Yesterday I learned something invaluable for life in New York City. When you want to calm down a six-hundred pound pig so that you can give it a shot, rub its belly. At first it won’t let you do that from close quarters, so use a broom from a few feet away. Once it starts to get wobbly legs, go in and start rubbing its belly with your hand until it finally collapses in a state of bliss. Looks like this:
It’s great to see how engaged the students are in learning about how to care for animals. After all, several of the kids will eventually work in agriculture (and some will work in tourism, many want to go onto university, and so on).
The school at Yachana really has an interesting educational balance. Every morning during a three-week “jornada” period from 7am-11am the kids split up into groups and work, on a rotating schedule, in projects involving animal husbandry (working with the pigs, chickens, fish, and such), microbusiness (making handicrafts, working with small student-run businesses that the school sponsors – more on that later), recycling, maintenance and agriculture (this last one sometimes involving many machetes, as we’ll see below). Then they have lunch, an hour off, and then four hours of more classical classes, such as biology, chemistry, math, business, history, culture, English, Spanish, technology, tourism, agriculture, and more. Then there’s an hour off, dinner, and then two hours of studying before lights out. Long day! But that’s not all..
This goes on for 21 days straight, and then they get a week off. When they return they do a three-week “pasantia”, which is an internship of sorts. This pasantia can be work in the lodge itself, at the biological field station for research, management roles in the school, or even roles in the Yachana office in Quito. This rotation continues throughout the school year, with some kids doing the jornada and others doing the pasantia during each three-week period, from early September through late July. By the time the year is over, they’ll have had a very useful mix of practical and in-class experience that will help them get jobs or go to university. One primary goal of the school is to have the kids return eventually to their communities and help lift them into a better economic, health and educational situation by serving as leaders. It’s important to note that the educational system in Ecuador is very weak (average schooling is just 6.7 years), and the indigenous population is the least served by it. Here, 90% of the students are indigenous and a very large percentage of them aim to go onto university! Impressive is an understatement.
Back to machetes, which I love to talk about.. this morning we prepared a field for growing beans and cucumbers. The role of some kids was to create stakes to stick in the ground at the end of each row. So the kids gathered pieces of bamboo (or at least that’s what it looked like) and started hacking away to sharpen the points. This looks easier than it really is. Christian is in this picture, competently creating stakes with just two or so swings. Below that, I’m clumsily hacking away, turning some bamboo sticks into useless stumps (I eventually got the hang of it).
My machete instructors
I love this one in particular. Can you picture a high school couple in the U.S. listening to a professor’s lecture while holding machetes? Or a couple of girlfriends taking a well-deserved break under the tree after clearing some wild growth from a field?
One detail that’s very much a part of daily life here is the presence or, more often the absence, of electricity. The school runs on a combination of solar and hydroelectric power (because when it’s not sunny, it’s raining, but we still need electricity when it rains!). Little problem these days though is that the inverter that turns the DC current into AC is broken. Unfortunately out here, it’s not possible to have someone come over within a day or two to come and fix the problem. For us, it’s a week’s wait. In the meantime, we’re using a rough patchwork of car batteries to provide electricity at very select hours of the day. This means that kids are studying often by lamplight or candlelight, and I am often frustrated that I can’t work on my computer as much as I’d like! That’s all ok though – this is teaching me a bit about how things run in the jungle. Especially after having lived in New York for the past two years and having had a very hectic (but fun!) life at Stern, this is teaching me to be more patient and make do with what’s available. It’s also valuable for me to know how things run in rural areas from a business standpoint. As someone who has lived in or near cities his whole life, it’s important for me to gain an appreciation for the daily challenges, values, and consumption habits (among other things) of the rural population. This knowledge can drastically affect business strategy, as I’m finding out as I progress with the solar panel project. I’ll write more on that in my next posting.
One last thing though that I’ll touch upon today is the forced bedtime we have here. It’s not so much forced per se, but you don’t really have a choice. When the electricity is cut at 9pm sharp, you simply can’t continue using your computer or reading by lamplight because bugs will immediately swarm around you. And that’s bad news for a laptop, since bugs will want to burrow into the keyboard and other parts of the unit and start laying eggs. So every night at 9pm when the lights go out, I take my flashlight and go wash up and go to bed. I honestly can’t remember the last time I was in this kind of a situation, but I suppose as we wake up at about 5:30am every morning, an early bedtime isn’t such a bad thing.
The other night though, a couple of other volunteers and I had some fun taking pictures in the dark… Have to amuse ourselves somehow!
(and by the way, I promise to keep future postings shorter than this one!)
walking my pig
