--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.
Enough for now, Jens.
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