Tuesday, April 08, 2008





posted by Steve @ 8:22 AM 4 comments

April

I tried to put up a few pictures for the few of you who check up on me now and again. I have had little success with pictures, but every now and again I get motivated to try.

These pictures show a bit of what I have been up to regarding work. Organizing, training, and working alongside my friends and neighbors. I have focused on beekeeping for about the past year; forming, training, and strengthening three community beekeepers associations. In the past 6 months I have been actively helping a foundation-supported tree nursery get started. It has been a challenge to help 90 families scattered across a few different communities get organized and stay motivated; however, things are still going forward and I am just now starting to see a few positive results.









In other news, I am very close to finishing a whopping 650pg book on church history – sobering stuff. It is amazing that I have never heard most of this stuff before. I am also enjoying hanging out with my adopted Ecuadorian parents/grandparents (they call me their son and I call them “Grandpa” and “Grandma”). My self-declared caretakers are already mourning my imminent departure, which is planned for August of this year.

A funny story – the other weekend, along with some other American friends, I accompanied a large group of Ecuadorian women to plant trees about 13,000ft up on a local mountain. After the long climb up, we started to dig the holes in order to plant the trees. All of a sudden one of my (American) friends excitedly turned to me and said, “Look, a gringo!” I stared for a few moments at the older white man who had not come up the mountain with us but who was evidently hiking up the mountain to the peak. All of a sudden, we realized what we were doing… we broke down laughing at our typical Ecuadorian reaction to foreigners, realizing that only hours before the majority of the women with whom we had come had reacted to us in the same way that we had so quickly taken notice of the elderly hiker.

posted by Steve @ 8:16 AM 8 comments