Rio Muchacho continued

Buenas tardes!
So i´ve gotten way better at spanish now. i´m able to basically communicate. the rest of sunday was fun. swimming and such. then we went back to rio muchacho. monday night we made chocolate from scratch!!! so cool. edgar picked the cacao fruit to show us and inside you take a bean that´s coated in this white slimy stuff that´s actually really tasty sweet fruit. you suck on the fruit until the flavor´s gone, then you spit out the seed. you sun dry the seeds for 5 days or so and then cook them in a special pot made out of clay over a hot fire. then you peel the seeds until you get the bitter chocolate. then you grind the chocolate together with pure sugar cane (also grown on the farm) and cook it on a stove with hot milk and you have amazing chocolate. i got to stir, peel, and grind. afterwards we ate chocolate with fresh bananas and pineapple. SO GOOD. my spanish teacher this week was Marta who was pretty cool. i had spanish for 4 hours every morning with taylor which was fun. i worked in the garden monday, with edgar, kyle, and max staining a house on tuesday, and then cultural day was wednesday. we got 3 horses and a mule. the horses we named seabiscuit, the general, and mr. ed. the mule we named mulan. it was pretty sweet. 8 of us rode and walked to these waterfalls that were part of rio muchacho and corinne and i swam and then yuri and i jumped off the waterfalls it was wicked sweet. thursday wasn´t as great. i got the bug. i went to spanish that morning and then spent the rest of the day in bed. i felt a little better thursday night, so carrie (one of the volunteers there from texas) taught me the most beautiful spanish song i´ve ever heard. she also has an incredible voice. a group of about 20 high school kids from the Amazon came to Rio Muchacho and we talked to them for a while. they spoke Quichua (which is the largest indigenous tribe in South America...i think) and spanish. it was fun communicating with them. friday i felt like crap and had a fever of 100.4, so i stayed in bed the whole day. maya was sick too, so we slept. i tried to attend an interview with dario, who is the founder of the farm, and we found out a lot about his life. he left home when he was 12 and lived on the streets and under the stairs of a school and volunteered at the Red Cross for 4 years. he lived with a guru in a volcano without food for a month and now he can perceive the auras around living things which helps him to know people better. he lived in a tree with Nicola (his wife) for a few years. i can´t remember everything right now, but his life has been pretty cool. he´s extremely passionate about what he does and it´s amazing. at one point i felt sick again so i went to bed. i woke up again for a lecture with dario. he told us about organic farming and told us that milk from a cow for a day is about $1 in ecuador. however, 100 kg of cow poop, which is about 3 days of cow poop, decomposes into humis, which is really good natural fertilizer, and is worth $9. that means a day´s worth of poop from one cow is worth $3 which means that cow shit is worth more than milk. also he talked about how what we perceive as the third world is actually dario´s first world because it´s so much closer to living with the environment instead of destroying it. that´s really stuck with me. it makes so much sense. people here in the ¨third world¨live such simple lives in tangent with the environment and they´re incredibly happy. it makes me want to live here (don´t worry, mom, i´m coming home). i felt a little better at dinner so i had some bananas and a little bit of chicken. yes, chicken. meat. actually, janiva and some of the boys and juanita (the queen of the kitchen who is also the scariest and most amazing woman i´ve ever met) killed the chicken. janiva held it´s head down while juanita killed it, and the boys helped to pluck the feathers. i wish i could´ve been there, but it was cool to hear about. at dinner we interviewed edgar which was pretty cool and then we all got on a bus with the volunteers and amazonians and drove down to the school. the program we went to see was supposed to start at 7. we got there at 7 30 and the actual thing started at 8 30. ecuadorians are late for everything. so basically the amazonians wore indigenous clothing and danced. i have a video of all the amazonian girls dancing with all the boys in our group. it´s hilarious. they had a lot of fun and it wa s great watching them. then we drove back to the farm, packed, and went to bed. the next morning we woke up and went on an 8 hour bus ride without a bathroom (which was really fun for those of us who were sick). we got to Quito, and i felt like crap again, so i slept while everyone went out to dinner and internet cafes. i woke up this morning and felt a lot better. i showered and now we´re in tena. we´re going to the amazon for a week without showers, electricity, or deodorant. we´re all sleeping in one room with a lot of bugs in an indigenous community. we´re building a cabin this week from scratch. it should be pretty cool. that´s all for now. i´ll update when i come back to quito
Chao!
Kate

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