unpredictable

work has been really slow lately, almost non-existent. I started off going to the consejo´s office every morning, usually staying until the afternoon. then i started skipping days and leaving before lunch because we hardly did anything if we hadnt done so by lunch. then i realized i hardly did anything most days and went to the office only a couple times a week. now ive also been lazy and its been 2 weeks since i last went; significant work is so few and far-between that most days its not even worth going.

so, ive been reading a ton lately, ive finished 4 books in the last 2 weeks. my total for the year i´ve been here is at 37. ive been rating them too, from 1-5, with 5 the best:

ender´s game: 5
me talk pretty someday: 5
secret life of bees: 2
white fang: 4
savages: 4
harry potter 7: 5
kite runner: 5
sidharta: 5
the forgotten: 5
fast food nation: 5
running with scissors: 5
lamb: 3
la selva: 2
animal dreams: 3
you shall know our velocity: 5
100 years of solitude: 4
living poor: 4
chavez: 4
memoirs of a geisha: 5
confessions of an economic hitman: 5
don´t kiss them goodbye: 1
lonesome dove: 4
lord of the flies: 2
killing pablo: 4
the 5 people you meet in heaven: 4
imperial america: 3
minus man: 3
into thin air: 5
a clockwork orange: 5
franny and zooey: 1
i am america: 5
count of monte cristo: 2
born standing up: 3
a short history of nearly everything: 5
angela´s ashes: 3
fluke: 4
lord of the rings 1: 5

most books come from volunteers in my group living nearby in th jungle, andrew and sadie. we have a ´book club´, where basically they get books sent from the US, read them, and leave them at my place til i get around to reding them. their tally is around 65 now, so i have a lot of books at my house waiting. im not trying to catch up with them, but at the rate im at now i just might.

on february 7 we celebrated our 1-year anniversary of being in ecuador. time has been going by faster, and now that there{s a new batch of habitat and agriculture volunteers in country (theyre still trainees, technically), i kinda feel like a veteran, and i guess i am, in a way. i mean, im not the best at getting things done and developes, but as far as the culture goes, i pretty much know what to expect (unpredictability, mainly). on an irrelevant side note, my program name got changed from ´habitat conservation´ to ´natural resources conservation´ recently - my boss says it´s cuz some ecuadorians dont know what ´habitat´ means and that natural resources is just a better term. i´d agree that if there´s anything we´re saving it´s natural resources like water and soil, more than jungles or forests from deforestation and the like.

back to working, i´d say the last ´work´ i did might be what got me into this funk in the first place. a few weeks ago i went down south 2 hours (which is a terribly bumpy bus ride, by the way) to Puyo in the neighboring province of Pastaza. on another side note, Puyo seems like a nice city, a little larger than Tena, more metropolitan, and cooler. my co-volunteer Jeremy lives down there with his wife, also working with environmental projects. a little town was interested in getting some some advice for building a dam so they could get running water in the homes and water to fill their fish ponds, and jeremy invited me to come out to help. we got out there, and saw the stream and the dam that was almost demolished after a big storm came. i{ll be brief here, if you wanna know details check out jeremy´s blog site, http://www.travelblog.org/South-America/Ecuador/Puyo/blog-248730.html
but basically we took some measurements, told them we´d come up with some designs for a new dam, and were on our way.

our (jeremy and i) idea was to make the dam/dike out of ´earth bags´: very basic, that is, just take some big mesh bags, fill them with soil, stack them, put a little clay over them , and voila - a dam. it would be pretty cheap, i estimated $150-$250 mostly just for the bags, although potentially time-consuming. nonetheless, us gringos decided it was the bestbet considering it´s very strong yet simple, and the resource missing was money, not time.

why did the original dam fall, you might ask? the municipality of puyo had apparently given them funds a couple years ago to build one, but hadnt provided them an engineer to consult them. so they built it out of expensive concrete - approximately 25 feet long, 4 feet tall, and 6 inches wide, essentially just a 90-degree wall sitting in the stream. now, i´m not an expert on dams, but i couldve predicted that the center of the wall would crack and fall due to the great pressure on it from the very strong rain storms that frequently hit Puyo. over the last year theyve been trying to put it together, but it just keeps falling with the storms. so jeremy and i found some resources online and in books on building this new earth bag dam, with a 45-degree slope to relieve pressure, dense, with a strong base anchored below the ground, and came back after a couple weeks to present our ideas.

the community leaders seemed to hear us but not listen. after all we had done to help design a durable dam, they told us they wanted to use a bulldozer to basically push soil and create a large strip of land where there was now a stream. they could get the bulldozer for free for a day, they just needed money for the gas. if anythig ive learned from working in ecuador its that it´s unpredictable, so i wasnt entirely surprised by this, and in fact i had told jeremy on the way there that i just hoped they wouldnt ask us for money. needless to say, we explained that we´re just volunteers and didnt have the funds, plus if we´d said yes they only wouldve asked for more later. jeremy and i still pushed the earth bag idea, as their idea might have rocks and materials in the soil where water could penetrate and crack it, and it wouldnt be dense enough, but they seemed set on their idea and we were set on not giving them money. we did tell them that whenever they are ready to bulldoze land we could come back to check it out, but nothings happened yet.

i feel bad for them, because they are the ones in poverty, they are the ones we are here to help, yet rather than accept our help they are stuck on the idea that money overrides knowledge. i hope they dont have to find out the hard way, again, but it seems thats what will happen. at least theres only about 40 people in their community. there are many points to this story - #1: working apart from the consejo can potentially be rewarding and allow me to see more of the country. #2: some institutions dont do a good job of really helping communities. #3: most communities would rather take money, especially from gringos, than sound advice thats better for the long term. #4: work here is unpredictable and in general sucks, yet im still trying to find my niche.