Community Contact Event

Hi all,

I've just got a couple minutes, but this is probably my last chance to post before I find out my site, so I'll talk a bit about meeting all the counterparts this week. It's been tough, just because I'm not great at small talk and schmoozing in English, let alone Spanish, but there have been a couple sites I'm excited about. 2 the first day were up high in the mountains and have some opportunities related to irrigation projects and some post-harvest processing--La Libertad, a tiny place at 3200 m in the province of Cotopaxi, and San Simon, slightly larger and in the province of Bolivar, down at 2200m or so. Then there's one in the transitional zone (1000-2000 m) further South in I think Azuay province. It's called San Rafael de Zharug and they're interested in watershed protection, irrigation, trying to find ag products they can market. There was also one site today in the Amazon area I was really interested in--one of the theoretically "guys only" sites. But I talked to the counterpart from there today and he said that to him it didn't matter much but that the community wanted a man because they'd had a female volunteer once before who was afraid to leave her house. Anyway, this site, called Campana Cocha on the Napo River near the city of Tena, has started planting cacao, which is the raw material for chocolate, and is interested in post-harvest processing, making dryers and looking into what they can do to improve quality control and do a little more value added processing.

So those are my favorites so far. There's sites from the coast coming tomorrow, and then we'll get to talk to the APCD and the other staff about our preferences. They say they'll take into account our preferences and the needs of the sites and all manner of other things, and we'll find out on Tuesday where we'll end up. I'm anxious to hear.