Hail, Proust, Cows, and other things that can ruin your day

Unfortunately, this week has consisted of one small annoyance after another (sprinkled with good news). First, classes were cancelled on Monday and Tuesday of the week because of an Ecuadorian holiday, so I had some time to get caught up on some chores on Monday. Monday night, my friend John called me up and asked if I wanted to climb El Corazón (15,700 feet) on Tuesday since we were free. It seemed like a good time to finally do it, so I left my house at 8:00AM on Tuesday, met up with John in El Chaupi, and we started to climb. Most of the way we followed a road, but then we had to follow a ridgeline covered with tall grass and spongy mounds of high Andean plants. The “real” climb started around 1:00PM when we left the grassy part of the mountain and started to climb the bare-rock trail. The weather was cloudy, but we were determined to get to the top. After seven hours of climbing, we made it to the top. The view was….of nothing but clouds. We couldn’t see anything, and to top it off, it started to hail. We hightailed it back down about 100 meters, and the miraculously the clouds blew away and we got a great view of Machachi, El Chaupi, La Libertad, and the valley around my house. Then the clouds rolled back in and we had to walk another four hours soaked and pelted by sleet, but it was worth it.

I think I’ve reached Critical Mass on the amount of damage I’ve done to all my worldly possessions, because everything is starting to just fall apart. My backpack, sleeping bag, jeans, all my shoes, camera, radio, CD player, cell phone, and every one of my embarrassingly “holy” socks are all in some state of disrepair (if not completely broken). I guess that shows that I’m really living the life of a Peace Corps Volunteer. The latest thing to go was my new iPod. I’ve been using it as an external hard drive and I think that hooking it up to my neighbor’s computer filled it with viruses. I grabbed some stuff of a friend’s computer the other day, and his anti-virus software deleted a bunch of infected files before I could stop it. It looks like some of the deleted files are necessary for it to run, because I can only get one song to play…ABBA’s Dancing Queen. Talk about worthless. This shouldn’t be a long-term problem because on Thanksgiving I’ll see a friend of mine who said he’d let me download a new copy of iTunes and all his music. Keep your fingers crossed!

Nine months ago I had planted some Broccoli by my house. Normally it takes about 3-4 months to harvest, but the cold really stunts growth up here, so the first ones weren’t ready until after seven months. I harvested all but two of them which were still very small and I didn’t think would produce. To help these two, I fertilized them a lot, and they started to form heads. They were almost ready this week and I had planned to serve them to my friends who are coming to visit (more on them later). After NINE months, FOUR days before I was going to harvest them, my old neighbor tied up her cow next to the broccolis and it ate them. I’d be upset, but stuff like that happens so often that you just have to throw up your hands.

The good news this week was that I went to check out one of the school gardens that we planted in October. Everything was growing well and they had already harvested most of the radishes for the kids’ lunches. We set up a date for the parents to come back and then we’ll show them how to transplant the plants into different beds at the school and also give them plants to take home. This is where the real goal of the gardens is accomplished. If the parents can see that they can grow more than corn/potatoes/ onions, it will make them more likely to continue with the gardens in their own houses after I’m gone. Any extra vitamins in their kids’ diet will make a huge improvement. If this first garden is an indication, I’ll be busy setting-up work dates, transplanting, and showing the parents how to do the whole process on their own land for the next month. Hopefully it works out like this and the time before I start working on training will fly by (and be the most productive period of my service).

Also, my neighbors just bought a pick-up truck. It is a 2001 and has over 100,000 miles on it, but they are proud. Sara doesn’t know how to drive a stick, so I told her I’d show her how…this should be interesting.

This week I finished the longest book I’ve ever read, Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Where to begin? Remembrance of Things Past is over 2,200 pages, and nothing really interesting happens. It basically consists of a guy talking about French society of the late 19th and early 20th century. It has been called the “Major novel of the 20th century”, and Steve Carrell’s character in Little Miss Sunshine calls Proust the greatest writer since Shakespeare. Maybe, but I thought it was wretched. At least I read the whole thing, so I can say that with authority. The funny thing is that the copy I had was signed on the cover “Marjorie Harden – 1941”. As I was reading the second volume, I started to have to separate many of the pages in order to read them. They weren’t stuck together with gum or jelly. When the book was printed, the bottoms of those pages were never cut apart. Therefore, in the 67 years since Ms. Harden signed it, NOBODY had read the book!!! I don’t care how smart a critic you are, great literature has one requirement…people must read it.

Finally, I mentioned that I was going to have visitors. My friends Kari, Susan, Nate, and Scott are coming down from Chicago for a week. It is going to be fun showing them around. The next post will hopefully detail their trip in their own words.