Our last days in the jungle

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Before I delve into my most recent experiences, I want to recap my last week in Chichico Rumi. Our last week in the jungle flew by. We started a new project in Putachincta on Monday: building a chicken coop. This was no small farm chicken coop. This was a two room chicken mansion. We built the entire thing from the ground up, including the outer structure, the roof, the cement walls, the doors, the fencing, the wood panels… It was quite a project. We had a lot of help from a number of the men from Chichi and Putachincta, which made things move faster. However, getting things moving in the morning was always a project in itself. Though the Kitchiwa people are hard working, they are not very task oriented, nor do they have organizational skills. We would have to delegate our own tasks in order to keep things moving and not end up sitting around looking for something to do.
However, after a week of hard work, we finished the coop and filled it with chickens. The entire village turned out for the ceremonial chicken coop christening, and then treated all of the volunteers to lunch to thank us for our hard work. The chicken coop is an important addition to the village. The food they eat is typically not very nutritious, so adding the protein from eggs and chicken will greatly improve their diets.
Our last few days in Chichi were relaxing. We spent Wednesday chopping down palms for grass skirts. The skirts were to be part of our costume for our farewell ceremony that night. After carrying the palms back to the village, we stripped them and boiled them to dry them out. We then had to tie each individual palm strip to a string and let it dry. We also wove these palm strips together to make headbands. The top part of our costume consisted of large leaves sewn to bras. We spent the rest of the day learning the ceremonial Kitchiwa dance, which, like everything else, took three times as long as it should have due to the lack of organization. Our group of volunteers then had to create our own “cultural dance” to perform at the ceremony. We chose the Macarena.
That night, we changes into our ceremonial garb, painted our faces with a local orange fruit, and performed our dances. The entire town, including several people from Puta attended the ceremony. The found our rendition of the Macarena very entertaining. After the dancing and numerous speeches from the men of the village, the women of the village presented all of the volunteers with a gift- most of us got hand-made jewelry. We were then treated to a fish dinner (the entire fish appeared on the plate and you had to remove the spine and head).
The next morning, we said our goodbyes to the villagers, many of whom cried as we left. We caught a bus in Tena for our 5 hour ride back to Quito. I came down with a cold during the bus ride, and was pretty much laid up for 24 hours once we got back to Quito. However, by Saturday morning I was back on my feet. Our entire group spent the day in Otavallo, a town about 2 hours from Quito that hosts an artisans market every Saturday. We spent the entire day weaving through the 8 city blocks of stands filled with everything from jewelry to art to alpaca clothing, to fresh meats. I spent too much money, but managed to get some of my Christmas shopping done!

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