Alex's Ecuadorian Forestry Blog

a link

2010-03-18T14:37:00.001-07:00

http://www.projectsforpeaceecuador.org/

i was asked to post this.

PICTURES!

2010-03-18T08:35:00.000-07:00

So I was gonna upload a bunch of sweet pics, but uploading this one took a while, and I don´t have all day to sit here and blog. I have to save some time for facebook.

Anyway, it is probably better to upload them one by one as opposed to displaying 20 photos of me being taller than everyone else all at once.

This particular photo was taken when I first got to site. I went out with some guys from the provincial government office of the environment to put a post delineating the buffer zone of the nearby reserve. In the photo you can clearly see some trees. Yes, there are many trees. Actually, I believe those are alders, known as aliso in these parts. Alders, though not techinically legumes, fix nitrogen into the soil through a symbiosis with some microbes. This is a very useful adaptation, and I believe it explains their niche in early succession. They are common around recent landslides. Although the lack to topsoil in these areas is an obstacle for other species, the alders can apparently handle it, probably due to their microbial buddies.

When these observations are put in a less naturalistic and more practical perspective, we can see why alders are such a good hedgerow plant around fields. Agricultural fields are a prime example of secondary succession, succession in which the topsoil remains but the vegetation is largely disturbed. Nitrogen is often a limiting factor for crops, and the alders can provide it as they drop their leaves. Furthermore, it comes with organic matter, which helps keep the nitrogen around, as opposed to chemical fertilizers, much of which is often washed away.

Another common characteristic of pioneer species such as the alder is rapid growth, and this has obvious benefits for the farmer looking to take advantage of a crop of quality wood.

So thats all very nice. Stuart the forester, my childhood friend and neighbor, if you are still reading this blog, please correct me if I´m wrong on the above.

Really, I should be blogging once or twice a week. I feel like maybe at one point I had built up a nice little readership base which I have now largely lost due to neglect. Now that I have internet so close to home, I have no excuse. Except maybe that I am working more. And thats true, the comment about facebook is almost entirely facetious. I´m working with several schools to build little nurseries to produce plants (such as the native alder) for the farmers. And stuff like that.

Ok, so maybe i´ll get back to this sooner rather than later. I´ll try to keep posting nice pictures.

Back Due to Popular Demand!

2010-03-01T07:36:00.000-08:00

ok, so the day by day breakdown i tried a while back clearly isn´t going to work to cover this hiatus. a week by week breakdown might be a bit much too, so i´ll try a month by month:

november: i kind of abandoned my community to live in the nearby town of Pimampiro. Pimampiro has internet access, but i still didn´t blog because i had more important things to do. Such as: the work for which i was in Pimampiro, and studying biology. The work was at a nursery that has pretty much been abandoned. this is the fate of projects past. NGOs and stuff in ecuador, and probably all of latin america if not the developing world, work on a project by project basis. this is the result of having to write grants and then having to complete, or at least look like they are trying to complete, the proposal as written in the grant. but then when the time and/or money runs out, nothing else happens except for the natural process of decomposition. in this case, the project was to create business opportunities by growing a bunch of aromatic herbs, giving the herbs away to farmers in return for a slice of the product, and then processing the herbs in big expensive machines to sell the essential oils for soap or tea or whatever. i never saw the machines. i never saw anyone growing the herbs actually. but i did see and work in this nursery full of lemongrass, mint, and some little plant called matico.

so basically, i spent november and most of december working in this nursery and listening to free mp3 biology lectures from mit (check it out www.ocw.mit.edu). like, pulling weeds and killing slugs and stuff. kind of a pain in the back. if i ever have any say in nursery construction, the plants are gonna be on tables.

one benefit though, was being able to go to karaoke in town. they have several english songs including Bohemian Rhapsody.

also, for thanksgiving, we were invited to quito to dine with the ambassador or her henchmen. i had heard rumors (she makes you watch dog shows instead of football) which led me to ask for a seat at one of the other places. apparently, the head security officer has the best party with bbq and football and stuff (this is where the marines go). but i went to another embassy worker´s place, and it was pretty cool. apparently, their kids go to a private school here that costs something like $100k a year. this isn´t a university, this is a highschool. and the embassy pays. also pays for their housing, which is pretty sweet. one of the guys i met there might help me with a grant for the abandoned trout ponds near here. i should call him up again. . .

DECEMBER:
kept working in that nursery for the first half of the month. ownership of which has been turned over to the parish council at my site, so thats cool. at this point, it appears that my work was pretty much pointless because the parish president (El Pastor, the evangelical guy i think i mentioned months back. hes cool) wants to get rid of all the herbs and plant trees. thats cool with me, trees are more my thing here. also, i made some friends by giving some herbs away.

my bro and dad came and visited and we went to cuenca, that was fun. then we came to my site, which was also cool. then they left.

January
umm... i did some things, but i don´t think i got anything done. thats kind of the story of this whole experience so far. like we went and got about 400 alder cuttings, which can be planted to produce little trees which are great for agroforestry because they fix nitrogen and they grow quickly. before going, i asked the director of the project if we could put them in the greenhouse (this isn´t the herb project in pimampiro, this is the project in my parish, the one working to give fruit trees to farmers who sell the fruit to the jelly co-op who sell jelly and make everyone happy) sure, he says. they are trying to get their greenhouse going and they want some plants to make it look good (see above about projects either doing things or appearing to do them). so i go with one of my new favorite parish councilmen and another local kid to cut these stakes to plant. we take great care to keep them moist, and we even get some bags to put them in. the director and i had agreed that he or his people or the students who "work" at the greenhouse (it is located at the local highschool, which doesn´t cost $100k per year) would plant the cuttings. so i drop them off and go about my merry way, i had some other shit to do. (actually, this story took place in december when i was working at the other nursery and i had to get back to killing slugs or something). i come back a week later and half of the cuttings are exactly where i left them and the other half are dessicating in the sun. you are supposed to plant these things within 48 hours and you are supposed to do it beneath a shade cloth, and you are supposed to water them every day, but lets not be too picky. so i plant the rest of them with another guy who works at the project who is about my age, and i figure since they spent like $10k on this fancy shmancy sprinkler system , maybe someone would bother to turn it on once in a while. but no. so at this point, now that the story is taking place in january, the cuttings are all dead. and there is a project meeting with the boss man from quito, who is italian and has a phd in philosophy. and someone mentions these cuttings, and i´m like, well, it was a good idea, but their all dead. the director bullshits about how he wasn´t told ahead of time and he can´t be expected to take care of stuff that no one tells him about. i was pissed, but i´ve decided it might be best not to talk too much when i´m pissed and there are a bunch of people around. so we spoke later. i wish i could say that we communicated successfully, but since then he has bullshitted me twice more and i´m getting kinda tired of it.

i would bust him out in a meeting, but i honestly feel like i haven´t gotten much done myself, so who am i to bust his balls? but then, at least i don´t tell people i´ll take care of something and then not do it and then pretend like these matters have nothing to do with me. so i might bust his balls at the meeting this thursday.

February
uhm. took the GRE. went up to the woods with some biologists and found some spectacled bear poop. might have found a new species of mountain snail, but the wily beast escaped (true story). did not find the salt lick that the tapirs use, but got better directions and i´ll find it next time.

decided a cool project would be a sacha cuy breeding program with my host family. they want to do it. i want to do something. questionable legality, but i´ve been researching and will contact the appropriate authority next time i go to ibarra (provincial capital). sacha cuy by the way is a wild guinea pig about the size of a short fat house cat.

continued to do stuff without getting much done. but as we speak, i have about 700 alders in the high school green house (also have not been adequately cared for, as the director promised, but at this point i expected as much) and if everything goes as planned (which it didn´t yesterday but i haven´t lost hope) at 5 pm today i will be giving these trees to local farmers who have swore to me that they will plant them and not leave them to rot on their back porch. i will ofcourse check up on them in a week.

so that pretty much brings everything up to date. . . . filling in a few holes: i got the 700 alders from a guy from the environmental ministry who promised me 2000 about 8 months ago. so this guy is relatively true to his word in my experience around these parts. umm.. . i´m not really as angry at the director as i may sound. mostly i am frustrated with my lack of accomplishments, but i understand it is to be expected in this line of work.

ok, i gotta go check on these alders.

ps. i love you too, arbi

its been a little bit

2009-10-18T17:33:00.000-07:00

ok, so since i last posted i´ve done a few things. not many things, but a few. i probably should have posted sooner, if only because my dad enjoys reading this stuff. (hey dad!). on the note of relatives, my dear aunt reads this stuff too, at least occasionally, so i have to stop cursing. i found that tidbit out on my 10 day leave to the states. in certain circumstances, PC will let volunteers take unpaid leave. i had those circumstances, so i did. i´m glad i did, but in general i´d say it isn´t a good idea to go home so early in service. you get back and you start missing stuff again. but anyway, i got back, and i taught english in a community for a week, and then i got strep throat, but since it had been exactly 7 days since i was in an airport, and i had body aches and a sore throat and whatnot, i was scared i had the pig flu. so i called the PC doctors a lot until they told me to come to quito, so i did. and they told me i had strep throat, but i was already pretty much over it. so i stayed another night just to hang out and i ate a 15$ steak at a restaurant called the Magic Bean. it had vegan food, i´ll take my pops there if we stay a night in Quito (hey dad!). i also met a girl who was ending her service. she was from the omnibus (training group) after me, so she had really just gotten out of training. she was quiting because she had been expecting an international health experience, and then she got to a little community in the middle of the mountains. so if you are expecting an international health experience, don´t sign up for peace corps.

then a week later i got called to go get a flu vaccine, and they haven´t offered to reimburse my travel expenses. and a week after that was the reconnect conference, in which we report on the surveys we´ve been doing and we get trained on ¨project design and management¨which i found pretty helpful. we are supposed to invite out counterparts, at first i had 3, the evangelical president of the parish (parish is the political unit one step above community, i think i´ve refered to it as district before, but now i know the right translation), known as the Pastor by his committee, at least behind his back, also the 2 agronomists from the Project i work with. but before it was go time, they all three backed out. the Pastor invited in his place the ex-president of the parish, who is also from my community, who is a good guy despite the fact that he hit my beloved dog Jack with a machete while i was on leave in the states. apparently jack was about to eat their much smaller family dog, and each protects his own, as my compañeros explained the situation. but then he backed out too. so i invited my host brother but at this point it was only several hours before we needed to be at the conference, which was more than several hours away.

so he asked a friend to drive the truck home from the market (where we had been selling another friend´s tree tomatoes at a price below the cost of production). the friend didn´t make it all the way back. the truck broke down. so they sold it. and then the asked me for a loan to buy another. first of all, i explained, i don´t have enough money to my name to cover the difference between what you sold the old truck for ($5k) and what you need to buy another (at least $10k). second of all, if i did, how would you pay me back in two years?

they wouldn´t. thats why peace corps suggests not making loans. anyway, reconnect went well. and afterwards, i visited a university in the area of Riobamba (which was where the 5 day conference was held for volunteers stationed in the sierra), and filmed an interview with a micobio Doctor who grows trichoderma, a fungus which lives in soil, fixes nitrogen, and combats other fungi which cause blights. i bought a kilo of the stuff, and i´m distributing it among farmers in my parish who are interested in testing it out.

the day after that, i visited an organic farm, also in the area of reconnect, and filmed interviews and demonstrations with the farmer showing how to grow tree tomato (the most common cash crop in my parish) organically. i´m currently preparing that footage to be made into a short film to show to my peeps. i don´t think anyone is likely to convert to organic, but if they can save some money on chemicals, then everybody wins. except the chemical companies. but they´ll hardly notice.

so i got back from there and shortly thereafter went to quito to take the LSAT (just got the score, couldn´t have done better!) and then spend the rest of my accrued vacation days in cuenca, visiting my old host family from my exchange student days. haven´t seen em in over 7 years, but they haven´t changed much. very very welcoming. pretty much spent a week an a half on the couch watching HBO. i looked in to some loans for the trout ponds in my parish, but mostly it was HBO.

so i got back from that and i decided i should do some work. so even before i got to my site, i was contacting the catholic church, which owns the majority share of the trout ponds, about selling them, and also my man who works with the ministry of the environment about getting me some trees to plant (did i mention i have about 20 farmers signed up to plant about 2000 native trees? its more complicated than that, but its a good start). he said he´d look in to getting my 1000, and he invited me on a trip to train some of the farmers in my area. cool. so i´m doing that tuesday.

i spent last week walking down the mountain and back up every day to work with the project, or if they seemed unproductive, the parish. that walk really wears one out. sometimes in the rain. sometimes in the dark. i got a little bit done.

friday was the beginning of the anniversarial festivities of a neighboring parish, so i was invited to go join the parade. afterwards, i got pulled out to dance and placed in front of a lady who turned out to be a consejal, councilperson, in the municipality, which owns most of the other shares of the trout pond. i had recently been told by the president of the womens´group (the one which has their bidness very well organized and wants to buy and put back in operation the run down trout ponds in their community) well, she told me that the new mayor of the municipality doesn´t want to sell the trout ponds, but would be happy if the women bought the church´s shares and took out a loan to renovate them. but the president says uh-uh, cause once they are in debt and the ponds are productive again, the municipality is gonna screw them. she opened her mouth and drew a finger across it, i´m not sure if it was to represent a fish hook, or food being stolen just as one was about to eat it, or something else, but it was expressive, and i think i´ll try it sometime.

but anyway, the consejala i danced with didn´t mind talking business with me (i asked first) and she said that it wasn´t just up to the mayor (he had said it was), that she and the other councilpeople would have to vote on it, and that she would start asking em what they think. so score one for me and my great dance moves.

so that was friday. saturday i declined to return to the festivities, opting instead to read, do a little exercise, clean my room, and watch some macguyver episodes (bought seasons one and two in cuenca!). macguyver rocks. my family doesn´t believe his smooth moves would work, but i know they would.

sunday, today, i came to town to work in a nursery they got here. they got it, but they ain´t got no one working in it. the project that started it has ended, and they are considering giving it to my parish, but the parish has to put up some sort of investment in return. they want to throw in a nurseryperson to work it, but they can´t fit it in the budget till the new year. thats where i come in. plus, there is a school nearby and i´m working on inviting students so i can teach em about nursery stuff. plus there are a bunch of native trees for me to weed, water, tend, and then give to my farmers who have signed up to plant trees. its a good deal. so i worked from mid afternoon, when i got the keys, till a little after dark. we´ll see what time i wake up tomorrow, but i forsee getting things done.

there are other things i could type about, but i think the internet cafe is gonna close soon. maybe i´ll blog some more this week. but maybe not. don´t hold your breath or anything.

chao!

The week I didn't really get anything done

2009-08-02T14:15:00.000-07:00

Monday the 27 was when I last updated. I left the internet cafe and went to the map office, knowing they weren't gonna give me anything, just to check up and make sure the situation was as i understood it to be. i had been told that at this point do to my repeated assaults on the office and Carlos in Quito's talking to the director of the project that made the maps to begin with, we were gonna get all the maps we need. we just needed the current pres of the parrochia and the newly elected one to sign something saying that they wouldn't give the maps away to anybody else, strictly for the use of the parrochia (and since the parrochia is a counterpart in the project, us too). the presidents were unavailable at the time, so i just went to the office to better understand how it was all gonna go down. i get there and i go to the pendejo and i ask him, why did you give me the overviews and tell me they were detailed? why didn't you give me the detailed maps? I didn't give them to you, he says, because now you have to pay for them, the mayor has given us new instructions. what? putting aside the fact that the mayor had not given these new instructions at the time of the pendejo civilly disobeying my requests, the mayor shouldn't have changed his mind, he already signed a form saying to give us the maps for free. well, i spoke with the pendejo's boss, and it is true. apparently these maps are just too great to actually be put to use. they spent a lot of money making them, so now its very important that they keep them hidden from anybody who wants to do anything. they wanna charge a dollar a hectare, this would come out to well over 2 grand. so now we gotta wait for the new mayor to take his seat and ask him to help us out.

tuesday the 28th i thought about waking up early and going to the other side of the mountain for grafting class, but laziness got the best of me. i went down to the project office in the afternoon only to find my laziness overshadowed by that of the much better paid engineers who work there. Victor, my friend, the director of the project was playing rummy with his assistant engineer David who is also a nice guy i just don't know him as well, and the jelly prez. its lunch break, they tell me, 2pm. well, the government offices close 12 to 2:30, so i guess its ok. anyway, theres not a damn thing i can do about it. so i go to a nearby community to talk to the prez of the women's community bank about getting a grant or a loan to buy the trout ponds. she gives me some coffee and tortillas, and i get back to the project office about 2 hours later. and they're still playing rummy. the jelly prez is winning all their money. thats a lot of lunch, i say. to their credit, there is a power outage, so they can't do computer work. but that doesn't mean they couldn't be doing something a little more constructive to earn their salaries (2 to 3 times what i make). anyway, after 5, i figure office hours are over so i show the jelly prez how to play texas hold'em and i win 50 cents. they gave a lecture that night to a couple of farmers (they could have been publicizing it during the day and maybe more people would have come). i gave a part on agroforestry and wrote down some people who want to plant aliso. i feel like their presentation was overly technical and the people didn't get much out of it. they talked about ion exchange capacity, among other things. i left early to catch the last truck up to my community.

wednesday july 29th: pretty much the same story. except this time they were drinking too.

thursday july 30th: went to town. blew most of the day on facebook.

friday july 31st: taught my classes. the young adults have stopped coming. this, even when i ask them if they want class, and they say yes, so i open up the school, and they just keep playing soccer for an hour, so i leave. its really not as frustrating as it sounds, i spent the time watching music videos that the teacher put on the computer and printing lsat study materials.

saturday august 1st: at site they were celebrating the entrance of the newly elected people, but i came to ibarra to celebrate the leaving of my peacecorps friend here. should not have drunk so much.

sunday august 2nd: paying the price of drinking so much.

so that is the week in which i didn't really do much. hopefully there won't be more of the same. tomorrow i'm gonna go to an office here in ibarra to see about getting some trees to plant. also, a development bank to see about getting a loan for the trout ponds. anyway, since i didn't really do much this week, i've posted below one of my fellow volunteer's stories.

Why I don't think I'm gonna quit:

2009-08-02T14:10:00.000-07:00

My friend sent out this story in an e-mail to our omnibus (training class). Its pretty wild, so I figured I'd post it. he's from Brooklyn, so read it with an accent. .

thursday, july 23rd, 700 am -- i woke up and saw, to my utter amazement, that the overnight high tide had taken an entire house off its stilts and dropped it IN THE MIDDLE OF THE BEACH, about 50 meters north of its original location. everyone in the community, of course, got a huge kick out of this: laughing, children playing on the now-vacant house, etc. however, they quickly realized that this is a bad omen, because in about 6 hours the tide would start coming back up again, possibly to destroy more houses. therefore, many people started evacuating their things from their houses and putting them on the road parallel to the beach. i realized that we had a potential "katrina-like" situation on our hands (imminent doom, etc.). i snapped some fotos and went to the municipio, where i had a meeting that afternoon.

thursday, july 23rd, 200 pm -- i show the fotos of the displaced house to the mayor and various people in the municipio. he makes the point that, all of the houses in this area of risk in Don Juan are illegal and were never supposed to have been built. he has a point, and even my house on thea beach is illegal, but still... to my shock, noone seems to concerned or ready to be proactive. unfortunately, i had more meetings to attend at my foundation´s office that afternoon/evening, so i did not return to my community for round 2 of the potential destruction (late afternoon tide). i tried to brace myself for the scene that i knew awaited me that evening...

friday, july 24th, 1230 am -- i finally return to my community after a long day of meetings. my community is eerily dark and quiet. i walk the beach with my flashlight, and the destruction of the late afternoon tide was horrible. my flashlight revealed that about 5 or 6 more houses had been destroyed (completely gone, not dropped on the beach), others had been mashed up pretty badly with wood and sh*t everywhere, and a few had that cross-section look, where an entire side had been carved away revealing the interior, like a doll house. all the people in the affected area where sleeping in the street, with all their stuff in piles around them. indeed it was, essentially, a refugee scene. the tide was starting to come back up, so i set my cell phone alarm for 300am that morning so i could be prepared for the next high tide.

friday, july 24th, 300 am -- i wake up and the waves are just smashing the hell out of my community, including my front porch. i watched for hours and saw light posts fall on top of boats, while houses, walls and fences disappeared entirely. the waves started overtaking my front porch quite a bit, and i had to jump back to avoid beeing doused. one of the stilts that holds up my front porch was beginning to buckle; i began running an escape plan through my mind. i already had a couple of bags packed to flee, just in case. really crazy stuff. the type of natural phenomenon that you cant take your eyes off. i finally decide to tap a nap at 600 am for an hour, knowing that a clean-up / relief effort would be necessary in the morning.

friday, july 24th, 800 am -- i wake up again and walk the community. we almost lost the front porch, but thankfully it is still standing. we reinforce it with a few more stilts. i walk to the south... approximately 15 houses are now completely gone, destroyed by the worst high tide of this multi-day disaster. it looks like bombs struck the individual lots where there were once houses. piles of rubble everywhere and people wandering around in stunned, post-disaster daze. i survey the damage along the beachfront and it is heartbreaking. after about an hour of silence and trying to think, i simply get busy. gotta get busy to take my mind off things. i got to each little zone of rubble and ask the people if they need help. i immediately suggest that we need to clear out all of the largest, heaviest posts from the destroyed houses because when the tide returns, those things would slam against the surviving houses and rip them apart. i convince dozens of people to STOP BURNING THE TRASH! holy sh*t, why do they just start burning everything? i say to everyone in large groups, "hey, we have to work out here all day long cleaning up and helping people. do you really want to work over fires and smoke all day, breathing in this sh*t? i dont! so lets cut it out! besides, you are just burning light little pieces of palm and bamboo. those wont do anything! they will float harmlessly in the ocean. lets get these huge posts out of here before they mash up everything again!" they listen (mostly), and the fires stop. after a few hours, some people start making lists of the families who dont have houses. this way, when the relief resources come, we will know who needs what.

friday, july 24th, 400 pm -- emergency meeting at the municipio. apparently the mayor is now willing to listen. great. before i leave, i tell dozens of people in the community to get their things ready to evacuate. trucks will be coming, so pack up your stuff and be ready to move when we get back. some blank stares and nods, and then i am off. we show fotos, discuss potential plans for this evening (tide coming back up to high in about another 2 hours!), etc. we suggest moving the people to higher, safer ground (school, church, empty lots, etc.). friday, july 24th, 700 pm -- we return to the community to see that NOONE HAS MOVED AN INCH! in the usa, when a disaster strikes, what do we do? we evacuate, right? not here. people keep saying that they would rather live in the street than evacuate to the school or church. why? because the school/church/empty lots are in don juan CENTRAL, and the people of BELLA VISTA don juan dont like the people of don juan central, so they refuse to go there, even in a crisis. unbelievable. all this while the tide is coming again. the press has arrived. i am pretty sure i was on the news. then the resources start coming in thanks to the municipio: mattresses, water bottles, pillows, sheets, towels, food rations, etc. the pista, the location where we would distribute the resources, is a f*ckin zoo of people who refuse to cooperate. i ask the police to help get some people out of there, the people who were not affected, so we can work. not happening. good job cops. there are kids playing indoor while we are trying to dish out rations. people are coming up to me asking for free sh*t when they live outside of the affectd zone. eventually, the system of handing out rations becomes corrupted, and people who LOST NOTHING SO FAR ARE RUNNING AWAY WITH MATTRESSES, WATER, SHEETS, you name it. that group of bandits includes my host family. when i see the mess that has become of this aid attempt, i kicked over a couple of plastic chairs, threw a few more out of the way, and yelled out something like "there is corruption here! people are taking things when they still have everything!" i storm out of there, refusing to calm down. this goes on well into the night.

well, perhaps i will write round 2 later, because now i have to go to yet another meeting with the mayor. there is so much more to tell. some final last thoughts to close out round 1 --
*people in don juan are beginning to invade private property to solve their housing problem
*i have had women yelling in my face about everything, when they still have a home and suffered nothing*miduvi is here and in the early stages of building new homes
*lets just say that my CAT tools community map will change DRAMATICALLY
*all of my projects post-CAT tools have been shelved, as you can imagine
*i didnt tell peace corps anything until 2 days ago, because i didnt want to get yanked from my site

alright, so bottom line - if any of yous quit after hearing what i have been through, i will shove my size 44 Venus sneakers so far up your culo that you will floss your teeth with the shoe laces, you got me?! yeah. seriously though, i am fine. its been tough, but we will make it. much like joyce, i just dont want to hear anymore omnibus 101 quitting stories, because if i can make it through this, we can all make it through everything. diga?

trying to catch up on the last month

2009-07-27T09:34:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-07-07T17:00:00.000-07:00

Ok, so i´m in Ibarra, the capital of the province of Imbabura. It is two hours from my site, which I thought was a lot until I heard how long it took other volunteers to get here for the 4th. I didn´t bring my notes. I took notes of what I did everyday for the last couple of weeks. Not having notes for the days before that doesn´t worry me because all the pc literature says most people don´t do anything particularly successful in the first month and a half at site other than try and integrate with the community. I´ll try and remember what it was I did the last 2.5 weeks without notes, then I´ll try and answer Stu´s Q´s regarding land management, then I'll see if I still feel like typing. . .

Sunday June 14th was the county election. Some evangelical from a town on the other side of the mountain won. But they have a sort of multi-party system, so there are 4 others in the cabinet. they all gave speeches, technically that took place next sunday, but i'm gonna type about it here. starting with the bottom cabinet member. he is the president of the jelly making community business that hasn´t functioned for something like a year. they´ve been working for five years, they´ve been paying dues, and they haven´t recieved a penny. not in dividends, not in wages. they´ve had equipment donated to them they have a place to work they are now even legally recognized, but they aren´t working. something about the water, or the certificate of health, or the bathroom, but these things hadn´t stopped them from working before. whatsmore, after all these years, they have a grand total of 93$ in the bank. the president and his wife go to the market to sell the goods and come back empty handed. some say they should check their pockets. . . but face to face he is a nice guy, and he gives decent speeches.

the next up cabinet member was the old prez of my community (not the 23 year old) and is now the sitting prez of the county until the new cabinet takes over in august. he´s cool. some people say he doens´t do much. he had to escort the community´s beauty queen for a week, so he gets made fun of for that. she´s pretty, pretty underage.

the next cabinet member up the totem pole is the rich guy who owns the greenhouses next to the highschool whose worker may or may not have dumped a load of rubble on the intake pipe to the highschool's trout pools, thus putting them out of service for something like 1 year and running. but they weren´t working before that either, so whatev. anyway, this guy is apparently a self made man. he was the first in the area to start growing the tree tomatoes that nearly everyone now relies upon. when he grew them there were no pests or blights to speak of, so he made a killing. now that everyone is in on it they have to throw down thousands of dollars a year on chemicals, and they don´t start producing for a year and a half, and the often don´t produce for more than 2 or 3 years, probably due to the cultivation practices. so now this guy grows tomatoes. and he is thinking about getting in on the jelly making operation by growing a fruit called chihualcan, which currently requires no chemicals. . .

the top cabinet member below the prez owns a truck and lives right next to the parroquial building. he is known as a blowhard. he claimed that if he didn´t win prez he would withdraw, but he is clearly not doing that. he stepped up to his speech late, walking slowly. he started talking about how great it would have been if he had won, and thanking the people for their 'infinite support.' and he ended with a few catch phrases from the president of ecuador, rafael correa. the crowd didn´t go wild.

the new evangelical prez seems like a really nice guy. he talked about working together and taking the cabinet to every community to talk about their needs instead of making community members coming to the cabinet. he also told people not to drink too much.

Monday June 15th i did my usual teaching gig. in two communities. turns out the teacher at one of them wrote a thesis on building a native and medicinal plant nursery for the county. this happens to be approximately what the project i am working with is doing. so i got a copy of her thesis and gave it to the project members.

Tuesday June 16th woke up early to help my host brothers try to fix some electrical problems at the one room school house next to our place. mission accomplished. then we went down to a project meeting with all the contributing partners in from quito. Carlos R, the guy who filled out the paperwork to get me there, Hugo C, the host brother, Sandro and Anita, Italians (Sandro is the boss), Victor the director of the project, and the Prez of the jelly operation. the director of the highschool couldn´t make it. I sat quietly until the end. Sandro called me out, and i made my comment, that the project should hire Carlos as the environmental consultant for which budget money is earmarked. Obviously, since carlos also filled out the paper work for the project, he will not only be the most informed on its purposes and procedures, but he will also have a personal interest in its success. carlos said he didn´t want to do it, and i looked dumb. also i made a grammar mistake and Anita laughed. damn italians. not really, anita is now working with us more and she´s cool. after the meeting we went to another community (Victor, Jelly Prez, myself, and a clown from the travelling circus) to eat some food they had prepared (we were invited). so this other community has two computers, and since the school will be closed, no one will be using them this summer, and the teacher there offered that we take them to one of the communities i teach at so we could use them for the summer. since all the PTA was at the party (it was the graduation celebration for a cooking class that the teacher had organized for interested community members) they voted on it. first proposal, voiced by the teacher was for the two computers to be taken to the community in between my community and theirs, so that we could unite our computers and have bigger computer classes with all the kids invited, and the communities band together to insure repairs if any computer is broken. voted down. second proposal, voiced by me was for one computer to be taken to my community, which is too far for them to want to walk to (which is why i am not walking to them every week). we will pay for repairs if there is an accident. voted yes. so they don´t want to send their computers to where their kids can use them, but they are fine sending one farther up to mountain to where only my community will use it. fine by me.

i walked home, and it was late.

Wednesday June 17th. hm. kinda forgot. . . no, i rembmer, i went back to the comunity with the computers to talk with the teacher about a project she was working on to get the students to grow fruit trees. gave a few tips on gardening (first time, most of the farmers have way more experience), and helped the teacher and her students prepare a garden of their own. got a ride back with some cattle dealers from the next county over. knew one of them cause my host family sold him a cow to help pay off their truck. they took me to San M. a town by the river near the parroquia. They bought a couple beers and we shot the shit for a bit until two women approached me. asked if i was the one who gave english and computer classes, and if i would do them the favor of giving some classes in their community. so far, every single community i´ve been to has asked me this. i am a 40 minute walk from the closest community (ok, well i can get to the parrrochia in 20 minutes running down the mountain, but it is a hard hike back up), and that teaching crap is not my primary assignment, and i really don´t like doing it, and i definitely don´t feel like scheduling yet another hour each way hike every week, so no, i won´t teach classes to your kids, and honestly, your kids are probably grateful for that.

but these were no two ordinary women, these were the president and the treasurer of the San M women´s community bank, the most successful community bank in the area, the community bank that had won prizes for being well organized, that had grown their meagure start up capital to a total of $60k, in a region in which the average yearly income is well under $2k. they weren´t taking no for an answer, so i said fine, i´ll make a page with all the basics and i´ll print a bunch of copies and you can give them out to the kids. towards the end of summer vacation, i´ll come every day for a week, but if those kids don´t know the stuff on the review pages by heart, they ain´t steppin foot in the classroom, and i ain´t coming back.

ok. on a more business note, they used most of their capital to buy land here in Ibarra, the prez thinks it is a good idea to start a satellite community bank here. really? i think in that case it would no longer be a community bank. and when you consider the travelling costs and such, it really doens´t seem like a good idea. she goes on to say that her group is so well organized, if she said 'lets all jump off that cliff!' they´d do it. no questions asked. uhm. ma'am, there is a word for that, and it is 'groupthink', and i'm not sure if i can translate that into spanish, but it is not a good thing.

so now that they´ve squandered all their hard earned capital on what i consider to be not such a good idea, they are looking for ways to raise money. the prez thinks she can get a loan and grow some tree tomatoes, but i´ve been crunching the numbers on that, and i´m not so sure. her other idea was to talk with the owners of some dry trout pools in their community to see if they could get them up and running again. she was shot down, and i´m not surprised. i asked around about this lady (gossip is a hallmark of peaceful communities, not to say that my communities are particularly peaceful, but to say that i´ve got nothing against putting my ear to the grape vine. . . and shaking) (www.peacefulsocieties.org) she asked the municipality for help getting a computer for her bank. he bank, ofcourse, would be willing to put up a part of the total. a small part. $50. so it seems that she drives a hard bargain, and so i am not surprised that she was shot down about the pools. I came to ibarra today in part to talk to the owners of the pools (happens to be the Catholic Diocese) and there is a slight possibility that we can work something out. got another meeting on friday.

thursday june 18th thursday thursday thursday. .. oh yea, i was supposed to help one of the community buds hoe some potatoes. you gotta hoe up the weeds, and throw the dirt on top of the potatoe plants. hard work. i was invited mostly for shits and giggles. on my part i think it is a good practice to give a bit of free labor in return for an interview. (did i mention i have to do 50 interviews by september. to date i have 17) fortunately, none of the other peons (their terminology) showed up, so instead we prepared for the guy´s parent's golden anniversary celebration by slaughtering 2 pigs and painting a wall. you gotta hold the pigs down while stabbing a knife into their heart. then you bring a hose and a blow torch and you singe the hair without burning the skin. then you shave them, with knives, then straight edge razors. then you cut em open without spilling the guts on the meat. then you let them hang for a bit while we eat dinner. then you lay em out and hit em with an axe for a while and rub garlic and herbs all over. then you shove em in the oven over night and your ready to go.

friday june 19th teaching gig every monday and friday. i got picked up from the second community by the family and friends, all piled in the pickup truck, and we went straight to the graduation party on the other side of the mountain. danced some. drank some. ate a lot. they open up the party serving way more food than anyone can handle. actually, i think one dude may have eaten everything. first theres the soup with a fourth of a chicken in it, then the plate of rice and guinea pig and chicken and pork, and ofcourse the chicha. i like the chicha. anyway, they hung up to go bags for everyone. so on the dance floor, there´s this one girl giving me the eye. she´s pretty cute. they put on this Moscow Moscow song from the Soviet era. remixed. the kids go wild. and this girl is bouncing up and down with no bra on. but she looks like she might be a bit young, so i do my due diligence and ask the guy she was dancing with. 13. no, i mean that girl you were dancing with earlier. i only danced with one girl, he says, she´s 13. oh, no, i got the wrong guy, sorry, i was confused. so i point her out. 13. 13. whoa. thats why i do my due diligence.

saturday june 20th todays the golden anniversary party. i skip mass. take a practice LSAT instead. do well. go to the party. i have to bend over to fit in the dance floor. people laugh. i am self conscious. but the host if very welcoming, shows me a seat. his sister arranges a dance partner for me just outside. then the pretty girl comes. no, not the 13 year old, you creep ball. another chick from San M. she gave me the eye at a party several weeks ago, but before i could come up with a witty, or atleast coherent line, she was dancing with some older dude. and before i could step in on the dance floor, she goes home in his truck. damn. makes sense, though, there aren´t many my age without kids, so ofcourse they are taken. no, actually, my host at this party informs me that the aforementioned older guy was her dad, and this girl is like 19 or 20, so i should ask her to dance. so i do. we even find a spot in the corner where a fortunate architectural irregularity allows me to stand more or less straight. and she likes to practice her english. she is actually pretty good. so we dance and we talk and she tells me about her older brother who is 18. geawdamit.

there is something called the Protect Act, a very decent and needed piece of legislation which allows expats to be charged with statutory rape for sex acts performed overseas. technically, even going on a date with a 17 year old here could get me thrown in prison back in the states. and dates are legally defined, but i haven´t read over it that deeply, just let me make clear that

sunday june 21st was not a date. i went with the local guys to San M for the soccer game. spoke with the prez lady of the bank, and a welder about fixing the door to the school of my community. (did i mention this: the PTA raised a good deal of money this year, like $500, and they don´t want to save it for when their kids are no longer at the school, so they have a meeting. they spend hours counting up the money and tabulating the expenses and the profits from their various activities. this could be done in about 10 minutes with an Excel spreadsheet. anyway, the figure they have $500 bucks to blow, and so they start voting on where they want to go for vacation. they don´t vote on whether to go on vacation or not, they vote on where to go. so we are going to the beach. i am invited because i helped at the fundraiser dance. and the door to the school is broken. its been broken all year, not to mention the electricity problems. i mention this at the meeting. we all have a good laugh. and we are going to the beach.) so anyway, i am trying to coordinate with this welder dude. he still hasn´t come. but i´m trying.

monday june 22nd i must have taught. don´t quite remember much. probably generally uneventful. may have worked in the garden or something.

tuesday june 23rd i had made arrangements with a guy from down in the parroquia to go to a grafting class on the other side of the valley. every tuesday for the next 2 months an ag engineer is gonna come teach useful skills, so i might as well take advantage. 6:45 am, he tells me. the class starts at 9, but it takes a while to get there and he doesn´t like being late. now this is ecuador. and anywhere in latin america is known for tardiness. so when i am held up by a late breakfast, i figure it´ll be fine, i run down the mountain in 20min, my fastest time to date, and i am there by 6:50. dude is gone. no problem, one of the guys on the bench by the road tells me. a truck is coming soon, he went walking, we will catch up. hang out and chit chat. so i do. with him and several other important members of the community, and i´m pretty sure i got some good info, but i´m not sure i remember exactly what it was. anyway the truck comes. a big covered one and we hop in the back, the gate is locked, and it is on its way. but it is going to wrong way. so i pound on the wall and he lets me out and i curse and they laugh and i start walking. i get to the Y in the road where the pick ups are supposed to pass going up to the community where the class is supposed to take place. i know this is the right Y, because it is the first Y i pass and everyone has told me that the first Y i pass is the right Y. it is now 8:30, i had walked for about an hour to get to the Y from when i hopped off the truck, and i was tired so i took a nap. i was later told that i scared the bjeezies out of some lady who was walking by. but no pick ups passed. until 9:30 when one came by but it wasn´t going up it was going back to the parrochia, but it had the italian Anita in it, so i joined her. it later turned out that i was not in fact at the correct Y. perhaps you infered this from the stress i put on my knowing that it was the correct Y. anyway, so Anita is gonna be working with the jelly operation now, which is good, because as i have aluded, it is a sketchy operation. she is looking for victor, but he isn´t in the office, but i´m sure he is in town because their was no lock on his door this morning which means he must have been sleeping inside.

anyway, we find him driving back from the highschool. we hop in. pick up a measuring tape, and head to the water intake for the nursery we are constructing for the Project. the welder dude is helping construct it. we moved a big rock. apparently they don´t grunt or groan when putting in a lot of effort to move stuff. i do. know that i think about it, i´m not sure why. just seemed like the right noise to make. anyway, i´m pretty sure the welder dude said i sounded like a hog. having recently helped slaughter two hogs, i can say that infact they do make grunting noises. no one ever said such a thing back in the states. i'm pretty sure most people i've worked with grunt when they move heavy stuff. anyway, i think i´m gonna see if i can stop grunting and just exhale. should be easy. but then again so should whistling and i've yet to accomplish that.

so then we ate lunch, served by the lovely, and yet probably underage beauty pageant queen of the county, the daughter of the shifty welder dude who says he will buy then won´t come fix the school door. then we measured the way from the intake to the nursery. 3400 feet. then we lunched on pork rinds and cola (there is no restaurant in the county) then we went to the jelly operation meeting.

i could say a lot about it, but i won´t. i´ll say that i didn´t say anything till the end, when i asked the simple question of when they planned on getting back to work. several members had expressed eagerness to get the production going again, even before the Project donates more improved equipment. they even seem willing to pay dues to buy the materials. so i got the prez to agree to bring a budget for said materials to the next meeting. walking back up the mountain with one of the members, i was filled in on some of the sketchiness of this operation. well, if you are unhappy with the leadership, why don´t you elect new officers? apparently they had held their elections when they were in the process of getting legalized, and the government bureaucrat had said that they needed to keep the same prez. and the term is two years. so he has another year and a half. well, i said, i've worked with democratic type groups before, and usually there is a way to throw out an officer, if you have a problem. but apparently, the prez keeps a tight grip on the statutes. thats not right. . .

wednesday june 24th i´m pretty sure i slept in. oh yea, the night before there was supposed to be a meeting, the prez of the community had told me he would make it happen. but he didn´t. he says he was sick. others said different. i don´t really care at this point. i was gonna show a movie. actually, this is what i had done on monday in the community 40 minutes away where i also teach. i showed a movie on the cultivation of quinoa and chocho. chocho is a bean. fixes nitrogen in the soil, so thats good, and it is very high in protein. so that is also good. and it can be grown pretty well chemical free, so all together thats great. quinoa also has high protien, but it takes a lot of micronutrients from the soil. it puts them in the product, so it is very nutritious, and can also be grown easily with few chemicals, but you gotta let the soil rest a bit afterwards, which is a good time to grow chocho. anyway, i had gotten this video from a guy in the . . . ok the government organization is a bit hard to translate, but in the bigger than a county smaller than a province capital an hour away from my community. call it the municipality. the guy, another carlos, edits video and happens to be the cousin of both my host father and the county prez. annywaaaaaay to get back to the day i´m at, i went down the mountian to talk to the jelly prez about those statutes. i opened slow. talked about other stuff. when we got around to business, i waited to let him ask me what i thought of the meeting. i gave a few tips on how i think meetings should be run based on my co-op experience. he busted out with the documents. handled them a bit. pointed out some rules which i happen to think are dumb, but i didn´t say so. talked about the unruly members. eventually i got around to slowly reaching across the table to thumb through the statutes, while he vented about how they always argue and stuff. i asked if he had any financial records for the organization. he has kept very thorough records of all the times he has spent money out of pocket, so mybe he will get reimbursed for that, otherwise, nothing. i told him, as a friend, i said, not having financial records makes you look like a thief. you should have them, and you should have them up to date, because that will protect you from allegations. he nodded. also, your treasurer doesn´t seem to be doing much. he is treasurer because he lives close, so he can sign things easily. well, maybe you should take one of those members who argues a lot and make them treasurer (sure its an election, but you know what i mean). that will shut them up. he seemed to agree with that too. now, i said, i´m gonna go make some copies of these statutes. oh, great, yeah we´ve been meaning to get to that, but we haven´t had the money. so i make a copy for the members in my community, and i head back up the mountain. that night several community members watch the quinoa and chocho video. i´ve arranged for an ag. engineer featured in the video to come to the communities i work with and give extension service.

thursday june 25th ehh. . . .i´m pretty sure i went to the municipal town and i should have blogged then. as it is, i don´t have time to finish blogging and get up to date right now. but i´ll get on it. i promise.

stu, the grass grows tall, but the cows cut it low. shrubs do not seem to be a problem for trees. the problem is the cows. aliso. . . i can get the scientific name up on the next blog post. thanks for your interest. there are a lot of acacia species that do well in reforesting andes pastureland, but i´m not sure they do well in this particular cut of the andes. humid montane forest. thats like the ecotype or something, but it the microclimes vary even within the individual communities. ok. i gotta run. chao

2009-06-07T06:36:00.000-07:00

The Poop Shoot

So when I got to site, a host brother was working on a septic system for my baño. basically, it is a whole in the ground. about 5 feet deep. the rocks start at about 1 foot, but they are soft, as far as rocks go. So are we gonna put like a tank into this hole or something? no. just a hole, with a pipe from my toilet. wouldn´t this leach into the field right there? um. no. maybe we could do a composting toilet, i´ve been trained on that. yeah, he says, but we don´t really have enough ash or sawdust for that. how about with a simulated marsh or something, i´ve heard they work well. no, we don´t do that here. the people aren´t used to such things. its just not how we do it. hm. and this guy lives in quito. he´s generally open to new ideas. well, he had already started the hole, and the toilet was already installed with water, and there really isn´t much room for a marsh. so my excrement goes to a hole in the ground. i just hope it doesn´t fill up.

The School Garden

the school is right next to my place. its got land around it, some of which is flat. the existing garden gets trampled and eaten by horses and cattle that a community member pays something like $20 a year to tie up there. there is a PTA meeting, a parent of each of the 8 kids has to show up. it is a one room school house, and this is how they run things. so i go to the meeting to propose a garden. i would establish it, and we can all maintain it, and the kids can eat more vegetables. even though there is a perfectly fine flat peice of land, i´ll use the hillside, and i´ll build terraces as a demonstration. the plan for the flat bit is to make a little soccer field. when the machine gets here to widen it. meanwhile the only way to widen it without burying the school would be to remove the boulders maintaining the base of the hill, but whatever.

i propose the idea. they aren´t into it. they´ve tried working together before, apparently it doesn´t pan out. i learn more about that experience later. for now, they tell me they would rather just each have their own garden and then they´ll give their kids more vegetables. eh. alright. if you don´t want to do it, i´m not about to make it happen by myself. (this isn´t just defeatist, it is based on development literature. say i do make a garden happen by myself, do you think its gonna last when i leave?)

but my presence at the meeting is not for naught. they are organizing a fiesta for mother´s day and i´m recruited to be both the door guy and the bar guy, because since nobody knows me i won´t be pressured for freebies. ok, seems like a decent way to integrate, i guess. and they say in both jobs i will be accompanied by one of the padres de familia. more on this later. . .

Planting potatoes with a shot gun

that wouldn´t really work, obviously the potatoes would splatter, but it is the punchline of a joke about farming on extreme slopes. such practices tend to lead to erosion and a subsequent lack of soil fertility, thus pressuring the farmer to invest more in chemical fertilizers. when i ask them, is your land sloped? not much, they say. and then i visit, and it is literally a 100% slope (1 meter rise for every 1 meter run, or 45 degrees). and do you have erosion problems? oh no, but the cost of chemicals is very high.

so anyway, i am helping my host ma plant some ocas. ocas are kinda like potatoes. definitely same family. they are smaller and can be made sweet by leaving them in the sun for a bit after harvest. so we are planting these ocas in contour lines, and i´m not really bending over because the slope is over 100%, so i stand straight up on one row and my hands touch the next row. but erosion isn´t really a problem.

then it starts raining. i try to point out the erosion happening before our eyes, but thats just a little bit, nothing really. anyway, can´t really work in the rain, aside from generally sucking, it compacts the soil and everyone understands that. so we walk home soaking wet. when we get there i realize that the bills i stashed in my boot, for a rainy day, so to speak, have been severely eroded despite the plastic bag meant to protect them.

thus ended my habit of stashing money in odd places incase i got robbed. my boots and shoes rubbed through the plastic and began ripping and removing the ink from those bills. the ones i had in my hat band are not somewhere in the páramo, as my hat band fell off while running up to check out some ruins (the cayambe shaman told me to do it), and i didn´t realize till later.

anyway, i gotta get these remaining bills changed at a bank, cause no one is gonna take them in this condition (i heard a theory that the less developed the country, the more scrutiny is given to $20s). and since there are no banks in town, that´s gonna reqiure a. .. .

Trip to Ibarra

The established volunteers had organized a get together to welcome us newbies. i wasn´t planning to attend, as my site is a bit off the beaten path, but it so happened that through various occurences i am now the only new volunteer in the cluster. so i kinda gotta be there.

anyway, i came i saw i conquered. they are all very nice. and robert even offered to get my ruined bills changed, since the PC out-of-site-day policy and banking hours do not coincide well.

eh, not much more to say about that.

Medio Ambiente Excursion
The next week, my host father, a volunteer park guard, informed me that some people would be coming from some government Environment Department to check out the borders of the national park (Cayambe-Cocas) nearby. so i should accompany. sure.

Two guys and an attractive young lady. I´ve come to believe that the more important the job is, the more likely the man doing it will be accompanied by an attractive young lady. thats a generalization, and it is kinda sexist, but some have said that this country is kinda sexist too, so maybe it is ok to make such generalizations about it.

anyway, their idea was to go with all the local farmers to their fields and delineate the buffer zone for the park. said delineation being made by the farmers, as it is their land afterall. they don´t cultivate all of their land (the cut-off seems to be at about 150% slope), so the remaining can be called a buffer zone. the only problem is that once it is declared a buffer zone, they can never cultivate it, so they see this as the govmnt taking their land away. and it was rumored that these guys were coming to take land whether the farmers liked it or not. anyway, nobody showed up to accompany them except the volunteer park guard, who was planning on asking for a stipend, but thought better of it.

but they did manage to argue for a bit, i didn´t really understand about what. i´ve come to realize that some people, when agitated, speak in tones that give me a headache. i can actually feel the pain in my head coincide with their words. relax, breathe deep, hey, there´s the president of the community walking up to do some fieldwork.

so we pressure him into accompanying us. free lunch. sure. and we walk along to take GPS points of what buffer zones they can get. and they show me how to use their GPS, pretty simple.

walking along, we pass a field with trees in it. native, nitrogen-fixing trees. this is agroforestry! says one of the medio ambiente guys. the farmers here should look to this guy as an example! the owner of said land, we'll call him Don E. I´m certain he doesn´t read english or use computers, but it is probably a good practice to keep some degree of anonymity. i make a note of him because i interviewed him later with interesting results.

anyway, it is interesting that the medio ambiente guys sit back and watch while the two from the campo (country folk), the park guard and the president of the community, do all the work of digging holes to place the boundary markers. i guess it should be just as interesting that i kinda just sat back and watched too, now that i think about it. . . uhm. . . it was a two person job, alright!

i did help carry the boundary markers. but anyway, there was much debate about whether to place one on some lady´s land. she doesn´t live in the community, she is a lawyer, and rumor has it she is brava. so i said, look, ya´l l work things out with her in the city, call me, and i´ll go with the president of the community (heretofor refered to as the prez) and place the marker. it was like the first time i had an opportunity to make myself useful. they agreed, but they still haven´t gotten back to me.

there were some good pictures taken (i don´t carry a camera), and a promise to email them, so maybe one day i´ll have something pretty to post.

also, my investigative conversationalism uncovered that they are working on a project in a neighboring county with organic gardens, so i can take some community members to visit later if we want. and, i took the opportunity to schedule an interview with . ..

The Prez

I like to give a little labor in return for interview time. it helps me integrate, i usually learn something, and it repays them for their time. the prez doesn´t own land, he works as a tenant, so when it boils down, i was really helping him landlord, but whatev. we went and picked uvillas for a day. free lunch, sweet. and all the uvillas i could handle. they are said to be particularly high in vitamin C, and with the swine flu scare, demand is supposed to increase for such things.

also, they told me that no chemicals are required to produce uvillas. really? yea really. like none at all? none. we only had to fumigate (chemicals) once last month. hm. you see where i come from, when someone says "none" it means. . . nevermind.

i forgot how much each sack of the fuit sells for, but it isn´t much. the daily wage for field work is 6$. and it isn´t particularly fun. so when we finished, and the prez asked me, "did you enjoy harvesting uvillas?" i kinda laughed and said "yea, didn´t you?"

but he was being sincere. harvesting uvillas is actually pretty tame work, and you get to eat them. when you grow up with a hoe in your hand you get a different perspective i guess. and you get a different perspective entirely when you have a ho in your hand, but to continue with the interview. . .

at this point, i was still perfecting the interview. actually, i still am, but it was in a longwinded form with many questions which i consider to have little utility at my site. the interview was compiled by the office monkeys, not that they don´t know what the sites are like, but they designed it to have some applicability at many sites, whereas i see it as my responsibility to make sure it has significant applicability at one site.

anyway, i found out, among other things, that he doesn´t get paid to be the prez. and when i asked him how much he makes a month, he said $30. i coughed and asked again, no, $30, he said. i haven´t broached the subject with him since, it was kind of embarrassing, but i´m pretty sure he was telling me the week´s wage, not the month. anyway, his pops is 81 years old and still working. the prez is only 23, same as me, so we´re kinda like friends.

probably the most interesting questions were about projects that had come to the community in the past. i don´t have the interview in front of me so i don´t have all the facts straight, but actually further interviews have led me to believe that he didn´t either. regardless, i think the main points hold true.

there was one project already that came to teach terracing and organic gardening. the terraces and organic gardens now exist only in memories. there were some disagreements. probably a reason why the students´parents didn´t want to work together on a veggie garden for the kids.

another project came and gave the people pigs, the costs of which were to be paid back over several years. the pigs, lovingly called chanchos gringos for their white skin, died. other sources say that maybe one survived and was sold. but i´ve seen some whitish pigs around, so i need to investigate further. anyway, the project next gave the people chickens, if i remember correctly, which also died. the people already have pigs and chickens, mind you, but these varieties were probably supposed to be better than the common. or maybe they didn´t have pigs and chickens back then. well, it was only like 10 years ago, i think they did. anyway, so this same project also taught the people to make various pastries, which no one makes anymore. finally, they must have said "f- it" or something similar, cause they just gave the people back their money. the people (i´ve been typing like it was everybody, actually it was like 9, but in a community with less than 20 families, 9 is a good representative portion) decided to make a community bank, which is still going and has doubled it´s funds. sweet.

but on the whole, projects come and go, and not much changes. so what am i, one little dude, gonna do? probably not much, says the prez. yea. probably not. alright. . . . he also wants some better seeds. they sell bad seeds in town. i think we can solve this. (everyone has a brother or a sister or a son in quito, and quito has quality seed banks. . . am i the first to put this together?)

well, i had some other stuff to type about, but this is taking awhile, so i´ll just go on with two more interviews.

Don V´s Mysterious Cow Problems

So I´d just printed out my new version of the interview, with a handy chart to calculate costs and income for each crop, and there happened to be a cheerful old man visiting my hosts. i´d already established rapport with him, and he seemed happy to help me with my interview. "You know, it`s good to talk and be with friends, sometimes, yes, its good to be with friends..." he kinda trailed off. awesome. so here´s approximately how it went:

Q. Name and age
A. Don V, uhmmm. . . .ehh. .. . . 120. 120 years.

Q. er. really?
A. yes, i´m sure. 120.

Q. ok. do you have any children.
A. yes, one lives in the house, he´s 30.

Q. so you had a kid when you were 90? no, i don´t get to ask that, because the host ma comes in and says, "You know you´re not 120, how old are you?!" they´d been laughing in another room.
A. oh. yes, you´re right. uhmm. . .. 82. i´m 82.

Q. are you sure?
A. you know, i´ve got it written down somewhere. its good to have these things written down. . .

the interview continues a bit, the host ma is now sitting at the table helping the old guy out. most questions i just cross out before asking, poor methodology i know, but if you don´t understand yet, you will. . .

Q. HAVE YOU EVER HAD ANY ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION CLASSES?
to make sure he hears, i´m kinda shouting. turns out he hears ok, he´s just. well
A. You know. . . its good to talk and be with friends sometimes. . . its good to be with friends. . .

i´m not sure why i continued. i guess i just wanted to fill out my agricultural table on the back.
Q. do you have any cows, and how much milk do they produce?
A. i had many cows, and they gave good milk, but none anymore.

Q. what happened?
A. they all died, one after another, they just died. it was bolivar. i know it was him. they just died. one after another.

Q. Bolivar?
A. every day i would come to the field and another would die. every two or three weeks one would die. and in the end i didn´t have any more. now i don´t have any more cows.

the host ma steps in to inform me that Don V is talking about black magic
Q. black magic?
A. yes, Bolivar came to me once during the night, i was all alone, and he came and he stood over my bed, and he reached out his hand, but it wasn´t a hand it was a skeleton, and he tried to rip out my eyes, but i said, "I stand behind the Lord, and the Lord stands behind me!" and he disappeared. i´m lucky i escaped with my life.

Q. indeed. (i´m about to cry i´ve been holding in so much laughter. the host ma and bro are just laughing it up in the next room, making it increasingly difficult to continue to interview. eventually i just start laughing in this guys face, but he doesn´t seem to mind he just keeps babbling about this damn Bolivar the witch and how he is still roaming the countryside killing stuff.)

A. etc. etc.

So i can´t recall a specific punchline for that one, but the host family says there are several in the community that are the same, brothers all three, and it is basically a waste of time to try and interview them. so my pool of 20 is now 17.

Don E´s Agricultural Innovations

This guy has 9 kids, none of which stayed in the community. his two grandkids are back in the house, neither of whom seems likely to complete high school.

Q. do you practice agroforestry techniques?
A. no

Q. what about those aliso trees (the native nitrogen fixers) in your pasture?
A. oh. i think i´ll cut those down.

Q. why?
A. they shade the grass. the grass doesn´t grow as well

(i´ve heard of studies -which i would cite, had the technician ever replied to the e-mail which he told me face to face he would surely reply to- of agrosilviculture, as it is called when you have cows and trees in the same field. in the case of a test plot in Chimborazo, in a climate similar to my site, they were able to stock less cows per hectare, but with the warmth, and nutritious forage provided during the dry season, the cows produced more milk, enough of a gain to offset to smaller herd size. they also produced for longer, and with the lowered costs of fodder during the dry season, plus the added benefit of wood production, it is ultimately worth it to grow trees in your cow pasture. at least that is what the technician told me. but he also told me he would email the damn study, which he has not. so what do i know?)

Q. how many cows do you have, and how much milk do they produce?
A. 3, less than a liter each per day. (they are currently dry, presumably they will produce more after calving again)

the interview progressed, and i asked him about him crops, potatoes, corn, and aba beans. i asked him what fertilizers and pesticides he uses, how much he uses and how much they cost. also, i asked how much he sold the product for. the corn and beans he eats and he sends to his children. he manages to sell a few potatoes, but they eat most of them.

Q. so what is your principle source of income?
A. the milk.

i'm sure i gave some sort of tick or twitch to indicate my surprise. but i left without saying much. i later did the math on the crops, and it turns out, assuming he gave me approximately currect figures, he is losing money on all of them. if he doubled his production using current practices, he would simply lose twice as much. he would have more money, and more time, if he simply bought his corn, beans, and potatos. he could grow trees on his land, and in 15 years, without doing anything, he would be better off than if he and his grandkids continue to toil daily for that time.

but these are the sort of things that they don´t realize. they don´t do the math. granted, my results could be wrong, but that would be because he gave me bad numbers, which just further proves my point. he really has no idea whether the trees are helping or hurting his milk production, because he has nothing to compare it to. he knows the grass grows more slowly, but he doesn´t know that his cows might be more sick (coughing and sneezing like the ones of my hosts) and thus produce less milk without the trees. so, i think i´m going to try and teach some basic accounting and record keeping. maybe a few will take it up, probably the younger ones. i´m not an agriculture volunteer, i´m a natural resources volunteer, but i won´t be able to convince them of the economic value of their natural resources unless they have a better understanding of how to compare economic values. (my research indicates that convincing the people of developing countries that their natural resources have significant non-economic values will do little to further conservation goals, afterall, we generally aren´t too worried about beauty when we are hungry)

Getting the Maps

Last time I was here, I got some maps from the municipal office. barely. and they didn´t give them all to me. i don´t think i´ll go into it, it doesn´t really have anything to do with ecuadorian forestry. neither does bolivar the witch, but whatev. basically, i got most of them, and i´m gonna come back during the week and get the rest, so help me baby jesus.

Expectations

so, to curb my enthusiasm before i got down here, i told myself that my main goal was just to plant some trees. its a good goal, and i can get trees from the medio ambiente folks, but first gotta have a place to plant them, and then i gotta arrange something for after i leave, or else they´ll just get cut and not replanted.

so i came up with a new set of goals or expectations for my service.
1. i want some people to start keeping track of their costs and incomes for their crops. that will help them compare crops, compare practices, and it will help future extensionists help them.

2. some of the movers and shakers around here talk about developing ecotourism. i don´t really put much faith in tourism as a foundation of sustainable development across the developing world. for one thing, there aren´t that many tourists. for two, they don´t want to go just anywhere, they generally want to go to the beach. or the jungle. generally not the páramo. its cold and wet and anyway there are much easier routes to see it than through my site. but hey, if the people want it, i´ll give it a shot. and anyway, the basic steps of developing ecotourism (training guides in english and environmental stuff, building infrastructure like hostels and stuff, and gathering information about the sites) are good steps to take anyway. so it´s my goal to help them take some of these steps.

3. get some slow forming terraces built: they have really steep slopes, but they won´t terrace because it is a whole lotta work. so there is this practice called slow forming terraces, which is basically a contour ditch with a row of long lasting plants above it. it should work. i think some people will try it if i help them with the work. and a couple of years after i leave, if they keep it up, it will probably increase their production.

4. some reduction in chemical use: another reason for the accounting. already i am making things happen to get some beneficial fungus to site. we will try it out, and it is supposed to prevent a blight on some of the crops. so then they wouldn´t have to use chemicals for the blight. also, if they terrace they should be able to get good effects with less chemicals. also, the director of the project in town i´m working with is an agricultural engineer and he also wants to decrease chemical use in the two years he and i are around. so i can help to spread the techniques he teaches.

5. last but not least, i´d like to gain some understanding and maybe help guide in a good direction the project i´m working with, and some of the community groups. this would probably have the greatest effect on the community, but it is also hardest to measure my input. i already have a few ideas to increase participation in the project (important, without participation, when the project leaves, it leaves nothing), increase membership in the community micro-enterprise group, bleh bleh bleh. we´ll see.

Teaching the kids

ok, i´m pretty much done blogging for the day, but this is the last thing on my list of stuff to blog about, so i´m gonna type something.

i´m teaching some kids in two communities english and computer. i´m gonna teach some older students too, but they gotta help me with interviews. i think its a good deal. plus i can use it to get the parents to come to meetings to disseminate ecologically friendly ag practices. awesome.

----------------
if you read this far, congratulations. you´ve read a lot of my blogging. maybe you should leave a comment, something like, "hey, i read that whole damn entry, and it was ok i guess." even if it was bad, don´t type that. it´ll discourage me, but above all, it conflicts with your behavior of reading the whole thing. psychological discord i believe it is called when one´s actions conflict with one´s beliefs. i´m not sure about that terminology, but it isn´t a good thing.

ok, i´m getting a call from the truck driver i gotta run.

its been a little while

2009-05-28T11:42:00.000-07:00

I´ve had trouble keeping up with the blog lately. I don´t usually have much time in town, and I´m too lazy to type up blog posts while at site (so as to load them when i get to town). mostly, i blog in my mind while riding in the back of pickup trucks. today, i should go to the municipio again and get the maps they owe me.

they don´t really owe me. in fact, they are going to tell me that i have to pay them, but i´m not gonna take that poopie. oh no. they are gonna give me those maps, and they´re gonna smile.

well, i should get out there, it´d be a shame if they left work before i got to stage my sit-in. i´ll come back to type up the results, which will be in reverse order because that´s how blog posts roll, but whatev.

chao

Site

2009-04-30T13:25:00.000-07:00

ok I´m here and i haven´t been robbed yet. brief run through of some things that have happened:

Salinas de Bolivar: they pulled themselves out of poverty. they had a series of international volunteers help them develop several value added industries like chocolate, cheeses, soccer balls, and some other stuff too. awesome

Training: I finished. 3 people didn´t. 1 left of own accord. 1 got kicked out for telling PC about taking some medicines that weren´t mentioned in the application, cause the trainee wasn´t taking them at that time. at least thats how i heard the story, and PC hasn´t clarified it any. the last got kicked out for attitude or something. that´s unfortunate, i didn´t think there were any problems, but whatev. thats how it goes. there is a theory that they plan (and budget) for a certain attrition rate and if the training class is as awesome as ours and few people leave, then there might be motivation on their part to look for problems. just a theory.

anyway, we had a last night together party at a little pizzeria/bar. it was crazy. unbloggably crazy. no one got hurt. (physically at least). nough said.

So here I am in Pimampiru waiting for a truck to take me up in to the mountains. and we are on alert for swine flu, so i shouldn´t be coming back down from the mountains for a while. well, i could come back to Pimampiru, but I probably won´t be able to visit the other PCVs around here. oh well, thats not why i´m here. Cuerpo de Paseo is the pun referencing volunteer experiences primarily based in tourism. this is the cuerpo de paz not the cuerpo de paseo we say.

others say if you´re not in africa, you´re not in the peace corps.

maybe. i dunno. ecuador is pretty posh, as far as developing countries go. some people cal it posh corps. ok. thats enough. i clearly have nothing worthwhile to type; i´ll get some lunch. meanwhile, if you´re interested, chew on this bit of anthropology my brother sent me. ..

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2009/01/11/120-taking-a-year-off/

Almost done with training Part 2

2009-04-25T13:15:00.000-07:00

So Puerto Quito was fun. Played EcuaVolley and that was fun. Its kinda like normal volley ball but there are a few differences. You can spike on a serve. You can play off the net. and officially it is 3 person teams, but we had too many folks. The net is higher too.

Also we had a trainees vs. trainers futbol game, and we won. But I should keep this on topic and educational. . .

So after Puerto Quito we broke up in to groups based on region: sierra, costa, y oriente. went to Riobamba. We stayed up on a hill nearby, like a suburb, at a place called . . . Pucará Tambo which means something in Kichwa. Pucará means either community or fort, I´m not sure. It is used to refer to communities which are located on the remains of forts. The forts were used by the Cayambí to fight off the Incas for several decades. All of them I have seen are located on hilltops and consist of 3 or more concentric rings of walls/rubble. Tambo means rest, so Pucará Tambo was a restored fort turned hostel. It was pretty nice. And we got something akin to a continental breakfast, which was awesome.

The first night there a local guide (and the counterpart of one of the trainees to be stationed there) showed us the town. Its been awhile and I forgot most of the details but he told us that through community organizing, they kind of run their own show. It is a primarily indigenous community, so they don´t have to deal with mestizo bureaucracy, they get to make their own. Their fields were all very eroded years ago, so agriculture isn´t flourishing, thus leading to a lot of outmigration, but at least the ones who remain have some political power. And they build that sweet hostel. Now they just need some tourists (aside from Intiraymi the sun festival, when they are presumably booked solid).

On the way back up to the hostel, the guide started telling us about old local legends. Sometime around the late 1800s I think it was, the campesinos had to pay tribute to the whites in the city. It was called the decimo which means 10th. So they should have been giving one tenth of their produce to the city which seems like a reasonable tax to pay to avoid being pillaged by bandits (which presumable the city folk would have fought off. I dunno, ever since I read, and only half understood, an economics article about agrarian empires -something about the cost of conquering/defending peons and the sustainable profit of taxing them versus the less sustainable profit of plundering them- I try to see old school oppression in terms of rational agents) . . .

But anyway, the decimo turned out to mean men on horses coming and taking the best of the harvest, and as much as they damn well pleased. So one day, the white man on horse back is coming up the hill and this dude, the hero of the legend, crosses his path. Hero starts out all humble and offers his harvest and whatnot, but the white man insults him in some additional manner, so the hero takes him down off his high horse, so to speak. This creates a lot of noise, and a crowd forms and everyone starts beating this hapless noble. Especially the women, the guide emphasized that the community women beat the crap out of him.

And they take him from community to community beating him and such but they don´t really know what to do with him and they don´t really have a leader. So they are looking for a leader and someone calls out old hero´s name, and everyone agrees, so the hero puts on a robe and takes a walking stick or something and kills the noble and declares war on the oppressors.

So the city folk don´t dare come up into the mountains for a while, cause they know what they have coming. Hero took that noble´s head and sent it back to town to get the message across. The city folk get an army from Quito or something to get their oppression going again, but the mountain communities see it coming and they ambush what was supposed to be a surprise attack. About that time we had arrived back at the hostel for dinner, so I don´t really know how the story ended. Maybe the communities retained their independence. Maybe they lost it and only recently gained it back. I dunno. I also don´t know exactly why they lost all their fertile volcanic topsoil, but they did.

______________

So we spend the next days checking out organic gardens in the area. There was a two year project with over $100k and several specialists who came and introduced a bunch of organic techniques and crops, so they showed us a community where damn near everyone had an organic plot and most were flourishing. I asked the people, and they said that now that they had the experience of working their family plots, they had plans to expand and market. This in turn would create jobs and keep community members in the communities, as opposed to migrating to the city for work. so thats nice. The head of the project said he would e-mail me the methods, results, and technical information they used. he has yet to reply, but i am optimistic.

He also showed us an interesting plot from a 7 year study that had recently ended. Basically, the cattle in that area produce about 2-3 liters of milk per day. That is abyssmal. At my site they produce 5-7, and at my training host family 20-30. My training host family has factory feed and money for chemicals for their pastures. Anyway, so for this study they took a plot of land and planted trees, pretty well spaced out, like 5-10m between each. Some trees were native, others were from other parts of the Andes. All could be used for firewood or lumber or forage, some even had medicinal value. Quichual, Yaguar, and Polilepus. I´ve italicized those names as if I know that they are scientific, but actually I don´t. Except for polilepus, I´m not even sure those are real tree species, but they sound right. Anyway, point is that the cows now produce 5-7 liters per day, and they produce for longer periods. But, you can only stock half the animals. But, you don´t have to buy additional feed for them, so all in all, it is a winner. And it holds the soil better, and the trees are capturing carbon and helping along the water cycle, its really just a pretty picture. I have yet to find the paper that resulting from the study, but really an anecdote may be more powerful when trying to convince the people at my site to plant some trees, or let me plant them.

We also petted a baby llama and reached 5000m above sea level on Mount Chimborazo, the summit of which is the point on the surface of the earth closest to the sun, which makes it the tallest mountain on earth in a way, but only because the equator bulges. Anyway, these aspects of the trip were less educational. Well, I did learn first hand that snow indeed has a high albido, and that combined with the thin atmosphere associated with high altitude, I could indeed get burned beneath the rim of my hat. In fact the bottom of my nose was burnt. So I should have worn sun screen. . .

Uhh. . . We then went to a place called Salinas. Salinas is a really nice resort city on the beach. But the Salinas that we went to is not that one. It is a town built around a salt mine. Back in the 70s a Catholic priest came from Italy. He helped the people organize. Instead of violently taking the land from the hacendado, the rich guy who took half of all profits from the salt mine, they bought the land from him. He was only too happy to sell because the violent means of land redistribution was all the vogue at the time. ah. I gotta run. we are on "StandFast" starting in like half an hour. That means semi-emergency precautions for all PC trainees and volunteers due to the elections taking place Sunday. I´ll type more about Salinas later, it´s process from the poorest town in the Province of Bolivar to its current economic diversification and relative prosperity (only 5% out migration), is quite interesting.

You can read all about it shortly, if the pig flu doesn´t kill you first.

Almost done with Training

2009-04-24T16:09:00.001-07:00

Ok so we went on a Technical Training trip last week. First we stayed at a sweet hotel in Puerto Quito which is lower and much more humid than the Sierra. Lots of bug bites. The hotel was managed by a high school somehow. They had a nursery and some small livestock. Also down the road was an integrated farm called La Montaña they grew chocolate trees as their main source of cash but they also had banana, and various wood species. They also had Tilapia pisciculture, vermiculture (worms), and pigs and some other stuff. We toured there, trained there, build some A-frame levels and made some slow forming terraces. Thats basically a small ditch along a contour, with a slight decline to drain and some perrenials planted directly above it to stabilize. As rains erode soil down slope, the plants slow it down and filter out some soil while the water goes down the ditch instead of washing out more soil. Over time the upper wall of the ditch gets higher as the perennials catch more soil. And eventually you have a terrace, and it doesn´t take tons of labor.

Also, we pruned some cacao, you have to keep the branches low enough to reasonably harvest. There was a termite nest on mine, so I machetied it down and fed it to the tilapia. The chickens enjoyed the trail of termites as well. I hate to let tht protein go to waste (which is one reason I ate a grub that one time, but we feed most grubs to turkeys here).

uh i gotta run. i´m not even halfway done with the tech trip, and we´ve done more since then. and we´re done with training next wednesday when we swear-in, and then i´ll go to site where i don´t expect to have access to the web for quite some time. . . . so ¡chao!

El Ultimo Guerrero Cayambi

2009-04-06T18:15:00.000-07:00

The rest of the site visit . . . I met Victor, the project director. 26 years old. Ingeniero Agropecuario interested in organic ag. also, we tied Paraguay 1:1. That makes it very difficult to go to the World Cup. Still possible I think, but I don´t really keep up with these things. Otherwise. . . I planted some potatoes with the host family and got my forearms sunburned. The father was impressed with my back and knee resilience, so I offered to show him joint mobility exercises. That will have to wait till I get back in May. . .

So back in Cayambe, we had training Friday, and more Spanish class Saturday morning, which I was not happy about. But fortunately our new facilitator is as cool as our last one, and she had our class in town. While we were walking around chatting spanish, we ran in to the 3000 year old shaman/cacique I mentioned a few posts back. His name is Pablo.

Pablo told us he would take us to his secret pools Sunday morning. He told us if we paid $50 for an old horse or a calf or something he would sacrifice it to the condors which would then fly down and consume it while we watched/took pictures. Cool, but we don´t really have that kind of money.

Anyway, so the next day me and two of the facilitators take the bus to the middle of the world monument near Cayambe (there seem to be many such monuments along the equator), where we met Pablo. He took us down a path and showed us where he would sacrifice livestock if we had it. The condors need room to take off, which is more difficult on a full belly. He pointed out a condor flying above the mountain as well. ´These are the last flights of the condor we are witnessing.¨he said. He´s probably right I guess. There are some 200 condors in Ecuador, he knows of 6 in this area.

So we checked out a little cave and then he took us down to the pools. The water comes from springs which filter through poumice stone. or some sort of stone which came from volcanic eruptions. it´s white and they call it cascajo and it is used as a soil amendment.

so the water comes out tasting fresh and he said in the morning it is carbonated. Pablo claims to be a geologist and I am inclined to believe him. He told us to get under a water fall, which would clean us and strengthen our lungs. Felt good enough. Then we got in this pool that he said his granpa constructed. The algae is a natural soap, he said. He also said the water would be good for us, but one of the facilitators had a slight allergic reaction. ´That´s not allergies, that´s your body rejecting all the synthetic things you eat and wear.´ ok.

so he´s got this scar on his back which he pointed out to me and said it´s from a spear. From the last indigenous war back when he was 18. Why did you fight? I ask. *shrug*

but on the bright side, he says he has worked on management plans for reserves before. Those of most of the indigenous reserves in Ecuador he says. Awesome, so I put him in contact with my counterpart Carlos, and we will see how that goes.

El Ultimo Guerrero Cayambi is his e-mail signature, by the way. It means the last Cayambi warrior.

Not sure if writing an entire blog entry on this dude is appropriate. Well, its on the guy and his pools. and the progress of the management plan. anyway, i thought it was interesting. I´ll probably take some other trainees back to those pools this week.

Site Visit

2009-04-03T18:16:00.001-07:00

Well, I was going to put off blogging another day or so, but my mom tells me ëveryone is excited about your blog¨ those dots over the e in everyone would be quotation marks if this keyboard was in the US.

So, last Sunday I hopped on a bus and headed to my site. When I got to Pimampiru, I met two brothers, sons of the family I will be staying with, their mother, and my counterpart, Carlos. Well, not my official on paper counterpart, but I´ll get to that. So they showed me the camionetta, thats a truck which people ride as if it were a double decker bus. we had some lunch (chicken foot soup, with real chicken feet, and some other not as exciting stuff), and then we hopped on the truck and headed out with just under a dozen other folks.

The truck belongs to one of the brothers, Juan Carlos. The other brother, Hugo, lives in Quito. He works, but I forgot in what, and, along with Carlos my pseudo-counterpart, and one other guy, runs a foundation which I will be working with. The family I am staying with has three other grown children, all of whom work in Quito. Job prospects are slim at my site.

The truck blew a gasket on the way. I don´t actually know what that means, or if that describes accurately what happened, but I heard a pop. and it wasn´t the tire. So I hope out to stretch my legs, and another guy hops out with me. He pulls me aside and tells me he wants to talk to me about something. Fortunately Carlos comes too, because I can´t really understand what this old dude is saying. But Carlos translates old campo person spanish to young Quito person spanish (Carlos lives in Quito and is youngish):

This old guy says that there are a lot of ancient indigenous burial sites around here, and a lot of them have gold. Carlos confirms this, some one found a big gold scepter a while back, and they are always uncovering burial pots with bones in the fetal position within. This old guy says there is definitely a stash on his land, because he has seen a ghost of a lady wearing a golden dress. So he invites me to come visit him and maybe bring a shovel. Carlos says his neighbor must have a nice dress.

So they fix whatever it was that was wrong with the truck, temporarily at least, and aside from the muddy hill we had to hop out for, the rest of the ride was uneventful. the scenery was very nice though. Steep hills, rivers, tropical cloud forest vegetation. and empty pisciculture pools. more about that later.

When we arrive, I meet the father. Nice guy. Volunteer park ranger. We chat for awhile about all the things that need to be done around here. Then we watch the game. Ecuador 1, Brazil 1. Damn refs didn´t call a foul that would have lead to a penalty kick that would have won the game for us.

That night, Carlos and Don Chavez (the father) take me out to explore the neighborhood. This is a barrio of 70 people, 21 families. There is the school, the playground, the teacher´s house, the church, the community house where meetings are held, and the old school where the dance during parties. It has a leaky roof. They would like to add a second story as a tourist lodge. They have wood for this.

The next day, Carlos and I go down to the main community, a couple of miles, or 25 minutes driving. We check out the Colegio, a technical highschool specializing in pisciculture. Their pools are empty. The rector tells us that one of the neighbor´s workmen dumped rocks off a cliff on to the entry way for the water for the trout pools. That was about two months ago. I want to go down with a hoe and a pole and clear it out. By hand I figure it might take 6 weeks. I´d figure less, but they figure more, so I average. Anyway, the rector doesn´t want that he wants to get a machine to make a new entry way. This would require dynamite. and a machine. When is it coming? when it comes. well if you give me a hoe and a pole and 6 weeks. . . no. also, their water tank leaks. I figure it works like a toilet and I could probably fix it with my leatherman. or maybe some wire and epoxy. but no, he´ll have his maintenance man fix it.

When we leave, Carlos tells me that the rector told him he´d fix the tank last time they spoke, a month ago. He explains that part of the machismo culture is not taking other people´s work from them. So I´m glad I have Carlos to help me with these things. Also, the rector seems pretty legit. He´s worked their for some 18 years. He´s got some serious credentials in pisciculture. And he didn´t just have bad news: his students have to complete some 120 hours of environmental volunteer work per year, so thats a potential resource for me; and they are getting funds from the Proyecto to start a vivero on their grounds. A vivero is a nursery. I´ll get to the Proyecto in a bit. But the soil is bad, and there are security issues that need to be shored up before the nursery gets going.

From there we go to the Proyecto office. This thing is funded by the European Union. Carlos scored this for the community, like he got a volunteer from Peace Corps (me). It amounts to something like $150k going to a new truck, several computers, staff for one year, the nursery, and jarring and jellymaking equipment. The nursery grows fruit and reforestation trees. The trees are given to the local farmers. Their produce, at least some of it, according to market studies and processing capability, is bought by the microempresas, that´s the small enterprises firm, processed, and sold locally and abroad. During the first year, starting now, agricultural and environmental extension agents will go to the various neighborhoods of the community and teach best practices, which the farmers may accept or reject, since it is their land afterall. So this seems like a good thing.

But no one is at the Proyecto office except the secretary, so I don´t find any of that out till the meeting the next day. Anyway, Carlos and I hike the shortcut back to the house. He points out the Eucalyptus trees and the abandoned greenhouses, plastic tatters on wooden frames, which are the result of USAID efforts over a decade ago. Abandoned greenhouses are clearly worthless, the Eucalyptus trees are generally considered to have negative environmental impacts: the suck up a lot of water, and their leaves contain resins which are harmful to other plant species, thus stifling biodiversity. So not all development efforts work out. Many don´t. Will mine? They say there is a town in Ecuador with a street named after a PC volunteer. Maybe they´ll name a street after me. We are hiking up this shortcut, taking about an hour, because the road is so bad. We talk about bettering and extending the road. But wait a minute, the neighborhood where my site is is supposed to have the most intact forest. It is also the furthest from the main community. If this correlation is causal, then wouldn´t bettering the road lead to more deforestation? if they can get their products to market easier, won´t they produce more? log more? clear more pasture? leave more trash from the city lying on the path for us to pick up? normally I don´t pick up trash on the ground, but since carlos is doing it i might as well follow suit. also, there really isn´t much so picking up a little leaves it fairly pristine. carlos assures me that bettering the road will not lead to more deforestation.

when we get back we eat lunch. then we go check out the school. the teacher is struggling with her computer. we offer to help. (we is still carlos and i) somehow 50gb have been used and we can´t figure on what. but thats not the problem, the printer is, so we mess with that for a while. the teacher would really like computer classes for her and her 8 students. also english classes. also a fence around the school grounds to keep out wandering livestock. i can do these things. she is also young and has all of her teeth. but the guy i later see her with has probably noticed these things before me. anyway, the fence can be a cerca viva, that means live fence, and we can expand upon the garden, and i can teach some environmental ed to the kids. so i have things to do in the neighborhood that don´t require the hour hike to the community center.

next we (C & I) take another hike up to a get a vista of the reserve. My site is located near the Cayambe Cocas national park, one of the largest in Ecuador. Between that and my site is a private reserve which the foundation which Carlos, Hugo, and the other guy run, the Fundación Semilla Ambiental has been working with the owner of the private reserve to get government support. There are three options: SocioBosques, Servidumbre Ecologica, and Bosque Protector.

SocioBosques is an Ecuadorian government thing which pays $10-20 per hectare of preserved forest, focusing on areas which have enthological importance (indigenous presence), watersheds, and areas bordering national parks. This private reserve, called Sabia Esperanza, which means Wise Hope, has no living indigenous peoples, but it does have at least 3 distinct ecosystems (páramo, cloud forest, and humid forest), and it does border the Cayambe Cocas. They are communicating with officials about the viability of getting in this program.

Servidumbre Ecologica is basically an agreement between neighbors to mutually protect their lands. The owner of the private reserve is certainly down for this, but the neighbors would probably need some incentive. Sociobosques could be an incentive. Ecotourism could be another. Anyway, to do this right, you have to write down all the ways the land can and cannot be used, and that pretty much requires a management plan. . .

Bosque Protector absolutely requires a management plan. It means that if the owner doesn´t have the resources to preserve the land (prevent logging, poaching, fires, etc), the gov will step in and help out. thats what Bosque Protector means, a management plan means a group of biologists specialized in birds, plants, animals, fungus, and whatnot spend a couple of weeks studying the site and a couple of more weeks analyzing the data and it costs several thousand dollars. I say it´d be nice to have that done by the time I leave, Carlos says he plans on getting that underway in 6 months at most. so i guess i´ll email all my biologist friends. . .

the proposed funds for this would be coming from ecotourism. but the economy is down. i play devil´s advocate with Carlos for a bit. We are looking out over the reserve. Not many tourists come this far out in the mountains. there are plenty of other more popular tourist destinations. and seriously, the economy is down.

maybe we can get some local university students to help us with a base for the management plan. then we can work from there.

we return to the house. we have scheduled a neighborhood meeting for 6pm. to introduce me to the community. we get to the community house at 6:30. at 7 enough people are there to start. Carlos does most of the talking. For my part, I point out that there are plenty of volunteer opportunities in the US, I chose to go abroad because I like to travel, to get to know knew places and knew people. I couldn´t ask for a better site than ecuador, and I really like this community. I don´t know much about agriculture, but I have resources from which to learn.

Then we do a priority needs assessment with the community members at the meeting. This is one of 4 PACA tools which the PC has taught us to utilize. PACA stands for Participatory Analysis for Community Action. We split into two groups, guys and gals. PACA does this for all the tools because many development efforts in the past focused only on guys, then only on gals, and really one needs to focus on both at the same time, while recognizing that they are different.

I´m with the ladies and Carlos is with the men. This is not how we planned it. I have been told that jealousies arouse easily in these parts, but it just worked out this way. So the ladies´priorities are: fix the road. build a bridge over the quebrada so we can travel when it rains. and work at the school (english, computers, and fence, like i mentioned). also, and this was an afterthought so it didn´t really get ranked in the priorities, but they all agreed it was important: train and get seeds for them to have integrated farms so they can feed their children well.

One lady got really frustrated when she realized that I couldn´t necessarily accomplish all of these things. specifically the road and the bridge. they are already in the process with the gov. she said, ¨so should we stop with the government, if you are going to provide these things?¨nononono. please don´t do that. i´ve never built a road before, or a bridge, i don´t really have the power to do such things, and my organization isn´t likely to get them done for me either. but hey, since i don´t really have a 9-5, or a farm or family to look after, i´ll go to the municipal office and nag them about the road sometimes, ok. . . .ok.

they guys want agricultural technical assistance, dairy technical assistance, and more markets for their products. well, the Proyecto covers that, and i´ll be working with the Proyecto, so I think things will go alright. also, i got an old PCV (claims to have been the first organic veggie farmer in ohio) to commit to giving a charla, thats like a seminar, on organic ag. also, i got a list of their tomate de arbol pests, and I got an ag manual with organic pest remedies. also, Carlos mentioned a NGO in quito which helps small farmers find markets. so yea. alright.

at the meeting I met the president of the neighborhood, nice guy. as well as the standing president (covering until the elections april 26), an older gentleman who was supposed to be my counterpart but that was before he got this position. anyway, he agreed to help Carlos and I by getting copies of some maps of the area showing land titles, watersheds, maybe even land use. . .

so that was my first full day at site. next day we participated in a minga, that a communal work party if you haven´t been keeping up. started at the old school house, moving the lumber inside so it would get rained on less. and then going down the road chopping the back the vegetation with machetes and hoeing clear the ditch on the side. carlos said i looked like i was in star wars wielding that machete. i had slightly different technique.

one of the guys tried to sell me some of his land. it is on about a 65 degree slope. no joke. i said if i was ever looking to jump off something, i might buy it from him. $10k. yea right. here, i got it in my pocket. oh no i don´t, must have fallen out.

then the electioneering trucks come by. they give us bread, cola, candy, and booze. that booze tastes terrible. puntas they call it. then lunch break. i get two plates. then Carlos yells over from around the bend that it is lunch time, so i get another plate. then we go back to the house, and i get another plate. we were gonna go to a meeting in another neighborhood, but we´d be late, and i´m full and lazy. so we hang around the house helping Don Chavez fix his pig pen. then we go to the main community for a meeting about the Proyecto same as the meeting we skipped, just a different place, so we didn´t miss anything.

i find out about the Proyecto, which I already typed about. afterwards, we ride home in the back of the truck. i get some more puntas, and an offer to get a personal guide to Lago Puruantag when I return in may, because this younger farmer thinks i´m a nice guy. the one with the booze tells me to take him back to the US, where the fields are flat. but this place is beautiful and you are close to nature. nature is nice, but it doesn´t pay the bills, take me to the US. He doesn´t like it here, says the younger farmer, because he is fat and he rolls down the slopes. He is a little bigger than the others. I want a tractor, he says, we don´t have any tractors here, they won´t fit on the slopes. Why don´t you make terraces, I ask. Because we are lazy! and he gives me another drink.

Meanwhile, this other drunk SOB keeps trying to shake my hand. we are both at the very back, tailgating so to speak. he is on the left, i am on the right, so when he offers his right hand, i offer my left, because my right hand is the only thing between me and a busted back full of rocks. and he´s like, no, like a man, like a man, with the right. so i wrap my arm around a bar and do what i can to shake his hand. ok, that was cool the first time, he demands i shake his hand about a dozen time in the 20 minute ride, and when he gets dropped off, he shakes my hand again, and he about got his ass dragged down the road when the truck pulled off cause he wasn´t letting go and i sure as hell wasn´t about to jump out the back. anyway, he did eventually let go.

well, if you´ve read this far, then you deserve the pointless story presented above. meanwhile, the guy who runs this internet place wants to close, so i gotta head out. the rest of the site visit went well. . . . other people have much crappier sites. some people on the beach have better ones. i am very happy with mine and the work i have ahead of me. hasta la vista

What has happened so far in training

2009-03-28T16:22:00.001-07:00

So for training I´m in a town named after the kichwa word for hard packed mud. Some say there was a young lady of that name and the town is named for her. anyway, its nice. except the park is barren. The park is a concrete area in front of the church, the main plaza. There are large beds, but no plants. Apparently they started a $90k project to renovate the plaza, and they only got $40k from the municipality. So the lamp posts don´t light up, and the irrigation lacks a pump, and there are no plants. If they get a fence up, or maybe if they don´t, we´ll plant some trees in the name of peace corps. We (me and the 4 other trainees in this town) spoke with the dirigente de la Junta del Agua about this, and he is down. A little more about him later. . .

So one day shortly after we arrived, I was walking down to the plaza, and some dude stopped me and told me to help him with this minga. a minga is a work party, or labor pow-wow, type thing in this culture. you work some, you get some food, and some chicha. chicha is booze. some people make it with spit, but they say they don´t do that here anymore what with hepatitis and all. Anyway, so I helped this guy paint a little sign. He was clearly drunk. He told me he was 3000 years old, and a shaman. ok. and another guy addressed him as ¨cacique¨which I believe corroborates his shaman story. shortly thereafter i realized that this minga might have political implications, so, being the good peace corps trainee that i am, i extricated myself from the situation. but not before asking the shaman if he would cure me sometime if i got sick. ¨sure,¨he said, just come by Cayambe. Cayambe is the bigger town in the area. they have plants in their plaza.

So as part of our training, we went to see this awesome organic farm. this guy, Don Edwin, a local, with an ag engineering degree, has turned his little 2.5 hectares of sandy windswept soil into a very productive operation. considering that something like .5 ha is buildings, and .5 ha is left as forest, and a hectare is about 2.something acres, that´s pretty good. he said it was real hard at first, and he is still working long days with his wife, but he makes good money selling his noncertified organic produce to upper class (often gringo) Cayambe folks, and even some from Quito I think. he said he used to sell to restaurants, but they demanded too much quantity for his little operation. a main source of income is his cuyes, thats guinea pigs, which sell for 7-8$ and they don´t come with litte cages lined with woodchips. they come in bags and they get eaten. he slaughtered one for us: step one grab cuy, step two firmly press cuy head into table top, step three *crack*. then he guts it and whatnot. the feet stay on. and it gets roasted.

His cuyes go for top dollar because he has his operation worked out real smooth. they are kept in hanging cages. that way, parasites can´t come get em from the floor. he said he used to raise em on the floor like everyone else does, but he saw clouds of parasite swarming on the newborns (he says they smell the placenta) and then the babies are stunted and often die. so he put them on tables, but he saw the parasites coming up the legs. now he has them in hanging cages. the feces falls through the bars, along with food scraps, so he has a few on the floor as a clean up crew. he also says that although cuy are naturally sensitive and nervous animals (perhaps why shamans use them to cleanse people of bad spirits? or maybe its just due to their handy size) the hanging cages work like cradles and soothe them. so they are fat and happy and he doesn´t have to dip them in toxins (many of which are illegal in the US for health reasons) to take care of the parasites. so thats why he gets top dollar for his cuyes. plus, it is real easy to clean out all the crap on the floor, which makes excellent compost. he is even working on a system to cage the piss, which he can sell for like . . . $20? a liter. it was a while ago when i was there, i don´t remember all the numbers.

anyway he also had all sorts of vegetable varieties which i won´t get in to. while we visited we were trained in lombricultura (worm farming), grafting, building seed beds, transplanting, and probably some other things which i may or may not have notes for somewhere.

so my host family (during training we stay with families, also for the first 3 months at site) has a dairy farm, 20 ha, 50 cows, plus about 7 ha of barley. they tell me the national beer of ecuador is owned by colombians who import rice and don´t use barley, but do have pictures of barley on the bottle. anyway, i´ve been talking with them since i got here about organic stuff and soil conservation and what not. they, especially the son, are interested, mainly because the price of agrochemicals is on the rise. so i arranged a visit with them and don edwin, and i went along. they bought some worms, a breeding pair of cuy, and a couple of cabbage trees. yes, cabbage trees. they probably aren´t actually botanically trees, but they grow tall (2 meters or so) and they produce all year round, and when they get too tall to harvest, you just push them over and they sprout from the side. so they bought a couple of those sprouts. all in all the spent about 20$ which i´m sure Don Edwin was happy for, but apparently he gets intrinsic pleasure from simply sharing his organic farming techniques. and the fact that he is a local and not some gringo who thinks he knows everything makes his farm a very good learning tool. in fact, my host brother said in about four months when he saves up some money, he´s gonna convert about 6 ha of the dairy farm pastures to organic. not that he´ll be getting a better price, no market for that here he says, but he won´t have to pay for the chemicals. i like to think i had something to do with that

annnnyway, while we were there, we saw my language facilitator (each group of trainees has a facilitator and we get language classes 3 days a week, tech classes 2 days a week, plus trips), who was there tutoring some trainee in that community, because it is good to mix up facilitators sometimes.. . so we offered to give her a ride back to our little pueblo. . .

we got to Cayambe, the bigger town in between Don Edwin´s place and our place, and she hopped out, said she was gonna check on another trainee from our group. i said i´d come too. so we went to see this indigenous Cayambi (thats the name of the native population) festival. it was called. . . .shooot. . . this is kichwa, and i don´t know kichwa, . . .mushuk nina? whatever it was, it means new flame. so it is some idigenous revival type ceremony. we walk up this hill outside of town, and we here the music, pipes and drums and singing, and we get there and find the other two trainees who went to check it out, and who do i see, but that old (3000 year old) shaman, chanting and baning on a drum in the middle of a circle of dancers. . .

the dirigente de la junta de agua is on the mic, calling people to dance, but there aren´t any gringos dancing, and i feel like i should respect their culture by maintaining a bit of distance at these things. . meanwhile there is a condor flying overhead and everyone likes that, must be a sign. then the shaman sees me in the crowd, i´m about a head and shoulder higher than everyone else, and i got this hat on, so he recognizes me, and he raises his hand up in kind of a salute. so i raise mine up and salute back, then he calls me over to dance. damnit. but i gotta go, i can´t disrespect a shaman like that, bad mojo. i kind of wanted to anyway, and an invitation is all i needed. so i go join the circle and march around and clap my hands and try to do what everyone else is doing, but i´m still sticking out like a sore gringo. and that dude, the dirigente de la junta de agua, says something in the mic, and refers to me a tourist. a tourist?! so i gotta talk to that guy and straighten out that little missunderstanding, but i haven´t seen him around since. plus i gotta talk with him about what trees he wants for his park. would a tourist get you trees for your park? i don´t think so.

anyway, after the dance, the shaman grabs me and asks if i want a cleanse. sure sounds great. so he turns me around and tells me to breathe three times and he raises my arms up and down, and then he cracks my back. then he says, ¨wait here¨(in spanish) several times, as if i was going somewhere, and he comes back with a handful of various herbs and wipes them on my face and neck and clothes. then he gets his water (or is it chicha?) and swigs is and spits on me. 4 times. front back side to side. and then he gives me a banana and tells me i´m clean. awesome.

on a totally different topic, there is this plant down here they call Guanto. i think. . . no, i forgot the scientific name. i could probably find it online if i felt like loading a few pages (but i don´t) because it is used to make scopolamine. don´t trust my spelling, i´m translating this from spanish escopolamina . this stuff, and i hear it is pretty easy to make, just crush up the flower and boil it or something, is like a freakin truth serume, but worse. you get a whiff of it, i mean like someone shoves a paper soaked with it in you face real quick, and within 10 minutes, you loose yourself. like, someone asks you for money, and you empy your wallet. then you go to the bank and empty your account, because a stranger is asking you nicely and you are drugged on scopolamine. so this stuff is pretty scary. date rape, organ theft, whatev.

the plant looks kinda like that trumpet flower, datura, aka jemson weed, aka lots of other names, which also has dangerous psychoactive effects. but anyway, one of our trainees got hit with this stuff in Otavalo. said three ladies approached wearing polos with little train emblems embroidered on them. they had pamphlets about trains and they shoved them in this trainee´s face. trainee: i don´t give a damn about trains, i´m trying to check out this market, leave me alone. they had their victim cornered, but this trainee is no runt, and definitely doesn´t want to check out these pamphlets, so two of the ladies run away. the other follows with the pamphlet until trainee grabs it and throws it in the trash. then she runs away too. not 10 minutes later, the drug takes effect, time feels real slow, heart beat in head. fortunately police and other trainees were nearby at this point and the trainee got the help needed. said didn´t feel right for about 45 minutes.

they say this happens and is reported about 10 times per month in quito, so i´m sure if i wanted to, i could find it. i don´t, ofcourse. i was thinking, maybe i should try and build up a resistance, but a bio major told me it don´t work that way. something about antagonistic receptors or something. so i figure if anyone talks to me on the street or tries to get me to hold, look at, or get close to a piece of paper, i´m just gonna get real mad and yell about scopolamine and drugs. they´ll probably run. if not that, i´ve been told to fake a seizure, they don´t want to deal with that either. if not that, i´ll just have to crack open a can of . .

so a little bit more about my site, which i am going to visit for the first time tomorrow: it is in the sierra, the mountains. and it is in the north, far (12+ hours) from Cuenca, my old home back in 2001. i thought maybe i´d get sent to the jungle. me training group mates got my head real big thinking i could clearly handle some tough stuff. but it turns out 2 of them are going to the jungle, and the other two are going to cuenca, or near it. so i was wondering why i got this site, and the training director of natural resource conservation program, tells me, ¨we were looking for a tough site for you man, something really far out there. but we didn´t have much this year, you got the deepest anyway¨or something like that. so he probably says that to everyone, but i´m proud to hear it anyway. one other girl is real far out down south. and another girl (sustainable ag, not nat resource, so they had different sites, so i couldn´t compete) she got sent so far out in the jungle she has to take a canoe to get to her site. thats some real shit.

regardless, i´m happy with my site, as it has been described to me. they grow tomate de árbol, thats tree tomatoes, for those who don´t know. they are tasty, sweet, not salty. and i happen to know of a trick for keeping the nematodes of em: fig mulch. never tried it and the report i read is vague, but if they have nematode problems, i´ve got a possible solution. also, there is a park ranger i´ll be working with, so thats cool. also a highschool teacher and a municipal politician. these are my primary contacts. some italian NGO funded a marmalade operation and a tree nursery at the local high school, so i might work with italians. and there is also this group called the semilla fundación or some such, (seed foundation, but foundation doesn´t mean a big group which gives money to smaller groups like in the states, it means a small group which has organized itself to get money from big groups). i can´t find any info on it within 3 minutes of googling, so i must assume that it has no internet presence. not really, but there seem to be several groups with similar names, and i´m tired and hungry, and i didn´t even tell you about the étno contemporaneo (contemporary ethnic) dance class we´ve been attending, but thats why i´m tired. also, i might type about té de estiercol, compost tea, which we made and we think it will work. its real easy. and its an organic fertilizer. ehh.. . . ok. chao.

I´m here.

2009-03-26T18:42:00.000-07:00

I´m in training and I´ve gotten my site. I go on sunday to check it out. apparently they´ve already scheduled a community meeting to greet me.

i´m headed to a small community (70 folks) about a mile outside of a slightly larger community (230) about five miles from where the bus line ends at a town called Pimampiro. I´d be more specific, but there are security concerns for US citizens operating abroad.

My primary activities, as outlined on a document i recieved which is subject to change at any time:
-control, observation, monitoring, and reporting of animal species, flora and general natural resources
-non-formal environmental education regarding natural resources and their conservation with students and the general public
-introduction of income alternatives focused around conservation
-help in the technical high school nursery
-ecological club
-help in reforestation and the fruit tree nursery
-waste management

secondary activities: english instruction related to tourism, health and education, help in computation.

yea, and i won`t have internet access. i have had internet access for the past month, i just haven´´t blogged because i haven´t had time. there i should have time, but no access. so we´ll see how the bloggin goes. i´ve learned a lot during training, and i´ve done somewhat interesting things, and i´d love to type all about it, but this internet cafe is about to close. and i want to google earth my site. so . . .. be seein ya

La Costa

2009-02-16T20:05:00.000-08:00

In an attempt to organize, I'll write a bit about each of the major regions of Ecuador. La Costa, or the coast, is the strip of land between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes mountains. As I understand it, this doesn't just mean the beach, it refers to the lowlands on the western side of the country.

Culturally, they say the costenos (i need a tilde for that n) are more laid back than the mountain folk. They have a different accent, swallowing the ends of words. If I remember correctly, there are less indigenous here than in the mountains or the eastern jungle, and there are more afro-ecuadorians. There is some community which is said to have been founded by a group of Africans freed from a life of slavery when the ship they were on wrecked, so that's cool.

Out of 30 Natural Resource Conservation PCV posts marked on a map, only three are on beach (not counting Galapagos, they said no one from omnibus 101 would be there), all of which are North of Guayaquil. Three more are in the El Oro province, which is coastal, but also mountainous. . . I just got side tracked big time trying to map the NRC PCV posts on Google Earth and overlay the national parks and reserves. I don't feel like blogging anymore tonight, but I got tons more bouncing around in my head. later

Conservation Tasks and Activities

2009-02-16T19:11:00.000-08:00

OK. I've been reading up a good bit already, so I have to go back over everything if I want to post my observations here. I'll start with some of the material I've received from the Peace Corps:

I'll be serving within the Natural Resources Conservation program, one of four programs in omnibus 101 (thats like the 101st class of volunteers to serve in Ecuador). The other programs involve agriculture, health, and families and children. I understand that volunteers often end up working with the other programs, depending on their interests and opportunities. Anyway, my job title within the program is Forestry Extension.

The natural resources program has three primary goals: environmental education, conservation, and income generation. Forestry Extension means mostly conservation tasks. These tasks include: assess status of natural resources and socio-economic situation; ID and select local orgs, leaders, stake-holders to implement sustainable practices; develop strategic plans (more on this late); conduct formal and non-formal training; form stakeholder groups; legalize community groups; conflict mitigation; network nationally and internationally; increase ability to demand services from local and central governments. ..

I've done got started with some of these already, so let me break it down fer ya:

assessment of natural resources and socio-economic situation: well this comes straight from the sustainability triangle concepts of environment, economy, and social equity. Two pressing problems for Ecuador's medio ambiente, according to an Encyclopedia of Ecuador my mom got for me are deforestation and erosion. Clearly these are interconnected, and they have different effects in the different regions. Along the coast, loss of the mangroves, or manglares, is a cause for concern. Most all of them have been cut down already and converted to shrimp farms, cause we just love our shrimp. There are a lot of problems with that, but maybe I should save it for another post. Shoot, I'm so behind with this, I don't know how I'm gonna get it all organized. . . hrm. . .

For now I'm gonna move on to another list of conservation activities I got from the PC. They sent me a CD with powerpoint presentations for each program. The activities listed for the Conservation goal within the Natural Resources Management program are: Native Species Nurseries; Reforestation Projects; Agroforestry and Analog Forestry; Raising of Native Fish Species; Raising of Llamas and Alpacas; Organic Family, School, and Community Gardens; Organizational Development; Institutional Strengthening; and Conflict Resolution. Sounds good to me. I worked at a nursery before. I planted trees. I dug some organic gardens. I've even developed organizations, strengthened (and weakened) institutions, and resolved a few conflicts at the student housing co-ops back in Austin. But I never done it in Ecuador, an I didn't do it so much or so well in the states, so I know I gotta lot to learn.

Pre-Departure

2009-02-16T12:47:00.000-08:00

I'm scheduled to leave in one week. One night in DC, 3 days in Quito, and then 3 months in Cayambe. That is the orientation and training schedule as far as I know. Halfway through, they will tell me where I am to be posted and I will get to check it out.

Ecuador is not a huge country; everyone writes that it is about the size of Colorado, but it contains some very diverse ecosystems. I've been trying to read up as much as possible, but there is a whole lot to know. I plan on treating this blog like a learning record for my observations--- uh. gotta run to the dojo. i'll pick this up later