Goodbye La Hesperia, Hello Pucara!

This week I traveled north in Ecuador, past Quito, past the Equator (I’m in the northern hemisphere again! …it doesn’t feel any different.) and now I’m in a tiny town (50 houses or so) in the mountains called Pucara. I actually spent the first half of the week at a farm that’s the base camp of the program I’m doing, which was wonderful. The farm is much more productive than La Hesperia, and the volunteers there eat all their food fresh from the garden – the pre-dinner conversation goes something like, “there are a lot of carrots in the garden, we could get some onions too, and I think I saw some zucchini ready, oh, and we have all those potatoes from last week…ok, let’s go harvest them”. All this is in Spanish, of course, because, although there was only one Spanish-speaker among us (a guy from Spain) it’s the lingua franca, and even when I was talking to the American guy we spoke mostly in Spanish.

Tuesday was Harvest Day, and so we spent the morning picking all sorts of vegetables and washing them and tying them in bunches to sell, then in the afternoon we went out in a truck and sold them all, to specific clients and anyone who happened to see us stopped on the side of the road. Sitting in the back of a truck, the wind blowing my hair, crunching on a sweet, organic carrot from the bin…life couldn’t get better.

On Thursday I left for Pucara, where I’m going to spend the next three weeks. After a morning spent thinning carrots (and munching on the larger ones, straight out of the ground), we hopped on a bus that took us deep into the mountains, far from any sort of civilization. Tiny, twisty roads brought us down from the high Sierras and their rain-starved brown fields (it’s the end of the dry season and everyone’s praying for rain) to the cloud forest, where everything is lush and large-leafed, even though technically it’s the dry season here too. I alighted in a town with one and a half roads (I think the second one disappears after a short distance), one school, and one kiosk-like shop that also, thankfully, has a public telephone.

My host is named Emperatriz, and her house is basic but sweet. My room is cozy and the cinderblock walls are painted a cheery yellow, made more inviting by the bright light bulb hanging from the ceiling by a wire. There’s no electricity apart from the lights in the whole house though, so I have to find someplace else to charge my computer if I want to write anything. The kitchen is separate, with a dirt floor and a roof so low even I have to duck in order to not hit my head, but the food that comes off of the tiny stove more than makes up for it – it’s simple, but very, very good. Emperatriz has a few chickens that have the run of the yard and sleep in a tree nearby (I’ve never seen chickens in a tree before, but I guess they’re birds too…) and a cute 3-month-old pig and a couple guinea pigs. Everyone has chickens here. You can hear them all day, and they strut along the road like it’s their own (and considering the number of cars that come by, it very well could be). The roosters have crowing contests across town, especially at 4:30 -5:00 in the morning when they all get together for a grand chorus, but I’ve learned to sleep through it.

The other woman who’s taken me under her wing is Consuela, and she spent all Saturday morning teaching me to make empanadas – sweet, cheese-filled rolls – and telling me about life in Pucara and all the other volunteers who stayed with her and wrote to tell her how much they missed her empanadas.

On Monday I start teaching in the elementary school in earnest (I went on Friday but it was a bit of a fiasco, and I have higher hopes for Monday when, hopefully, I’ll know what I’m doing) and I’ll be here until the beginning of November, when I go off to Colombia to another organic farm.