The Weekend Wonders

This morning, sometime circa 4:45am, Jocelyn and I started making a list of everything I have to daily life blog about after this weekend. No, we’re not insomniacs; the overnight bus we all hopped on Sunday night at 10pm had broken down somewhere in the Ecuadorian countryside, and we were all cuddled around, cranking at each other in garbled Spanglish and trying to focus on all the good that came from Cuenca. Which was a really easy task for Jos and I once we started. Thus follows the list I have to build from this week in the daily life blog.

1. 10 hour bus ride out to Cuenca, the first 2 hours of which were spent listening/watching/avoiding Big Mama’s House, dubbed in horrifically hysterical Spanish.
2. The incredible architecture of downtown Cuenca, especially the central church.

(church arch-ways)

3. The random break-dance off we came across taking place in a gazebo in the middle of Cuenca
4. The feisty (read: MEAN) little old Ecuadorian woman who became incredibly territorial while washing her clothes in the local river, ending in her running at us with a stick.

(right before she started using the stick as a weapon, photo taken from inside my purse...)

5. The Ecuadorian election which happened this weekend, deciding whether or not to pass the new constitution put forth by Corea. Voting in Ecuador is mandatory, thus everyone was traveling, voting, and conversing about it all weekend.
6. Cajas National Park. Incredible.

(one of over 230 lakes found in the park)

7. Our encounter with a self-declared ‘revolutionary’ dressed up as Che, who owned a restaurant called Che, and served us a very strange almuerzo (coupled with a few anti-Bush tirades)
8. The visit to the Panama Hat Museum, and subsequent purchasing of said hats.

(Holly, Jocelyn, Dana (NEWBIE!!), and Serena modeling our new wears)

Thanks for tuning in to yet another wild week down on the Equator!
Holly

Oops...

Greetings from Cuenca!

Don´t have enough time to write an actual update, but I realized this afternoon that in my haste to last minute pack on Thursday for our 10 hour over-night bus, I completely forgot about the daily life blog!

As much as I wanted to just blame it on S.W. (remember, Shifty Wireless?!), I really have no excuse. And seeing as how I´m sitting in an internet cafe next to Serena right now, there really is no way to post a daily picture either!

That said, expect a grand update come Monday. Extending the olive branch NOW :)

Holly

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