Monday, July 27, 2009

Notebook

I should have been more specific
I told the staff at the tree nursery that we aren’t going to burn leaves there anymore because we can use them as compost or mulch. Plus, the burning of leaves contaminates the air and increases the chance of respiratory problems (which are very common around here).

So I came into the nursery the next day and saw that they were putting the leaves in a pile, but then I noticed another pile of plastic garbage that was not going to the garbage can.

I asked the employees why they hadn’t put the plastic in the garbage can. They told me that we had stopped burning leaves.

I have since clarified our policy, and we will no longer be burning garbage in the nursery.
People here try to take advantage of arbitrage opportunity
The Ecuadorian government subsidizes the price of gasoline here. It is pinned at $1.48/gallon of Extra grade (I’m not sure if this is leaded or unleaded. I don’t really know what extra refers to) and $2.10ish/gallon of Super grade (I’m pretty sure this means unleaded).

Because I live in a border province and the neighboring countries don’t have similar subsidies on petroleum products, there is a black market for these items.

Army soldiers man every gas station and natural gas delivery trucks to patrol this trafficking.

I’m mostly saying this so you get a sense for life down here. When I first saw the soldiers at the gas stations, I thought it was for security reasons — or something like that.

This policy of stationing army soldiers at the gas stations has affected my life in one ways. The army solider who works with us in the tree nursery said he would take me to the ecological reserve, which is run by the military, to present me to the authorities there. But he has been on gas duty the last two weeks and unable to take me.

Eventually, he’ll get a free weekend, and I’ll get the chance to see the reserve
When you’re baking like a toasted cheeser…
My city doesn’t have a public swimming pool.

But on weekends, the local army base’s pool is open to the public.

And depending on the guard on duty, you will pay between nothing and $1.50 to use the pool. Also, the pool complex includes a billiards table and weight room.

So for all those oven-like weekends down here, I know where I’ll go to cool off. Unfortunately, Wendy Peffercorn is not on duty.
Paper plates?
I went to the super market in Machala last week, in search of paper plates.

You see, all the local high schools here serve their lunches on Styrofoam plates, which then get thrown into the landfill — where they will stay forever.

So in search of alternatives to this, I went looking for paper plates that will biodegrade in this millennium. What I found at the very modern supermarket in Machala was an entire aisle of Styrofoam and plastic kitchen utensils and just one section of one shelf with cardboard plates.

Saturday, July 25, 2009

Can´t Touch This

A tree nursery is kind of like a science lab. You don’t just go playing, willy-nilly, with what’s in the test tube.

But one of my friends learned that lesson the hard way...

Last week, we applied a different kind of organic fertilizer to my garden for the first time.

We had made a mixture of cow manure, brown sugar, yeast, weeds, milk, and water and let it ferment in a sealed container for seven weeks. It’s called biol.

With the anaerobic decomposition, this mixture becomes a very strong fertilizer at the end of two months. So strong, in fact, that it has to be diluted with 15 parts of water to one part of biol so you don’t burn your plants.

We opened the sealed containers for the first time last week, and it smelled horrible. Kind of a combination of fermented cow manure, mixed with spoiled milk. We only opened a small portion of the top of the tank, but it made the entire storage room stink for days.

So we started applying a few sample to see its effectiveness.

At about the same time that we were applying the biol to my garden, one of my friends came by to show the garden to some of her friends.

As is often the case, the mosquitoes were quite hungry. And they found my friend’s forearms the perfect place for a midafternoon snack.

So my friend, overwhelmed by the onslaught of mosquitoes, looked down at yellowish liquid we were applying to the plants. Thinking it was an organic remedy against ants and other pests, she decided to liberally apply some to her arms.

Well, as soon as I noticed what was going on, I asked her why she was applying fermented cow manure water to her arms. Then, she got a whiff of what she was putting on her arms and started freaking out.

We quickly went over to unstink her arms. She worked tirelessly at this for 15 minutes until most of the stank was gone.

On the positive side, she stopped worrying about the mosquitoes. So maybe she knew what she was doing all along.

Friday, July 24, 2009

I blame Bill Bryson for the lack of recent posts

You may have noticed that we at hearyoni have not been updating the blog as often as we should. There is a simple explanation for that.

It´s Bill Bryson´s fault.

I have recently been engrossed in ´´A Walk in the Woods´´ and have been unable to focus on anything else.

I have corrected the situation by finishing the book and highly recommend to all of my blog readers, or anybody for that matter.

Monday, July 20, 2009

Different Standards

I have two words for you: Anaconda 2.

Movie sequels often have trouble living up to the high standards of the original.

The first movie sets the bar so high that it is nearly impossible to achieve the same level of greatness.

Now, I have never seen Anaconda 2. Frankly, I didn’t even know that it existed until Thursday night. But according to my friend, that is his favorite and, in his opinion, the best movie ever.

Citizen Kane? No.
The Godfather? Not so much.
Gone with the Wind? You’re joking, right?
Casablanca? You mean the football stadium in Quito?

I haven’t had time to do my research yet. It could be that Anaconda 2 is one of those cult classics. In a couple of years, you’ll see it regularly featured among the midnight showings at the State Theater, replacing Lebowski or Rocky Horror. I promise to find out soon enough, though.

I asked him what he thought of the first Anaconda. He liked the first one, but in his opinion, the second one was just an all-around better film. He also liked that the film was shot in Ecuador. (I did a bit of imdb´ing and learned they are making a fourth Anaconda. I also learned that the working title of Snakes on a Plane was Anaconda 3)

Intrigued, I inquired a bit more about his favorite films.

His next one was Fast and the Furious 3.

It is very rare to find the sequel that even comes close to the greatness of first offering. You have the rare occasion where you can eclipse the first one, like with Anaconda. Normally, you just find the second edition rehashing lines and gimmicks from the first one and leave unimpressed. But for someone to think that the fourth offering in a series is the best, the producers have really outdone themselves.

In fact, I have had the privelege of watching this one. The only reason I knew it existed was that they played the entire trilogy on my bus ride from Huacachina, Peru, to Lima, Peru, last summer. As third segments in movie series go, I would say that it doesn´t quite live up to expectations of Major League 3.

The conversation continued, and we started talking about Tom Cruise movies. He said he really liked Mission Impossible. I told him that I remember going to see that one at the Birmingham 8 and that I thought it was really cool, but I still don’t understand what happened. He said he really liked it because of when Tom Cruise took his face off. He couldn´t explain the plot to me.

Then we talked about Tomb Raider and Resident Evil. I admitted to not having seen those movies before, but he said that I really should. I told him I would looked into it. Then the subject of the conversation changed to video games.

I guess that the takeaway from this conversation is how different the taste in movies is down here. On the surface, the culture seems very similar. I mean, we have, more or less, the same movie selection in the United States that they have down here. But what makes a movie a good movie is a little different.

Saturday, July 18, 2009

The other national pastime



In addition to soccer, I would consider volleyball Ecuador’s national past time.

Every town or neighborhood has a soccer pitch, but it also has a volleyball court.

I might even contend that the volleyball sensation is more intense, at least in my town.

Every day, after work, the men will go and gather around the volleyball court. Some will play, but most will just sit around and enjoy a beer and tiem with friends.

But unlike the traditional beach volleyball, Ecua-volley rules are a little bit different. It’s not exactly the one-touch rule you have in beach volley, I would descibe it as somewhere between beach volleyball and nuke ‘em. You aren’t allowed to carry the ball or throw it, but you are certainly allowed a little be more freedom than someone playing beach volleyball. They play with a little bit harder ball, and the teams are three people, instead of five.

Little by little, I am immersing myself in this culture. But because I’m not so big on betting, and it’s almost impossible to play a game of volleyball without betting, my opportunities to play have been few and far between. (It’s more that I don’t trust my volleyball abilities with my money and have a better use for it at the produce stand)

Well, last week on the way back from the fiestas in Batanes, we stopped off to play a friendly game of volleyball in another community.

I only spent forty minutes in this community, but I think I left quite the impression.

One of the key rules of volleyball is that, no matter what, you can’t cross the centerline. Even if your momentum carries you, it is automatically the other team’s point if you cross the centerline. My coworker explained it to me that your feet can’t cross the line.

Well, we got to playing. And the other team pummeled us for the first two games. My volleyball Spanish is still a little weak, and when they keep telling me to pay attention and I think I’m paying attention, but I’m not paying attention in the way they want me to pay attention. There is some subtlety to the language that I am still picking up.

So the third game is a hard-fought match. We’re going back and forth with points. Then we are tied at seven. I think this game is to 11 or 15. Nobody really explained to me. I just kept playing each point like it was my last. We are in the midst of a pretty intense rally, and I make what I think is an unbelievable recovery to keep the point alive. The ball is near the net and I am on the far side of the court. I realize that I am the only member of my team in any position to make a play on this ball. So I go balls to the walls and make the miraculous save to keep the point alive, and my entire body falls to the other side of the net, except my feet stay on my team’s side (And the court is made of sand, so there are clear marks where my feet went). As I am laying there, I see my teammate complete the kill and begin to celebrate the point.

All I hear, though, is laughing. Apparently, I had violated one of the sacred rules of volleyball. And obviously, everybody here knows that fact.

None of your body can cross the line. Not even your hands. There is actually a judge seated at the centerline to keep score, but also to decide whether someone has crossed the line or not.

In trying to make a parallel with American sports, I would compare my transgression to someone swinging at strike three and thinking they get four strikes.

Now I know. We ended up losing the game, but I think I won a lot of respect.

Is respect the word I’m looking for? OK, so maybe I won their laughter. But, at least I won something.

Four days later in the office, they were still laughing about what transpired.

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Oxymoronic?

I met someone named Darwin who doesn’t believe in evolution.

On the wall of the house where I stayed for the weekend was this advertisement for a local store.

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Larry and Little Jerry

The fiesta is the pinnacle of an Ecuadorian town’s calendar.

It is the time of year that the pueblo looks forward to and reminisces about the most.

But fiesta here isn’t just a one-day deal. No, depending on the size of the town, the fiestas range from a few days to an entire month (apparently, Guayaquil, the largest city in Ecuador, has fiestas for the entire month of July).

Also, the term fiesta can mean a lot of things, depending on the specific activities each town or neighborhood has planned. But there are a few staples of most every fiesta.

Pilsener — the most popular beer in Ecuador. For the fiestas of Batanes that I attended last week, the town council bought 960 liters of beer. In fact, you couldn’t even buy bottled water at the tienda — it was Pilsener or Big Cola.

Baile – Dance. But Ecuadorian dancing is a bit different than the American version. First off, your not supposed to look at the person you are dancing with. You just have to maintain the appearance that you. Also, it seems to me that you can’t do anything that looks like you are dancing either. Stepping from side to side and moving your hands a bit counts. I would describe the dancing level here as closer to the Joe Cornell, pre-bar/bat mitzvah circuit dance classes than the Thriller video.

Bingo – Apparently, the fallback fundraiser for any charity in Ecuador is Bingo night. And this holds true for the towns as they try to raise money for their fiestas. Some towns mix the dance and Bingo by breaking into dance party for 15 minutes between each bingo game. Much like the disco breaks in Zohan.

Election of the reina (queen) – Pretty much every event, fiesta or not, has some sort of beauty pageant involved. It could really be anything, from kicking off the soccer season to a meeting of small banana growers to a small meeting of banana growers. Sometimes, there are photos in the newspaper of taxi company and the reina of said taxi company. I would love to see beauty pageants organized by New York City cabbies.

Mass – This is a very Catholic country, and every town has its patron saint. The town’s fiestas typically fall on the day in which you remember that saint. In Batanes, those saints are San Roque and Santa Marianita, for example.

Then, there are other activities that are common in fiestas, but not necessarily the staples.

It is not uncommon to have a bull-ring, parades through the town, cock fights, or a soccer tournament. But this all depends on the size of the town.

Now, a bit about my first foray into the fiesta frontier, which was Friday.

The weekend kicked off with what everybody in attendance thought was going to be a traditional Bingo night. Each family brings a prize for the prize box, and boards cost $1.00.

To ensure that the boards are certified, I think there is a stationary store in each town that is in charge of Bingo board certification. They print the Bingo boards, number them, and write the date and time that the boards are valid for. This will prevent Bingo fraud, which was a horrible problem in ‘80s.



Well, I bought my Bingo board and sat around with my host family for the weekend. I did my best pre-Bingo trash talk, saying that they could have all the luck in the world, but I am a very skillful Bingo player. I broke down my strategy and told them that I liked to call my Bingo board “the answer sheet.”

They moved the church pews out into the town square, and the entire town gathered for the big event. The Pilsener was flowing (the school kitchen doubled as the bar). Everybody was having a good time, even though my Bingo skillz didn’t quite live up to the pre-game hype. I wouldn’t quite say that I didn’t win, but that I merely ran out of time.

Whereas a sandwich maker might be a common prize if this were an American Bingo game, the ceviche maker was the most common prize. In fact, one six-year-old won two ceviche makers.

But if there was one problem with this bingo night, it would be that the MC didn’t really have a good vibe for the audience. From my perspective, in the church pews, the crowd really just wanted to play bingo. But the M.C. thought he was more of a DJ than an M.C. and insisted on playing extended sets of dance music between bingo games. The crowd was going restless, to say the least. Then, as the bingo game crept up on four and a half hours and the clock his midnight, I would describe the crowd as restful. To compound his lack of understanding of the crowd’s desire, he decided to play several games of ‘first to fill the entire board’ wins. Well, this requires that one draw close to eighty numbers (Standard Bingo rules in Ecuador call for 100 numbers, I seem to remember fewer numbers in the standard American version. Also, there was no Jerusalem Pizza in Batanes.)

Well, after the Bingo game, we all returned home to rest ahead of the fiesta’s big day (The Bingo is more of an opening ceremony)

Saturday morning, this started slowly.

They rechalked the lines of the soccer field, and vendors started showing up. I guess, because it’s the fiestas and there are a lot of people concentrated in a small space, that vendors figure it would be a good opportunity to sell their goods. Vendors came with bags full of everything. Someone was selling toys and agricultural equipment (if you have the sudden urge to a tank to apply your pesticides, this guy has it). Another woman had your entire wardrobe in her sack.

Behind one house in the town square, I heard a lot of clucking and wanted to know what the fuss was about. I walked down the steps and saw a ring, surrounded by a bunch of chickens tied to the fence — they were getting ready for the cockfight.



I’ve never seen a cock fight before and don’t really agree with the whole premise of having animals fighting each other (although I do think that the chicken has a much better chance of surviving this encounter with another chicken than that same chicken has at surviving his or her experience in the slaughterhouse).

Apparently, the first cockfight of the afternoon was free. Because after I watched the first match on the undercard, they started asking me to bet on this. Well, all moral issues aside, I have no idea how to predict who will win or how long the match will last. It’s not like the NCAA Tournament where, if you don’t know anything else, you at least know the team’s mascot. In cockfights, they’re all chickens. So I ducked out of there after one match, as much because of my moral issues with the sport as I have no desire to throw away money like that.

Apparently the two teams of chickens came from two different trainers in nearby villages. And judging by how one of them celebrated after his chicken took the first match, there is quite a rivalry between these two. I like to think that cockfighting chicken train like sumo wrestlers, coming from a dojo-like setting where they spend all their time preparing for the big moment and that it is as much of a religious and cultural activity than anything else. But judging by the trainers fanny pack and the way he was treating his ‘athletes’(?), this was all about the money.

(insert diatribe about how there was a time where cockfighting was about something bigger than money. That is was about respect and tradition and culture. Now, everybody is cutting corners, feeding their chickens steroids and other performance enhancers)

The one match that I did watch lasted for about 30 seconds. The two chicks jockeyed for position for a few seconds before one of them pounced on the other and poked the other’s eye out. (I have a picture of this cycloptic chick, but I don’t feel the need to share on this blog)

After the cockfight, the soccer tournament started. The municipality fielded a team for this competition, because it was the weekend and the striking employees didn’t have to be at the picket lines. And the municipality played its match as if it were standing at the picket lines, dropping it 8-2 to the hosts.



Because of the difficulty we had in getting to Batanes without a reliable means of transit (two hours on two buses (one of which only leaves once a day) and a half hour walk through three rivers), we decided to return with the municipal employees because they were going straight back, which only takes about an hour.

I was sad to leave before the dance, but I am sure that I will have plenty of opportunities to attend more dances during my stay here in Ecuador. Because there are only 140 residents in Batanes, I don’t think they attend a reina, but they did have a mass to remember their saints.

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Just the break I needed

A little over two months cooped up in my town of 14,000, I needed a break.

So I took that much-needed respite.

In a community of 140.

Thursday night, I attended the community bank meeting in Batanes. And as you learned from my previous post, the municipality’s fleet of vehicles is not reliable.

As is usual, the car was at its second home — the shop. (I joke around with my coworkers that its first home is the mechanic and that its second home is on the road.)

There is no bus that goes to Batanes — you have to ford a river three times to reach the community. Relying on public transit, you have to take a 90-minute bus from Santa Rosa to El Carmen and walk half an hour.

The bus route runs twice a day — 11:30 and 3:00. Bear in mind that these times are merely estimates. Anything within 40 minutes of them is still considered “on time.” And to go from El Carmen back to Santa Rosa, there is just one bus per day (sometime around noon but I heard 11:30, 12:00, and 12:30, so I figured I’d take the average and say it leaves at noon)

Well, without a means to get us back to town, we (My municipal coworker and I) had to spend the night. And since the annual fiesta in Batanes started Friday, we figured that we would aprovechar (to take advantage of) this opportunity and spend a couple of days in the campo (as opposed to the ciudad).

Instead of waking up to the sound of clucking roosters and the sight of a chicken coup out my window, I got to wake up to the sound of clucking roosters and bit of the Ecuadorian countryside out my window.



(By the way, having to worry about whether the chickens enter the bathroom when you are going is a hilarious thing to worry about.)

We arrived a little before 5:00 and helped them prepare for the fiesta. Their current project was putting up poles on which to put lights. There was using a rebar and concrete to put them in place and would wait until the lights and connecting wire arrived on Friday. (The lights and wire never arrived. We joked that they weren’t putting these poles up for this year’s party, but that they were already thinking about next year’s party and had a year to conseguir (get or acquire) the lights.)

At 6:00 was the community bank meeting. This was a momentous meeting for this group because it was their first opportunity to take out loans from the community bank. And well…. that is exactly what happened. This is kind of like the community bank equivalent of the first radishes I harvested from my vegetable patch.

Everybody was very excited about the first loan and combined with the excitement surrounding the town’s fiestas, I would describe the emotion in this sleepy town as ‘sleepless.’

Speaking of sleepy, when one is out in the campo and there isn’t much light or anything to do once the sun goes down, I got really tired really early. This is much like what happened during training, when I was in my training village outside Cayambe. So after the meeting, we hung out with our hosts for the weekend.

The next day, we played soccer with the students at the local school (The local school only has six students, and even though they are in different grades, they all have class in the same classroom. Their map still has the Union Sovietica) We also took a stroll up to the recently constructed water tank.

In the afternoon, there was a soccer match between the Batanes team and some of the neighboring communities. I got to help chalk the lines for match, which involved pacing off the distances between the goal and the corners and pouring crushed up chalk along the string we set down .

(The municipality was supposed to field a team for this match, but because of car difficulties and a strike that has kept most of the staff out of the office for the last week and a half prevented its participation {What happened was that the striking workers couldn’t leave the strike to play in the match, but if there had not been a strike, they would have been able to leave work to play in the match. For some reason, this logic doesn’t make too much sense to me}).

I almost played for the Batanes team, but after the other members of the team saw me play and then saw the 13-year-old nephew of my host mom play, they opted for the 13-year-old nephew. My soccer coach from my days in the BBSC jokes about how he might have the lowest winning percentage in soccer history. After watching me play, I think it’s more obvious that his teams lacked talent than technical know-how.

Well, I spent the rest of the afternoon noshing on banana and shmoozing with the family that so graciously hosted me for a few days.

The tranquilidad (tranquility) of the campo is incredible. Being able to wake up and look out the window at lush mountainside (even though most of it was deforested for cattle, there are still some trees left) and being able to breath the fresh air, instead of the respiratory-problem-inducing dust of the city was a great break. It gave me time to clear my head and almost finish a book.

But that tranquilidad ended after my conversations with the host family, because that night, the fiestas got under way.

And seeing as I am already two pages into this blog post, we will have to save the fiestas for my next dispatch.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

First fruits

This week, I got to harvest the first fruits of my garden.




For gardeners wanting to see quick results, radish is the vegetable of choice. In the coastal region, radish can mature from seed to fruit in 22 days. So, there is no suprise that it was my first harvest, but it was the first time that I did harvest in a garden I started.

I ate them for dinner with bread, cheese, and tomato. There are probably other, and better, ways to eat the radish, but I didn´t have access to the interwebs at the time. I´ll be more creative next time.

Thursday, July 09, 2009

Fun 4th of July

Now, I didn´t get to admire fireworks, watch the Nathan´s Hot Dog contest or sit around a barbecue. But I did get the opportunity to contribute to one of Peace Corps` three goals - raising cultural awareness of the United States with people in other countries.

I went to help someone start a garden in their house, and during some of the downtime, I talked with his wife. Here is a transcript of the conversation (translated, of course).

Wife: Is the United States bigger than Ecuador?

Ian: Yes

Wife: Is it bigger than Peru?

Ian: Yes, it´s bigger than Brazil.

Wife: Is it close to the ocean?

Ian: It touches three oceans.

The Peace Corps has three goals - one of them involves technical assitance in sustainable development, while the other two speak to raising cultural awareness. And it is these two that often get overlooked, but judging by how I celebrated my country´s independence day, these two goals are just as important.

Tuesday, July 07, 2009

Intro to Environmental Ed

For the last month, I have been teaching four days a week in one of the local high schools. I am working on starting an Ecological Club at the school, and to generate interest, I’ve been asked to teach during the elective hour.

(From my understanding, elective hour is generally spent playing soccer. So in essence, they are getting forty minutes with me instead of forty minutes of soccer.)

But because every class has three free hours per week, I have mas o menos replaced their free hour with an ecology hour.

(In the Ecuadorian high school system, the students remain in the same classroom all day long and the teachers rotate between rooms. The students don’t have unique schedules. They do everything with the same group of classmates. It’s like homeroom every hour)

And I’m cool with that because it gives me a chance to help develop the environmental conscience that is lacking in this community.

I know that this conscious is lacking because, of the ten times I gave my “introduction to the environment and the responsibility of the human beings in this environment,” the students merely talked about the preventative role that human beings have, such as not cutting down trees, not contaminating the rivers, not throwing garbage in the street, and not burning garbage.

While it was good that the students could repeat these messages, I only heard three or four ideas of what human beings can do to improve the situation of the environment and prevent its continued degradation. As in, of more than a hundred students I talked to, three of them knew the three “r’s (In Spanish, the three r’s are “reducir, reciclar y reutilizar”).

The ultimate message of my chat was that human beings have a responsibility to care for the environment and that we need to take an active role in that process because passivity will not change the world for the better.

So, hopefully, a few students got the message, and some of those are interested in starting this club.

My “introduction to the environment and the responsibility of the human beings in this environment” class was merely the first lesson in my environmental curriculum. We have also done activities about the competition for natural resources and how we need to share these natural resources with the rest of natural world, chats about why people shouldn’t burn their household garbage, a demonstration about how long garbage takes to decompose, and we started planting some fruit trees.

From every class that I teach, I try to wrap it up with some action or some way that the students can change their behavior to take this active role in conserving our environment.

Sunday, July 05, 2009

I love icebreakers

I contend that there is no better way to start a meeting or class that allowing those in attendance to share a little something about themselves that the rest of the group might not already know.

This is the strategy that was employed in the two student groups I became most involved in at the University of Michigan (Daily Sports and Shmooze), and I think that the environment created by the routine ice breakers was part of my attraction to these groups.

At the beginning of every meeting, we would go around the room at discuss our most painful sports memory or if there were to be a sandwich named after you, what would be on it.

So, since I started teaching environmental education four days a week in the local high school, I have obviously employed the strategy of beginning each class with an ice breaker. For me this is as important as anything that we will eventually cover in the class because it gives the students a chance to think freely, to think about something personal, to think about how themselves as an individual, and maybe develop a bit of self-worth or self-esteem.

And then after the student introduces himself or herself, I allow for a few moments of discussion about the previous response. From my talking to the students, they seem to enjoy these questions but from their responses, I realize how necessary doing these small activities really are.

In the first few classes, we went with some more generic questions of

• What are you most proud of?

I think that every student in the class was proud of their parents and siblings. When asked why, they didn’t really have a response.

I said that I was proud of the opportunity to represent the United States as a Peace Corps volunteer.

• If you could go to one place in the world, where would you go?

Because of the influence of soap operas in primetime television here, most students was to go to Rio de Janeiro or Buenos Aires or Colombia — because that is where the soap operas take place. I’m just waiting for the “Home Improvement” fan to say that he or she wants to go to suburban Detroit.

Those that didn’t say soap opera sets said Las Vegas, Madrid, or New York. I said that I wanted to go to Patagonia or Isle Royale.

• What is the happiest moment of your life?

For some reason, the kids mistook this question to mean “where is your favorite beach?” I think the root of the confusion came from when the first student in the class said their happiest moment is when they are at the beach. I asked “which beach?” and things spiraled down hill from there. Well, to answer the modified question, most like the beaches of Salinas (west of Guayaquil) or the beaches of Manabi province. Some like Jambeli, which is the closest beach to here.

Shabbat dinner tables don’t exist here. Otherwise, I imagine everybody else would have the same response as I did.

• Most difficult thing they have done…

For some reason, they were stumped on this one. So I guess, the answer would be trying to answer this icebreaker.

I told them that trying to teach environmental education to Ecuadorian high schools was near the top of my list.

• What is your favorite place?

For some reason, this was also understood as “what is your favorite beach?” So we had a lot of repeats.

That is because none of them have ever been Up North.

• What is your favorite activity?

In terms of favorite activity, you would think that these kids do nothing but play soccer – and occasionally volleyball and basketball.

I told them that I liked doing stuff outdoors and being active.

• Most ridiculous thing you have ever done…

I guess they don’t quite understand my far-reaching definition of the word ridiculous because most of them said that it was the time when they almost fell from a motorcycle or how they tripped in front of a large group of people or how they fell off a tree. One kid claimed to have killed a snake.

I told them that doing Gadna (basic, basic, basic training for the Israeli army) with my high school classmates was outstanding, especially because we all took it seriously.

• Person in history you most admire….

The most common response here was Albert Einstein. Christopher Columbus also received votes, along with Simon Bolivar. A few soap opera actreeses were mentioned.

I told them that Raoul Wallenberg. They have no idea who that it, so I explained a bit. I will have to do more explaining.

• If you could eat dinner with one person (currently alive and not in your family) with whom would you eat…

The most popular response to this one were Reggaton DJs, bachata bands, the Jonas Brothers, Avril Lavigne, Rafael Correa, and soap opera actresses who I don’t know.

I gave this question in two classes. I think that dinner with Khomeini or Ahmedinijad would be exciting. In the other, I went with Obama.

• If you could travel to one place in time, to when would you travel….

Almost everybody wanted to travel to the time of the dinosaurs, which proves there would be a market for Jurassic Park down here if they don’t employ Wayne Knight.

I thought the summer of 1969 would be a pretty awesome time, especially if I could extend my stay to the fall of ’69 and watch Bo-Woody I.

• If you would meet one person in the history of the world, who would it be…

For this question, the most popular responses were Einstein, Columbus, Madonna (which gave me a great chance to drop the “she’s from my state and attended my university” line), Jesus, and Michael Jordan.

I thought about this one for a long time and developed a fun list, in no particular order. William Shakespeare, Socrates, Shaq, Yoni Netanyahu, Raoul Wallenberg, Muhammad, Job, Newton, Abraham Lincoln, David Ben Gurion

• Favorite fruit…

The most popular ones were the pear, apple, grape, mango, and granadilla (a mild version of the passion fruit).

Well, it is at this point that I typically break into a monologue about how much I love fruit and how blessed the people here are to have such diversity of fruit, even though they don’t have pomegranate, blueberries, or honey crisp apples.

So these are some examples of icebreakers that I have been using with my kids to get to know them a bit, but just as importantly so that their classmates get to know them a little better, as well.

I’d love to get to know my blog readers a little better as well. So If you want to answer some of these icebreakers or present ideas for other icebreaker questions, giddy up.

Friday, July 03, 2009

Checking the specs on the enlign

It has been brought to my attention that this blog has been more of a chronicle of the predators in my garden than a detailed account of my experience as a Peace Corps volunteer and the things that I am doing.

While the garden is part of what I am doing, I am involved in several other projects.

One of them, for example, is the community bank I am starting in a community of 30 families about an hour away from where I live. There is no bus route to this town, so we have to rely on the municipality's resources for mobilization.

(Peace Corps has adapted a model for a community bank that is based off the idea of microfinance and microcredit that Mohammed Yunis developed)

To describe the municipality's fleet of vehicles as past their prime would be an accurate statement. The gem of the corps is "The New Chispita," which translates to "the new spark" ("the new" being English and not requiring translation). I don't really know what year the Chispita was made or what brand it is. I contend that it is a brand in and of itself and that it might have been one of the things that was created between the sixth and seventh day of creation (Pirke Avot simply omitted the Chispita).

Some would say that the Chispita defies science. I would contend that science defies the Chispita.

Well, either way, it's a good time. Last night, as we are returning from the community bank meeting and heading up a hill on the highway, the Chispita gives out. It simply couldn't do it.

So we pulled over to the side of the road to inspect the problem. And here is a photo of me checking the specs on the enlign for the rotary gerter. That line, from my favorite film, is the depth and breadth of my car knowledge.



To make a long, and fun, story short, we finally made it back home at 10:45, when we should have gotten back around 8:00. After the car didn't make it up the first time, we decided to give it another go. After that didn't work, we relied on gravity to take us down to the town at the bottom of the hill, where we called for help (no cell reception) and left the car for the night.

The night involved us eating some horrendous bread for dinner, me being freaked out by a barking dog, and three games of Casino (Ecuadorian rules are slightly different than what Grandma and Papa taught me, but the spirit of competition here is just as intense).