My life has taken a turn for the best, it has now turned into mango season, which means that the streets, stores and hands of every Ecuadorian are jammed full of ripe delicious mangos! What a sweet treat after 6 months of bananas but dont get me wrong, I still love bananas and eat at least 2 a day. But the mangos here are eaten like apples and they are deliciously messy. So that's the best part of my life right now! But with the other things…
Work: Ive basically stopped working with my original boss and the baby banana company. I do a little bit of work for them when theres something I can help with me Im tired of being told to have patience and there will be work. I now call my boss every Monday morning and he always tells me that he wants me to help him out or attend some meeting with him later in the week but as always, I fail to hear from him. So instead Ive been filling my time with other projects. Alice (the other peace corp volunteer) and I gave our first trash charla, which is like an informal presentation about properly disposing of trash and protecting the earth, at one of the local schools to over 100 kids. It was suuuuper nerve-racking and Im not sure if any of the kids could understand our Spanish but they sure loved the games and candy we handed out. Our goal is to give this charla to majority of the schools by the following june because june 5th is the worldwide clean water day and we want to host a river clean up with all of the kids. There´s about 30 schools we want to do so that's about 3-4 a month or one a week so its defiantly do able. The other main project IÕm working on is helping one of the high schools plan an open house about the variety of opportunities that our region has to offer. Im super excited about this because my group is focusing on how to prepare a variety of foods so I am going to take advantage of this and create fliers about nutrition and proportion sizes and also new recipes and meal plans that include more fresh vegetables.
Life: a few weeks went by where Alice and I were spending a lot of time together (mostly because I went through an angry spell with Ecuador itself and turned to her for support) but we both decided that we cant hang out so much and we need to make new friends. So we are currently having a fun competition about who can make the most friends which has actually been really beneficial for the both of us. I joined-created a womens basketball team and we had our first game the other night because bucay is in the middle of their annual fiestas. We won by like 15 points I think and I have now become famous for being an incredible basketball player but in my defense, for the advantage that I have, I really did not play well. I know I had at least 6 fouls but my friend was in charge of the books so he helped me out. The game was a lot of fun and since we won, we got invited to play another game in December and now that I have seen us play, I have a lot of things I want to teach them. Like how to catch a basketball to playing defense. Ha, one of my teammates had the ball and the girl guarding her grabbed her arm and fouled her but instead of walking away, my teammate backhanded the girl in the face. I could not believe it. She got kicked out of the game which sucked cuz she was defiantly the best one of them all. So I guess we´ll also work on controlling our tempers. A downer in my life here is that last week one of my friends from Cumanda died in a car accident. It was very sad and he was very popular here in the community. He was the son of one of Melitas very good friends so it was a hard week with everything that was going on.
Traveling: a few weekends back we had a big party here in Cumanda for a housewarming and birthday party. It was a lot of fun and was a good success. We ate a lot of good, delicious American food and spent both evenings at my friends bar. The night life here is so different, we stayed out one night until 9 am the next day just sitting around chatting, singing and listening to people pass the guitar around. For Halloween, we had a big peace corps party in a town called El Chaco and its in the eastern-jungle-amazon part of Ecuador and was my first time in this area. It was an incredible weekend and we all went rafting on Saturday and then had a typical Halloween party in the evening. I dressed up as a crab. I´ll try and get photos up soon.
I cant believe its already November. That means I have less than two months until the end of the year. Wow wow wow! I need to stop saying how fast time is flying by and actually grasp my time here. Anyways forgive me for horrible efforts at keeping you updated, November will be better, I promise!! Love you all and take care!
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