technology! what a miracle!

roasting cacao

de-graining corn

tia maita feeding the chicks

chancho in the yard!

little leslie and i

haircut time for pilli

vero gathering the guineos for the dulce

newborn chick!

carmella +karen+flowers

flora!

rocio with lunch

cacao drying on the roof

my favorite tree

platanos on the terrace

maria gabriella y leslita playing with dollies

the boys with saturday´s load of maracuya to bring into town (14 cents a kilo! next to nothing for all the hard work...)


more to come later!

la finca de la tentación

Hello friends! I am writing you from a far better place (health-wise) than the last time I wrote in here.... On Thursday, I was starting to feel better (and the ultrasound of my upper abdomen didn´t show any signs of wiggling parasites!) so I was finally able to make the trek out to Vero´s family´s farm, or finca as they call them here. Around noon, Vero, her colleague Maria del Carmen who was visiting from Esmeraldas (a coastal town 3 hours away), and I set out for greener pastures.

We left La Concordia by bus and got off about twenty minutes out of town. From there, we set off by foot down a rocky, muddy, hilly road used by the few farmers in the area. For an hour and a half, we walked, passing neighboring farmland - but this isn´t what you North American friends might have in mind when I say farmland. No, this land is abundant with tropical crops such as cacao, maracuyá (passion fruit), palma (palm oil is a big export in the region), plantains, and guineos, the Spanish word for the sweet, yellow fruit we call bananas!

When we got to her farm, we were welcomed by her mother Mariana (Tia Maita to all), sister Rocio, a few brothers, some cousins, a tiny family friend, Leslie, and her constant companion, a squirmy white puppy. After enjoying our lunch and taking a rest, Vero showed us around her farm; trees filled with papaya, avocados, mangos, guanábanas, sugar cane, ciruelos (hard plum-like fruits with spiny centers), arasha (a sweet yellow fruit I had never seen before that smelled somewhat of peaches but taste completely different, and magnificent!), oranges, and grapefruit adorned the land surrounding the house. Now this is my kind of farming! As if the tropical fruit wasn´t enough, there were chickens, a few roosters, a gaggle of geese, squawking ducks, a herd of cows, a family of pigs, four dogs, and a sweet cat named FiFi running around. I could have died and gone to heaven! All that were missing were a few goaties, but still, close enough....

Now, as most goods stories go, the best way to tell this one is through food! There were the yapingachos for dinner made from the yucca we dug from the earth on our walk-through that afternoon. And the chocolate milk the next morning made from cacao harvested on their farm, dried on their roof, roasted over their hearth, and ground into powder to be added to the milk taken from the cows that morning. Also from that same milk, we enjoyed queso fresco, or fresh cheese, that we folded into dough and put into the hearth so that they puffed up and made delicious cheesy bread to be enjoyed for la merienda. The next morning, after the roosters and geese woke us up before the first sunlight, we went up to the terrace and collected a bucketful of guineos which we peeled, mashed, and put on the hearth to cook down all day long until they became a sweet brown paste, or dulce de guineo, which we also folded into dough as a snack for the family. At lunch, a chicken soup for which I was present for the killing of said chicken (a rooster too many) at the hands of Rocio and her ever-sharp machete. For dinner, corn tortillas made from maíz harvested that morning, shucked and ground in the yard with the chickens fighting over any kernels we may have dropped at our feet. Ripe avocados to adorn our plates at every meal. Juices, or coladas, made from every possible fruit, and aguas aromaticas (herbal teas) made from every possible leaves (naranja, guanabaná, menta, toronjíl). Like I said before, heaven. It´s a good thing my stomach started behaving just in time!


I wish I could post pictures of the food, the animals, the kids, the fruits, the flowers (my god, the flowers)- but the computer is being difficult at the moment... So I´ll just let you all paint these pictures for yourself in your mind!

Tomorrow I leave for the Biological Reserve called Bilsa, a few days later than expected, but better late than never! I´ve been waiting to return to Bilsa ever since I was last there, three and a half years ago, so this is sort of a big deal for me. What with all the excitement of the farm the past few days, I´ve barely been able to think about what awaits me. I´ll be back on here in a few weeks with lots of stories to tell... ´Til then, be well!

cariños de Carmella

A few words on being sick abroad

It´s the worst. Well maybe there are worse things in the world, but since I´m a big fat baby, being sick abroad is the absolute Worst.

Last Friday, I journeyed from Baños to La Concordia, where my friend Veronica and her family live. I started feeling a little queasy on the bus ride, but I thought it was just the winding roads and scary hairpin turns that were making me ill. That night, I was up until dawn with shivers and a ferocious fever; not fun.

Now, I´ve been down this road before and I learned my lesson. As much as I WANT the local remedies to work, I´ve learned the hard way that my fragile North American digestive system really needs good old western medication. It´s the sad truth.

(Last time I was in Ecuador, I drank a few cups of chicha at a village celebration - a fermented yucca drink - and immediately fell ill. I drank a tea made out of this concoction for a week without any results. I finally ventured to the nearest city, found a doctor, was prescribed pills, and felt immediately cured. Sad, but true. I´ll gladly accept Vero´s mama´s delicious healing teas of oregano, onion root, mint, and my favorite - manzanilla, or chamomile as you might know it - but I know it´s not enough.)

So, the morning after my feverish nightmare, Vero took me to see the local doctor for the fever and a weird upper abdominal pain. He did some blood tests ("No es dengue!", he told me when I came back for the results. Yay, I don´t have dengue!) and prescribed me some medications for the fever, the pain, and the intestinal infection that I apparently had (have?). I expected the immediate results as I had had previously. Not the case. The pain persisted. A few days pass. Another sleepless night. I tossed around best and worst case scenarios. Maybe I just had a little indigestion. Maybe I was suffering from internal bleeding! What if I had to go home early? How much would that cost? Would I be able to survive the bus ride back to Quito?? In the morning, I was a wreck. I went back to the doctor. I started crying in his office. "I´m scared!", I whimpered;"it hurts." (Remember, I told you at the beginning that I´m a Big Fat Baby). He adjusted my medications. Maybe one of them had given me stomach pain. I don´t know! I´m not a doctor!

This was yesterday. The pain was alleviated most of the day, but then it returned in the evening. Sitting in Veronica´s family´s convenience store, we talked with a friend, Hermann, about my situation. People stopped by and told me what they thought it might be, because their sister once had a similar pain and she drank some papaya seeds in milk for a week and it went away and why don´t I try that. Hermann suggested that perhaps I had Helicobacter pylori, an increase of a bacteria that already exists in our system. I started getting freaked out again, and we decided I should visit another doctor in the morning.

Cut to Tuesday morning, 5am. Hermann comes to pick Vero and I up in his taxi and drives us to the neighboring town, La Independencia. We´re going to see Doctor Henry Olvera, and apparently we´re not the only ones. He only takes the first 10 patients, and we find out that we´re number eleven when we arrive at 5:30. Some people have been waiting since 4. The doctor won´t arrive until 8, but he´ll be there half the day seeing patients before going to work at another location in the afternoon. He only takes ten, but that´s because he takes the proper amount of time with each of them, somebody explains to me.

I woke up with minimal pain and it doesn´t look like I´ll get seen that day so I wonder if we should bother staying at all. "Ya estamos aquí." We´re already here, Veronica tells me, imploring me to wait a bit longer. We shoot the shit with our fellow patients, one of whom is the young mother of a 2 month old baby with a runny nose. She´s number twelve, but they say the doctor usually makes exceptions for babies and small children so hopefully she´ll get seen.

An hour or 2 passes, and Veronica and I go to sit at the front entrance of the clinic. She knows where the doctor lives so every so often she goes to look and see if he´s coming. A few minutes later, I see her coming up the path with the doctor, explaining to him very rapidly my situation. He shakes my hand and continues to walk briskly towards the clinic. We walk past the group of waiting patients and he motions me into his office. It´s 7:30am. I am astonished by my friend´s take-charge attitude. "Eres mi heoína," I whipser to her as we sit down. You´re my hero, Verito! He looks over my blood test results, assigns me a few more tests, pokes me a bit, asks me more questions, and it´s over just as quickly as it began.