Birthday Bash Banter

Apparently turning 25 is the new 21 and also, 27 is 21 too. How do I figure this? The shenanigans that Jason and I celebrated for our 27th and 25th birthdays, respectively, were not those of professional adults but resembled the actions of a college student who just threw out the fake ID and decides to take on the town, be it Durham or San Fransisco, for a whole week. The circumstances were just too beautiful not to take advantage and celebrate hard. My birthday was on a Wednesday, middle of the week, so instead of having to decide between one of the weekends, before or after, I decided to celebrate the whole week. Also, Jason’s birthday is the day after mine and therefore it was an absurd necessity calling for a full week celebration. To top it off, my other good friend Susan BC (not married Susan) birthday was the following Sunday.

So, where to celebrate? As I mentioned the circumstances are just too perfect. Do I want to go an hour south to Canoa to party on the beach with a bunch of local friends and x-pats or to Mompiche, a less developed but pretty beach 3 hours north with all my Peace Corps friends or stay in Tabuga? So many great options. Well, when your birthday is a week long, you can do it all. So, Jason and I started in Canoa with a bunch of friends, danced our faces off and ended up at a bonfire on the beach Saturday night. On Sunday after a day of fish soup, coconuts on the beach and general laziness Jason and I collected our things to head home. Being responsible adults that needed to work Monday.

While passing the Surf Shack, my brother’s former employer, Greg, stopped Jason and I, apologized for not making it out the night before and insisted that we stay another night. Jason and I have gotten really good at playing what we call the poor hungry gringo card which leads to us getting free food, alcohol and a bed for the night. Greg accepted the challenge and challenged us to tequila shots, on him. There isn’t a better way to make me stay then free tequila shots with good people on the beach. So, instead of being responsible Jason and I went tequila and we did it well. Jason fell of his chair and then proceeded to kick himself out of the bar with embarrassment and I drank him under the table, chatting about micro-credit and organic farming. All said, Jason passed the Canoa initiation and I continued with my reputation of competitive drinking and sustainable development banter.
Back in Tabuga, Jason and I went responsible for two days and awaited the arrival of Ryan, Akul and Elliot.

On my birthday the high school took the day off to celebrate on the beach. All the kids put in money to get groceries and we enjoyed an incredible afternoon of beach soccer, tuna sandwiches and even Frisbee. It was an awesome gesture of appreciation for me and a perfect birthday afternoon. Afterwards all the teachers came over to my America-in-a-box to give me a toast, some gifts and eat cake. The president of the community who is also the director of the high school, my neighbor and friend gave a really nice toast to my year and eight months that brought tears close to my eyes but happiness and cheap champagne wiped away the tears. It was really fun to have my work peers, my Ecuadorian brother, Jason, Ryan and Juan Carlos, a good friend from the bigger town of Jama all together on my birthday. I felt so lucky and full of love and goodness. My good friend Geomaira and other friend Fabiola gave me this really soft tiger print pillow for my birthday. Geomaira explained why the pillow was so important, she told me 1. The tiger print represents the way I attacked projects and can get really mad, 2. It says I love you in English because it’s a phrase you use with friends and I speak englihs, and 3, the light color on the tiger print is the same color as me. Hilarious!
The next day, Jason’s birthday, Akul and Elliot also showed up and we had a great birthday dinner and then played basketball in Tabuga with some teenagers in the rain. It was really awesome to have my friends in Tabuga and celebrate goodness with them.

Then, the weekend was upon us and we all headed north. Mompiche is the Esmeraldas province and was a completely different world. We are currently in the extreme dry season in Tabuga and everything looks dead and brown but up north it’s still green and beautiful. The beach at Mompiche is really nice and at the beginning stages of development. It’s the perfect place to invest in land, if anyone is interested. We’d be happy to live on it and manage it for you!

Some other friends met us in Mompiche and we spent the weekend in hammocks, drinking rum, fruit drinks, eating fresh fish, swimming, playing soccer and Frisbee. The best part of the weekend was the walk that we took to a virgin black sand beach. It was so beautiful! The sand glistened and was really brilliant. A handful of the black sand weighs so much and is just so different than regular sand. In an effort to display our politically correctness, we all covered our bodies in the black sand. It looked really awesome with my pink bathing suit and sunglasses. I’ll get pictures to post. After the black sand beach adventure we headed further north to a little island. We had to pay $1 a person to cross. The island is really small and only hosts a few habitants. We ate a delicious meal at the one ‘restaurant’ on the island and then took a walk. We attempted to climb coconut trees and drank fresh picked coconuts.

All said and done, the birthday week was absolutely fabulous and it was fun to turn 21 again!

Turkey Day

Thanksgiving has always been one of my favorite holidays and in my head and heart is a time to be with family. Thinking back right now I realize that I haven’t actually had thanksgiving in Concord since my junior year of college, 2004. Yet, I have still enjoyed my turkey with people I love. This year I started the day at Parque Carolina, the big park in Quito. I laid in the sun and cheered on my friends while they played football. I originally wanted to play, assuming it was going to be a casual Peace Corps game. Unfortunately for me, we accidently met up with a bunch of guys from the US Embassy. The head of DEA operations, military guys, etc. The majority of them had cleats and they even had real flags, the ones with a belt. So, my hippy bare-foot version of football didn’t happen but, it was still fun to watch and relax on grass. Grass is a funny thing to miss but after a life of soccer, lacrosse and playing outside, not havening green soft grass in your life is sad. In Tabuga there is just dirt, or dust in the dry season, like now.

A bunch of my friends were at Ryan’s new pad in Quito making a turkey day feast and I headed to the DCMs house. The DCM is the second to the US Ambassador and a pretty big deal. The house the Embassy rents out for him is a three story, 7 bedroom, 8 bathroom mansion. You can imagine the image we may have had of this dinner upon arrival. My inability to use a fork and knife after only using a spoon for two years and my new skill of sucking the meat off chicken bones had me focusing on my table manners. I even repeated to myself, don’t talk with your mouth full.

As it turns out, this image was wrong. The DCM and his family were incredibly welcoming, chill, fun and really wonderful. It was really great to talk to him about his work, all the places they had lived, the Foreign Service, the Peace Corps and everything. His pre-meal speech was perfect and reflected all my own thoughts. Thanksgiving is wonderful because it’s not about gifts and materialism, it’s about family and sharing and being appreciative. All of us people abroad find in others that sense of family and it was really awesome to be invited into their home with 8 other volunteers, share a delicious meal, some wine, cheese and good times.
We even got to watch football, sit on comfy couches and chose which ever bathroom we wanted to use.

After I went back to Ryans and allowed the turkey comatose to take over my body as I watched a movie and drank some boxed red wine with my PC family. I love Thanksgiving!

A Walk in the Woods

These woods look a lot different than the ones I visited in NH in October, but for me, a walk in the woods, no matter what woods, is an unexplainable pleasure. This 7 hour walk took me all along the boundary of the Lalo Loor Reserve, into an Ecuadorian uncle’s banana farm and back down around to the northern most point of Tabuga. The reserve is on the southern most boarder of Tabuga. While I was relaxing and eating lunch at one of the two local restaurants, scraping the freckle sized ticks off every part of my body, I had the biggest exhausted grin on my face.

Bigote, Maximo and I started the walk carrying a bunch of barbed wire, hammer, machetes etc. Bigote is the cook at the reserve and Maximo is in charge of trails, volunteers and other activities. The reserve has had problems with hunters and people cutting down wood (woodsmen?) and we were on a mission to close a door they had recently opened in the boundary fence. I strongly believe that the people coming into the reserve aren’t doing it o be malicious but literally for lack of other options. The people are coming in from Camarones and if you look at Camarones from some of the high points along the walk, it’s clear that the people have already destroyed all of the forest in the community. The community sits in a bowl surrounding by stripped hills once lush with dry tropical forest. Now the only forest sits along the rim of the bowl because it’s owned by big landowners who haven’t needed to exploit it yet.
To get to this fence we walked along a stream, it’s dry now because we’re in the dry season but remains the greenest part of the forest. Monkeys howled above our heads, playfully checking out who was in their territory. These howler monkeys yell like gorillas but really are the size of a two year old, an American two year old, not an Ecuadorian two year old, they’re smaller here. They are black and have awesome tails that allow them to eat fruits high up in trees that would otherwise be unreachable. They are also known for peeing on people and throwing their own feces in self-defense. This was the case with a fun Israeli volunteer who was really into photography. In attempt to capture the playful howlers on camera he would climb the trees and quietly follow the monkeys. I am not sure if he got any good pictures because he uses film and processes his own prints, but he definitely got some good stories.

I collected a few different plants along the walk to plant in our botanical garden that we are working on at the environmental interpretation center. One of these being a baby strangler fig. They are incredible trees, have a huge impressive presence and are my favorite in the forest. People say the roots can grow up to 100m from the main trunk of the tree. I don’t know if this is true but there are definitely roots in places where it’s hard to find the main tree. One of my favorite parts of the walk is this steep rock face that in the rainy season is a really beautiful waterfall. When we got to the boundary it was really disappointing to see that our neighbors had opened up a new door to get into our woods. We collected motor oil bottles, bullet shells and other trash. Then we got to work. It felt so good to be with Bigot e and Maximo, just the three of us, working hard, making jokes and being together. Besides my host family, they are my family here. Working side by side with them has been incredible. They have completely accepted my desire to learn everything even if it’s considered ‘man’s work’ and even expect me to carry heavy loads, machete the tough hard spots and align the barbed wire.

After the fence was put up and photos were taken as evidence of the trash and the new fence we headed uphill. This incline is ridiculously hard and I gasped at the new fence that my host dad and uncles had put up the week prior. My host dad is 50 but moves like a teenager in the woods. He grew up in the forest collecting tagua and palm seeds. Maximo, Bigote and I had to take two breaks just to get up this hill, my dad and uncles did it while carrying barbed wire and the fence has three layers… craziness.














The top of this hill marks the highest point in reserve and the farthest boundary from the road. From it you can see the ocean, which when you’re hot and sweaty is like a huge tease and makes you think, I wish I was a bird. Well, what kind of bird because during one of the breaks a yellow bellied toucan flew over us. Toucans have a very distinct call and all of our heads flew to the sky to catch a quick glimpse of this awesome bird.

Also at the top of the hill, you can find a lot of tagua trees and chonta trees. Tagua is the vegetable ivory that is used for jewelry and other art. It starts out as a liquid that is in a pod that is in a bunch of pods. With time the liquid transforms into a solid like coconut meat and later becomes really really hard. So hard that it is called vegetable ivory, you can carve it, dye it and makes amazing things with it. Still to this day people drink the tagua liquid where they’re out in the forest and, after that steep climb Max, Bigote and I really chugged it down. I also helped Bigote collect chonta which is a small peanut M&M size fruit from a spiny palm tree that is used to make a drink mixed with sweet plantains (Yummy!). In order to get the chonta down we had to use a long piece of bamboo, make a hook at the top and attempt to catch the thick stems in the bamboo to tear it off. This involved me stepping back and trying to direct Bigote. Every time he’s catch a stem of the huge heavy bunch of chonta he’d have to jump back quickly. Then we collected the bright orange seeds, drank a little more tagua juice and started to walk along the ridge of the hill.

This brought us to my uncle Gio’s land where I had never been. He has a ton of banana and plantain trees and a mama pig with 7 piglets came running to us through the trees thinking that we had brought them food. From here we started to descend into the northern part of Tabuga. As we passed different bunch of fruit trees Bigote told me who owned what. It was awesome to finally see where all the men go when they head off in rubber boats, on their mules with a machete.

During the dry season ticks are a problem in the forest and especially near cows. The ticks don’t carry diseases but are a pain in the butt and hard to get off. I have never ever seen anything so bizarre as the thousands of ticks that were falling on Bigote and Maximo. The ticks accumulate at the end of little twigs in the paths and when you hit them all those thousands of ticks stick to your pants and try to find the warm spots. Read between the lines here, almost all the men have found ticks in their ‘warm spots’. Not to mention armpits or just everywhere!

The walk ends on a smooth decent through ovo trees. I don’t know if there is word for ovos in English but they are a little bigger than grapes, have a hard seed in the middle and can either be sweet, sour or incredibly sour. People often eat them with salt and when I first tried them I hated them. Not, as time has taught, I love them. We stopped and climbed the trees and ate ovos all the way back down to Tabuga.

My walk in the woods was probably one of my favorite days in Tabuga. I felt so at peace, happy and sad all at once. I can’t believe I am leaving here so soon and that time has passed so fast. Yet, I felt like I was having closure with the forest. I saw monkeys, a toucan, tons of other birds, drank tagua, collected chonta and was with my forest family, Bigote and Max. Walking down the main road with a machete and a baby strangler fig, in my rubber boats, dirty and exhausted I couldn’t have been happier.

When I first got to Tabuga I started to take every Wednesday as ‘Andrea Day’. On this treasured Wednesday I would clean up my house, hand wash my clothes, prepare myself a favorite meal, bake sweets, read good books, listen to music and grade homework. I haven’t taken an Andrea Day since my brother got here in December. I pay my neighbor $3 to wash my clothes, I do favors for my mom in return for her to clean up my room, I live off rice, fried eggs and fried plantains and haven’t read a book for a good while. Now, almost a whole year later I am enjoying a well-deserved Andrea Day. I just ate a spicy home-made dish of vegetable curry, swept my floor, cleaned up my America-in-a-box room and was just reading. I am about to go bake some banana bread with my mom and later, go machete some weeds on our other piece of land with my dad.

It’s amazing that even in this slow life style I can lose my own tranquility, forget to take a breath and over-work. Just like the over-achiever I have always been I want to do too much, there is so much help to be given, so much progress to help set in motion. So, even though I have a ‘to do’ list as long as the stalk of bamboo I carried to my land yesterday, I am having an Andrea Day. Ecuador has taught me patience; a different deep patience that I think is impossible to find in the states, and today I am embracing it.

I originally started this blog as an email to a good friend but figured that it’s about time that I get a little personal in this blog. With the end of my time in Tabuga just around the corner, I find myself more emotional, sentimental and thoughtful. More than once this week I have been brought to tears by the kindness of a neighbor or my family. Tears brought on my happiness and warmth are distinct from those of sadness. But, mine seem to be a strong mix. The kindness and comfort warm me and then leave me chilled with the awareness of losing this all. My Ecuadorian family is currently distraught by the immediacy of my departure. Just last night, while we were discussing the plans of building me a bamboo house, my mom let out a helpless sigh. I thought perhaps she had cut her finger or stubbed her toe, but no, it was simply an honest sigh of pre-missing me.

On January 12th, 2009 I will head up to Quito for my close of service conference. This doesn’t mean much except for a lot of paperwork, the COS connference is 3 months early. But, for me, it’s a big deal as it signifies a big move to the capital. I will spend the end of January and the first part of February preparing for the arrival of Omnibus 101 in Quio. Then, I will head to Cayambe for two months to prepare the next group of natural resource conservation volunteers with fellow volunteer Susan BC. Cayambe is where this whole adventure started for us and it’s a crazy trip heading back there now as Co-trainer. I am really excited about the opportunity to share everything I have learned and be the coach for the next group. I think my Duke Lax senior year days are really going to be helpful for this experience. Coaching is the unique act of motivating a group of people while teaching them all the skills necessary for success. Team moral is crucial and simple lackluster classes won’t do the job of creating a super charged group of volunteers ready to go off on their own and perform.

Then why do you ask am I planning on building a house in Tabuga? Well, as it turns out there is an option to extend my service. I have been working with the president in my community on a request for a health volunteer to come to Tabuga after me. The health program is on a different schedule and the volunteers arrive in late August. So, I am requesting an extension of my service back to Tabuga to work for 4 months until a health volunteer arrives August, 2009. I am currently writing up a work plan with the president of my community to see what we could get done in those 4 months. We have two really great ideas and I think the Peace Corps will grant my extension…keep your fingers crossed.

So, I have less than a month and half in Tabuga but am planning on returning after training. My experience as co-trainer is going to be an incredible opportunity to wrap up my experience as a Peace Corps volunteer and I am hoping that a few extra months in Tabuga afterwards will help me wrap up my time here. I really feel like it’s too soon to go back to the states. I am experiencing an incredible mix of sadness and appreciation. This truly has been the most amazing experience of my life in so many ways. The amount of appreciation and love I have for Tabuga and all of my friends her is immeasurable. The sadness I feel in leaving Tabuga is weird. Mostly, I feel bad for leaving and have always found in my life that being the one that leaves is easier. In leaving one finds newness, where as the ones who are left find emptiness.
My Ecua-mom stated the other day that there will never been a Gringa like me again. She started to go through a list of my qualities that she loves and will miss. I tried to explain that different doesn’t mean bad, and the new volunteer will have something else to offer. Like lost lovers, we don’t ever replace them but rather move on to something different, unique and beautiful in their own right.