Adios Rio Muchacho - 9/1/09

Finished up our last week at Rio Muchacho, it was really sad to leave everyone, we´d become a pretty tight knit group. But I´m excited to move onto new things. One of the days we took a hike through a nearby village. The hike itself was really pretty, passing through river beds and farms, however, the first part of the trip we were walking through a bunch of brush and got absolutely covered in tiny tiny ticks. You would look down at your pants and there would literally be thousands of them. When you tried to brush them off you could only get some of them; the ohters would be all over you hands,socks, legs, shoes, stomach, face... god it was disgusting. And they don´t brush off all that easily so you really have to scrape them off your skin. It was so gross and resulted in a lot of us looking like we had the chicken pox. Another cool thing we did was learn all about bees and harvesting honey. An apiculturalist (I think that´s what their called) came to the farm and then we all put on these big white bee suits and went to the bee boxes to pull out the boards that had huge collections of honey comb. There were thousands of bees everywhere and the buzzing was unnervingly loud. It´s a little (a lot) scary at first because its really difficult to believe that the suit you´re wearing could actually fully protect you. Also, the bees are africanized so they´re really aggressive and Nicola told us that when she got stung it was the most painful thing ever. Not so encouraging. But no one got stung, and we all ate delicious honey. We got a really strange volunteer our last week. She was supposed to stay at least 3 weeks but then deicded that she was only going to stay for 3 days so that she could go be with her boyfriend who lives in the States. She thought it would be a great idea to just go to Quito from Canoa right away, go straight to the airport, and hop on an earlier flight. It never occurred to her that she might not be able to just hop on a flight right away because she´s always seen at least one empty seat on all the planes she´s been on... dumbass. She was also shameless in just asking for peoples stuff like someone´s full pack of cigarettes, or their last bite of food, or, and this is the weirdest, if I had any extra underwear to give her... No I don´t have any extra underwear and why in gods name would she want it!? Freak. I also had to tell her not to smoke in our room and then explain to her why it might not be the best idea to smoke in a house made of dry bamboo and thatch. Then there was her painfully annoying habit of constantly asking questions and especially when she would sit in on our class and ask for an explanation for everything - things we had already covered, things that had no relevance, things that were painfully obvious - which was so irritating to the rest of us that had paid for and attended the entire class. Unanimously decided, she sucked. After we all left, Steve, Tania, Jo and I went to Mompiche. Mompiche is paradise; it´s a small and minimally touristy beach in the north that has lush, jungley vegetation up until a white sand beach that stretches for miles. We got there at 7 pm which is when they turn all the power out for an hour each evening,which was really disorienting. Immediately we found a hostal which ended up being a filthy dump. They led us through a kitchen that smelled like everything was rotting, up a creepy staircase, to a hallway where a fat old man in tiny underpants was leering at us from the doorway. The room looked like a crack house - no windows and a bathroom that had no door and was not really separated from the rest of the room. I hated it so much. I slept on a towel all night too, ugh. We spent one night there then Jo and I moved to a super chill, clean, nearly empty hostal in which the sleeping area and the toilet were two distinct areas. Major upgrade. On the last night Jo and I wandered into a surfers bar and had so much fun, the guys there were hilarious. We also ditched these two obnoxious guys who were trying to guilt trip us into hanging out with them by telling us that we would be liars if we didn´t have one drink with them because we told them that we might earlier. I yelled at him and told him that we would not be having a drink with them. I guess I´m a liar now. Funny enough, the guy I yelled at ended up being on my bus to Quito and we shared a ride in the cab from the terminal to the city... in silence... guess he´s still unhappy about that drink. Now I´m onto the super hippy farm in Malchingui called the Rhiannon community (you can google it) where there is no electricity and no internet for miles, so i´ll be a bit out of touch, but hopefully it´ll be great!

Pig poop - 8/22/09

Rio Muchacho is still incredible. It´s unbeliebable that this will be my last week; time seems to be blowing by faster and faster as my trip progresses. The course is still so fascinating to me. We´ve been talking a lot about compost and permaculture. For my morning jobs I first worked with the horses and cows and then with the pigs. I was a little nerbous about the horses; they get a little worked up when they´re hungry and I would imagine that getting kicked by one would really hurt. HOwever, there´s a donkey in with the horeses and cows that I think is awesome. First, the noises donkeys make is the funniest thing I´ve ever heard come out of an animal. This donkey is also super friendly; it will come up to you and nudge your arm so you´ll pet it. I´m a big fan and he kind of reminds me of Mackenzie. So that weeks job wasn´t so awful. Then, this past week I had the pigs. The pigs are serious pooping machines. I was pretty comfortable with animal poo and even human poo after working in the composting toilets during the first two weeks, but the pigs are completely different. There are 7 small pens, some with two smaller pigs, one with a huge mom pig and her adorable babies, and four massive pigs, thne there are two more giant pigs that hang out in the horse/cow/donkey section that are gross and I don´t like, and then there is the absolutely evil Isidoro. Isidoro is a male pig that is the size of a cow who hasn´t been castrated and is so agressive that he pushed one of hte volunteers to the ground when she was trying to get into his pen to feed him. I hate him, I refuse to go in there and feed him, he can starve or turn into breakfast sausages as far as I´m considered. So the first part of hte job is mixing about a liter of molasses (sp?) with a bucket of water and dish that out before someone starts shovelling; this keeps them at least a bit occupied. THen yo uhave to shovel four of the pens of the poo and put sawdust down. The other three pens you shovel into a different bucket to use the poo for the biodigester which turns poop into usable gas energy. While that´s going on someone mixes up and dishes out the pig food. The pigs sole thought is on being fed so they are unleashing blood curdling screams while waiting for the food. Sometimes they try to nibble on your boots or the shovel or knock over the poo bucket. Sometimes they just have temper tantrumbs, stomping around, squealing like toddlers, which is actually the funniest thing I´ve seen an animal do. The sawdust poo goes to the compost. With the biodigester you have what I consider to be the most disgusting job on the farm. You mix the poo with water and have to pull out the sticks and straw you find in it and then CAREFULLY pour it into the tube that feeds it into the biodigester. If the biodigester is clogged, as it was a couple of day ago, you have to feed a hose through the poopy tube, pull out the now shit covered hose, then turn the tube (about 7 feet long) so it´s standing up right and hit it on the ground until about three liters of smelly pig shit comes flowing out and you are trying not to thing about the droplets falling on your head from the other end of the tube hovering right about you. This was so damn gross. On the last day I got to partake in that as well as poo collecting to make a certain kind of compost called bocashi. We went down the road a bit to an area that was filled with cows and horses. The ground was 100% dried up poop. I had to use this tool which is like a pole with a board perpendicular to it and you drag it on the ground to make mounds so its easier to shovel into bags. One of the workers, Jinsin, was pulling the pole while I was on the ground pushing the board and getting poo dust all over and in my mouht/eyes/nose. I was absolutely exhausted after doing this for like thirty minutes, sweating, and Jinsin was really encouraging by telling me "Tu cara es pura mierda", your face is pure shit, when I stood up. There was a little boy there playing around who was hilarious and "helping" us. He had completely peed his pants and as he was running down a hill, yelling at all of us to watch him jump, he tripped and fell face first into a pile of shit. I was crying I laughed so hard.