Our time in Ecuador is drawing to an end. We depart tomorrow (Saturday October 24) for Arequipa, Peru where we will begin the second half of our adventure. We arrived yesterday in Quito after ten days in the Intag region. While we were there, we learned about sustainable, organic agriculture as well as the fight between the people of that region and ENAMI, the Ecuadorean national mining company trying to extract copper from the tropical rainforest. A lot of the members of our group had a hard time here, myself included, but it proved to be a very educational and beneficial ten days.
We worked with a man by the name of Peter Shear, an American from Vermont who relocated to Ecuador 20 years ago. He lives on and runs an organic farm in Pucará with his daughter Nina, a very sweet ten year old. While in Pucará, we took day long hikes to observe the primary forest in which the town was located, harvested and planted chemical free pineapples, inoculated rotting trees with mushroom spores, and learned how to make sustainable herbicides, pesticides and fungicides.
I feel obligated to include one small story regarding my time in Pucará. On a rainy Wednesday night the nine other Carpe boys and I were seated, barefooted, in the local resturant for one of our weekly group meetings. We were all tired after a full day of hiking and a visit to Rio Intag coffee cooperative, a fair trade, shade grown, organic coffee cooperative. We were all very focused in our drawing meditation activity, no one seemed to notice the group of 14 year olds loitering outside the resturant where we had left our shoes in order not to track mud inside. After a theraupeautic drawing activity, we all set off for our homes to eat dinner and converse with our homestay families. The walk home would have been made much simpler with a right shoe. Looking back, it was obvious that the local kids had never seen a canoe… I mean shoe, as big as mine and they had to take one back to their home to run futher tests on this foreign object. However, they failed to consider how hard it would be to walk home, or anywhere else without a shoe. The rest of my time in Pucará was at the least partially devoted to right shoe recovery. The future looked bleak, everyone I asked claimed that a dog had taken it into the woods and it would never be seen again. This seemed logical, why on Earth would anyone take a shoe as big as mine (US size 16 Ecuador size 50) it won’t fit them, and even if it did, why would they take just one? The dog theroy was starting to check out, but some of my group members claimed that there wasn’t a dog on earth big enough to fit my massive shoe in his mouth. Not willing to give up hope, my group leader Lindsey helped me print our ¨Zapato Perdido¨ signs which my buddy Noam helped me hang around town. While the shoe was missing I learned how to farm in Chacos and I adapted well to this minor setback. Days went by with no signs of hope, I even had to play a full length soccer match against the Pucaranians barefooted (We lost 10-2 but most of our players considered the missing shoe to be an 8 goal swing in their direction). I even interupted a town hall meeting to announce to the citizens that I desperatley needed this shoe back. I began to lose sleep thinking, How will I hike the Inca Trail in Chacos? You can’t buy a size 16 in American stores, there’s no way I can find sufficient footwear in South America… Our last day in Pucará, I had all but given up hope, I had already developed plans to duct tape Ziploc bags to my feet to wear as a waterproof layer under my Chacos. My lost shoe signs had fallen off their posts and the buzz around town regarding the missing shoe had died down. However, a guardian angel of sorts had his eye out for me. Peter Shear heard information from his daughter regarding shoe thieves pushing a large, organge and grey shoe into a sewage drain. Peter found and interrogated the culprits and successfully returned the water ski… I mean, waterproof trail running shoe to it’s owner.
After the shoe was returned the rest of the trip went swimmingly well. We arrived safely in Junin where we learned more about the mining issue and enjoyed a six and a half hour hike through the rainforest.
We arrived yesterday in Quito to our original home base Community Hostel where we took our first showers in 10+ days and finally washed our laundry. Today I went to the embassay and got my new passport so I’m finally elligable to leave Ecuador. Tonight our plans consist of relaxing, eating brownies and popcorn, and watching American movies online. We have finished our whirlwind tour of Ecuador and we are all looking forward to upcoming adventures in Peru!
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