Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Breakfast was yummy empanadas with preserves, so good. Then we went to another lodge in the canoe, the Arajuno Jungle Lodge. It was even better than the other one. It’s completely self-sufficient and sustainable, and the owner, Tom, came to Ecuador from Nebraska when he was in the Peace Corps. They had an awesome swing where could go out over the river.

We took the canoes to Santa Barbara, a little community with a school. We “taught the kids math” for an hour, but the kids hardly knew their numbers for the most part. They just knew what sounds came after each other, at least until five. My girl was Diana, and she told me she was three but she definitely was at least five. Some of the other girls said they were three when they weren’t, too, we aren’t sure why. After “teaching,” we painted the daycare with the help of some of the kids. Some kids were swinging from a vine hanging from a huge sable tree. We took a walk around their chacra, their indigenous-style farm where everything grows together, it was really interesting. I tried a cocoa bean.

Canoe trip back to the lodge. We swam in the river, it was the perfect temperature, really nice. There are those fish that swim up you if you pee and you need a big operation to get it out. I built a sandcastle with a couple other people. By the way, the lodge was a pet monkey called Mona.

At dinnertime, the owner put on a Pink Floyd concert DVD and lit a lot of candles on the porch/dining room. There were hammocks, too, and these awesome swinging chairs. For dinner we had quinoa soup, salad with good kind of blue cheesy dressing, pasta with creamy kind of basily sauce, and really really good muffins with passion fruit sauce. Later we put five headlamps on one of the girls and tried to take pictures of her swinging in the dark. We played cuarenta, and later a couple of us stayed up and talked to the cook from Uruguay. I slept in a top bunk like at Wooster!