That's a wrap

The maps are now all in the hands of the communities. On Thursday and Friday, I went to the three communities with the technical team to present them with the maps and talk about other Yanapuma projects. It was really nice to hear the maps are appreciated and there was even some pretty high praise; a man from Peripa called it a ‘historic’ act.

El Poste

I finished up the last of my work at the office this afternoon, making data accessible, preparing maps for extra prints and adding a final bit to my project report. The director thanked me for my work and said that this project opened channels for Yanapuma with the communities that they hadn’t had before. Peripa and Poste have never worked with the NGO before and are both very interested in other endeavors.

Overall, this has been a really great experience. As the only volunteer on the project, I’ve worked on all aspects of the mapping process. Splitting my time between Quito and Santo Domingo gave me a look at the daily life of a completely different culture and of a non-profit organization. If you’re looking for an internship/ volunteer position, I’d recommend this one.

Molly gets in tomorrow night and then we’re off to explore the country!

The Last Map

I've ordered the prints for the last community map. I'm now a familiar face at the print shop up the street from the Yanapuma office and have a regular order now: one size-A1 and two size-A2 maps printed on a plastic canvas material, then 20 A4 maps printed on normal paper.
Here it is:

The Last Comuna

Comuna La Peripa: two full days. My visits are getting shorter and shorter. At this pace, I could have easily finished the six unmapped Tsachila communities if I had a full semester instead of the Dartmouth quarter. Still, I’m happy with the three we managed and I’m glad I got to squeeze in Peripa. In this last comuna I had some good conversations, saw some beautiful countryside and finally got to ride a motorcycle without straddling another man. Friday afternoon I took out Eddie’s (short for Edison, the 28 year-old president of the community) Suzuki to mark roads. Although it took me a good 5 minutes to start the bike on an uphill (after pushing it across a river), I still felt pretty damn cool riding home with a backdrop of banana palms against a sunset.

Walking the boundary in Peripa

I was pushed to an interesting conclusion recently (no, not about my vanity as I set up a tripod to pose with the motorcycle). The Dickey Center, benevolent providers of funding for this internship/adventure, sent me a short check-up including a seemingly mundane question; “What kinds of daily/weekly routines have you established? How are these helping or hindering your experience of the local culture and customs?” After writing the obvious, “I wake up around 8:30 and go to the office…”, I got stuck on the second part. I had been pleased with the routine I’d established and the efficiency I accomplished, but pondering it more, I couldn’t help thinking there was some negative correlation between efficiency and ‘experience of culture.’ Work in Naranjos was anything but efficient, but the extra time allowed me to get to know the family and learn about daily life in the comuna. Peripa may have been a deviation from the rule; during my short stay I engaged in more social activity than my four days in El Poste, though I wouldn’t say it was an exception. Saturday night I attended a huge graduation party for the son of the vice president. I was dropped off early, got to help set up, and then was fed the famous guanta while I talked about mapping with a member of another community. It was fun, but I probably would have stayed for the raucous later party if I had known more than one face in the crowd, that is, if I had been in town for more than 48 hours.
So in my philosophical musing I decided efficiency might not be all it’s cut out to be. We hold efficiency as a synonymous virtue with productivity, but maybe productivity, with some necessary redefinition, is a more appropriate goal. If ‘product’ is broadened to include the intangibles, correctly weighted above physical goods, then we have a more useful metric. Judging by this standard, I was as productive in Los Naranjos as in El Poste, where I mapped twice the area in half the time, because I made friends and learned a ton.

Hostel de Luz

It’s now long past due that I wrote a blog about my hostel. I have a small private room at the Galapagos Natural Life Hostel in la Mariscal, the main tourist district of Quito. Although the combination of iffy location and cheesy name seem the recipe for a gringo trap, this hostel has become almost a homestay. An Ecuadorian family owns it and receives help from relatives now and then. Vivienta is the youngest daughter, in her thirties, and does the majority of the work around the place. But it is Luz, the house matriarch, that imbues the hostel with its character. She ensures that every guest feels “en su casa” and calls everyone “mi joven” or “m’hijo.” The times that I have fallen sick or injured (food poisoning last weekend and a twisted ankle this Sunday), I have been dotingly and frantically attended to in that way only mothers can do. When I hobbled in the door after coming back from hiking, she insisted that I sit down while she fetched an ace bandage and all the remotely relevant medicines. Now, it’s necessary to point out that Luz inches around the building with a walker because she broke her ankle several months ago and still has metal screws in the bone. Regardless of her worse injury, she wouldn’t let me get up.

We spend quite a few evenings together since I’ve started cooking instead of eating out and have thus solidified our friendship. She gives me leftovers and makes me coladas and I open jars and reach high things for her. In my relatively short time living with them I have apparently proved my merit; she wants me to manage the hostel when the family is at her son’s wedding this Saturday evening. Luz told me there is a nephew available for the job, but he is quote, “less known.” Maybe I’ve been spending too much time here…

It’s unlikely that I’ll be able to help out though, because I leave tomorrow morning for Peripa and would have to complete the entire boundary in one day to make it back in time.

The rest of my time is pretty much planned out: I return to Quito sometime on the weekend, work in the office till Wednesday on the Peripa map, return Thursday and Friday with other Yanapuma staff to the communities to present them with the finished product. Then next Sunday, Molly arrives and we take off to tour Ecuador! Squeak!

More Maps

This map shows the locations of all seven Tsáchila communities as well as Santo Domingo and Puerto Limón. Red boundaries are mapped, doubled dashed lines are not mapped. I'll be going next to Peripa (in purple) which you can see shares a line with El Poste. For your reading pleasure I translated this one to English.

Once again, roads and unmapped communities provided by Victor Torres.

Map #2

This map I made to show the portion of the boundary that follows a river or stream, which adds up to 11km.

I have to thank Victor Torres for the road file. He has a blog at http://tsachila.blogspot.com/ with photos and entries about different communities.

Part Two

Last night I returned from a very efficient trip to El Poste. I was dropped off Monday evening during the middle of a small meeting and met the town council. My host family came to pick me up (in a truck!), and the next morning we were on the boundary at 9. We followed a similar routine Tuesday through Friday: meet up with community members who knew the area (often traveling with a group of 8 or more) at 9 am, stop for lunch after noon when a group of women would carry in food to border, then continue work until 3 pm. So working roughly 6 hours a day we finished in just 4 days. After marking the roads on motorcycle Friday afternoon, I got a ride into town and took the first bus back to Quito.

A couple significant differences between Los Naranjos and El Poste are that while Naranjos has some jagged edges, the community limits are roughly rectangular and often follow a road. More than half of El Poste’s property lines follow a river or a stream and we only walked on a clear path for a total of a few hundred meters. Needless to say, I spent a considerable portion of this week soaking wet. 

Wading the Rio Nile

So I actually only have two weeks of work left. I had been planning on pursuing a third project in a nearby community, but between finishing this map, printing and delivering it, then writing up reports to make my data usable by later volunteers, I might not have any extra time. That said, the next community I would visit does have a shared border with El Poste, so I already have some of it done, and I might just be able to squeeze it in.

The Commute

I think with the amount of time I've spent in transit, this topic deserves its own post. This last trip to the comuna went pretty smoothly. I walked up to the terminal just as the bus was pulling out (no thats not a cause for alarm, just means you're on time), some three and half hours I stepped into a taxi, once downtown I boarded an already full colectivo, and when I got to my stop, Richard (a motorcycle taxi friend) was waiting for me. On the way back, the whole trip takes an extra hour because we arrive at the south town station, which is two public buses from my hostal. For a journey 30 times shorter than an Oregon visit from school, it has twice as many legs.

Heading out of Los Naranjos (and marking the road)

Its interesting to change 7000 feet in altitude so frequently. I now anticipate some degree of explosion of my Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap when arriving in the low pressure Andes, after the death of a roller-tip deodorant stick that lost its ball. Another curious consistency has been the medical treatises given to a captive audience on the bus out of Quito. Instead of just extolling the benefits of their given product, ginsing or noni and maca tablets, these tag-a-long vendors deem it necessary to teach the passengers about the dangers of cancer, the intricacies of sexual health and any other attention-grabbing ailment. I was up front for the first talk, and it was riddled with misinformation. According to the lecturer, Asians can reproduce into their 90s (the ginseng of course) and skin cancer is ravaging the Ecuadorian population. I found it hard to believe that one, reproducing into my 90s was a good idea, and two, the sun was a bigger threat than the driver (judging by the uninhibited view of the valley floor thousands of feet below and the lack of seat belts). I pondered the mortality (or at least injury) rate of health lecturers standing in the aisle of a bus careening down a mountain road. Did I mention the rock slides? I've already had to return and take an alternate route once because the road was suddenly out of commission, a common occurrence if the bare hills are any sign. With all this entertainment, and killer views to boot, my commute is at least not too boring.

On this last visit, the main goal was to get revision suggestions on the map draft. We're ready to print off a final!

Aerofoto

Here it is. The # symbols were supposed to be plain dots and the black dash is actually a north arrow, both features were somehow lost in the conversion to pdf. Other than that though, this is a pretty complete draft.

All is not lost

Well, the GPS is functioning again. I suppose 4 years is too long to go without a software update. I walked around the block and the track log was recording correctly.

More good news, we finally located Los Naranjos on the aerial photo that I bought. Even the folks at the IGM couldn’t find the community; the photo was taken from pretty high up, and there aren’t very many easily recognizable landmarks in the area. I overlaid the boundary line on the photo, but wasn’t able to project it very accurately, because I only have sample points (spots on the photo I know the coordinates of) from a small section of the photographed area. Another bonus is that I should be able to trace the roads off of the photo, so at least I won't have to collect that data again.

It's not my fault

I swear.

Okay, maybe if I should have had the foresight to perform an intense check-up on my GPS unit beforehand, but I'd never noticed anything wrong before; how was I supposed to know that it would malfunction? The track log, which essentially leaves a breadcrumb trail of waypoints, was lying to me. I told it to record coordinates every 5 seconds, more than enough to accurately portray the curves of a road while walking. The little graphic on the screen showed little white dots accumulating behind me, and since there is no way to manually check the coordinates saved before uploading the data to a computer, I had to trust that. How naive. After three days of slogging through tropical streams with GPS in one hand and machete in the other, after logging miles and miles on dirt roads, I'm left with unseemly, inaccurate, jagged lines; poor excuses for the nuanced bends of a creek or trail. Basically, the data I collected is worse than I could do with paper and pencil. 

The treacherous GPS

So my next step for my sorry excuse for a GPS will be a master reset, full software update and a series of tests. Then it will be back to Los Naranjos for a second go. 

Back Again

I've done what I can in the office for now, so the next few days I'm going to spend in Los Naranjo collecting data on the roads and rivers that cross the community.
While I'm finishing up this map, Yanapuma is contacting other Tsachila villages in the area to see if they would also like to pursue a mapping project. So hopefully I'll be able to repeat the process for another community; this time with a little experience.

Map 1

It's not very glorious without a base map to give reference, but here is a draft of my first production.

ArcView is up!

After a mere 3 days of installation (reinstallation, registration, authorization, fail, repeat), ArcView is up and running! I lugged the desktop computer console down to the distributors office this morning and we found the error in one of the multiple registration codes. Yay!

Dongle

Barring a breach of contract on the part of the local ArcGIS distributor, I should be able to start work tomorrow! Yes, start. Well, I have uploaded the waypoints to the computer at the office, navigated the maze of user accounts and executed the necessary software updates, but as of today I haven’t been able to open the geography software that will facilitate our final product. Due to the cost of ESRI products (~$1500 for the most basic GIS kit), the manufacturer requires a rather intensive registration process to activate the program. Sometime in the last two years the software was uninstalled from the Yanapuma computers, so I reinstalled it yesterday afternoon. The first time I opened it, an error message declared I was missing a Sentinal SuperPro driver. Installed the necessary driver, I was informed that I was now missing the Single Use Hardware Key, also known as a 'dongle'. This dongle is a USB drive that ensures the software can’t be used on multiple computers at once. By what I would say is a design flaw, it looks just like a common flash memory stick so sometime in the period of time when no one was using the software at Yanapuma, the key walked off. By 9:30 this morning I had determined that the missing key was our problem, after starting installation about noon yesterday. The interim I was talking on the phone, chatting and emailing customer service reps in the US and Ecuador. Because the NGO is located in Ecuador, US reps claimed they couldn’t help and I would have to contact the Ecuadorian distributor. Since ArcGIS was donated to Yanapuma from the US, the Ecuadorian distributor said they couldn’t offer assistance. When I visited the distributors office they informed me that I would have to pay the annual maintenance fee before I could purchase the hardware key, for $600. The head of the Conservation Grant program at ESRI that originally donated the software said I could apply for funding to cover the maintenance cost and since I couldn’t buy the key, writing a grant presented itself as the only option. I sent a desperate email to our assigned customer service rep at ESRI hoping for some exemption from the maintenance fee. A few hours of grant forms later I get an email from the distributor saying they’d sell me the key. The rep had sent this email: “Would you be kind enough to assist the customer below with purchasing an hardware key? They seemed to have lost theirs.” With such a mandate from the headquarters, the distributor couldn’t turn me down.

One Week; One Comuna

We've done it! My GPS now holds coordinates corresponding to the complete community boundary.
So far, I've now circumnavigated Comuna Los Naranjo, been on board a 4-person motorcycle ride, and not gone a day this week without eating bananas in some form or another. I'd like to say I walked the whole perimeter, but the last day we drove a few of the boundary roads on Roberto's bike (see right), thus finishing our fourth day's work in the afternoon of the third day. Another qualification, the 4-person moto did include 2 children, so was actually less of a feat than sharing the seat with two fair-sized men. The banana boast is no stretch though, I've hardly gone a meal without plátano, interestingly, never once served raw. We eat it boiled, steamed, mashed and fried, sliced and fried, and of course, the Tsáchila favorite: boiled, mashed, then rolled. Here you can see the process, the finished product is sitting in the pot on top of the boiled bananas. Excuse the culinary digression, it has been somewhat of a preoccupation in the last week.
With the extra time I had after the exterior property lines, I made waypoints at the school, football field, cemetery, and a bridge. This will hopefully serve as highly visible reference points for overlaying an aerial photo.

On Friday, I attended a meeting in Puerto Limon concerning a reforestation project for the county containing Los Naranjo. Giovanny, Yanapuma's agriculture expert, gave a presentation advocating the participation of the Tsachila as seedling vendors to county officials, members of a local NGO and an environmental consultant. I was brought along because one of the issues complicating project initiation in border regions is that the county does not have very well defined boundaries. I was surprised to hear some debate about which towns actually fell within the county's authority. Towards the end of the meeting, the brought the position they envisioned me taking on: head county GIS technician! That was a bit of a shock. I felt like I was possibly getting myself roped into something I had no desire or ability to do. Fortunately, I knew all I had to do was talk a little longer and they would better comprehend my skill level as demonstrated by my language (in)competence. They were not easily dissuaded, but we eventually compromised to the goal of mapping the nearby Tsáchila communities instead of the entire county. The only problem with this plan is that it will take full participation from each of the Tsáchila comunas. So as of yet, this blog's title maintains its pertinence. This week I have my work set out for me though, remembering how to use ArcGIS at the Quito office.

Half-mapped

Hurrah! We´ve begun mapping! The meeting Monday morning happened as predicted and was amazingly punctual (only 10 minutes late!). The six men who gathered at Alejandro´s house talked for a little more than a half and hour in Tsafike, presumably about the mapping process and obstacles. When the conversation ended, Alejandro turns to me and says something along the lines of, "Well, would you like to say something about the project and Yanapuma?" I asked him to fill me in a little on the discussion, then tried to explain the one potential misunderstanding, that our final product will not be an official survey or even necessarily permantent.

Alejandro taking notes on a waypoint

To my surprise, a little after my fumbling speech everyone stood up and I learned that we were to start mapping right then. We walked to Zacarias´s farm and started back along the boundary, which was marked by a thicker line of brush between two fields. We started by putting waypoints about every 30 meteres, but since the line was pretty straight we decided to just mark corners and a few in between. Communication was a little tough that first day for a few reasons. I was out of the loop of most conversation and didn´t have a good idea of the plan, so I often stuggled to answer questions about the mapping process. I tried to stress that I was just a technician and this was their project, but they still needed to know how to faciliate the GPS work. My complete lack of experience in the area was complicated by my difficulty with a technical vocabulary in Spanish. In spite of that, we managed to cover a few kilometers that morning and put down 25 points. The hardest part of the work is definitely coordinating land owners, which I have little hand in. After the second day, the track of waypoints on my GPS seems to suggest that we´ve covered half of the border. We´re now discussing what we can do next. There are a lot of options; marking all the roads and rivers for reference points on the map, overlaying the boundary line on an aerial photo, or uploading the roads to google maps so tourists can get directions to community shows.
Apart from mapping, I´ve been having a lot of fun taking part in a different lifestyle. Yesterday afternoon we fished the creek with nets and a toxic root that makes the fish ´drunk´ as Alejandro told me. After the opaque extract from the pounded root is released into the water, the small fish swim to the surface impaired enough to easily scoop up. After getting the hang of the motorcycle taxis that took me to Puerto Limon where I lasted posted, I got a chance to ride one motorcycle with two other grown men. I sat furthest back on the ride on the dirt road that connects the community to the highway, my feet on the pegs and Alejandro´s feet on mine, his son-in-law drove us.
Well, that´s all for now, will post more when I have time.

And so it begins... kind of

Anai, Diana, and me

Well, I haven´t technically started work yet, but I have worked. I spent this weekend getting to know my homestay family, the Aguavil´s, and helping out a little. On Saturday, I ferried banana bunches in their field/orchard/forest. On Friday I scraped the dangerously slipperly mossy slime from the hard-packed dirt ground around the compound, I suppose the equivilant of mowing the lawn. Also on Friday, the day after I arrived, I helped out with a Tsáchila tourist show. A group of 7th graders from the nearby city of Santo Domingo came to watch and participate in a display of Tsáchila traditional culture. (Here is a short video of the family performing). The night before, the Aguavil´s showed me how to make henna-like tatoos with the juice of a huito fruit. When applied with a stick, it goes on mostly clear, but in the morning you have a bluish-black mark that lasts for 8 days. The father put one ring on my arm, without pressure or knowledge of the expectations I stayed with that. The day of, all the men, myself included, painted their hair red with the dye from achiote, which washes out with soap. Everyone else was dressed in skirts and fully painted, so I wasn´t a very convincing Tsáchila (the blue eyes were a give-away too).
The community Los Naranjo has a center (the futbol field of course), but most of the families live a short distance away on their fincas (in this case, the banana dominated, partially-wild plantations). I´m sleeping in an approximately 15´x16´ timber framed house with bamboo-siding and a thatched roof. There are several other buildings like it on the compound, varing in shape and size, as well as a couple of palm-roofed covered areas holding hamacas or benches. Closest to the road the parents stay in a cement-block home with a kitchen and tv and further up the oldest son lives with his wife and three daughters. These grandaughters, aged 8 to 2, are a hoot and always keep me company, requested or not. Their favorite games include stealing my hat, repeatedly asking what my name is, and all sitting in my lap at once.
As for the mapping project, the plan is to have a meeting Monday morning. My host father seems to be very keen on having a map of the community, so I´m trying to stay optimistic, but I can imagine the difficulty in convincing all the community members to bushwack their property lines with a gringo.

The covered area in the family compound used for meetings and shows

I'm off!

Two days after I began the search for a community map of Los Naranjo, I’ve finally figured it out; no such map exists. Within a few hours of turning in my painstakingly edited letter to CELIR, I was sent an email from the director recommending that I take my request to the Sub-secretary of Lands. To make a long story short, I went to a new building, started on the 8^th floor, got sent to the 5^th then the 11^th, then back to the 5^th. The phrase, “I was just there, they told me to come here,” became far too familiar. I returned one last time to the 11^th floor this morning, only to be informed that the government has never mapped Los Naranjo.

Tomorrow I'll bus the four hours to Santo Domingo, then another hour with Guadalupe to the village. She'll introduce me to the community and I'll get my host family. Then I can start!

First Day

As directed, I arrived punctually between 9 and 10 am. I think I got a pretty good feeling of how this internship will be structured. After a welcoming, but pretty short orientation, I was showed a computer that housed all the GIS data of previous projects. Since what work has been done previously was in other communities, I gleaned what I could from the processes the previous workers used. Thankfully, several of them left in-depth reports of past projects, detailing how they had gone about engaging community members, what problems they encountered and a great deal more useful information. I also chatted with Guadalupe, the outreach staff person who has been visiting the communities to see if they would like a map done. Since the community Los Naranjo has decided they would like to delineate their property lines, we can start with my part as soon as I arrive. Guadelupe and I planned to meet Thursday in Santo Domingo because she will be in a different town on Wednesday and I still need to find some maps of the area. And that was my next task.

After an early lunch of fried plantains and eggs with a syrupy mango juice, I walked to the Instituto Geografico Militar (IGM), which happens to sit at the very top of a fair-sized hill. At the front gate where visitors receive passes, I learned it’s always good to carry identification. I saved myself from another trek by convincing the guard that my written passport number and name would be enough. Ok, maybe I just acted pitiful and fumbled in my bag for a while before pleading he allow it, but I got in either way.

The cartography office was very impressive; far more professional and modern than its counterpart in Buenos Aires. A woman who manipulated the map database on a touch screen computer helped me locate the topographic maps I needed. Los Naranjo was printed near the bottom edge so I bought the grid to the south as well, since it happens to contain another Tsáchila community, Cóngoma. I purchased two of each to keep on in the office in Quito. Besides the hill, that was easy, but the next map I needed, of community boundaries as created in a government concession years ago, turned out to be a lot harder to get. On goal of this project will be to compare the historic legal boundaries of the community with what is left of their lands after continued encroachment from surrounding ranchers over the years.

Instituto Geografico Militar

The folks at IGM told me to go to CELIR (The Special Commission of Interior Boundaries of the Republic) at the junction of Chile y Guayaquil. I stopped by the Yanapuma office to drop off the topo maps and find CELIR online, but the phone number given on the government website raised no one. I took a taxi this time, as recommended by Guadelupe, to the historical center. With help, I located the Guerrero Mora building (thankful for the practice I had in pronouncing guerrero after living in a province of that name in Mexico), but the first guard told me CELI (they drop the republic part) had moved, which appeared likely since it was full of construction rubble inside. I returned to protest after two people on the street redirected me to the Mora building, but to no avail. After an argument with the man at the front counter through a chest-high opening in the glass, I was told to go to the general tourist office. The lady at the tourist office kindly marked two places she knew were government offices. I went to the closest one first, Department of National Security and they told me to go the Ministry of the Interior at the Presidential Palace. So I put on a business face, walked up to the building where Rafael Correa works and requested to visit the Interior Ministry. I was told to go around back. The security trio at that door told me to go to the Guerrero Mora building, of which I had to convince them was not correct before I could continue. Then the officer at the desk inside told me to go to the Mora building. And so it continued until I was inside the building and finally found someone who was aware of CELI. The chubby bureaucrat at the end of the line listened to my plea and told me all solicitations had to be in writing, addressed to Señor Ministerio del Interior. An hour later I returned with a letter in hand, corrected and embellished by the owner of the internet café I used, but the office had closed at 4:30.

Although I hadn’t achieved everything I hoped, I felt it was a pretty successful day. I had one map and a plan to start work.

The weekend

Saturday afternoon I straddled a creatively marked, but incorrectly located equator, sat in the confessional seat of a gilded Jesuit church, crept through traffic in the historical center for two hours and drank canelazo at the foot of the virgin-of-the-small-loaf-of-bread (La Virgen del Panecillo, who happens to be a dragon tamer). Back at Cisco’s house, the extended family had gathered for dinner, Cisco’s family of four, two cousins, two aunts, two uncles and me. Before the turkey and potatoes came out, the cousins traded Chuck Norris jokes (who knew his omnipotent influence spread so far?). I failed miserably at explaining why I couldn’t translate Knock, Knock jokes of the orange variety; “Naranja you glad I didn’t say banana?” just doesn’t make much sense. I was also privy to an interesting debate about the role of General San Martin in Latin American history; being an Argentinean (like one of Cisco’s uncles) his role is downplayed in the liberation of Ecuador, either that or its exaggerated by Argentinean textbooks, I haven’t checked.

El Centro Historico

To rest from such a busy day of driving around, Cisco and I retired to his family’s finca. An hour north of the city they have a small house on a quarter of an acre with avocado, lemon and other fruit trees, some of which they sell to local supermarkets. We spent the afternoon drinking Pilsner (the Ecuadorian’s beer of choice), talking about life and picking green avocados to ripen later. I also tried for the first time a tree-growing variety of tomato (the tamarillo), as well as a cross between a lime and a mandarin orange.

I’m steadily increasing my Ecuadorian slang. Chévere means cools, cheveraso means really cool and man (pronounced mahn) means man, or woman actually (e.g. “Mira ésta man). For more, see the Factbook group, “You know you're Ecuadorian when...”, strangely and fortunately in English.

I’m now at the Hostel Galapagos Natural Life, which was recommended to me by the Yanapuma folks for its proximity to their office, though there are a million other hostels here in the tourist district La Mariscal. I scored a private room for the price of a dorm ($8 a night) because 15 Chilean girls traveling together filled the rest of the hostel. Around dinnertime a woman from the hostel came and knocked on my door to tell me there were empanadas and coffee in the dining room. The 15 Chileans, 2 Germans, 4 Ecuadorians and I shared a large dish of fried empanadas with cheese and fried dough with syrup. I’ve got high hopes for the complementary breakfast since dinner wasn’t even advertised.

To work tomorrow!

Quito!

Seeing my friend Cisco as I walked out of customs in the Quito airport was a wonderful welcome. It's such a luxury not to have to search for a hostel on the first night in town. I met Cisco, who's real name is Francisco and actually goes by Pancho here, when he spent a year in my hometown as an exchange student. In the evening we had a good time talking about old friends as we browsed pictures of high school track; Cisco and I competed in the 4x 200 meter relay together. Last night, after a hot meal and shower, I slept soundly surrounded by the familiar photographs of Dan Evans.
I woke up this morning and pulled back the shades to be greeted by the Andes mountains sitting what seems like just a few blocks away. Pretty comparable to Sitka ;), except the elevation here is 2,800 meters (9,200 ft).

Ciao,
Ben

SeaTac

Now that I'm en route, it's time to set up a blog. My goal for this blog is both to keep friends and family up to date (with hopefully weekly posts) and to encourage myself to write about the experience.
I have to admit, I've been a little anxious about my ability to help with my minimal GIS experience and without much prior knowledge of project details. I have agreed to help the Yanapuma Foundation with community mapping, but the large part of my adventures are yet unknown (thank Molly for the great title of this blog). Yanapuma approached the Tsáchila community after they expressed interested in a mapping project, but the process of determining exactly what needs to be done is a long one, so my preparation has been a little short on specifics.
I've made contact with a high school friend who lives in Quito, who generously offered to pick me up at the airport and take me in for the weekend. On Monday, I'll report the Yanapuma office to hopefully learn what I'll be doing. Next update will be from Ecuador!

Thanks for reading Mom,
Ben