I thoroughly apologize between the vast lag time between blogs. The past few weeks have been extremely busy and I unintentionally left my blog on the backburner.

I’ll start off with my visit to Canoa, a beach on the Pacific coast of Ecuador. The beach was beautiful and tranquil. By comparison it is one of the more laid back beaches off the coast of Ecuador. The beach front is lined with hostels, beach front tiendas (where I had the best pina colada of my life), and a variety of restaurants. It was a very relaxing weekend and one in which I encountered my first steak dinner since I have been down here. You tend to figure out what your priorities are when you splurge to spend half of your weekly stipend on a single dinner. Well worth it!

Work has been increasingly more time consuming. Not only are we on the cusp of starting our programs we also are in the process of moving to a new house. For those of you who don’t know, we have a house and an apartment (with access from the roof of our house via a “hobbit” door). This hobbit door although convenient has been the bane of my existence the past few days. We have had the daunting task of filling in the doorway instructed by our ringleader, Brock. Luckily Brock has had experience with this before and guided Sam and I through the process. I officially spent all of my free time outside of the library covered in concrete. The good news, we got our deposit back in full.

As far as programs go, I’m involved with four. I’m working with our agriculture program, children’s art, micro finance, and cooking class.

For agriculture we work with one of our partner organizations, Anamisi. Anamisi consists of two people, Christian and Laura; they run a small organic farm as well as give English and computer lessons. Our main goal here is to strengthen their organization in any way that deems necessary. We also want to expand the knowledge of organic farming and the practice of raising animals such as cuy throughout the surrounding communities.

Children’s art is in place in order to encourage the creative thinking of children. From what I have seen and gathered from past PD’s, creative thinking is lacking in the school systems that surround the area. It is also a very enjoyable class for these children and educates them on different styles of art and artists from around the world.

If you aren’t sure what micro finance is, Wikipedia it, that’s what I did. Our main objective for the time being is to start up a small business class with one of our partner organizations, EPV, a small lending organization. This will be in place to teach aspiring business owners practical business principles. We also hope to branch off from here to start another class for current business owners, in order to refresh their skills and build upon their business knowledge.

Lastly, cooking class. What does a typical Ecuadorian meal consist of? I’ll tell you, the same thing, seriously, the same thing, over and over. Rice, a small portion of meat, and perhaps a little serving of vegetables all served with a glass full of fresh juice. The food is good if you can handle the lack of protein (I can’t!). The problem is the typical Ecuadorian diet doesn’t have much variety. Because of this a cooking class has been organized in order to provide variety to the Ecuadorian diet. The idea is to give healthier cooking options all while widening the variety of foods used in Ecuadorian households. However, the past week and the current week haven’t been especially healthy. Last week was pizza. Can you guess what we are making this week? Cake, yup, we are passing on the states obese epidemic to Ecuador. I’m obviously joking; these are just a few things that they wanted to learn how to make. The goal is to mix these recipes in with some of our own, more healthy options.

Thanks for reading. I’ll be blogging at a more frequent pace from now on, promise.

Hasta lluego,

Luke