The joys of food

I am finding writing a blog a bit of an odd thing- producing a rambling monologue with no clear audience...but anyway, I'm going to carry on regardless.

I have now finished my orientation program and on Monday I start 'proper work'. The orientation has been amazing – lots of really interesting meetings and a huge quantity of information to absorb. I feel like I now need another two weeks with absolutely no new input in order to take everything in.

The orientation included a trip to Cuenca, Ecuador's third largest city, which is in the Andes like Quito but in the south of the country. As soon as I arrived there I went to the birthday party of one of the Progressio development workers who live in the city and met the development workers and a group of other foreigners. It was nice to feel part of a little community of similar folk and they were wonderfully welcoming despite the fact that after a long hard day of Spanish my overstretched brain had given up and the best communication I could manage was mute grins and nods.

After meeting them informally on Tuesday night I had a marathon of non stop meetings with each of them in their workplaces and learnt lots more about the work of Progressio's partner organisations there. It was useful to learn about some of the differences in context between Quito and Cuenca e.g. the challenges of HIV AIDS work in a place where everyone knows everyone compared to in the capital. I also learnt that it is now winter in Cuenca and cold and rainy and that it would have been good to take a coat.

Today I've spent getting lost in lots of parts of Quito buying bits and pieces to make my new room more homely and on a long quest for a fruit and veg market. When I was in Cusco the market was the centre of life – for lunch, juice, mountains of fresh fruit and veg and friendly faces. Here it seems things have moved much more towards our supermarket monopoly lifestyle: everyone who can afford to goes to Supermaxi and markets aren't so easy to find in the city centre.

I met with someone from CEA this week, a network of agroecology organisations which works to support small scale sustainable production. He told the familiar story of farmers being squeezed by the big supermarket monopolies and pressurised into intensive production of large quantities of a limited variety of vegetables, resulting in loss of crop diversity, contamination, dependency on bought seeds etc etc. It was really interesting too to hear to their objections to organic certification schemes which are seen by many small producers here as another form of northern tyranny and control where head offices in the US/Europe set the criteria, charge unmanageably high fees for registration and place very stringent demands on producers. They feel the criteria have a lot more to do with the interests of the consumer than the interests of the communities and environments the crops are grown in and are seeking to set up local certification with a greater emphasis on social and environmental criteria.

So, I finally found the market in the end and got slightly carried away with happily purchasing serious quantities of unfamiliar tropical fruits from the colourful mountains on display. I also stumbled across a fairtrade/wholefood shop with lots of grains, nuts and pulses and soy products (very exciting for a veggie in this meat-orientated culture). Having staggered home with far too much food, I will now have to hurry up and make lots of fruit and tofu-loving friends to eat it all...