En Ecuador, aprendiendo y viajando: Week of 10/11/12

I open this post with a glimpse of the Malecón, aka the tourist seaside part of Puerto Baquerizo Moreno. This is the path to the boat dock, where we came in.

This is the view if you turn your head to the right from the previous picture.

Cultural show night with the Puerto Baquerizo Moreno kids, where Genesis danced on Wednesday. A little girl posing for her brother's picture at a flat of paintings done by kids.

Presentation of certificates of achievement to all of the dancers.

We found out on Wednesday that we won’t have a teacher until next Tuesday, when Andrea comes to teach the second half of the class. Valeria’s father was very sick and she needed to leave the island to be with him in Quito, so Anna Mae, one of the graduate students in our program, will be taking over conducting the class happenings until Andrea’s arrival.
Valeria used today’s lecture to explain some of the clean water engineering and training work that she’s done in Ecuador. Her favorite endeavor so far was a series of water quality testing workshops that she held for community leaders and involved citizens of some of the towns located downstream of heavy usage areas on mainland Ecuador. One of these places was apparently Coca, our flight destination for boats to Tiputini, and the kit of water quality testing supplies that the researchers left for the town was pulled out during a dispute with the petroleum companies and was key to getting the companies to agree to monitor their waste discharge into the river. Pretty awesome to empower the people!

Thursday was a field trip to the highlands - the place we are to evacuate to in case of a tsunami - to visit El Cafetal, the coffee plantation. But we opened our morning at Mockingbird Cafe, which is run in close affiliation with the plantation and serves their coffee... along with a delicious humongous breakfast that we enjoyed as a class. The coffee plantation was started by Manuel Julian Cobos, who was basically a slave driver and dictator on the island for a great number of years before there was a revolution and he was killed. However, he brought lots of agriculture and invasive guava plants to the island in the process! Wow Julian!

These are Galapagos coffee beans with their shells still on. They are a species of Arabic beans. And I think I bit open the shell.

Nico our guide, who also works at Mockingbird Cafe, explaining specifics about the hacienda to us. Behind are the coffee plants, and the trees are various other species that provide shelter for the coffee to grow in a shady, more humid environment.

Compost is "bokash" in Spanish, and this is the bokash pile made of coffee bean shells left from the deshelling process.

The plantation is pretty sustainably run - they don’t water the plants because the supply of rain is pretty reliable throughout the year (and also the switch from Sucres to US Dollars in the early 2000s meant their original irrigation plans became too expensive to implement), they preserve the forested areas around the waterways that flow from El Junco lake, which is the only freshwater source in all of the Galápagos and they know that the forests maintain the health of the water systems, and they are building a completely new coffee shelling machine to match with the wastewater treatment plant that will supposedly start fully functioning at the end of March. Their fertilizer is composted coffee bean shells, and they manage the plants in a forest ecosystem instead of giant open fields, so it maintains the moist and covered environment that allows for the coffee plants to thrive.

The deshelling machine.

More of the cover of the forest. There are guava trees everywhere.

Galápagos coffee is ranked among the top 5 coffee beans in the entire world by some sort of connoisseur organization, and this plantation maintains a high quality of product to sell to really high end buyers who are willing to pay more than 4 times the standard price for coffee; these buyers are mostly in Europe and North America. Apparently some Starbucks stores sells bags of their beans. I don’t know much about coffee since I don’t really drink it, but what we were served at breakfast was pretty tasty! Yes, parents, I will bring some back as souvenir.

When we got back, I went to lunch and had ceviche with Savannah, Mary, and Laleña. This was also the day I snorkeled with Savannah on both Playa Mann and Punta Corola, with a meeting with Keegan and Anna about our plans for the Environmental Education program in between. We saw tons of beautiful fish, and we swam with two types of sea turtles on Corola! It was wonderful.

Friday a ton of people were sick. Savannah texted me at about 5:44 am the previous night to report illness, and Laleña and Anna Mae were both sick. Savannah suspected the ceviche for making her and Laleña sick, but Mary and I ordered the same thing and were both fine. So it could have been anything. =( We went ahead with the class plans for the day without any authority figure to direct us, and ended early. Then I went and had lunch at Aqui Sí, which is a cute little restaurant run by Iris, who is a half Austrian, half Ecuadorian lady with a sassy 9 year old who wants to go back to the US after being in the Galapagos for a little over a year now and two 13-year-old twins who seem more tolerant of their new home. Here I chatted with Iris (the owner and chef), Hubert (Iris’ dad, who doesn’t look like he is her dad), and Larry, who is the English teacher of English teachers on the island. I chatted with him for a long time about education, since he has a huge dearth of experience and knowledge about it after working over 45 years as a teacher, principal, administrator, and consultant. He’s started a ton of charter schools, designed and managed lots of curriculums, oversaw the restructuring of plenty of his consultation schools, and has a special focus on ESL and low-income students. I would say our conversation scored exactly a billion points for being awesome. Then I went to visit sickly Savannah with Mary and ran random errands for the rest of the day.

I don't have pictures from that day, so here is a shot of the chickens that live near my host house.

This is the view a little bit down the street from my host house. I don't get to live in the bright green house, unfortunately.

Saturday, we went to a “rodeo” fundraiser for a farm in the highlands. About 30 of us took a van-ish bus that the school arranged for us and “Buscar”-ed our way up the big road. Buscar is the name of the bus company, is a combination of “bus” and “car”, and means “to look for” in Spanish. I thought this was really clever. I’ve learned to not have clear cut expectations for things in this country and just let things surprise me, so that mindset was useful in this situation.
There was supposed to be sheep wrangling, a professional team of female soccer players holding a challenge against local women who dared to play them, and lots of fun and games for kids. This brings to mind something like the NC State Fair, yes? Well... Ecuador... doesn’t do that. It was held in the back yard of a school, so the main events were held on the basketball court and tiny soccer court, and the food was being sold in what I assume is the open-air eating area the students use. We arrived at about 1 pm, ate food that we purchased in a really chaotic Ecuadorian line-bundlesofpeople (if you thought Ecuadorian line-bundles only exist in the airport like I’d thought, you’re very wrong), got rained on, kind of watched kids play musical chairs after a casual game of soccer with the local men, took this picture from the top of a hill near the tents:

and then we took a taxi back to town.

The taxi driver did not realize that the 5 of us in his truck were very tired, cold, wet, and could not or did not want to hold a conversation with him in Spanish, so he kept chatting with me about his life. It was chevere though. Then I did work for the rest of the day, ran some more errands, had dinner with some folks, and did more work.