Fiestas, Festivales, Giving of Thanks and a few more Parties

November 2011

Napo, Ecuador

   By the beginning of November I had made it back to my home in Tena and settled down for the Day of the Dead holiday week in my room to fight off a cold. For the week I spent most of my time watching movies and reading and catching up in lost sleep. By the time I was once again back with the living and out of my house we had moved into the second week of November which began with my birthday (23 years old!) and also the commencement of the Fiestas of Tena. The fiestas of Tena commemorate the founding of Tena and are said to be the largets festivals in the Ecuadorian Amazon. With 8 consecutive days of soccer, parades, fairs of arts and crafts, concerts and not to mention ,by American standards, a "sketchy as hell" carnival fair grounds; the fiestas of Tena were quite the site. One day my host family even had a cart to sell typical native food at the crafts fair. We sold various type of soups and fish and the crowd ate everything we could make within a few hours. During the festivals nearly every business in Tena is shut down except for the shops that are near the festivals and I took full advantage of the time off (following the previous week off) to soak up what Tena had to offer. 

  On the last day of the festivals a fellow PCV from the coast came into Tena with his sister who was visiting on her way home from Africa where she spent 27 months as a community health PC volunteer. I helped them organize their trip and set them up at one of the communities I work with, Kamak Maki. One day I had a chance to meet up with them to travel around for the afternoon and catch up as well as hear stories from the life of a volunteer in Africa. She said that where she had been posted in the middle of the Sub-Sahara, she lived a 30 km bike ride just to get to a road where she could catch a bus 8 hours to the nearest volunteer. She had no running water and more or less spent her entire 27 months with the same small village of a few hundred inhabitants. It was really interesting to talk to her and compare our two experiences. While being in Africa certainly seems to be a much greater stretch to the human capacity (living in Ecuador we get called "Posh-Corps" by other country volunteers) I feel like she also had a greater impact on the people in her village considering she worked and lived so closely with an isolated few. Living in Ecuador on the other hand, while we may not share in the hardships of living in a mud hut isolated in the Sahara, we do have the opportunity to reach a far greater number of people. I recently, for example, helped to write a business plan for a $4 million eco-tourism project which spans 6 communities directly and will include over 20 communities in the value chain. 

   This vast disparity between our two experiences really highlights the different forms of volunteer need found in various areas of the world as well as the need for a diverse set of development techniques. Where here in Ecuador I am able to reach a broader range of the population at a higher level (large project management) volunteers who work closely with an isolated community in Africa develop a much deeper connection with those chosen few (HIV awareness and first aid). I think that these two ends of the spectrum have delivered very positive outcomes. In her case of community health a closer one-on-one relationship is needed before you can even begin to talk about sex education, whereas in my case I am working with a federation of very well organized communities about creating sustainable jobs which is a fairy easy topic to gain public interest. 

  Another topic that was brought up was differences in training. Something I found particularly amusing was the issue of snake bites. Where I live in the Amazon snake bites are a very real concern, of the over 210 species of snakes in Ecuador more than half are poisonous. Her comment for volunteers in Africa however was that in training they are told, "if bitten by a snake: go home, write a letter to your parents, stay calm and go to bed. If you wake up in the morning you can throw the letter away".  This is because the volunteers are so remote you really have no chance if you are bitten by anything deadly... makes you think a bit. 

  Anyways, with the brother and sister duo we took a canoe from the river town of Misahualli down river a few minutes to a small indigenous community, active in community tourism. We were welcomed by the community members and brought into a bamboo hut complete with a thatched roof. Here our guide demonstrated the elaboration of chicha by mashing boiled yucca into a paste with camote (a root similar to a carrot) and letting it ferment 2-4 days before drinking. Next our guide played a song for us accompanied by his two sons and a group of 6 women dancers, we even got to join in on the dance! After a few pictures we were taken to a small hut too small to stand up in without hunching over where the community shaman, or medicine man works. Here we watched and received the limpieza, or cleansing ceremony, which consists of being repeatedly hit with leaves said to have curing properties while he recited a chant and blew tobacco smoke around the room. Having spent the previous 2 weeks fighting off my cold I was eager to give it a go, afterwards i don't know if I felt "clean" so much as smokey. 

  The next few weeks of November were spent most around my house, helping in the fields, harvesting cacao, yucca, platano and the various jungle fruits that have come into season like the ice cream bean, guava, camote, and a bunch of other round fruits I can't remember the names of. Between our time spent in the trees and out running through the jungle hunting (I only helped, we aren't aloud to actually hunt as pcv's) I quite enjoyed a very hot and sunny November. One of my favorite experiences here at the house was a morning when I had gone out to harvest cacao with my host brothers. By 10 am we had quite a mountain of cacao ready to sun dry and my 2 host brothers and I headed into the jungle with the family shot gun and our dogs. When we came up to a clearing back in the jungle we encountered a guatusu (which are quite plentiful here). My host brother took it down quickly with one shot and we headed back to our outdoor kitchen for lunch. Within an hour they had clean and quartered our catch and we prepared the traditional massamora, a soup made with mashed green plantain. While the soup boiled away I ran out and harvested a few guava beans, plantain and fresh picked jabanero peppers for the soup. I must say there is nothing quite like a jungle lunch that is that simple and fresh. 

   Before I knew it we had come to the end of November. The weekend before Thanksgiving I caught a bus to the mountains and visited the town of Otavalo to do some quick Christmas shopping and visit my fellow volunteers there. Then I was back to Tumbaco to visit my old host family from training and the 26.25 mile pilgrimage to the church of El Quinche. This is an annual pilgrimage in the sierra and the largest in Ecuador. For 3 days, over half a million souls shut down the streets by night to complete the pilgrimage over 6-9 hours. After a light dinner of a full plate of rice and fried chicken, note the sarcasm, we set out on our trek just after 9 pm. Having heard bout this trek in high school I told my host family during training that I would be back in November to walk with them. So on a clear night in Tumbaco I walked with my host dad and brother from 9 to 4:30 am with a total of 7 breaks lasting no longer than 60 seconds each. Along the way we passed food vendors, music groups, parents with children strapped to their backs, teens carrying boom-boxes, a few stray dogs and a lot of sleeping houses. By 12 'o clock I made a mental note that my legs officially hurt and by 4:30 we were stumbling up the church steps to take a "I told you we'd make it mom" picture and by 7:30 I was knocked out on the couch back home in Tumbaco. All-in-all I'm still not sure if it was a good idea but I had a good time with the host family.

  The following weekend back in Tena was Thanksgiving weekend and we volunteers in Tena found ourselves hosting a small group of PCV's from the coast. After our Thanksgiving dinner at the local Tex-Mex restaurant Thursday night I found myself playing tour guide for our visiting friends that weekend. Friday we headed down to Misahualli to play with the troop of Capuchin monkeys that live there. It was rather entertaining watching the girls on their tip-toes trying to feed ciruelas (a small plum like fruit) to the monkeys in the trees above who would stretch down, hanging by their tails, as far as they could and grab the ciruelas with the tips of their fingers. If one monkey was too small to reach their friends would help them out by jumping on the branch to weigh it down more. Next we caught a canoe down river to Kamak Maki and toured the community, botanical garden, kichwa museum and local animals before heading back to Tena for the best $8 filet mignon I have ever had (complete with penne marinara). On Saturday we caught a bus north to the Jumandy Caverns and paid 3 dollars each for a 3 hour guided tour into some of the largest caves in Ecuador. Our guide took us back to a waterfall where we jumped off the 6 foot high ledge into the pool beneath to swim, we took a bath in the clay deposits found at the end of a very slimy path, drank water from the stilagtite formation known as El Pene del Diablo which is said to give fertility and longevity, and jumped into a hole 3 feet wide where a waterfall had burrowed 15 feet vertical feet into the rock below (if you are claustrophobic, this was not for you). Following our spelunking expedition I took the group to a local treat at the typical food fair in Archidona where my host-sister runs one of the best restaurants in the Amazon. Here we dined on the famous Maito (tilapia wrapped in a maito leaf and grilled) and drank fresh guayusa, I even got them to try Chonta Curro, the steamed grub worms, and they liked them!

   And now, as I sit here in my room in Tena writing this update, we have entered the second week of December.  My time in the days since Thanksgiving have been spent largely around the house or scouring the shops of Tena in search for the perfect Christmas gifts. This week I've been building traps in the jungle with hopes of catching lunch, no luck so far. Also, as of the 21st I will be on my way back to Washington for the first time in nearly a year. I am now really looking forward to getting back to Seattle to see friends and family and spend time with my girlfriend. I am looking forward to shopping at Pike Place, seeing my mom's new house in town, getting coffee at Useless Bay Coffee Co. and hopefully getting up to Bellingham for a day on the slopes!