some random pics for ya

Tena, home, sweet home

Felipe swinging off a rope into the tena river

Panama Jade, Pirate, backpacker emily...the heat gets to you here sometimes

me with new hair and ruth

new hair again and rachel

semester over....

monografia is done. 22 page paper in spanish entitled "the affects of globalization and capitalism of fish farming, cacao, and governmental projects in the province of Napo, Ecuador"...not entirely sure if that makes sense in english, but there you have it. I managed to relate all my random work days and experience into one coherent paper. personally...i think i deserve a cookie and a gold star. hahaha
next semester i will be living with the same family and working in the tena hospital. i also get to write another monografia...i cant wait ;)

Procrastinating

yo,
so, two weeks left in the program. really should get started on that monografia and presentation thus i am writing on my blog. left my flash at home so killing time till i go interview a guy at the municipality at 3pm. gonna go pretend i know what i am writing about, which i dont cause i had no real internship. hahaha
in other news....
rafting last saturday was awesome. 38 km through the rainforest. gorgeous!!! probably one of the most beautiful places i have ever been. wish i had pics. gonna try and get some from the company.
went back to quito for our big thankgiving party. it was weird being back in quito. cold for one, and there was so many...people, stores…everything. felt like i was in the US again for a day. best thing about the visit was that i got to get really clean and shave my legs in a nice indoor shower.
spent about 24 hours in quito before heading to the coast with 5 other girls from cimas. went to tonsupa by atacames in esmeraldas province. chilled out on the beach for a whole day. swam in the ocean with some crazy fun waves. stayed in a very...interesting hostel. still had a balcony with and ocean view so cant complain. and we got running water during the day at least hahaha. saturday night my friend nichole and i started the long journey back to el oriente. took 7 hour bus ride from esmeraldas to quito at 10pm. we were aided in finding the bus station by moron missionaries from utah.
once in quito at 445 am we ate a lovely breakfast of grilled cheese and nescafe at a lovely bus station diner and caught a bus to tena at 530 and we back in tena by 1130. spent the rest of the day hanging out with my host family and jumping off a cliff into the tena river. crashed at 8pm and did not move until 6am when i went for a run. yup..there you have it. brief summary of the last week of my life. one of these days i will remember my flash drive and put up pics.

im still in summer weather suckers

hey,
havent written in a while. gets so hot here i mostly just read emails and never write back cause i dont want to move. but the ac is on in this place.
still no internship, so i have been working on my family's farm. learning how to use machete. going rafting tomorrow.
still amazed at the variety and size of bugs here. cockroaches the size of my hand. chickens love them.
not much else to tell.
machismo is through the roof here and it kinda pisses me off, but other than that things are going well.

pics of new life in archidona

canoe trip down the napo river!!

my little sis dana and little bro lan

pilsner add. hahaha one of two beers sold in ecuador

yep, i ate it

view out my bedroom window

mamallacta

http://kesselberg.info/kichua/es/vision.html

my fam has a hostel
there are pics of my dad nelson, mom flora, and sis dana

new town, new fam

hey everyone,
i am now living in archidona, 12 km outside of tena ecuador. i have a new host family. mom, dad, baby, and six year old host sister. they are an indigenous family. very kind and very knowledgeable. i have learned a lot about the kichwa (Quechua, spelled academically)
culture in the pat few days. i will hopefully be learning a little of the kichwa language. my host parents converse in it often. so far though i pretty much only know yacu means water and llacta means earth. which is cool cause my host fams last name is mamallacta, mother earth. bugs here aren't too bad. getting kinda bit up, and bug repelant doesn't really work. maybe cause it doesn't work on ants or various other random bugs in this part of the world. I guess taking vitamin b and eating yuca is supposed to help. i am doing plenty of both. yuca is a root that is similar to potato and they eat it with almost every meal here.
my internship is yet to begin, mostly i have been hanging out with the host fam and learning a lot from there stories. there are the festivals of tena that started yesterday and go till the 15th of november. got to see fire works last night and a parade. luckily 6 other cimas students are living around here too so we can meet up in tena pretty easily even though we are all in different communities. we all have electricity and our own rooms, which is awesome. most shower with buckets out in the open. i got lucky, we share our bathroom with another house (my aunt and uncle i think) and it has a door, and there is toilet paper. no running water in the house, but we get jugs of drinkable water. there is even an internet cafe in archidona that works relatively fast. even though little kids kinda surrounded me last time to see what i was doing, which was a little awkward.
hmmm, what else?
oh yes, how could i forgert...i ate ants
after three days of thunderstorms here these giant ants (bout 1.5 inches) come out, you collect them, fry them up, and eat them. high in protein i guess. we ate our mashed up in yuca. was rather tasty surprisingly.
people in tena seem to be more creative in their cat calls than in quito. less “hello” and more shit like “its a beautiful day for my eyes”..said in english.
that all for now, pretty slow life here. hope to start work soon, getting kinda bored.

random pics+walk to school+ last day at cimas

david killing his gua gua de pan (bread in the shape of babies that you dip in fruit soup)

emily with her gua gua

when in ecuador??

oh, they love eachother...cute hahaha

my house in quito

crazy people hahaha

more crazy people

another tirp to tena

exiting the cave

felipe doing who knows what..being felipe

arent we a special group? (im in the back)

I went back to tena this weekend to have an interview with ecobona(the organization I will be interning with. Over half of the cimas kids ended up going (15 of us). Most of us had interviews or meetings with our families. Everything went really well. I am afraid I might not have sufficient education in environmental science for my internship. Well see…i´ll do want I can.
Our first night only 8 of us were there. We arrived at 1 am and got a hostel right outside of the bus station. Next day we switched hostels to be closer to the river. It is freakin hot as hell in tena so we spent a good amount of time swimming in the river napo. There was a rope to swing in on, but only felipe and david used it. I was happy just jumping of the side the island.
At night, once all of us had arrived, we drank a bit and went to a karaoke bar. We ended up being the only ones there beside like 5 other ecuatorians. It was a lot of fun sang some good old classics.
Our last day we went to the caves. This was the best part of the trip. We got a couple flash lights and tour guide who was awesome and way excited about his job. These caves are not touristy like in the US. No lights, not stairs, no one holding your hand…ok the guide had to do that once in awhile. But it was still awesome. We got to swim through some parts, squeeze through others, and climb around, over and under till we reached the other end. The exit was beautiful. We climbed up some rocks into the lush green forest in the middle of a rainstorm. The walk back was an adventure in itself. The rain made the hillside muddy and slippery. Almost everyone had a wipe out at some point.
After we split into groups of 4 and hitched back to quito. My group got to go most of the way in a comfortable SUV, with an awesome couple that bought us manjar. we hadn’t eaten all day and feasted on a two litter jug of yogurt and a block of cheese. I got hope and crashed immediately after dinner.

beach, northern ecuador

my host dad and i made a friend while walking on the beach

never seen a tree like this

these crabs are everywhere! i stepped on one and killed it :(..but not this one

Going to the beach was awesome. It was the second time in my life I have had the opportunity to swim in an ocean. At first I forgot the whole it being salt water thing. That was a pleasant surprise.
Most of this trip was spent hanging out on the beach, swimming, playing cards, and drinking beer with my host fam. Pretty relaxed.
The northern coast is mostly afro ecuatoriano. This is because a slave ship crashed there at some point. Interesting story. Interesting place. i really liked the people and the atmosphere. Very friendly and relaxed. Pretty much like any coastal population I think. People that live by beaches just seem to be more chilled out. Hahaha

here are some more pics from the beach

after tena time

ahhh!!! pretty... our 5km walk back. sucks doesnt it?
climbing the waterfall
so they decided to jump in. not like it wasnt a moutain lake that was freakin freezing...wait..yes it was. silly kids.

it was 6am and very very cold

at the end of our trip to tena not a single one of us wanted to go back to quito because, well we dont really like quito. so we had our prof drop us off at a little mountain town called papallacta that is know for its hot baths. image a sound of music setting and that is almost how beautiful this place was. we were starting to run out of money so instead of taking a taxi truck to the hostel we walked the two km up hill. this town is higher than quito so the attitude is killer going up hill with a pack, not mention i am kinda out of shape. the first hostel we looked into we stayed at. we had to take there “simple” rooms cause they were the cheapest. $10 a night, included the thermal pools. another gorgeous hostel. it was much colder here than in tena so the hot baths were awesome. there were three to choose from. one outside where you could see the stars, a lager indoor one, and another indoor one that was really warm and a more romantic setting. haha
we spent most of our night relaxing in the hottest bath.
we woke up at 530 the next morning to go on a hike in la reserva cayambe in el paramo, which is at a very high altitude. i am glad we went in the morning. it was a a lot of hiking and cool enough to not sweat buckets. we also got a beautiful view of a snow covered mountain. we hiked to the lagoons and a waterfall. to get to the water fall we had to go a little off the path and the land up there acts like a sponge so we got pretty muddy. the did little rock climbing to get the waterfall.
again we did not want to pay for a taxi back to the hostel so we waked the 5 km from the nature reserve. luckily it was down hill most of the. we got back to the hostel by 1010 am ate breakfast and waked to the the highway to catch a bus back to quito. i got home and crashed a 7pm. now i am back in quito writing papers for a fews days. thursady i am heading to the coast.

tena time

shooting darts

basket weaving

home sweet home
green!
eating fruit on the farm, and yes we are in the middle of a farm at this point

Just got back from a four day trip to el oriente. also known as the freakin amazon rain forest!
the environmental track students, all 5 of us, got to go to the amazon area for our observation trip. i
we stayed on an organic farm with out lights or running water. we visited two indigenous communities and learned a lot of their hardships fighting against oil companies, loggers, and other large companies.
the rain forest is what one would expect. really hot, really humid, and had some of the biggest f'ing bugs i have ever seen in my life.
the people are unbelievably nice though. such as welcome change from quito. especially the indigenous communities were so inclusive. i never expected to feel so welcome.
so i think i will be doing my internship in an indigenous community for 5 weeks helping with agriculture and tourism. i have never gone 5 weeks with out running water or electricity. i am a little worried about that, but bathing in a river cant be that bad right? i have to get used to the food though. the eat yuca, bananas and fish mostly. the yuca and bananas i totally cool with. but it will take me awhile to get used to being served a whole fish, and eventually i will have to learn to eat the head of the fish as well. it was a challenge enough for me to remove the spine. so i'm a wimp, I'll get over it. but i really hope this internship possibility works out. it would be an amazing opportunity.