well my trip home has come and gone but i am happy to say that those 3 weeks were as glorious and incredible as i was anticipating. my trip was so great that i have decided to forever live abroad and solely vacation in the united states; but hopefully i'll have a job that will allow me to vacation more frequently then my current situation.
i've been back in ecuador for about a week and half now and its almost as if i never left. i have great memories and stash of great american foods to last me a few more weeks but life here has easily returned to its normal flow. i actually did a great job of planning my vacation time because i arrived back just in time to kick off the two weeks festivals of Bucay and i came back during finals week at the high school. My sitemate Alice kindly played substitute teacher in my classes and even wrote up a final exam for me to give the students. so last week and this week there has been limited work with the municipal, which consists of basically attending the festival's events and this week the high schools are all on vacation. two more additional weeks of vacation? yes please and thank you.
The good news is, actually i hate to say this in the case of jinxing ourselves, but i feel that we are finally making headway with the dehydrated banana project. a few weeks before i came home, my boss from peace corps in quito came down to do his annual visit/check up and it proved to be very beneficial. he helped to get my counterpart and i lined up to see eye to eye on things and now my counterpart and i are working on filling out a grant for small business start ups through peace corps. we're hoping to have it completed by friday so that we can get production started asap. i'm excited that maybe this banana project will turn out after all!
lets see, what else do i have on my plate for upcoming events...oh this trimesters theme is going to be geography. one because i love it and two because then we can include peace corps #1 favorite project: World Map! i helped another peace corps volunteer with this project almost a year ago and decided i defiantly wanted to do one in my community but its a simple project of painting a map of the world and labeling the countries which will be great to do with my students.
also some exciting news from cumanda, last week 4 men attacked a women as she was leaving the bank and robbed her. she had withdrawn $4000 and was in the process of transferring the money to another account in a different bank. The police caught 2 of the men and placed them in the local jail and left to go seek out the remaining two. while the police were gone, a gathering of Cumanda-ians went to tantalize the robbers who where just as rude in response and ended up upsetting the people so they decided to punch holes in the wall of the brick building in order to beat them. when they couldn't get the prisoners out they decided what better thing to do then to smoke them out? so through the wholes they managed to make in the walls, the cumandaians threw in gasoline and a tire lit on fire. One of the inmates managed to crawl out of the hole and ran into an abandoned shack down the road while the other inmate ended up suffering 2nd and 3rd degree burns and was in very unstable conditions by time he made it to the medical center (wont even call it a hospital). they ended up removing the other inmate from the shack once the police arrived and he was sent off to jail in another town. hopefully one that had more secure walls. but anyways moral of the story as stated by the local news broadcast is that if you steal in cumanda, you'll probably get burned.
as i mentioned earlier, bucay is having its festivals right now. i'm having a little deja-vu because it was last year at these same fiestas that i had my first "night out" with my neighbors and it was funny/weird to see how much has changed.
welp, its lunch time and i am craving my bowl of soup so its time to get going! thanks for catching up on my blog and i'm sorry for its delay :) love.
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