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.