Water Monitoring, Weddings, and Meetings

The weeks just seem to be flying by here in Ecuador. Still, I struggle with the language - I think I´ll just set the language bar at being functional. Admittedly, I don´t practice enough on my Spanish - it is my own fault and I readily admit it. I just have a hard time spending 10 hours working and then going home to study - all in a foreign language.

I have started a little game with one of the interns in the office - Yadira. She and I get along really well and she tries to teach me a few new words each day - I do pretty well with that and my vocabulary is definitely growing - however - putting words together to form fluid and coherent sentences is a different challenge all together. I manage to talk myself into corners rather quickly. I´ll get going with something then realize that the next word that I need to use is not in my lexicon. For example, I have really been hung up lately with trying to say things like: he was supposed to go, but he didn´t have time. There is no word for supposed in Spanish - damn them. So you have to use the imperfect indicative form (which I have no idea what they means even in English - it has been a long time since Mr. Smith´s 9th grade English class) of the verb ir which means to go. So you essentially say he was going to go. This, to me, is not a perfect translation, but it works. Other things that trip me up are related to proper conjugation of verbs. Clearly people must see me as the ¨slow¨gringo in Puyo. It´s humbling, challenging, and probably exactly what I need in my life - more perspective.

Last week, on paper, was going to be a hell week. I had meetings scheduled at schools with the Prensa about our kid´s page and meeting scheduled in a few of the communities. Every day of the week was booked solid. But, like so many things here, plans changed and I ended up only having a couple of meetings - sort of. Yadira and I went to FRATES to give a charla (talk) on organic fertilizers. The three communities were supposed to come, but everyone forgot. The meeting started at 8:00am. Never mind that Yadira and I had to catch the bus at 6:00am for this meeting. By 9:30 still nobody came, so we decided to hike to the waterfall. When we returned, there were two people from one of the communities. They came 2 hours late - we decided to reschedule the meeting for this week. We still had to wait around for a few hours to catch the bus back in the afternoon.

Fast forward to today. I got up bright and early to catch the bus with Yadira to FRATES. To our surprise (not really) nobody showed up for the charla. So we caught the bus as it came back through and went back to Puyo.

It is sad that the communities have no interest in attending this free series of workshops that would provide them with the know-how and resources to greatly improve their agricultural practices with ZERO cost to them. I tried to think outside of the box to suggest a more convenient time for a meeting - perhaps a weekend after church would be good (the church is a 5 minute walk from FRATES). Yadira grounded me though by reminding me that Wednesday mornings at 8:00 was the time the communities requested not one that we arbitrarily chose.

Last Wednesday we started our water monitoring program within the watershed of Puyo. We are collaborating with two masters students and a group of high school students from a local high school. Diana and Douglas - the master students - are being paid by the municipio to monitor the water quality and will use the data for their theses. The high school students are participating because we thought it would be a great opportunity to get the local youth involved in the project and to educate them about water quality issues. Anyhow, on Wednesday Diana and Douglas gave a lecture to the students and had them take a test at the end. There were 40 students present, but we could only select 18 of them. As they were taking the test, I realized that the students are no different than my students back home. I think about 80% of them were cheating, some blatantly, others were more discrete. Douglas and Diana didn´t care, however, I couldn´t just let it slide by. I called a few of them on it - told them not to share answers - that this wasn´t a grade - in effect, I had zero effect. Oh well, the important thing is that they were interested in being part of the project.

Friday was the first day of field work for the project. I had the responsibility of coordinating the snacks and transportation. We were to meet at one of the parks by Río Puyo at 2:30pm. I was there right on time, as were 3-4 students. By 3:00 all the students were there, but no Douglas or Diana. I attempted to call and text them, but had no response. The students were getting restless and kept asking me when we would start. I stalled for as long as I could then decided to let them eat the snack now while we waited. By 3:30 I was ready to send them home, when I received a message from Diana that they were on their way. By 4:00 we started.

The students had a blast looking for macroinvertebrates and doing all sorts of water quality tests. I was amazed at how well these 17 and 18 year-olds did. The whole experience made me realize how much I miss my students at Circleville. These students are no different than those at CHS save one thing - they speak Spanish - though some of them speak decent English - or at lease decent enough for me to understand it.

In all, we visited 3 different sites: one right before the city of Puyo, one in the middle of town and one just past the city. As you might guess, the water quality got progressively worse as we moved from one site to the next. One of the sites is right by one of the sewage discharge pipes - gross.

The students will head to the lab on Monday to identify the macroinvertebrates they collected and to do some analysis of the data. We´ll be doing this monitoring on a monthly basis - this excites me, because teaching in the field is a strength of mine and it is certainly more interesting than sitting in front of a computer in my office.

Last weekend, Sue and I went to Baños for the wedding of one of the women Susan works with. Beth is an American working on her PhD here in Puyo. The wedding was quaint and very quick. It was a civil ceremony so it lasted all of 10 minutes (if that). It was an outdoor wedding at a restaurant in Baños. The facility was perfect for a small wedding and the food was good as well. There are so many things that similar between Ecuadorian and U.S. weddings - so much so that it would be hard to see any real differences, however, there are some subtleties. For instance - the fathers give the toasts not the best man or maid of honor. At one point, we passed the microphone along and everyone had the opportunity to say something. This I liked, however, I deem it to be very dangerous to incorporate into a U.S. wedding. Too many chances for drunk relatives and friends to say something inappropriate. The Ecuadorians had tact and spoke well, though there was a tense moment when Pablo´s 10 year-old cousin/nephew started to ramble on about things inappropriate for a 10 year-old to say in front of a group at a wedding.

The dancing was incredible - latinos just know how to shake it. They move with such fluidity and purpose - its beautiful. Not to be left out, Susan and I incorporated our swing moves with the latin music and I think we pulled it off fairly well - we were not chased of the dance floor - so that was a good sign.

Another interesting occurrence at the wedding - the only alcohol served (after the champagne toast) was whiskey. They took bottles of it, poured them into pitchers and then proceeded to pour multiple shots for all to drink. At one point I think I had 5 shots in the span of 20 minutes - I didn´t want to be rude and refuse - besides, it wasn´t the strongest of whiskeys. This practice of handing off shots is very much a latino thing. It is quite common for a group of 10-15 people to share one glass. You fill it up, take a shot, then fill it up again and pass it to somebody else. Communal drinking I call it - it is a good concept once you get past the fact that it might not be cleanest of practices.

At one point, Sue and I were in mid-dance when one of Pablo´s relatives came up with shots for us. We stopped in mid-swing and took our shots then restarted our dance. Come to think of it, this happened multiple times. Oh yeah, it is expected that you take the whole shot and not just a sip - that is bad form for which I was scolded by a beautiful and very tall young Ecuadorian woman.

We partied it up until about 10:30 or 11:00 - not bad considering the festivities started at 4:00. Then we caught a bus back to Puyo. Everyone else stayed in Baños - something Sue and I were not able to do because of Peace Corps rules.

Sunday we woke up to a beautiful morning. I was up at 6:30 and had washed clothes and hung them to dry before Susan even stirred from bed. I made banana pancakes, which I had not made in a long time, then Sue and I headed into town to go to the market and look at bikes. We had time to kill, all of Pastaza was out of power so we had nothing to do. We got our veggies from our favorite little old lady, looked at bikes, and then went to the store to pick up some other stuff. It was clear blue skies when we walked into the store - when we walked out 10 minutes later it was overcast, thundering, and threatening rain.

We walked home in a race to beat the rain. We did, I recovered our dry clothes from the roof moments before the skies opened up. Without power, and with a crazy rainstorm, we both settled down with books and read for most of the day. By the time the rain passed, we had cabin-fever. We decided to take a walk back into town to see if we could find a curtain rod for a project Sue has for the apartment. The power was still out, so nothing was open.

Monday of this week, Katie and I went to the Prensa to see if we could reschedule the meetings we had with them in the schools last week. Naturally, there was much confusion from all ends and our presentations in the schools about our kid´s page have been post-poned again. I really want to do this presentation, because it will give me the opportunity to meet more teachers and to promote my environmental education teacher´s guide that I am making. I´m keeping my fingers crossed that we´ll eventually do this before too long.

Our friend John Wilson (another Volunteer from our omnibus) came to Puyo this week to do some legwork on planning a workshop on trafficking and migration of people. It is a new initiative of Peace Corps - to educate on this issue - not to traffic people. John is good people for sure. Sue, John, Katie, and I had dinner at our house on Monday evening. I made Mexican food and for dessert I made a cheese cake. After dinner we played speed scrabble - I won by the way - that is a first. We played were you could use Spanish and English words. Anyhow, we had a blast and then decided to dig into the cheesecake. Earlier in the day Susan had cut up some fresh strawberries to put on the cake. Oh this was going to be soooooo good. I cut up the cake, dished it out, Sue put on the strawberries, then….I took a bite - it was horribly salty - I was stunned, what did I do wrong - I don´t screw up with baking in my toaster oven. I trouble shot the situation and realized that my lovely wife loaded the strawberries with salt instead of sugar. So, imagine a cup of salt on your fresh strawberries - disgusting. Well, we salvaged what we could of the cake and all agreed that it was a good cake and we all agreed to never let Sue live this one down. She took it well - it was rather funny. However, I think it gave Katie a leg-up in our informal competition to out-bake each other. Katie makes a mean pound-cake that I am jealous of, but I think my carrot cakes, cheesecakes, and cookies more than equal her pound-cake.

Yesterday, the taxis in Puyo were on strike. This meant that there were zero taxis on the road and they blocked the main road as well, so there was no bus traffic either. Schools were cancelled and the town seemed eerily quiet. It was really nice to not have the noise from buses and taxis - it was also nice to see people out and about on foot. I had to walk to work in a downpour - because there was no other way to get there - and I didn´t have my umbrella, it was conveniently in the office. I was soaked, by the time I got to the office, but I didn´t care, it was fun. I was supposed to go to do some surveys in one of the communities north of Puyo, but without transport I wasn´t going anywhere. Instead I worked on the next edition of the kid´s page.

John and Katie spent the day checking out potential hotels for the workshop - they had a good day to do it - after the morning rain things cleared up and the day was gorgeous. That night we all went to the Colibrí to get pizza and beer. We had a great time and spent the evening talking politics. John is a Libertarian and he has some interesting views that I had never thought about before - though he was outnumbered by Sue, Katie, and I.

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