Quito Days Are Here!

December 6th is Quito Day, when Quiteños and other Ecuadorians celebrate the founding of the city of Quito. Viva Quito!

The celebration, however, is not just one simple day of the year - it's 9 non-stop days of festivities, hence "Quito Days." The fiesta began yesterday afternoon with the first bull fights and guess who arrived at the same time? Here we are reunited (awww):

Jens arrived on our doorstep, back from Peru in one piece, happy but tired, dirty, and covered with chigger bites. I was happy to see him! After a shower and change of clothes he was revived a bit and he, Caleb, and I went off to "La Noche Quiteña" at Caleb's school, Colegio Nuevo Mundo, where we ate "pinchos" (like shish kabob) and corn on the cob with white cheese, and drank "canelazo," a warm sweet cinnamon drink. Some parents were complaining that the canelazo had no rum in it, but Colegio Nuevo Mundo is a smoke-free and alcohol-free place, as was announced periodically during the evening.

The school had brought in a traditional band whose music got the younger children dancing, and later a student band played songs that roused up the adolescents. The most popular act was the Vaca Loca (crazy cow), a person who ran among the crowd with a fireworks stick construction the shape of a cow on his head. The thing was lit and shot off fireworks in all directions at the students, faculty, and parents. It was great fun to watch (at a distance)!

Today was the opening parade for Quito Days and it happened to start right around the corner from our house. We watched both the beginning and end of the 6-hour event and especially enjoyed the performers on stilts. One of these is a condor - can you tell? (Click on any of these photos to see an enlarged version.)

Then came the float with the Reina de Quito (Queen of Quito). Can you spot her behind all those great giant masks?


In between watching the beginning and end of the parade, we went on an outing up Pichincha Mountain. In the photo below, Jens has entered by the "Viva Quito" sign to buy our cable car tickets.


In just a few minutes, the cable car took us from 9,680 ft. above sea level to 13,500 feet above sea level. The air was a little thin at that altitude. Can you read the sign below, which encourages people to move slowly and not to run?

We started walking up and around to get various views of the city, Pichincha Mountain, and other landmarks. If you looked closely, you could see the colors of the parade way down below and halfway across the valley. Here Caleb is taking a moment to catch his breath and enjoy the view:


In the picture below, you can see Quito in the valley running long from north (left) to south (right). The second or middle ridge behind the city is Cerro Ilalo, which was our first climb here in Ecuador this fall (see earlier blog).

We saw some fun plants and formations, including this one below. What you see is about a foot of biomass above 8-10 inches of ash that Pichincha Mountain had dumped during one of its many eruptions long ago. The ash has lots of pumice stone and it's all eroding away because it's exposed by a road cut.


All three of us have at one time or another climbed the lower of Pichincha's two peaks, which is called Ruco and was wonderfully visible today. (It's altitude is 15,400 feet.) We were a bit worried when a lost, American young man hiking alone asked the way up the mountain and, in answer to our questions, reported he did not have either water or warm clothing. I told him we'd been snowed or sleeted on twice up on that mountain, but he seemed to think it was just a bit higher than what he was used to in Colorado and he'd just come back down if he encountered any problem. I hope not to read about him in tomorrow's newspaper!

The church in this photo is new since we last were up on Pichincha Mountain in 2007. It was a bit out of place but tastefully done otherwise.

As we prepared to descend back into the city, we saw two young men coming up the cable car to do some mountain biking on the way back down. Check it out:


Viva Quito!
-Spee

Jens's Adventures in Peru - Part V

Just got on the computers as one place was down and the rest full up with no free computers. After the workshop went across the river with Robert, where he has a local awaruana ahijado [Indian godson] that is 14 years old. The boy has 8 brothers and sisters, his mom is 43. It is a really fun family living in very sparse conditions, but full of laughter, and they really love Robert who is just wonderful with all of them. Next to the waterfall local boys have fun swinging on vines.

Came back to find that Jorge, who took a tumble at the waterfall was having a local healing herb applied to his rib by the wife of one of the workshop participants. Rufinio is quite a character with a lot of stories and a lot of the "old ways" about him.

The mix of mestizos and Awaruna, though all speak Spanish well, adds a different dimension, there is a very definite cultural divide. The mestizo/whites are church or NGO types mostly, but still function, talk, tell stories, in different ways. Had a couple of flop exercises and some surprise power ones. Was great that the electricity stayed off until we finished today, as the disco place next door couldn’t play their music ´til just after we finished.

One more day and though Jorge and I are ready to head home, we aren’t looking forward to that eight, or more, hour drive do Bagua. Nor am I looking forward to the trip back up to the border. Don’t know how those drivers take it trip after jarring, noisy trip. And yet, there is both enormous and detailed beauty the whole way!

Thanks for keeping the news coming.

J.

Jens's Adventures in Peru - Part IV

Hola, we are a little fried, but doing well. The second workshop is off to a good start, no need for translation, so it is easier in that sense. The new place is next to a pseudo discotheque, so my head is pounding from trying to hear while trying to block out the pounding rhythms next door.

May try to get online later, after I get back from supper. This place is nuts with all the different currents, conflicts, world views, agendas spinning past. Am learning a bit about the catholic push since we are in the casa comunal of the catholic church in town.

Hot, sweaty, it was raining when we woke up and the river is up again. Nice that the internet speed has increased substantially.

J.

Jens's Adventures in Peru - Part III

More news from Jens after Day 2 of the first Workshop he's co-facilitating...

Hola,

Back on the computer for my allotted hour.

We are well into the jungle, in the sense it is flat and the mountains are up-river from us, though the local folks talk about the two ranges that flank this area. There is a small canyon where the two ranges meet that is famous for the wildness of the waters flowing through (in essence the whole watershed of three river systems). It is said to be hugely deep and prone to whirlpools. Only the best motoristas take canoes through, and then only during certain conditions, otherwise folks hike up, over, and around. I think google earth will show you pictures of this place called a "pando" locally. Part of the lore of the area. Today the river is down and we had very hot, sunny weather.

Day two is over with more cultural and language challenges, though folks seem engaged and involved. A couple of the participants seem to have been through major trauma and seem to come and go, mentally. There are three "mestizos" in the group who have all the gregariousness of most latinos, and they will be chuckling while half of the indigenous folk are stone-faced. Everyone seems to enjoy the light and livelies [exercises], however.

Have been learning a fair amount about the native groups. All are subgroups of the Jibaro (a name many of them use though it is not their original name for themselves) people and they are related fairly closely to the Shwar and Ashwar [Indians]. The place of women is pretty low, and the folks from the Environment Ministry and other NGOs talk about the extreme difficulty of outsiders having any substantial contact with the women. Even if they do some work, they will not accept money but wait for the husband to show up and get paid. Social problems in the area are huge. Lots of AIDS, sexual abuse, revenge killings, suicide (particularly among women), alcoholism, etc. And yet I´ve never seen a group grasp I-messages faster or work better at resolving conflicts in some of the standard AVP confrontation exercises. Below, most of the group is heading back across the river at the end of the day.

Community is very strong, but very contentious. A couple of the Apus who are taking the workshop talk of how the people don´t like them to come to Nieva out of fear they will sell communal lands to the oil companies. These guys wouldn´t dream of doing that, from how they talk.

Fascinating. Brujeria [witchcraft] is rampant and blamed for a lot.

Re my visa, I´m hoping to play it by ear, depending on how the trip back works. It may not be as full of timely connections as I had coming here. Hope I don´t have to stay until Monday but it may be that is when I catch a flight back from Cuenca. Or I could spend more time and pay the 200 bucks in Quito. Will see and have a better sense when I get back up to Bagua or Jaen.

Love,

J.

Jens's Adventures in Peru - Part II

Nieva is a fascinating combination frontier town, river town, small town, jungle town. It has a plaza with the Catholic church just up the hill. Much of the town goes along the Nieva and Marañon rivers with the main street just behind the houses that line the flows. Yesterday´s rains have made the river rise all day today, with some participants in the
workshop expressing concern about getting home after dark: too many trees and branches float down and can´t be seen in the dark. The afternoon activity in the plaza was a women´s power volleyball game.

This is native Amazonian territory - a large percentage of the population is native, though there is a good mestizo population and a few foreign NGO workers. Also the police who go jogging and yelling in rhythm at 6:00 a.m. up the main street. And a few govt. folk. A sponsor of these workshops is the Ministry of Environment, thanks to the wife of Robert
Vincent who is moving up those ranks.

This morning after our potato, yucca, and egg breakfast, Jorge and I took a motorized dug-out across the river to an NGO office where the workshop is being held. The room is a thatched-roof building open on all sides in the local style. Butterflies and dragonflies buzzing through, with chickens under the beautiful chainsawed hardwood floor.

The workshop has been unlike any I´ve done before. Most of the participants are native, and four speak very little Spanish so we do a lot of translation. I used to think AVP is about as cultureless as you can get in this sort of work, and I still feel this way, but that doesn´t mean it isn´t cultureless. It took the first three rounds before everyone caught on to what Concentric Circles was about, not ´cause anybody is slow, but rather, it seems, because who would ever think of arranging a way for people to talk together in this way? Nevertheless, the topics of violence/non-violence, communication, community, conflict resolution, are of intense interest to the group. There have been a number of comments as to having to bring this up in the community.

Peru has handled their native population very differently from Ecuador, mostly neglected until recently, with much less development, until recently, and now with a very forward thinking, I think, approach of helping many groups register their land as communal land that is not accessible to development. Hence the uproar earlier this year when Alan Garcia suddenly had some laws passed allowing oil companies to move around looking for their black death.

Among the group are some Apus, community leaders, who are listening carefully and making great comments. It is clear they deal with conflicts all the time and really want to talk about this stuff.

Have to go to dinner, more yucca, I´m sure, and there are many folks waiting for this computer. I do want to thank you all for the birthday greetings, much appreciated, and I wish you were either here or there were other ways to share time with you in this setting. Jungle rivers are something else, muddy yet clean, flowing, yet calm, fringed in huge
trees, sandbars that disappear quickly, traveled by noisy and stealthy canoes.

Much love, and thanks for writing,

Jens, pop, that guy.

Jens's Adventures in not Ecuador, but Peru!

Thinking of you in Nieva, at the confluence of the Nieva and Marañon rivers. The Marañon is considered the main headwaters of the Amazon and was a big part of the reason Ecuador and Peru were at odds for so long.

The eight hour trip started at 3:30 am this morning with a wait for the car. What happens here is much like a service in Jerusalem where cars leave when they are full. But the three of us (Robert, Jorge, and I) paid for the extra seat so we would have the little Toyota Corolla station wagon to ourselves. So it came by closer to four and by the time the driver stopped by his house for his overnight bag, and we got gas, and filled the tire with air it was closer to 4:30. We did great, even with the rain, until we hit the spot where the river flows over the road.

We had to wait three hours for the river to go down. Then there was another hour while we got the car on a balsa raft that the locals push across another river and then help pull the car up the mudslide on the other side. It was all a lot of fun, if you are not a Toyota Corolla. I now know that last winter I could have easily backed on down into that ditch and driven out up the other side. No problem, we even have tread on our tires! That car swam, went over boulders, waded through foot deep mud, bottomed out a hundred times or more, and came through with its muffler intact.

We arrived in Nieva at about 5:pm. It is a neat little town, pretty typical Amazon river place, lots of indigenous folk, some mestizos and a very few foreigners with ICUN and other groups.

This connection is slower than last night´s. Jorge gave up as aol would not load due, I think, to all the trash and images they put up with their e-mail. Thanks for the birthday wishes. The only thing wrong with the day was that my family wasn´t along with me. Natalie would be interested in talking to the many obviously-young-teen mothers you see around here.
The native compounds would also be of interest. Great to be back in the jungle.

Much love,

J.

Jens's Travels to Peru

Here's a report from Jens on his very long journey over the past two days to the AVP meeting place in Peru. In another message, he explained that the Internet service he was using and the keyboard did not make it easy for him to send all this news, so I'm glad he succeeded somehow.

-Spee

I am in Peru, and boy, did it take a long time to get here. Cuenca to Loja [Ecuador] was pretty nice, though like elsewhere there were places they were working on the road. It was a slooow bus, everyone seemed to wish they had taken another company. I arrived in Loja and found out that the bus to the border was leaving in 15 minutes (4:00 p.m). So I bought some water and bread, the ticket, hopped on and off we went even more slowly than on the Loja bus. The road to Vilcabamba (a town famous for having a larger number of centenarians in the population than is normal) was great, and the views wild and wonderful. Then the pavement ended and it was basically a one lane dirt road going down down down. Then it started to rain and the dirt turned to very slick clay which caused an accident up ahead and we sat for 45 minutes while everyone wondered why there were people on the road who didn´t bring along chains.

When we got going again, the rain stopped and the road returned to its usual ups downs and sharp turns. About 10:15 p.m. we went through a little town and then headed up. About twenty minutes later I looked out the window and the town was directly below us. If went over the edge, we would have rolled right into town hundreds of feet below.

We got to Zumba, the main town near the [Peruvian] border about 11:45 p.m. and I had to wake up the owner of a rinky dink place that charged $6 for the night, itchy creatures included, but no breakfast. At 8:00 am this morning I left Zumba on one of the old style buses seats but open sides, called a ranchero, and continued south for two more hours and over about four ridges ´til we got to the border.

This picture is of the Zumba bus station, the ranchero and, I think, Peru in the far distant ridge.

Had two Belgian fellows next to me who smoked pot, probably finishing up their stash before crossing into Peru. There is a freeway style bridge over a beautiful river at the border. It will probably be years before the road matches the bridge. You may be able to make out the Peruvian and Ecuadorian flags on either side of the bridge--this is the border crossing (Peruvian gvt. electronic equipment in the foreground).

It was another three or so hours coming out of the mountains before we got to a decent road. From San Ignacio the road was the same dirt, then it became clear there had been a little pavement once. Then there were more potholes than pavement, then more pavement than potholes, and finally a gorgeous highway winding down a wide river valley with lots of
rice fields. Looked like Asia.

I´m now in Bagua Chica waiting for Jorge Arauz and Robert Vincent to arrive. We will take off at 3:30 a.m. tomorrow morning and head back to the bad roads which will take us down to the jungle and the little town of Nieva.

Will try to stay in touch if possible.

Much love,

Pop

The World's Biggest Mountains

We went with Jens towards Peru as far south as Cuenca, which is a beautiful, old, and interesting Ecuadorian city that I’ve been waiting over 20 years to visit. We spent 2 days there and all four of us really liked it. We enjoyed exploring not only the different parts of the city, but also a spectacular valley nearby that led up into a high-altitude lake region where Cajas National Park is. It was one of the most gorgeous spots I’ve ever been. See Natalie's blog at http://nat-travels.blogspot.com/ for pictures.

While on the drive from Quito south to Cuenca (8-1/2 hours), we had seen no mountains at all, but on the way back north (alas, without Jens), we had the most incredible views. This was surprising given that we’re in the rainy season and clear days are rare. Caleb was thrilled at his luck! Along the way, we saw 7 snow-capped mountains ranging from 5,000 (16,400 feet) to 6,300 meters (20,660 feet) in height, including a view of every inch of huge, magnificent Chimborazo Mountain.


From about the mid-1700s to the mid-1800s, Chimborazo was thought to be the tallest mountain in the world. Indeed, Ecuadorians will remind you that this mountain is still the tallest in the world if you measure from the middle of the earth, because of the earth's bulge around the equator. We had absolutely spectacular views of it mile after mile.

Another one we saw quite up close was Cotopaxi Mountain, famous for its classic volcano shape. Caleb is waiting for the day when we can go into the Cotopaxi National Park, get even closer, explore, and maybe even climb it.

Also during this ride, we stopped and visited Ecuador's best Incan ruins, called Ingapirca. Since we weren't coming from Peru's Machu Picchu, we didn't suffer from being "underwhelmed," as some tourists are. We had seen smaller Incan ruins in two places in Cuenca, so this larger former Incan settlement - also a former settlement of the Canari Indians, who were fierce fighters against the Incan empire - was just great. We especially liked the shape of the Incan windows and doors.


The main roads in Ecuador are really quite impressive, although some are currently under renovation and reconstruction. At one point, we waited half an hour at a place where asphalt was being laid. The workers were permitting no traffic to pass either way. Soon tempers rose and people began yelling out their windows and honking their horns. Then a bunch of them got out of their cars and marched down to speak to the construction workers. Natalie, Caleb, and I watched with amusement, wondering if a full riot would break out.

The people were told they would be let through and sent back to their cars. But nothing happened and they began honking again. Then they began coming down the left-hand side of the road, demanding passage, using their cars and trucks to pressure the workers. Still we waited, but eventually we were allowed to pass on through. Generally, I think of Ecuadorians as quite calm, but we saw tempers in this instance!

Let me close with a view of another huge Ecuadorian mountain. This is El Altar, one of the few Ecuadorian mountains that lost its Indian name to a Spanish one. What you see are 9 craggy peaks around a crater that is 3 kilometers across. The tallest of the peaks, El Obispo (the bishop), gives the mountain its current altitude of 5,300 meters (17,400 feet). Can you imagine how huge this mountain was before it blew its top??!!


If you STILL don't want to visit Ecuador, I give up.

-Spee

Meanwhile, back at the equator...

Picture by NRB

...it is high time I (Jens) take a turn at posting the family blog. Some of the things that have kept me busy during our time here, besides keeping up with the family trips, are:

--writing a paper for a conference on peace and human rights at the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, which was partly sponsored by the Ecuadorian AVP group. (Here the Alternative to Violence Project is called PAV--Propuestas Alternativas a la Violencia.) At the conference I presented a vastly modified version of the paper because when I walked into the room where I was to give the speech, I found it full of high school students whom I didn´t think would appreciate listening to an academic paper on peace work in an intercultural context. All was in Spanish, so I´ve had to get back into la honda de la lengua a toda velocidad. During the conference I also co-facilitated a mini-AVP workshop, heard some interesting speakers, had a formal dinner with the University President, and learned about local efforts to build cultures of peace with Colombian refugees and northern villagers. (The University President showed us all, pre-dinner, the university´s "Sala de las Libertadoras." In English, this is the hall of the women involved in the liberation wars against Spain. We usually hear about Bolívar, Sucre, Martí, and such but there were, as usual, a lot of women involved in the struggle. They were commemorated in huge wood carvings and stained glass windows that were made by the father of the artist who created the QIVC Farmhouse window. The dinner could be an entire blog-post by itself, as it was a colonial-style white-gloved feast in an institution that aspires to democratize and lift up, through education, the fractured and marginalized societies of Andean America);

--(deep breath, remember I´m making a list of things I´ve been doing, such as) visiting and getting reacquainted with wonderful old friends;

--doing a good portion of the family management stuff like paying the bills, (which mostly means standing in lines over at the electric corp. building, and the phone co. building, and the bank, etc. ), buying food at the great markets, cooking, buying bread at any one of the 10 fabulous bakeries in the neighborhood (what is it about Americans and our ignorance about how quality of life improves with good fresh baked goods of all sorts?), replacing lost or stolen cell phones, fixing broken car windows, you all know the routines);

--preparing for and co-facilitating a day long gathering of national AVP facilitators;

--preparing for a two week November trip to the northern jungle region of Peru for AVP workshops;

--doing some work with/for Spee on one of her consultancies;

--and building a tree house way up in a loaded avocado tree.

This past weekend, known up north as Halloween, has been fun for us here in its mostly non-orange and blackness. Some time ago, as trick or treating began to really get out of hand, the government set a question out to the population: ¿Why are you succumbing to this foreign custom of frenzy and calories, when we have wonderful local customs to highlight the spirit of what these first days of November have meant for us? Asking the question seemed to have worked. There was some, but very little halloweenieness to the past few days and quite a bit of the traditional celebration of día de los muertos.

We were invited, along with my parents, to the home of a wonderful old friend who worked with my folks back when they were doing integrated development at the missionary-run farm named Picalqui, north of Quito; i.e., she knew me when I was a snotty little kid. After she served us a large and tasty meal, we were given the traditional colada morada, a blackberry and fruit drink, and guaguas de pan, or human shaped and decorated loaves of bread. Our friend, Faviola, is now slightly deaf,

but she gave a very moving speech about all the folks who have passed through our lives together (including my sister, whom she of course also knew) and have left parts of themselves with us.

Natalie had done some research on the origins of Halloween and had shared that ancient sense of the beginning of our northern fall as being a time when there is a thinness to the boundaries between the living and the dead. Faviola truly brought this forward for all of us. See Natalie´s blog for a tour of Faviola´s garden.

Later that evening Caleb and I went down

to the Tumbaco valley where a schoolmate of mine and her family were having a little more of an American Day of the Dead celebration. We dads hid in the dark out in their garden with bags of sweets, and the kids had to find us to get their candy. The group there included a family that is about to head out to Australia as the father has been named Ecuador´s ambassador to that country, a regional director for CARE Latin America, a couple where he was the son of the ambassador to Cuba and she is the niece of Raúl Castro, and a couple who recently worked for the Nature Conservancy as head of Latin American programs.

This last couple led us today on a trip up to the back side of Antisana, one of the few snowcaps in Ecuador that I never climbed - mainly because it is so remote and it was always complicated to get permission from the hacienda owner to get to the road that provided access to the mountain. The wildlife up there is abundant because the area has been so lightly touched.

On the way up there is a huge quebrada with cliffs on the far side where Condors nest. I saw three different condors in flight today, and they are impressive birds. Unfortunately, digital pictures of the flying condors look like there are dust specks in the clouds. You may be able to see white streaks of guano on the cliff picture, above which are the condors´nests.

The one species we did not see that is often present up there is the endangered Andean Ibis. But otherwise there were the blue-headed white-chested hummingbirds, fields of Caracaras, Andean Gulls, Andean Coots, Andean Teals (the white folks who named these birds were not very creative), finches ground doves, and plenty more all at an altitude above 12,000 ft.

Below is a Caracara, some gulls and some wild horses that roam the high plateau.

If you can imagine the above photo
and these next two as a panorama, you might have a sense of one of the views we enjoyed this afternoon.

Natalia, Caleb and Natalie in front of an overcast Antisana.

Enough for now, Jens.

Training in Basra

Days 1 and 2 of orientation training went well. I had my doubts, though, when I first saw the training room on Saturday. Here's what it looked like:


On what would people sit? Remember, this is a start-up operation without any extra supplies or furniture on hand. How would we comfortably fit over 20 trainees in the space? Could we successfully arrange the room for optimal experiential learning, with a few people each at a round table and empty space for participatory exercises?

Fardos, the Human Resources Manager, came to the rescue, with a late afternoon trip to buy furniture. She came back to the office with 5 small, light-weight, plastic garden sets - the kind used in restaurants here. This is part of the load that came off the pick-up truck:

I spent much of the evening wiping the dust off the 20 chairs one by one and voilà, I had a great arrangement for the trainees by the time they arrived Sunday morning.

Here are a couple of my trainees in the area in front of the main building but still within the walls of our compound. They're security guards and the one on the left especially enjoyed volunteering for a role play in which he was the new employee and one of the women trainees was his "buddy," helping him learn the ropes.

* * A special prize goes to the reader who can offer a logical explanation for his t-shirt. * *
(click on the photo to enlarge it and read the English and Spanish on it)

-Spee

I have a feeling I'm not in Kansas anymore

For news of the Braun Family in Ecuador, you'll need to contact someone else. I'm on the other side of the world in Basra, preparing to conduct orientation training for Save's newly hired staff.

The program I helped start up in 2003 closed in 2006 because of the difficult security situation. Now Basra is calmer (it's all relative) and we're off again, launching programs focused on children's education and their protection from harm.

Here I am dressed to go by car (in the back seat, of course) to the "supermarket" to buy some food for the week. We women live in a house adjacent to the office building/men's quarters. It's all in one relatively small compound, and since I'm headed to bed, I'm in "lock down" in a "safe room" on a "safe floor" in a "safe house." You should see the number of bolts we have to close before going to bed - it's a work-out. Don't I look safe in my little room?



-Spee

Ecuador Then and Now

Hard to believe, but I've been coming to Ecuador every 2 to 4 years ever since I married Jens. That's 9 times in the past 24 years. Here are some "then and now" observations.

1. The Ecuadorian roads are hugely improved. As you drive the main routes between towns and cities, you no longer have to fear that a big pothole will suddenly loom in front of you with little chance for you to dodge it. The drivers are a bit less insane. The government is working hard through a public ad campaign to get drivers to slow down, not pass on curves, not drive drunk, and put their children in the back seat. As we neared the coast, one sign said, "La playa no se va a ningun lado - no corras!" which means, "The beach isn't going anywhere - slow down!" The sign in the photo below says, translated into English, "Daddy, keep me safe, don't speed!!!"


2. The latest global initiatives to improve the world are seen here in various manifestations. These include programs that are successfully increasing life expectancy, reducing maternal mortality, and increasing literacy rates. They also are reflected in the fact that some Ecuadorians are getting into organic food, permaculture, green construction, and natural birth. Natalie is participating actively in the latter as a trainee at a clinic that specializes in water births. Here she is in her doula uniform.

The government has a big "buy local" campaign going. Here is a photo of the many "primero Ecuador" billboards they have put up. "When you travel, first Ecuador." Other billboards promote locally produced food and locally made clothing.

3. Two decades ago, Helen and Gene still sent us lists of what to bring from the U.S. - items that could not be found in Ecuador at all or for a reasonable price. Now we send them lists of what to bring from Ecuador to the U.S. In Quito you can buy anything. The mall we pass through to walk from our home to Helen and Gene's, the Quicentro, is expanding (see construction signs on the left-hand side of the photo) and has a lot of business, despite the presence of two other big shopping centers/malls within 3 blocks of this one.

Caleb thought these modified names of chain stores was hilarious:

4. On a less cheerful note, the coast is much more built up. The small, quiet fishing villages of the past are hard to find. As reported in our last blog post, we went to stay at Atacames, pictured below.

Then we went on a long day trip on bad roads to Mompiche and discovered a taste of the past in that sleepy village. Here's the extent of the village:
The men are still mostly fishing for a living.
The main fun in the late afternoon is co-ed soccer on the beach (not pictured) and other play, such as that of these four boys on an old surfboard.
5. Family relationships continue one generation after the next. Gene and Helen knew well the great-grandparents of Edison, our godchild, who is a Cayambi Indian. Over time, the members of this family have gotten more and more educated and their economic circumstances have steadily improved. Each generation grows taller, because of better nutrition, while they speak more Spanish and less Quechua. Edison dresses like a teenager almost anywhere in the world and learns much of the same material in school that Caleb is learning. Here's a picture of Edison and some of his family. From left to right: Edison's cousin Sally, Edison, me, Sally's mom Elena, Edison's mom Fanny (they're sisters), Gene, Segundo (Edison's grandfather), and Caleb.

Now here's something that hasn't changed: Fanny served us a wonderful traditional meal of guinea pig, potatoes, salad, and fresh juice. Caleb is getting good at eating guinea pig, which is a real skill !!


-Spee