Seeds and Rory Update

This week was also fairly uneventful for my starts and Rory. Rory is spending mor and more time with the other horses, which is so good for his spirit. He went out to pasture with them every night this week, and he even ate with them a few times. I sprayed him with the anti-tick concoction again this week, and i think they may finally all be dead. He is definitely looking better than he was before, and he is now quite noticeably healthier looking than the other horses.

On that topic, I got a little more information from Kevin this week that clarifies some of my conjectures in last week’s post, “Hardships on the Farm.” Kevin talked to Oscar, the primary caretaker of the horses, who explained that now that we are into the dry season, there is not enough grass in the pastures to support all of the horses. The farm grows pastures full of a very tall and fibrous type of grass called pasto, which they cut down and use to feed the horses. Under normal circumstances, we would put the grass through a machine that shreds the leaf and stalk together into a very digestible kind of coleslaw for the horses and cows to eat everyday. However, this machine has not been working the entire time I have been at the farm. We still feed the pasto to the horses, chopped roughly with a machete, but the horses chew the leaf off the stalk and leave the corral littered with the evidence of their malnutrition. They need the calories from the stalk to stay healthy, but it is too tough for them to chew. Ideally, the horses would be receiving 75% of their calories and nutrition from grasses (pasture & pasto) and 25% from the mixed grains we feed them when we have it. The lack of both of these things has left the horses looking frail enough that visitors have asked me why they are so thin.

On a more positive note, the starts from my first round of seeds got planted in the huerta this week! I felt like a proud mother watching my little cauliflower and nabo cabbage children graduate from preschool. We planted them in freshly hoed beds, tucked them in with humus from the guinea pigs, and protected them from ants with repurposed water bottles. Soon they will be producing food for future volunteers!

Cultural Afternoon: Palma rings

This Wednesday we headed to the workshop to make rings out of nuts from a certain type of palm tree. There are two different types of nuts we use, one resulting in caramel colored rings and the other in a very rich, dark brown.

We used the saw to cut a ring from the middle of the nut, and then popped the actual nut out of the middle of the shell.

We used the sanding machine to smooth the edges and buff off some of the fibrous material covering the outside of the shell. We used an attachment of the machine to sand out the middle of the rings to size them.

We then affixed the rings to the straight attachment and used sandpaper to smooth the outside surface of the ring.

Finally, we used a buffer to polish the rings until they were extremely shiny. I made three rings in the time we were there, and I’d like to make a few more this week.

WEEK 4

This week was pretty slow compared to other weeks. I was feeling very low energy, even with a good amount of sleep each night. Luckily, I was assigned to work in the garden almost every morning and afternoon, which was pretty light work save for the occasional hoeing of beds to be planted. My fatigue has me wondering about the nutritional value of the food at the farm. I am not the only one suffering from this unshakable tiredness–Catherine and our newest intern, Amelia, have both also felt unusually out of breath walking uphill and dizzy upon standing. We wonder if maybe we have not been getting enough protein. Meals here are very carbohydrate heavy, often containing rice, plantains, and potatoes or yucca in one meal. Sometimes there is not a protein at every meal, or not much of it. In an effort to change my personal situation, I am bringing peanut butter back to the farm to supplement my protein intake. Hopefully this week I will wake up feeling refreshed and ready to work.

On a very sad note, three of the chanchitos in the litter with five left were found dead Tuesday morning. The other two were alive and eating when I left for the weekend, but I doubt they will make it into adulthood. It’s so hard to see them go–that makes six dead since I arrived at the farm one month ago.

Hardships on the Farm

Hardships on the Farm

After three weeks of observing and talking to the other volunteers, I finally feel equipped to share some of the inefficiencies, issues, and downright mismanagements I have observed at Rio Muchacho.

The first problem I have observed is that there are often not enough supplies around the farm. This most often shows up as a shortage of food for the animals, but we have also seen a lack of animal medications and even necessities such as toilet paper. It is easy to understand why this happens. The farm is 17 kilometers from the nearest city, which is the small beach town of Canoa. It takes a long time and a lot of gas to go into town and pick up supplies, and not everything can be found nearby. Dario is in charge of ordering and retrieving the supplies, and he is often overbooked and overworked between the four different businesses he runs and raising the twins. However, the supplies are essential to the success of the farm. I have seen the evidence of the problems caused by the lack of regularity of obtaining these things. The animals suffer the most; as I mentioned before, the two litters of piglets did not receive the regular immunization at eight days old, and now seven have died and the remaining six look very ill. I believe that this is due in part to the frequent shortage of food for their mothers. The pigs are fed a combination of kitchen scraps (the amount of which varies based on the number of people at the farm), pasto grass and sugar came grown at the farm, and a dry grain mixture. I would estimate that we are out of the grain mixture, which provides the bulk of their calories, at least two days per week. When we get low on food, we start skimping on how much we feed the animals to stretch it for an extra day or two.

The horses are also victims of this problem. I noticed in the past few days that Rory now looks healthier than the other six horses. His ribs and hips show less than theirs–they definitely look like they are underfed. Part of this is because the farm is understaffed. There are simply not enough hands to do all the work that needs to be done on a regular basis. The horses are often not brought in from pasture during the day because there is not enough time to go get them and/or even if they were brought in, there would be no grains to feed them. So, the horses are often ignored and left to feed themselves grasses from the field. Alternately, they are brought in but they are fed only pasto grass, which is not much different than being out to pasture.

I believe the farm is missing one very essential employee: a farm manager. I have been told that the situation at the farm was very different a few months back. Nicola went back to New Zealand to have the twins, and Dario was there with her. They were gone for a few months, during which a man named Benjamin was essentially running the farm with the help of Julia and another long term intern named Kelsey. I believe he had been at the farm for seven years, acting as a farm manager and third in command next to Dario and Nicola. He left his job after the couple returned from New Zealand in February because his daughter graduated from the Rio Muchacho school and had to go to high school in a different city. The dynamic on the farm changed rapidly at that point, as Dario and Nicola returned to their posts as owners and directors of the farm, but also had to begin managing the daily work as well as taking care of the babies. Nicola now manages the garden and Dario manages the animals, and both clearly have a plethora of other responsibilities to attend to each day. Because they attend to different parts of the farm, workers and volunteers often receive conflicting instructions and requests. Additionally, because Dario and Nicola are not out kn the field everyday, they often aren’t aware of every single thing that has occurred, and so their instructions conflict with what the local guys believe should be done. This causes a fair amount of conflict, especially with Dario in regards to the care of the animals.

Sadly, the garden doesn’t even look as good as I would like it to. The soil is in poor condition in most of the beds, almost all of which have been cultivated for at least ten years. They apply compost made from the excrement of the pigs, horses, and cows. The soil is incredibly dry, thanks to the sun that remains directly overhead all day. There is a drip irrigation system in some of the beds, but the rest are watered by hand. This isn’t done every day, but when it is, it is done midday when the water is at the greatest risk of evaporating. This is simply not an efficient use of resources. Additionally, there are plants in the food forest appear to be dying, especially coffee. The living ones are producing a great deal of fruit, but much of it appears to go wasted. I have seen cacao, lemons, limes, and mandarin oranges go wasted simply because there is not enough time to harvest regularly. Because of this, food is being wastes.

The farm is not an NGO, but it functions as one. It is always struggling to pull in enough money to support Dario and Nicola, the staff, and the professors at the school. To make money, the farm hosts tours and group visits for travelers and locals. Sometimes just one tourist will come and spend 1-3 days at the farm. In this case, Julia, the ecotourism intern, is responsible for attending to them during their stay. She gives tours and does activities with them all day, making her unavailable to do other work on the farm. Other times, huge groups stay for a few days or even a few weeks. This past week, we had three groups here at the same time, which brought the total number of people on the farm up to 100. When groups come, staff and volunteers alike must dedicate their time to cooking, cleaning, giving tours, leading groups, etc., so the normal work on the farm doesn’t get done. Dario and Nicola do not set a limit on the number of people who can be at the farm at once, so sometimes it just becomes too much for is to handle. Everyone becomes tense because we are overworked and pressed for time. By the end of the week, the volunteers were so anxious to get away from the farm and relax that we ordered a car to Canoa on Friday evening instead of the usual Saturday morning.

I do not wish to give the impression that this farm is no good or that I am not enjoying my experience here. I do, however, think it’s important to think critically about the inner workings of the organization of which I am temporarily a member. My experience here is giving me ideas about how I would and would not like to run my own farm in the future. I hope to be able to visit other farms on other continents to compare their practices and equip myself for the challenges that lie ahead for me as a potential future small scale farmer.

The Beauty of the Farm

Ecuador is an exceptionally beautiful country, and I have been lucky enough to spend my time here on a coastal organic farm where the vegetation is lush and colorful and the scenery is breathtaking. I’d like to give you a taste of the beauty of my daily surroundings.

Rory update

Rory made some real progress this week! Besides continuing to fatten up, he was able to rejoin his fellow caballos when he was went out to pasture. He wasn’t being quarantined–all we needed to get him back with the others was a logistical solution. This was found in cooperation from Oscar, the local worker who takes care of the farm’s horses. This week, I started going with Oscar to bring the horses in before breakfast, during our routines and when I would usually be getting Rory. If Oscar goes with me, then I can lead Rory into his pen and he can lead the other horses to the corral area where they are fed separately. I am so happy for Rory; he seems to be tolerating being in his pen much better since he has been able to spend more time with his friends.

Additionally, Oscar helped me make and apply a compound to kill all of Rory’s many ticks. We made the medicated liquid from water, a little bit of milk, leaves of the nin tree, and leaves from ají, which are tiny hot peppers. We put the liquid in a container that straps on like a backpack and has a hose with a spray nozzle. I held Rory still while Oscar sprayed every inch of Rory’s body, concentrating on the areas where the ticks are really populous. Afterward, Oscar warned me that the compound is very strong, so I should shower and wash my clothed so my skin does not get irritated. It really must have been strong, because the next day, nearly every tick on his body was dead! Two days after the treatment, Oscar showed me how to take Rory down to the river and bathe him. I used a bucket to wet him, then rubbed him with soap. While I was doing that, Oscar walked off and came back with a handful of leaves. He instructed me to rub Rory’s soapy body with the leaves before rinsing him off. He said that the type of leaves is important, but he did not explain why. Next week, I think I will repeat the treatment to really make sure we got all of the ticks and prevent them from reproducing as rampantly as they did last time.

Week 3 of the Seed Project

This week, I continued my daily watering of the seedlings. On Tuesday, I saw the first signs of life from the first two Asian seed varieties I planted on Friday the week before. Wednesday, as soon as I was feeling better, Nicola put me to work planting the other 16 varieties in the first round. The lot included eggplant, hot peppers, cabbage, cauliflower, any many others.

I numbered them with row markers I made of old milk cartons that were lying around the Bodega de Reciclaje at the farm. I used a knife to cut off the top and bottom of the bottle, leaving a filet of plastic from around the middle. I then used scissors to cut 3/4 inch slices and give them pointy ends. We used a paint marker to write a number on each that corresponds to a detailed list Nicola’s friend gave her with the seeds. It was a great way to re-purpose something that was not being used, and to create a useful tool for the farm that will last forever.

On Friday, before I left for Canoa, I noticed that the second of the first two varieties had begun to raise its minuscule leaves above the soil’s surface. I’m hoping the same will be true for many others when I return to the farm on Sunday evening.

People of the Farm

I have met an incredible number and variety of people over the last three weeks. They have really helped define my experience here, so I would like to give you a glimpse into the world of characters in which I have been functioning.

Dario and Nicola are the couple who owns and runs the farm. Dario is Ecuadorian, originally from Quito, and is 60 years old. Nicola is originally from New Zealand, but she has been going back and forth between there and Ecuador for the past 25-ish years. She is 49. The two met around 1990 and have been together, un-married ever since. They just had twins, Rafael and Florence, seven months ago. They live together as a family in the main house of the farm, which is also the location of the kitchen and community space, my shared bedroom and other bedrooms, and the office. Nicola runs the garden and Dario deals with the animals and the tourism side of the farm. They have many businesses together. The farm, which includes the actual farming and ecotourism; the school down the street, which they started for the community and continue to oversee; and Ecopapel, which is a paper recycling company that makes handmade papers, which was started by Nicola and employs about ten people full time. They are totally busy are overworked, especially since the arrival of the twins, who are currently teething and chronically unhappy.

Julia is the ecotourism intern who has been here for ten months. She is from Germany, and is taking a gap year between high school and college. She works in the Canoa office once per week, and she schedules and oversees all tourists and groups that come through the farm. She also doubles as nanny and does many other small tasks around the house–she is on call at all times, and is usually exhausted. She plans to study sports management when she returns to Germany in September.

Kevin smiling pretty

Kevin is the volunteer coordinator intern who is on his fourth of seven months here. He is from Philadelphia and is in his mid-thirties. He quit his full time volunteer coordinator job to come here and take a vacation, gain experience, and learn the language. He is an accomplished yogi, and I have enjoyed practicing with him in the Sai Baba Garden.

There are a handful of individuals from the community who work at the farm full time. First is Norita, who is a light in a sometimes tense house. She is the head cook, and she must be in her seventies. She is so sweet and cute. She really takes care of everyone on the farm. Her eight-year-old great-granddaughter, Cristel, lives with her and calls her Mami.

Dexi is Norita’s sous chef. she doesn’t work every single day, but she is here most of the time. She provides a foil to Norita’s cherry demeanor. She can be a bit snippy, but is quite funny if you can break through to her good side.

There are five guys who make everything on the farm happen. Leo is Norita’s grandson, and I honestly don’t know him very well because we never work together. Roberto is a man of few and mumbled words who works in the garden. Sergio lives across the street and is the in-house carpenter and fix it man. He has worked for the farm since the beginning. Danilo and Oscar are the two guys I spend the most time with and therefore know the best. Danilo is 24 and has three kids. He works with the animals and in the garden. He desperately wants to learn English because it would make his job so much easier. He attends colegio (essentially high school) in another town in the weekends. He is a huge joker, and I can actually understand his jokes because he speaks slowly and clearly enough for the volunteers to understand. Oscar is 28 and has no kids, and he has worked here for 11 years. He deals with the horses and works in the garden. He helps me with Rory, and he has taught me many Spanish words recently through our conversations while we take the horses to pasture.

Melina is the oldest daughter of Sergio. She is eighteen and she has a two-year-old child. She lives across the street with her family, but she spends all day at the main house of the farm taking care of the twins. Her little daughter, Jeni, gets left with Sergio’s wife as Melina helps raise Nicola’s children. She is very talented at painting designs on toe an fingernails.

Moving on to the volunteers who have really made my experience wonderful thus far…

Tamara was my first friend on the farm. She is 23 years old and from Toronto, but her family migrated from Georgia/Russia when she was twelve. Her first language is Russian. She studied Environmental Science at the University of Guelph and worked at her university’s Office of Sustainability. She then worked for a year as her school’s recycling coordinator. She came to Ecuador this summer for a vacation before she heads off to Newfoundland to start her masters in the recycling of electronics around the world. She was in Ecuador for a total of two months. She started at a farm in the mountains near Otavalo, but after some management problems started she decided to move. She came to Rio Muchacho two weeks before I did, and stayed for two more weeks after I arrived. We became fast friends as we weeded beds of beets my first morning and discovered that we have an incredible number of things in common. Our personalities and dispositions are very similar, we have similar health challenges, and we both use yoga as a way to deal with the world. She is blunt and funny and very self-aware, and we had so much fun together talking and laughing and sharing stories and histories. It was so hard to say goodbye last Sunday, but we made an agreement to visit each other this coming year with Catherine.

Catherine was the third girl in our trio. She arrived the day after I did, and we soon found that our personalities worked perfectly together with Tamara’s. Catherine is 24 years old and from Montreal. Her first language is French. She did International Studies for her undergrad and is going into her second year of a Social Work masters degree. She came to Ecuador and Rio Muchacho to regroup after a difficult year and to improve her Spanish. She will be on the farm for approximately six weeks total, after which she will travel around Ecuador for a bit longer. She has done an incredible amount of traveling over the past ten years. She has been to Cuba, Burkina Faso in Africa, 13 countries in Asia over nine months last year, and now Ecuador. Catherine came across as shy when I first met her, but her true sense of humor and witty, intelligent banter came through quickly. When Tamara left, Catherine moved her belongings to the bed next to mine. Now we are able to lay in bed and talk or sit on our beds and practice our instruments–guitar for her and mandolin for me–both of which have happened a lot this past week. She will be here for at least as long as I will, so I will have one good friend for the rest of my stay on the farm, and into the future.

Amy at the lunch table

Amy and Yvan (pronounced Ivan) are a married couple who have been together for 17 years. They arrived at the farm three days after me, and they stayed until Thursday of this week. They are on a ten-week trip through Ecuador, Peru, and Lima. Their next stop is Lima to visit a close friend and her family. Amy and Yvan were only here for two weeks, but their presence made a huge impact on both the farm and the school. They are both teachers. Amy teaches Spanish and Yvan is a history teacher who is currently working as a sub. Amy is fluent in Spanish, and she is also a creative writer of both novels and plays. She has the air of an actress and the heart of a mother, though she is not one. Yvan is sweet to the core, and is incredibly humble, kind, and generous. They had just completed their TEFL training this spring, and they came prepared to jump right in at the Escuela Ambientalista Río Muchacho. They spent most of their time there, teaching English and creative thinking through songs, games, and activities. They were adored by students and teachers alike, and Amy ended up putting on a workshop for eighteen teachers from nearby schools to teach them how to teach their students how to be creative thinkers in the classroom. In Ecuador, math is emphasized over most other subjects, so this is a fairly radical concept for them to grasp. It was sad to say goodbye, but I now have a standing invitation to visit them in Seattle.

We have seen many other people pass through…there was a Swiss family who stayed here for three days. They were at the tail end of a five month trip around Ecuador with their eight and eleven-year-old girl and boy, respectively. They were an interesting bunch and I enjoyed hearing about their experiences in a Quechua community in the rainforest and at the Galapagos. We had a woman named Mia who is from Finland but living in Australia. We have seen a group of 50 college students from Quito, another of 10 students from all over the world, and a third of 15 highschoolers from the States, all at the same time. We also received two volunteers at the beginning of this week: Karen from New Zealand and Maren from Germany. I was in bed for the first two days of the week and have just started getting to know them, so I’ll report back in a week or two about my new roommates.

That’s everyone for now, but I’m sure there will be more people to come.

WEEK 3

This week was different than the first two weeks I spent at the farm. First of all, I got a stomach bug while we were in Canoa over the weekend, and I spent all of Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday in bed. At that time we had a group of ten college students from a group called International Student Volunteers living and working with us. On Wednesday, we spent all day preparing for the arrival of a group of 50 college students from Quito who camped next to the river for two nights. On Thursday morning, fifteen more students arrived, this time high schoolers from the US. We had to feed all these people three meals a day and do their dishes and lead groups and keep everything organized, all while trying to maintain some semblance of a normal routine on the farm. I did not have a normal routine this week, but instead made sure I took really good care of Rory. We also left Friday night for Canoa instead of Saturday morning. None of the volunteers could wait to get out of there after feeling like we had been on call all week. In short, the week was difficult but it made the weekend seem so much sweeter.

The Truth About Chanchos

This week I was so lucky to be put on chanchos (pigs) for my morning routine. It was bound to happen at some point. There are only five routines–casa, cuyes, pollos, caballos, y chanchos–and I’m here for five weeks total.

So, Catherine and I went to work shoveling their poop and taking it to the huge compost pile, throwing down sawdust in their pens, and feeding them a dry grain mixture to which we add water. The actual work is not difficult if you’re okay with climbing over fences and using a shovel. The difficulty comes from the nature of pigs. I have had my eyes opened. When I was young I loved pigs. I had stuffed animal pigs and piggy banks on my bookshelf for several years. I even slept with a stuffed animal of Piglet from Winnie the Pooh until I lost it in China at fourteen. Had I known then what I know now about pigs, I think I would have chosen a different animal to favor. They are awful. Really, really awful. The expressions “eating like a pig” and calling men “pigs” for sleeping around or being animalistic in some way are totally accurate. There is no endearing oinking here. The pigs make three noises: grunting, barking, and screaming. All the pigs ever want to do is eat. Every time you get near them, they stand up and lean agains the fences of their pens and bark at you for food. Screaming, the worst of the three, is reserved for those special times when I go to feed Rory his grains and the two largest, most despicable of the pigs stick their snouts through the slats of the fence and scream at the top of their lungs in hope of a taste.

While the large pigs are clearly hard to take, the piglets are adorable. There are chanchitos of various ages, two litters with their mothers and one slightly older bunch without. The older group has one adopted member, Boris the wild boar (my nickname for him). He is the same size as the domesticated piglets, but has longer hair, an anteater-like snout, and loves to be petted. I don’t actually know his story, but one day he will have to be returned to the wild. In the meantime, I certainly enjoy having him around.

The two litters of piglets are incredibly cute, but not actually doing very well. The one litter had four piglets when I arrived, and I have seen three become extremely frail, start to shake, stop walking, and die in the past few weeks. Now there is only one piglet left, and he is fat and healthy looking. There are five piglets in the other litter, but none of them appear to be doing well. They are thin and weak-looking, and I noticed the other day that one was walking around on a broken foot turned the wrong way. Another one has a large cyst on his belly that the local workers Oscar and Danilo claim contains an embryo.

There are several hypotheses as to why these litters are having such trouble. The first is that the mothers are simply too old. They have been at the farm since it was started in 1991, making them at least as old as me. It is possible that they just aren’t able to produce enough milk to feed their babies sufficiently. The second is that the mother pigs are not receiving enough food to create enough milk to fee their babies. There are days that we have none of the grain mix to feed them because we ran out and more was not brought to the farm on time. On these days we scramble to cut enough sugar cane and pasto grass to fill them up, but it’s not quite the same. The third is that the piglets are sick because they did not receive an immunization that they should have received at eight days old. I do not know why this didn’t happen, but it could be contributing to the widespread illness among them.

Whatever the reason, the fact is that the piglets are sick and starving to death, and I don’t see anyone doing anything about it. We are basically just watching them die off one by one, and it disgusts me. I hope to have my own farm someday, and if these were my pigs, I would be nursing them with a bottle and feeding the mothers an extra healthy diet in an attempt to help them. In addition, I would not just leave my pigs in twelve foot by twelve foot pens 24 hours per day. They need room to roam and forage and do their pig thing! The only purpose o the pigs in this farm is to process the food for compost, which would be harder if they were out to pasture, but the way they are treated here borders on cruelty in my mind.

Side note: the farm used to have about thirty chickens, but a few days before I arrived they mysteriously disappeared overnight. However, one chicken remained, either unseen by the thieves or too slow to escape with its comrades. The lone chicken was moved from the coop to the area where the pigs stay. It made itself at home and ended up moving in with one of the pigs. Now it stays there all the time, and the two of them are pals. They sleep right next to each other, which is adorable.

So, there is the good and the bad about the chanchos. I’m sure glad I don’t have to be on that routine for the rest of my time here, but I have learned a lot about what it takes to care for animals and keep them healthy.