Escape to Ecuador (My Mom´s Blog Entry)

Tired of bundling up and shoveling snow? If so, I suggest a quick trip to Ecuador for a little relief from it all. The weather is perfect, the prices are beyond belief, and the scenery is magnificent, especially in the southern region. Carl and I joined Andy for a week this past November and had a great time. We visited his site in San Pedro which is a sleepy little community located near the main tourist town of Vilcabamba.
After a couple of days of exploring this area and visiting Andy's projects (Women's Cooperative and Coffee Growers Association), we headed towards Loja and then to Cuenca. Our trip concluded in Guayaquil, the largest city in Ecuador. Of the places we visited, I personally enjoyed Andrew's location the best. We flew from Guayaquil to Loja - the approach to the airport is worth the trip. Looking out the window, the Andes Mountains are on your left and you suddenly bank to the right for a quick landing on the airstrip. Magnificent! As Andrew has mentioned in his previous blogs, this area is known as the Valley of Longevity . We tried to drink up as much water as we could to test the premise. I should add that the land is being bought up by Americans and Europeans which is rather sad, but many know a good thing when they see it. The rolling hillsides are lush, good for hiking or just viewing - one afternoon we were at a lovely hostel having lunch on the porch that overlooked the valley. I think I could have spent the entire week at this one location.
While there Carl and I were introduced to many new experiences...we ate guinea pig at the home of his host family, visited a sugar cane processing center, awoke every morning to the noises of barnyard animals (donkeys braying, roosters crowing, and dogs barking), walked through some Incan ruins, shopped at an outdoor market where everything and anything was being sold...hardware, toilet paper, candy, and of course vegetables. We tried different foods and drink and discovered that we really enjoyed Ecuadorian soups and juices . They don't seem to be big on sweets or salty food, BUT they do have popcorn...however, they put it in the soup!
A couple of things struck us as funny. One day we came out of Andy's little house and we saw a burro walking down the side of the road. We looked for a farmer but there was none. Apparently, these animals know how to get back and forth from the sugar cane fields without anyone tending to them. Along this same line, we were riding on the highway when we came upon a sight we haven't seen around here. In front us was a very small pickup truck loaded down with one huge cow tethered to the sides of the truck with a couple of ropes. We were grateful that the cow (and everything else) stayed in the truck!
Andy is planning on being in Ecuador for a couple more months. If you want a good tour guide, we suggest you contact him soon. His plan is to return to the states by late March or early April. It will be wonderful to have him back home, but having been to Ecuador we can better understand why he will want to return.

Volunteers from Abroad

When I joined the Peace Corps I mentally prepared myself for a very solitary experience, one where I was going to be working alone in a foreign land with the only resources provided to me were by the Peace Corps and my surrounding community. But in my time here I am happy to say that that has not been the case as I have received support from all kinds of people who are still living in the US but want to help me in my cause any way they can.
That is where Jay and Melanie of New Mexico come in. About 8 months ago the Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) that I work for, the Colinas Verdes Foundation, was going through a small lull in-between projects. In that time I was looking for stuff to do so I went to our website, http://www.colinasverdes.org/, and decided that it needed a drastic overhaul. After choosing to take on this project I was going through a list of friends in my head who might be able to help me with the web design and amazingly enough I received a message that same day on my blog from a couple by the name of Jay & Melanie who own a web design company (check them out at http://www.websitesanddesign.com/) and were very interested in helping to redo the Colinas Verdes website. Well the first thing I did was jump for joy at the fact that someone other than my Mom & Dad was actually reading my blog and then I celebrated the fact that these people were so eager to help.
First off I guess I should give you a little bit of back round information about the Colinas Verdes Foundation. They were formed in the mid-1990’s as an organization to help with the conservation of southern Ecuador’s natural resources (with a focus on Podocarpus National Park) as well as to help with the development of the local farmers and their practices to provide a better standard of living for them and their families. That being said, Colinas Verdes solicits money from all over the world to fund projects in areas such as irrigation, coffee, a starch made from the Achira plant and marmalade production to name a few. With some NGO’s I have had heard horror stories about how they just take the money and do minimal work on the proposed project and just keep the rest of the money but I am happy to say that that is not the case with the Colinas Verdes Foundation; they are truly a remarkable group that is very organized and dedicated to helping the people of southern Ecuador.
Now, given the fact that the first action possible donors will take in approving the foundation for a project funding is to go to their website, I thought it essential to update http://www.colinasverdes.org/ to a tool they could use to portray their professionalism and successful past projects. Therefore, over the past 8 months I have worked essentially as a liaison between the Colinas Verdes team and Jay & Melanie to create a website (in both English and Spanish) containing the mission, vision, past projects, galleries of images and enabling outsiders to contact us from all over the world.
As well as building a website to benefit Colinas Verdes, we have also created “buttons” on the home page of http://www.colinasverdes.org/ that will direct people to some of the other smaller organizations of the San Pedro de Vilcabamba community. The beauty of these “buttons” is that these small organizations now have a web presence that will enable them to direct people to should they pose the interest. (We have actually had one person contact us who is interested in importing honey to the US!)
From a personal standpoint I am deeply indebted to Jay and Melanie for all their help. Previous to this project I felt as though even though I was a member of the Colinas Verdes team I was not really providing too much value to the organization. I was more or less just another set of hands that could work a shovel or fill a plastic bag with dirt. But since the website project I have felt that the team has grasped what I can do to help benefit the foundation and the resources I have available to me.
As well as receiving help from Jay & Melanie at http://www.websitesanddesign.com/, I would also like to thank my Mom the English teacher for all her help going through the English portion of the website. In sending her the pages to proofread I was amazed at how bad my English had gotten and I know myself as well as the Colinas Verdes team are very grateful for her help.
So if you are bored at your computer and looking for things to check out online (and I know you are if you are reading my blog) please check out http://www.colinasverdes.org/ and you will get an idea of everything this great organization stands for. I am especially proud of the Contact Us page, check it out!

SSssccarrryy Gringos

“to promote a better understanding of the American people on the part of the peoples served.”
Above is the second goal of the Peace Corps and I believe that the following story is relevant.

A couple of weeks ago I was working with my organization, the Colinas Verdes Foundation, in a little town named Chalaca, about an hour south of San Pedro de Vilcabamba. In this small “pueblo” we were putting in one of our “Support Centers” which is part of our initiative to furnish groups of coffee growers with the facilities to wash and dry their coffee as well as to grow new coffee plants. While we were there I noticed how all of the kids were keeping their distance from me. Usually the kids are very curious about the gringo and always come up to me to talk but this instance wasn’t the case. After trying to talk with them a couple of times and the kids running away from me I asked the people we were working with why the kids were so scared of me. That is when they explained to me that someone, most likely their parents, told the kids that if they aren’t good little boys and girls the gringos will come and either cut out their eyes or chop off their arms/legs to sell in the United States or Europe. After we all laughed about the absurdity of this idea I made it my mission to befriend these kids. So for the rest of the day I sat with the kids and we just chatted it up about school, what kinds of games they like to play and any other topic that may be pertinent to a 7 yr old. By the end of the day I had three little boys following me around asking me all kinds of questions and trying to help me with whatever task I was doing at the time. So I think they got over their fear that I was going to rob them of certain body parts.
This past week I went back to the town of Chalaca to show the people there how to compost and make organic fertilizers/pesticides. My new friends finally came around after about an hour and were hilarious in their attempts to help me. Making compost constitutes mixing all kinds of organic material that needs to be finely chopped up with machetes and then put into levels in the designated area. My little new little helpers were basically fighting over who gets to carry the bag of cow manure over to the compost area, something that was cracking all of the grown ups up. One of the little boys even made his shirt into a makeshift basket and filled it with about 30 oranges to give to me.
Well after a couple of hours both the compost piles and organic pesticides were complete and it was time for me to go home. But before I left, I decided to give these sweet, poor little boys a couple of gifts. The first was some coloring books with magic markers that my Mom had sent me from the US. As I pulled them out of my bag their faces immediately lit up and I literally felt like Santa Claus on Christmas morning and I realized how rare it was for these great, sweet, well-mannered little boys to receive a gift, especially something new. My next gift was an old Nerf football that my girlfriend, Katie, had brought from the US and had given to me just before she left. At first these little boys had no idea what it was and thought I was giving them some new type of sponge to wash dishes with, but after a little explanation of “Futbol Americano” and showing them how to throw it they were soon chucking it around the yard and chasing each other in circles.
As I mentioned above the second goal of the Peace Corps is “to promote a better understanding of the American people on the part of the peoples served.” The idea of this is to give the people in the countries we are serving a feel of who Americans are, why we are here and ultimately for us to give them an idea of the culture in which we live. This isn’t done through a class or workshops, it is accomplished by the volunteers living in the communities and interacting with the people on a daily basis. This situation with the children of Chalaca was definitely an extreme example of this but it really made an impression on me how truly uninformed these people really are, especially in the poorer communities, about the world outside of Southern Ecuador.
After this experience in Chalaca I sent the Peace Corps office in Washington DC an email suggesting that they change their second goal to read; “to promote a better understanding that the American people will not cut the arms or legs off of the peoples served…” Just kidding.

Sweet, Sweet Compost Project

One thing I have found that we as Peace Corps Volunteers can offer in our respective communities is our access to information. This information can come in many forms, whether it is teaching people how to use computers and the internet, showing farmers a new technique that is used in a different part of the country or by introducing a small business to a distributor based out of Quito to sell their products. For you see many of the people in my site (and other sites I would assume) basically just live in their own little world surrounded by the same people and setting for their entire life, rarely venturing out of their tiny little bubble or if they do it is only for a small, short vacation. Therefore I have found that I can use this access to information and contacts through the Peace Corps, whether it is another volunteer or an Ecuadorian contact, to help my community with their progressive development.
One such case of this utilization of contacts is a recent compost project I have been undertaking the past six months or so. It all started out when my NGO, The Colinas Verdes Foundation, was preparing to give a small workshop on composting and organic fertilizers. In preparation for a composting/organic fertilizer workshop my co-workers mentioned to me that it was hard to convince the local farmers to utilize compost because of the long drawn out process that can last as long as a year before it is ready. Remembering a training session we had in my first couple of weeks, I contacted a volunteer from up north who had presented to us a special kind of composting bacteria he had access to in his site and after speaking with him he was very excited to help me and immediately sent me about a half pound of these special bacterias that come in powder form.
Together, Colinas Verdes and I, did a test as to whether or not these bacterias actually worked and sure enough they broke down all of the organic matter and in just a little over a month the compost was ready to be applied. So that following week I presented these “magic bacterias” in our composting and organic fertilizer workshop to about 20 of the local farmers from San Pedro de Vilcabamba. In my presentation I showed how easy it was to make and that even though it required a little bit more labor in the first couple of weeks, the compost would be ready in about a month. I also expressed to them that within each pile of this now “living” compost they made, that if they saved a third or fourth of their pile and started another compost pile, that the bacterias would transfer over and start breaking down the new organic material. The farmers seemed to be very impressed with this new type of compost and at the conclusion of my presentation I offered to set up a time with each and every farmer in attendance to come to their farms and make this compost with them and I am happy to say that five of the farmers accepted my invitation and we have since made some huge mounds of this “sweet, sweet compost.” (I was even able to talk my girlfriend Katie into helping with one of the compost piles).
This Friday the Colinas Verdes Foundation will be having another composting workshop in a neighboring town where I will be presenting my “magic composting bacterias” again and hopefully I can persuade a couple of these farmers to begin composting using this new technology.

Potable Water Project in Zhucos, Ecuador

When my girlfriend, Katie, first came to her site in the city of Loja in southern Ecuador she was assigned to work in a small town just outside the city named Zhucos (pronounced shucos). After working there a couple of weeks she decided that Zhucos would be a good place to do some surveys that the Peace Corps requires us to do in our first couple of months in site. These tools are basically just a long list of questions to help us identify areas within our communities where we may be able to help. As Katie went from house to house asking the same questions she found that the people of Zhucos were all expressing the same thing, the need for a source of healthy drinking water.
Fast forward a year, Katie’s family in the US are all part of the Great Bridge Presbyterian Church of Chesapeake, VA who was starting to participate in the “Living Waters” program. “Living Waters” is a non-profit group that supplies the necessary filtration systems to churches who wish to do potable water projects in third world countries and the circumstances couldn’t have been better for the church, Katie and Zhucos. So Katie went to work, first testing their water which turned out to be filled with bacterias and then she began to set up everything for the project which included ordering about 300 plastic bottles, organizing the town to have participants come help and learn, and figuring out where we were going to put the filtration system. It was a long drawn out process but things all came together at the last minute (as they always do here in Ecuador) just as the installation team from Great Bridge arrived.
The installation team was composed of the two Sam’s, Sam Howard (Katie’s Dad) and Sam Chalk whose responsibility it was to set up the system and make sure it ran properly. The other Great Bridge team members were Karen Gibson and Traci Chamberlain Bagley who worked alongside Katie in educating the women and children about the importance of clean drinking water and in how to clean the re-usable bottles. My friend and fellow Peace Corps Volunteer, Jason Kreisselman and I were able to help the two Sam’s as helpers and as translators to the locals who also assisted in the installation process.
The system consisted of the water running through three initial filters to catch any sediment in the water then passing through the “ozonator” where ozone was mixed with the water for the ultimate step in the cleansing process. The water then went to this huge storage tank where it was stored until required by the community. We were very lucky to have some great hard working Ecuadorians helping us which enabled the system to be completed, including the construction of an enclosure around the system for security, in only two days.
After the system was installed and all of classes were over we celebrated the completion of the project with a small fiesta complete with bubbles, candy and our new, clean water. The community came down from their houses all over the hillsides just to try their new water and to express their appreciation. The “Living Waters” team of Great Bridge Presbyterian Church should be very proud of the great job they did preparing for and delivering clean drinking water to this small community and from a Peace Corps Volunteer’s standpoint it was very fulfilling to be a part of something so great and I will definitely look upon this project as one of the highlights of my time here in Ecuador.

Tsachilas visit to Vilcabamba

A couple of weeks ago I was contacted by a friend of mine who lives with an indigenous tribe named the Tsachilas (Pronounced Sachilas) who reside outside of the city of Santo Domingo, Ecuador. My friend, Clay, had come to visit me a couple of months ago and I took him to my women’s group to see the artesenia they made. One their products, baskets hand-made from banana leaves, seemed like they might be a good thing for the Tsachilas to make as well seeing as they have an abundance of bananas where they live.
So Clay and I arranged for what is called a “Tech Trip” through the Peace Corps. A tech trip is basically where the Peace Corps pays for one volunteer and a member of their community to travel to another volunteer’s site to learn a specific skill. In our case, Clay was going to bring the mother from his host family to San Pedro de Vilcabamba in order to learn how to make these baskets and sell them with the jewelry they sell in fairs. Tagging along with Clay and his host mother was his host father who is also a Shaman medicine man. Unfortunately the Peace Corps would only pay for two people’s trips so we decided that Alejandro, Clay’s host father, would do some “cleansings” with the some of the local Peace Corps volunteers in order to pay for his trip. Also the goal of this trip wasn’t just for Clay’s host parents to come and learn how to make the baskets and to do the cleansings, but to experience the people and places of a part of Ecuador which they have never seen before due to the fact that they can rarely afford a trip like this.
So a week ago Clay and his host parents came into San Pedro de Vilcabamba at about 8am following a long 14 hr bus ride. After a brief rest and a change into their native dress, we all went over to my women’s group to get his host Mom started with her class. While she was in training, Clay, myself and his host Dad walked around my town to introduce him to the people in my community. I was fascinated how intrigued they all were to meet him and how they all were very interested in his culture and in being cleansed. We also were able to meet with the people of my organization, Colinas Verdes, to give Alejandro a tour of our nursery and the work we do there. He was very interested in all the coffee we had planted and so as a gift we decided to give him some coffee plants to take back to his farm and plant.
After Rosa, Clay’s host Mom, was finished with her class we all headed back to my house to prepare for the cleansings. That night we had about 15 people show up who all participated in an individual spiritual cleansing which he used different rock statues and some grain alcohol to basically tell us about our past, present and our future. Then he used an egg to cleanse our spirits and rid us of all the evil surrounding us. (The entire process is very hard to explain, you will just have to visit and experience it for yourself!)
After the cleansing it was time for our herbal sauna. This involved boiling a number of different herbal plants in a large pot as well as digging a deep hole for a sauna. What they do is fill the hole with the water and herbal plants, then drop a super hot rock in the hole to create steam. Then they put a stick over the hole for you to place your feet as you sit in a chair with a blanket wrapped around your body and the hole, thus creating a “mini” sauna for your body.
The entire cleansing and sauna experience was very soothing and relaxing (even though it felt like my feet were burning off in the sauna at one point). I literally almost fell asleep while he was doing my cleansing and the sauna felt amazing!
The next day we decided to head to the nearby tourism town of Vilcabamba and hike to the top of Mount Mandango to give them a view of the Valley of Longevity. Both Alejandro and Rosa really enjoyed the view from up there even though they hard time understanding why we would do a hike like that for pleasure. After treating them to a spaghetti lunch, the Tsachilas unfortunately had to head back to their town, but not before buying some souvenirs in the local artesenia shops.
The Tsachilas visit was a great experience for everyone involved and even though it was brief they really enjoyed being somewhat celebrities in my site and seeing a new part of the country. The cultural exchange for both the Tsachilas and the people of my site was really something special and both Clay and I were very happy we organized the tech trip. Their visit also got me super excited to go and visit Clay to experience their culture first hand in his site (and maybe get another cleansing/sauna).

Organic Certification Workshop

About six months ago another volunteer and I were approached by the Peace Corps office to spearhead a workshop to educate both coffee and cacao growers on the process and benefits organic certifications. The Peace Corps approached Brigitte and I because we were both working in communities that were very active in the cultivation of coffee. The other crop this workshop was to focus on was Cacao, which is the bean they use to make chocolate and comes primarily from the hot and humid coastal communities where we have many volunteers located as well.
So Brigitte and I started the long, hectic and often times annoying process of dealing with Ecuadorian hotels/convention halls, restaurants and organic certifiers to arrange the food, lodging and presenters of our workshop. First we had to contact all of these possible places to have them send us a cost breakdown, which can be very frustrating given the level of business we were both accustomed to in the US and how extremely different they do things here. Then we wrote what is called a PL480 grant to apply for funds established by the US Dept of Agriculture specifically for Peace Corps projects. (I am also in the process of writing another grant like this for a greenhouse and nursery project in my site). About 4 months later we finally got the money and were ready to set up the workshop.
Fortunately we found a great place located in Quevedo, Ecuador which is known as a distribution hub for Ecuador’s huge banana production. We had our workshop at the Instituto Nacional Autonomo De Investigaciones Agropecuarias, aka INIAP, which is an area of about 3000 acres set up by the Ecuadorian government as a farming research and training facility. It was a great location for us because we could eat, sleep and conduct the seminars without having to leave their campus.
The training started on May 4th and lasted for three days and was conducted by a group named Conservation and Desarollo who are auditors for the Rainforest Alliance certifications. They gave a great presentation on all the different types of certifications, the process of becoming certified and we even went on a little field trip to a farm to show the growers the auditory process that is conducted in a certification. After their presentation we were also lucky enough to have a Cacao distributor come in from Guayaquil to do a brief presentation on the commercialization and exportation of cacao.
Given the amount of participation of both the Peace Corps volunteers and their counterparts I think the workshop was a great success. We had about 30 people attending with 7 of them being volunteers, thus it was a great learning experience for the Ecuadorian coffee and cacao producers and hopefully they are spreading that knowledge back in their communities.
Personally this workshop couldn’t have come at a better time for the coffee growers in Loja and in my community. I was able to bring representatives of 8 different coffee groups from my area, including Carlos Lapo from San Pedro de Vilcabamba (my site). Within these 8 groups, a number of them are starting the process of becoming certified. San Pedro’s coffee organization, named APECAEL, has only been together for about six months so they still have some more internal issues to address before they can pursue their certification, but with their formation they are fulfilling the first goal of becoming certified, coordinating the coffee growers. The goal of this workshop was to give groups like APECAEL an idea of what to expect on down the road when they do decide to pursue some type of organic certification and I am confident we achieved that. (Just to give you an idea, groups can earn about $75 more per sack of coffee if they were certified which is a substantial chunk of change here in Ecuador).
For now Carlos and I are planning on giving a small presentation to the local coffee growers on what we learned in order to pass it on to them. The entire certification process lasts about 3-5 years so unfortunately it won’t happen in my time but I hope that I have at least helped to lay the foundation for them to be certified in the future.