Almost done with training Part 2

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.

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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.