Normalcy

When did it all become normal. I decided to write a blog to update and really cant think of any topic. It has all become normal, the usual. But when did that happen? Everynight I get waken up by iguana/cat fights on my roof. I sometimes have a hard time deciding weather it is two cats, two iguanas or a cat and an iguana, or maybe even mutliple of both parties. Iguanas seems to make a lot more noise cause their finger claws are so long but i would imagine that a bunch of cats have the same potential to make all that racket. But then cats scream, like really scream, more like a baby scream than an adult but scream none the less. And i can imagine a cat screaming where i cant imagine an iguana making that noise. Then it all might just boil down to my mild hysteria? I can officially say that roosters have become more like the inssent crickets back home. They are always making noise and will always be making noise, so you kind of tune them out but need them secretly to sing you to sleep. yeah to sleep cause roosters here dont do the wake up call they do the all day call, i think its just the rampant hormones in this country. those same hormones that maintain the steady rate of teenage pregnancy and families the size of soccer teams. This is what i  call normal.

I rescued a kitten, a very ugly, devastatingly infected kitten. Little children, grown adults and kleber ran from this two week old kitten. Its eye goo alone was enough to take away my appitite for the whole day. This kitty is also a cuddler, you know the touching type. Like when you come in, its just always there touching you and when you lay down it attacks your face with that cooing that kitten do. Which is really adorable untill you add in the eye goo and to top it all off anal poo leakage. I just cant be mean to small helpless animals no matter how ugly they might be, and in my saintly state the kitty leaked poo on me twice in one night calling for many pajama changes but hey i was awake anyway trying to decide between iguanas and cats. So i bought some eye medication and when i try to put the drops in those tiny gooey eyes the cat shits on my counter, everytime. (due to the anal poo leakage) I cant even be mad cause he really cant help it, i think its time to see the vet. I am totally over poo.

If you did not know yesterday the 1st of december was World Aids day. In my never ending quest to get this country to start using condoms i planned a huge night. The night included a dance competition between all the dance groups in the pennisula and a hallway of Aids discrimination. Today i feel like i was hit by a bus full of untimely problems and surging headaches. I am recuperating slowly with a cocktail in sight. But really the event went well. We had 6 dance groups perform; two of which are really really good, the others are getting there. We had a huge audience all vulnerable to my AIDs/use condom propaganda being shouted by the animators. We handed out over 100 condoms and other pamphlets. Which i can only hope get used. If you are wondering why you would have a dance competition for World Aids day its obvious. The people that come to these events are primarily, youth girls that draw in horney youth boys, as well as any gay man, and the creepy old guys which pretty much wraps up all the "vulnerable" demographics, i know genius. Then when you top it off with free condom giveaways you really get the attention of all the aforementioned parties.

I have 18 days till i am home for chirstmas and less than 5 months till i am home to stay, i wonder how strange the states will seem. Maybe i will just buy a rooster.

washing machine

I am just gonna say it…. I really miss television and hot water. When your laying in bed and there just seems to be nothing that will turn your brain off for the night to let you drift off in a peaceful sleep and you start to get this hopeless feeling that starts somewhere between your stomach and upper intestinal tract, you know food is not going to solve anything and the minutes are just ticking by. Well in a place like my parents house, my college dorm actually anywhere I have lived up until Ecuador (wait take out Chincoteague island with Maggie, but normally I had enough booze running through me with the summer heat outside that sleep was not a quest) so yeah until Ecuador I would have just turned on the good old tube to some amazing program like “I should be dead” on Animal Planet, or “Jurassic fight club” on History channel, or maybe even the latest reruns of “jersey shore” on MTV. Any good American made English speaking program to just take you out of where you are, put your mind at ease, and coerce you into a wonderful night of dreams.  Unfortunately, the one television I have only gets one very fuzzy station and every single program is all in Spanish. (Too some that sounds like a surprise because I am pretty much fluent, well actually I am fluent in Spanish, but there is something about watching tv in another language, you just have to think too hard, plus their telenovelas are prossibly the worst acting I have ever seen, actually watching TV here is like a direct line to those no stopping thoughts that keep me from sleeping), so yeah not an option.

That brings me to the fact that I have not showered in 5 days. I finally broke down and used a wash cloth to try and get some of the crust off of me and let my hair get wet under a faucet since it was starting to dread. But we are in the depth of the cold season here, and honestly its chilly enough to wear pants and at night put on a sweater. Anyway the sun is just not hot enough to heat up the water tubes any so the water that comes out is fucking cold. Especially at night when I normally like to indulge in my bath time. Tomorrow I should work up a good sweat at my aerobics class, where immediately after I will literally run home to keep the sweat going making the cold water feel relatively bearable. Five days really is not so bad.

Oh and can I say, actually I am not sure, maybe I will whisper instead the two words, that seem so distant to my reality and so wanted… “washing machine” what I would do for a god damn washing machine. Remember when yogi bear would walk into a kitchen or wherever and see a picnic basket and it would be surrounded in the beam of gold lighting that seemed to keep it afloat hovering for his poor drooling eyes. Well currently when I picture a washing machine in my head that’s what is looks like. This large powerful mechanism shiny and white and dazzling outlined in this gold heavenly beam hovering just far enough away from my reach that I know my white girl jump will never make the distance. Meanwhile my pile of dirty clothes are just piling up and I half don’t have the money to get them washed and half feel bad for the poor lady because she has such small hands for my very large pants.

Other than my current desires life is going super solid. My womens football team is faltering a little but I am soo  busy with my other projects I hardly notice. My newest conquer will to be build a new classroom from recycled bottles that are packed with trash. I encourage you all to google it cause it is an awesome project you can do literally anywhere. But the basics are we need the whole community to start packing their washed off inorganic trash into washed out plastic soda bottles, until the bottle is completely stuffed and hard to the touch. After we have accumulated about 4000 of these bottles we will start to build the structures of the classroom and the roof. From there we pull tight chicken wire between the pillars and tie the plastic bottles to the wire in rows. We then fill all the holes with cement and cover the bottles to make a pretty, seemingly ordinary classroom. If all goes well, my town will be cleaner, people will realize a different way to recycle and use their trash, and we will be left with a school room, ready for any kind of natural disaster, to educate tomorrows leaders. So yeah if you are so overwhelmingly taken by this great project feel free to be moved enough to donate to help  buy supplies J the classroom should cost 1/3 of what a normal classroom should cost bringing us to needing about $3,000. Chump change right, no but really I will soon be looking for the money to get this project into a reality so the poorest district of my town can change out an old wooden plank and bamboo room into a nice eco friendly cement one so any support would be awesome.

Read the Hunger Games trilogy (recommended by my amazing friend beth daigle) in a weeks time on my new kindle (thanks to my fabulous mom) and I am in awe. Wished it would have ended differently but that is some of the best writing I have read, blowing me way out of the water in the writing game, sorry poor readers of my blog. But really read the trilogy when you get the chance, besides motivating you to conquer the world it also makes you insanely jealous, why does it always seem these days that the mediocre looking, average personality main character is torn between two handsome, strong, intelligent, loving boys. Its just not fair to get our hopes up like that, I mean I am pretty and all I do is fight for this no money making, fairly built, way too honest ecua novio. Where is my Peeta, or Jacob, I mean I would even take Ron Weasly at this point.

Life is beautiful.  Now get some rest.

1000 cupcakes

I made 1000 cupcakes. I have to write this down, for none other then myself, so that when I am old and grey telling stories to whoever will listen, I have proof that I am not exaggerating again but I really did make 1000 cupcakes in a day and a half. I will include also that I only received about 8 hours of help from a friend Edison who has never made cupcakes before; 8 hours out of 18. The next most important part of this story is why, well we can boil that down to my overwhelmingly persistent or as some say stubborn manner.  I wanted to clean up San Pablo, at least a little, really even if I got people to notice there is trash all around them I would have been happy. There are 8000 citizens of San Pablo I was hoping for 1000. I could find no financial help from anyone, so I raffled off a one hundred pound bag of rice and a DVD player which earned me about 70 net profit. That $70 plus another $100 I had saved from an earlier money maker were my only funds.  I originally wanted to give everyone a sandwich and a glass of soda but 170 meager dollars did not come to close to that. I had to think fast, having one week  left till trash day. So if you cant give them sandwiches go with something sweet, and cupcakes were just the thing, being on average 12 cents a piece (this is without frosting) coming in a variety of flavors, chocolate, banana, peanut butter, and good ol’ vanilla. I went and bought an insane amount of ingredients and started the baking bonanza. They all said it couldn’t be done.

Trash day had more participation than anyone had seen before. Children and parents alike were riding up carts full of trash* from all corners of the town looking for a sweet treat in return. They fucking loved my god damn cupcakes.

*NOTE: “Trash” is an objective term, for some it means waste made by humans including paper, plastics, cans, bottles etc. for others it means all things unwanted. In the case of San Pablo it is the latter, so Trash Day was more like home lawn care day. They pruned their bushes, cut the trees, sweaped the dirty top layer of dirt to leave the more clean shiny dirt underneath exposed, bringing all of this “Trash” to get their cupcakes. It ended up being about 80% organic material collected…. But at least they participated. And then we collected it all and threw it into an uninhabited part of Ecuador without any sanitation facilities in sight. Conclusions: contamination of Ecuador is the same, trash amount in San Pablo is the same, amount of people that think I help, exponentially grown J

Then I went to Costa Rica with my family, and here is what I think about that. Its silly beautiful; they have tons of animals; they have really comfortable places to stay, they have lots of things to do, they take safety measures, they have great looking men, they have really good tasting food from all over the world, they have drinkable water from the tap, they have volcanoes, they have cloud forest, they have beaches, they have a great bar scene with amazing happy hours, they speak English (including the taxi drivers), they have one of the best economies in Latin America, they also have crazy overly expensive everything that by the time you leave your week vacation you not only cleaned out you vacation account but also dipped into your retirement savings without really knowing cause the people are just so nice. So what do I think about Costa Rica, I think you should come to Ecuador instead. We have lots of things to do and many more places to see. Saftey measures are overrated and who travels to latin America to speak English, its much more interesting to not have any idea what they are saying. Along that line, when you travel you should experience local culture including the food, and I sure bet you cant get out of Ecuador without trying the local food, that may or may not be served with a side of Gyardia or helicobacter pylori, but it’s a hard catch to even find Costa Rican gastronomy. To put it more simply, you have a really good chance to lose weight on an Ecuadorian vacation than on a Costa Rican. Also who needs happy hour when at all hours drinks max out at $2.50 and a bottle of rum will set you back a whole $5. So yeah Costa Rica has their shit together, while Ecuador is still hovering in the outhouse but you will have a great time floating in the unknown and get home with enough left in savings that you can come back next year.

Que mas… I am now working for the Defensoria Comunitaria which would be the San Pablo social work and I help out on Saturdays at a new HIV clinic… put shortly I am the epicenter of all ugly rumors and head of knowledge of all the shit you never wanted to know about a town. Like everywhere else in the world, San Pablo has problems of all types… I am thinking about resigning, I just don’t want to know anymore; though because of my new found work I have decided that I either want to be a lawyer or a doctor.  It’s a toss up, one that I need to decide pronto.

I painted Van Gogh The Starry Night on my wall, the whole wall, next to my bed, its really big, it looks great but not as settling as I had hoped. I lay there in bed and from far away its looks real nice but up close you can see every brush stroke and I just cant stop looking, its driving me mad, last night I contemplated cutting my ear off and sending it to Kleber in an envelope. Van Gogh was not crazy he just could not stop looking I totally understand.

Remind me for next time to tell you the story about the gay birthday party I recently attended. 

Gumption

I am reading Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, about 100 pages from the end and good ol’ Robert M. Pirsig started talking about “gumption”. I got super intrigued by the word and how it relates to my life, the more I read the more I realized I need to work on my amount of gumption but it gave me great inspiration to sit down and write a long delayed blog so thank you Robert and your almost intolerable way of writing about the most simple ideas in life.

You know when you start to read a book cause all your friends/more intellectual peers, that you are insanely jealous of, told you they loved the book, and you read and keep reading it, and even after the last page look for more clues of what the hell everyone is talking about. Well that’s me and this zen philosophy long as shit, need every piece of your brain to pay attention or you have to read the page all over again, book. Though I still have another 100 pages so I will keep giving it that chance to blow my mind but so far I think this Robert guy needs a slap back into reality and/or needs to lay off the weed. If you don’t agree with me let me put it this way, who can write 540 pages with the intention of defining a single word but never actually doing it, the dictionary is not even that long.

In other news, I am currently doing a trash brigade of San Pablo. Meaning I am giving lessons to all the school kids in the town and trying to get a town-wide trash pick up day for next Sunday. The kicker is, though I am a volunteer, volunteerism is a very foreign topic, the only way I can get my community members to participate is to reward them with food. So this lovely trash pick up day needs heavy financial support, of which most of you know I don’t have. So I put together a raffle, two prizes, first: 100 pounds of rice; second: a new DVD player. And would you believe that almost no one was interested in the DVD player, but super excited about the rice. Could you even imagine if someone raffled off 100 pounds of spaghetti in the states, I am pretty sure you would get more donations than bought raffle tickets.  Its like the simple buying of a raffle ticket should put you on the dangerously obese list of the national institute of health. I am pretty sure the purchase would make your health insurance rate go up.  Anyway I had about 250 tickets to sell costing $1 each. The prizes were going to cost $60 leaving me with a small pot to buy some sandwiches to supply the trash pickers. I delegated the work by handing out sheets of 12 numbers each to friends for them to sell. I had a meeting in Quito so had to leave site and when I got back 5 days later I had found out that out of 21 sheets 3 and a half had been sold. I went on a raffle selling rampage, selling 6 sheets in three days. Bribing the town drinkers to sell a sheet for free beer (which worked much better than expected).  In the end I made about $70 much less than expected with only a week to pull off some miracles. Hey at least I made $70. 

They made me go to the dentist, I really went in with high spirits, thinking I had gotten over my little girlish freight of all those big bad spinny tools and stainless shiny steel. Within 5 minutes of sitting in the newly bought chair I was quickly reminded that all that fear is definitely still there and my teeth  have not gotten any less sensitive. I tried meditating, which I think is a practiced sport, on the bright side I have a whole other year to hone in on those skills. She had to put two novicane shots in both sides since of course I had cavities (I really like sugar, stop yelling at me at least I don’t really like crack, think about those teeth problems) Once I could no longer feel my nose let alone my teeth I let her start the drilling and I swear after like 15 minutes I could already start feeling it again. I think my relationship with Novocain is synonymous with alcohol, I am just too strong for that shit… And this is not even getting into the nurse lady in charge of the spit sucker thing, she was letting it rest under the tongue around those really sensitive bone bumps that have like minus two layers of skin over them. After I started to wine about that she let it slide into my throat, when I started choking they decided I was too sensitive to handle the spit sucker thing and deduced to just let me spit, me, cant feel my nose let alone handle the functions of my mouth, spitting. An hour later I was out and not talking, those dentists are possibly the only people that can really get me to shut up, and when I get back to the states, am going to look for the first dentist that has no quams about putting me under for a simple teeth cleaning.

In case you did not know I made it through my first year which means I only have one year left, its like shit I got to start doing something. Saving the world might take more than two years in the middle of no where. Especially at this “its too damn hot to walk so I think I will just stroll” pace of my Ecuadorian life. On the bright side I am filling up daily with more and more gumption, at night time I sleep with a blanket comfortably. Next time you see the map look at the equator and all the countries around it, yep all “I want a 100 pounds of rice” poor. It’s just too hot not to sleep, I went to cold quito for a week and did not take a single nap in 5 days, did not even drink coffee woke up at 6:30 every day and not once felt my eyelids sliding closed, it was like I was a whole new gumption filled person.

Finally, I got to see an Ecuadorian rugby game, mens, to put it short they have many years of development ahead. I was begging them to let me play, I really hate this machismo culture, I really could have shown them a few tricks/rules/general rugby ideas. But it was great to see the game expanding to such places as Ecuador, I just feel bad that they are being taught by gringos from the states, who in the scheme of things suck at the game as well and not by some beefy Samoan from new Zealand who could really teach a thing or two. I am going to the local university to see if I can start a team, hopefully behind all those whispy hair surfer guys there are 15 bad asses that want to play in some dirt. I need rugby in my life

Naturally Occurring Mud

My blogging has slowly become a thing of yesteryear. My bad. But it’s a new year, so new blogs and I am going to really try to stay on top of it this time. I think what happened is my life became increasingly less interesting, more of the same but really just saying that I am fooling myself. I think I could live in Ecuador for 15 years and every new week will shock me in another unexpected way. So what has been happening.

Well for chirstmas I went home to rolling hills Pennsylvania to spend some time with the fam and what turned into a 2 week food and alcohol tour. It was amazing. I made it back to Ecuador about ten pounds heavier, possibly still hung-over, with eggnog on my mind, fabulous. I also got to take the cobwebs off my skies and pummel down the slopes for a day with my family, minus mom who went to work instead. I decided that skiing is the most painful fun sport invented, and that is coming from prior black-eyed rugby player. Why you ask? Well due to my personal altitude of almost 6 feet, my blood in cold temperatures likes to stop moving beyond my knees and elbows leaving my poor toes and fingers to fend for themselves in their white deathly state of icicles constantly screaming for help at that wonderfully rich oxygenated blood that just stares from my knees laughing. If I was 5 feet tall, skiing could be thoroughly enjoyable.

As normal travel back to my site in Ecuador posed its own large dilemmas like a two hour delay on my first flight with exactly a two hour layover for my second flight had me literally sprinting through houstan airport to arrive luckily just in time, sweating my ass off but as luck and a lot of things seem to happen in threes, I not only made the impossible happen with making both my flights, but I had been upgraded to shrimp salad, mixed grill, free alcohol, first class seats on both my flights. It was quite possibly the best end to my two week gluten session. The third luck struck when I was trying to get a bus down to Guayaquil to make it back to my site. I was in Quito at about 11 pm fresh off the plane and searching for a bus, I managed to get one of the last tickets that night on one of the last buses back, sitting in the very last seat that really shouldn’t even be there, but was stuck in the very back in the isle row so I had all the leg room in the world. I am not sure how the stars aligned for me that day but I was not asking questions. I made it back. And it was new years.

I was soon informed by my dancer pants best friend and ecua-novio that I had nothing to wear. Shocked as I have more clothes than every peace corps volunteer in Ecuador combined, but I guess I was not prepared for the extensiveness of new years eve in Ecuador. Whether or not you only have 5 dollars to your name you will spend that 5 dollars on a new outfit for the turn of January. The night process goes like this, Mass is at 9 which is held outside because there are too many people to fit inside (I elected to skip the crowd and spend that time changing my outfit 12 times.) It lets out at 10 wherein the whole town meets up with their significant other or best friends, children etc to casually walk in these new outfits up and down the main drag. It reminded me of old community days but with adults and minus the fair rides. You do this till just before 12, just walking and then turning around to walk back and then again and again. Then comes the real excitement. For two weeks prior to new years families make what they call “viejos” which are large paper mache people or animals ie, someone made a Viejo in the form of my ecua-novio, also shrek, penguins, transformers…  they stand between 4 to 7 feet tall, human viejos are dressed in real clothes, paper mache head, if you don’t have a good hand in such artwork you can buy them at local Viejo markets. Well at exactly at midnight they throw the viejos in a pile in front of the house and set them on fire, big bonfire type, while the men grab a bottle of rum or anything alcoholic nearby and start drinking, and the children start to play with the flaming debris. Most people then proceed to have this huge dinner till about 1 am after which you either just keep drinking or go to the dance or both. I personally went to a baptism celebration with ecua-novio and his fam till 4 am and then to the dance until 6 am. My night was so far from my norm new years, which is passed out wasted face by 2am without even a dream of seeing the likes of 6 am or having the human mobility to dance. So it was different, enjoyable, and even further rocked my feminist internal core to vibrations with the cultural rule that only men can enjoy the awesomeness of what is alcohol. But no worries I got mine over chirstmas J

On another note, I started my aerobics class up again and I guess with the images of green been casserole, chirstmas cookies, bagels and their lasting effects on the love handles hovering in my mind, I kicked my own ass, twice, I have been so sore, it feels fabulous. I also gave wings to my raising pigs for money project at the high school with a successful flee market of donated clothes I brought back with me, raising a little over $200. Also having meeting with the parents trying to convince them of how good an idea this is, much harder than I expected. All I asked was for them to send their food trash to school with their kid so we can feed the pig, it turned into a 4 hour contemplation, between 30 parents, over the intricacies of raising pigs, which I really have no knowledge. Also a complete dismissal of all the benefits students get with this kind of responsibility and possibilities of dissections and uses of pig shit. But I think we are moving forward with the idea, and I am just crossing my fingers that some spiritual bunny will come bless me with overflowing knowledge of  pigs, or maybe I should just go with google.

Finally I had a really awesome friend come visit me and in all our combined awesomeness, we went to the banos of san Vicente. Banos meaning bath, but in this instance more meaning mud pit. We hitchhiked our asses there, not taking no for a answer so we could bath in some natuarally occurring mud, like all mud is not naturally occurring… but anway, Its this little compound that has this muddy water pool and when you test out the cold water, your toes get pulled into 2 feet deep of caly/mud. It’s a fairly sizeable ugly area, circumference of 10 or so feet, enough for many visitors to enjoy in the niceties of the mud. When you arrive you see women, children, men alike standing in the muddy water, picking up the clay from the bottom rubbing it all over their bodies, face, hair and all. And then sitting out in the sun to let it dry. I was perplexed but soon joined into the excitement, skipping out on the face, and hair. It has a certain sewage smell to it, I guess its sulfur or some other mineral, but nothing I would put in my nose electively. After we turned into human rhinos we washed off the mud and went into the hot spring tubs, this time regular clear hot bubbly mineral water, still with that same subdued sewage smell.  After a little more normalcy we went for massages ($4) choice of sabila (aloe vera) or more mud. I picked mud, my friend said he had enough of mud and went with sabila. It was a 15 minute process, less massage more like mud/sabila rub down. They heat it up a little and then just spread it all over your body, while trying to make polite conversation. It was at this moment that all my hopes of keeping this naturally occurring mineral mud out of my nose when to shit and the masseuse rubbed it all over my ears, face and yes some in the nostrils. She then promptly kicked me out of the room, covered, having to carry all my things telling me to go let it dry once again and then wash off. I met my friend outside, he seemed to fair better then me as sabila is clear, just kind of looked like he wreaked his car but the air bag was a gelatin bag instead, with the same disgruntled car crash expression, apparently his masseuse could use some hospitality lessons. We washed off, a 15 minute process, (it was in my goddamn ears) and got a ride back to my site. All in all a great experience but prob not going back anytime soon, I will stick with my naturally occurring ocean for now.