What has happened so far in training

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.