trying to catch up on the last month

starting back with Thursday June 25th i went to town, then to Ibarra to get some money out of the bank, then back to town, where i ran errands for the guy who filled out the paperwork to get me at this site. He works in Quito. it is very unfortunate that he doesn´t work here for the project. he and i both get frustrated at the way things go, but him more so because he can´t do anything about it. anyway, so he wanted me to keep trying to get these maps i might have mentioned before. the guy i have to talk to to get them is a real pendejo. by that i mean ass. he goes on and on about how he knows so much about thie computer map system thing, and he repeatedly fails to give me the maps we need. i don´t mind typing bad about the guy, because one of these days i´m gonna tell him to his face. anyway, so this time i have evidence that the last time, when he promised that he had given me all the maps of the county, he had in fact given me less than half. so i point out all the maps i need. i write down their codes, and i say, look, just copy and paste these on my hard drive. he dithers for about 10 minutes. manages to copy 1 file. then decides that i´ve asked for too much. hey man, i got the oficio, you wanna see the oficio? the freakin mayor signed it, bitch. so he does and talks to his boss, who is reasonable, and tells him to give me the maps, because if not, i´m just gonna come back and bother them both some more. so the pendejo goes back to his computer and shows me the big overview pictures. he showed me them before, when he offered me the choice of either overviews or details, but for some reason i couldn´t have both. i´ve come to realize that reason is his being an asshole. so he gives me the overviews, and i say, no, i want the details. these have the same detail, he blows me off. no they don´t. yes they do. no they don´t. yes they do, let me show you. he opens one up and zooms in. see, they have the same. no, i see that they don´t. let me check, i ask, hoping to just see the file size of the overviews and compare it with the detailed versions to prove that he is, in fact, an ass hole trying to shit on me. but no. i can´t touch the computer, because he is the expert (who can´t manage to copy and paste a few files without first complaining about it for 15 minutes and then doing it especially inefficiently). and then, to top it off, he deletes the detail file that he had put on my hard drive. why´d you do that? i ask, i´m starting to get pissed. oh, because. he says. alright dude, my ride is about to leave, so i´m not gonna waste any more of our time -today. but i´ll be back, and you´re gonna give me my maps godamit

so i went back to site. gave my first English class to the young adults in the community. they liked it.

Friday June 26th taught my little kids´english and computer classes in my community. went down to the central community to organize a meeting of all the community presidents. met with the new employees of the Project. they seem like a good team. but problems will arise. then i went back up to my other class then i went home.

Sat June 27th went to milk the cows with the host ma. studied some LSAT. slept. taught the young adults computer skills. Sunday June 28th slept in some more. thats what weekends are for. exercised. cleaned room. etc.

Monday June 29th taught classes
Tuesday June 30th woke up early to go to the agronomy classes in the community on the other side of the mountain. Made it there this time. Learned some grafting skills. have since tried them out with the host pa. we´ll see if it works. The most interest thing i learned that day which i can easily communicate via text is that it is possible to revive an old tree by cultivating several saplings close around it and grafting the saplings in to the trunk of the main tree. it is a good way to maintain a producer. anyway, on the way back, the guy who had invited me suggested we take a "short cut." cause he was in a hurry. i wanted to talk to the engineer who taught the class about making a video, but i like short cuts, so i went along. turns out our short cut was anything but, and this guy was intent on marching all the way back to the central community. this is an hour drive, but marching over the mountain as opposed to driving around it makes it an hour march instead. i like to think i´m in pretty good shape. me blood has thickened to adapt to the altitude and i can generally keep up. but i was in no mood. for one thing, i´s planning to hike to a lake the next day and i didn´t want to start tired. for two, he said it was a short cut, and i was kinda pissed about that. so when he kept calling to me to hurry, i eventually stopped trying to explain that he could go on if he wanted but i was in no hurry. instead i just started cursing him in english. great stress reliever. anyway i eventually got to the road and my host family happened to be driving back home so i jumped in back.

Wednesday July 1st I´m a little pissed at typing this because i typed it last night in an attempt to not spend all my time in town blogging, but there was a power outage and i lost the work. anyway, i hiked 9 hours with some local guys to a lake, Laguna Puruhanta. i wasn´t gonna go, because i sharted my pants at breakfast that morning from stomach issues. shart, in ecuadorian colloquial spanish is translated as pedo con caldo or, "fart with soup." anyway the stomach issues cleared up and i went. it was 9 hours in the rain and the mud with a back pack on an overgrown path, parts of which were so steep we were doing pull-ups with exposed roots to get past, other parts i had to crawl to get under the overgrowth, other parts the mud was up to my thigh. it sucked. and they want to develop this for tourists. at least it was interesting to see the transition to páramo, the high altitude wetland. similar to the peat bogs of scotland, páramo ecosystems maintain a lot of organic matter. while the cold is a limiting factor on biomass production, it is more limiting on decomposition, so there is all this slowly decomposing biomass which acts like a sponge, soaking up water. it is a really important ecosystem for watersheds. but it isn´t that great for camping. when we got there, i started cutting grass for the sleeping mat, but i wasn´t much better at that than i was at the hike. in gringo standards, i am pretty good with a machete, but nothing compared to the locals. they made a tent out of several sheets of plastic. lit a fire (using gasoline, everything was soaking wet). and made dinner.

Thursday July 2nd I was resigned to hang out in the tent all day. i would have left if they had wanted to, but somehow, they were enthusiastic to put on their cold wet pants and go out to the lake. eventually i followed them and watched two of the older more experienced guys catch a fish with a machete. machete fishing method: cut grass and pile rocks at mouth of stream entering lake. poke around upstream with stick. bash fish with machete at dam. i was impressed, but the water was high from all the rain so we went back. i then executed my plan to stay in the tent, while they inflated a raft and went out on the lake. i offered my video camera and they were excited about that. they caught some more fish too. that night it rained again and this time the tent leaked.

Friday July 3rd another 9 hour hike back. i fell less. i got used to the cold wet pants. and when we got back, it felt really really good to take a hot shower. i guess it is good sometimes to do stuff that sucks because you feel better afterwards. anyway, i made sure to thank the guys for having invited me and treating me well despite my lameness. they would make good guides, but if we are gonna develop this for gringo tourists, we gotta do something about the conditions. i can´t imagine paying for that. a $5k grant from USAID would be sufficient to cut another trail (there is a 3 hour route, i´m told) and build a cabin, or at least a foundation so you don´t have to camp on the aforementioned wet organic sponge.

Saturday July 4th went to Ibarra to celebrate our great nation´s independence. the other PCVs in the area had set up a barbq by another lake. Yaguarcocha, this one is called, which means puddle of blood. named after an especially brutal battle between invading Inca and some defending tribe. anyway, there was no hike to this lake. parking lot is right next too it. and instead of a leaky inflatable raft, they had swan boats. (sidenote on the leaky inflatable raft: superglue mixed with baking soda creates a cement sealant which can be used with old bicycle innertubes to fix leaky inflatable rafts. i was nicknamed macgyver by my training class, but the ecuadorians are the real macgyvers around here, speaking of which, did i mention welding with a tub of water, lemons, salt, wires, pliers, and the welding electrode?) anyway, the other peace corps people are nice. except all the ladies were taken, and no one wanted to party that night despite having talked it up all day.

but i picked up a pile of good books from one of the guys who is heading out soon. including The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. published after his death, it is more of a compilation of his writings, but it was good. Also a funny right wing family values book. funny because by studying for the LSAT i have become picky with the logic of written things, and there are mistakes. but the mistakes are apparently only funny because i don´t agree with some of the conclusions. when i read Noam Chomsky´s Latin America book, the mistakes just piss me off, probably because i would readily agree with a lot of the conclusions if only he would back them up with more than bs. Hey Chomsky, ever find the universal grammar center in the brain? no? then why don´t you keep looking instead of ranting about shit that is out of your scope. Does Chomsky have any experience in latin america? i don´t know. the first few pages of his book did not indicate any such thing.

anyway, Sunday July 5th I went with Anita, the Italian NGO worker, to the jelly group meeting. she had not been informed of the jelly group having a meeting until i called her the night before hoping for a ride back to site. this angered her because she had spoken with the jelly prez, and he had said nothing. more problems forthcoming. anyway, they decided at the meeting to charge $400 for membership in their little group. before, it was $100, based on the expenses they had incurred getting the group to where it is today. but they had actually never done the math, so when Anita helped them add it all up, it came out substantially higher. i was busy printing out the group statutes during most of the meeting, but i came towards the end. i made a few comments, namely, that charging $400 is functionally equivalent of charging $300, or $500, or $50,000, because any of those numbers mean that no one is going to join them. Furthermore, they need to clarify whether they are charging for the costs they the old members have incurred, or for the benefits a new member will recieve, because charging for both doesn´t make sense to me. for example, they are charging $6 per meeting held, which adds up a lot. but new members are hardly benefiting from the wasted meetings of the past. (and that value for the time required for a meeting is pretty questionable. $6 is the going rate for a day´s work, and it was only $5 in the past). they are also charging a substantial albeit depreciated amount for the cost of equipment which was not only donated to them but also will be rendered inconsequential upon the arrival of the new equipment which the Project is supposed to get them. then there was the vote by which they decided on $400: out of 15 people, 6 voted for $400, 5 voted for $300, and 4 voted for $250. Now, $400 clearly has a plurality, but a majority has voted for less than $400. You are using the mode average when maybe you should consider the mean or even the median average as a more democratic way of aggregating your votes. this kid is smart, they said, but we´ve already voted, so $400 it is. In one lady´s eyes in particular, i could see little dollar signs spinning. This jelly group is kinda pissing me off. they spend half the time complaining, and the other half thinking up ways to get money without producing anything. they´ve made a total of $93 in five years. actually, i´m impressed by their persistence.

Monday July 6th teach
Tuesdy July 7th went to Ibarra. primary objective: check out the ownership situation of the trout ponds in San M. the church is supposedly majority owner, but the ponds are dry. been dry for over a year. the sun is damaging them. the community bank is ready and willing to work in them. maybe the church would be open to something for the good of the community. not so fast. the church is running this and other businesses through a company. the company is out to make a profit. how about a little something for the good of the people? i ask. well, we might hire some of them. hmm..

secondary objective: check my mail. mission accomplished. thanks mom.

tertiary objective: find a place to crash for the night. usual friend is out of town. Anita has no room/would feel bad if i slept on concrete. but we go to get a beer with her boyfriend. she met her bf working in another community kinda close. they have organized businesses around their hot springs. they have hotels and restaurants and its all run by the communities involved. sounds nice. i´ll have to check it out. they show me a good cheap hostel in Ibarra. the manager´s daughter had done a study in their hot springs place. she needs another tourism study to graduate, i mention my site. we haven´t followed up on that, but i will next time i´m in Ibarra. also, on the way to the beer, i ran in to the teacher from San I. the one who did the cooking class and is working on growing fruit trees with the PTA. but the teachers are all in training over summer, so she can´t keep in touch with the PTA on the trees, i offer to help, but in this as well I have yet to follow through. I will though.

Wednesday July 8th wake up early to catch a bus back to site. meet with Carlos from Quito and a friend of his who is specialized in tourism. we are heading to the meeting of all the community presidents. we get there late. they talk a lot. i don´t like it when specialists come to a meeting and talk the whole time. really, we should be listening to the people at the meeting, and then make recomendations based on what they tell us about the specific situation. if they don´t feel like they are part of the decision making process, they are less likely to follow through. i point this out, thus somewhat ironically adding my own wind to that of the specialists.

to try and get some participation from the community representatives, i asked them a few questions, like what they see as potential tourist attractions, and when they are having meetings so we can further discuss with the individual communities. we noted the meeting dates and said we´d be there (this turned out to be untrue). also, a lot of the meeting went to debating a proposed canal that would potentially take water from the community to the cities below. unfortunately there was very little information around which to base the debate, and really the communities have very little say in the project. so i noted a contact to follow up on and get more info, and begged the group to move on to matters which we could actually have an intellegent conversation about. i finally succeeded only by ignoring the canal talk and talking about tourism again.

that night we went to San V. the community where i teach and Carlos and William, the tourism specialist, told them we would train them in community tourism (also, as yet, untrue).

July 9th went to town. worked on the map situation. actually i think some of what i was ranting about before occured on this date. regardless, that guy is an ass.

July 10th there was a meeting with the San M. community women´s bank. I told them about the situation with the church and the trout pools. and that some engineers would be coming to evaluate the pools´condition. the prez wasn´t there, she was in Quito getting support from the Ministry of Agriculture and Pisciculture.

Saturday July 11th went to town. probably just wasted time on facebook or something.

Sunday July 12th went to San M. for the soccer match. spoke with the Prez of the womens' bank. tried to get a guy to weld the door of the school in my community. been trying for probably about a month at that point. he always promises next saturday. . .

Monday July 13th toured the trout pools with the engineers. they say it is worth about $70k, and it needs about $90k investment to be fully functional. the water intake is full of rocks, and the water is about a meter below it. will have to look in to some sort of partial renovation to limit initial investment.

then i went to San V. to teach. afterwards i became very ill. and passed the next several days in bed. was very thankful for the books i had picked up in Ibarra. and for the PC medical officer. we can´t go to the doctor without the PCMO´s approval (unless its an extreme emergency) and my viral stomach infection was not approved. all the doctor would do is sell me antibiotics, which don´t do much good against a virus.

anyway, i was fully recovered by Friday July 17th so I went and taught my regular classes.

Saturday July 18th I walked about 10 miles trying to meet a Dr. of agronomy in Ibarra. He works with a fungus called trichoderma. very common in soil, it is an antiviral agent, and it has a lot of potential for fighting at least one of several common plagues that affect the tree tomato, the most common cash crop around my site. if it is effective, not only will it prevent these diseases and thus help production, but it will render unnecessary some of the chemicals which they spray every 2 weeks. they don´t use the recommended protection when they spray, and they use red label chemicals, banned in the U.S. for their toxicity to humans and in the environment. so this trichoderma stuff could come in handy. unfortunately there were no cars leaving from the central community, so i started walking to town. this is a 3 hour walk, i figured one would pass coming from another community or something, but no such luck. had i the constitution to wake my lazy butt up at 4am, i could have caught a truck leaving from my site, but i figured i would be able to catch a later ride. nope. by the time of the scheduled meeting with the Doc, I was an hours walk from town, which is still an hour from Ibarra where we were to meet. I happened to get reception in that particular bend in the road, so i called to tell him i´d be late. could we reschedule? no can do. so i turned around, and it started to rain. anyway i crossed the raging stream (up to my thigh at a point what with the rain and all) and got home.

Sunday July 19th i relaxed. did a little exercise, and studied for the LSAT.
Monday July 20th taught my classes, and did another class for the young adults of my community

Tuesday July 21st went to town and got the agricultural engineer from the quinoa and chocho video to come to my community and give a talk. he came and 6 people signed up to grow. actually, i think he had already come. i think i got my dates wrong. but anyway, he came back a second time on this date, and the people who had signed up before agreed to go on a field trip to see people who grow quinoa in another town, Cotacachi, famous for its leather. I´m personally more interested in amaranth, another crop that this guy advocates. i have a little experience with amaranth from austin where a biologist friend of mine grew it to isolate it´s dye to be used to indicate expired medicines. that was his idea. i haven´t spoken with him in years. i hope it panned out. anyway, according to the figures this engineer gave us, we could be making $10k per hectare twice a year on amaranth. considering, as i´ve mentioned, the average annual income is something like $1,500, thats pretty damn good. almost too good to be true. we´ll experiment.

Wednesday July 22nd went by San M. just cause i had time, and it happened to be the day that another engineer, this one from the ministry of agriculture and pisciculture, was scheduled to check out the pools. So I went with the prez of the community bank and the engineer and some other members of the community bank. i chimed in with what i had gleaned from the previous trip. in the end i offered my help in getting copies of some documentation concerning the pools to the engineer from the ministry. this ended up taking several hours longer than i had expected, but that´s what volunteers are for, right? also, i taught a class to the young adults.

Thursday July 23rd this is when i spent those hours getting those copies to that engineer.

Friday July 24th taught my classes and in between, i went to the central community where the Project was giving out the plants it had promised. Actually, they came several hours late, and they gave out a lot less than some of the beneficiaries had expected. 10 plants per species per farmer who had signed up. haven´t signed up? haven´t heard about it? tough tamales.

but what pissed me off a little bit more was that Carlos and William couldn´t come to the tourism meeting they had promised a community on the other side of the mountain. Why not? the director of the Project, also my friend, couldn´t give them any money. Why not? basically because Carlos doesn´t work here, he doesn´t get the full scoop in time. he needed to fill out a budget to send to Italy to get the money. wahwah.

so i tell the people from that community the bad news. They are apparently a well organized group of 60 working to promote tourism in their community. they are relatively close to the lake (the 9 hour route), and they have a locally famous Virgin Mary that, legend has it, appeared out of the rock. they told me that they had prepared food and everything, so i called their president to tell him to stop the stoves, the specialists aren´t coming. but he was like, well, hey, why don´t you come? thats a long way man. (one hour walk coming back from there to the central community, which is 40 minutes uphill to my site, the walk there would be significantly more than an hour because it is all uphill). and the meeting is at night, i can´t reasonably expect myself to make it. but he promises me a ride. he here at this time. so i´m there at that time and there is no ride. i´m still a little chafed about that, but maybe there was a good reason.

Saturday July 25th and Sunday July 26th i mostly just hung out. thats what weekends are for.

Monday July 27th came to town with the president of the county (the town is the capital of the municipality, which is bigger than the county) to get cracking once again on those maps. unfortunately, the mayor wasn´t there. so we couldn´t do much on that line. we were gonna circumvent the a-hole and get it all done. . .anyway, we spoke with an engineer about a budget for a bridge over the raging stream i forged the other week. my persistent questionng led to a $2k cut in the price, bringing it within the amount allocated by the province. sweet.

ok, my butt is sore from all this sitting. not sure how i did it in school. chao.