Friday, May 1, 2009

Today was my last full day here, which is pretty sad since I’ve really gotten attached to the town. I’ve only had a week and a half here, I’d have liked to have had more time. It’s a really interesting place in lots of way. They have more community organizations than most anywhere – they have a women’s cooperative with a garden and a communal bank, there’s an artesian group that sells the paja toquilla work at markets, the cooperative that I worked with that’s kind of a local banking system that specializes in small-scale loans, and there’s the local government, and I never found out much about them but there are church things and a potable water committee. Migration is a really big deal here and the town is mostly women by a lot since so many of the men have left – actually most of them went to Danbury, Connecticut, and nobody’s sure exactly why except that’s where other people from Principal went first. The Peace Corps has been here for eight years, so that’s an interesting example of how the Peace Corps works in a place like this – a good example I heard was one of the first volunteers taught them how to make apple pie since this is such a great apple growing place. They’ve been trying to promote themselves as a tourist destination, without much success so far, but they’ve been working on defining trails and adding signage and promotion with tours. A mining company has been wanting to mine here and the community’s been resisting it since a mining company has been working at a nearby town and has ruined their river, their water supply. They are very into natural farming, but it’s more because they don’t have much use for pesticides than any yuppie organic thing.

Jessie came to visit today and we went to cook lunch with a family. We were there for about four hours. The actual lunch was just potatoes and rice and lettuce with a good dessert of apples cored and filled with suger and butter and roasted, but then later I came other for dinner and the soup was ready. That was with mote, beans, and a peanut broth. The mother had just came back from the Oriente, where the jungle is, and brought back a lot of fruit, so they gave me some really good oranges.