Siga no mas 2011

I just came in from watching a parade from my roof – January 22 must be a holiday here but my family doesn’t really know what it is. Ecuadorians will find any excuse to have a parade though. I spent most of the evening patching up holes in my clothes. I heard another volunteer say once that Peace Corps is where clothes come to die, and I totally agree. My clothes are already worn out from wearing them so many times and washing them on a cement slab. Today I also went to a minga with my host sister. This is any time when the community needs to get something done so the leaders make all the members contribute. Some examples would be all the families of the kids at the school have to come on a Saturday and paint a few desks, or more like the one I went to today which was a construction project. In Cebadas they are building a new coliseum, apparently for musicians and maybe soccer games or bull fights; I’m not exactly sure. Anyways, they are doing it with a huge minga. Each family is assigned 3 Saturdays where they have to send at least one member of the family to help out, and if they don’t they are fined so it’s a pretty big deal and lots of people show up. It kind of reminded me of working at Habitat for Humanity because there were a few people who knew what they were doing, but other than that there were just lots of other people doing random jobs. However, the process and tools used were very different than what I have used for construction in the US. The building is brick and cement, and today we were laying the cement on a stair or seat of the bleachers I guess. First we put up some wood planks and leveled and secured them, then filled in the area with big rocks on the bottom and smaller rocks on top. We then carried 50 KG bags of cement and mixed it with sand, gravel and water with shovels and hoes. It was carried by wheelbarrow on top of the rocks on planks of wood, then we threw more rocks in it and put one more layer of cement on top that was smoothed out. It is going to take forever to finish the building at this pace with that technique, but it will never fall down filled with all those rocks. I definitely think I will be sore tomorrow from carrying rocks and mixing cement all day, but it was cool to see how the construction process and the mingas work, and they got to see that not all Americans are lazy – they actually said we were good workers and Ecuadorians were lazy. Its easier for us though with cement trucks and power tools.

Since I last wrote on my blog I have had some visitors come see me – my sister Shannon and my best friend Sarah got here on Christmas day to spend 3 weeks in Ecuador. I spent Christmas traveling to Quito to meet them at the airport, but my family didn’t really even do much here, and my host sister went with me because she had only been to Quito when she was really little. We stayed in Cebadas for a few days over New Years which was an interesting celebration. They make this big paper mache kind of dolls and burn them and the men dress up like women. There was a contest for the best doll and the best woman costume (although there was only 1) and the president of the community asked me to be a judge. We also spent a few days in the Subcentro where Shannon and Sarah were pretty disgusted with the lack of cleanliness and privacy. It made me realize that I’ve just gotten used to that now, which is maybe not a good thing, but they also gave me some good ideas on how we can improve. I wanted them to go to the communities with us and we were supposed to, but then stuff just came up like it always does and we didn’t ever get to go. Another day in my site we went to another little town outside of Riobamba that has some hot springs; it was actually New Year ’s Day so there were lots of people there and it was pretty gross. You could rent a swimming suit for 1 dollar and there was one lady who had hers on backwards and it was really awkward. We also had to check out the market in Guamote on Thursday. The time we spent outside of my site, we went to Cajas National Park near Cuenca but up in the mountains. It was pretty cold and rainy but we got to do a cool hike and then we spent the night in the refugio in our sleeping bags. Shannon and I went to Tena for a weekend while Sarah went back to Quito to visit people she used to work with. Tena is in the oriente/Amazon area, so it was pretty hot and humid there. There are some really pretty rivers in that area, but actually last April the whole town pretty much flooded. We went to a little zoo thing that was being repaired because it was ruined in the flood and some of the big snakes and crocodiles were swept away in the water! From there Shannon went with me to a Peace Corps conference that I had to go to (I will write about that later) but I’m glad she got to meet the other volunteers and see kind of what Peace Corps is actually like. We went to the equator (the real one and the fake tourist one) and took a quick trip to go visit my host family from training then spent one day in Quito before they left to go home.

After my vacation time with my visitors it was time to get back to work, which has been as interesting and random as always. In the beginning of January I went to a conference called “Project Design and Management” with my counterpart Dr. Silva. We finally sat down and talked and worked on planning a project on medicinal gardens of native plants. However, last week he got a promotion after 14 years in the Subcentro and is now the Provincial Director of Intercultural Health and will no longer be working in Cebadas on a day to day basis. I think this is a good thing because I think he will love his new job and he will be a great resource if I still do the medicinal plant project, it will just be more difficult without him being there every day. I still feel obligated to work in the Subcentro though, but lately they have all been busy with a new nation-wide project going door to door looking for pregnant women and children under one. In order to achieve zero malnutrition, they are going to pay the women a certain amount for each time they come in for a checkup. I am not totally supportive of this idea, because it leaves me in the Subcentro with one nurse having to tell everyone that there´s no doctor here who can help them. Also they aren´t even finding all the pregnant ladies because they leave to go to work or whatever and aren´t always in their houses, then they come to the Subcentro asking about it saying no one visited their house. It is important that they come in and take advantage of the free medical care, but I think they should do it because they understand why it is important not because someone is paying them, and also there should be doctors available to see the patients that they say have to come in. Last week I went to visit another volunteer near me about an hour and a half away in Alausí who is working with World Vision in her town. There is also an office in Cebadas, and so the Health Promoter who works there and I chose 5 teenagers to come with us and we went to a workshop the youth group in Alausí because we want to start something like that in Cebadas. The idea is that the kids come down from the communities (and these are the kids who study only on the weekends) for a workshop about some topic of sexual and reproductive health and then they have to go back to their community and repeat the workshop for all the other teenagers. The original group receives training on sex-ed topics obviously and also self esteem activities and tips on how to be a facilitator. In Cebadas we want to start this with the teenagers who don’t go to school at all because there are quite a few who just don’t continue after elementary school, and I think they are the ones who need this information the most because they just end up getting married and having kids. I hopefully will start working more with World Vision in Cebadas once we get this group set up. I have also been working on the toothbrush project still, but its been difficult figuring out how to get them down here, and now we might have to go through the embassy or something.

I have now been here for 5 months and 4 days in my site, which sometimes seems like a long time, but I am still enjoying pretty much every day of this experience. Working with a huge national organization has become increasingly frustrating, but it would also be difficult working with no community connections so I’m doing the best that I can. Overall though this experience has made me realize that I don´t know what I´m doing and neither do the people who are in charge, so I’ve been looking into grad programs in public health, and especially ones that have Peace Corps fellowship scholarship programs.

Also new pictures on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2456613&id=19227721&l=6cf6897deb