Chimborazo

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So we got a call on Sunday morning saying there was a meeting in Gradas that morning that were supposed to attend and be ready in 10 minutes. Half an hour later we headed up, and then we (and the rest of the coomunity) waited for two hours for the leader to show up. They we had a little private meeting with him where we explained that we had been trying to do workshops but no one shows up, and we went to Visote and the people there are really interested and basically we aren´t going to spend any more money in Gradas unless we start seeing some cooperation. He said he thinks the people are mad because he told them we were comign with 5 grand and now we don´t have it and they think we spent it elsewhere or on ourselves. Of course, we said that we never said we had 5 grand so that really isn´t our fault, lather, rinse, repeat. We decided to try once more Monday (today) to do a workshop and if no one shows up then we will no longer be working with Gradas. Afterwards we attended the town meeting (which was 3 hours late at this point) and he announced this plan to the people there with little response. We went home frustrated and very tired.
This morning we get a call from Marco (the leader) and he says that they had another meeting last night and all of the community leaders showed little interest in participating, so it´s probably better if we just do a project in Visote. We´re all pretty happy about this because in addition to being more pleasant to work with, Visote has a lot more need than Gradas as it is more remote and has never received any sort of assistance in the past.
So, since we now had the day free (the people in Visote had told us last week that they couldn´t do a workshop today because they needed to work) we went to see Chimborazo. Chimborazo is an inactive volcano and it´s peak is the highest point in the world from the centre of the earth. We got a camionetta to drive us up to the refuge at 4100m and we hiked (slowly) up to the second refuge at about 5000m.

It was breathtaking. Here are some pictures.

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