Asi Es La Vida...

Family Fun!

An update is way overdue (when is it not?), so after laboring all day, getting myself dusty and sweaty, and then walking the 30 minutes uphill back to my house, I am sitting down to let you all “in” on what´s been happening.

First, it has been a month since Mom, Dad, and Katie (little sis) were here for their two week visit! Neglectfully, I haven´t written anything about their amazing time here. For 10 days in January, I was able to introduce ¾ of my nuclear family to all of the strange things that have become customary to me, present them to my friends, show them the Andes Mountains, and try to poison them with local food.

The highlight for them (at least this is what they told me) and for me was to finally have them here in Santa Ana. Everyone wanted to meet them, chat with them (which meant a lot of smiles and nodded heads and confusion on both sides), and give them food – they really wanted to feed them, to the point that we had to eat 2 dinners one night because it was our last night and one family would NOT be denied! I was really impressed with Mom and Dad, and especially Katie´s adaptability to all of the situations that arose in their 4 days here in “my neck of the woods”!

We also had a chance to go spend some time in the jungle seeing all sorts of orchids, butterflies, hummingbirds and a few waterfalls. We even zoomed for a few hundred yards over a canopy-covered valley in a little cable-suspended “car” (I think Dad opened his eyes for a moment or two as we crossed – he loves heights). Afterwards, we downhill-biked down the largest active volcano in the world; starting somewhere around 15,000ft and rolling down to about 7-8,000, it was an adventure! Then, we finished out our time together crossing back and forth between the north and south hemisphere and learning why Ecuador deserves the title The Middle of the World.

It really was an awesome time, and I am so glad that they made all of the sacrifices they did in order to be able to come down!

Well… to bring everyone up to date to now:

The bees are going just fine. The production has been much lower than expected, but the Professionals say that this year has been a super bad honey year. Additionally, the goals that I have for the 3 Beekeepers´ Associations have more to do with learning, organization, initiative, and independence than they do with production. So I am content.

My main new project has been building and starting a tree nursery from scratch. It is just myself and a friend of mine doing this, so I have been involved in every aspect of everything. This was exactly the idea. I am learning a ton about how to produce trees (and why everything is done the way that it is). The work has been super physical and I have been falling into bed asleep for the past couple of weeks – partly because I came down with the flu last weekend and am only feeling 100% again since Thursday.

Oh yeah, I was the coach of the high school basketball team for about a month (it´s entire history), and they won all three games they played and finished the CHAMPIONS of the tournament in which they competed… fun stuff!

posted by Steve @ 12:37 PM