Trip Home

Sorry it has been so long since I last updated the blog, but it has been a hectic couple of weeks. Conor Magee was down for 9 days and we had a great time (Thanks for the blog post Conor. Now everyone can see that Irish wit at it´s best!)

Sadly, on the second to last day of Conor´s visit while we were in Quito, I got a call from my Sister. She told me that my Grandfather had passed away that morning. Gramps had been sick for a while and although I was prepared for the news, it still hit pretty hard. Before I came down here, I spent over a week visiting my Grandparents out in the Country. The day I left Loose Creek, he was having a "Good Day" and was pretty lucid. As I hugged him for the last time we had tears in our eyes and I think we both knew that we would never see each other again. I´m grateful for those last days with the man who had such an influence over my life (and the lives of so many others). We miss you Gramps!


After putting Conor on the bus to Guayaquil to catch his flight, I headed back to La Libertad. I spent a day getting stuff ready and then headed to the States for the funeral. It took over twenty hours to get home even thought the flights were only 7 1/2 hours. The trip back was pretty uneventful, but if anyone is thinking about flying to South America, I recommend flying "LAN". Good food, good movies, and free whiskey. What more can you ask for? After spending the night at the Miami Airport, I got into St. Louis on Sunday the 9th and after changing clothes and putting away my first Ted Drewes concrete in months (famous frozen custard for you non-Saint Louisans), we headed out to my Grandparent´s town for the visitation. I don't really want to go into all the details of the weekend here. It was great to see all my family even under the circumstances, but with the funeral of my Grandfather and this being the first time I´d been home since my Cousin Dale´s passing, it was very emotional.

I didn´t have a lot of time back home before I had to head back to Ecuador. My training group was having an important meeting that started the day after the funeral, so I had to get back. The meeting was over funding procurement for our projects, so it was imperative the I be there because this was going to be the majority of my work for the rest of my time in-country.

I only had a couple of hours free time in St. Louis before I had to catch my flight. I went to the grocery store to get some things that you can´t find down here. Most of the stuff was for me, but I also picked up some stuff for a friend of mine. I had called a bunch of my friends to see if they wanted anything while I was home, but since another friend had just been home, nobody really needed anything. The one thing that I had to get was a box of tampons for a girl I know. Apparently you can´t find them in Ecuador, so I had to pick some out. Mom went to the store with me and I think she got a kick out of seeing me try to decide what brand, size, etc. I needed to get. I didn´t think it was very funny, and of course when I got to Ecuador I found out that I got the wrong type. Oh well, beggars can´t be choosers.

I got to the Airport with plenty of time, but my flight was delayed. I grabbed a beer at the bar by my gate, but I didn´t realize until after I got it that it was $8. Holy Sh#%! That´s more than I make in a day. Anyway, because my flight was delayed, I missed my connection in Atlanta. Instead of waiting all night in Atlanta and then having t spend a whole day waiting in Miami, I flew to Ft Lauderdale and then took a Town Car to the Miami Airport. I made my flight to Quito OK, but without my bags. This normally wouldn't be a problem, but I had to go right to the meeting without a change of clothes. I ended up wearing the same clothes all week, and even with showers, I stunk bad! A couple of my friends didn´t know about my bag situation and told me, "Man, you really are going Peace Corps!". Other than my stench the meetings were good and informative. A couple of days later I was able to get my bags in Quito (with the most important contents: canned chili, hot sauce, and curry past intact). Also in the bag was a pair of old shoes (I can´t find shoes in my size down here), a portable CD player and a bunch of CDs.

Since I got back, I´ve been trying to get in the swing of things. I have English, agriculture, and gym class every day. Yeah, I said gym class. Apparently the old gym teacher was a little on the heavy side, so the wanted me to help out. The kids aren´t used to doing much during class, so they are going to be in for a shock when I make them run everyday. That is the reason I said that I´d teach that class. I´m getting out of shape, and this will be motivation to exercise more. Also, I want to teach the kids baseball. I got one of my Chicago friends working on getting me some 16" softballs to play with so the kids won´t need gloves. I´m counting on you Tubbs!

Other than that things are OK down here. The election for the new Constitutional Assembly is next Sunday, so my normal routine will be disrupted because we are on "Lock Down" for the weekend. I won´t be able to leave L.L. for those days in case there are any problems with the election. It will be interesting to see how things go with the new Constitution they are going to write. I´m sure you guys will here about it in the States if anything crazy happens, but hopefully it will be calm and the news can focus on crazy OJ Simpson.

Donde Esta Frankie Maguire?

Well, I think I get the privilege of being the first person other than Jay to write an entry on here, I feel kind of like Bono being asked to guest edit the Independent for a day................sort of.

I met up with Jay in Guayaquill on Tuesday and the next morning we travelled up to Cuenca which is about 2500m /8000 ft above sea level. The journey itself was pretty impressive, lots of hairpin bends and shear drops at the side of the road. We went to a soccer game that night and sampled some of the local beverages. Pilsener and Club are your 2 options in most places in Ecuador, I couldn't tell much of a difference between them to be honest, sort of like Budweiser and MGD........

After we left Cuenca we travelled north to Riobamba and organised a couple of mountain bikes for descending down from Mount Chimborazoo which is the highest mountain in Ecuador, and higher than anywhere north of it in the Americas. We got as high as 5000m / 17,000 ft, up there you can really feel how thin the air is and walking up even 20 metres really takes it out of you. The descent down on the bikes was great, I'd reccommend it for anyone taking a trip down there.

After Riobamba We headed further north, Jay headed up to his village and I took a bus out to a place called Quilotoa to hike around a lake. I have exactly 14 words of Spanish so I was interested to see how easy it would be to get around (I was surprised during the trip that more people didn't speak English) . You can actually communicate pretty well with a few phrases and a lot of hand gestures. Anyway, the hike was great, but it took about 3 hours and there were some pretty decent climbs so by the end of it I was a bit wrecked. By the time I got back on the bus, where as pretty much always I was the only Gringo, for the return trip I was ready for a snooze. Just as I was falling asleep I heard some Irish music playing, I looked up and saw they were playing "The Devil's Own" on the TV. Now, listening to Brad Pitt playing an IRA fugitive (Frankey Maguire) is a pretty painful expereince. However, listening to Brad Pitt playing an IRA fugitive (Frankey Maguire) while dubbed in Ecuadorian Spanish is actually very entertaining. Sadly it wasn't appreciated by the locals and they soon switched it off to listen to the local Sierra Music.

Next day I met up with Jay again at his village, it's small, very small, but Jay seems to be a hit among the people who live there. We spent a night there and travelled up to Quito the next day. Quito was my favourite place in Ecuador, spectacular setting and a great place to spend a couple of days I thought.

All in all I enjoyed the trip a lot, knowing a few words of Spanish goes a long way. I found Ecuadorians pretty friendly in general (with one or two exceptions) especially if you make the effort to say hello (in Spanish).

Never got around to tasting Guinea Pig unfortunately, still it's something to look forward to for the next time...

Thanks for a great trip Jay!



Conor

The JayPole

To keep you updated w/ my hectic travel schedule, the day after I wrote my last blog post, I went into Quito to do some errands. While we were still in training, I thought it would be nice to make t-shirts for everyone. I made a design that everyone liked, but we didn't have time to order them. Once we got to our sites, I started looking for a place to get them made, but had no luck. Finally I found a place in the North part of Quito that could make them. It took a long time to find the place (even the taxi driver didn't recognize the address). I was pretty happy with myself that I could get around a strange part of town, find the shop, and order the t-shirts w/0 much problem. The shirts only cost $5 and will be ready in time for our big group meeting in the middle of September.

I had a free day before my town's big festival started, so I spent the day doing laundry and working in my garden. I had to weed and fertilize the whole thing and I also tried an experiment. I was reading "Collapse" by Jared Diamond (the follow up to "Guns, Germs, and Steel"). It was an interesting book, and briefly mentioned a thing called "Lithic Mulch". This is where you sow small rocks around your plants and put a layer of rocks on top of the soil. Supposedly it helps in dry/cold areas with water retention and frost prevention. We'll see how it works, and if I get good results, I'll try it with my next round of plants and teaching it to the locals.

I found out right before the town's festival was to begin that the old PCV from my site couldn't make it, but a girl from my training group was going to visit with a friend. They weren't coming until Saturday, so I had Friday night at the party to myself. first, I went to the Ladie's house who was hosting the party. There were a bunch of people coking a ton of food in the addition to her house that they built especially for the fiesta. I helped moving the bathtub sized pots of food around. Apparently, I have the reputation in town for being strong, because whenever anyone has something heavy to move, they always ask for me to help. Anyway, they fed me before and after helping out. Around sunset, there was a procession from the house to the church. They had 12 kids in traditional outfits dancing, music, and they carried a statue of John the Baptist along and threw rose petals on it. My job was to carry a feed sack full of rose petals for them to throw. Not a hard task, except they kept hitting my in the face with the roses.

At the church, we had a long prayer service and the went outside to watch the kids do some traditional dances. Everybody was drinking and starting to get drunk, so I decided to call it a night.

The next day my friend showed up around 8:00AM w/ her friend from home. We walked around and then had lunch at the hosts house. After lunch we went to mass and then to the town's soccer field. There they had "Juegos de Gallinas" or "Hen Games". [For more info on this, see my post, "Hen Games, Exploding Toilets, and Pork Roulette] It was pretty much the same thing as when I saw it before, but smaller. After all the chickens had been caught, the kids did another dance and then asked me to come out in the middle of the field with them. They had a 24 oz. bottle of beer with a bunch of long colored ribbons tied to the top. They explained that they were going to o a dance and needed me to hold the bottle over my head. They were doing a Maypole dance, except I was the pole! It was pretty funny and they danced until I was wrapped to the shoulders in ribbon. Then the undid me and I got to spray the beer all over them. After that we all went to the center of town to eat, drink, and dance. We could only take about 10 hours of this, so we went back to my house at around 11:30, but I could hear people up until 6:00Am.

One funny thing happened at the party while we were eating. We just had bowls of potatoes to eat with a little meat. I was talking to a guy who was three sheets to the wind. He told me that he loved potatoes and I said that if that was so, then he should be able to eat one in one bite. He tried, but couldn't. I said that it was easy, and popped one in. His friends were impressed and to to do it, but couldn't. We ended up getting more people involved and jokingly yelled at each other. I just kept thinking how ridiculous this was and that I spent 4 1/2 years in a fraternity, but had to come to Ecuador to haze people(and with potatoes no less).

Sunday night they were at it again, but I had had enough.