Observations from the Trip to Manta

The trip to Manta has made me recognize the knowledge bases in conflict, between me and my community. There is the Western knowledge base, which I more strongly connect with, and the Kichwa knowledge base. Although I have tried to be extremely culturally sensitive, the trip to Manta brought these differences out. Before the trip, the only really conflict I had had was that our conception of time is different. Often my coordinator would be late (30 minutes to two hours late) coming to a meeting that I had been early for, or he would be really early on the days that I happened to be accidentally late.

However, on the trip to Manta the differences became clear. The first was that the differences in the conception of time became emphasized. We had to have the coffee in Manta by 9am on Monday, and we left at 4pm the night before, leaving lots of time to make the 12 hour drive. The only problem was that we were driving extremely slowly; sometimes we were going up the mountain passes at the speed of a walking horse... It took us 9 hours to get from the community to Quito, a trip that should take about 4 to 5 hours. By 9am, we were just over halfway there. By that point, we also started getting frustrated calls from the project director who was supposed to be meeting us in Manta at that time. This clash was brought to the test when we finally got to Manta around 3pm (23 hours later) and the program director had to cover up for the community by saying that it was the driver’s fault, not the community’s tardiness. Being this late for a deadline could have cost them the contract that they have with the shipping company, but I don’t think that they recognized that.

The second knowledge difference was of gender. When there is a cramped space, Western culture places the woman in the best spot. From my experience in that ride to Manta, it might be the opposite in Kichwa culture. I already knew that men were placed at a higher standard than women, but my position in the car exemplified that. This may not seem like a huge deal, but when there are 3 people (and the driver) crammed into a truck bench seat made for two, something has to give. I was told to go in first and was given the worst position in the car, half on the seat, and half on the emergency break, having the stick shift jammed into my lower thigh every time the gear needed to be changed. I eventually dealt with this by talking clothes and blankets and stuffing them around the emergency break to create another cushion for myself. However, things got worse when the two men beside me were getting antsy and uncomfortable, and so they spread their legs and ended up pushing me so far towards the driver, I had to cling to the driver’s seat in order to stay upright. They did not notice, and when I asked them to give me more room, like gave me dirty looks and grumbled before they moved over maybe an inch. Apparently, even though I am in huge amounts of pain, their comfort matters more.

On a background note, the trip we made to Manta (a coastal city in Ecuador) was to drop off just under 10,000 pounds of organic, shade-grown, fair trade coffee at a shipping company so it could be sent to the buyer in Germany. I had the privilege of going because I am learning about the coffee process in their community as an alternative to oil development. This amount of coffee is actually only the last 2 months worth of production, which I think is amazing! I went with my coordinator’s assistant, the driver, and a chauffeur (because the driver didn’t know how to get to Manta). I did learn lots about the final bits of coffee production and they asked me to take pictures so that they could increase their small database of pictures they have of the process.

63 bags of beans (aroun 10,00 pounds - each bag is 125 pounds)

Also, based on my experience above, I decided not to go back to the community with them, opting for taking a bus. This decision was also reinforced when I found out that they were not going to stop so the driver could sleep, even though he had already been up for over 48 hours. Definitely wasn’t going to risk my life to get back to my community faster...

Anyways, it was an interesting trip to do to follow the process of coffee as far as I can take it. However, I doubt I would do it again...

Musings from Amazon: Week II

My mom gave me the idea of doing vignettes about what I have been doing in my placement, since there is honestly too much going on to write down, or even think... So here goes:

The Marvels of the Amazon

Although I have a lot of bug bites, I have a rash in the crook of my left knee that is red, itchy, and bumpy (a lot like hives). I showed this to my host mom, Yolanda, and she immediately diagnosed it as from a butterfly. A butterfly... A pretty butterfly has caused this incredibly itchy rash on my leg. Only in the Amazon... She explained that the powder that is on the wings causes the rash, although I have no idea how this could have happened. It is in a rather awkward spot. I told her I had medicine for it, but she went outside to her garden anyways.  She came back with a few large, deep green leaves which she dipped into some hot water. She worked one into a paste on her hand and then rubbed it onto my rash. She explained that the plant has penicillin in it and they use it for stomach pains, infections, and stomach ailments. She told me that they don’t need medicines from the pharmacy because they have all the medication they need in the plants around them. It definitely worked, and I didn’t been my anti-itch cream. This I thought was extremely interesting. The Amazon produces weird insects that cause crazy reactions, but it also produces the cures to these reactions. It shows the power of indigenous knowledge about plants and their uses, and also shows that nature thinks of everything. Why need to buy your medication when you can just get it from a plant outside your back door? This is obviously something that Western culture has lost is its quest for modernity...

A Break From Work

Hacking through the Amazon with a machete. This is what Kinti and I did to reach the underground spring that pumps up the water that we use for coffee production. Well, he did the hacking and I did the slipping and sinking into mud up to my shins.

My coordinator’s son, Kinti, asked me after a few hours of boring work in the sun if I wanted to see where the water comes from. I, of course, said yes – anything to get out of the hot son and monotonous work to have a bit of adventure. This water flows from a black plastic tube into the three big blue barrels that we have set out to catch water for our use with washing the coffee cherries and beans. It is always flowing, except after a large amount rain the night before makes it stop, the reason why, I now know. He led me to a path into the jungle and we flowed the tube that was lying beside us, sometimes spewing a faint mist of water from a hole somewhere in the plastic. This path led us gradually, and sometimes steeply, up a hill. I had to use the trees for support with all of the mud, wondering if the bark was going to give me a rash... but I risked it as falling into the mud was something I didn’t want to do. At two points, my foot got stuck almost up to the top of my rubber boot in mud, which I had to tug out by pulling with all my might on a tree, all the while with Kinti laughing at me. There was another point where there was such a steep decline that opened up into a cavern below and I was afraid I was going to fall in if I slipped. Kinti told me that a few days ago when he was running to fix a hose, he had almost fallen into a cavern. When we reached this point, it was obviously why. I had to gingerly step down the steep, muddy incline and hold onto things in order to stop me falling into a cavern 20 feet below... About 20 minutes later, we reached the spring. There was water gushing out of a hole somewhere in the rock which flowed into a cement catchment area. It was really neat, and he said because there was so much sand produced by the spring, there was a crab living there. He tried to coax it out, but I wouldn’t come out either if someone was jamming a machete into my hole... He told me that the sand that is produced here gets churned up something fierce when it rains (understandable) and it clogs the pipes. Luckily, on the way back, I didn’t get stuck again, although I did get my cream coloured work pants rather caked in mud, much to Kinti’s enjoyment. He emerged with barely a speck of mud above his rubber boots. How he managed that is beyond me... All in all, it was a fun end to a boring day working in coffee processing.

First Week in the Amazon

As my first work week in my community comes to a close, I have learned and experienced many things.

I have been productive, unlike my last week I spent in my community; I have planned out my activities for the whole month and have been working in the coffee fields and processing building every morning. However, I also have a lot of time to myself, usually in the afternoons. I try to spent my free time doing useful things and I have started going the many assignments that have been assigned to us for February. I feel guilty doing these though because our professor also impressed on us that there should be no wasted time and I should always be out in the open. She said this was important so that people can see that I am doing things and not shut in somewhere. It increases transparency if I am visible and this is especially important because I am Canadian, and my nationality is already a strike against me. The crux of this is that I do have lots of free time but I have no place to be out in the open, only my room in the house where I live. Although I have asked one of my coordinators if it would be possible to have a space to work in the office, she has yet to tell me for sure but also understood the importance of this.

The Amazon is really hot and humid, as I have said before. So hot and humid, that I could barely sleep the first night I was there. Luckily, my body is slowly getting used to the temperature and I am able to cope with the climate during the day, and in the night.

I have taken to wearing my headphones at night though because it is so noisy. There are dogs barking through the night (and day) and the bus plows by on the front street starting at 5am, shaking the entire house. As my family slaughters about 100 chickens every morning, I sometimes wake up at 3am to hear the cries of chickens, and then again at 5 or 6am when the roosters start calling, which doesn’t stop until the sun goes down. There is also a green parrot that has been trained to talk and make noises that hangs out two houses down. I am not sure if it just likes the people there or is actually tied down because it has a similar schedule to the roosters, and makes a heck of a lot of noise.

When it rains here, it honestly pours. I now know where the saying comes from. The rain comes down so hard that it sounds like hail on the tin roof. The run off from all the water that is coming from the sky creates deep divits in the dirt and gravel road, and because the soil is so poor here, it doesn’t really get absorbed into the ground, just runs away. That is why deforestation is such a problem, because the soil is very thin and poor, and when it is gone, all that is left is clay. The roots also don’t extend very far down, and almost all the biodiversity of the forest is above ground, unlike in North America (where there a lot of things growing in and around the ground, not far above it). Anyways, it rains here quite a lot, almost every day, which is saying something because apparently we are coming into the dry season. I can’t imagine what it is like in the rainy season.

The first day I worked in the fields, I cleared the land and planted coffee seeds (which are really just the beans). It was really interesting clearing the land because a) I saw more different kinds of insects than I could ever imagine (and a large spider I thought for sure was poisonous but really wasn’t when I asked), and b) the vegetation was barely in the ground, despite it being so dense. Once you hacked the ground with a machete a few times, you could almost pull off the vegetation from the ground, and I certainly pulled up a lot of shallow roots running horizontal to the ground. Not to mention, this was only in a 5 x 10 meter area.

After that, the last couple days I have been sorting, pitting, cleaning the seeds – preparing them to be dried in the hot Amazon sun. Next week I will probably be doing the same thing, but the week might end with a trip to Manta to deliver the organic seeds/beans to the company that buys them.

I have also been the recipient of a lot of pointed stares. Being one of five volunteers in the community, this make me only one of 5 white people. Because I am different and stand out, I have been stared at constantly wherever I go. I thought it was bad in Quito and other places we have gone, but here is by far the worst. I never can do anything without people watching, and even in the house I am living, the kids are always going through the stuff I own and looking at it with interest, never having seen an iPod before, or never having used a camera. They also take turns going through my Spanish-English dictionary and finding words in English to sound out, or ask me what Spanish words are in English and try to repeat what I say. The youngest daughter, Wiñay, has told me I am a better English teacher than her own English teacher, and I have just been teaching her the words she asks to know.

I am faring better than I was the last time I was here. In the beginning of December for the 6 days I was here, I was sick and anxious the entire time. Dealing with intense culture shock (happens when you suddenly jump into a culture so different from your own) and trying to deal with the climate (hot and humid), I did not eat much and spent a lot of time in the washroom. Now, I can eat everything given to me without wanting to gag, and I can more or less get a decent 7 hours of sleep a night without waking up in a sweat. I attribute this change to preparing myself for life in the Amazon through the Christmas vacation, even if it included freaking out, and knowing what was coming (at least for the initial shock). Now, the only thing I have to deal with is trying to fill my day with things to make me busy, and trying to answer my research question AND do the mound of homework assigned to us for February.

                                                                                                                                                    

I am in good spirits, although homesick at times (which I suppose is to be expected) and I hope this next week continues to be good. I know there will be ups and downs in this next semester, ones that are much harder than the last, but having gone this far into the program and not failing, I feel I can continue through the rest. It is only 3 months... and today marks my 5^th month of being in Ecuador. So much has happened and I hope I continue to learn as much as I have already.

Reflections

There are many things that I realized about myself this Christmas. The first being that I can do this (placement and trip in general), but not without the support of my dear family and friends. They have given me enough strength to get though the last 5 months and I hope they can help me get me through the next 4 months (the next 3 being the hardest of them all). I have also had many small achievements like realizing I can get anywhere in this country on my own because I know how things work (like catching buses and cabs, to booking tours and making friends) and my Spanish is finally good enough. Granted though, it is still not spectacular and still needs a lot of work.

The second being that culture shock is all relative and about perspective. I did know this before, but I realized it to a more extreme extent when thinking about my travels to the Amazon and how I will be living. I will be living in the standard of living that most of the world lives in, and eating the main staple of food that most people eat, rice. I realized that Quito is extremely Western and wondered how I had culture shock in the first place, given that it is so close to the pace and atmosphere of North America. But this is where the relativity came in. I came on this trip thinking that the worst would be over by the time Thanksgiving hit, not thinking about my placement. I thought my placement would be a breeze and I would be ready for it when it came. I was wrong. I am not ready for the next 3 months and that realization, when it came in December, shocked me. I will be facing culture shock again in the coming month and a half, and it will be worse than last time. I will want to abandon everything and come home to Canada, or at least Quito, but I know that will not be possible. For one the culture shock going back to those places after living in my community will be bad, especially Canada. I have also been warned that my culture shock when I get home to Canada will be much worse than anything I have experienced so far. So... I must remind myself, the only way is forward. Forward through the next 3 months of living in the Amazon and forward with what I have been preparing myself for, really, for as long as I can remember. This placement is the closest thing to job preparation that I am going to get, and depending on how I reach the end will determine if I am cut out for this line of work... and I am determined to make it successful.

The Start of a New Semester

Sometimes, even when you have the best vacation, it doesn’t change the foreboding and dread you have for the future. This is how I felt about my placement, which I was to be in by the 9^th of January.

The week of December 27^th to January 4^th, I spent on the coast in the fishing village of Puerto Lopez. It was nice being back on the coast, with the heat and humidity, and the village was beautiful and tranquil. I spent the first few days laying on the beach in a hammock and eating excellent seafood. Then Sarah came on the 30^th and we spent the days hanging out on the beach and exploring the town. We made a friend, a man named Bill from Alaska who comes to the coast of Ecuador for 6 months a year and works the other half, and shared piña coladas and beer with him. We spent New Year’s Eve eating a delicious gourmet 6-course dinner (only $30) at the hotel, and then we moved to the beach to enjoy lighting airborne lanterns and sending them off into the sky, a gigantic bonfire, and many fireworks over the ocean. The next couple days were spent much like the first few, but I did make it to Isla de la Plata (or the “Poor Man’s Galapagos”, which is exactly the reason I went). It was gorgeous, but desolate and hot, and there were huge amounts of Blue-footed Boobies hanging around with their young. I also went snorkelling with colourful fish and to my surprise, sea turtles, which was the best part of the trip; their huge bodies swam gracefully under me as they glided through the water. We left on the 4^th to go back to Quito and because I did not want to attempt the 10 hour bus ride back, I bought a flight, which is relatively cheap in Canadian standards for the half hour flight at $80.

The beach in front of the hotel in Puerto Lopez

Bonfire on New Years Eve

Sea Turtle off Isla de la Plata

The next few days in Quito consisted of me getting my life in order to go into the field. We had one semi-useless class about what we are supposed to do in the field, but an incredibly helpful meeting with my program coordinator that alleviated a lot of my worries – my health being the first and foremost, and the role I will be playing in the community coming in a close second. I also spent a lot of time with my friends here, many of whom were just as worried and scared as I was about leaving Quito to venture into the unknown. We had to remind ourselves many times that this placement was the reason we are going on this trip, and what we have been working toward for the last 4 months. I also took much courage and solace from the book, “The Alchemist”, a great and wise book that I have revisited on this trip.

Even though I have had many doubts about myself this last week (and breaks in my resilience), I managed to get on a bus on Monday morning for a four hour bus ride to the town of Archidona where I took a short cab ride to my community, the small Amazonian village of Rukullakta. Here begins the next phase in my life...

Sunset in Puerto Lopez