"What's the knife for?" - "Panthers"

To my fellow readers,

   Sorry for the lack of updating my blog, the last few weeks have been a bit busy to say the least. Last I left off we had just gotten back from a family trip up to the Otavalo native market. The following week was spent back in class and doing the final eval. tests (I scored Advanced High on my Spanish test). We also had a volunteer potluck, a value added fair and us 5 business volunteers had most of a day to teach the other volunteers about various business topics. I covered costing and pricing and then a bit of Econ 101 (my professors would be so proud haha). We also played plenty of soccer and a bit of frisbee. Saturday was family appreciation day for which all us volunteers were responsible for planning out the day and bringing all the food. We had 40 of our chickens that were raised in back of the training center slaughtered and prepared for our families as well as fruits and vegetables and drinks. I was on the activities group and being the loudest of the group, got stuck being MC for the day. We had an egg carry, sack race, 3-legged race, soccer, frisbee and basketball to name a few. That night we all met up at one of the volunteer's houses for a fair well party and danced away until the wee hours of the morning. The following day my host family took me on a 3 hour car ride south to Ambato where we saw the big leather markets and ate cuy (guinea pig) and rabbit.

   That Monday we started our final week of training which really lasted two days. We had some over view sessions for scheduling the week and met with various people from the embassy. Tuesday we took a "cultural: trip" into Quito and toured the churches, much better in the daylight, and were done with training by 2:30, free to go home and pack. The following day we all got to the training center at 8 am and were met with lunch. Everyone had on their Ecuadorian best completed by our PCVL who wore a corduroy green sport coat. By 9:00 we started our swearing in service accompanied by the current Chargé of the U.S. embassy (due to the previous Ambassador's PNG status). Swearing in was short and sweat and had a few nice speeches from fellow volunteers. After some pictures and a few good byes, half of the training group hopped on buses and headed to their sight. The other half met up later that afternoon for a nice good by dinner, or "Last Supper" if you will, at were gone by 6. I however, had the privilege of  staying one more night in Tumbaco with my host family who were personally driving me to Tena the following day. Therefore I only saw it necessary to treat them to the Liga soccer game that night at the Casa Blanca stadium (Liga won 1-0).

   Thursday morning I left my host in Tumbaco for the last time with my host family extra early, only to stop off  at our aunt's house for a quick breakfast and coffee before getting underway. We had a beautiful, sunny drive up over the mountain pass of Papallacta and into the Amazon. We made a quick stop in Archidona, about 15 miles north of Tena, for some Mitos (tilapia wrapped in a leaf and bbq'd) before arriving at my new home in Tena around 1. After some words of thanks on my part and words of wisdom and encouragement from my host family, they were off back to Tumbaco to de-Gringo the house. I am grateful for all they have done for me.

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  And hear begins the Tena saga. Having arrived to an Evangelical Kichwa community on the Thursday of Semana Santa, I was just in time for church. We began with dinner, at the church mind you (everyone had chipped in weeks before), followed by the opening mass of  weekend festivities. I couldn't quite tell you how long it went but I left around 10:30 and they were going strong. My guess is they were there till around 1 or 2 am. The following day we went back to the church for breakfast followed by morning mass which lead, conveniently enough, straight into lunch at 1 pm. After lunch we were free to relax in the shade, hiding for the 90 degree heat, or try as I may to throw the fishing net out back in the Tilapia ponds. Then back to church around 6 for dinner and repeat of the night before. The night time mass was highlighted by various church groups introducing themselves, some having come from as far away as Quito, and a few even had songs to share, both in Spanish and Kichwa.

   The following morning I was up by 3 am, headed to the church with my counterpart to cook breakfast for the 1,500 Kichwa people who had come to Tena (how could you say no to that?!). So there we were at 3 am on a Saturday morning in back of a church, cutting mountains of freshly slaughtered beef from the day before, chopping piles of onions, tomatoes, carrots and cilantro. We boiled pots of plantain bigger than I am and massed them in the traditional for with what can only be explained as a wooden bludger from Harry Potter. Then by 6:30 am we served our massed plantain with beef stew and Colada Mora and trash cans full of Chicha to drink to around 1,500 happy and smiling faces. Having made breakfast that morning, I was able to sneak out of morning mass to go buy food from the local market for lunch that day including 300 pounds of potatoes. That afternoon we went swimming in the river that wraps my community and little to my knowledge there was a big swimming hole in one bend in the river deep enough to dive into and race across the river. The water was perfectly refreshing and the sand on the fair side of the beach nearly rivals a real beach from the west coast. That evening I was in bed by 9, having snuck out of the evening mass early due to my immense lack of sleep.

   Sunday was the final day of Semana Santa and looked much more similar to a traditional church mass. After   a breakfast of fresh chicken slaughtered the night before, rice, veggies and more trashcans full of Chicha, we had mass until 11 or so. I spent the majority of the rest of the day napping and reading a book. Apart from my 4 day Evangelical church experience, I was able to meet nearly every Evangelical Kichwa family within 100 miles of Tena and at the least everyone in my community and the surrounding communities. I got a chance to talk, joke, laugh and drink chicha from the traditional pilche (a cup made from a local tree growing gourde) with many of my community members and can not count how many times I have been asked if I am married and have children. I met family members, a professional white water kayak and rafting guide who won Survivor Ecuador a few years back, a local teacher at a bi-lingual Kichwa school, expert hunters, and village elders. I've met mothers and daughters and last year's Miss Tena. And I've been personally introduced as an Engineer of International Business and Economics to many of the Presidents of the surrounding communities in which I will be working over the next two years. So needless to say, apart from the aspects of being in church, I got a lot of important work done over the weekend.

   Monday I officially started work. We went to the office and planned out some of my schedule for the next few months here and then spent most of the rest of the day at the hardware store and the Office of Tourism. Yesterday I was up by 5:30 and out of the house by 6:30. My counterpart Lenin and I, accompanied by two other employees at FENAKIN, drove about an hour south out of Tena to a community called Ponce Loma. We dropped off some farming supplies bought the day before at the hardware store and then donned our rubber boots and hiked out into the jungle. It was an hour long hike through an old muddy trail that lead us to our first destination, a community called Yana Urcu. There we met our guide, a 50 something kichwa man clad in camo from head to toe and armed with a 6 inch kitchen knife. Along with 4 other village members, 2 early twenties boys armed with a machete and a shotgun who literally ran out in front of our group for protection and to hunt, and 2 late 50's men also armed with machetes to clear the path, one of which was missing more than half his teeth. After a few cups of Chicha de Yucca we left Yana Urcu and headed north, following an old, muddy hunting trail out through the Amazon Jungle. At various points during our hike which was more of a slow jog, our guide would point out various trees marking the edges of properties lines of the men in his family (most properties were around 40 hectares minimum). Within an hour we got to the end of the trail where they had put in a little wooden cabin on the edge of a cliff looking out over the valley. From there we dropped off the side of the trail and picked our way through the jungle, all the while our guide new exactly where he was going (and when I say through the jungle, I mean zero trail, jumping over trees and clinging to branches as we switchbacked down the cliff. Once we were about an hour off the trail and walking along a cliff drop, our guide stopped quickly and hacked down some branches in front of the cliff to reveal an amazing view out over the valley to a giant waterfall (literally named Mother Waterfall in Kichwa) completely in accessible but for this one foot path. At this point in our hike I asked our guide why we was carrying a kitchen knife, he looked back at me and simply replied, "panthers," and carried on with our conversation. After 5 minutes of rest to talk about building a pathway out there and a look out we quickly turned around, and with the same speed as our walk down into the valley, we ascended and hiked out. By the time we arrived back and Yana Urcu, I pulled off my rubber boots and rung the sweat out of my socks to let my then pruney feet dry out in the sun. My pants had wicked sweat to mid-thigh and my shirt had soaked through- I drank over a gallon of water.  One hour back through the mud saw us to the car and we headed home, all-in-all it was 7 hours of hiking with a short break for chicha, chicken and yucca soup.

   Needless to say, when I woke up this morning after one of the more solid nights of sleep I have had to date here in Ecuador, I was a bit soar. Never-the-less a  Peace Corps Volunteer's work is never done so by 7 am we were back in the truck off to pick up 335 baby chickens and deliver them out to a community 3.5 hours down the Napo River. For the first 2 hours we followed a well groomed gravel road, maintained by the oil company drilling somewhere out in the jungle, but for the next hour and a half we were on a...more humble gravel road that was determined to make us turn back. There was no stopping our little Mazda truck from delivering those baby chicks however and we made it out to our destination in good time. The road ends at a river, which during a dry period is easily crossable by trucks, though the heavy rains last night and this morning brought the trickling stream to roaring life, easily 8 feet deep and churning thick with mud and silt. We were met by many members of the community there at the river who had come to carry their supplies back over an old, shaky suspension footbridge and out an hour's walk to get home (supplies included nine 100 pound sacks of feed) and they did so with smiles from ear to ear.