Six Months = Half a Year

Forgive me, this post is about 3 weeks old, but its got a lot of info, so I didn't want to just delete it. Just imagine what you were doing 3 weeks ago, and insert this information into your nightly blog browsing... 

Hello again! I'm comin' atcha with another update from my exciting, confusing and often weird life. Many things have happened in the last month since my last update, and I'll do my best to summarize it all here.

1. Reconnect
As I mentioned in the last post, after the first 3 months at site, everyone participates in a conference called Reconnect. At this conference, we shared the results of our community interviews and presented a plan for our activities for the first year. Of course, this "plan" is subject to change because after 3 months I think it's impossible to fully know the opportunities and where our time will be best spent. Since Reconnect, I've already learned about two possible projects that I would much rather work on than the stupid things I mentioned. So we'll just have to see what happens.

For the conference, we were back at the training center in Tumbaco, which is not my favorite place in Ecuador. Maybe bottom 5 so far. We also stayed with our host families from training, which I was dreading beforehand but which actually turned out pretty great. I was able to relax more and head to Quito a couple times, which I definitely would not have been able to do if we were all staying together at the training center.

2. Thanksgiving
Nothing too exciting for my favorite holiday this year... on the actual day, I worked and then went home and made a sort of tuna casserole for my host family. I took the next day, Friday, off from work and headed to Riobamba, where I helped make a big Thanksgiving meal with a few PCVs in the area. At the last minute, a few others also showed up to eat, so we ended up with 13 people, which was 5 more than we'd planned I think. Fortunately, there was plenty of food to go around and everyone was way too full and sleepy by the end of the evening.

The feast! From left clockwise; mashed potatoes and gravy, stuffing, zucchini casserole, green bean casserole, camote (sweet purple potato) with marshmallows. Hiding: turkey.  Not pictured: chicken noodle soup.

3. Food security conference
I headed back to Tumbaco a couple days after Thanksgiving for a 3 day conference on food security. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, food security refers to people's access and utilization of food in their daily lives. For me, food security is a huge issue in the communities of Tixan on a pretty basic level. For example, I've mentioned before that most families eat meat once or twice a week because of a lack of economic access ("no hay plata", there's no money) and physical access (there aren't markets in the communities to purchase meat, fruits, veggies and other products). However, for people that have access to foods, there are issues with utilization, which is to say even people that eat meat every day can be considered food insecure if they only know how to cook it in lard and eat it with rice and potatoes. A diet like that is going to produce a lot of obesity, diabetes, heart problems, etc.

Anyway, the conference was pretty awesome. There was lots and lots of good information and we shared the training center with the last group (ever!) of agriculture volunteers, who got here about 4 months before us. It was really great to meet the Ag volunteers that are sort of in my area because I will DEFINITELY be calling them for advice or to do a tech exchange in the future. Also, it was exciting because they're cool.

On a side note, this group of agriculture volunteers is the last because Peace Corps does in fact continuously evaluate the necessity and usefulness of volunteers in Ecuador. In recent years, the Ecuadorian government has taken strides to improve support of small farmers in the country (supposedly) and instead of more volunteers helping out in the area of agriculture, the government decided that they wanted English teachers. So! PC Ecuador switched out Agriculture for TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language), and the Health program incorporated Food Security and Nutrition as one of our 3 program goals. For the record, the other two goals are Water Safety and Hygiene, and Sexual and Reproductive Health.

At the conference, I got the chance to talk for a bit about the work that I'm doing at the clinic in Tixan, during a Maternal and Child Health session. One of the Health program trainers, Bibi, and I did a little skit demonstrating a typical conversation I have with a mom at the clinic, which was weird to do in English, but went really well. Then we talked a bit with the group about nutrition and pregnancy and breastfeeding and kids under 5 years old. I'm not an expert in these areas by any means, but I've learned a lot in the these first few months and it was really exciting to impart my knowledge with my fellow volunteers. After the session, I got a lot of great feedback from people, which was validating. It was also apparent that even though lots of people like to talk about what they're doing in site, it's hard to tell how much is actually getting done and how much is embellishment. For my part, I'm grateful to now have a small role in my clinic, even though its been difficult to navigate and I've experienced a lot of uncertainty and frustration. I think that as my Spanish improves, I'll be able to do even more!

Well, that's all for now. I hope this finds everyone doing well and getting ready to enjoy the holidays!