Brief Tech Trip Recap

In one week, I will officially be done with pre-service training. Soon, we will move out of our training communities and head to Quito for our swearing-in ceremony.

I have much to blog about, but I wanted to give you an idea of my schedule before I get deep into the specifics of how to use a hatchet to cut sugar cane.

Who trained me to handle sugar cane?

Someone who prefers to be called Rambo and another one called Mustache.

This all happened during the coastal, natural resource technical trip I went on last week to get better acquainted with some of the technical aspects I am likely to encounter at my site.

We spent the first three days of the trip at a hostel/environmental education center in Puerto Quito before splitting off into our regional trips. The bulk of the technical sessions there involved visits to an integrated farm down the street. The highlight of this was when we had to prune cacao trees. This phrase is code for climbing the tree and using a machete to cut down bad branches.

The other important technical aspect of our stay at the environmental education center (this phrase brings back memories of elementary school field trips) were the soccer matches between trainers and trainees in the afternoon. Even though Ecuador is obsessed with futbol and America could care less, the trainees won both matches.

Then we moved on to the coastal portion of our trip. We traveled six hours to the coastal village of Tabuga where one of our co-trainers has been working for two years on a dry tropical forest reserve.

We stayed at the reserve, in a building made out of sugar cane and without electricity. It’s a weird feeling to use howler monkeys to wake you up instead of an alarm clock. At the reserve, we learned about the history of the reserve, trail management, the logic behind their botanical garden, and the threats of illegal hunting in the reserve. We went on a hike and repaired some steps along the trail (more details to come in future posts).

We spent an afternoon walking around our co-trainer’s village to get a sense of life as a volunteer in the field and finished the day at the beach.

The next morning, we visited the owner of the reserve at his yogurt farm. He makes some delicious yogurt. Afterwards, we went to an agro-ecotourism project owned by an Italian where he is growing eight different types of tomatoes in greenhouse. This is the first coastal greenhouse I have ever heard of (it’s normally so hot on the ocast that a greenhouse is unnecessary, bu the is using it against the flies). Then we had a delicious Italian lunch (a good break from rice and fried plantains).

We continued our journey south along the coast to the community of Rio Muchacho where they have an environmental elementary school and an organic, integrated farm. It is a really awesome place, and I will write more about it soon. The owners also helped start the world’s first organic shrimp farm (shrimp farms were really big along the coast until El Nino and the white spot disease).

Our last night of the technical trip was spent in Bahia de Caroquez. It is a town on the coast that used to be a bustling metropolis. But after El Nino and an earthquake hit it bad in successive years, a lot of people moved out. You can still see that many of the buildings are abandoned. The landscape is still gorgeous, even if the buildings are abandoned.

The next morning, we took the 10 hour bus back to Cayambe.

That was a quick synopsis of our trip. I will go more in depth in subsequent posts but in the case that I don’t, I at least wanted to give you a sense of what I have done the last week, other than take pictures of funny street signs.

To finish this post, here are a few fun facts and stories that I have come across in the last few days:

One of my friend´s site is in a county on the coast which is known to have a rural population that is very skillful with the machete. Whenver he tells someone where he is going, the common reaction is the a throat-slitting action followed by them saying ´cuidado´(¨be careful¨). On his site visit, his host dad was bragging about how skillful he is with a machete. Later that day, he came home with a bandage over his thumb. Expect more posts about machete use.

My other friend´s site is the hometown of Lorena Bobbitt.