You Dirty Rat

One of the things Peace Corps stresses is that volunteers from multiple programs work together. In that spirit, the PCV from Latacunga and I decided to look into some projects around there. He is in the youth and families program, so he travels to a bunch of schools around Latacunga. A couple have asked him for help setting up small gardens near the school. He knows even less than I do about horticulture, so he asked me to help out. Our first visit was to a small town called Tilipulo. I thought that things were rough in La Libertad, but it was much worse there. John couldn´t remember the exact directions to the school, so he went to ask a family. The Mother offered her son as a guide for 20 cents. We declined the offer and walked another 50 feet to where the school was. My idea was to take a quick look around to see what was growing and what we would need to do, but as soon as the word that there were a bunch of "gringos" in town spread, we were surrounded by locals. We explained what we were doing and then they told us there plans. They wanted to start planting a nearby field right away with seeds that of course we would provide. I said that we wanted to start smaller and work mainly with the kids.

We looked around a little bit more, but they kept treating us like tourists. One of the ladies was spinning wool on a hand reel and some of the other ladies kept asking us if we wanted to take pictures of her (I we did, then they´d ask for money). As we were leaving, one of the ladies asked for a dollar so she could buy a coke. I said that I didn´t have any money. She then said it wasn´t a problem and told us that when we came back she would grill a cuy for us. I know she wouldn´t charge us for the guinea pig. It is such a strange thing down here when people will beg for small change, but then offer you a meal that costs $7 at any restaurant in the city.

The other night I was in bed almost asleep when a moth started buzzing around my bed. I laid there a bit before motivating myself to get out from under my warm covers. While I was laying, I heard a rustling sound in my room. I´m used to having to kill a moth pretty much every other night, but I hadn´t heard this other sound before. I turned on the light and first turned to see the moth. It was caught in a web by my bed and a big spider was crawling towards it. Also, there was a massive slug squirming up the wall by my light switch and to top it all off, I found out what was making the rustling sound in my room. As I turned to swat the moth, I saw a rat sitting in the middle of my room.

I HATE rats and mice. I wouldn´t cal lit a phobia, but it is close (now you know why I´m not a big fan of eating Guinea Pig).

After a slight pause of revulsion, I went after the rat. It was a fast mother and took off into my bathroom to hide. I ran into my kitchen and grabbed a broom, killed the moth/spider combo and the slug, and then went into the bathroom. The rat immediately ran out, and thus began a 40 minute midnight rumble to the death. I pretty much destroyed my room as the rat went under everything, ran up my walls, and climbed my shower curtain (which I ripped off the wall with a swing of the broom). I finally clipped it and then finished the job after spitting out every expletive in Spanish and English that I know. The rat was over a foot long from nose to tail and I don´t know how it got into the house, so now at night whenever I hear a noise, I get a little freaked out.

A couple of my friends from the southern end of Ecuador were in Quito for meetings last week, so I spent the night on Thursday hanging out with them. It was nice to catch up and also to pick up my mail from the office for the first time in a while. I got a bunch of packages from my family with Christmas presents and a big box from a college friend with softball bats, Chicago style 16" softballs, and matts for bases and home plate. I´m planning on playing softball with the kids at the high school. I hope they like it because I´d like to play all the time.

Thanks Mom, Dad, Steph, Matt, and Kyle for the Christmas presents and thanks Vaughn for all your work getting this sent to me Belyew, Bosone, Schriner, and Kruzic for the softball gear. I´ll post some pictures of the kids playing (or more likely, trying to play) softball soon.

Also while in Quito I was able to get the battery changed on my watch. I went to the Fossil store in the mall so that I could be sure to get the right battery put in my Fossil watch. As I was waiting, I thought to myself, "Do they really need Peace Corps Volunteers in a country where I can take a bus and get to a Fossil store in 3 hours?".

Checkmate!

Thanks to John, the PCV who lives in Latacunga, I now have something to occupy my nights. He found some cheap chess sets and gave me one. I´m currently trying to teach the kids next door how to play chess, or ajedrez, in Spanish. I´m on a pretty good winning streak against them, but the are starting to pick it up.

It has been a busy week and a half, starting off with another first for me. I got to help slaughter my first hog! I went to visit one of the families in town the other day, and right as I got there, they were getting ready to kill the pig. We muscled it to the ground and then the 60-something mother of the family stabbed the pig in the heart. It took only a minute for the pig to die, and then we put it in a wheelbarrow and poured boiling water over it. We had to keep moving the pig in the barrow to get the water over all of it, so I was glad that the clothes I was wearing were already dirty and therefore didn´t mind the bloody/shitty pig water getting on me. Next we ripped the hair and epidermis off the pig. We couldn´t get all the hair off, so my job was to shave the pig with a Bic razor (an activity I´m out of practice with as you´ll read). Then we ripped off the hoofs and cut it open and removed the guts to feed to the dogs. Next we separated the skin from the meat and rubbed it all over with spices before sending it to the next town over where they have big ovens that can roast a whole pig. The typical roast pork dish down here is called hornado and is very tasty. The family said I could come back the next day to eat, but unfortunately I had plans. My payment for shaving their pig instead was a plate of boiled potatoes with a couple of chunks of the pigs fried kidney. Not only did it smell like piss, but it was super tough (I only managed to try one small bite). Thankfully there were a couple dogs in the house who took care of the meat for me.

The other day my neighbor, Carlos, came into my house and asked me to help him cook some "American Food". He showed me a package with Mareican Army rations that he got from his work. Apparently the Ecuadorian Army is trying out some new MRE´s and Carlos got picked to see how they taste. The problem was that the instructions on how to heat it up were in English. I translated and we used the chemicals in the kit to heat up a nice spaggetti dinner. While WE were doing this, Carlos´wife, Sara, was gutting and ripping the hair off a couple of Guinea Pigs for their real dinner. When the pasta was ready, I offered some to Sara and she pulled away, shook her head, and wouldn´t eat. Disembowling a large rodent for your meal=OK. Chef Boyardee=Disgusting.

Another example of cultural differences happened on the bus back from the market this week. On the Pan-Americanthere was a bad accident about half a mile in front of us. As soon as our bus stopped in the traffic, litteraly 75% of the pasengers jump off the bus and sprinted up the road to the accident site to see the crashed cars. It wasn´t just the people in my bus, the side of the road was full of people running to try to see a dead body. I know that people will rubberneck in the States, but this is a whole different level. I don´t know, they think I´m odd when they see me outside on a clear night staring at the stars.

I spent my one free afternoon this week picking the radishes we planted last month. As I suspected, the ones I planted with a lot of space between them were huge, and the ones my neighbor planted were tiny. It didn´t matter to them though, because we fed them all to the rabbits. I found out that nobody in the family likes radishes, but then either do I. I then cleared and fertilized some more land for my new garden that I´m planting with lettuce, zucchini, broccoli, cucumber, and pumpkins. I´m goign to try covering this garden with a half assed plastic greenhouse that I´m making. I think it will help the non-lettuce plants especially, and may be an option for the families here if it works.

NOTES:
-I added another PCV´s blog link to the frontpage of my blog. He was a science teacher before he and his wife came down here. The blog is good, and I especially like the pictures of the poker game we had the other week. Check it out at http://www.travelblog.org/South-America/Ecuador/Puyo/blog-232911.html and scroll down to the pictures.

- Tungurahua, the volcano I passed on my way to the jungle for the Christmas party, is gettign ready to erupt. It is only about 40 miles away from me, and I can see it from the hills near my house, but I´m in no danger.

- This week I finally used up the first can of shaving cream that I brought down here. I hate shaving, and since nobody cares what I look like down here, I rarely shave. That is one of the benifits of life in the Peace Corps, but it does put you at a disadvantage when you have to shave a whole pig.

Happy Old Year!

Well, here we are in 2008. I hope y´all had a great New Year´s Eve wherever you were. There were no dropping balls or midnight kisses down here, but it was still interesting. The festivities started a couple of days earlier with a group of guys walking around town wearing brightly colored clothes and human and animal masks. These payasos or clowns were supposed to be representing the muñecos or dolls that were to be burnt on NYE. It is an Ecuadorian tradition (I´m sure going back to at least Incan times) that on NYE everyone burns an effigy of someone, usually a family member. This is supposed to get rid of all the bad luck from the previous year. People take it pretty seriously (although it is all for fun). The family I live by made a life size doll representation of my neighbor (see the picture a the top of the post), Carlos, complete with his clothes and an Army hat.

Back to the payasos so these clown walked around town a couple of times every day scaring the kids and giving out booze to all the adults they met. The day before NYE I was visiting a family and a group pf payasos asked me to help them build a toll gate on the road into town. After it was done, they used it to stop traffic into town and force the drivers to pay them some small change. I stayed with them a bit to watch the drivers reactions. Most laughed it off, but a truck with some tourists came by and the climbers in the back didn´t know what to think when they got stopped on the road by a bunch of clowns and a white guy asking for spare change. I didn´t ask what the money went to, but I imagine it was more booze.

On NYE I was invited to a party that was supposed to start at 3:00. I got there at 3:45 thinking that I´d be a little early, but nothing was set up yet, so I helped get things started and then went home. It rained hard the rest of the day, so I stayed in and read. After dinner, my neighbor told me that we were leaving. I couldn´t understand where she said we were going until I asked again as we were driving away on the back of a truck. I was then pleased to learn that we were headed out of town to spend NYE at a wake for some lady I didn´t know. Normally these things don´t take too long, so I wasn´t concerned. Unfortunately, we stayed at the wake for a couple of hours just sitting in silence. I didn´t get home until after 11:00 and then walked into town. There was a DJ playing Ecua-Rap and the teenagers were dancing, so I walked home. I then met my neighbors and helped them bring the muñeco back to town to burn it. I looked at my watch as were were walking and saw that it was past midnight. I can say that I spent the first moments of 2008 dragging a life-sized doll up a dirt road. We got to the center of town and while trying not to pass out from the fumes off the flaming piles of nylon and denim, we burnt Carlos and the bad vibes of 2007.

The next dayI went to Latacunga and met some other PCVs. We then grabbed a bus to the town of Chugchilán. Chugchilán is a small town just south of me (about 20 miles as the crow flies, but around 4 hours by bus). It is starting to become a tourist destination for hikers doing the Quilotoa Loop and visiting Lake Quilotoa. I attached a picture of Roger (the old dude), his two kids who were visiting, and Jeremy and Susan (a married couple from my group). For some more good pictures of the lake go to http://www.ecuador-images.net/lake.quilotoa.htm . Another PCV lives in Chugchilán and we stayed at a hostal that is owned by his friends. We spent the first night hanging out and playing cards.

The next day, we took a truck to Lake Quilotoa, walked around checking out the view, and then hiked back. The five hour hike was beautiful and we only got a little lost. We got back to the hostal in the rain and after drying out and eating dinner, we spent our last night playing some more cards. Apparently the PCV who lives there is a good card player and never loses (some other PCVs even refuse to play with him). Even the owners of the hostal told me that he has never lost there. Anyway, I beat him head to head at Texas hold ém both nights (I won all of $10). With the lack of really juicy gossip and the way that things spread through all the PCVs down here, I´m sure that within a month I´ll be known as the greatest poker player around. I think I´ll have to go into retirement to keep my reputation, "I choose not to play!"

NOTES:

-I just finished reading War and Peace (Thanks Chacho!). For 1,455 pages, it really flew by. It was very interesting, although one wonders if it would have been as successful with it´s original title War, What is it Good For?

- For the first time in a month I had a free Saturday and could listen to the Saturday opera on Quito radio. They play an opera every Saturday at 1:30, and from December to April it is broadcast live from the Met in New York complete with commentary and plot explanations in English. Saddly, this is one of the highlights of my week. They actually broadcast the same program all over the US, so if you would like to listen along with me you can find a station near you at http://www.operainfo.org/stationfinder/northamerica.htm .