travels, gardens, and agriculture galore

February... a month of homemade valentine's day decorations, well-aimed water balloons, and programmatic progress. This past month I've been fortunate enough to embark upon a Manna retreat to Riobamba and a 4-day Carnaval weekend to Tena, a quaint town on the edge of the rain forest. The first destination started with an earful of shaving cream (even though we were over a week away from the holidays) and ended with a picturesque drive close to Tungaragua, a currently active volcano in the area.

Our weekend in Tena had much more shaving cream / water balloons / random buckets of water from balconies in store for us as it was Carnaval weekend itself, the Latin American equivalent to Mardi Gras. The area of Tena has experienced a ton of development recently - one man told us the last time he visited the town inhabited 2,000 and now the population is up to 30,000. As we canoed down the Napo, our guide complained about the dump trucks that were extracting rocks for a local airport construction project. Despite this, Haley, Sarah, Krysta and I very much enjoyed venturing out to explore the infamous caves, frolic through the rivers, and hike (slash get lost) into the Amazon.

Ear full-a shaving cream :)


A glimpse of Tungaragua through the clouds

Canoes along the Rio Napo


An anti-oil drilling plea in Tena (Yasuni is about 4 hours east on the Rio Napo)

Programmatic-ly speaking, there has also been a lot of work-related excitement in the past few weeks. After a semi-embarrassing interview on public radio last month, the president of Fundacion Vision Agropecuaria introduced himself to me and we set up a meeting to get to know each other's organizations better. As it turns out, his foundation helps fund many cuy (guinea pig) relation projects, from large-scale commercial, to individual families. He was enthusiastic at the idea of giving monthly talks in our centro and after doing some surveying research in the community to see who would be interested, we plan to set these up.

We have also started work on a nutrition/agriculture education program for Aliñambi, a local school. Krysta, Haley and I will take the 6th graders out of class for 3 hours a week to teach them about nutrition, give them cooking classes, and run our own class garden (if you couldn't guess, that's the part I'll be responsible for!). The class will begin in March and run for 16 weeks through June. I'm really excited to apply what I've learned from managing 4 compost piles in our house and the garden that Sonia and I put together (although right now we're in a losing battle against weeds... don't worry, we'll prevail).

Sonia holding some produce from our garden - limes, potatoes, and chile peppers!

Until next time,
Jackie