I´m just sowing seeds, hombre

Well it´s a scorcher here in Yantzaza, ladies and gentlemen. Forty-five degrees celcius, that´s like 130 in Farenheight? Syke...it´s just hot. This is the Ecuador I was imagining! Not the sleeping in a sleeping bag with 5 blankets sort of thing...goes to show how variant the country is.

Anyway, yesterday I was in Guaysimi working in the fields! I know, I know...Corrie? Manual labor? But it happened. I am learning how to adapt, people. (It is Chris´s site, however I didn´t get to see him.) Friday night, Polivio and Monica told me we were going to do a family minga which is like an activity (usually involved cleaning or labor...). We arrived late at Monica´s grandmother´s house...very campo. They had turkeys running around, chickens laying eggs in make shift coops, the works. Very hard to sleep due to the massive amount of animal noise, but it´s something I guess you get used to.

It was pretty incredible to meet her grandparents, though. Her grandmother is 79-years-old and has uterine cancer. She´s had it for the past eight years, and you would never have thought this woman had cancer. She has more pep and spirit than any old person I´ve ever met...it was incredible! Monica said the doctors didn´t give her any medicine because it was in its terminal stages, but clearly that hasn´t affected her at all. Her grandfather is in great shape, too. Slow, but he gets the job done.

At 6 am, we all got up. Literally, 15 minutes after waking up I helped Monica kill a chicken for breakfast. Good morning, gringa! She took the chicken and stood on its wings and feet and held the neck back. I held the ¨blood bowl¨ while she sliced the throat and pretty much let it bleed out while snapping its neck. Really disgusting...and you all know how I am with blood. The best part was as she sliced it, the blood splattered all over my arm. Gross. Needless to say, breakfast was not nearly as appetizing as I had wanted it to be, as I had seen it killed, plucked and disembowled a mere 2 hours prior (we had soup, by the way).

Then we went with various cousins and uncles to their piece of land to plant corn. They follow a lunar calendar for crops, so yesterday was the day to do it. There were about nine of us and we all stood in a row and took palos or long sticks and drove it into the ground. Then, we took two to three seeds of hybrid corn and planted them. It was actually pretty hard because the field they were planting on was basically chopped down forest. So there was a ton of bamboo and branches and weeds you had to step over. Really difficult. The hardest part for me was staying in a straight line. They kept yelling at me to move over; either I was too close on the sides or not making the distances between seeds large enough. I´m just sowing seeds, hombre.

Went back for lunch...bull soup...and then I took a delicious nap. For dinner we had cuy, straight from the kitchen. The grandma has about 30 cuy just running around her kitchen and I had a ball watching Valeria, the devil child, try and catch them.

Great day though. Met a lot of family and they asked me a lot of questions...very curious about my motives for coming down here. But it´s good I am making friends. Just today I went running and someone came up and shook my hand because I am the gringa he sees running around all the time... At times like these I am really glad I am white and blonde...

The grandma in the kitchen with the cuys. They think it´s so funny that we have cuys as pets in the US...and the grandma couldn´t understand why we don´t eat them...Oh, and that´s bull meat hanging above the stove.

Me with the boys...there are 3 generations of Guayas standing here. Pretty amazing to see. We´re taking a break from sowing seeds for 2 hours. It was hot...but really rewarding.