Kitchen chores

The night previous we met Don Segundo, his wife, daughters, sons, the whole family and sat around the dinner table shyly eating mote and rice for dinner. His older son, Fabian, is a park guard in Sangay and we worked with him the night Alejandro came up weeks past to ID amphibians. He was nice enough to clear a space for us outside his room. He is only about 18 and recently married to a shy Canari girl who barely looks beyond 16 herself. You grow up quickly here. Our private space on the floor meant little to all the curious younger boys running around the house. Our sleeping bags and packs are fair game for small fingers and prying eyes. Eventually, like most children, the boys lost interest and I fell asleep to the sound of thumping Kumbia reverberating from the hillsides. The new luxaries of electricity here....

In the morning after chores the boys ran down the hillside for school lessons, while the women took care of the household and looked after the animals. I took this picture of one of the boys as he helped catch a chicken and his sister slit its throat, drained the blood, plucked it, and cleaned it right there in the kitchen in a matter of minutes. It was quite incredible and gives new meaning to fast food, and fresh food for that matter too. I reckon its meant for tonight to go with a heaping plate of mote corn boiling on the fire nearby.

Seth joined Don Segundo to help deforest a plot nearby to make a shephards hut by the pasture. It seems so innocent but this is exactly how the forest is lost, piece by piece. It gave us all a new outlook on the reality of deforestation and the conservation problems we study here. While he did this I went to check on the students in the valley below, chatting with Don Jose on the way down and running into Hannah and Sarah learning to gather the cattle and hoeing in the chakra fields.

It was such a beautiful day I wandered in the fields and layed in the grass watching a pair of kestrels hunt together along the fields while I prepared my last lectures. If I were to be reincarnated I would want it to be as a kestrel. They are beutiful and elegent little raptors, living all along the edge of the forests and farmland just where I want to be. They mate for life and are always paired but free together like I´d want to be. Most of all they are so free, always soaring high above the world in comraderie with the breeze.

Humble but proud. They inspire me.