A little over 8 Judy picked D. and me up from the place where I’m staying. She is going to a community with two American women and asked us to come with her the night before. Before taking off, she shows a tree which is just across the road, called guava (pakay in kichwa). It’s a leguminous tree, which fixes nitrogen. It comes up like weed and it grows really fast, but that makes the tree very suitable for firewood. And because the fruit is partly edible, people spit the seeds on the ground, making the tree come up everywhere. This is good for the soil nutrients, though.
The group left without taking a guy with them, so they had to go back to the hotel. He didn’t show up however, so we went to buy some rubber boots for everyone. Judy asked us: “neither of you has rubber boots? You really need them at the farm.” But she doesn’t have any, she just does it all barefoot, like the inhabitants.
On the way back we pass by the hotel again, but the guy is still not there, so we go. D. and me in the back of the pickup-truck, enjoying the scenery and the wind in our hair. After a pretty new road, we take a gravel road (which is less comfortable in the back), and then we arrive at the outskirts of the community. While walking to the river, Judy amazes me with the knowledge she has on the local flora. A little boy brings us across the river with a canoe. He pushes the canoe hard with a stick, making it rock pretty much, and while making motor noises. We cross one by one. Probably because the canoe is a bit leaky and fills up with water slowly.
We are right on time at the community ‘house’, but the community is a little later. Judy says this could be because the group yesterday was late. While the women prepare a meal for us, one of the children wants to show us the school, so we go with him. Meanwhile, he borrowed the camera from one of the American women and keeps making pictures, some of them very good.
The first thing we get to eat is fruit. Three plates with banana, papaya and pineapple are presented, and everything is so fresh, it all tastes better than I’ve ever tasted. You can buy bananas in the city, but here they are picked ripe and they are so much tastier. After that follow a number of other dishes, among which frogs’ legs, fish and gusano’s (caterpillars) for the non-vegetarians. The things I did eat were wild potatoes (papa china), palm heart (palmito), a cacao relative (cacao blanco), yuca and frutipan (paparawa, a nut that resembles chestnut by taste). And I repent that I didn’t take any pictures of all this.
After dinner, D and I played with the kids. Some of them really loved being swung around, but then we had to play some soccer. It was the middle of the day and the sun was out, so it was pretty hard playing. We won though. But after that we had to play another game with everyone. I played with my rubber boots on at first, but tried it with bare feet this time. That didn’t stop us from winning again, even though Judy was playing pretty fanatically.
After the games, Judy and the other two women left us. We were divided over two families and went for a swim in the river. The water was perfect. The kids brought each of us to our respective guest houses. Mine was a 5 minute walk along the river, although the river used to run a little further away. There was a flood this year.
My family is not very talkative, just one of the sons asks a lot, and jokes a lot. That we’re going to harvest a quintal of coffee each the next morning for example. The coffee is still quit green. But they serve me a nice dinner with rice and an egg and I watch the woman of the house prepare chicha, the local ‘beer’. Though they don’t let it ferment it so much and she doesn’t chew on the yuca first either. This makes it more like a kombucha brew. It tastes nice, though, a bit like milk. And they show me the cute little house monkey ‘chichi’. When it gets dark we stay up for a little while longer, but before 9pm we went to bed.
It was a difficult sleep, the bed was pretty hard, but mostly it was because we went to bed so early and there was a rooster crowing all night. I did my best though and I slept until the sun had risen and the others were all up already.
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