An Irresolvable Riddle

Reading: Latin American Folktales by John Bierhorst

An Ecuadorian wildflower

Another riddle for you:

Fuí a un cuarto,
Encontré un muerto,
Hablé con él
Y le saqué el secreto.

I entered a room
And found a dead man,
Spoke with him
And came away with his secrets.

Many of us who find ourselves in Peace Corps, come because of a certain incoherent skepticism we have of the United States. What we find abroad is something that is even more difficult to articulate to anyone outside of our experiences. It is a longing and love for a perceived essence of our home country while still maintaining an assortment of criticism for how that essence plays out in reality. It is a complicated and complete contradiction.

My personal inconsistency, in this sense, has been weighing on me the last few months, with little resolve. Until this morning and with the unlikely help of a guest DJ on a weekly radio show that I like to listen to. I can't say that Dan Deacon has cleared everything up for me... but his opening words to his newest record are certainly heading in the right direction.

Rodeo Days

Reading: Latin American Folktales by John Bierhorst

Opening procession

Here’s a Latin American riddle for you:

Monte blanco,
Flores negras,
Un arado,
Y cinco yeguas.

White mountains,
Black flowers,
One plow,
Five horses.

Paccha and the Canton of Atahualpa have spent the last three weeks celebrating their founding with a series of fiestas. The drawn out affair started out with a pregón dedicating the new coliseum to the canton (equivalent to a county) that involved dancing until all hours of the morning to a Maná cover band. This precursor gave way to a series of fiestas throughout the canton cumulating last weekend in Paccha with several more dances, including the beloved and gratuitous street dance. Let it be noted that Atahualpa is the only place in this country that I have encountered where it seems that Club beer is preferred to the national staple of Pilsner. Pacchenses like to keep it classy with personal 12ozers, a novel practice in this country.

Writer's Block

Reading: Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall

Life above the clouds

The last week and a half have been nothing but one epic blockade for my being capable of  writing anything remotely coherent. This applies to blog post, personal statements, album reviews, emails, etc. So instead I give you websites you should read (and that are some what relevant):

1. Hilary loves Peace Corps. If Madam Secretary giving some love to PCVs doesn't warm your heart, you just might not have a heart to warm.

   I’m very proud of our Peace Corps Volunteers because they are standing up for the idea that every young woman can make a difference in her own life and in her community. And it is a great pleasure for me always, as I travel around the world, to meet Peace Corps Volunteers, who represent the great values and ideals of our nation.
   - Secretary of State Hilary Clinton during her visit to a Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World) in Malawi run by Peace Corps Volunteers. 
   

The First Attempt

Reading: Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

A beautiful day in Paccha

Paccha has a new pastime. That is to say a few paragliding aficionados have discovered the beautiful hills of Atahualpa and its great wind currents. Being that they are some pretty hip, young Ecuadorians, naturally I befriended them. After some genuine coaxing, they had me convinced that I absolutely had to go paragliding with them.

So after a late night of celebrating the founding of Ayapamba, I found myself hiking up the very large hill overlooking Paccha with a pack full of harnesses. After taking a moment to enjoy the spectacular view, the guys went to work setting up the paragliders. They had spent the previous day flying and repeatedly assured me that they knew what they were doing (the one I would be flying with is an instructor after all) and after my first flight I would be hooked.

What they didn’t tell me is that paragliding involves literally running and diving off the side of a mountain while strapped into a very cumbersome harness and attached to another person. Consequently, my first two attempts were in vain. The idea of running off the side of a mountain and the idea that it would lead to me flying several thousand feet above the Andes is a rather difficult thing to wrap your head around. I quickly found out it is also not very successful if you even think about hesitating.