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

Beach Trip and, Alas, No World Cup Trip

Caleb asked that we go to the Pacific coast for his 15th birthday, which we celebrated last Friday. Some friends kindly lent us their apartment near the coastal town of Atacames, and off we went for the long weekend, joined by our 13-year-old godson Edison. We had fabulous views heading down to sea level, like this one. Can you spot the cattle?

We also had fabulous views from the 3rd floor apartment at the beach.
Here Spee and Natalie are drying off by the pool, while Jens is looking up at Caleb the photographer.
We had fun in the water. Here Caleb is emerging from successfully body-surfing in, while Jens is still cruising.
We had fun on the beach as well. Here Jens is digging for the crab that made a hole he spotted, while Edison and Caleb look on.
We had beautiful views on the way home on Monday. We took a new route - newly constructed and new to us - whereby first we drove north along the Ecuadorian coast and then headed inland (east) to the city of Ibarra along a new route not too far south of the Colombian border. Because it's a new road and the road cuts (cliffs, bluffs) haven't yet settled, there were many stones and even mini-landslides that had landed on the road, which made the driving even more tricky than usual. But the valley heading up to Ibarra was absolutely gorgeous. The scenery was stunning for over an hour.

Also on the road were many sticks that had been recently dropped by sugar cane trucks heading up to the highlands in front of us. We stopped and picked up one big stick, then used our pocket knives to make short pieces on which we happily munched for a while.


The other big news is that Ecuador has tried valiantly to qualify for the 2010 World Cup Soccer Tournament. On Saturday afternoon, we joined everyone else in the country to watch Ecuador play Uruguay in the second-to-last qualifying match. They just had to win it and they would likely be selected for the World Cup. How sad it was when Ecuador lost right at the very end of the game 2-1. On the other hand, we had a good night's sleep because the fans went to bed early.

This evening was the final qualifying match, with Ecuador playing Chile, which had already qualified and had nothing to lose. Did they then let Ecuador win, giving them the opportunity to play in the World Cup next year? No, they sent Ecuador to defeat 1-0 and it's a very quiet night here in Quito. Here are Caleb and Natalie's new friend Sam (Lewis & Clark college student who stayed on post-study abroad last spring) modeling their Ecuador national team t-shirts. Tonight after the game, they went to the local park and played some soccer with Caleb's new soccer ball, while Natalie attended an online class for Goddard. College attendance sure looks different these days, doesn't it?


-Spee