Projects
April 23-27, 2007 After a slight lull in our community work, this week saw a strong resurgence. Through further developing relations with La Universidad Católica de Bahia I was able to connect two groups which now have a great opportunity to benefit from each other. The Maria Auxialadora neighborhood, where an eco-tourism development plan exists for the Bosque en Medio de las Ruinas (an inner-city […]
April 16-20, 2007 The rains continue and so does the reforestation work. We are underway with loading up the greenhouse with trees for next year and this will occupy much time in the coming weeks and months. The slower growing trees are being planted early so they will have the most time to grow before being transplanted in the sites. Faster growing trees will be […]
April 9-13, 2007 This week we focused efforts on reforestation projects and the greenhouse. We’ve planted most of the trees from the greenhouse for this year and are beginning to think about growing trees for next year’s sites. With an initial goal of 2,500 trees for the coming year, we need to begin growing now (and collecting a lot of bottles to grow them in). […]
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 […]