Resume booster?

If you have any questions about puppet management and creation, you can ask me.

I am now certified in the subject — after last week's ten-hour course.

This month is month of the arts in Ecuador. This means that there are a bunch of programs going on throughout the country to promote the arts - in a variety of forms.

So a troupe came through town last week promoting, promoting puppets made out of recycled materials. I thought this sounded interesting. Plus, I'll take any opportunity to receive further certification (This will go on my resume between handwashing and beekeeping).

The training was free and open to the public, so you got a variety of age groups. There was some younger kids, a few high schoolers, some school teachers, and a couple of Peace Corps Volunteers.

The entire week build up to each partificpant performing on the final day of the workshop.

After the first day was spent getting to know a bit about puppets, we devoted the second day to collecting reusable materials that we would use to make our puppets. On the third day, the instructors divided us into groups of three. We each chose a fable to perform on the last day. My group chose "The Lion and the Rat."

I wasn't very familiar with this story, so I had to do some independent research on the subject. To make a short story shorter: A rat wakes up a sleeping lion in the jungle. The lion is angry and threatens to eat the rat. The rat pleas for forgiveness, saying that one day he will help the lion out. A few days later, the lion is trapped by hunters, and the rat helps the lion out of the predicament.

It was my job to make the rat. We spent the next few days making our pieces. My rat was made out of a can of garbanzo beans, the top of a 20 oz. bottle, an eight of clubs playing card, two pieces of paper, broom bristles, and some carpet. I named him Fausto, because I thought he looks like a Fausto.



(If you buy ten sticks of hot glue gun glue, they give you a ridiculous hat.)

Friday was the big day. And I was kind of nervous because I hadn't performed since I appeared as the Chinese immigrant in "Anything Goes" in tenth grade. But it all turned out well.

I just remembered what the professor had been telling us:

• Remember that your character has to walk onto the stage. He just can't appear out of nowhere.
• Only the birds and insects can fly, everybody else has to walk along the top of the curtain.
• Don't take your eyes off you puppet. If you take your eyes off your puppet, you lose focus.
• Many of the items that we think are garbage can be used to make rats. (This is true because if you leave food scraps lying around the house.....)

And because of that, I'm now certified.

(You wonder why there haven't been blogs lately? I've been too busy playing with puppets.)

Fridge fixed

When I left off, the refrigerator repair had finally shown up at my house - just seven hours late.

He said that it wasn't my fault that my fridge broke. It was because, in Ecuador, electicity can very unreliable and often comes and goes as it pleases. These surges of energy are not very good for refrigerators.

Luckily, my refrigerator guy knows how to fix this problem. He looked around my kitchen and saw the gas tank I use for my stove. He asked if I would let him use the tank. I had no idea why but, sure, as long as it's in the name of fixing my fridge.



He runs out to his car to get some tool, chief among them was a blow torch. He hooked up the torch to my gas tank and started welding (soldar).



He got about fifteen minutes into fixing my fridge when he reconnected my gas tank to my stove and started packing up his stuff.

Ian: Is my fridge fixed? That was fast.
Repair man: Not yet. It's getting late. I'll come back tomorrow.

Keep in mind that he showed up at 4:00 in the afternoon when he said he would be at my house at 9:00.

The next day, he showed up on time and worked throughout the morning. When I came back to my house for lunch, he was still there but the fridge was starting to cool down.

He came back later in the afternoon to make sure everything was still working. Success.

---

Of any week for my fridge to stop working, this was probably one of the worst ones. On Friday, I had made mass quantities of food for shabbat dinner, assuming the the majority could be stored away in my fridge and heated up in my over for meals throughout the week. I figured that I could eat three meals of leftovers per day until Wednesday, at least.

That was the plan until Saturday morning when I went into the fridge to finish the previous night's dessert crisp and discovered it was room temperature. Thankfully, my neighbor's let me store my food in their fridge for the week.

Unfortunately, the schools were on vacation, and my neighbor's took advantage of the time off to travel a little bit with their kids, as opposed to their "home all day" schedule when there are classes.

I adjusted to this uncertainty by always having some food on hand to make an easy meal, just in case they weren't home. Obviously, it wasn't as easy as reheating leftovers.

Losing the waiting game

My fridge broke, again. This time, it wasn't my fault.

The wires that connect my house with my kitchen were in rough condition and finally bit the dust. The electrician came by and repaired the power issue. But another one remained.

My refrigerator did not take well to the comings and goings of electricity and decided to shut down.

The fridge made this decision at some point on Friday night, and I realized Saturday morning. I stored all my refrigerated foods at my neighbor's house and set out in search of the repairman.

One man in town has a reputation for being the only capable technician in town. He fixed up my fridge last time it stopped being cold, and I trust his work.

After three days of trying to find him, I finally caught up with him on Monday at lunch. He told me that he'd stop by later in the afternoon. He came into my house without any tools. He scoped around for 15 minutes, whistling a song the entire time. He said he had identified the problem and that he would come back on Wednesday morning at 9:00 a.m. to fix the problem.

I was waiting for him at 9:00 a.m. He never showed. I gave him the hora ecuatoriana. Still no sign.

In the States, you give a cable guy a three-hour time window to come by your house. Translating that into Ecuadorian time, that means he might show up in the next week. Luckily, I had something that cable and utilities companies would never give you - the man's home address.

So I decided to track him down and see why he didn't show up. I was talking to a fellow volunteer, Laurel, and she said that if I followed a repair guy to his house "in the US that might get you a restraining order."

Here, it's what I like to call accountability and the only way to get stuff done.

I posted a note on my door to the technician and headed to his house. An elderly woman answered the door.

Ian: I'm looking for the refrigerator repair guy.
Elderly woman: He's not home.
Ian: He told me he would be at my house at 9:00, but he hasn't showed up yet.
Elderly woman: (Laughing) He's so unreliable.
Ian: Does he have a phone number?
Elderly woman: We can't trust him with a phone. He loses everything.
Ian: Do you think he'll show up this morning?
Elderly woman: He might. Wait at your house all morning.
Ian: If he doesn't show up this morning, I'll come back here during lunch.

I went back home. I had so much to do around the house (e.g. laundry, clean the kitchen), but I couldn't do any of it because I wouldn't be within earshot of the door. I split time between a few episodes of Seinfeld, a few chapters of my book, and reheating some food that I had stored in my neighbor's fridge.

As soon as standard lunchtime struck, I was at his front door. He told me that he had forgotten and that he'd be at my house at 4:00 p.m.

He was there at 4:05, only seven hours late.

"Good" music

When the newspaper kids come to my house to learn how to use Photoshop and InDesign, they also if I have music on my computer. I open up iTunes, and they tell me that I don't have any "good" music.

Now, the newspaper kids and I have different understandings of what makes music good. My preferred music probably wouldn't be well-received at a discotec, whereas that's pretty much all the youth want.

After the "you don't have any good music" bit played out a few times, I asked them to make me a list of music that they would like to listen to when they are at my house so I could get what they want. I now have over 150 bachata songs, 175 reggaeton songs, 74 baladas de amor, and a good variety of other genres they enjoy (cumbia, vallenato, salsa, pop, etc).

By now, pretty much every kid who uses the computer is satisfied with the music selection. My iTunes collection is constantly changing. If the kids want to listen to a song, I want to make them happy so they continue learning how to use the programs.

Two days ago one of the kids came by with a few suggestions on how I could improve my iTunes library.

One of the songs he suggested was "El Dengue" by DJ Loko.

I had never heard of this song before, but having overcome El Dengue, I wanted to know what DJ Loko felt dengue sounded like.



The song does a nice job of expressing the ups and downs of the dengue. Its intermittent use of horns to show the intense headaches followed a brief lull to express how the disease hits use in waves.

If I were to critique the song, I would say that it doesn't really do an accurate job of representing the "everything tastes like chalk" aspect of the sickness or the "I feel as if I was just run over by a tractor" side of things.

While I don't know how that would be done musically, I know that DJ Loko's production is not it. But then again, if you were to accurately portray that in music, I don't think anybody would want to listen.

The dangers of working with cactuses

I spent this morning chopping off branches of cactus plants for a living fence we are building.

A word of caution when working with cacti: Always be aware of the spikes on the cactus, but don't forget about other risks. I learned that one the hard way.

The idea of a living fence is to make a barrier out of plants that people or animals wouldn't want to cross. We are making one of these in town and decided to make it out of cactus.

• It is a local species, so it would not be out of place in the botanical garden.
• Cactus has prickly things that hurt when you touch them.
• They are adapted to the dry season. You can plant them in the dry season, and they will you flourish.
• They are remarkably easy to reproduce.

The easiest way to propagate cactus is by chopping off a chunk of an existing cactus plant and planting that chunk in the ground. Unbelievably simple. Although I'm not sure if it works with all cactus species, it does with the local variety.



The first step was finding someone who had enough cactus on their property that wouldn't mind letting the us prune their plants for seedlings. One of my coworkers said that his neighbor, who lives on some hilly property near the river, has cactus coming out of his ears.

I went down there this morning with my machete to check it out. It didn't help that it rained last night, making the slope heading down toward the river. But I was wearing my work clothes and gardening gloves, so I didn't really care if I fell going down the hill, which happened repeatedly.

I spent a couple of hours chopping down cactus branches and putting them into a pile. It was a lot of fun. The cacti are on the side of a hill, and I had to crawl around the ground to get in better cactus-chopping position. I didn't get pricked because I have cat-like speed and reflexes and was wearing gloves.

Most of the cactus pieces that I took were ones that were lying on the ground and had already fallen off the plants. Well, little did I realize, cactus pieces weren't the only think lying around down there...

Apparently, my cactus seed search had bothered some hornets/wasps. They felt as if I had invaded their territory, which I probably did, and decided to go after my left elbow.

I couldn't really move very quickly because I was crawling underneath a bunch of cactus plants, and any miscalculated movement meant more stinging pain. I maintained my composure as much as I could and rolled to safety. I think I sustained about six stings on my elbow/upper arm (no cool swelling pictures because it didn't really swell up).

I regrouped and finished collecting cactus and lugging it up the hill. And my arm was sore for the rest of the afternoon and had a bit of a burning sensation, as if I had spent the entire day working with hot peppers, but nothing too serious.

But I just want this to be a warning that just because you have mitigated the effects of the cactus spikes that doesn't mean you eliminated all the risks.

Multipurpose rock

I wash my laundry on a concrete slab behind my house.

It has a faucet, drain, and flat surface where I can scrub my clothes.

All along I had been calling this a laundry rock.

I was wrong.

Last week, I was finishing my breakfast one morning when I heard a bird chirping. How pleasant, I thought. The birds had come to feast on the bread crumbs my landlord's wife leaves out every morning.

I heard the chirping again and noticed that it wasn't coming from my landlord's window. It was coming from my laundry rock.

I went to check what was going on. My neighbors were crowding around the laundry rock, holding a chicken in their hands.

Then, suddenly, no more chirping. Just blood dripping down the surface I wash my clothes on.

I had to run out the door, so I couldn't watch the clean-up effort or ask my neighbors any questions at the time. (And it's probably better that way)

This allowed me to reflect about what I had just witnessed and how I was going to handle my laundry situation going forward.

The whole chicken being killed thing isn't a big deal to me. The fact that they decided to perform the act where I wash my dirty underwear and socks made me think.

First off, who would kill a chicken where somebody puts their filthy clothes? Then I thought about some of the sanitary conditions of the local butcher shop and realized that my neighbor's set up was probably cleaner.

Then I considered whether this act would have any effect on how I do laundry for the remainder of my service. I don't think it will.

Any effort that I put into doing laundry is more about effort than results. I'm not exactly sure how much cleaner or less smelly my clothes are getting, but what matters is that I'm trying (and listening to some good podcasts). So a little diluted chicken blood on the drain? No pasa nada. Also, both of my neighbors have since done laundry on the same rock.

I asked a few other volunteers about what they would do in such a situation. And, unsurprisingly, my case is not unique. A couple of my friends recalled having their laundry rocks being used for dinner killing. Plus, I figure I encounter enough hazards that I really don't need to worry about traces of chicken blood on a surface that is exposed to quite a bit of soap and soapy water.

So I'm just going to move forward here and treat it as a learning experience - mostly opening my eyes to the possibilities of what I can do with that multipurpose rock.

Does anyone know a shokhet?