Our First Week in Sayausi

April 25, 2008
Friday
12:28 pm
Internet Cafe
Cuenca

We made it to our site! We arrived early Saturday morning and have successfully navigated our first week. Here´s a quick breakdown of what we were up to each day.

Saturday:
We arrived at 7:30am, after an ten hour bus ride, to the terminal in Cuenca where we were met by my counterpart, Padre Oscar and his apprentice Romel. We loaded our giant quantity of luggage into the Ecua equivalent of a Rav-4 and then made our way to Sayausi. In Sayausi we were taken to our new host family and served cafecito, coffee, bread and cheese. The house is over a hundred years old and you can tell. Our room is large with a cement floor and a low ceiling (Mike cannot stand up all the way!). The shower has hot water (but I have to duck to use the shower so I´m not sure how Mike does it), the kitchen is large and our mom serves about 15 diferent people a day (all different family members), and at night we can hear frogs, roosters (at all hours but between 2 and 5 am is when they are most active, and cats...but no worries we´re still sleeping soundly for most of the night.

After cafecito we unpacked our bags and then met with Padre Oscar and the convent for lunch. After lunch we attended a local meeting about the management of the local watershed...that´s pretty much all I understood during the entire three hours as I was completely exhausted from the bus ride the previous night. Nevertheless, Mike and I were invited to attend a later meeting made up of a few of the attendees to consolidate information they had on watershed use in the area.

We then returned and had dinner then went to bed around eight tired but happy.

Sunday
On Sunday we did laundry all morning. Then took a walk aroung SAyausi during the afternoon. When we returned from the walk we met seven of an unknown number of grandchildren and spent the afternoon/evening playing with them, watching ecua-volley, and pretty much just hanging out. During this time we were probably asked at least fifty times to name colors in English.

Monday
Mike and I went to the office at Parque Nacionl Cajas for their weekly adminstrative meeting during whcih we signed up to un 4 miles at about 4,000 meters in June...we´ll see how much of the run turns into a slow but steady walk. Everyone one in the office was really nice but the office itself is cold....for me, Mike seemed very comfortable, it must be that Ithaca upbringing. We were at the office until around 4:30 then returned to SAyausi in time for the afternoon cafecito (coffee and bread), played with the many grandchildren, ate dinner (met another grandchild), and hung out until bed time (again around eight o´clock).

Tuesday
We went back to Cajas for the day and drove around wtihthe secound in command all day traveling trhough the park and essentially down to the coast, which was hot beyond belief, to pay some sort of bill. It was a gorgeous ride and we got to see some amazing vistas they we were told nobody had seen for at least five years because because usually it is so cloudy.. We were then told several times that we must be good luck...not a bad perception to have to start off, we´ll try not to mess that up!

Wednesday
Mike went in to Cajas and spent the day fixing trails, hauling gravel, rowing boats, fishing a dead baby alpaca out of a lake, chatting with some exchange students from the states who were helping fix the same trail, and ate a piece of bread and 6 ounces of coke for lunch.

I spent the morning in a meeting with Padre Oscar during which we typed up a lot of information about the communities I´ll be working with and projects that need to be done and then he replaced the new updated file with the old one and the work from the morning disappeared...my first taste of how things here might be a little different that what I´m used to. AFter the meeting I did laundry again and finally took down the laudry we had down on Sunday because it was mostly dry...except for Mike´s pants which are still hanging today (Friday). I spent the rest of the day filling out the mountain of forms that we need to send back to Peace Corps and chatting with our host mom and here niece. Oh, I was served yogurt and apples for a mid-mornign snack at the Padre´s office, and squash soup, tuna, noodles, rice, and juice for lunch. When Mike got back and our family heard how little he ate during the day they immediately served him a big snack, coffee, and then pretty muched doubled his dinner portion that night...it seems that mothers and grandmother´s around the world make sure their children are fed well.

Thursday
Mike went into Cajas in the morning fro a meeting wtih all of the park guards in Cajas and I went with the Padre to visit a nearby school and the Sanctuary where he wants me to pretty much be in charge of planning the removal of the invasive pines in the area, replacing them with the natvie Quinoa tree (after improving the soil, of course), and many other things...and this is only one of the many projects that we´ve talked about, so it looks like I could end up being pretty bust pretty quickly, but we´ll see how everything goes as things have a tendency to change quickly and unexpectedly here.

In the afternoon, Mike and I went to the meeting about the local watershed again and spend the next 4 hours listening to the two other meeting attendees review a fifty-page document they plan the next phase of action. My brain just about exploded from the quanity and speed of Spanish that I was exposed to..I´m not joking when I say that I had a headache when I left.

Friday
So, that brings us to today which we are spending doing errands in Cuenca and enjoying a little bit more independence than is possible when living with a host family...though we very much enjoy our family here!

Hope everything with everyone is well and we promise we won´t bore you every week with what we did every day...but for now a while everything is new it is fun to share...unless of course we are inundated with requests for more minutae, then of course we will oblige.

Love to all!

..as we mentioned last post, our camera is broken. As such, we have stolen some images from some of our friends blogs. Sorry there aren´t more. We will work on it. enjoy....

PCV!!

April 17, 2008
Thursday
2:41
Quito
Peace Corps Office

We are officially volunteers! This morning we swore in at the ambassador's house and they served us BAGELS afterwards...not that bagels were more exciting than being sworn in but it was definitely a close second.

The house was beautiful and the morning was picture perfect....unfortunately we do not have any pictures...nor will we for a while. On Sunday, April 13 our camera took its last picture and then stopped working, permanently. So, for the indefinite future we will not be able to post any pictures of anything. Please check out the links to some of the other volunteer blogs for pictures from the past week.

Other than the lack of our digital camera everything continues to go well. We got our cell phones, which we've already sent out the numbers, and an address. Drum roll please:

Name of Volunteer (Mike Carbone or Mary Driscoll)
Cuerpo de Paz
Casilla 01-01-2001
Cuenca-Azuay
Ecuador

And please refer to our previous post about sending mail. All the previous rules apply, most importantly, no packages over 4 pounds and do not declare a value.

So, we've been in Quito since Tuesday morning after saying goodbye to Dona Fabiola and the family. We also had a party for all the families that hosted volunteers during training...during which Mike sang a Kichwa song to everybody with his Kichwa class and then danced!!

We leave for Cuenca tomorrow night and will arrive in our site sometime Saturday morning. Then two years of....I guess I'll finish that sentence over the course of two years.

Hope everyone is well. We love you and miss you all!

Sierra Trip

Monday
April 7, 2008
6:00pm
La Esperanza
Our Room

We’re back in La Esperanza after two weeks of traveling around the country. So now we have pictures to share and more stories to tell. Below is a slideshow of pictures from the first week when we were in and around Puerto Quito (a small, small city 5 hours west of Quito). Enjoy and if you have questions about any of the pictures there’s more info in our last post…if you still have questions post a comment and we can answer from there!



We spent the second week, last week, traveling around the southern sierra. First we traveled to Cuenca, which we’ve already said but doesn’t hurt to say again that it took twelve hours to get there from Quito. The first day we were in Cuenca we just relaxed, walked around the pretty city, and took a bus to Sayausi (our future site). Sayausi is only 25 minutes by bus from the center of Old Town Cuenca. Needless to say, it seems like we’ll be visiting Cuenca frequently. Our site seems nice, though we didn’t get a chance to walk around because it was raining. It’s located on a super green, super big hillside with a river running behind it and in front of it. After seeing it we’re really excited about getting there.

The next two days (Monday and Tuesday) we spent in Parque Nacional Cajas. This is the park that Mike is going to be working with for the next two years. It was beautiful! There are over 200 lakes and just as many waterfalls surrounded by steep green hills. The random picture of a house looking building with trucks in front of it is the office where Mike will be working.

Wednesday we went to an alpaca farm 3 hours, by dirt 4x4 road, outside of Azogues which is an hour north of Cuenca. The farm is run by Stuart White who is the person responsible for reintroducing alpacas to Ecuador in the 1980’s, and a former Peace Corps volunteer (Columbia, 71-73). During our visit we learned a lot about the paramo and paramo management and about how awesome alpacas are!! I love alpacas! They are just about the silliest creatures in the entire world. They’re totally skittish and make the strangest noises. We got to help cut their nails, sheer them, catch them, give them vaccines, and observe a castration. It was by far the best part of our training so far.

Thursday we traveled 3 hours back to Azogues then 6 hours north to Rio Bamba, where two years ago we rode on top of a train. So that was pretty much all of Thursday.

Friday we visited a small community that produces organic quinoa and Mike practiced his Kichwa with the local mujeres. Friday night we ate amazing hamburgers at a street stand with grilled pineapple, took super hot showers with reasonable water pressure, and watched some cable TV…in English! We’re totally roughin’ it.

Saturday we returned to La Esperanza after 7 more hours on a bus, did laundry, and went to bed super early!

Sunday we went to Otavalo a ir de compras and we ate some delicious pie.

Now here we are back in La Esperanza for our last week of training here before going to Quito to swear in as official volunteers. We hope all is well back home and that everyone is enjoying spring!!



(as always, click on the image to see a larger version/more options)