expect nothing and anything

i realize i´ve been a bit negative about my experience in ecuador so far, but really its not a bad place. it has its advantages, for instance:

after 2 years i will be an expert in balancing myself in the bed of pickup trucks. seated, standing, crowded in with 25 other people, halfway hanging off the side, grasping on at 60 miles an hour, in the rain, in the dust, securing a water barrel full of fish, it doesnt matter.

peeing in public is much more common than in the US. there is a lack of restrooms here and so its just more accepted that when u gotta go, u gotta go. but sometimes u have to watch out where u go. one time i peed on the side of someone´s house and was almost killed by the owners´ dogs.

being able to speak english with other volunteers without others knowing what ur saying. it comes in handy sometimes, like when u don´t particularly like someone. i like to talk trash on the basketball court in english esp. when other gringos are playing too. occasionally i talk trash in spanish too. it´s amazing how quickly ur words can switch to spanish when u need it. and my vocabulary somehow gets 10 times better when i try to argue a call.

even though i dont play basketball anywhere near as frequently as i used to, my game is definitely above average for an ecuadorian, and this has helped me ´integrate´ into my community a little as i play for the provincial government team. we just had a game on friday night in which we played teams from different parts of the province like archidona, baeza, and el chaco. my team is pretty good, i scored 9 points wearing running shoes (i need to buy bball shoes soon but its tough to find size 11 shoes in tena). so its pretty fun playing ball and getting to know some of my coworkers. supposedly we´re gonna go up to the province of ibarra next month and play in a tournament of consejo provincials from all over the country.

this country is ridiculously rich in natural wonders. for being only the size of colorado, it feels alot bigger. of course, this is due to the fact that its cut in half by the ginormous andes mountains which in part make the travel times alot longer (to get from tena to quito, which is 100 miles, it takes 5 hours on bus. there is an elevation change of nearly 2 miles. stupid andes). anyways, the parts of this country that have been left relatively unspoiled are are incredibly beautiful. theres tall waterfalls, ripe rainforest, snowcapped volcanoes, rampaging rivers, cavernous caverns, majestic mountains, and parched paramo. and thats not even including the coast. last week on my way from tena to quito, slowly ascending the eastern flanks of the andes, i went from seeing waterfalls in the humid tropical rainforest to icy and barren paramo to the snow-capped volcanoes that surround metropolitan quito. the trip is quite humbling.

last sunday i ran an 8k (5 mile) race in quito. it was cool, a little unorganized but im used to it, but i was happy with my time of 39 minutes, just under 8 minutes a mile (plus it was windy and the altitude doesnt help). although it was a flat race, running all on paved streets so that helped too. theres a 10k coming up next month, and supposedly a bunch of the new health and youth volunteers are gonna participate (the day after their swearing-in) so i might try to make it up there for that.

it seems northamericans are more sheltered than most ecuadorians. for instance, how many americans have killed a chicken. i know i havent. but here i have already seen several killed right in front of me, and im fairly sure that i will kill one or two myself before i leave. really what i mean to say is, living in ecuador, unless u live in one of the large cities, is a lot like living on a farm. i live in a city of 15,000 people and still theres chickens cooped up outside my apartment. (for people from so cal, tena reminds me a little of artesia in this respect).

on wednesday this week i went up to my counterpart´s farm. my counterpart, by the way, is fabian he´s 26 or 27 and is kind of a spaz but hes pretty dedicated to the project. anyway, we went up there to deliver 400 baby chicks. fabian is originally from baeza so we went up to his family´s house and set up a little chick coop and put a heater above them to keep them warm. (on a long tangent, baeza is a couple hours north of tena. its smaller than tena and the people are much friendlier. in tena only once in a while will a stranger say buenas dias or buenas noches to you, but in baeza as in most small towns its much more common. baeza is mountainy and much colder than tena, being at maybe a mile altitude compared to tena´s 500 ft. my best PC friend, a volunteer from my omnibus who also lived in olmedo during training, elliott, is stationed in baeza although hes usually in tena about once a week cuz the parkgaurds he works with have meetings in the environment office here and also cuz theres more nightlife here. but i half-joke with him that we should switch sites in a year cuz baeza is just that nice. yeah.) when would i have the chance to see or participate in that back home??

the next day we went over to his farm to check out his father´s tomate de arbol farm (yes, in ecuador the tomatoes grow on trees. no joke.) it was pretty impressive, although it looked like they use a heap of pesticides which maybe someday i can get them to change. then we went to castrate pigs! well i didnt really do the castrating, an agricultor came along to do the actual surgery but i helped tie the pig up and held him down. i even twisted one of the testis off, which u can see in of of my pics on snapfish [*warning some are pretty graphic]. it wasnt too gruesome having dissected several animals in biology lab, although those animals are usually dead, and the cry of the pigs wasnt pleasant. after that we injected all of them with a vaccine against pig viruses and such ailments with which pigs are afflicted(?). so fabian had to grab the pigs (some of them as big as, well just think to the largest pigs u´ve ever seen) by the ears in front and i come in from behind and make sure it doesnt back out by basically grabbing its flanks. and oh the screeching. then they would kick their legs trying to escape and in the process kick, yes, pig crap onto we. so thats what i mean by sheltered..

i fell in love with one of fabian´s family´s puppies, a 4 month old named rufo. he rode with me in the back of the pickup to the farm, just me and him after another dog riding with us mysteriously jumped out at 30 miles an hour (he was fine, but rode inside the truck the rest of the way). little did i know that back in tena the night before, my own dog (well, half-dog. . me and my landlords share responsibility for her) gave birth to puppies of her own. 13! it was at 4am, i wish i could have been there for it. and we were expecting only 3 or 4. so i´ve been a little preoccupied with taking care of them and feeding yana, but mostly with just watching 13 puppies. they have their own dog house under the stairs, dry and obviously warm, where they make adorable little whimpers and barks. its amazing i´ve never been around so many puppies, i wasnt even sure a dog birth would go, do u need to help the mom or what? but for people here living with and raising animals comes second nature, theyve been doing it all their lives.

living on my own is pretty cool. its the first time ive ever had my own place and i must say i like it. besides the cockroaches, roosters (which i am slowly getting used to), and the occasional roof leak, i really like where i live. its big and has a nice view, its in a central location, and my neighbors and animals are cool.