Catching up a little

Cotopaxi, taken from the bus window coming back from Baños

My amazing Quito host family, Pepe, Ligia and Doris

I´m in Cuenca now and its amazing, I love it. It´s an awesome colonial city and the countryside around is it is sooooo beautiful. I´ve been visiting different villages for the past three days with a couple guys from an organization that coordinates a network of the region´s micro-credit institutions.

Tuesday was my favorite - we went to a tiny village called Guel and the actual cooperativa was not that wonderful since the woman wasn´t that cooperative, but in the afternoon I went on a walk by myself while they worked, and it was one of my favorite times in Ecuador. I started walking down the dirt road and fell in step with these two indigenous women weaving Panama hats (they are actually Ecuador hats, Panama was just a distribution center) and a little boy with a few sheep, so I walked with them for an half hour. They were so nice and cute. The older lady asked if I would take her to the US so I told her I would take her in my purse, so in case you´re wondering when I get home who that elderly indigenous lady in my bag is, remember this. And it was just perfect weather, perfect light, and the road goes along about halfway up a big hill and then there´s a valley and a mountain on the other side. There are tons of little farm plots right up the mountains at crazy angles. Later I met another lady making a hat and a woman herding some cows thought I was scared of them (they had horns so I was a little) told me they wouldn´t hurt me and laughed at me. The soil there was red, like Prince Edward Island.

Yesterday I went to a tiny town called Jadan and did pretty much the same thing. I interview the director in the morning and walk around in the afternoon while the guys I´m with finish working. Jadan was really cool. A lot of the houses are still made of adobe dirt blocks and there were tons of animals tied up everywhere. I walked some of the not-road paths that they use to walk between each others farms and got very muddy. They were renovating their church.

Today I went to an indigenous village in Cañar and they have a really cool cooperativa so I might go live there next week if I can. They were white hats with puff balls on them and the women wear the skirts. It´s a higher altitude than the other places and has lots of fields and pastures.

One of the ladies I met in Guel, about to weave a hat

Good Friday Procession