- I spent New Year´s Eve with my Spanish tutor and best Ecuadorian friend, Diana, and her family in South Quito.
- New Year´s day my host family from my time in Tumbaco (Rocio and Pedro) surprised me by showing up at my home in Lloa.
- Julie and Kevin visited for a week; we hiked volcano, Guagua Pichincha, saw toucans in the cloud forest of Mindo, and caught up on the nitty-gritty of our lives.
- My counterpart Yolanda came back to work with me in the Faro!!!
- I was lucky to have visits from friends both from the Peace Corps and the United Sates.
- I went to the jungle, Tena/Puyo, to give a recycling art workshop to a group of volunteers in the region.
As you can
see, things are happening and I have a lot of reasons to be happy and
grateful. I am starting to appreciate a
rhythm to my day to day; a rhythm to my steps and words and a rhythm to the
world around me.
Without
fail at 3:30am, through the colors of my dreams in the darkness of the night
the rhythm starts where it ends in the shuffling feet and muffled bickering of
my 70 year old host parents. 3:30am is
when Isabel and Alonso leave to milk the cows.
They close the door behind them and with it the darkness of the night
slips away and again I melt into the colors of sleep. By 6:30am shuffling and bickering returns,
they are always in a hurry, this time to catch the bus to Quito where they will
sell their milk.
Then I am
up, peeking out my window. Sometimes
fog, but more often a clear sky is the picture of morning. And the mornings are cold. My feet sting when they leave the warmth of
my covers for the ice covered lake which is my cement floor. Breakfast, coffee, turn a few pages in a book
and then I am on the streets of Lloa.
Walking four blocks to my “office” I smile passing neighbors draped in
numerous wool shawls and more than one hat, then I grunt and frown at the dogs
whose persistence in following me and barking at my heels has strangled any
desire I might have had to go for jog.
Work is a
place throbbing with potential, potential for projects, potential for failure,
and potential for success. These are the
projects I am working on supporting with my counterpart:
- With my Kids Club, create a book, the story and illustrations - focusing on themes of creativity, imagination, teamwork, goal setting, art, and to strengthen their desire to read.
- School and community garden.
- Running and yoga club – we meet in the park Saturday and Sunday mornings at 6:30 (why I picked 6:30 I have no idea, I regret it, this is too early).
- Supporting efforts for a youth group. It is hard to motivate the youth!
- Recycling arts and crafts workshops.
- Teaching English classes in the school through the arts.
- Secondary project – supporting an amazing branch of my counterpart organization in Quito, CREO Arte.
Like I
said, throbbing with potential… ideas upon ideas of things to do, but to be
sustainable… These ideas are like tiny
seeds within my hands that I wish I could toss into the wind like the Lupine
Lady, letting them fall to the ground on their own will, letting the natural
order of the sun and the rain turn them into something real, something
beautiful. But these ideas come from
seeds that will not sprout from the ground and continue to grow unless they are
planted by the hands of my community. I
have to force my hands into my pockets being the motivator whispering again and
again that maybe it is time to plant the seeds they have identified as
important for the continued beauty of the community.
Rhythms
continue. Conversations will only get me
so far in efforts to motivate, so my ears take in the dull rhythm of my fingers
on a keyboard. Every key pressed twists
the knife a little deeper into the heart my expectation that the Peace Corps
would be a place that would provide me with the relief of being unplugged from
the virtual world. But the pounding of
computer keys becomes the music of my days because in order to motivate I need
to prove that something is possible; I need to prove this through written
words. Words and words fill project
proposals and progress reports, emails to Peace Corps friends, emails home…
Like I have
to force my hands into my pockets to keep myself from imposing ideas on my
community I also have to force my eyes from locking on the smiling faces of my
friends and family which I find on social media networks through the internet.
It takes a significant effort to peel my eyes away from the screen. When I finally do, I look outside. And there my eyes find the most beautiful, the
most alarming thing I have ever seen and I see it every day. The clouds and the mountains…
I don´t
know of any place in the world where the relationship between the sky and the
ground is more apparent. This is a
rhythm you cannot predict, born from the footprint of the day before, every day
is completely distinct. In the morning,
clear blue skies and a sun to the east fill Lloa with shadows stretching westward
toward the cloud forest of Mindo through the rolling green Mountains. By noon shadows have receded into their hosts
and large cotton ball clouds form to the west, a magical sea contained by green
walls. Magical is the perfect word to
describe the feeling because you look down onto the top of the sea of clouds, as if
you were in an airplane. My imagination
has grown roots here and as such I have at times imagined what it would be like
to be in Captain Hook´s ship when it is has freed itself of evil and sails up
and through the clouds.
Sometime
after noon the cotton ball clouds ooze forward. (Can you believe it? Cotton can ooze!)
Characteristic of something that oozes; the clouds get stuck in the
crevices of the mountains. This gives
their procession forward a strange longing and watching this I have found
myself at times felling anxious. Before
you know it you are face to face with the cotton ball clouds. You don´t need to lift your chin up to look
into its eyes. It is right there, eye
level with you. You can put out your
hand and touch its face. In the moment
that you try to do this, you suddenly find you are in it. The rest of the afternoon you remain in the
belly of the clouds.
Days I have
spent working in Quito I often find myself looking toward Guagua Pichincha
which shelters my home in Lloa. As the
clouds greet Lloa first, I see them then spill out over the ridge that divides
Lloa from Quito.
The rhythms of my steps and the world around me continue; consistent and even and completely unpredictable. Time ticks on. I can´t believe more than a quarter of my service has passed!
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| New Years Eve with my spanish Tutor Diana (furthest on the right) and her family. |
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| New Years Eve Turkey |
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| At midnight on New Years it is good luck to eat one grape for every month of the new year... hard to do in the minute before midnight! |
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| Top of Guagua Pichincha, looking toward Rucu Pichincha. |
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| On New Years everyone burns "Años Viejos" (dolls that represent everything you wish to get rid of in your life) at midnight. |
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| Julie and I, at the crater. |
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| Julie and Kevin almost at the top! Feeling the altitude, nearly 15,000 ft. |
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| Mountains, Clouds, Me |
