Waorani Women´s Association, decided to set up her laptop and projector in order to show movies in the community of Meñepare. Yep, there we were in the jungle watching the Waorani become totally mezmerized by a movie that featured them--in the same jungle---and their struggle with oil development in their territory. The kids were enraptured by the images of their family that were projected on a wooden schoolhouse wall. It was a little surreal being in a remote jungle Waorani community with little infrastructure...watching a movie about the Waorani.

While in New York at the U.N. meeting on indigenous issues, Manuela was given a copy of Keepers of Eden, a film that adeptly captures the modern challenges facing the Waorani. Anyway, it was interesting for me to watch the movie (narrated by Joanne Woodward) because I know almost all of the people that are featured in it (plus it had some unflattering footage of Puyo). Although I couldn´t hear all of the audio (it was hard to hear the small laptop speakers over the noisy generator and constant rain on the tin roof), what I did hear did not paint an overly-romantic and overly-simplistic characterization of the Waorani as other books and films have done. It also showed the ugly side-effects of oil and western cultural influences on the Waorani---including the alcohol problems and the paternalistic dependency on the compania that has been created. The sad part is, that although someone made this film and is undoubtedly profiting from the film, little benefit is being returned to the Waorani beyond some additional awareness of their plight. I am not aware of any profit sharing or other benefit to them besides giving them one lousy copy of the movie. The least the producers could do is give them a few hundred copies so that the Women´s Association could sell them in their store for a profit and reinvest that money back into projects to benefit them. Ahhh...but that would be too easy. Anyway, all blogstalkers should definitely

Alive and well....almost

2008-05-22T12:20:00.004-05:00

Well, we all survived our jungle adventures in Meñepare. We were dirty, stinky and exhausted, but all in one piece when we got back to Puyo. Some of the students have since developed some stomach issues. On the bright side, they are dealing with them in the comfort of Puyo (running water, CABLE tv! and lots of food choices, not to mention professional medical care).

There is soooo much to write about from the last week. I just need to find the time to get it all out. Yesterday I was so tired I couldn´t motivate myself to do much of anything besides rest up and eat. Jer and I did decide that I am going to look for another apartment. Yep, the more than a month straight of no water (besides a few drops in the mornings) has finally pushed us over the edge. The stinky bathroom, partial showers and accumulation of dirty dishes that I can´t wash that then attract fruit flies and cockroaches...yeah, I´ve had enough. So the search begins...

Rain delay

2008-05-14T09:34:00.002-05:00

Well, right about now we were supposed to be getting to Puerto Napo and turning off the main road and heading to the Waorani community of Meñepare...but we have a slight delay...it seems the recent rains have damaged one of the bridges leading to the community, thus leading to the oft repeated phrase that has been the bane of many volunteers´existence of late: "no hay paso." Soooo.... this means we must wait until the road and bridge is repaired before we can travel there. I guess the good thing is that we are forced to wait in Puyo rather than on the side of the road (always the optimist). Since the problem area is along the oil road, the company is usually good about fixing this sort of thing, but we still have no good idea how long it might be. Sooooo....the waiting game begins. Some of the students are catching some zzzz´s, others are catching up on news from home, and others are hanging out. I left my house full of hungry Peace Corps Volunteers...
I am trying to put it all in perspective to the students (who have been awesome through the whole preparation). These things happen. It is part of everyday life here. I mean, the last few times I have travelled adentro, there have been delays of varying kinds...from gas shortages grounding the planes, to communities renting our reserved canoes to higher paying people. Asi es la vida. We just have to be patient and wait...

minga month

2008-05-10T15:20:00.006-05:00

Friday marked the start of a month-long minga (communal work trip) with a group of 9 students from Duke University. We will be building chambira palm nurseries, constructing a traditional house and a composting toilet. The students will also be doing a feasibility study for use of solar panels in two Waorani communities. It is going to be a lot of work and a lot of logistics (mostly on my part) but I think it will be cool. The group seems really great. They seem well prepared, thoughtful and fun. Last night we all attended the ceremony to crown the new Indigenous Queen. This year it only lasted until 12:30 a.m. Jer and I arrived in pure Ecua-style an hour and a half late...and of course it was just getting started. It was a better program overall than last years (although the karaoke-like talent show in between the indigenous performances was pretty painfull) Am going to be super, super busy over the next month, so I apologize in advance for leaving my blogstalkers hanging. I just won´t have time to do much blogging...but I am positive that once I do, I will have lots of great stories and photos. stay tuned.

fair share of fair food

2008-05-02T14:04:00.002-05:00

Well, it is fair time here in Puyo. Nope, no fried Snickers bars or fried cheesecake or any of those great Ohio State Fair favorites. Yesterday I did a sampling of random fair foods. Here is the list, of what I consumed, what I paid and my fairfoodrating from 1 to 5 .
Ceviche de camaron (shrimp) $3. For taste, I give it a 4... It was pretty darn good. But, it was crazy expensive and I was still starving after I ate it (I thought it came with a plate of food, not just soup) So I give it an overall fairfoodrating of 3.
Besito (lame excuse for fresh fruit dipped in chocolate) $0.50. rating: 1. I got about 4 soggy, mushed strawberries that were dipped in a chocolate fountain pot right after a little girl stuck her finger in without any parental repremand. RIP OFF!
Chocolate candies: $0.50. fairfoodrating: 3. The chocolate was ok nothing to write home about.... but I at least felt good supporting an organization that employs disabled Ecuadorians.
Salchipapa: $0.50. fairfoodrating: 3. It is hard to screw up thick french fries. These had a great topping blend of kechup, mayo and onions topped with a splayed hotdog bite. Taste was good, but not as hot and fresh as it could have been.
Mystery meat with papas and salad: $3. fairfoodrating: 2. I was with two of my Waorani friends and we were mesmerized by the roasting of a big slab o meat over a fire. The Colombian guy was a slick salesman and convinced us to buy a plate to share. The potatoes were tasteless, just greasy. The meat was pork we think, fatty and grisly. A fun experience eating with the women...but I am worried that it will come back to bite me...
Oblea (or something like that): $0.65. fairfoodrating: 4. This was my favorite thing of the day. It was a big thin waffle-wafer-like cookie smeared with a variety of jam-like spreads on the inside.

So, all in all it was a pretty underwhelming assortment of fair fares and jacked up prices.

Other random thoughts and observations:

My favorite view from last night was seeing an SUV pull up with a bunch of naked mannequins stacked on the roof like cordwood. Definitely did a double take.

The Waorani Women´s Association has a booth at the fair---and it is the best looking one of theirs to date I have to say (thanks in part to the cool display boxes Jer made). And, this fair more than the others, the women seem much more engaged and almost excited to be participating. They all actually showed up to set up the booth this morning....and EARLY! Yay! Well, going to head back to the fair and then it is off to Tena for toilet taller number 2.

insert favorite bathroom joke here

2008-04-28T18:43:00.003-05:00

On Saturday, Jer and I and a handful of our Peace Corps pals participated in a minga where we were constructing composting toilets. We are planning to build some of these in Waoani communities next month, so we wanted to learn more about the process.

Composting toilets are waaaaaay better than standard toilets because their construction is low impact (lowgreenhouse gas production), they are odorless, cheap to build, easy to maintain, and help reduce diarrhea-causing parasites. And, well, you don´t use water (see last post/rant) to flush your crap into the same streams that communities use to dink out of, bathe in, etc.

Here are some action shots from the sponsoring organization, Global Pediatric Alliance:
http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=62jsk9dd.2tykg7m5&x=0&y=-6o79kw&localeid=en_US

Agua no es yapa. ¡Cuidala!

2008-04-25T09:36:00.004-05:00

Happy belated Earth Day blogstalkers! In the spirit of Earth Day, today's post has to do with water. Jer´s coined the phrase, "Agua no es yapa" for the Puyo water campaign. Outside, we have lot´s of water. It has been pouring nonstop for hours here in Puyo. Inside, we have no water. Our apartment has not had water for several days. I did get a short trickle coming out of the faucet this morning before it went out again. We have been filling a bucket at a spiggot near the street in order to take bucket baths, wash our dishes and throw water down the toilet. Speaking of toilets, we are going to be constructing some composting toilets this weekend. They don´t use water. Cuz flush toilets in the jungle generally just flow straight to the streams anyway. With the composting versions, the crap can break down and later be used to fertilize the chambira palm nurseries that we´ll also be constructing... well, provided it is not pouring down rain. So, there you have it, folks: the cycle of water.

Che visits Puyo

2008-04-22T10:52:00.004-05:00

Here are a few photos I snapped while walking into town the other day...and these are but a few of the dozens of Che images scattered through town. Top to bottom: Che with President Correa, Che´s taxi service, Che´s online high school, and Che´s elementary school.

4-20

2008-04-20T17:25:00.002-05:00

4-20. Obscure drug reference. Best friends birthday. One year anniversary as a Peace Corps Volunteer. I thought I would have some profound thought or reflection on this last year´s highs and lows...but I don´t. I blame the drugs. Legal ones, of course. I took a decongestant to fight off this cold I´m getting and now I have medicine head. So deep thoughts will have to wait for another day and a clearer head.

Happy Campers

2008-04-16T17:57:00.000-05:00

I spent the good part of the last week helping out with a camp for Ecuadorian girls which took place in the beach town of Canoa. Peace Corps Volunteers are able to nominate girls from their communities that are between the ages of 15-17 to attend Camp ALMA, a leadership camp. The Peace Corps Gender and Committee, which I am a member (and actually co-prez) runs the entire camp---from planning, finding funds, supervising, teaching, coordinating travel, etc. It is quite an undertaking when you consider that the camp includes girls from all over the country. I was responsible for escorting four girls from the Oriente region of the country to the camp. Without getting into a protracted explanation of the logistics, I’ll summarize by saying it involved getting up at 4 a.m., getting on five different buses before finally arriving at our destination at around 7:10 p.m. One of the girls had travelled a day and a half just to get to Puyo to go with me. Despite having a very sore behind from the looooong bus ride, the camp was really, really cool…and it was at the beach, so what’s not to love!

The girls were really great and represented the cultural diversity of the three distinct mainland areas of the country…at one point I was helping with an activity with three girls: one from the coast, one from the sierra and one from the oriente. Very cool. Some of the girls had never seen the ocean before, so it was really neat to be with them as they got their first glimpses of the beach. Some had never even travelled outside of their province, so this was a huge opportunity for them to see other parts of their own country.

At the start of the camp the girls were really quiet and somewhat timid. But, by the end of the camp the girls all had a dozen new best friends and they cried when they said goodbye. It was really sweet. It brought back many fond memories from when I attended summer camp with my cousin in Michigan, 4-H camp at Camp Palmer, and church camp at Lakeside. Summer camps and day camps are the types of experiences that we Americans take for granted and are part of every other kids’ childhood; yet camps just are not common here, so this was a very unique experience for these girls. We were able to pay for all the girls expenses—including all the bus fares to get to Canoa. We packed a lot of different things into the camp—the activities ranged from information sessions on sex ed, small business, environmental ed, trafficking in persons and immigration…plus activities included hiking in a local dry forest reserve, making jewelry out of tagua (vegetable ivory), playing games on the beach, and doing skits. It was a really rewarding (albeit a little exhausting) experience. I already got a call from one of the girls who attended…she just wanted to say hi…and thanks again.

every which way

2008-04-08T10:27:00.003-05:00

Right before Easter I was walking home from the center of town and I noticed a car coming towards me going the wrong way on a one way street. I tried to signal tothem to turn around--that they were going the wrong way. Then I saw another car coming. Then another. I then wondered if maybe there was a street closed and thus they made the one way street a two-way street temporarily. So, I approached a pair of policemen to pose this very question. “No, this is now a TWO-way street.” “Since when?” I asked, incredulously. “Oh, for a couple hours now,” he answered. What???? Yes these are the questions we ask ourselves. Why would the city change the traffic flow at night…especially before a big 3-day weekend??? As I walked, I saw no less than three near head-on collisions, as cars careened downhill on a street that for what I can only imagine was formany years a one way street.

The next day I realized that not only had they changed one of the main streets—which used to be one-way into a two-way street. They also changed some of the other one-way streets into one-way streets going THE OTHER WAY. Who does that??? And who does that without ANY signs or other warnings??? These are the things that make me roll my eyes and shake my head. I want to laugh. But...really, what the &%$?

a day

2008-04-03T17:40:00.001-05:00

Today started like any other day. I got up, did some crunches, showered, drank coffee, then biked to the Waorani Women’s Association office. I got a few things done that I needed to do to prepare for the upcoming work trip “adentro” with a group of Duke students and some Peace Corps pals. Around lunchtime I see that the sky is darkening, so I decide to pedal on home in hopes of missing the rain. Yeah, right. About 4 minutes into my ride, it starts to rain hard. Then I narrowly miss getting hit by a bus (more on Puyo traffic in another post). Then I got uncomfortably close to a hitting car because my back brakes are now rusty after the last time I got caught in a downpour on my bike. Then, I see this poor, poor little dog hopping down the side of the road and its front left paw is totally gone and the bone is sticking out and it was gross and just sad and I was helpless to do anything for it. It was truly awful. And I can’t get the image out of my head. When I finally get to the apartment, soaked, and realize I left my keys in my desk drawer at the office. Thankfully my dear husband jumped in a cab and came home to save me from my mini-meltdown by coming and unlocking the door for me, even though he wasn’t planning on coming home for lunch because he had to catch an afternoon bus. I get in the apartment and strip off my wet clothes and go to make some hot tea…and of course there is no water.

Always the optimist, I am trying to find the silver lining in all of this. I guess I should be thankful that I was not in fact hit by a vehicle… unlike my friend Becca who was hit by a truck last week (she’s fine. Just has to do some physical therapy, though).

In other news, I am now on FaceBook. Yes, I know I swore I would never get involved in those social networking site things, and that I thought no one over the age of, say, 27 is into them. And I also swore them off because I was afraid my addictive personality would get hooked. Well, when I was helping with the training of the new group of Peace Corps Volunteers, I was peer (actually “beer”) pressured into joining. And, well, I signed up. And, well, I am sort of hooked. I now have 40-some FaceBook Friends in at least four different countries… including an old boyfriend I had when I was a Freshman in high school, my childhood friend who met her husband online in the mid 1990-s and moved to Germany (WAY before dating online was fashionable), and lots of other totally random people. Well, enough chitchat. Must check my Facebook account to see how many new friends I have. Ciao!

Oh…one last thing: a big shout out to my pals Rick and Melinda who are proud new parents of Kindred Connor. Can’t wait to meet you KC!

so close...

2008-03-27T15:05:00.002-05:00

So... I ALMOST saw a spectacled bear yesterday. Yes, almost. It is one of a long list of megafauna that I have ALMOST seen... You know that commercial where the girl on the whalewatchng boat is facing the wrong way and the whale breaches...and she misses the whole thing. That was me. Oh well, it was exciting nonetheless just to knowingly be near these awesome animals. The spectacled bear is the only bear species in all of South America; it is endangered, and sightings of them are extremely rare. The near-bear sighting (not to be confused with the Chris Thomas Watkins Road bear sighting) was in theMacipacuna Reserve a cloud forest about 2.5 hours northwest of Quito. I am currently hanging out with the new group of Peace Corp trainees. Of course many of the trainees saw the bear...but I missed it. Damn!

A big shout out to my pals Chris and Sarah who are the proud new parents of Dylan Christopher Thomas. Dylan, may you have many fun years of bear watching with your pops.

wish list

2008-03-23T15:54:00.002-05:00

I am often asked, ¨So what do you need us to send you?" I am lucky to have so many generous friends and family who have kindly sent or brought us books, a steady supply of Take 5 candy bars and Reece's Cups, newsclippings and random other things such as bottle brushes, cordless drills, ziplocks and even wine!. Sooooo, If I haven´t thanked you enough already, I want to express a very public THANK YOU! You guys are the best. (You know who you are!)

Sometimes when I am asked what I want to be sent to me, I can´t think of anything to request or I just don´t want to have anyone go postal at the post office and spend more 10 times more postage than the thing you´re sending is worth. But you´ll be happy to hear that I recently thought of something that I really, really, really want: NEW MUSIC!!! Before coming down hereI had been an NPR junkie for many years, so I hadn´t actually purchased any new music, in an embarrasingly long time. So when we loaded up the new iPod before we came, I loaded everything I had: which was all my stuff from college. Don´t get me wrong. I LOVE my music, and it takes me back to my dormroom days at Denison, and my punkrock, ska and "estrogen evening" DJ days at WDUB...but there is only so many times I can listen to Fugazi or Mighty Mighty Bosstones or the Breeders and not go a little batty. And Jer has every last U2 live, bootlegged and extended version album known to man loaded on there. Plus way too much GRUVER-Cowboy Hillbilly Hippy Folk. I love the guys dearly. I love the scene. (I miss you guys terribly!) But it is no secret I don´t love the music.... ánd I just can´t take it anymore!!!! Please would someone please oh please send me something new!!! Puuuuuhhhhhhlllllease? Anything from say, oh this milennium, would be new to our iPod. Got the 90´s covered already. Thanks in advance for your generosity (pity).