como el tiempo vuela

My last week as an intern! Seriously, time has flown. In culinary news, I ate a sandwich with pesto, red peppers, green peppers, and goat cheese, and it was divine. Goat cheese is embarrassingly expensive here, but the splurge was worth it. Speaking of splurges, I also bought my first (!) ice cream (pistachio) yesterday, and it was great. I wish I was eating as much ice cream as I did during my Chilean street vendors project, but then again, I wasn’t sucking any cacao fruits there, and that’s pretty delicious too. Fruits in general here are good- I tried guanabana, and maracuyá is always worth it. Mangos are disappointingly expensive, but there is chirimoya here (delish) and naranjilla in a juice is pretty heavenly.

In non-culinary news, I’m writing up lots of concluding reports, overall summaries of data I collected, and summing up all of the information about cacao that I learned that will hopefully help any future (ojalá que haya futuros pasantes trabajando en mi proyecto) interns avoid the researching process. I’m also planning my travels afterwards- definitely going to Otovalo (there’s a big indigenous market there), Mindo (supposed to be great hiking there, I want to go canyoning, and possibly tubing), and the Quilotoa Loop (there’s a beautiful laguna there and you travel through tiny indigenous towns checking out the markets and doing local hikes). From there, I’m still deciding: jungle (really? more mosquitoes?) basing myself from Tena, coast to get some more sun and possibly see some whales, or south to Cuenca and Loja (super far though) to check out another World Cultural Heritage site and to get to know Ecuador del Sur.

In other project news, I’ve had a really frustrating love/hate relationship with Giovanny, the permanent Yanapuma agricultural specialist in Bua because he’s not very demonstrative in his appreciation of the work that I’m doing, and because he’s a very poor team-communicator- I would frequently have to grill him for information just in case he forgot to tell me about a meeting or something. I wanted us to work as a team, but he’s a very introverted person and very attached to his community, and I finally decided that perhaps he wanted to keep a distance from me in case my part of the project didn’t go well, because he is a permanent presence in the community. Still, when he’s not being introverted or lame, I think he gets a kick out of me (Ecuadorians and Tsa’chilas don’t seem to be gifted with any natural sense of humor and they think I’m a hoot) and we have occasionally good conversations. Then today Idalia came back from Bua and told me that Giovanny had told her how pleased he was with my work, that he sometimes gets frustrated with interns coming in and doing their own projects and not thinking about the community but that my project was really useful in helping with a project that had long-term potential, that we worked really well together and that I did a really good job in creating the survey, creating the plastic pictures of cacao and its diseases, and in talking to the farmers in their fincas, convincing them of the usefulness of the project! He said he was going to miss my sense of humor and enthusiasm, and that I had been really helpful! Which was really nice to hear, since all of this time I had thought that Giovanny had regarded me with a sort of disdain. So that made me really happy that the community members and Giovanny had all thought I had done a good job and had done something useful, which was my main concern, that I was going to do something that wasn’t actually going to help out. So that’s what I have to brag about, and it made me feel really good.

Alvaro comes in tonight around 9ish and I’ll go pick him up at the airport. I’m stoked to see him again, and hopefully I’ll be able to maneuver some sort of running leap airport reunion like they have in the movies because those are sweet. Also, I’m thinking about pancakes for breakfast on my birthday.

Love to all, how is everyone? I hope there is sun wherever you are, and that everyone is relaxing, being productive, and enjoying themselves immensely. 18 days until I’m back in the States (at midnight). What a thought!

Love love con amor

M