April 2-7, 2007 This week we had two new volunteers show up, Christine from California and Roxanne from Scotland. We said goodbye to our Canadian friends from the Children of Ecuador foundation. We celebrated Semana Santa (Holy Week), a national holiday, and we got a bit closer with the Bellavista community by celebrating the opening of their lookout tourist attraction. On Monday I went out […]
March 12-March 30, 2007 Greetings from Bahia de Caraquez. It’s been awhile since there’s been an update and a lot has happened. March was our one month of real rain this year, and even so it was still pretty sparse. We finished the planting we will be doing this season, all in all about eight hundred trees. That’s a lot of trees that are going […]
Bahia de Caraquez, Ecuador After many delays due to rain and unavailability of people or horses, Clay and I finally made a second trip to the village of Pajonal for the purpose of riding over the most promising road site to the Planet Drum land. We began to encounter the usual obstacles immediately. At the outset there was only one horse and one burro for […]
Bahia de Caraquez, Ecuador Whenever I return to Ecuador the first real taste of the country is the Guayaquil bus terminal (terminal terrestre). Serving the biggest city in the country, it feels like the commercial district of a uniquely busy small town of its own because there are thousands of people and hundreds of seemingly permanent features such as import and export delivery businesses, vendors, […]
February 17-23, 2007 Now that all of our planned new sites for the year have been planted and the rains have been keeping up a semi-regular basis, we’ve been able to devote most of our energy to the Eco-week and local community activities. Unfortunately we had to make it through this time with only one volunteer; it would have been nice to have some more […]
February 10-16, 2007 Although the rains have ceased since the initial few days of rain we received, only teasing us with an occasional sprinkle, we continued to plant our sites. At a certain point you have to plant no matter what. Once it gets too late in the season it’s not worth planting anyways since the trees don’t have enough time in the ground before […]
February 5-9, 2007 We began the week with a downpour on Sunday night and what was likely to be the commencement of the raining season! The “festival of nature” as it was described to me by an eco-amigo. Since we needed to wait for a few of days of hard rain to begin planting—the earth needs to soften up a bit before we can transplant […]
Date Activity Place Participants 01/12/07 Fixing up the park in the Fanca Neighborhood Entrance to Fanca Friends of the Eco-city, Sucre Municipality 01/16/07 Painting, watering, planting Entrance to Fanca Friends of the Eco-city, Sucre Municipality, local students 01/19/07 Collecting Mangrove seeds Beach in San Vicente Friends of the Eco-city, local students and volunteers 01/23-26/07 Painting a mural Fanca Friends of the Eco-city, Sucre Municipality, local […]
January 29-February 2, 2007 Did I say that we were waiting for rain? In fact it is the rain that is waiting for us. We prepare our seedlings, tend to the greenhouse, turn compost, and water trees, and yet somehow we are not ready because the drought continues. What we are lacking in preparation is a mystery to me, but we are not waiting. In other […]
Ramon’s Weekly Bioregional Education Report January 24th, 2007 We met in the Manuel Nevares park and sat under a tree. We began to have dialogue about everything we’ve learned in this class and the importance of being able to create a bioregion education class. I told the students they need to take advantage of all the information I have taught them. I also explained that […]