And They Started Rolling In...

(Today's guest blog comes from Seth Harlan, a second year Manna Ecuador PD and the authority on all things Spanish slang. In my opinion the best cook in the house (who else could pull off Mediterranean chicken in South America?), Seth is up for anything from mountain climbing to discotec dancing, knows more people in the community than anyone else, and has sweet talked his way into the heart of our local venta lady.)

"We woke up to another beautiful morning in Conocoto, the sun rising over the mountains and not as cloud in the sky. It was the first time in weeks that we could see the snowy peak of Cotopaxi from our rooftop. Today was going to be a good day with no need for raincoats or fleece jacket, or so I thought. It's funny that after a year in Ecuador, I still haven't learned that the only rule here is that anything goes and nothing is certain.

As we sat reading with kids in our homemade tent nicked named "la cueva" that Holly built for our apoyo escolar program, the light started to fade. At first I thought it was just the blankets blocking the sun, but like clockwork, 15 minutes before the program ended, the clouds rolled in, thunder cracked, and the rain started. After three straight days of pelting rain in the afternoons it can only mean one thing –no more flip flops, no more short sleeves… the dreaded rainy season has come!"

(la cueva packed with readers)

(Felix, Holly, and Mafe share reading duty)

Welcome Dana!

I’m posting this late night because we all just got back to Conocoto from meeting up with our newest member, Dana, in Quito. Her plane arrived tonight at 10:30pm, and we all taxied out there to meet her at her host family’s house. Meeting 8 new housemates, 3 of which were particularly hyper for some unknown reason (3 guesses who it was; hint, we’re also the ones who eat ice cream after midnight), speaking in a foreign language after flying 6 hours was undoubtedly stressful, but Dana was true to her Colorado form and rolled with it all. When she moves in with me next week, the Colorado contingency will continue its legacy in the big room with the view, previously occupied by Annie and Abbie, both Colorado girls.

It’s late and so I’m going to sign off; tune in tomorrow for the first guest blog of one Seth Harlan!

Until Thursday,
Holly

(Serena and Jos cracking coconuts for batidos (milkshakes)!)

Our First Minga

As I mentioned last week, on Saturday we participated in a minga to clean up the local river which has, for the past 3 years, served as a dumping ground for thousands of plastic bottles. A longstanding Andean tradition, mingas began as a way to clear a farmer’s fields; since the job could not be undertaken by a single family, the entire community would come together and help clear and harvest different fields each week. The practice of mingas continues today, albeit with less frequency. Luke, who has been working within the community to identify areas where mingas could respond to a need, collaborated with a number of women living in San Francisco and Tena to organize this weekend’s project.

5:45am on Saturday found team Ecuador stumbling around our kitchen trying to find coffee and scramble eggs with our eyes half closed, laughing at how out of it everyone is before 8am, our usual kitchen meeting time. After dangerously passing 2 ladders from the roof down the front of our house by hanging out the second story windows and hoping they didn’t drop on the faces of those waiting to receive them on the front patio, we all piled into what was quite possibly the most beat up Mazda truck I have ever seen and headed over to the river.

(the Mazda, held together by scrap metal and reggaton beats)

Upon splitting into two teams, the ‘river people’ and the ‘cleaning people’, we got down to work. Serena, Luke, and I started out in the river with 5 Ecuadorians, all decked out in rainboots and rubber gloves, looking hesitantly at the enormous pile of bottles, while Seth, Jocelyn, Eliah and Dunc headed down to the ‘cleaning station’ at Aliñambi, which consisted of wash tubs and a cement patio to crush the bottles. Craig was our 'go between' guy, hauling the bags from the river down to the recycling center, and Mark set about constructing “NO Bota Basura!” signs to put at different points along the river's path.

(Serena and I with our first trash bag of the day)

Starting at 7:30am, we worked straight to 1:30pm, at which time we were all a little woozy from the amount of trash and fumes from the discarded paint cans, gasoline bottles, and fermenting plastic. Serena, Paulo (a community member who spent much of the time in the river balanced on one of the ladders pushing the bottles away from the deep middle) and I all ended up falling into the river at some point, filling our boots with sludge and soaking our jeans in awful ways. Despite having filled up 49 industrial sized trash bags, we were barely half way through the bottles, and the executive decision to split the minga into two days was made by Christina after we realized we had already overflowed the recycling center’s capacity for bottles 3 times over.

(Jocelyn, Eliah, Dunc and Seth handwashing each of the plastic bottles)

Overall, it was a day filled with sweat, trash, bilingual conversations, horrible smells, frustration, and laughter. It was hard to spend the entire morning waist deep in trash, thinking not only about the work of cleaning it up, but also the feasibility of changing the mentality that turned the river into a trash pit. But none of us came down to Ecuador with the intention of avoiding encounters with the difficult, rather we came to dive into the thick of it. This weekend was a study in that dive; and while we may have bellyflopped a few times, it’s good to be in the deep water together, even if that water is a contaminated river...

Best,
Holly

Late Night Arrivals

Eliah and Dunc just walked in the front door a few minutes ago (it’s currently 10:47pm) from their fifth day of small business class, and they are both spent. Instead of simply putting the class on, the boys are also participants in the program, which is proving to be quite the undertaking.

Considering we all are getting up at 5:45am tomorrow morning to head in to San Francisco to take part in a community minga to clean the plastic bottles from the river (see the daily photo), I can only assume that the late night friday class was particularly difficult to get through. Or so it seems by the amount of heavy sighing currently coming from the living room where they’ve both collapsed onto the couches. It’s also a little late to be up in the kitchen making churros, but sometimes when I start something I can’t make myself stop until the task is complete. Plus they’ll be great for breakfast tomorrow morning, right...?

Happy weekend!
Holly

(the local San Franciscan river and site of our 7am community minga clean-up!)

The Dog

In Ecuador, there are a lot of dogs.

A lot of street dogs.

A lot of dirty, mangy street dogs.

The girls in the house can’t help but fall in love with all of them. We see the potential for cuddling; after a few (read, 8) flea baths, a hair cut, and a miraculous memory wipe/personality swap to backtrack from years of abuse, any street dog could be redeemed in the eyes of Jocelyn, Serena and I. The boys feel a little differently, instead dwelling on the fact that most of the street dogs look like they’ve been hit by a truck. A truck filled with Ugly.

So despite the girl’s longing for a dog to call our own, our house is still animal free.

Except there is this one that I KNOW we could get Mark in on. He’s not a street dog per say (aka he belongs to someone, minor detail), but he is pretty awesome. (Side note: most Ecuadorians who own dogs (and want to keep them looking somewhat healthy) keep them on their unfinished rooftops, since fenced in yard space is essentially unheard of. Or reserved for chicken coops and cow grazing.) Anyway, on our way to programs everyday, we pass under one of these roof-dwelling dogs (who actually lives on the abandoned second floor of a building). He is huge. Enormous. And Mark’s tall enough that they can almost get each other. And they have a bond, as in the dog wants to destroy Mark, and Mark wants to push the dog to it’s absolute limits, taunting him ceaselessly and essentially begging him to jump. Which, if he ever did, would be the end of Marco as we know him.

This is when the daily picture really comes in handy, huh :)

Holly

(Mark and his bff)