Buenas Tardes todos! Been a second since I´ve written but i think that's because I have been enjoying my last days here toooo much.
Leaving the Yanacocha foundation Friday afternoon on my way into Quito I had a hankering I would not be returning to that little piece of captive animal paradise after the festival on Tuesday. It was beautiful and so amazing to get to interact with all the animals so intimately but I felt like I had a complete experience in that first week and actually felt like it was more of a glorified zoo then a place for rehabilitation and restoration for animals and their habitats. Also the two other volunteers were also leaving that weekend, so upon my return I would have been the only lonely volunteer, and after living at the farm with upwards of ten other volunteers I wasn´t ready for the isolation. Anywho! I arrived in Quito late, after 11, the streets were already popping off in full celebration. I met some super cool American chicks on the bus who were doing a semester abroad in Ecuador and I got to learn all about the water quality and purification projects they had been working on also up in Puyo. We shared a taxi into the city from the bus terminal, and bid each other adu, they had final papers to write, and I was gonna hit the hay, take the first night of the festival easy since it was about to last three more days. There were lots of cool cultural events planned all over the city that weekend, one of which was Feria Quitumbe, an AMAZING outdoor music festival/Ecuadorian family fair that went all day every day with two stages and bands performances starting at noon and lasting into the night. I got to see some pretty cool South American acts, like one that was a six man group that sang acapella, but were singing the noises instruments make, so they sounded like a band with out the instruments, sort of nerdy concept, but it was entertaining enough, did sound bizarre though, i could definitely not sit down and chill to a cd of that playing in the background. On Monday, at noon, the last day of the festival, The Wailers! They sounded great, such a chill concert to be at. Then there was the other half of the fair grounds, where there were tons of booths with great Ecuadorian fair food, which is actually just all of their normal every day food, since everything they cook is already fried and greasy and super unhealthy, what I would associate with fair food. There were tons of crazy fair games, some really silly ones where the fair staff would recruit people into a ring and they would get into two teams and then jump on each other....hmm hard to explain but absolutely ridiculous, and the crowd went wild for it, but also activities for children like "hey climb up this pole" or "ride in this derby car that your dad or mom is pushing around a dirt track". I was so glad to get to walk around and soak up all the Ecuadorianess of it. Super cool.
Sooooo apparently a monkey stole my cellular phone when I was up in Puyo because I honestly can not imagine anyone else taking it and I literally tore my room apart looking for it and found far too many roaches and other bugs instead. Thankfully I was staying at the same hostel in Quito as all my buddies from the farm so I was far from alone in Quito just unable to contact any old friends from Yanapuma, my Spanish school. However, Saturday night, out and about, and I run into Allie, a volunteer from Yanapuma, who for five months has lived out in a very small coastal community called Estero de Platano working with the people to improve their systems of health, education and financial organization. Well, we had a great night out, actually stumbled into an Ecuadorian party held in a hotel banquet room with a live band and open bar and danced our hearts out, we are talking line dancing, the macarena, the cha cha slide, it was great, but we also conversed about me coming down to the coast with her. Since I wasn´t planning to return to Yanacocha animal reserve this new plan sounded perfecto. I would get to see what some long term volunteering looked like and have the experience of staying in a home stay in a completely different part of Ecuador. Allie had just received and filled a large grant from Yanapuma and was taking 1200 dollars of books back to the school library (built by a peace corp volunteer the previous summer) and was happy for the help with organization and education about the new materials.
I am now in the Esmeraldas bus terminal on my way out of Estero, but just had an absolutely amazing week there. I almost don´t know where to begin, there is so much to describe and the experience was so unique to anything else so far. Firstly, it is an absolutely breathtaking place, where the jungle meets the ocean. My home stay family was beyond hospitable and generous and welcoming. Emeritus was the grandma of the house, but she still had her 11 year old son in the house plus two of her grown children there with the additions to their families, needless to say it was a tiny, full house. So loud at six in the morning when the three little girls all under 4 years old were up and about and had their mothers running around after them. She cooked bountiful meals three times a day, I´m talking bountiful meals, even though this was a very small impoverished community they definitely had no shortage of food, fried, or family love. I got to sit in with Allie on the Women´s group and community bank meetings, and even though I´m still struggling to understand all the Spanish I´m hearing, (especially difficult down there on the coast where they drop more of their continents) it was still cool to see the development and processions of these meetings, Allie and Nik (the other volunteer from Yanapuma) always translated enough for me to stay just behind the flow.
I got to swim in the ocean, wash my clothes in the river, teach English in the school, go out dancing in one of the two town discoteques, learn some new Ecuadorian card games, have some seriously cold showers, practice a lot of Spanish and soak up some serious sun before returning to the dark and cold winter of Seattle. So glad to have this experience. Now I am off to Banos, a hot spring three hours past Quito for some R and R and that´ll just about do it for me here in Ecuador before my departure to the good ol´U. S. of A. next Sunday at 6 in the morning.
Can´t wait to see you all.
No comments:
Post a Comment