Legos

I don´t have time to write a lot of updates to the blog, so I am pasting some stuff I wrote to family in emails (sorry family, I´m needing some new material here)

Wednesday: We just finished one of our last lectures as a group of peace corps habitat volunteer trainees (still not officially volunteers until the 20th!) The session was super interesting. We had a guest speaker who was an American anthropologist, Dr. Anthony Stocks, who has worked with Indigenous communities in Latin America for the last 35 years. It was fascinating hearing about his experience and successes (!) working with indigenous communities on conservation projects in Peru, Guatemala (with the Q`eqchi) and Nicaragua (with the Miskito). He had lots of great maps and data on forest protection in indigenous vs. mestizo communities that spanned decades in some cases. Fascinating stuff. He was a professor at Idaho State, and also consulted a lot for The Nature Conservancy and Cultural Survival on some of their projects in Central America. Incidentally, he just bought ¨some sand¨ in Ecuador´s Esmeraldas province and will be retiring here. He knows a little bit about the Waorani (also spelled with an H in English, in case you are curious) plus has contacts and he may be consulting on a USAID-funded project with the Waorani...so I think he will be a great resource for me and Jer both.

We have just over a week left of training. We are having a big party for all of our host families on Saturday. It is funny, because there is an election on Sunday and Ecuador has a ´dry law´ that dictates that you cannot drink for two days before the election. They´ll throw you in the klink if you are caught drinking or even trying to buy alcohol!!! Ecuadorians think the U.S. is crazy for not banning drinking before elections (which is not necessarily a bad idea, as there were clearly a lot of drunk people that voted during the last election). Ecuador also prohibits gatherings of more than 10 people or something before the election. We had to get special permission to have the host family appreciation party from local political officials I guess. I think it will be dry, too, but we still needed some special permission to have a gathering right before the election. On Sunday we are in ´lock down´ meaning we cannot leave our communities for any reason, as per the embassy. I´m not sure if any information on the upcoming election has made its way up north or not, but Ecuadorians will be voting to approve changes to their constitution and how members of their congress are elected. It is aimed at curbing the rampant corruption, but it is unclear if the reforms prescribed will actually do that. It is pretty confusing, actually, and I haven´t been able to get a clear answer as to what it would or would not do. There have been numerous public demonstrations around the country in support of it, and I´m guessing it will pass. In any case, please share any information you hear about it from the U.S. press. I´m super curious to hear what their spin is.

Today: I asked my parents to send me some old legos that I know are stored in a labeled box in our attic, so we could give them to our host brother, age 8, who plays with a small set of legos almost every day. Anyway, he was really, really sick yesterday, so we gave him the Studer family hand-me-down legos and a note to tell him we hope he feels better. He LOVED them! and they definitely cheered him up. I told them that I played with them with my brothers when I was little (and so they are sort of old...he thought Jeremy was 51). He said that he is going to keep them and when he has kids some day, he will give the legos to them. I thought that was sooo cute! He and our other host brother (Andrès, 15) played with them all night last night. They made a bunch of cool little cars and a boat. Gottta love the legos!