Progress?

Chimborazo, in the middle of the photo, the view on my walk to Amapolas.

Well, I guess it's time for an update. Things are still going well and I'm still keeping very busy. I guess it's been 2 weeks since I posted...well, I went to visit Patricio in Riobamba with a couple guys, which was good, and got some tomate de arbol seeds from him to plant here, as well as seeds for a sort of alfalfa bush, I think lupina is the latin name, or one of them anyway. It's good for soil conservation live barriers.

The canal is almost ready to go--next week we're filling some holes with concrete and running some giant hoses (I think that's the plan) over the landslide area. We finally had a sucessful meeting of the canal directiva on Wednesday this week (third time's the charm!) and are having a general meeting for all the users this Sunday. So there's some actual movement happening, which is good.
Moving giant rocks at the canal minga

I also think we're finally making some progress with the PL-480 grant for the canal. The civil engineer who did the technical work on the original proposal, named Walter, stopped by this week and looked over the suggestions from the PL-480 engineer, most of which are not valid. The engineer who did the review no longer works for PL-480, and Walter knows the canal backwards and forwards since he helped rebuild it with the World Bank 10 years ago. So sunday morning before the meeting we're going to to a walkthrough of the canal and look at how to respond to these suggested revisions, and then submit something. He's also going to find the copy of the original project that's somewhere on the office computer. So that feels really good. Something about talking to people who know what they're talking about--especially if they happen to be good engineers--is really nice. And a good break from the incessant politics that seem to accompany anything related to the canal.

I have a new group I'm working with, about 7 or 8 people in Amapolas who are interested in making a sort of community garden. I was there yesterday (Friday) and we cleared a spot for seedbeds and made some organic fertilizers. The field we're using for the garden has habas (fava beans, apparently. They're bigger than limas, and green, with a tough-ish inner shell) on it, and a couple people still have fresh corn, so we collected some corn and habas and made lunch! It was fun.

On Wednesday this week we had a visit from PL-480, a monitoring sort of thing for the 2 projects PL-480 funded for the cooperativa. Basically these gave them some operating capital to give loans. A guy came down, looked at some of the numbers (not all of which got done in time...that's my "keeping up my computer literacy" project for the week, and will involve fighting with MS Excel more than is fun), and interviewed a few members. It's a funny contrast to me that Maria Elena and I walk or take public transit everywhere, operate on a nonexistant budget, etc, and the PL-480 guy comes into town in a bright white Honda CR-V with US Embassy plates (although he was Ecuadorian) and goes out to ask people if they know what the monthly interest rate on their loans is. They don't usually know--"not very much" was the common answer.
PL-480 guy doing an intervie

Today's project is to try to get my miniature greenhouse together. This is where all those plastic skills from Drop Day roofs come in handy. I'll take pictures when it's ready