A weekend in the mountains...

(for some reason this didn´t get published on friday when i wrote it.......)

It's been another wonderful week of work, but I just can't help but relive my incredible experience in the mountains last weekend. Four of us (Santi, Scott, Patrick and I) headed up to the village of Pilko outside of Mocha, about 3 hours south of Quito to visit Aracelly's family in the Sierra. Ara is the wonderful bouncy little Equadorian we work with who works with community relations and basically is our ecuadorian 13th volunteer.



I will try to sumarize... We take a bus at 11 pm on friday night five hours north where we get off in the middle of nowhere and hike 45 min in the pitch black up a mountain (mind you the altitude change is quite noticable and we are sucking air like nobody's business) until we get to a small stone house in the middle of an open field at five in the morning. Here we would spend the next two days experiencing real life in the Sierra. This meant waking up at 6:30 to go up to the hills and move and milk the cows, (I don't want to brag, but apparantly I am quite gifted in this arena, and have been promised a daily duty should i return - and i drank about half a pitcher of fresh milk and felt sick for the next couple hours, but earned my stay), letting out the pigs and sheep, walking through fields of onions and potatoes, killing and skinning Cuy (guinea pig - a delicacy in ecuador, and one of the most scarring experiences of my life, given that the only pet I ever had was a guinea pig named Slick), wearing ponchos and wool scarves all weekend but still being completely freezing and soaking wet becuase of the dew and long grass and mud, cooking and warming ourselves over an open fire with two pieces of rebar over it where they cooked all their meals, and cramming 5 people into 2 single beds. It all reminded me of the farm I worked at in Germany and I loved it. That and Assisi, as the hillside looked just like looking down over the farmland below assisi, but adding a much brighter green color and closer horizon with mountains on all sides. Sunday we hiked up to this huge stone cross on top of the hill, a few thousand kilometers elevation, which was originally this old wooden cross that Pope John Paul II had carried up at the beginning of his papacy - talk about a pilgimage! it was amazing. you could barely see anything from the top because of all the cloud cover, and to be honest I didn't think i'd even make it to the top with the hour and a half hike i was panting entirely throughout, literally having to stop after every three steps to catch my breath. Mt. Rainier, here I come!



The entire weekend was just another world... So peaceful, such welcoming and hospitable family, and more natural beauty than I could have ever tried to fit into such a short amount of time. I think I may need to go spend a week or two there after my year ends, becuase I just can't get it out of my mind.



On a different note though, I recognize that while I would love to spend months of my life in those mountains, for the people that I met there that is the only reality they know and will ever know. Their understanding of the world outside of their village is more or less just a marketplace - the only part pertinant to their daily survival. They wake up and do the same incredible labor every day, and know no difference. It's a matter of survival, of comfort, and of education. It's a lifestyle that is simultaneously both incredibly natural and beautiful and peaceful while also being naive and trapped in a sense.....i don't really know how to explain it....but to say that part of me will be calling me back to try to figure it out this entire year.