Justin McCandless

Ok, so I left off with my USA presentation on my first full day in Ecuador, Thursday the 7th of May.

The next day I started work at Fundación Ecologica Arcoiris. I dressed up in a tie and all, and Fátima, a new friend from AIESEC came to get me at my house and take me there and make sure everything was ok with the job. The tie ended up being a bit too professional, everyone there was so laid back. But no regrets, I wanted to show them I was serious and could really do a lot of things to help them out. Nobody spoke English there though, so the laid backness did help me not feel entirely out of place. Fátima helped set me straight on everything I needed to know about the job, and then she left and I got my first assignment: completely redesign the website. I was excited about that, I really had no constraints because they all seemed to hate the old website so much that they wanted to change everything.

Now let me jump into the future and explain how that has been going. I have been putting A LOT of time into the website these past few weeks I've been working. My new design as of now uses the majority of the text and structure from the old site so I didn't have to worry about constantly having people proofread my Spanish right off the bat, but everything is much improved. There were so many sloppily done, confusing things from the old site, and they are all fixed now. I redid everything from the ground up too, and the appearance is entirely different and much better looking. I think I kept the logo and that was it. It still needs a bit of prettifying I think, and hopefully I can do that with some input from coworkers and some more photos which Arcoiris has tons of but I have none. I also have a few ideas of cool completely new things I want to add once I have a fully working product. As of this writing I have the whole thing done except for a tiny bit more translating to do for the English version, since the old site was lacking tons of English content. Then I just have to clean up a few ugly remnants from the old website before I launch version 1. This is by far the nicest looking and most complex website I've done, which isn't saying much considering I only have about a year of html under my belt, and by the looks of this blog (I'll upgrade it when I get the chance), but I'm still pretty excited.

Ok, so back in the past, I actually didn't do any work on the website at all on my first day of work. After meeting and talking with my "equipo" consisting of two really cool people named Ángel and Paola, us three just decided to go out and get a café. This is usually a small meal consisting of the ever popular coffee, and something small like a tamal or some bread. I had an huma, which is one of my favorite Ecuadorian foods now. It's like a corn tamal but it's a little bit sweet, and it's eaten for breakfast sometimes too. Then Ángel had something else for us to do to finish off the day. Some guy had borrowed one of the Arcoiris trucks and wrecked it, and now he was refusing to pay for the damage, so we had to go find the dude and see what was up. Good task for the first day at work. We drove around and ended up finding the truck, but after asking around for where the guy who was driving it was, it turned out he was nowhere near so we gave up and went home. And to add to this story, I actually had no idea what we were doing for the majority of the trip until Ángel finally explained the situation to me. That happens a lot to me in Ecuador, I'll just be following people around with no idea where we are going or why. It's kind of fun to all of a sudden find out that you're tracking down someone who wrecked your truck, though.

That weekend I hung out in Loja. I went to a bar for the first time in my life since you only have to be 18 here. And now that I think of it, my host brother was there as well, and he just turned 18 yesterday so I guess they're not even really that strict about it. It was pretty fun though, it was me, Pria, and a bunch of Ecuadorians, and just our attempt at communicating in a crazy mix of Spanish, English, and French was hilarious.

I also went hiking with my host brother and one of his friends up a mountain near the house that weekend. That was my first taste of the craziness of the forest and mountains around here. And at the top of the mountain we climbed was a castle, but a little bit newer than the medieval kind since it was actually a recent attempt at building what would have been a really cool restaurant and lookout place above the city, but unfortunatel cash ran out before it was finished and now it's abandoned. You could get inside easily though, and we went all over in it, it was pretty fun, and there were some great views. We also saw several young Ecuadorian couples hanging out and enjoying the scenery haha, they're super romantic here.

I began work on the website the next week, but I also got to do some fun stuff too. Ángel and Paola invited me to come with them to the Arcoiris reserve in the San Francisco cloud forest in Podocarpus National Park. It's a pretty cool place, there is a really nice house there in the forest that Arcoiris uses for various activities and stuff. And surrounded the house are huge mountains with clouds floating around in the trees. The house here is only about an our west of the Amazon. I found out why the heck we were there long into the trip again as is typical for me in Ecuador, which was to fix the water supply to the house. This consisted of carrying abunch of tools and stuff about a kilometer from the house to a stream, where there was a water tank that was supposed to be collecting the water. Yeah, that was the house's water system. It had been messed up by rain though, which had changed the stream enough to make it not flow into the tank anymore. This is understandable considering the amount of landslides you see covering Ecuadorian highways as tractors scramble to clear them. We worked there in the mud for a few hours, building a dam and digging out the stream to flow into the correct place. It was really fun and the forest was cool, though I did get eaten alive by mosquitos. No yellow fever yet though. We went to a really small town nearby, as in no more than a dozen buildings and some delicious, straight from the farm style food before calling it a day.

The next weekend I got to see la Puerta de la Ciudad , a pretty big landmark in Loja. It's basically the city gates as the name implies, like a castle with a gate that a road goes through, and several artsy type things around, like a Don Quixote and Sancho statue. I went with Renato and AIESEC Ángel up to the top and saw the view, and also checked out an art gallery on the inside.

That weekend was also Pria and my welcome parties, which consisted of a pretty cool trip to Malacatos and Vilcabamba. Vilcabamba is a decently well known town; it's called the "Valley of Longetivity" because the perfect climate and small village lifestyle and diet supposedly contribute to make the people there easily live to be 100 years and older. Malacatos is a smaller town nearby where one of the AIESECers named Paola lives in a pretty sweet farm style house. We took a bus there in the morning, which cost 90 cents if I remember correctly, and proceeded to walk around the centro. We went to a park and hung out for awhile, and there were orange and banana trees all over. We also saw a place that takes sugar cane and makes this hard candy out of it that the area is known for, though unfortunately it wasn't producing at that moment. Later we headed to Paola's house and hung out there for the rest of the day, relaxing in hammocks and playing a bunch of crazy games, including an Ecuadorian card game called La Burra Nerviosa.

At around dusk we all crammed into cars and drove to Vilcabamba. We stopped at this place overlooking the valley that sold sugar cane juice, which is really good and actually dark green. It's more like fruit juice and not really the sugar water I pictured it as at first. That was cool though, just sitting there looking out over Vilcabamba at sunset with a few wisps of clouds floating around the valley. We continued down to Vilcabamba and walked around a bit before getting some dinner. Then we crammed back into the cars and took an uncomfortable drive back to Loja.

Concluding the weekend, Sam, the new intern from Boulder, Colorado, arrived. Me, him, and a bunch of AIESECers all went to Jipiro Park on Sunday, which is a really cool place. It was packed with people, and all kinds of stuff like a lake, a skatepark, 50 cent horseback riding, and mini replicas of world land marks as playgrounds. And tons more. We hung out and played some freeze tag before heading home at dusk, but I definitely want to go back there again.

The next week was back to work on the website, but once again I lucked into being able to travel and do some more fun stuff. I was working in the office one day like usual, except that Ángel wasn't around for whatever reason. This is typical though, he's always traveling and meeting people and stuff. Anyway, the girl at the front desk called the phone in the room where I work and told me that I was needed by someone to translate something, which Ángel had approved of, and I would be picked up in a half hour or so. Well that was the end result of the conversation, it was actually my first time talking to someone on the phone in Spanish and it was much more difficult than I thought. It was pretty embarassing too seeing as the whole Arcoiris building is pretty tiny and I probably could have gotten up and walked to her desk in a fourth the time it took us to struggle through a phone conversation. But I figured it out, and a half an hour later I walked outside expecting to see Ángel there waiting to pick me up. Instead there was a guy who I had never seen before, but he seemed be expecting me so I got in the car with him (sorry again Mom). We started driving, and I quickly learned that not only was Ángel not going to be waiting for me at our destination, but this guy didn't even know who Ángel was. I asked where we were going and he told me Catacocha, which did not sound like an office building 10 minutes away like I was expecting. It turned out to be a small town about two hours away.

We arrived after passing a few of those highway landslides and plenty of livestock hanging out on the road, and the place ended up being a rural center for developing the relations between Ecuadorians and Peruvians in the border regions. They set me up in a room with a computer connected to a projector, and for the rest of the day I translated their several pages long document as the eight or so other guys in the room yelled out things to me in Spanish about what each word meant. They were actually a bunch of really cool guys, and they kept feeding me and giving me coffee the whole time I was working. The document itself was a project proposal to a US organization in Washington DC looking to fund something of the sort. The project consisted of getting students and other people involved in helping farmers in a border river basin make the transition to more sustainable agriculture. Or at least that's what I got out of it, my entire perception of the project changed several times throughout the translation process. Seriously though I think I came out with a pretty professional and well translated document at the end of it all. And I actually had to go back home that night and finish it at their office in Loja the next day since it was so long. That drive was a pretty scary one too, there was fog so thick in some places I swear I couldn't see 10 feet in front of the car. And it was night. But the next day I finished the translation and submitted it right then and there, which made me feel important since they had that much faith in my translation to send it straight off without even looking it over, let alone having anyone else check my English. I hope they get their funding, they told me they would invite me back sometime since I would be in Loja so long so maybe I'll find out later.

That weekend a new intern named David arrived, and he's from the University of Michigan! We strangely hadn't met before despite both being involved with AIESEC, but it's great now having someone to talk to about Michigan sports as the football season draws near and I'm isolated in Ecuador. On Sunday I went with him, Sam, Pria, and another US intern named Carla, to go hiking in Zamora. We also had César, the guy who picked me up at the airport, as our Ecuadorian guide. And we met some more gringos and a few more Ecuadorians on the bus who were mostly volunteers from Loja and company, and they came along with us as well. We all crammed into a truck taxi, which took us from the terminal to the Bombuscaro entrance of Podocarpus National Park. Zamora is in the Amazon as I stated, so we were right in the middle of the rain forest. And now I know why it's called the rain forest, it was so wet and muddy, and it was pouring rain for half of the hike. I was completely soaked through after only a few minutes in. And the hike was awesome, first we went to a massive waterfall and got even more soaked. Then we climbed a mountain, which was a decently tough hike, but at the top there was a great view looking back on Zamora (when clouds didn't float over and block it). We went back down and came to the Bombuscaro river, which everyone was looking forward to swimming in due to already being wet, but because of the rain it was rushing way to fast to be able to get in. We hung out for a while there though, and there were all kinds of crazy types of butterflies flying around. We then headed back out of the park to meet our truck taxi again, which took us back into Zamora. We walked around a bit there, seeing the market and their giant clock that's built into a hillside. Then we grabbed dinner before catching a bus back to Loja. Sorry for my muddy nastiness, people who had to sit near me.

Renato was out of town the next week taking some sort of exams in Quito because he graduates in a few weeks. And my luck of not getting hit too hard with any sickness due to the change of food and climate and stuff finally caught up with me. I still don't know if what I had was an actual sickness or not, I never really had that much of a true sick feeling, but I did have a bit of a fever combined with massive chills and crazy sweats. I got over it by the end of the weekend though and now I'm fine, and I was kind of expecting worse due to the transition anyway.

That Tuesday I packed up to head for Manta, and you know the rest. After the trip I spent a typical week at work, since most of my coworkers were out of town on some type of trip of their own. Now it's Friday, we have Dave, Sam, and Demetri's welcome party tomorrow, and probably a Vilcabamba trip on Sunday for some horseback riding. I'm really going to try and stay on top of my writing now that I'm all caught up. And I'll try to post some pictures if possible. Till then.