La Primera

OK-so I got you all excited by saying we had a blog, and THEN, there was nothing on it! How clever of me. We actually have been away from internet for several days so I have an excuse. Our 3 wks in Ecuador has rapidly come to a close, so it seems somehow appropriate that I am just now writing a post from the Quito house of our host Michael. I´m not sure I´ll post pics yet, so you´ll have to be on the edge of your seat for that. The farm is the family farm that belonged to his father. It is right in the center of a little town, Perucho, about an hour and half away from Quito. His family is one of the orginal families in town, so he jokes about being related to just about everyone, unless they´ve moved to town in the last 20 years. The surrounding area and other towns are all farming communties, often negotiating terrain that is so steep you can hardly imagine the dirt doesn´t all run off with one big rain storm. He has about 2 hectares of land, enough to produce some food to sell at the Quito farmer´s market during the height of the season. Unfortunately, because of an extremely wet rainy season, not much was growing when we got there. We did eat a lot of good vegetarian food, but not as much was provided from the farm as we had hoped. However, rice and lentils DO taste better on rural land in Ecuador! Apparently, we missed the Chiramoya season, which is supposedly one of the best fruits on earth, creamy and sweet. Michael is in the process of getting his farm organically certified. While doing that, he is also trying to convert some of the other farmers. We helped work on several other farms, all belonging to relatives! That´s one way to start a revolution I suppose. The biggest polluters in the area are the flower farms. While they employ several hundreds, they do not use safe pesticide management procedures and their use of pèsticides is extremely high. As you might guess, the US is a huge import of Ecuadorian roses, so think twice before you buy that next bouqet. I guess I could write for days, so I´ll try to stick to the highlights. Some revelations - they shovel shit in Ecuador just like in the states! Our most ¨exciting¨ opportunity to experience this was a chicken farm. We got dropped off, just us gringos, and embarked on the task of cleaning a 15´ by 40´ building of slopping wet, 8¨ inch deep chicken business. Oh yeah, there was a handful of dead chickens to boot. After one of the volunteers puked, he ran back down to the farm and told Michael about the conditions. We were NOT required to finish. Yes, we are paying to have this volunteer experience!! I joke, but it has been wonderful. We enjoyed a trip to the coast to an Ecotourist farm called Rio Muchacho. It was interesting because it was a completely different set-up from our host farm. Much more established and because it catered to tourists, there was this strange mix of tourist, volunteers, Ecuadorian staff, and students for a permaculture class. I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out everyone´s role. And, yes, we had another opportunity to move some poo! This time horse and cow. This farm was particularily interesting because they have several active waste reuse systems - grey water, methane gas collection for the kitchen, and various different composting systems. Randomly one afternoon, while Ramijio (Michael´s cousin) was driving us around in his flower farm transportation bus, we stumbled upon a small yogurt and cheese making factory in one of the towns higher up in the mountains. We were so excited we took a field trip back 2 days later to check in on Raquel milking her 11 cows, then helped start to process the yogurt and bag some cheese made the day before. Oh this cheese!! It is called queso fresco and I´m not sure if we can get it in the states. It is wetter than Cotija and more of a fresh mozzerella consitency. Our volunteer teams have eaten 1 to 2 bricks of this a day!! Carsen endured a 7 hour night bus ride where we were stuck in the last 3 seats on the bus with a raging fever. Luckily, that was the ONLY symptom! The busses drive CRAZY fast here and I woke up several times thinking ¨Don´t look, you don´t want to know!¨ When one passed on a hairpin turn I realized praying might be a good practice after all. The the last 2 days saw his fever arise again, followed by me getting it and Sinclair getting a stomach bug. We´re flying tomorrow, so I hope we are all feeling better. Fortunately, we have not had any problems with ¨the travelers plague¨ (you know what I´m talkin´about!) but we´ve had a very conscientious host. Traveling on our own in Peru might present us with some different circumstances! We´ll have more to say about it on the next blog......