Shavuot - or as much as I can do

So it is the Jewish holiday of Shavuot. This holiday has a few diferent meanings.

During the days of the Temple in Jerusalem, people would offer the first fruits of their crops as a sacrifice. There´s no Temple anymore, and we don´t do sacrifice. But I thought that I might be able to offer you a picture of the first fruits of the garden I am starting. We are only a few weeks in and don´t have any actual first fruits growing, but I thought I would take advantage of this opportunity to show you some of what I have been working on.



(If you click on the image, it is much bigger and clearer)

Thank you very much for the seeds you gave me before I left. They have allowed me to start a kick-ass garden that I will use as a model for community and school gardens I´ll be starting.

One is that is marks the time when the Jewish people received the Torah at Mt. Sinai. To mark this occasion, it is tradition to stay up all night studying a text. I didn´t find a group of peopel to study with. Instead, I watched Seinfeld episodes until midnight, studying ¨nothing¨ but everything at the same time. I think that´s an adaquate replacement.

It is also customary to eat dairy products on Shavuot. One of the most tradition would be blitzes, a pastry that I have no idea how to make. So I didn´t even try.

But another food that is customary on shavuot is cheesecake. I consulted with my friend David, who is a cheesecake-cooking champion, and made his chocolate macaroon cheesecake. Macaroon is difficult to come by here, so I had to modify the recipe a bit. But the fundamentals of the cake remained strong. I was very pleased with the results.



I also didn´t have a heavy-duty blender. I only had my heavy-duty biceps to mix the batter. Also, I was using a local cream cheese, Toni, that isn´t quite Philadelphia. I know it´s silly to cook with anything different, but Philly wasn´t available at the local tienda. There is also a chance that the sour cream I used was past its prime.

Overall, a pretty outstanding shavuot.

This is advertised as the presidential model

Eskimo logic

When the Eskimos are cold and hungry, do they eat ice cream?

No, I imagine that they will try to satisfy their cravings and heat up their bodies at the same time. You know, so they won’t freeze to death (I’m not an expert on Eskimos, though. Once, I went to dogsledding in Fairbanks, Alaska, in the middle of January).

They would make a fire, cook something up, and avoid frost bite.

For some reason, that logic doesn’t translate to the hot, sticky sauna that is my site.

Every day, I come home for lunch and my host mom is complaining about the heat — how we live in an oven (We frequently debate whether it’s an oven or a sauna.)

Every day, I come home for lunch and my host mom has prepared a hot soup, hot entrée, and room temperature juice (keep in mind that room temperature is a little warmer than room temperature back home).

There’s a gap here.

They have the capabilities to make food colder – freezer and refrigerator, but they don’t have the capabilities to make the room drastically colder (a sometimes-functioning fan but no air conditioning).

When the meal is done, they continue to complain about the heat, perhaps not realizing that while they eat they could also be cooling themselves down. I understand that it would be difficult to survive on cold foods. But they could make a few adjustments.

What I think is the cause of this is a mentality that you can’t change your present situation. Whatever you have, wherever you are born, you just have to play with the cards you are dealt.

The people here don’t have a problem complaining about the heat and humidity, but if they used half the time they spend complaining about the weather and looked for small ways to cool down around the lunch table, there would be a lot less kvetching.

I think this is starting to hit on a much deeper cultural, social, economic condition that I don’t want to explore here, so I’ll just start my list of possible solutions.

Gazpacho or other type of chilled soup – This is a perfect appetizer to a midday meal, a cool soup with a bunch of vegetables. You could follow this with a warm dish if you would like. Plus, you can make a big batch at the beginning of the week and be satisfied for the entire week. I made this for my family. They liked it, and I passed the recipe around to a few other people in town.

Chilling the juice – They make juice for every meal. Why not just make a double batch during breakfast and put half in the refrigerator.

Cold cuts – Not all the time. But every once in a while.

Those are just a few ideas I had to get started. If you have other ideas, you can leave them in the comments section.

Maybe I’ll start teaching cooking classes?

Maybe I should look for a shaman?

I moved to the other side of the Equator, hoping to reverse the curse.

It turns out that my luck with sports teams is unaffected by the Coriolis effect.

The local soccer team, Deportivo Condor, was having its best season in recent memory. It had advanced to the provincial semifinals. Two more wins and it would move up one classification.

Let’s just say there has been a buzz around town.

(The way soccer works in pretty much every country in the world is that if you play well, you move up to a higher division. And the teams that do poorly in the high division get relegated to lower leagues. The local team is about four miraculous seasons away from making it to the top classficiation. If the NFL worked like this, the Lions would be playing against flag football teams.)

The semifinal was in Santa Rosa, a city about 30 minutes from, and I went with some coworkers to the match.

True to form, my team came up short. We had some great opportunities in the first half to take the lead but couldn’t convert. We never really had any rhythm in our passes and couldn’t create offense on our own. Our best chances came from our goalie’s goal kicks because he sent the ball 75 meters down the field where our striker would have a one-on-one against the opposing defender.

In the second half, Santa Rosa was in control most of the time and scored about ten minutes in. Then, in the final minutes of extra time, we started to get some pressure on Santa Rosa and appeared to score the game-tying goal in the final seconds. But the referees had apparently blown the whistle before the ball went in. So, it was back to the buses for the Condor fans.

Even though we lost, I still had a great time. You have to have that kind of attitude when you have the recent track record for sports teams that I have had (It only applies to teams that I cover. So because I’m writing about this team on my blog, the curse applies.).

Here are a few of my other musings and observations from the match.

- The team (or bus company, I’m not quite sure) had arranged for a caravan of buses to take fans to and from the match. And these aren’t just your normal buses. They are full of hooligans, including the driver. He beeps his horn the entire way, and fans are yelling out the window in support of their team. I’ve always enjoyed watching these pass caravans pass by on the street on the way to games and have always wanted to participate in one. Well, it was awesome — and exactly what you would expect. We drove around my town for 20 minutes, honking the horn and yelling to get people on board.

- The soccer stadium was concrete and pretty typical of other soccer stadiums I had seen in small South American towns. Think of a big high school football stadium with the field surrounded in barbed wire.

- In terms of concessions, the most important — and popular — concession was the beer tank, which was full of big bottles of Pilsener (the most popular beer in Ecuador). For $1.00, you could get 750 ml. I explained to my friend that is costs six times as much to get half of that at a baseball game in Detroit.



- In terms of food concessions, I was reminded of The Simpsons episode when there is a big soccer match in Springfield and Homer asks the paella man to “wing one up here.” Well, paella isn’t a traditional dish in Ecuador. But salchipapas are.



- At every other soccer game I have attended in South America, the section for visiting fans was surrounded in barbed wire — to prevent any fighting between the fans. At first, I thought this practice was a little excessive. I mean, it makes the stadium look more like a prison yard than an athletic facility. Then, Santa Rosa scored. And in celebration, they started pouring beer on the Condor fans and throwing plastic bottles at them. A fight nearly broke out, but the police came in to calm tempers. So for the rest of the game, an anti-riot team stood between us and the Santa Rosa fans.

- Something about soccer that I will never get used to is the whining, embellishing of fouls, and faking injuries. In soccer, if the other team is called for a foul, you get a free kick. So there is an incentive in getting called for a foul. And because one good free kick can be the difference between winning and losing, whereas in basketball the game will rarely be decided by one foul. So these soccer players are flopping all over the place, and play dead just so that they can get a free kick. I think it teaches the kids here a horrible lesson. Because when I play soccer with the neighborhood kids, they’re flopping all over the place as well.

My friend asked me if athletes in the United States fake injury like they do in soccer in Latin America. I told him that if a hockey player were to fake an injury like some of the soccer players do, that hockey player would lose all credibility. The only players that are really known to embellish the injury are kickers in football because of how much his team benefits from the penalty.

- But as much as I hate the fake injuries in soccer, I love the medical units that are deployed to handle such injuries — a guy with a water bottle and two guys carrying a stretcher. The guys with the stretch will role the “injured” player over, onto the stretcher and carry him to the sideline, where he almost always recovers immediately from the injury that paralyzed him seconds earlier. In stadiums with more advanced medical equipment, they have a magic spray that they apply to injuries that heals them on contact.

- The two penalty cards in soccer are yellow and red. A red card is an automatic ejection, and the team has to play with 10 players for the rest of the game — instead of 11. Two yellows equal a red. These cards aren’t very complex. They look like a notecard or just a piece of paper. For some reason, the referee at last night’s game didn’t have a yellow card. So he used a neon green one, instead.

- The halftime show at the game was pretty impressive, as well. It was a guy bouncing the soccer ball (I don’t know if the correct verb is bouncing. It might be juggling. Or it might be something that I can’t thing of right now). But it was really cool. He finished it by bouncing a big rock (I have a video of it that I will try to upload to the YouTube and link, but I don’t think my Internet here is fast enough for such an undertaking). Would I say that his performance was more impressive than backwards somersaults the length of the basketball court, followed by pedaling around in a tractor? I would call it a toss up.

- I’m really happy that my local soccer team’s mascot is Condor. I don’t know exactly why it’s condor. It might be something corporate. I don’t really know. But I would say that having condor as your team mascot is the South American equivalent of having the wolverine as your mascot. The Andean Condor is the largest flying bird in the Western Hemisphere, with a wingspan of 9-10 ft. It is a national symbol of all Andean countries and has a similar mythological role to that of the bald eagle in North America.

The beginning of a beautiful relationship

I’m three days into what I hope will become a very serious relationship.

But I understand that it will take time.

Everybody has pressure points. Different things that make us stop, and others that allow us to go without restraint. Little by little, you find out what these things are. You make things work. And eventually, you get to know the other better than you know yourself.

I think that the long-run benefits of this relationship are infinite. And the more time I spend in this relationship, I think I will become a better person.

This has been the case the last few days between me and my “new” bike.

To describe the last few days as learning process would be accurate.

For the first couple days, the gears would grind and stop every time I tried to pedal. Shifting gears was an adventure, and the sound hurt my ears (kind of like scratching the blackboard).

After receiving some parental advice, I went back to my bike guy, Don Campo, to get the chain oiled up. That made things a little better but it still didn’t ride like the well-oiled machine I wanted it to be, even though it was well-oiled.

Well, one thing I learned from the “Seinfeld” episodes I’ve been watching is that an excursion or vacation with your new significant other is like putting the relationship on steroids. You can fast forward six months in a matter of 24 hours.

So I decided to go on a long bike ride this morning with some co-workers from the office. This would allow me to spend some quality time with my bike (If you have any suggestions for a possible name for her, I would like to hear them). At first , we were going to do a hilly ride up to the dam. But putting this in relationship terms, that would be like meeting the parents after one date — relationship suicide.

We opted for the flat, 13 km road from my site to the ocean. After a few, expected bumps at the beginning, I got in a rhythm. And if the following picture is any indication, I would say this relationship still has a lot of potential.



I have to make this relationship with the bike work out. I understand that we have some irreconcilable differences (I’m tall. The bike’s not.). But I know that we can overcome these and have a fruitful partnership for the next two years.

Check out my new ride

I´m not sure what make or model it is. The ¨Monark¨ decal on the frame is a sticker, and when the salesman at the bike shop wrote up my receipt, it says it´s from 1996. But the frame looks like it has been repeatedly painted over, so I think that was a best guess, rather than actual information.

It has 15-speeds, and the rear break is on the left side of the handle bar. I guess things are in reverse on the other side of the equator.

The frame is 28cm. That´s the biggest bike I could find in town, and the seat is as high as it will go. It´s still a bit short.

The bike cost me $35, and the helmet $20. I don´t know if I have spent that much money in my three weeks at site. But I probably have, if you include my $35 fan.

I am legend

Last night’s hide and go seek game might have been the greatest moment of my life.

That’s something a seven year old might say.

I’m twenty-two.

I’ll set the scene.

Ian and thirteen eleven year olds are playing hide and go seek at the park down the street. I look for a hiding spot. It’s tough because the park is pretty exposed and I´m not that small, but I find a good place on the curb between the road and the sidewalk. The curb is high enough that I can be pretty well disclosed.

So I take my spot there. And obviously, six other kids follow me (The logic when an American is playing with Ecuadorian kids is that they will follow you and do exactly what you are doing.).

So there are six kids lying on the street with me. Some kids have trouble keeping quiet as the seeker begins his search. Other kids are fascinated by my leg hair and start pulling at it (Leg hair doesn’t exist in this country).

As time passes the seeker spots all the kids lying in the street around me, but because I am up against the wall, he doesn’t catch me. A few more minutes pass, and the tension builds.

The seeker is baffled. He has no idea where I could be. Everyone else is found. The dramatic irony is intense. The seeker becomes frustrated.

Then the crowd gets into it. The start cheering me on “Yoni, Yoni, Yoni..” as the futile search continues.

All the while, I am sitting in the gutter, for all intents and purposes (although it doesn’t really drain, so I’d rather just call it the street), relishing the cheers and the suspense. The cheers become more intense.

By now at least seven minutes have passed. The noise is deafening, and I decide to reveal myself.

I revel in the glory and secure my legendary status.

Now you understand why that game of hide and good seek was so awesome.

Like your kids walking for the first time

In the last few days, my vegetable patch has made some tremendous progress. Namely, the seeds are starting to sprout. This must be what parents feel like when their kids walk for the first time.



Mike Tyson once told someone he wants to eat their children. I think he was referring to their plants.

My hands feel like burning

It sounds like something Ralph Wiggum would say.

But that was how I felt last night. For a completely explicable reason, I had an intense burning sensation in my hands. In fact, it had been there all day.

My hands felt really warm, but my hands weren’t actually any hotter than the rest of my body. The culprit in this situation was improper hot pepper management.

I had spent the entire morning making an organic, anti-ant remedy for my new vegetable patch. As I’m getting ready to transplant the seedlings into the garden, I want to rid the soil of bugs that might feed on my new young plants. The solution includes garlic, hot peppers, and soapy water. You’re probably thinking that this mixture would have a wretched, biting scent.

That’s the point.

So I went about preparing the solution by crushing garlic and hot peppers on a rock with smaller rock. Everythingw as going great. The scent was bien fuerte (really strong). I was not going to have any issues with pests in my new garden.



As I’m mashing up the vegetables one of the soldiers who helps manage the nursery walked by and told me that I should put some gloves on when working with peppers. I didn’t really understand why. I thought that it was so my hands wouldn’t reek of hot peppers all day. So I took his advice and put on some rubber gloves.

Then I went about the task of finishing my solution and letting it ferment over the weekend. Then I walked back to the municipality office (which is a just a few blocks from the nursery) to get ready for lunch.

As I’m sitting in the office, chatting with my coworkers, my hands start to feel like they are on fire. Then I realized why the soldier had told me to put the gloves on. With prolonged exposure to the hot peppers, the same chemicals that make them spicy also emit a burning sensation to your skin — especially when you have open cut on your hand.

I’m not big on spicy foods to begin and normally stay away from the when possible. But I do know that you’re typically not supposed to use water to ease intensely spicy foods. I just didn’t know what the proper strategy was to take with aji peppers.

I walked across the street to the internet café and did a little research. Milk products are the solution. So I got a yogurt and eased the burning on my lips and around my mouth. I also applied some to my hands, but obviously not enough.

Pretty soon, my lips stopped burning. But my hands didn’t.

The pain wasn’t unbearbable, and for large parts of the day, it wasn’t even noticeable. But after a took a cold shower last night, the water seemed to aggravate whatever remnants of hot pepper were in my hand —and the burning became more intense.

It went in cycles of heating up and cooling down throughout the night (I’ve never used IcyHot before, but I imagine that this is what it feels like). I told one of my fellow volunteers about my burning sensation in my hands and how my lips were burning earlier in the day. He sent me a text message that advised wearing gloves when I go to the bathroom. I told him that might be the best advice I’ve ever received.

When I woke up this morning, my hands were almost back to normal.

Lesson learned.

Famous person from La Chimba dies

During my training, I lived in the village of La Chimba, near Cayambe. La Chimba is a village of dairy farmers, with a large indigenous population. It´s a very tranquil town, where the residents live their lives and shy away from the public spotlight. Everybody in the village knows each other. In the United States, I live in a village that calls itself "the town that time forgot." I guess La Chimba would be an Ecuadorian version of that.

The most noteworthy thing about La Chimba is that it was the hometown of one of Ecuador's most famous Indian rights activists, Transit Amaguaña. She died this week at the age of 99, although she claimed to be older than that (she just didn't have a birth certificate to back it up). I never met her. She lived on the other side of town and I wanted to respect her privacy.

She was famous for promoting agricultural unions and cooperatives among the indigenous population and founding the Ecuadorian Federation of Indians. She started bilingual schools that taught kichwa and Spanish.

She was also considered one of the most respected Ecuadorians. It´s a big loss for Ecuador, but she did great things and contributed to the conservation (and respect) for the native populations.

As a proud former resident of La Chimba, I was bit offended when the news organizations said she lived in the neighboring town of Pesillo.

Fear the Fro

I played high school basketball in the United States.

In Ecuador, I don’t feel like I need to qualify that statement.

Like the fact that I only played two years (freshman and senior year).

Or the fact that I played for a Jewish day school.

Or the fact that I was, at best, the 11th guy in the rotation.

Or that I spent the first half of home games inside the mascot outfit, did somersaults the length of the court and wheeled around the court on a tractor as part of my halftime shtick, and was only called over to the bench for the second half if there was a chance I could get in the game (this typically meant we were losing by 20 points at halftime).

Or that the only time I saw meaningful playing time was when the coach was so frustrated with our team’s offense that he looked over to the end of the bench and asked if we knew how to run the plays. Jumping at the chance to get in the game, I said I did. I forgot to set a pick on our first possession and was promptly removed from the game.

Or that I scored my first basket of the season during a game on a fast day where the only reason I was playing at the time was that the coach had to rotate the players a lot to keep his best players fresh. I was standing at the top of the key, and my coach yelled “Shoot it, Ian.” So I promptly put up a shot and banked in a three. I didn’t call the bank, so some would say that it shouldn’t even count.

So that should make me one of the best basketball players in Ecuador, right?

At least in the group that I am currently running with.

Then again, this group is the local high school basketball team. I am a foot higher than their tallest player, and the shortest player on the team comes up to my hip.

I don’t really care. They practice every day at the coliseum in town, and they let me play with them at the end of practice.

Although practice is a rough term for what they do. The drills lack any sort of fluidity or rhythm. But they’re playing basketball, and that’s all that matters. I don’t want to get too involved in the management of the team because I don’t want to step on the coach’s toes, but if I have the opportunity, maybe I could be an assistant coach.

I think I’m qualified for this. I once looked Coach K in the eyes.

Well, if that happens, I’m sure I’ll cover extensively in this blog. Possible game covers, columns, player features, I would say the possibilities here are endless. So I guess I would double as the assistant coach and beat writer (so maybe more of a media relations position).

So, back to me dominating a bunch of 15-year olds.

The style of pick-up basketball in this country is a little different than what I’m used to.

They play basketball here like they play soccer. They flop all over the court and complain about the slightest contact. If I were playing a legitimate game, I would have fouled out. Luckily, they didn’t count.

Whenever my opponent (in this game, the guys I was playing against was definitely around 20 years old. I think he used to play for the local team and just comes back to play pick-up games) would try to drive to the hoop, I would play defense, which is code for not giving him an open lane to the hoop. When you play against me, you have to earn every bucket. I won’t back down (Fowlkes!!!!) Three straight possessions I was called for a foul. Then on the next one, my opponent pushed off to create some space.

Call me a tool, if you want, but I called him for a foul on that move. He complained, and because my Spanish basketball vocabulary hasn’t fully developed, I just told him, “I felt what I felt.”

After hat, things calmed down a bit. My team won that game 20-8. I was sinking mid-range jumpers like Richard Hamilton and controlling the glass like Ben Wallace, circa 2004.

Which brings me to an explanation of how our styles of play clash a bit. As a child, the basketball teams that I admired had a defense-first, selfless mentality. Whether it was the end of the Bad Boys run, the rest of the Joe Dumars era, or the “Going to Work” era teams with Ben Wallace, I always liked the way they went about their business.

That’s not quite the kind of style that is on display on the courts in Ecuador. The like to go for more of a showboating, flashy look. I like to fight for rebounds.

They don’t really put an emphasis on rebounding. I’m pretty sure there is no word in Spanish for “box out.” When they play pick-up, the standard defensive alignment is a zone (2-3).

The standard offensive set is to have the entire team along the perimeter, passing the ball until one kid thinks he has what it takes to drive against the zone. With the rest of his teammates standing along the perimeter, there is little chance of getting an offensive rebound to keep the possession alive.

My job in the zone defense was the play in the middle. I would say I got in my opponents’ head enough that he though twice about driving to the hole.

On the offensive side of the court, I would let my teammates work the ball around the outside, position myself to get the rebound after they missed their 3-point attempt and make the putback (it’s easy to do this when you have a Tayshaun Prince-like wingspan and a Ben Wallace-like afro). I would say I have great length, but limited upside (at least when it comes to basketball).

Well, this was my first day playing, and I put together a 1,000-word blog post to recap it.

To recap this post, let’s take a look at some of the outstanding references I made.

I referred to Coach Shoe, directly or indirectly, three times
I used the team upside, which my brother hates
I wrote Fowlkes, in honor of the Pistons’ former defensive stopper .
I compared myself to Tayshaun Prince and Ben Wallace
At times, I got way too technical about basketball for a Peace Corps blog
I never mentioned Tommy Amaker’s motion offense or Beilein’s 1-3-1 zone (If I get to be an assistant coach, you know that I am going to try to throw this wrinkle in there. I’ve already started to think about who I want to run along the baseline)
I made a reference to the Jewish Academy’s epic loss to Westside Christian. So many great stories from this game, whether it be the collapsing pull-up bar at halftime or laughing when they almost pulled off an alley-oop against us.

Now, the blog post is 1,200 words and way too technical. Well, I had a good time writing it, at least.

Bondermania hits Ecuador

So I was on the phone with one of my friends last night when my host cousin walked into the room, wearing his pijamas.

I noticed him walk into the room, and, when I saw the olde English D on his sleeve, I had to do a double take.

I immediately hung up the phone and tried to explain to my four-year old cousin that he was wearing pijamas of my favorite baseball team. He is four, so that was a bit of a struggle, but his parents appreciated it.



As a wise man once said: ¨Good things don´t end with ´-eum.´ They end with ´-mania´ or ´-teria´ ¨

Developing stories

There are some topics that can’t be covered in a single post. Rather, they develop over months, or even years. Because I plan on having a thriving blog for a couple of years, I want to start a couple of ongoing items that we will revisit each month or so to see how things are going.

Sandal tan

If I have ever spoken with you, there are a few things you know about me: I like Tigers baseball, fresh produce, kugel, and sandal tans.

I take pride in my ability to carve a pattern into my pigment through a summer’s worth of exposure to the sun, only to have the Zorro sign fade over the winter. Well, now that I will be spending two years in a coastal climate, it’s time that we start tracking my progress.

In my family, mostly with my younger brother, there is a definite pride about the sandal tan. When he was working at an outdoor equipment store and the sales rep from Chaco came in for a presentation, my brother asked about the possibility of a Chaco tan promotion, or at least a prize for having the best Chaco tan in the room. The sales rep wasn’t as excited as my younger brother about the prospect for that type of promotion.

By the way, Chaco is one of the few companies to offer a discount to Peace Corps volunteers. I have done everything in these sandals: played basketball, gone running, climbed Gavea da Pedra in Rio, been rejected from entering a club in Buenos Aires (because I was wearing them), and led a six-day camping trip in Algonquin Park. These babies are unstoppable.

Here is the baseline that we will begin with. I look forward to revisiting this subject every month.



Biodegradable plastic bag

Every major supermarket chain in Ecuador promotes its plastic shopping bags as biodegradeable. It’s not that I am skeptical about this promotion, but I am interested to find out whether they actually are biodegradeable. Because I’ve always heard that it takes 1,000 years for a plastic bag to biodegrade, I think it might be a little misleading to promote your bags as biodegradeable.

But the small print on the bag says

1. This bag will biodegrade in 12 to 24 in land or in a landfill with exposure to oxygen, sun light….. (and something in Spanish that I don’t understand)

2. This product will biodegrade in 24 to 36 months in the presence of microorganisms in a landfill.

Well, that is considerably less than the 1,000 years I had heard it normally takes for these products to biodegrade. Let’s see how things go.

My first huelga

Three days on the job.

That’s all it took for my office to go on strike.

Apparently there was some issue with getting paid for the month of April (I think the issue was not getting paid for the month of April), so my coworkers and the rest of the municipal staff decided to strike.

Word spread around the office Tuesday afternoon about a meeting early Wednesday morning. I heard that it was at 7:00 a.m. At this point, I wasn’t aware of the reason for the meeting. I just didn’t want to have to come into work so early. I asked if I was expected to be at the meeting, and my coworker said I didn’t.

So Wednesday morning comes around, and I stroll (sashay?) into municipality. But as I enter the building, the entire staff is on its way out (kind of the salmon swimming up stream, if you will). Apparently, things hadn’t gone as planned in the meeting, so the workers were striking.

The workers set up a circle of chairs outside of the office and hung out all morning. Some left to run errands. A couple went across the street to the Internet café. It was very calm.

There was no yelling, no pickets, no chants. Just a bare bones work stoppage.

I have experience breaking picket lines at the University of Michigan when the GSIs or the lecturers would complain about some detail in their contract, and I relished the feeling of breaking the circle. But in this case, walking into the office, through the circle of plastic chairs, didn’t carry the same thrill.

Because the strike only affected salaried employees, the contract workers in my office weren’t involved. So there was still some work to do, but it was also a good chance for me to integrate with the staff.

At about 11:00 a.m., one of my striking coworkers (that describes his labor status, not his looks) came in and said everybody would be back to work in the afternoon.

The afternoon rolled around, and nobody came back into the office.

Apparently, they resolved the dispute and didn’t want to go back to work.

Every one was back at work Thursday morning, like nothing happened.

¿Jhonny Appleseed?

Or any type of seed, for that matter.

Tree nurseries.

I don’t know too much about them now. But I better learn fast.

In my first couple days at my new office and talking with the staff, I will spend most of my time with the municipal nursery.

The nursery serves several purposes.

It provides trees to towns within the county for municipal purposes, gives trees to schools to help with environmental education, and uses the trees as parts of reforestation projects. The nursery also sells trees to private landowners.

(A picture would look really nice here. I should’ve brought my camera to the nursery today. Maybe I’ll bring it tomorrow. Just know that the picture below is a Google Image picture of a tree nursery to give you and idea of what’s going on)



Deforestation is a big problem in this county, and I think the nursery can really help with the reforestation.

I think they produce 20,000 trees per year. But I might have misheard this number. It’s a big operation.

The nursery is a cooperatively operated by the municipality, the military, and the neighborhood where the nursery is located. The neighborhood provides the space. The military and the municipality provide the labor, while the municipality does the managing.

Right now, the nursery works almost exclusively with ornamental plants and trees, and I don’t think it’s an organic operation (I can’t be sure but I don’t think I saw green label products in the storage shed). A large portion of the land is currently occupied by plantain crops that the neighborhood shares.

For now, I will work with my coworkers from the municipality to learn the lay of the land in the nursery. I will talk to the current employees about what they do, what they think could be done better, what they think management could do better, where they see an opportunity for growth, etc.

I have a few ideas I want to implement, but I want to make sure that the staff is receptive to them. They would be to make the place more organic — they already do some composting but I want to increase that. I also want to expand into fruits and vegetables, maybe work with some schools and communities on gardens to promote better nutrition and some environmental education. I also want to focus on native species.

But these will take some time. It’s only been two days.

I know this post was light on hilarious details. Explaining nursery management isn’t exactly the best source for entertainment. In the future, you might see pictures of Ian with a machete or a map of the nursery and a week-by-week feature on the life of a tree. But for now, I’m just explaining the nursery, in general.

Something I learned about growing apples in Ecuador (in relation to the title of this post). It is difficult to grow apples in Ecuador because they don’t have four seasons here. Apple trees need to have a “winter” in order to have a “summer.” To simulate winter for apple trees in Ecuador, you have to climb up in the tree and take all the leaves (they don’t have an autumn when they all fall off naturally).

Because the house I am living at now doesn’t have space for a garden, I might be able to use a plot in the garden for my personal garden.

Tomorrow´s the big day

Tomorrow, I start my job.

Because of Labor Day, we have had a bit of a three-day week down here (I think it was a three-day weekend everywhere in the world, except in the US).

That was nice because it has given me the opportunity to ease into life in my site. I have spent the last two days wandering around the town to get a sense for things. Here are a few my musings from my adventures.

Stickball?

I didn’t know Ecuadorians knew much about baseball. I don’t think there are any native Ecuadorians in Major League Baseball (at least, I haven’t heard of any). But I guess with ESPN Deportes and Beisbol del Noche Domingo (Sunday Night Baseball – White Sox-Rangers tonight), there is some cultural awareness of the game,

On my first afternoon of wandering around my community, I came across a game of stickball.

Well, it was a variety of stickball.

And like any good game of stickball, these kids adjusted the game to fit their environment.

There were only six kids on each team. Because of space limitations in the intersection (or a misunderstanding of the rules), they only played with three bases.

The distance from first base to second base was about double the distance to the other two bases, so most outs were force outs at second because the runner couldn’t get there fast enough.

In addition, the batter could decide whether or not to run out a hit ball — after hitting the ball and seeing where it was going. If he thought he had a chance to reach first (or that the runner on first had a chance to reach second) he would choose to run. Otherwise, the at-bat would continue where it left off before.

Maybe this is how you play cricket. I don’t really know.

I’m sure that I will revisit this baseball game in subsequent posts. I would say the possibilities here are endless, so stay tuned.

Pounding the pavement

In my two months of training, I never made time to go out running.

Most mornings, I had to be on the bus by 6:15, and I didn’t get back to my house until 5:00. And the days that I didn’t have class all day, I wanted to spend time with my host family.

Maybe I’m just trying to come up with excuses for why I didn’t take advantage of living at 10,000 feet above sea level and build incredible lung capacity or maybe I was actually busy all the time.

Either way, I wasn’t going to allow that to happen at my new site.

On my second day here, I went for my first jog. Because it was my first time out in a couple of months, I didn’t have the endurance that I’m used to. So I went out for about twenty minutes. My legs ache today.

I guess I had to start somewhere.

It’s like a sauna here

Behind the synagogue, I might argue that the shvitz (sauna) is the most important institution in the Jewish community.

It is where the community comes together to, well, shmooze and shvitz (sweat).

But there is a major difference between the shvitz being a community institution and the community being an actual shvitz.

That’s what we’re going through down here. In many ways, I feel like I am living in a sauna.

It’s very humid, and I’m always sweating. I would use the term perma-sweat to describe things down here. There is always a layer of perspiration. After taking a cold shower (down here, it’s one of the best sensations), it takes about 12 minutes for the perma-sweat to return.

I have been told that to expect this humid weather eight months out of the year. The other four have been described to me as “fresco” (fresh).

I love fresco.

Talk about diversification

Down the street from my house is a store that advertises as a funeral parlor, which is true. The store has all the ornaments you would expect from a funeral-arranging service. I don’t really know what they are called, but they carry a wide variety of gold, shiny things that look like they have some part in the funeral.

But that’s not all this place is carrying. Funeral parlor is a pretty reliable business. I mean, people die. It’s a market that is always in demand. But in the case that people aren’t dying, this store is prepared.

In addition to the funeral gear, they also have a calling booth in the store. This is another reliable market. People always need to make phone calls, especially in a culture where the second biggest contributor to the GDP are remittances from family members living in other countries.

If that isn’t enough, this store has invested in another stable market — ice cream. In front of the store, there is a giant cooler, carring all of the best from the Pinguino brand.

If you thought phone calls and funeral services were staple products, they are nothing compared to the ice cream demand in this sauna.

Correo

Before I begin, a quick statement

My new host parents forgot my name in the month since I visited, so they asked me what I wanted to be called. Ian is hard for them to pronounce, but Yoni isn’t. Yoni is my Hebrew and what my family in the U.S. usually calls me. So around the house, at lease, I will be Yoni. They actually spell it Jhonny, but it’s pronounced the same.

Now, for your questions….

I know you take pride in your stomach’s ability to, well, stomach anything. How has it performed so far?

I am tied for the fewest stomach issues of anybody in my training group. We could have done a survey to figure this out, but when you haven’t had any problems, you don’t need to do any research to reach this conclusion.

Other trainees have had more trouble adjusting to the diet here than I have. A few reasons for this would be that I spent three weeks in Ecuador last summer and already knew what to expect (and more importantly, so did my stomach), my host family doesn’t really like to cook and gave me plenty of opportunities to cook for them (I never made lasagna before coming to Ecuador, but my host family there says they will never forget the first time I made it), and by staying vegetarian I have avoided a lot of the questionable meats that are common in the diet.

Some of my friends have had more than one bout with giardia (the common symptom is something frothy and sulphurous coming out of mouth and butt, sometimes at the same time). Luckily, I have avoided that bug.

I know you take pride in your T-shirt collection. Can you please update on the t-shirt collection progress?

Well, I started with five t-shirts.
· A blue shirt with maize “Michigan” across the chest
· A gray, Detroit Tigers t-shirt
· A gray, Detroit Pistons, 2004 Eastern Conference Champions shirt
· A red, Moosejaw shirt
· A white t-shirt that is now tinted red after a laundry incident.

There are two additions.

· A light yellow shirt that says “there’s no charge for awesomeness,” but in Spanish, across the front. The line is inspired by a quote from Kung Fu Panda.

· A blue shirt from our technical trip, with yellow writing, and an inside joke on the back.

It only costs $4.00 to make t-shirts in this country, so t-shirt collection expansion is highly likely.

I have heard that Peace Corps volunteers read a lot of books because they have time. Have you found that to be the case?

I have also heard the same thing, but I don’t think it holds true during training. We are very busy with sessions and spending time with our host families that reading time is limited. I have finished “Pride and Prejudice” and traded it for “On The Road.” I am about halfway done with “The Bourne Identity.”

My reading time has been limited by my watching the entire series of “The Office” and the fact that the time I would spend reading books is spent reading the news and e-mails I download from the internet. When I go to the interent café, I copy and paste personal emails and news stories of interest to my flash drive and then read them on my computer when I get home. I don’t see that system changing too much now that I am at my site.

Why don't you try and start up a dodgeball league? Or how about Ga-Ga, our favorite Israeli dodgeball game? Both soccer and volleyballs can be used for both…


This is a great idea and will be taken into consideration.

Do the PC folks play, rock, paper, scissor, shoot? Or do you shoot after scissors? It can really mess up your game if you don't know when you are supposed to go.


I completely agree with your stance on the subject. That is why it is important everybody involved is clear on the rules. The standard Peace Corps policy is to say ¨rock, paper, scissors, shoot¨ and throw on ¨shoot.¨

How long does it take to wash one garment, because in my head i think it would take me at least 1 hour to get all the soap out of one think; hence, would never attempt it?

This depends on the type of clothes. When doing laundry, I like to measure time in terms of songs (it should be prohibited to do laundry without music or some other form of escape). For instance, a shirt might take one song to soap and rinse while a pair of pants might be three. I understand the song isn´t the most exact unit of measurement, but laundry isn´t an exact science either.

This laundry detergent you speak of, this could be the answer to your "capoiera-smudge" shirt and many other stains.....

True. If you use a little bit of deja, I think I would be able to turn my capoiera shirt white. Now a little background on this question. Last summer, I spent three weeks in Rio de Janeiro, learning capoiera at night.

Because of my laundry situation at the time, I followed a different paradigm for hygiene. I didn´t separate my clothes into clean or dirty. Instead, I separated them based on usage. For instance, I had my clothes I would wear for capoeira. I had my clothes I would wear to the beach, and I had my clothes I would wear to the bar. Well, after three weeks of doing capoiera, my once-white shirt turned into a light brown. My capoeira name (everybody in capoeira earns a nickname that they referred to as) was cascao, named after a Brazilian cartoon character who was afraid of water.

Nine Weeks Later...

Wednesday, I officially became a Peace Corps Volunteer. We had the swearing-in ceremony at the Ambassador’s house. In the post below, you can see a clean-shaven, ‘fro-sporting volunteer next to the Ambassador and PC Country Director, a volunteer who is ready for whatever the next two years might bring.

But this is only the beginning.

After several years of wanting nothing else than to join the Peace Corps, six months of applying, three months of waiting, and two months of training, I am now a Peace Corps Volunteer.

My journey started on February 24. After a brief meeting in Washington with the 44 other members of my training group, we were in Quito a day later. The first few days in Quito were filled with meetings and general information about Peace Corps Ecuador. Then, we moved out to the training site in Cayambe, an hour north of Quito.

We were split up into training villages where we lived with host families. I was living with a host mother, brother, and sister in the community furthest away from Cayambe (an hour and fifteen minute bus ride). I never learned what happened to the father, but I didn’t need to know. I had a great time with my host family. They loved watching my movies, listening to me butcher their language, and enjoying my creations in the kitchen.

I really enjoyed my host family and don’t think the experience could have gone any better. I have heard that people in the Sierra (the Andean region of Ecuador) are really good at detecting people’s moods. I don’t’ know if this is true, but I do know that my host mother in La Chimba was better at reading my moods than anyone I have ever met. If something bothered me with training or if I was hungry or tired, she would know without me saying anything. It was really incredible. Sometimes I would feel something and not know what I was feeling. Then she would ask me if something was bothering me from training, and I would realize what was wrong.

Training was very comprehensive. Three days a week we had language training in our host communities and had general meetings with the entire training group twice a week. The general meeting topics were normally about security, cross-cultural issues, and technical topics.

Four weeks into training, we received our site assignments. I told the trainers that I had no real geographic preference and was ready for anything. And, in Ecuador, even though the country is relatively small, one could really be anywhere in terms of geography. One could be on the beach, in the middle of a cloud forest, living at 10,000 feet below a snow-capped peak, in the middle of the jungle, or on the Galapagos Islands.

My site is in in the El Oro province in a city of 14,000 people. Some of my friends are in communities of seven families, so this is a change of pace from what one might think of when they picture the typical Peace Corps site — in Africa with no electricity, no running water, a hole for a toilet, and a mud hut. I’m not complaining.

I will be working for the Office of Environmental Management at the local municipality. I will assist in reforestation projects, teach environmental education, work with the local landfill, help run the municipal tree nursery, and work with the local ecological reserve to protect a dry tropical rainforest. I got to visit my site for four days to get to know my host family, my office, and what I will be doing for the first four months. I was really happy with my experience and excited about the opportunity for the next two years.

When I returned to Cayambe after my site visit, I felt like my mind never left my site. Because I knew I would only be in training for a few more weeks, I felt like I was ready to leave and ready for the challenges presented by my site.

After our site visits, we returned to our training villages for a week before we went on technical trips. I went with the natural resource coastal tech trip and had a great time. We went to the coast in the Manabi province to see some sample Peace Corps projects, visit an ecological reserve, visit an organic farm, and soak in the coastal culture.

After our technical trips, we returned to the training sites for another week before heading back to Quito for the swearing-in ceremony. I thought I would have a little bit more free time in Quito to buy some stuff and visit people I know, but I didn’t. I did have time to get some seeds for a garden I hope to plant (passion fruit and melon, because they’re tough to find in a seed store Michigan).

We had our swearing-in ceremony on Wednesday morning, a bagel breakfast at the Peace Corps office in the late morning (I wouldn’t call it brunch because they started lunch at 12:30, so it was clearly a breakfast), a barbecue lunch, a pick-up basketball game between the new volunteers and those who came in to celebrate our swearing-in, a brief break to run errands, and then a celebration that night. The 12-hour bus to my site left at 6:00 a.m. So I decided to pull and all-nighter in hopes of crashing for the majority of the bus journey, waking up sporadically to catch bits of the bad action movie the bus officer decided to play.

The plan worked to perfection, except that, instead of action, it was a bad comedy. That, and nobody else was awake between 3:30 and 4:30, making that a lonely hour.

Now, I am at my site for the next two years. All of the volunteers have said it goes by really quickly. Let me think back to where I was two years ago today. Doing some iPhoto-assisted research, I see that I was in Washington, D.C., with a program from the Michigan Business School, sitting in on a meeting with Senator Carl Levin. That doesn’t seem like so long ago.