there and they
had a disco movil (dj & sound system) and everything! We basically took the party over and danced until the abuelita kicked us out so she could get some sleep. My fellow Bolivian Cindy, not one to miss a chance to grind to reggaeton and do the cumbia shuffle made quite an impression on my neighbors, leav
ing with several numbers and invitations. I brought over my cakes and after blowing out a match I took the traditional bite of cake (¡muerde!) and David did 
the traditional shoving of my face into the 
cake. It´s okay, he promptly licked most of it off. I cut the cake into lots of tiny pieces and it was all gobbled up before I actually got a piece. No worries, the recipe was so easy that I made another one a few days later, mostly because Magola didn´t get a piece either (can´t snub the suegra after she cooked me dinenr!) I went to bed around 3 am, which in my old age is impressive; although some of my neighbors continued drinking non-stop into the next afternoon, a bad Ecua habit some people have when there´s a big party, they just don´t know when to stop. They keep drinking until they fall asleep in their chair or wherever they pass out. Not cool, but at least it´s not something that happens all the time, although I would say it certainly happens more than it should.A Family Affair, some of David´s many relatives:
Me and little brother Daniel
Great Grandmother Gratulina and Cousin Jairo
David and his sister Patricia (she´s single and wants me to introduce her to a gringo, preferably either Alok or Neil.)
The gringa portion of my birthday involved a reunion with most of my fellow Bolivia transfers whom I hadn´t seen since our second close of service (COS) conference in June. It was going to
be a sort of despedida but most everyone is staying past October now. So we made it into a sort of joint birthday 
celebration for me and Kasia, whose birthday is the day after mine. We headed to Guayaquil for a night time boat ride dressed as pirates. We took over the ship, and the open bar, dancing to Ecua hits along with classics by Michael Jackson, which we heavily requested. The next day David and I explored Guayaquil´s boardwalk by daylight. For me 
it´s the only draw the city offers, oh that plus the iguanas everywhere just hanging out. We got our fill of this expensive port city and headed home.I´m glad I had an eye patch handy for yet another pirate encounter.
Speaking of birthdays, I was invited to my first Quinceñera. My neighbor´s daughter was turning 15 and this naturally called for chancho. They called in Jorge and Mario to kill, skin and gut a pig.
Then it was time to cook fritada and chicaron in a giant pot on a wood fire outside. David decided to be the official pot stirrer and taste tester. 
The fritada involved frying up pig skin which they ate for lunch. The meat was cooked to make chicaron and served for dinner. I ate a lot of yucca, which was delicious and a lot less greasy. After dinner we danced, ate cake and I tried to avoid taking sots of a really gross sugar cane liquor mixed with pineapple juice that they kept passing around. Really nasty stuff. The next day while almost everyone was hungover I went to work in the garden feeling great.On the other end of the spectrum, I also went to my first Ecua wake, which was a lot more gruesome than I expected. I wasn´t going to go because the deceased was not actually from my town and I didn´t know him, but he was the nephew of Don Jose, a prominent leader in the town whom I did know, so I went. I was quite surprised when I went up to view the body that it was covered in blood, had an obvious odor and the face was not even recognizable. Apparently this man had been shot three times a few days before and they hadn´t cleaned him up or even changed the clothes. This isn´t really the norm here, and it certainly took me by surprise. I left as soon as it was socially acceptable to do so.
I am certainly experiencing a lot of new things here and learning a lot about latin culture. Every day is a struggle but also an opportunity. Así es pues. Sometimes I wish I had more structure, better work opportunities, an established group to work with, a functioning project... But I´ve learned a lot about the way things work in development and it´s not easy. People have real lives, real problems and real obligations. They don´t always have time for even the best intentioned person trying to teach them something new. I feel lucky that I have an active social life, I´m integrated in my community to the point where people not only know my name, but they know my dog´s as well. A lot of times I think that if it wasn´t for David I would have given up a long time ago. He helps and supports me in everything I try to do. From working on the community garden to drawing the background for a puppet show, he´s always willing to lend me a hand and open to learning new things. He´s easily the best thing I´ve got going here and my best ¨student.¨ Not only does he no longer throw garbage out of bus windows or on the ground like most Ecuas, but he´s taken on my personal passion for recycling, coming up with a great idea to recycle the plastic bags from the ice cream cones for his uncle´s ice cream truck to plant more boya tree seeds. Plus he was all for dressing up like a pirate. What more could a girl ask for?
I was more excited about seeing some of my fellow ex-Bolivian vols and about rocking our awesome Emo Morales t-shirts, a tribute to graffitti encountered in Sucre and indirectly to the man who repeatedly called us spies and caused our expulsion from the country.
With the help of a bilingual children´s book I bought in Peru, The Little Prince, The first Harry Potter and the Giving Tree in Spanish, a few puzzles and coloring books I bought in the city and some Sunday comics that were sent from the states (thanks Andrew!) I had my curriculum. The kids were all on different levels and not just based on age. I was teaching the alphabet to a 6 year old who can´t read or write yet. I was reading with an 8 year old who wasn´t much further along. With the more advanced kids I had them read a story and answer questions about it. They also wrote and illustrated their own stories and cut up the comics, which are in English, and wrote their own story lines in Spanish. With my literature background I of course have a bias and think every child needs to develop a healthy love of the written word. Reading is just not big in Ecuador and most of the children say simply ¨I don´t like to read.¨ But I think it´s more that they don´t have access to fun books and they´re definitely not read to at home and I´m pretty sure that story time is not part of the school curriculum either. But with a little exposure most children can appreciate a good Shel Silverstein or Dr. Seuss. The other day when Daniel finished his math problems and I told him he could pick his next activity and he said enthusiastically ¨Quiero leer!¨(I want to read!) I have to admit that I felt I had accomplished something. True he was probably just happy he didn´t have to do more long division but he could have colored or drawn a picture, but he wanted to read and since my supplies are so limited it´s not like he hadn´t already read that story before.) Daniel, who I´ll admit is one of my favorite kids and not just because he´s my boyfriend´s little brother, also made me feel like this is so worth it when 3 pre-schoolers randomly showed up one day and he read them El Árbol Generoso and even tried asking them questions the same way I do after we read a story. Children reading to other children, what a sight!
The river is really more of a creek but with the rainy season it´s grown enough to be pleasantly refreshing- Then I go home and change into dry clothes. I continue sweating because even when the sun starts going down it´s still humid. Then I visit my neighbors, watch the daily volleyball game at Viviana´s or just chill out at my house catching up on the newspapers and magazinges and eating the candy I´ve been sent (shout out to my Mom and Dad, Aunt Diane, Ellen, Andrew, and Pat you guys are awesome!) The puppy and the boy take up the rest of my time. First stats on the puppy.
I was hesitant about taking on the responsibility at first. I´ve never had a dog of my own before and I wasn´t sure I was ready. But then my absolute favorite dogs in my community got it on and made some adorable babies so of course I had to have one. Gladys, the owner of the mother, willingly gifted me one of the females and when she was a little more than a month old I took her home. 
Her name is Fresa or Fresita since she´s so little. It´s Spanish for strawberry which David, who helped name her says is slang for something that´s really cool. I like it because I think her head looks like a strawberry and it confuses people because dog names here are woefully unoriginal, like everyone suggested I name her Negra because she´s black.
Some people when they hear her name like to reiterate to me that strawberries are red and she is in fact black. Silly gringa. So far people have told me that she can die from all of the following: being held too much, being held by too many different people. the evil eye or jealosy (hence the red ribbon she wears which is supposed to protect against this), being vaccinated, not being vaccinated. drinking cow milk that´s not diluted with water and probably a whole bunch of other things like sleeping too much and being too well fed. Spanish is her first language but like my students she´ll be learning English soon. Like I said, I don´t know that much about dogs, I always considered myself a cat person and never had a dog but I´m pretty sure that Fresa is the most awesome puppy on the entire planet. I totally get the dog thing now. And the parent thing too because whenever I have to leave her home or with someone else there is a part of my mind that is thinking about her, wondering and worrying. 
But how wonderful it is to just instantly love something even though you have to clean up their poop. And like most new moms I have about a million pictures of her. Here she is at her cutest.
and we saw how the women weave the colorful skirts that they traditionally wear (it takes up to 2 weeks to make each one)! 
We also visited the local shaman and he performed a quick cleansing for each of us, which for me was much needed. 
They also served us lunch which included BBQ-ed tree grubs, a local delicacy full of protein. In my opinion, they´re actually pretty tasty, as long as you don´t think about what it is you´re actually eating. Clay and Ryan each ate one raw (aka alive) and from their reactions I´m guessing they´re a lot better cooked. 
I tried my hand at making this mashed plantain thing, which was quite good, no thanks to me; I had no idea what I was doing. 
Afterwards, they played some traditional music and we danced around a bit even though we were all sweating profusly from the heat. 
This visit seemed like just the thing to get me out of my post-vacation funk and I´m really looking forward to the big celebration in Ryan´s site for the Tsachila New Year in April. Incidentally, Clay has just gotten his community project up online and is seeking donations for a reforestation project. I know that with the economic crisis money is pretty tight but if you want to check it out and possibly make a donation here´s the link:
My first topic was the 3 food groups, as they are know in Latin America. (Formadores, foods that form us, protectores, foods that protect us and energeticos, foods that give us energy.) So, after explaining what each group consisted of I handed out all these pictures of different foods and they had to walk up to my good friend Sergio and place them in the correct category, and the prize for placing it correctly of course was an oatmeal raisin cookie. They really seemed to enjoy it and I was very relieved. I put up the recipe for the cookies and told them I would leave it up until next week since most of them didn’t have a pen and paper with them. The following week I decided to make a quinoa salad since I was talking about protein and it is a complete protein that is delicious (I think if you have heard the song I wrote about quinoa then you know how much I love it). I tried my best to convince them that they could eat at least one meal a day with quinoa instead of rice (which is eaten in heapfuls at every meal) but you know, that’s the custom so it’s hard to break out of that. The next week they learned about vitamins and minerals, played another game and ate some more cookies, peanut butter ones this time (full of protein)! I just love the irony of talking about nutrition and handing out cookies at the same time. But they’ve never eaten these types of things before and they really like that I give them the recipes so they can make them. Everyone wants to know what else I can make. They invite me over to their houses to make soy milk and pumpkin pie, so it’s been a great way of getting to know people and integrate into my community. This week pizza!
I went swimming near a small waterfall on the way to Mindo at the site of another volunteer and I just thought “Will I ever get tired of doing things like this? Will there ever be a point where I say, okay, I’ve seen enough amazingly beautiful things, I don’t need to see anymore.” And I think the answer is a definitive no, it would be impossible for me to stop wanting to experience things like diving into the freezing cold water next to a waterfall. In Mindo we went hiking to a 70 meter waterfall, and Kasia and I struck our best senior yearbook poses. 
It was a great weekend that made me feel extremely lucky, for once, that I am in Ecuador. Given the circumstances (of having to leave Bolivia) I was feeling very apprehensive about my decision to start again somewhere new. It would have been so easy just to stay in the US, it was so hard to leave everyone again, and for what, I think as I stare at myself in the mirror. But in PC things get exponentially better the longer you are in the same place. You have to work on it, but you just come to appreciate the little things more. I feel so fortunate to be in Ecuador, and to be in a site where I actually have Ecuadorian friends (ranging in age from 6 to 86) and while the volunteer community here is definitely different than what I had in Bolivia, it is still a source of support and comfort knowing that people are just a phone call or a text away.
and a huge pot luck dinner at a vols house, which incidentally looks like a spaceship and has a disco in the building, with this bizarre robot speaker system. Here we are doing a “Bolivian” (i.e. no smiling) picture with the robot. 
All the food was delicious and before leaving at the end of the night people scavenged for whatever was leftover until basically everything was gone. Here is the before and after:
So, I pretty much felt like I was going to die for the first hour up. I choose to believe that I am not as out of shape as I appeared and that it was the altitude and heavy Thanksgiving dinner that was affecting me. After the hardest part was over I felt a lot better and then it was just about enjoying the gorgeous views and not falling off the extremely narrow trail. 
I felt a great sense of accomplishment when we finished and celebrated by eating Mexican food in town, still in our sweaty hiking attire. On Sunday it was back to Loja, where most everything was closed of course, and I got on another 12 hour overnight bus which made no stops for bathroom breaks and was way more crowded than the bus coming down. I got into Santo Domingo early in the morning and then headed back to site. It felt good to be “home” and have my Ecua friends ask me about my trip and tell me they missed me.
Marlon, Daniel, Juan Daniel and Paula are all cross dressing, which seems to be pretty common here and the boys seem especially enthusiastic about wearing skirts and having balloon breasts. The highlight of the evening is definitely when this 15 year old kid from my town, who was going around feeling up people’s balloons, pinches my boob thinking that it is fake and then gets so embarrassed that he can’t even look at me for the rest of the night. I don’t think either of us are going to hear the end of that for a while, everyone was hysterical. 
We had practiced the dance to these 4 specific songs that were all cut together and burned to a CD by Karina, but when we get there they can’t find the CD, of course, so we end up performing to different music, except for that abuelo song at the end, which incidentally I’ve heard over 100 times since my neighbor has the same 10 songs on loop everyday. 
The dance goes over well, people laugh and we look like idiots, a good time is had by all. We go back to the truck to change and then watch the celebratory fireworks which culminate in the burning of a tower that then reveals a picture of Jesús de Gran Poder, the name of the church and congregation that the church in my town is part of. I have to say I was pretty impressed by the fireworks, and the Jesus thing was a really nice touch. 
Then we get back into the truck and head home flying down the windy highway and then slowly down the dirt road of my town, recounting things that just happened. Didn’t Marlon look good as la secretaria? Remember when Paul accidentally felt up Michelle? That was so funny!
