Ecuador!

Wow, I don´t even know how to start! I´ve been in Ecuador almost a week now and it´s been such a whirlwind! I had a couple days in DC followed by a couple days in Quito and Cayambe getting bombarded with information on medical, security, technical, and Spanish info. On Sunday all of us went out to our host families. Mine´s in a town called Paquiestancia, which has a couple hundred people in it and is near Cayambe. I´m living with a woman named Sonia, her husband Luis Enrique, and their 4 kids: Jorge (16?) Irma (15) Jesse (10ish) and Luis Enrique, or Junior, who´s 3. They have dairy cows, pigs, rabbits, and chickens, as well as a huge garden. On Saturday after I got there I went out with Irma and "helped" milk the cows. I did sucessfully get milk to come out, but really slowly. We rode the horse up to the land where they keep their cows, about half a mile out of town, and then walked back.

Sunday I helped put a roof on the new pig house. The walls were concrete, and the door was a piece of recycled metal. We put the roof on using nothing but wire (new spanish word of the day: alambre is wire), pieces of tree branches, and prefabricated corrugated roofing sheets. Pretty clever, I thought. We also planted potatoes, garlic, fava beans, mallorca (like potatoes, but small and colorful), and a kind of beans that were bright pink. I don´t remember what they were called though.

My host mom is really involved in womens groups in the community. I went with her to a meeting of one group where they have a bank where they all deposit and give each other credit. Apparently the big banks won´t let them get loans without permission of their husbands. So that was cool. She also teaches alternative cooking and nutrition classes around Paquiestancia--so I´ve been eating really well. Yesterday before my Spanish class at 8:30 we made soymilk and a kind of fried soybean stuff with what´s left once you filter the soymilk. It was neat.

I have spanish classes every day in the mornings and then in the afternoons have time usually to do various things with my family here, or work on Peace Corps projects--right now we´re making a map of the town and finding resources. We´ll also have to make a garden and apparently learn to deal with small animals, including pigs, rabbits, chickens, and guinea pigs, which are a delicacy here. They´re called cuy.

There´s more, but I´m running out of time. If you guys write me letters I´ll try to write back. I only get to email once a week but I have time in the evenings sometimes to write letters.

mo