Site Assignment

Hi all,

Exciting day today as we just got our site assignments! I will be spending the next two years starting April 21st in San Lorenzo, which is a town of about 1000 people about an hour south of Guaranda, in the province of Bolivar. It's at about 2500m altitude, lower than here, and is apparently gorgeous. The town just implemented an irrigation project and my main job will be helping with irrigation on individual plots and looking at new crops to take advantage of the new water system. There's also opportunities to work with family and community gardens and to work with a micro credit group in the area. It's a neat site, and I'll have tons more to say about it after I visit next week!

In training lately, I've learned how to castrate cuyes (using a red hot needle) and if I find a way to upload video, I can actually show a video of me castrating the poor guy. But that's nothing compared to castrating pigs, which is like minor surgery, and which we will all be doing later--we got a demonstration on Friday. Other than that, I've got my garden started and have some lettuce seedlings coming up nicely in my soda bottle seedbeds (sorry, no photos of that yet). I've also got acelga (which is swiss chard, which I never associated with South America but it grows great here), cabbage, onions, carrots, radishes and beets in the vegetable part, and I have a "green manure"/cuy (guinea pig) food plot with oats and vetch.

My group is giving a presentation tomorrow at the school on environmental education, where we'll be talking about the water cycle and pollution, and picking up trash around the town. Hopefully that goes well. It's raining today, which is great because we really need the rain, but I hope it stays dry for us tomorrow, at least till 12:30.

In other news, we've been cooking with wood because the entire Cayambe area has no gas. Everyone uses those tanks of gas and there aren't any, apparently. My host mom asked what we did when we ran out of gas in the US and I told her the gas comes to the house in pipes like the water. She asked what happened when they broke. I said, well, they don't break very often and when they do it's a huge problem. Little cultural exchange there.

So that's the update. I will most likely not be checking my email all next week, so I'll try to check maybe once more before I go. Also, apparently in the US you guys did that daylight savings time thing, and nobody else does that (or at least Ecuador doesn't) so I'm now on central time.