I Trekked To Machu Pichu And All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt

...And those memories...And those photos...Oh, and that inability to walk -- but that will go away ;-)

I believe we left off the night before we headed out to the Inca Trail to begin our trek. I´ll pick up from there. Well, what with the packing and the stuffing of non-essentials into bags to be stored at our hostel I didn´t get to sleep until 11ish which was a little late considering that I´d gotten about 6 hours of sleep in the past 48 hours and we´d be waking up at 5ish. Still, I woke up, showered (gotta be clean to get dirty), ate a lovely breakfast with the traditional coca tea and out we headed.

Now for a quick (well, I can´t promise anything) comment on coca. Coca is what most Americans recognize only as the plant from which cocaine is derived. This is true. Cocaine is derived from coca. However, as a popular Latin American slogan says "Coca no es la Cocaina" or, rather, coca is not cocaine any more than poppy seeds are opium or heroin. Coca leaves have medicinal properties and have been used by locals for hundreds and hundreds of years for those properties and not as a narcotic. They help with altitude sickness, give you energy, make your mouth a little numb if you chew the actual leaves and make delicious tea. And candy. On this trip through Peru, I´ve had many litres of coca tea, some coca candy and have even chewed the leaves along with the traditional ash (uck) to enhance the plant´s properties and I can safely say I have not done drugs. Coca, all in all, is pretty awesome and I can see it being really popular in the states as a kind of tea or energy supplement...were it not illegal. There´s the crux. The U.S. crop dusts coca plantations in Colombia so that drug cartels don´t refine it into cocaine, but the people farming the coca are poor peasants, not drug dealers, and they´re growing a crop that´s been grown for centuries. The drug cartels pay the highest price and so the farmers sell them their coca. Who can blame them? Here in Peru, coca is perfectly legal. The Incas even farmed it. But if you´re caught with even the tiniest bit of cocaine, it´s twenty-five years in prison for you. Fine. We can grow poppies in the U.S. and we can´t make them into heroin. Why doesn´t that work with coca? A lot of innocuous or even useful substances can be made into something harmful -- we aren´t allowed to bring more than 3 ounces of liquid on airplanes because you can find out how to make almost anything into a bomb on the interent-- but we don´t demonize the innocuous stuff. No one is outlawing soap. But they are outlawing coca. The idea of a war on drugs in general is a little stupid. We shouldn´t be fighting the drugs. They´re bad, but the problem is the violence that goes with them and the best way to get at the problem is to fix the broken economies in which being a drug mule is a good career option. Crop dusting some coca plants isn´t hurting anyone but the poor farmers who chose to plant coca over potatoes because it sells for a higher price at market. That´s the general idea of what I think, at least. Í´ve been thinking about it a little over the past few days. I was surprised, when I first was served coca tea because I´d always thought that coca was bad, bad and only bad. Live and learn.

Anyway...now back to our feature presentation:

We took a 1.5 hour bust ride from Cusco (which I´d always thought was spelled with a z...) to Ollantaytambo for a quick shopping stop. I bought two bags of coca candies, a bag of coca leaves, some M&M´s and a walking stick at the guide´s recommendation (all of that...not just the walking stick) and was glad to have all of it along the way (although actually I still have 98% of the coca products...we had tea in the morning and with every meal so I was coca-ed out). We hopped back on the bus to our point of departure, Piskacucho -- 2600 meters (mind you, not feet...that´s 8,530 feet above sea level). Day one was the "easy day." We walked 11km to Wayllabamba("Why-ya-bamba") -- 3,000 meters or 9,842 feet. Sadly, for me it was not easy. I was very, very tired and a little behind. I conked out the second we got to camp, woke up for 5:30 "chocolate time" (hot cocoa, tea or coffee and some crackers or popcorn) and then slept right through dinner. The next day, day two, was the day of death. There were no Inca sites to visit, just miles and miles of up, up, up. At about 7:30am we set out from Wayllabamba (3,000 meters, remember) and walked up to Warmi Wañusca, or "Dead Woman´s Pass," named, supposedly, because it resembles a dead or reclining woman, but really, I´m not so sure. It didn´t look that much like a woman to me...Dead Woman´s Pass is 4215 meters or 13,828 feet above sea level and is only about 6km from Wayllabamba. For those of you who don´t like math, that´s a climb of about 4,000 feet (at altitude) over 3ish miles. Then there ware some steep stairs down to our camp for the night at Pacaymayo (a mere 3,600 meters or 11,811 feet). I was BEAT. I arrived at camp at 4:30 and had missed the late lunch that the other, faster, people had eaten. That´s NINE hours of hiking with no food. Sandy was amazing and hung out with me the whole laborious time...and she was starving. A porter did meet us on the trail with about 30 minutes to go til camp with ham and cheese sandwhiches which had been the snack for the day but which we had both passed up since we either don´t like or don´t eat ham. I didn´t think I was that hungry, but since he brought them I figured I should eat it. Let me just say, that may have been the best sandwhich I have ever or will ever eat in my entire life. I´m sorry Subway, I just don´t think you can beat it. When we finally got to camp on day 2 I was pretty tired, but very, very happy to be done with the dreaded second section. I survived...and I had been dubious as to my odds.

A word now about the porters. They are beasts. (I mean that as a complement for those of you who aren´t up on today´s teen slang...which I don´t really use anyway, actually, but there you are). They are all from poor families, as far as I can tell, and get paid 40 soles a day, which works out to about 13 dollars. Their food is included while they´re portering, but still, not a high-paying career choice. I think, though, that it´s pretty decent as far as their other options are concerned. Still, it is no easy feat. Our guide Ruben and our assistant guide Edwin (who are absolutely amazing by the way and if you ever hike the Inca trail you should go with the company we went with -- Qénte -- because it´s locally owned, less expensive, awesome, and has Ruben and Edwin whom you should ask for), said that a porter will trek 5 to 6 times A MONTH. That´s pretty much every day! And, if you haven´t been following closely, it´s not an easy trek. Particularly if it´s your job to carry 20 or 30 kilos (we aren´t clear on the current law, but either way it´s much better than it was even ten years ago) and to run up and down the hills so that you beat your trek group to lunch or camp sites with time to set up tents. While hiking, it´s etiquette to get out of a porter´s way (which is often a welcom 2 or 3 second break) and on the last night of the trek we gave tips. There were, however, 27 porters for our group (because they have to carry our group gear, food, and their things) so it didn´t work out to any spectacular amount. A bunch of us chipped in with whatever soles we had left with us. On a side porter-related note, the cook and assistant cooks were awesome. Everything tastes better hiking, sure, but this was pretty gourmet. We had a big tent with a long table in it and we´d pass around bowls of soup and then plastic casserole dishes from which we served ourselves. I was expecting camp stoves. On the last night, they even made us a cake! At altitude! It tasted sort of like a giant pancake, but it´s the thought that counts and it said "Well Done Chicos" so I like the thought quite a bit :-)

Day three was more tough uphill at the beginning to get over a second pass called Rankurakay (3,900 meters or 12,795 feet), but only for an hour or hour and a half. Then it was down, flat or some rolling hills (still not easy once you´re that tired, but so, SO much better than infinite up). And there were some ruins to entertain us along the way -- that is to say nothing of the scenery which, after descending from Dead Woman´s Pass, began to change from Andean brush to Amazonian greenery. Both, however, were beautiful (although right at the bottom at the beginning of day one it looked eerily like driving out of L.A. north on the 5...). I have a TON of photos, believe me, but I´m not sure when I´ll get them posted. I´m still in Aguas Calientes at the bottom of Machu Picchu waiting for the train...we won´t be back at the hostel until late and then we´re heading out early for our 3 day plane fest to China. I´m excited to have some chill time to read and sleep, but a little sad that all my gross comfy clothes from Machu Picchu will remain gross and unwearable until we arrive at our destination on the other side of the world. Anyway, that´s why the photos may not be forthcoming.

Today was day four. We woke up at 3:50am (after a bad night´s sleep for me, sadly...after feeling GOOD after the hike on day three -- good enough not to nap before bedtime and to make all meals -- my frustrating and constant runny nose from day two morphed into a full on cold with the sneezing and the dry coughs, or what I like to call "Machu Picch-flu"...I´d rationed my role of toilet paper carefully along the trek, blowing many snot rockets (don´t ask, don´t tell) along the trail instead of using the tp to blow my nose, but the night of day three my tent mate also had runny nose issues and I gave her the remainder of my roll in the hopes that she´d quiet down her snore/moaning...she used up the roll but didn´t really quiet down...ah well)...Anyway, we woke up mega early, had tea for breakfast and headed of to Intipata to watch the sun rise which was awesome. Then there were another 6km of flat, down and rolling hills to get to Intipunku -- the Sun Gate -- and then from there down to Machu Picchu. I suppose it wasn´t too terribly difficult objectively speaking, but I was beat and found it difficult indeed. Still, I made it to Machu Picchu -- I´m not sure exactly what time but I know I was there by 8am. I got my passport and my journal stamped with the Machu Picchu emblem at the checkpoint and headed in...again...because we´d had to head out first to get to the checkpoint where they make you leave your pack and walking stick. We toured around with our guides for another 2 and a half hours, learning some interesting facts and seeing the sights (and moaning every time we got up from a seated position or tried to go down stairs), then it was free time for an hour or so. Four of us (the crazies: Liz, John, Zack and Katie R.) opted to climb on to Waynapicchu ("Little Mountain" as opposed to Machu Picchu which means "Big Mountain"), the rest of us chilled out or wrote in journals and then headed down on the bus into Aguas Calientes for lunch.

Ah, lunch. It was a buffet. We were NOT the people that buffet wanted walking in the door. We were RAVENOUS and it was delicious. Much food was eaten and there was much rejoicing. And the bathrooms were BEAUTIFUL. There was soap and toilets and toilet paper and flowers in a bowl of water and potpourri. After lunch, I tried to wipe up a bit and changed into comfy clothes. When it was time to head out and say goodbye to Edwin and Ruben I nearly cried. Honestly. They were just so nice to me. And Edwin particularly was such an interesting guy. He´d be talking to Robin near me for about a hour on day three and wow...he came from a poor family, taught himself English (and still is), picked a career he thought would be lucrative enough but chose not to go into the drug trade and had a lot to say about the importance of education and the importance of self-advancement. And he was so sweet, too. I was too tired to be embarrassed about my lack of hiking speed, but even if I weren´t I might have avoided the sentiment, they were so encouraging. I have both of their emails and I´ll be sending them photos. The thought makes me happy. :-D

Anyway, I really wanted to buy a shirt that said "I Survived The Inca Trail." Normally, I´m not much for those touristy shirts, but this one I felt I deserved. But I hadn´t brought much money and had only 2 soles left (and it´s about 3 soles to the dollar). Then, magic happened. I found dollar bills in my pocket that I didn´t know I had!!! And Aguas Calientes is SUPER touristy so I thought they might take them...AND...THEY DID!!! I could have even gotten change in dollars but I got soles to pay for the internet cafe which you should all appreciate. So I am now the proud owner of an odd green colored shirt with a map of the Inca Trail (including altitudes if you look closely), a coca leaf that says "La Hoja Coca No Es Una Droga" and the happy phrase "I Survided The Inca Trail." Hooray!

Anyway, you´re pretty much current with me now. I love getting all your emails and wish you all well on the various trips everyone seems to be going on. And if you´re not going for a trip, I wish you well on your staycation or just work as the case may be.

I´m off to Cusco and from there to Lima to San Salvador to L.A. to Beijing to Kunming.
Keep keeping me posted!

Love, your still alive,
Becca

Welcome To The Jungle

Hello there!

Sorry for such a terse last post…this next one doesn’t promise to be too much longer. We’ve been incredibly busy since leaving Bua last Wednesday morning (before which I was incredibly busy being hit on by another drunk Ecuadorian, throwing up for the first time since 3^rd grade, coaching Isabel to kill a scorpion in our living room (because I was sick and also too afraid to look at it…scorpions are in a scary bug league of their own as far as I’m concerned), and getting cleansed by our host grandfather because our family thought that both Isabel and I were suffering from “mal de ojo” (evil looks) and not, as we suspected, “mal de leche” (evil milk). ) Whew! That was a long and winding parenthetical.

So, what have we been so very busy with? Media projects! I’m in the text group this month, so we had to write summaries for the website about our time in Costa Rica and Ecuador as well as an article about the history of water resources in Bua. As time consuming as that was and as many late nights as we had, the other three groups had it harder. The Google Earth project group ended up not being able to use Google Earth because, shockingly, the people at Google haven’t yet found it imperative to take satellite pictures of Bua. They also tried to use the GPS map of Bua that some folks at Yanapuma are working on, but they ended up with PowerPoint. Don’t let that deter you though. I’ve seen it and it’s a far cooler presentation than PowerPoint deserves to drag down with its dull name. The podcast group was decimated by illness (Alexis, the only group member with Garage Band experience was out with a parasite and Dave was out with…not a parasite…but something) but managed to overcome that obstacle and their technological difficulties to put together a presentation that I would really love to listen to. I’m sure it’s awesome. I heard a rough version and it sounded pretty interesting. It was the video group, however, that had it the hardest of all. They had a few nights of not going to sleep at all and only finished last night (this morning?) at 2am in the Lima airport. I was up, too, and saw the finished product. I was very impressed and you will be too, but please, for their sakes, multiply your level of wow by 100. It was that hard to put it all together and they deserve the credit.

So now you’re thinking, “Huh. Those might be interesting. I’d like to learn about water in Bua and see awesome photos from TBB’s time there. I wish Becca had told me how to do that…” (If you are not thinking that, you should be). Well, lucky you, here’s a quick How To: Go to www.thinkingbeyondborders.org. Click on “Student Voices.” Click on Costa Rica for our summary of our time there, or Ecuador for our summary-ette and the media projects. Simple, no? Except…we’ve had some uploading issues so you’ll have to wait until at least October 25^th…because tomorrow WE’RE GOING TO MACHU PICCHU!!! (And we can’t upload until we get back).

Our last few days in Quito weren’t all work and no play, though. Don’t get the wrong idea. I hit up the marketplace and got some very sweet knit hats to keep me warm on our hike and next year at college. We took a fieldtrip to Quito’s largest water treatment plant which was up on a hill so the view was beautiful. Saturday most of the group went on a hike, but I was feeling a little under the weather so I stuck around Quito – took a walk and ran some errands. I even found an English language bookstore (called the Confederate Bookstore…run by a guy from Virginia who bought it six years ago from his friend who was likely also from Virginia) and got The Beautiful and the Damned, a two-in-one by Virginia Woolf with Jacob’s Room and The Waves and some assorted long poems by Auden. Yay!

We left for the airport at 3pm Sunday for our 6pm flight. We arrived in Lima at about 8pm, collected our bags, went through customs and then camped out against a wall until we could check in for our 5am flight to Cusco around 4am. A few people slept. I didn’t really. I did, however, fill out my ballot, catch up on journaling and watch Silence of the Lambs which I rather liked (and Anthony Heald, an actor from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, is in it and I recognized him right away and it felt like I knew someone in the movie).

When we finally arrived in Cusco we had a briefing with our the agency that will guide us up Machu Picchu (I’m terrified, by the way…altitude is TOUGH) and then were left to our own devices. Despite an overwhelming desire to sleep, we all went out and enjoyed the city. I did some major shopping, but since it’s 3.1 soles to the dollar I didn’t do major damage. I got a fabulous llama charm necklace (for some reason I’m attracted to anything llama…it’s my new favorite animal by far), a long pair of wool socks, wool glittens (the glove/mitten combo) and a tealish skirt like the ones the indigenous Peruvians wear around and also kind of like people wore in the ‘50’s.

However, it is late and I am tired and I’m not quite done packing so I’m going to sign off. If you don’t hear from me ‘til around Halloween, I’m sorry, but immediately after Machu Picchu we get on airplanes for three days and head to China. We arrive late on the 27^th I believe…

Anyway, remember to check out the media projects! (Oh and also, the video of Correa addressing us at his speech in Santo Domingo is going out with the TBB newsletter and will be on YouTube under TBB).

Much love,

Becca

I Know This Doesn't Really Count As An Update...

But I'm super busy and actually slightly stressed out so it must suffice for now.

Left Bua. Great memories. Good stories to tell. Arrived in Quito. Working on media project (as is everyone else). Will try to link to projects, but if I don't they'll be at thinkingbeyondborders.com under the student voices section. Did upload more photos in all three albums, Costa Rica, Quito 1 and Bua/Sua/Bua. Go check them out, please. 

Love to all.

A Miscellaneous Update From El Centro

It's that time again...hello! 

I'm in Santo Domingo, spending the day trying to upload photos (I'm really trying, I promise, but it may or may not happen...), blog and print some photos for my host family. I'll probably be back tomorrow doing mostly the same things.

So what is Santo Domingo like, you might ask. And where am I exactly? Well, my favorite spot is this internet cafe on the second floor of a building a block and a half away from the one and only shopping center which we TBBers use as our base of operations in the city. There are three clusters of computers, four around a pillar with high stools to sit on while using them. They play some Spanish language music and some English, a lot of Bob Marley. We're 99% sure that the guy who works here, who is very friendly, is a pot dealer by night. The strong smell of incense last time we were here, the guitar hanging from the ceiling with the peace sign painted on it and the spherical light that projects spinning rainbow colors when turned on hanging from the ceiling in one corner all reinforce our hypothesis. But by day it's not sketchy, I swear. Just comfortable and occasionally faster than the speed of a snail. Right now, however, I'm on one of our laptops using wireless which is free, a little faster, and should allow me to upload the pictures I've saved on this computer...or some of them. I've been here for 45 minutes and it's uploaded 10 of 256 MB...

Actual Santo Domingo, however, outside of this internet cafe, is probably one of the ugliest cities I've ever seen. It's basically cropped up entirely in the last 15 years and now has about 600,000 people in the city proper. It's all dreary cement and worn signs except for near the outskirts where bright green weeds crop up between buildings and through cracks. There are, apparently, no traffic laws; lane lines are mere suggestions. They seem to be pretty nice about pedestrians, though. I haven't seen anyone get hit yet, at least. A strange phenomenon I've noticed in Ecuador is the occasional comandeering of an American brand logo for something completely different. There was a car shop with a big sign of the logo from the computer animated movie "Cars" and down the street from me now is a yogurt/ice cream store with the old rainbow Mac symbol on its storefront. Also, a ton of smaller, hole in the wall type restaurants and shops have signs out front with a CocaCola logo on the left or on both ends and then their name in the remaining white space. It's almost as if a CocaCola representative walked around Ecuador offering to make free signs for anyone who wanted one and printed them up in the back of a truck or something. Very odd. 

Eight TBBers took the opportunity to go to Guayaquil this weekend -- our first opportunity for independent student travel. I was going to go, but then I thought better of it. I had really wanted to go to Otavalo, but nixed the idea because it's proably a six hour bus ride. Then I found out the Guayaquil was also a six hour bus ride. They left yesterday for Santo Domingo on the 3:30 bus, probably arrived about 4:15 and then intended to take the next bus out to Guayaquil. They have to be back Sunday, so they'd only really have one day there. It is Guayaquil's Independence Day Weekend (most big cities here have their own independence holiday) so that should be fun. I, however, surrendered to my long to do list and my desire to stave off total exhaustion and decided to chill in Bua. I'm very glad I did. In addition to all the internet stuff and the photos, I desperately need a new journal. I have a grand total of 7 pages left in mine...And I really need to read through the California voter information guide my mom thoughtfully sent my way because guess what? I GOT MY ABSENTEE BALLOT YESTERDAY!!! I GET TO VOTE!!! SWEET!!!

Incidentally, props to Connecticut for being the third state to legalize gay marriage and for actually writing a strong opinion in favor of it. 

So, how go our actual projects in Bua? 

Well, the bathrooms at the school are seeing some true progress. They've finished the lower half, where the tanks will sit about 3 meters down (the drop from the level of the school to the level of the field...we've built the bathrooms into a hillside remember), laid the floor and are now building up the walls. The doors are built, say "No Olvides Lavar Los Manos" on them  and are being painted with preservative and varnish. We also installed a new sink at the school, the water from which will drain to mix with the urine from the bathrooms and go out to water the trees that will be planted along the perimeter of the field. Giovanni, an engineer working with the agriculture sector of Yanapuma, is creating a compost garden. Isabel and I spent about an hour carrying cement blocks up steep dirt stairs with him (one at a time for each of us, two at time for him), then we helped him shovel a ton of gravel and mix a ton of cement. Hard, hard work. The bathrooms won't be finished by the time we leave, because we're leaving on Wednesday, but they'll be nearly done and Andy, one of the founders of Yanapuma, said he'd send along photos of the finished product. 

Project number 2, the single bano at Freddy's (it's y, not ie as I'd thought...sorry Freddy) is coming along. I've worked on it two days this week, mainly mixing cement and then trying to get it to stick to the cylindrical wire frame we've built. It does not want to stick. The second layer, which we've started, needs to be smooth to look nice, but even so is much easier. It's treacherous work though. The wire is sharp and I don't think anyone has avoided stabbing themselves at least once (I had until yesterday, but alas, I jabbed my finger with the bottom of some wire mesh...thank goodness for tetanus shots). Plus, concrete dries out your hands like nothing else. My hands actually hold up alright and I bought some lotion last Wednesday, but some people get cuts from the sand in the cement and others have lost entire layers of skin. Still, it's actually pretty fun work and not too exhausting. AND we might finish it! We're probably going to work extra long Monday and Tuesday, but we really might be able to do it.

Project number 3, the well at Shino Pi, is something I've not yet seen. There was a huge rock in their way that they spent 2 days breaking, but they got through. The TBBers helping have been allowed to go down the 12 meter hole and they've come up absolutely covered in dirt. At one point, ants started attacking Zack and there was nothing anyone could really do since he was at the bottom of a soon to be well. I haven't seen the well because I haven't voluteered to work on it. Plenty of people want to, but being lowered on a rope down into a dark and bug infested hole does not sound fun to me. We won't finish the well by Wednesday, but the Tsachila certainly can. They had started it anyway, I sort of feel like we just helped them along a little and arranged for the well digging tools to get to them. 

By the way, it's now been an hour and a half and only 16 photos uploaded (it stopped about 20 minutes ago...I don't know why) so I went through and just chose some and started again. I'm trying to get you all some pictures, I am! I guess, though, that I won't be using the internet as a backup for them...Good thing I brought that USB drive!

So, exciting news for Isabel and I on the home front. On Thursday night (after that really particularly exhausting day of work and a sleepless night the night before...literally we woke up at 12:45 and just stayed up...our light, coincidentally, was still on -- until it went off at 4am...we wonder who was up then and noticed it was still on...) Anyway, on Thursday night, our family found Tilapia! This may not sound particularly exciting -- I do mean the fish and not a person named Tilapia -- but trust me, it is. They've been telling us about this traditional dish where they wrap the fish in leaves for weeks and apparently the fish must be Tilapia and Tilapia has not been easy to find. But they found it! So, instead of going to watch the Gringos vs. Tsachila soccer game with everyone else (an event I must say I'm sad I missed, but there was nothing we could do about the bad timing), we got to hang out with the whole family and have the grandmother teach us how to wrap whole fish in giant leaves. They also wrapped some of the Tsachila skirt fabric around me and made Isabel use her belt to tie one of Kati's skirts on like an apron...I think mainly because they thought it was hilarious. The grandfather also grilled some grub on a wire skewer, but only for himself. Honestly, I was a little disappointed. I was ready to try grilled grub. About a week ago there was one night when several different families served it to their honorary children and a few people said it was actually pretty good -- tasted like bacon. They served it to Robin and Sandy at Shino Pi that night and Robin didn't eat any. Wimp. Then again, I didn't actually have to eat any either. 

After we set the fish on the grill, it took an hour to cook. We felt a little in the way so we went back to our little casita and hung out until Andy came to get us for an early 6:45 dinner. Normally they put us at a little table facing the wall in the living room and either Germania or Wilson (our mother and father) will eat with use. Recently it's been Wilson all the time. Thursday night, however, they let us into the kitchen to eat with the whole family on the packed dirt floor with no spoon! (A spoon is the utensil of choice in Bua...although we did get a fork yesterday...I didn't know they HAD forks...) We were thrilled! We were like a real part of the family for, oh, 20 minutes. So I have officially picked apart a whole Tilapia with my bare hands and eaten it. I was alright at the whole getting-the-meat-but-not-choking-on-bones thing. Isabel was a mess. Wilson was a pro. He basically left a clean spine, a pile of other bones, the tail, two fins and the head bone. He didn't even leave the eyes! Clearly we have some work to do on our whole-fish-eating skills.

I have a video of some of the fish grilling as well as the grandmother peeling plantains out back with a spoon. She was just ripping through them; it was very, very impressive. I don't know if any of those videos will ever get to any of you though, since the whole photo uploading thing seems to be slow going.

I have, however, uploaded four photos as a separate post below this one for your enjoyment. (Please accept this and don't ask why they aren't part of this one). Hooray! They are, in order: Isabel and I in our Tsachila skirts wrapping fish with our Grandmother, our three host siblings Andy, Magdalena (aka Tatiana aka Lili), and Leo (aka Benicio), the eco toilet we're building at Freddy's circa last Tuesday and a bunch of TBBers sitting on the wall near the beach in Sua...the one standing on the left is not a TBBer but a very awesome Rasta coffeeshop owner -- he makes the only real coffee in Sua and, as far as I can tell, all of Ecuador. Everywhere else it's instant. 

That's all for now...I'll work on the photos for a while and if I get some to an album on Picasa I'll be sure to link to it.

~ Becca

p.s. I saw an ad on the side of the New York Times website while I was reading up on the news for a production of the Seagull with Peter Sarsgaard. Will someone in New York *cough* Annie *cough* please enjoy that for me? Because I would LOVE to see it! I miss theatre! (I actually miss fiction of any kind and am going to make finding an English language bookstore number two on my list of things to do in Quito right after finding a laundromat and putting all my clothes through it twice).

***EDIT*** I'VE GOT SOME PHOTOS UP!!!

Here: http://picasaweb.google.com/becca.title/BuaSuaBua#

And Here: http://picasaweb.google.com/becca.title/Quito1#

The first album is of Bua, Sua and more Bua and the second is of some of our time in Quito before we came out here. (Backwards, sorry). Hooray!!!

A Few Photos!

This Is Just To Say

I have added two new gadgets on the right sidebar!

One is called "Want to Subscribe?" and allows you to subscribe to posts on this blog so you don´t have to check to see if it´s been updated-- you´ll just know.

The other is called "Want More TBB Blogs?" and will link to the blogs of other TBB students. Right now it only links to one, but I´ll work on that. Promise. I don´t have time to read them, but hey, I get to hang out with these people all the time. They´re pretty awesome and we all have different experiences to share so you might want to check their blogs out. I know that right now, for example, my friend Alexandra, whose blog is the only one I currently link to, is writing about her experience getting cleansed by a shaman last night. I don´t live anywhere near her or the shaman so I wasn´t there, but I´ve heard about it and it´s probably an interesting and entertaining read.

Beyond that, I don´t have too many exciting stories to share from the past few days.

Sua was a tourist beach town in its off season and probably isn´t a place I´d head back to even when it was warm and sunny, but for a weekend away as a group with showers (icy, but oh so good), toilets, pillows (we don´t have those in Bua either) and some time to bond and relax it was lovely. And they had really good batidos de coco (coconut) and mango (a batido is a fruit juice mixed with milk kind of like a smoothie except so much better).

Sunday night we returned to Bua. The bus ride was three hours -- two hours shorter than the ride there. We didn´t make stops, but that doesn´t account for the whole two hours. I think we time warped. Sunday night for dinner we had soup with pieces of something unidentifiable floating in it. First I thought it was really gristly chicken, but our host mother insisted that it wasn´t meat. What was it? Well, it was something they use to put with peanuts and make another dish. Obviously. Duh, sorry. So I tried a bite...and tried TO bite, but I couldn´t. It was like solid rubber. It´s sort of how I imagine the inside of an intestine, with all the villi and what not. I swallowed as much of it as I could, but I must confess I left some in the bowl.

After dinner, I walked over to visit our closest TBB neighbors, Liz and Noah. We had nice visit and I walked home about 40 minutes later, expecting Isabel to be in bed (since she hadn´t come with me because she was tired). Nope. She was standing in our doorway talking to six moderately drunk Bua natives. I permiso-ed my way through them and stood next to here in the doorway where she quickly explained that they had come to talk to her when she watched me walk over to Liz and Noah´s (it was dark, so just to be safe) and hadn´t left since. They thought she was my translator, but once they realized I could speak Spanish they were pretty excited. Their leader, who introduced himself as Lider (which translates to leader), said he was proud to talk to me. I was the first foreigner he´d met. I guess Isabel didn´t count. She said he´d told her he thought I was beautiful. She also previously told me that when she lived in Guatemala they thought all blonde people were immediately more attractive and that all people who had not brown eyes and not black hair were considered blonde. So hey, I´m blonde! Anyway, I told him politely that our light would be turned out in 5 minutes (true) and that we had to get in our pajamas because we had to get up early to work. He asked if he could give me a kiss on the cheek goodbye. Sure. My second kiss on the cheek this weekend (a guy trying to convince me to go whale watching in Sua also demanded a kiss goodbye...and I turned my head...note that there are no whales in Sua this time of year).

Anyway, I´ve got to go...Sorry about the abrupt ending...But Liz just showed up so I´ll also add a link to her blog!

Bye for now,
Becca

It´s been a month! (Week 3 in Bua)

Hello again out there!

I´m in Santo Domingo again, but we are heading to the coast later today...to Sua, in fact. Much like Bua, but with an S :-P

This past week has been awesome, as usual. I´d been feeling a little sick and tired, but I started feeling much much better which is fabulous.

On Monday I went with Robin and five other TBBers to another Tsachila community about two hours by open bed truck from Bua called Poste (POST-a) to help dig a well there. The idea is that after we finish the well there we can use the equipment to build one at Shino Pi (the cultural center in Bua). Ultimately, it looks like the well-digging in Poste has been postponed until the Missionaries who began it can come back and finish it because at 17 meters deep it´s getting very difficult to dig and they estimate we have another 13 meters to go! Still, on Monday, when I went, we were still dig, dig, digging and so I will do my best to describe the process. (The same process we´ll be working on it in Bua starting Monday.) I have some photos that may be more useful than my attempt at an explanation and I drew a diagram in my journal, but for now this is the best I can do:

Basically, there is about 50 feet of bamboo scaffolding. On one side, about three quarters of the way up is a bamboo platform on which someone stands or sits to guide the tools from above. The four giant vertical pieces of bamboo that primarily make up the scaffolding each sit in a meter deep hole to keep them stable; crossbars of bamboo connect the four main poles and are attached with thin metal wire. The cross bars function mainly as a way to climb up to the bamboo platform. At the top of the scaffolding is a pulley, through which runs a rope. The rope is attached at one end to a long metal pole and at the other hangs loose. At the bottom of the pole is a digging apparatus shaped like two cupped hands attached at the palm near the wrist. It is maybe 8 inches long. To dig, you lower the pole down into the hole and twist is around so that the cuplike apparatus fills with dirt. However, by the time we got to the well, the hole was 15 meters deep, so after lowing the pole until its tip was just above ground level, we had to use monkey wrenches to screw on another equally long (about 50 feet each) metal pole and then lower the whole shebang until it hit bottom and was sticking about four feet out of the hole. It is this second pole that has the wooden handle at its tip that we actually grab on to in order to dig. Then we walk around the pole in circles for 3 to 5 minutes and hope we´ve filled the scooper with dirt. Then it´s time to lift it out. The extra pole has to be unscrewed each time, because leaving them connected would risk breaking the entire thing as together they are much much taller than the scaffolding. Each "scoop" of dirt earned us about 6 inches of depth -- we think -- if it was a good, full scoop. When we hit rock, we had to untie teh pole from the rope and tie on a chisel (a GIANT chisel as long as my arm fro mshoulder to fingertip and very heavy) and drop it down the hole to break through the rock. We kept hitting this rocky wet clay which was maybe worse than rock; the chisel could sort of loosen it, but not break through and it was so sticky that at one point it took three guys pulling for several minutes to unstick it from the depths of the hole. So basically, well digging is slow going! Luckily, the well we´ll be digging at Shino Pi has already been started by hand, meaning that 12 meters (!) down there is room enough for someone to stand so we can start the digging from there and our bamboo scaffolding can be shorter and more stable.

Additionally, while digging at Poste, we met another Peace Corps volunteer named Ryan who had been living there for about 6 months. I asked him for more information about how the PC works, really. I hope we keep meeting volunteers...I´m getting a lot of useful insight and information about how the Peace Corps works that I can store away and use to help me make my decision about possibly applying when the time comes.

I spent the next two days helping to build the six doors for the school´s soon to be new eco toilets -- measuring, sawing, hammering -- I´m going to be downright handy by the time this month is over!

After work two days this week, some of the neighboring TBBers have come over to visitm, chatting or playing cards for an hour or so in the evening. It´s so incredibly nice to have time to get to know people and just hang out...and it´s fun. We discussed our holiday traditions and I´m going to see if I can get some dreidels and gelt mailed to Vietnam. I´m also learning to play cribbage! (I´m sorry if that is horribly misspelled...) Several people on the program play at home with their grandparents...maybe it´s an East Coast thing? I´d hardly heard of it before last month.

Yesterday, half of us went on a "river walk" with a woman named Tatianna who is an environmental engineering student at the university in Quito and also works with Yanapuma to map out Bua with GPS. She talked a lot about the importance of stopping river pollution and reforesting along its banks...all in Spanish and I understood 99 percent of it! It was very interesting, but I don´t have time to rehash it all here. We did find a lot of trash in the river as well as empty bottles of pesticides and I feel substantially less clean knowing that that is where I´ve been bathing for the past few weeks. Incidentally, Tatianna was standing on the rock we use to wash our clothes when she said that that part of the river was very dirty and she´d hate to have to bathe in it. Oh, and we were told to watch out for the very venemous X snakes that I did not previously know inhabited the river. Sweet. :-P

Today I came into Santo Domingo with Robin, two Tsachila community leaders Alfonso and Freddie, Andy (the head of Yanapuma) and Guillermo (the director of the school we´re working at) to meet with the representative of the local prefect. She was interested in building similar projects all over if this pilot project proved successful and wanted specific project information and cost analyses to present to the prefecture this afternoon. She seemed to maybe underestimate how difficult it is to convince people of the importance of conservation and the utility of eco toilets, but did at least seem enthusiastic about the idea. I guess it´s easier to talk down expectations than to get her to like the project at all.

So, that brings me to now, in this internet cafe with Robin. We´ve got to head back to Bua so that we can catch a bus for our 4 hour ride to the coast where we´ll spend the weekend. (Showers!!! And an outlet to charge my iPod!!!)

I didn´t catch the debate last night, but I´ve read about it...I want to see at least one live...I hope we can!

´sall for now folks,
Becca

Oh, P.S. I read Brideshead Revisited last weekend...very good. I missed literature! It made me SO happy to read a novel!

Week 2 in Bua: The Cliff Notes Version

Hi again to everyone!

First I just want to say that even though I don´t really have time to reply individually to everyone´s emails and comments on this muy lento (sloooooooooow) internet connection in Santo Domingo, I love to hear from you all -- anything and everything from politics and the economy to family news or about what you´ve been up to -- so thanks so much for keeping in touch! (Those of you not being in touch take this as a subtle plea for updates on your lives).

I don´t know how long it feels like it´s been since I left the U.S., but I´d have to say at least two months...and we´ve just broken 3 weeks I think! But I´m having the time of my life.

I think I´m going to depart from the play by play style this blog has adopted in the interest of not spending every Saturday between now and March at internet cafes the world over, but don´t worry, the good stuff will still be here and I´ll have more stories to tell when I get home :-D

This past week has been a whirlwind. I´ll start with Monday.

Monday: Goodbye to Nina and a Hello from Correa
Monday was a rollercoaster of a day. We arrived at work at 8am ready to go. While we were sitting around waiting for our morning seminar (it fluctuates between morning and afternoon...) Lily and John mentioned that their homestay father was going into Santo Domingo to hear Rafael Correa speak. Correa is the current President of Ecuador and has spearheaded the writing of the new constitution. There is a referendum on the constitution tomorrow.

We all jumped at the news and started talking about how we should go in and see him speak. Robin went outside for a few minutes to make some arrangements and before we knew it we had plans to head into Santo Domingo at 10 to hear the noon speech.

But first, some news. As we sat in a circle, ready for our seminar, Robin said he had some sad news: Nina, the third guide with us other than Robin and Sandy (the married couple and two thirds of the TBB founding team), would be leaving. We recieved as good an explanation as Robin and Sandy could give. Basically, the program just wasn´t a good fit for her. A letter was sent to our parents that probably explained it as honestly and fully as it was explained to us. We were all very surprised, they had all three done a good job of keeping any strife away from the group, and we were all sad. A few tears were shed and there were hugs all around and then a cab came and spirited Nina away. Her bag had been in the room and no one had noticed. We´ll all miss Nina, but we´re all fine and Robin and Sandy have made sure that there will be a third staff member with us at all times until an official replacement hopefully meets us in China.

After that, we had an hour long discussion about Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (read it!) and then hopped in the back of our now semi-official group truck with it´s driver, Wilson (not my homestay father), and headed to Santo Domingo. We arrived at about 10:45 and they were still setting up. I ended up sitting next to a Tsachila man from another villiage who was probably about 25. We talked about the government (Correa´s OK...better than the line of corrupt presidents they´ve had in the last ten years), the constitution (he liked some of it and thought it would pass), birthdays (don´t ask), and the American government and the war in Iraq (this seems to come up a lot and mostly people really don´t get it, really want information). At one point I was trying to explain why some American government officials don´t like to talk to other countries and he finished my sentence for me as I searched for the right words in Spanish: they think they´re superior. Yeah...pretty much...good call... Hearteningly, though, all the Ecuadorians I´ve met so far may not be fans of our government, but they have nothing against us as Americans personally. In fact, as you´re about to hear, they rather like the fact that we´re here visiting and helping out.

At noon some provincial officials including the governor spoke and a lot of giant checks were given out (some micro loans, I believe). Finally, at 1:30, Correa got up to give his speech. While we´d been sitting around looking at our cartoon pamphlets explaining the new constitution, a woman working for the campaign came up and talked to us, asking who we were, where we were from, what we were doing etc and we ended up being introduced as one of the groups being welcomed which was pretty cool. We thougth that was the end of it, but in the middle of his speech, Correa mentioned that some foreigners were present and then switched into English to welcome us to Ecuador, ask if we were enjoying the country and tell us that they were in the middle of a revolution and needed change. Then he calmly continued on in Spanish. Oh, and I have it all on video thanks to my handy little cannon point and shoot :-D I think Sandy is going to try to put it up on the website at some point!

His speech was a little hard to understand because of the microphone feedback, but Isabel translated it for us afterwards. What I did understand though, was a part about change that sounded just like Obama. Voting for the constitution is voting for change, voting no is voting for more of the past. The "past" here is about at popular as it is in the U.S., maybe even less so. As far as delivery goes, Correa is very charismatic and all the women seem to find him muy guapo. (I asked my homestay father how old he is and he guessed 38. ) He speaks fluidly and forcefully without any notes or a teleprompter to guide him and even improvises well in English as we found out. (He is a U.S. educated economist from some college in the midwest I think...I don´t remember exactly where.)

Afterwards, we ended up networking with some of the local prefects adn the sister of a prefect ended up visiting our project site in Bua. It would be great if we could get them to work with Yanapuma (the organization we´re partnered with here) and support their efforts. All in all, it was a very sucessful trip.

Tuesday through Thursday:
We´ve been workign on our project and looking into projects we´ll be starting next week. Most of the trenches we dug the first week ended up being useless. A few of us helped redesign part of the project and it looks like it´s good to go for now. It´s been frustrating, but educational and in the end something good will come of it.

My homestay partner, Isabel, has been sick, so I´ve been taking care of her. She finally went into Quito to the hospital yesterday and actually just walked into the internet cafe as I typed that. She´s fine and she´ll get rest and get better. Don´t be alarmed. If anything, feel good knowing that we get good medical care here when we need it. Mostly we´ve all been a little sick on and off...just different food stuff mainly, and an inflamed foot due to an infected bug bite...or an alergic reaction to it...or something.

Friday: The Jungle
Instead of work on Friday, we took a trip to a forest preserve and walked around with a guide for 3 hours. It was pretty interesting and I got to take lots of fun pictures and play with the macro function on my camera so I was thorougly entertained.

Anyway, I´ve been trying to keep up with the news whenever I get internet. I read about the debate today, and Zack and Isabel got to watch it while they were in Quito last night so I have some first hand sources, too. I hear the economy sucks. Sorry about that. The dollar is rockin´here in Ecuador. A bottle of water is 25 cents. Lunch today, crab soup, chicken and juice, was two dollars.

Oh and a mini soap opera update...the girl who ran away was actually, as far as I can now gather, my host mother´s niece and is now living with us. She is fifteen, could pass for seventeen on looks but acts younger. She´s happy all the time now and is perfectly nice. Her daughter lives with us on and off...I think she´s next door with the grandparents the rest of the time but I´m not positive. Also, the home she no longer lives in is also a TBB homestay family, but luckily it´s in the area with the four homestays all together so the TBBers assigned there get family time in with "the commune" as we call it. That´s all. Just thought I should finish the story I started.

I´m off! I think we´re taking a little trip to the coast next weekend so I don´t know if I´ll have internet...So bye for now and keep in touch!

xxoo

Sara-Ma Hue From Santo Domingo

Hey All!

I have some internet time today, so I thought I´d try to catch up on blogging (after reading my 40 emails! No, I´m not really THAT popular...half of them were from facebook and the Obama campaign) I have about 20 pages of journaling from the last, what?, five days so we´ll see how this goes. I apologize in advance if this ends in a cliffhanger :-)

So, I´ll try my best to go chronologically.

September 16
We at breakfast in the hostel where we met a British gapper named Ross. He had just arrived in Quito the night before and was planning on staying at the hostel for eight months and teaching English in a school. And traveling, of course. He didnt´know anyone and didn´t really seem to know what he was supposed to be doing, but he seemed excited (although he said his plan was "a little mental, really." Gap year students from England that end up halfway across the world tend to have a bad reputation for not being particularly hard-working because, since so many people in England take gap years, it´s the stereotypical lazy, rich kids that end up in places like Quito. That´s the stereotype we TBBers are fighting against, or so I´ve been informed. Ross seemed nice, though, and I hope to see him when we return to Quito next month to see how it ended up working out for him.

After breakfast, we took a van to the public bus station. We´v ebeen warnexd several times about pickpockets and thieves who will slit open our bags, so we were on our guard. We got on our bus, put our big bags in storage, and took our little carry-ons with us, all our valuables in them. I wrapped my bakcpack around my foot and made sure that I knew the people sitting behind me in case it slid that way. Before we left the station, an armed police officer in a kevlar vest boarded the bus and made the guy sitting diagonally behind me get off. I have no idea what he supposedly did wrong, but I doubt it was your normal visa check because the guy seemed to be Ecuadorian (as most everyone at the bus station other than us was).

After about an hour on the bus, a movie started playing on teh flat screen TV at the front. It was loud and in English with Spanish subtitles. "What classy movie did they choose to play?" you ask. Superhero Movie of course! For those of you not lucky enough to have seen this cinematic gem, it´s a spiderman spoof along the lines of Scary Movies 1 through 3 or Not Another Teen Movie. Apparently, though, the movies they normally play are incredibly violent, so I guess you could say we got lucky.

We got off the bust in Santo Domingo. Alexandra grabbed her carry-on only to find that it had been slit open. Although she´d had her feet on it the whole time, someone in the row behind her managed to slit open the side and grab out her nice camera. Everything else was still there, including the point-and-shoot camera she´d brought which, luckily, had the wrong memory card in it (the one with all her photos, which she´d taken on the nice camera). The guy who likely took teh camera had gotten off at an earlier stop. She´s reported it to the police. That´s about the end of that. You´ve got to be careful, but sometimes things happen and sometimes it sucks.

We were met at teh bus stop by a Bua man dressed in dark grey slacks, but with only a red piee of fabric drapd across his chest. He had his hair traditionally done: buzzed on the side and dyed red and flattened out on the top so that it looke das if he´d put a leaf on his head. We alll piled into the back of a truck, the kind with a big flat bed and wooden sides that reached about chest height, and hung on for out 20 minute ride to Bua. That seems to be the preferred method of transportation here, other than motorcylces, which we aren´t allowed to ride. That´s how we got back to Santo Domingo today.

Bua is really jsut a lot of houses spaced out along the road tha tcomes from Santo Doingo. Your address is the number of the kilometer your house is on. For example, the school is at kilometer 15 and the cultural center, where we headed first, is at kilometer 21.

Once at the center, we ate our bag lunch sandwhiches provided by Yanapuma (the organization we´re working with here in Bua). The had of the center, Alfonso, welcomed us, first in Tsafiki, then in Spanish. He was very emotional and very kind. He looked almos teary thanking us for coming from so far, telling us to be sur eto ask if we needed something, describing his hope for our cultural exchange and expressing pride in his village that has come so far in the last five years. We were shown their small cultural museum and introduced to our homestay fathers. Mine and Isabel´s is Wilson. Initially I thought that our family had sent a son to pick us up, but no, he´s the dad. He could possibly be 28, but at first glance I would have guessed 21. He has already hoste dthree volunteers which is why they put Isabel and I with him. Although we both said we´d eat anything, they had us down as vegetarians and actually, Wilson thought we were vegan. That would be rather difficult in Bua. You would eat a LOT of rice. He was very relieved to find out that we´ll eat mostly anything.

After a little hike through their ¨reserva¨ (not easy in flipflops...I fell twice...very gracefully, of course...and picked up about 50 bugbites along the way) we hopped back in the truck and got dropped off at our respective homes. Isabel and I were dropped off first, so we didn´t know where anyone else was living. We, however, are right next to the school, and I have since discovered that Liz and Noah live across the street from the school, two other pairs live down the street, and then the other four groups live in a little family group about a 10 minute walk down the road and then another 10 into the woods.

Isabel and I actually have our own house! Our family built it to house volunteers, although at first we were worried we´d kicked them out of one of the family houses. It´s basically a cement block with a corrugated metal roof. There are two bed in little side rooms, but we share a bed so that we can both benefit from the one hot pink, butterfly bed net. There aren´t doors other than to the outside, so when the kids in the family come to play, they get very curious about our stuff. There are 6 different calendars on the walls, one is even a little scadalous, being used as decoration. There are also three or four family photos.

When we arrived, Wilson introduced us to his three kids Anderson (almost 8...his birthday, I´ve since found out, is October 23), Magdalena (6) an dBenicio (2), as well as his wife, Germania. They all left us to unpack which took about 1 minute since there arent any drawers or shelves, but soon Andy and Magdalena were back to play. He´s very rambunctious and not particularly talkative; she, on the other hand, seems really smart and talks almost non-stop. She´s that kid that tells you all the awkward family secrets her parents don´t want you to know and in addition to being adorable, that makes here rather useful. (She already let us know that her mom is pregnant, which we found out again from Germania only yesterday). Out front, a volleyball game was going on. It looked like a bunch of 20 year old guys, so I was surprised to realize that Wilson was one of the jugadores. Benicio showed up a little later to hang out and I ended up kicking a soccer ball around with Andy for a few minutes.

It´s becoming apparent to me that I will never finish this post in my alotted time since nearly everyone else has vacated the internet cafe and we have to be in groups of four, so I´ll try to hit some high points and summarize.

The family speaks Tsafiki among themselves and Spanish to us. Our first night, Wilson spent time with us translating some basic Spanish phrases to Tsafiki and the Grandpa, who I think lives in the family house, teaches us a word every time he sees us. The title of this post, Sara-Ma Hue, means something like ¨good morning¨although I´m sure I´m spelling it wrong.

The first night we bathed using water in a little bucket in the back yard because it was already late, but since then we´ve been bathing in the river. It gets about thigh deep at its deepest and it´s a brownish color because of the dirt and moss that gets kicked up, but clean has quickly become a relative term and ¨there is dirt on me¨dirty is preferable to ¨disgusting and sweaty¨dirty.

Before dinner our first night, we were talking to the grandmother and she asked us how old we were and if we had boyfriends. We said 18 an no and she asked if we met someone, would we stay in Bua. We tried to explain no, we were on a schedule, and we would only be here for a month anyway. She said that most people have two kids by 18 although I´ve since found out that our host mother is almost 30, so she didn´t have kids until 22. Then again, I think our family may be a little more progressive than most. Wilson helped make breakfast one morning and when Isabel mentioned that she hurt her foot, he rubbed lotion on it and wrapped it in leaves he had Germania warm with a candle before replacing the Ace bandage.

We generally eat breakfast at about 7 and head to the school about 7:45. The project has quickly become an interesting lesson in international development. What we´re bascially doing is building six ¨banos secos¨to replace the eight year old septic system at the local school. The problem is twofold. First, the system was built to be used by 70 students and the school has already grown to 250. Secondly, there is no way to clean out septic tanks in Bua. It has already overflowed into the field, although an engineer came last year to put in a pipe so that now it overflows elsewhere. We´re basically manual labor. I have moved dirt from one pile to another and then respread it over the field, I built some stairs out of rocks put into holes we dug in the dirt (becuse the field is about 10 feet below the level of the school), and I dug a trench three feet deep into clay (not alone, but with the group). We get work done really quickly, which is good, but it´s starting to look like this project may only last one more week.

The really interesting part though, is the organizational issues we´ve been having. I´ll try to summarize, but before I do, I´d like to say that everyone involved is incredibly generous and well meaning. Basically, the problem is this: Yanapuma is a two year old NGO that has been working in the community for about as long as it´s been in existance. They talked to the director of the school, Guillermo, to see what kind of project he´d like done and he said some toilets would be great. So then Yanapuma called up the Portland chapter of Engineers without Borders (an organization that is itself only about 8 years old) and had them design the project. They sent down an advance team in March and asked good questions (example: Do your cinderblocks have holes in them? Answer: Yes. Problem: It turns out that the wholes don´t go all the way through.) They raised funds and headed down here on accumulated vacation time, making their airfare their donation to the project. When they got here they found that a local construction crew had been hired. Then they began to argue with the crew about materials and design because first of all, Ecuadorian buildign stadards are way more lax than those in teh U.S. and thus much cheaper and secondly, as evidenced by the cinderlbock prolem, the plans had to be changed and no one agreed on exactly how. I´m sure it doesn´t halp that all the engineers sent down here are electronics or water research engineers adn not actually people with construction experience. The engineers seem to be getting frustrated and demoralized because teh constrction crew builds better than they do and even seems to know better regarding some design issues and they expected this to be THEIR project. Also, when Cathy, one of the engineers, introduced herself to us, she said she was project manager and then qualified that with "Ï don´t know what that means, exactly.¨ There is a leadership void which is leading to miscommunication. Yanapuma has one plan, Engineers without borders has another and the construction crew has a third. Then of course there´s TBB. As I said, we´re basically being used as manual labor. Since we move so quickly, it sounds like we might build some wells in this and other Tsachila communities during out last few weeks here.

One more fun fact and then I have to go. We´ve dropped into the middle of a family crisis. My host mother´s sister left her husband and child and ran to Santo Domingo. They were looking for her for a few days, but have since found her and she may or may not be the new girl that started living in our house yesterday. She´s supposed to be fifteen and has a 14 month old daughter. The girl looks about our age and has been carrying around a little girl. Ian and Katie are in the family she left. Somehow though, no one seems particularly perturbed. Everyone is happy and nice and apparently very easygoing.

Anyway, I´ve got to go. Everyone is waiting.

Much love!
xxoo

P.S. Again, I don´t know when I´ll be back on the internet...Sorry!

A fond farewell for now...

Hi again!

I´m at an internet cafe in Quito, Ecuador that closes in about fifteen minutes, so forgive me if this post is a little short. I´m going to hit the important points first.

We had a lot of orientation today with Yanapuma, the program we´re parterned with here in Ecuador and what I´ve gathered is basically this:
1) We leave for Bua early tomorrow morning. Bua is hot and humid and at sea level, unlike Quito which is at 9,000 feet and for which I broke out the long sleeved shirt and the jacket.
2) Bua is UBER rural. We will bathe in a river. If we´re lucky a toilet will be a hole in the ground. I´m thinking no internet access...although in Santo Domingo, a town about 45 minutes away (I think) I might get some internet...I can go there on weekends, but if you don´t hear from me for a while, I´m most likely both still alive and totally fine.
3) My homestay partner is Isabel. She is actually from Guatemala and so is fluent in Spanish. I´m a little sad that I´m not the more advanced Spanish speaker, but on the other hand, she will likely just chat away with our family and the experience will be almost as if we weren´t partnered. Also she´s really nice. Not than I have anything really bad to say about anyone in TBB. Everyone is fascinating, unique and pretty generally friendly and awesome.
4) Bua is actually a villiage where the majority of the population is from an indigenous tribe called the Tsachila (I think...I don´t have my notes with me) and they speak a language called Tsafiki. I fully intend to learn some Tsafiki while I´m there. The school we´ll be working at is even a bilingual school and I´m pretty sure the two languages are Spanish and Tsafiki.
5) We will be working to bring sanitary toilets to the local school, and by ¨bring¨I mean build from scratch. It seems there will be a lot of digging and pouring of cement. The toilets we´re building are eco toilets so that all the human waste that goes in will come out either immediately or in six months as some form of fertilizer. Pretty awesome, right?
6) The traditional gender roles are apparently pretty strong in Bua, to the point where we girls may not be able to get a lot of digging or carrying in at the beginning without the men offering to help us out. Also, there is apparently no such thing as platonic friendships between men and women so I´m really curious to see what happens in the homestays where we have one girl and one boy. I´m a little sad I´m not in one of those as well, but honestly, I can´t really complain. There is no way this isn´t going to be an amazing experience.

That pretty much covers the basics. We had a two hour lecture about Ecuador´s history today, followed by a short introduction to Bua by a girl who visited for the first time last weekend, so my information may not be perfectly accurate. Then we had about an hour and a half of Spanish class...I was in an advanced group so we ended up talking about American politics after twenty five minutes of reading on Ecuadorian culture and learning words pertinent to our work in Bua. We were all trying to explain the war in Iraq to our instructor. She was honestly interested, but didn´t really understand why we couldn´t just pull out immediately. We figured out that she thought it was a war medieval style, with two armies charging each other on a field (or basically like that...as opposed to the policing and counter insurgency operation that it is in reality). She also knew a little about Obama and McCain (whom she called McClain).

What surprised me is that Ecuadorian politics right now is equally as exciting as American. They elected a new president in January of 2007 and he´s been instituting more reforms than any recent past president of Ecuador. Apparently they go through presidents pretty quickly here, with a lot not finishing terms. There is a referendum on a new constitution in two weeks. It would be Ecuador´s twentieth since it´s independence from Spain in 1809! Included are causes legalizing abortion and gay marriage as well as mandating free schools (and that 7.5% of the budget be spent on education) and free health care. The catholic church is against it because of the gay marriage and abortion clauses and the country is ostensibly 95% catholic (supposedly there are more people that practice indigenous religions than will admit it on a census), but most people seem to think it will pass. The question is, where will Ecuador get the money to pay for all this. Supposedly the government will start to tax the rich which it apparently does not do as of now, but with nearly 50% of it´s annual budget going to pay off the INTEREST on loans from the world bank (read: America conned Ecuador into perpetual debt so that it would be under our political thumb...you should really read Confessions of an Economic Hit Man) and only 1% of the budget currently allocated for education it still sounds a little far fetched to me.

Anyway, the internet cafe is closing, so I´ve got to go pay my seventy cents for the hour.
I´ll see ya when I see ya (but not if you see me first)
Quick! Name that movie reference!

Love to all,
Becca

Diez Dias en Bahia Ballena

Hi everybody!

I´m sorry it´s been quite some time. We didn´t have internet in the little town we´ve been in for the past week plus, or at least, I heard a rumor about an internet cafe the day before yesterday but I never found it. I promise when I´m settled in my Ecuadorian homestay I´ll work out internet at least once a week.

As far as formalities go, I´m alive, just a tad sunburned, a lot bug bitten (picked up some Off Deep Woods in una farmacia today on the way back to San Jose so we´ll see how that goes) and having an amazing time so far. We´re supposed to write in our journal for at least five minutes a day and I´ve been reasonably good...When I write it´s more like forty five minutes...but then I skip some days. I´ll work on it. The journal keeping is good for you all, though, because I have some prerecorded awesome experiences to share. So, on the the details!

After my last post, we got up the next morning and took what was supposed to be a four hour bus ride (a charter bus, not public) to Bahia Ballena (there´s an accent over the "i" but I´m not good at this computer...I think that will become a common refrain over the next few months). Bahia Ballena is near Playa Uvita if you feel the need to mapquest it. The ride turned into more like 6 hours because we ran into some construction and were stopped dead for about thirty minutes...and we stopped for lunch at this beautiful little restaurant on the side of the road. As a side note, the food here has been consistently good. Breakfast is always yesterday´s rice mixed with yesterday´s black beans and some cilantro and then some scrambled eggs. Lunch and dinner is usually rice, beans, salad, some kind of fresh juice and either chicken, steak, pork or fish. The fish at Bahia Ballena was top notch...really fresh, obviously.

Anyway, we arrived at our hotel and organized three to a room. There were three little cabin looking things with four rooms in each. We were the only people staying at the hotel. The rooms were nice with tile floors and bathrooms in each. Only cold water, but that wasn´t really an issue. We at about three quarters of our meals at the hotel (called Canto de las Ballenas if you want to google it) and, as I said before, very good. The hotel is, I believe, run by a coop of people that live in the town. They were all really nice. Nice is a word I would consistently use to describe people I´ve met thus far. ¨Pura Vida,¨ which translates at ¨pure life¨but really means something like easy going and hang loose, is a Costa Rican motto and outside of San Jose at least, it definitely applies. This results in what I like to call ¨Costa Rican Time¨which results in taxis coming about 30 minutes late and estimates of distance to be between 5 and 30 minutes short, but it doesn´t seem to matter. I´ve got to get to some concrete details, like I promised though, or I never will. Let me grab the journal and start at the beginning with choice exerpts and paraphrases.

Day 2 in BB: Rainforest Hike and Group Constitution
After breakfast and some group bonding exercises that I won´t go into we drove a ways to a specific section of the rainforest (with an impromptu safari on the way...¨look! a monkey! look! a sloth! and a toucan! let´s pull over and look!¨) where we hiked down a steep hill with some wooden logs made into rough stairs for about twenty minutes. At the bottom was a little waterfall in part of a river that quite literally looked fake it was so picturesque. We climbed up above the waterfall where there was a little pool and some rocks to jump off of. I did jump, but my ears popped and hurt for the rest of the day. Still, I jumped and I so don´t regret it. I just may never do it again. We had lunch and explored the river and the area for a few hours, then hiked back up. It was quite the hike...very steep. I´m freaking out a little about Macchu Pichu...I´m going to try to find time to go running in Bua (the village we´ll be in in Ecuador). Later that day, back at the hotel, we had one of our typical orientation conversations. This was aobut expectations, both of ourselves and each other. Out of an exercise we did came a group constitution which served to make me and I think all of us feel better about the group. Everyone seemed to share values of being supportive, inclusive, respectful and responsible as well as seeing the importance of keeping a sense of humor. It´s a good group we´ve got here.

Day 3: Reflections, Goals and Bahia Ballena
We had a conversation about why we´re each individually here doing TBB. Everyone´s reasons were different, but we each identified with a lot of them. We then set 9 personal goals in the following categories: Personal Challenge, Intellectual Challenge, Service Challenge, Vocational slash Employment Challenge, Spiritual Challenge, Adventure Challenge, Interpersonal Challenge, Creative Challenge and Personal Challenge of Your Choice. My vocational challenge, to use it as an example, is to find some theatre or storytelling in each community and explore it´s value in the culture.
After lunch we hung out in the pool for a few hours (I didn´t mention this, but we went to the beach the first day and it was beautiful but a good thirty minute muddy walk away). Then we were met by a Peace Corps volunteer named Travis who was originally from San Diego and his Tica (Costa Rican) girlfriend Pilar. He lived and worked in Bahia Ballena for two years and is now taking a third Peace Corps year organizing the Costa Rican contingent from San Jose where he now lives. He plans to stay in Costa Rica when his peace corps time is up. He told us some basic facts about the country that we could easily find on wikipedia and then we all got up and went on a walk through Bahia Ballena. I´ll list some of the things about that afternoon that struck me:
1) Travis may be from San Diego, but his English is now accented. He is, in fact, more comfortable speaking in Spanish and occasionally would say a word in Spanish when he couldn´t find the English.
2) The national government is not working particularly well on a local level in Costa Rica. At one point we walked across a long grass strip that is an abandoned or at the very least very rarely used airstripd that the community proposed to turn into housing for the homeless of Bahia Ballena. The government apparently vetoed this idea without much explanation. They seem to have some future plans for the strip, but didn´t disclose them. The Pura Vida attitude means that no is no...no one really fought for it. Another example is the local marine park. It was owned by the community and the revenue went back into them and to the maintenance of the park. Recently the government took over and the income from the park is pooled into a national fund for marine preserves. The locals were furious and burned down the cabin at one entrance to the park, but it seems that the only result was that the cabin was rebuilt. Finally, the government will propose a construction project and get the community to agree by promising something like 500 jobs. Then they bring in 450 workers. But hey, Pura Vida.

Also on day 3 we wrote ourselves letters about what we hope to gain from TBB to be read when we arrive in Virginia in March. Along the same lines, we videotaped ourselves answering six questions posed to us by Robin. We turned on the camera and then read each question off the screen of a lap top and answered it immediately. They were along the lines of ¨Why is there poverty?¨and ¨Will there be world peace in your lifetime?¨Heavy, big picture questions. It will be interesting to see how my opinions change over the course of this year.

As you might be gathering from the descriptions, a day here so far has felt like a week. But, on to Days 4 and 5.

On day four our main discussion was ¨How do we define ourselves?¨As you can imagine, it was a sprawling two hour discussion. The kids on this program are ridiculously smart, opinionated and have strong personalities. It was a little intimidating, but very interesting, as all our big picture conversations are. I think as we get into different core countries our discussions will become a little more specific, but this is orientation and it´s been all big picture all the time (when not discussing safety or logistical program details, of course).

On the morning of the 9th we went kayaking in a mangrove forest. It was pretty chill. We saw a lot of river crabs, some tree snakes and apparently some iguanas, birds and a racoon but even when the guide stopped next to our kayak and pointed them out I couldn´t see them. Talk about good camoflage. I have NO idea how Michael (our guide) spotted them while paddling along. We went back to the hotel, had some lunch, and then we decide to walk back into ¨downtown¨Bahia during our free hour. There was a shop with some sarongs hanging outside that looked interesting. I ended up picked a charm out of a glass case that looked like a semi cylindrical piece of petrified wood wrapped in some metal wire and asking the man working at (and who I think owned) the store if he could put it on a chain. He said he didn´t have one, but he had some string and he made a nifty necklace out of it. I can even adjust the length. He explained how to work it twice because he thought I didn´t get it the first time. It was sweet. He was very patient. Then again, I´m pretty sure that after I left he was thinking "inept americans." While I was looking around, I heard him talking to someone about how he loves chess. He has a teacher and also reads about strategy in books. I think Zack actually played a few games with him, in fact. (Zack is one of the TBBers). As I was walking back, Alexandra (a TBBer...let´s just assume that from now on unless I say otherwise, ok?) asked if I´d noticed the Spanish language Nietzche books stacked in the corner that he´d clearly been reading. I had not, but I was very impressed. I can´t even spell Nietzche. He seemed like a fascinating guy.

After the afternoon discussion, one of the guys working at our hotel grabbed a bunch of the young coconuts off one of the trees on the property and chopped the tops off with a machete so that we could try the milk. It was delicious! Apparently it´s best when the coconuts are still green, and green they were. Mmm.

Two quick side notes here, while I´m thinking of them: 1) I have not yet posted pictures, but a few kids from TBB have put some on facebook so I know it´s possible. I have pictures of most of the stuff I´ve mentioned so I´ll work on it and try and get some up soon...or in a few weeks...pura vida, right? 2) The first book we´ve been assigned in its entirely is Confessions of an Economic Hit Man which several people recommended to me before I left. I must say, I´m about 230 pages in of about 280 and it´s really fascinating. I highly recommend it. It´s a pretty quick read and relatively well written, too.

And now for TURTLEING. Oh no, that is not a typo, you read that correctly. I´m going to borrow heavily from my journal entry for this. If you´re even still reading. Sorry this entry is becoming absolutely epic. Perhaps I should have composed a poem. Anyway:

OK, so last night was awesome. No one knew exactly what we were doing or where we were going, but after a short educational session about turtles while we were waiting for the cabs we hadn´t called ahead because we hadn´t known we´d need them, we endedup driving about fifteen minutes (on Costa Rica´s crazy potholed roads you rarely hit thirty mph so fifteen minutes is not particularly far) to a different beach with our turtleing ¨guide¨Mauricio. I put guide in quotes because he´s a volunteer turtler and what we were really doing was tagging along with him. So we started walking along the dark beach. (We had been told to wear dark clothes, not to bring flashlights or to wear bugspray so I had on long pants, but risked getting my arms bitten up because it was too hot to wear the jacket I´d brought along, even after dark. It remained too hot for the remainder of the night and I woke up with 32 new bites as a result, but as you´ll soon see, it was worth it.)

Anyway, we started walking pretty quickly, but Mauricio told us to slow down because it was only a thirty minute walk down the beach and we didn´t want to miss any turtle tracks. It was about 8:30 when we started walking and, as it turns out, ¨thirty minutes¨was a prime example of Costa Rica Time, but walk more slowly we did. I stuck with Mauricio and Emily and listened to their conversation, piping in sometimes if I had a question. About thirty actual minutes later, we stopped at the hatchery. It was a rectangle about 20ft by 10ft that Mauricio had built over the past two months with the help of some locals. The rectangle was defined by big wooden treetrunk poles connected by a strong plastic netting. He said the netting extended a meter into the sand to keep out predators. The sand inside the hatchery was crisscrossed with strings dividing the area into square plots for nests. A stick poked out of each, ready to be used as a marker when eggs were buried beneath. Next to the hatchery was a makeshift shelter, or rather, a shelter in progress. Mauricio said sometimes he´d be woken up in the middle of the night by smelly wild pigs. Still, it seemed kind of nice. Very peaceful and in nature.

The reason we´d stopped was so that Mauricio could quickly build a door for the hatchery (or, hinge on the door he´d already built--wood frame, mesh center--and attach a lock). Just, you know, casually pause to put up a door. In the dark. A few of us offered to help hand him nails from the bucket he´d brought or whatever, and so he kept talking. Below is a condensed version of all I learned talking with him that night:

Mauricio was from a northern suburb of San Jose. He had attende the national university and studied marine biology. At one point he studied in England (he spoke pretty good English and was already working on French) and he wanted to become a doctor--specifically, a pediatrician, because he loves kids. (Cue: Awwwww). His day job involves whale and dolphin research that he conducts mainly on behalf of whale watching companies or maybe the government with a group of a few other guys. He sleeps, he said, about 4 hours a night, but doesn´t seem to mind much. He was about 25, with a huge heart and a passion for life. He lit up telling me about the work he´s doing to prove that two different populations of humpback whales interbreed during a specific period of time--something rare, but something that would be very good for the genetic diversity of both populations and thus be important for whale conservationists. He talked about reaching out to the community because so few people appreciate the beauty and biodiversity in their own backyard. He hated the turtle egg poachers whom, he said, condescendingly, still believe turtle eggs are aphrodesiacs and endanger the species as a result. He implored us not to purchase anything made from turtle. When asking us about ourselves, I mentioned that I wanted to study acting in college and he said he had ¨the opposeite of a niece¨(nephew) studying that. After talking for a while, he invited us (those of us helping with the door...or watching him build the door, at least) to live in the shelter next summer as a turtleing volunteer. Next summer I´m working at Green Cove, but rigth then I was about ready to sign up for summer 2010. He was an amazing guy and his spirit was contagious.

Anyway, we continued our walk down the beach. We found a poached nest and an intact one. Mauricio took some measure ments of the poached nest, located it with a portable GPS he´d been carrying, and said we´d return for the eggs from the intact nest on our way back. By the time we reached the end of the beach it was 11:00. Half hour walk, right? And in the sand...after a busy day...We were all tired. Robin (one of the TBB founders) hadn´t realized we would also be walking back. He´d thought the taxis would pick us up at this end. Ooops. The group opted to head back and started walking...but the turtleing wasn´t done and Katie R, Isabel and I decided to stick it out along with Sandy, Nina and Chris (TBB founder, first staff member, and TBB founder and parent liason, respectively). Mauricio went a ways back down the beach and we sat together in the dark on a tropical Costa Rican beach recounting memories of ordinary but perfect days. Finally, he signaled to us to walk back to him by flashing his red headlamp a few times. he hadn´t found anything, so we continued on. Five minutes later, we found fresh turtle tracks and followed them up the beach to a turtle in the process of digging her nest. We watched from ten feet back, silent. When they´re about to lay eggs, tutles go into a trance-like state. We crept closer. Mauricio took the turtle´s measurements, then set Katie up with a plastic bag and had her hold it open under the tutle to catch the eggs as they fell into the nest. It was one of those moments that felt almost sacred.

The turtle finished and, bag in hand, we continued back down the beach, leaving her to cover up her empty nest. We left Isabel, Chris and Sandy to dig up the nest we´d passed by earlier and kept heading to the hatchery. there I put on a rubber glove, kneeled in the sand and slowly, carefully, laid each soft, thing shelled pin pong ball egg into the makeshif nest Mauricio had dug second from teh right on the far side of the hatchery enclosure. It must have taken ten minutes. At its deepest, the nest fit my arm to halfway between my elbow and my shoulder. (The depth affects the temperature which in turn affects teh gender of the babies so Mauricio is careful to honor the size of the mother´s nest). My only focus while placing the eggs in the nest was to count. 91. The bag that had held them for the walk back probably weighed 10 pounds. That is a LOT of eggs.

Isabel returned with the eggs from the other nest (87) and Nina renested them in the hatchery. by this point it was about 1am. We´d gotten up that morning at 5 to go kayaking so we were understandably exhausted (and very thirsty). We walked back to the entrance to the beach and said goodbye and thank you to Mauricio, but he ended up hopping in the cab with us. He said had we not come, he wouldn´t have had gas to get to the beach that evening and may have been too tired to walk or bike. I was especially glad we´d come turtleing that particular night. We finally got back to the hotel at 1:50. In bed at 2:08. It was totally worth it.

On Thursday the 11th our main event other than discussions was to attend a local soccer game. It was a small turf field covered by a shell roof. They played a few games of 5 on 5. We grabbed some dinner and hung out. Not a ton to report. It was fun though.

I´m pretty sick of typing...It´s been nearly a hour and 45 minutes since I´ve started, but I felt guilty for keeping you all waiting for so long. Tomorrow we´re off to Quito and then two days later to Bua for our first homestay. We´ll be staying in pairs because the homes are pretty remote and working in schools to bring them clean water. This involves something about building toilets, but I can´t say exactly what. I´ll let you know when I know.

I mentioned pictures before. I know for a fact that there are some on facebook and I´m tagged in a couple. I´ll work on pictures in the future.

Say Hi to the States for Me,
Becca

In The Beginning

Well, it´s 12:42am Costa Rica time, so 11:42 L.A. time. We finally arrived, a little late, but all in one piece and one group. We took a small detour to Panama to refuel because it was too foggy to land here (as the flight attendant explained, San Jose is in a valley and it´s been rainy so...) and we´d been circling. Anyway, we´re staying at a hostel called Hostel Pangea in San Jose for tonight. It seems nice. I´m in a room with 5 other girls...bunk beds...But there´s pizza downstairs and I´m hungry (and a little line of us TBBers waiting for the 2 out of 6 computers here that work) so I´m going to sign out. Also, please excuse typos...this is a strange keyboard and it´s dark in here.

In Lieu of A Thousand Words

When I put photos online, you should be able to find them here. (That is: http://picasaweb.google.com/becca.title) When I actually upload some for the first time, I'll try to remember to post the link and URL again, but now you can't say I never did. :-)

Leaving On (Several) Jet Planes

Well, this is nearly it. I'm leaving the day after tomorrow. And I'm almost sort of packed! Impressive, I know. I'm pretty excited to leave. Sure there are things and people I'll miss, but really, I'm excited to leave. I'm even more excited to meet all the other TBB kids. And a little tiny bit anxious. And a lot antsy.

Anyway, welcome again to this blog. I guess I'll try to write once a week, but I think some weeks it may be more and some less. Who knows when I'll end up having internet access and free time simultaneously? I don't really know much detail-wise about what this year will be like. It's an adventure!

So, back to packing! Score!

Bye for now