half-way done!

one year of service has come and gone in ecualand. it´s weird to realize that, because the days themselves seem to go by slowly, yet the weeks and months are flying by. i´m still not ´working´ much, but i have prospects and remain optimistic. basically the last few weeks i´ve been trying to work less with the consejo, and meet contacts myself. i´m a lot more confident in my spanish that i was when i got to tena a year ago (one year and one week ago today - i arrived here on april 22 2007). it´s not that my spanish vocabulary is outstanding now, and i´m definitely not fluent. i feel more comfortable, knowing what´s usually said in an average ecuadorian converstion and knowing that i´m gonna make some mistakes. it´s cool to know another language, but it would be cooler if i didnt have to work at it still - like if i didnt have to concentrate as much, or if i could speak ´street spanish´ better or if i didnt have to practice by reading spanish subtitles in movies. but it´s progressing with time.

i´ve been to the town outside puyo with the dam a couple more times since the last blog. i finally remembered the name of it now - urki churi, or something like that. interesting name, i know - it´s a kichwa name for a type of bird, they tell me. anyway, me and jeremy went back last month to check out the dam they built. they got money for diesel for a tractor and in one day they bulldozed a bunch of dirt & rocks near where the old dam was. the first time we returned jeremy and i were pleasantly surprised to find the 10 fish ponds full of water (no fish) and the dirt dam they made looking pretty good. of course, it wasnt our design, with bags of soil and clay that would make it dense and fairly erosion-resistant. so we still told them our concerns and advises them to put a layer of clay where the water met the dam. we were pretty impressed, the dam was about 15m long and 5m wide, apparently constructed easily with the use of the machine.
we arranged a ´charla´, or discussion session, aboutfish farming and environmental topics for a few weeks later, and left feeling pleased yet a little worried about the durability of this new dam.

sure enough, we come back a few weeks later to do the charla, and there´s no water in the fish ponds. great. inspecting the dam, it´s still holding up, but now the problem is where the pipes on the side of the reservoir catches the water to send it to the fish ponds. water is now slowly flowing under his cement catchment basin, and basically going around the dam. so somehow they gotta patch-up that leak (and pray the actual dirt dam portion holds up). i gave my fish presentation to 10 community members (they originally said 30 would show up) in 1.5 hours. i wrote it in a powerpoint show and jeremy brought his laptop and a projector from his office to present it on a screen. i even incorporated a little educational game halfway through. i think it went really well. of course, i wish more people had shown up, and we´ll have to wait for them to get water in their ponds to see how well they´ll raise fish.

after a chicha break, jeremy gave his presentation on environment issues such as global warming & pollution for 30 minutes. i loved when he explained to these people who live in the jungle (yeah, theyre cutting it at alarming rates, but theyre still living much more sustainably than the average american) how america is the #1 polluter, but it´s affecting people everywhere like themselves. we drank some more chicha and discussed perhaps a potable rainwater collection system for them, then got on a bus back to puyo. i for one was feeling pretty damn good (it was my first charla, jeremy has given several before). i´d say it´s probably the most productive thing ive done in my service yet. hopefully they can actually get their damn dam fixed and some fish into those holes in the ground.

a few weeks ago i went to the coast for the first time. it was really nice. i planned to go with elliott and his girlfriend trinity , but he had to work, so just me and trinity went. like elliott, her and i are good friends (she always lets me stay at her place in quito when i´m there, and vice versa). her & elliott were going out in the states (colorado), and when he came to ecuador for PC she signed up for teach for america here too. it´s a program where u pay $ to teach english in other countries, and they pay u back as u live and work in that country. shes not a big fan of quito´s cold weather, but generally likes ecuador. and i like having a free place to crash in quito.

so the bus ride took 9.5 hours, from quito to a small town named tabuga, outside jama, in the province of manabi. normally it would have taken 7 hours, but it had been raining heavily the week before and mudslides closed the main road to the coast. we stayed w a PC vol andrea, who´s also a godd friend. as soon as we arrived she served us ceviche - a typically coastal soup with huge shrimp grown nearby, yuca, lime juice, and platano chips, or ´verde´. we hung out a while in her small, quaint hut and slept while andrea and her brother alex, who´s been living w her since january, went to work in the forest reserve nearby. i´d only slept 4 hours on the night bus we took, so her hammock was very nice. it´s funny, andrea´s mom got to know me through hammocks. her family visited tena in december, and while we were having cocktails together at araña bar she mentioned something about my hammock. how did u know i have a hammock? i asked. turns out she´d read about it in my blog before she came. g2g for now. ¡chao!