Catching up - some photos

After a prolonged silence, some photos. In a slightly jumbled order...

Chimborazo
Mark at Chimborazo a few weekends ago. Chimborazo is behind him in the fog. We did a hard cold wet cycle from 4000m up to 4900m to the refuge. (Although I did more walking and complaining than cycling...)

Illegal logging and trip to Esmeraldas

I went with Luis to check out the location for a new development worker in Esmeraldas in the north west of Ecuador. I wanted to do some interviews with communites affected by illegal logging, but people were too scared to be seen talking to a strange foreigner and preferred to come to our office in Quito to talk. Took some photos of logging activites though...

Esmeraldas - the city:

Unplanned invasion housing:

Borbon:

San Lorenzo:

African palm plantations:

Huge areas of forest are being cut down and replaced with monoculture palm plantations

Logging

Bananas:

Photography class

Trip out to Plaza Foch: night photography

Mindo

Amazing lush leafyness and lots of rain

Mark climbing up very steep ladder (sideways - cant seem to turn it over)

Peru Development workers meeting on the beach

Last week was the DW meeting on a beautiful beach Punto Rocas about an hour south of Lima(It's a hard life)

The house:

The beach:

The meeting:
The sunsets:

Interviewing farmers in Huaral

I went to Huaral, a bizarre lush river valley in the middle of the desert to the north of Lima. A new Progressio development worker, Bruno started work there this month with our partner organisation Cepes. He'll be doing environmental work with the small scale farmers there.

Some of the ad-hoc housing in the desert (communities established through invasion/squatting of land with no planning and no services):

A tall white gringa with some farmers: (I was interviewing them about terminator technology, GM seeds and their own seedsaving or buying habits). None of them had heard of GM technology, some thought it sounded dangerous, others thought they would like to try it...


The view from my flat in Quito

by day...

and night:


Playa Escondida

For Carnaval, we went with the South American Explorers club to a beach in the north of Ecuador near Atacames. Beautiful with lots of cycling, eating, drinking and scrabble and not nearly as much rain as there might have been.

Paracas

Last weekend I went to Pisco to go and visit the nearby Paracas National Park and the Ballestras Islands. They are wierd desert islands totally covered in birds - in colonial times one of the main sources of Peru's income because the hot dry conditions mean that the bird dropping - guano - are preserved perfectly. It was collected in huge quantities and exported as fertiliser.

(The tiny black spots on top of the hill are thousands of birds and the white is all guano. Below on the beach are loads of sealions. The mother sealions were swimming around teaching the babies to swim. )

Lots of birds. Even though it is desert and really hot there are penguins because the humbolt current makes the sea very cold.

The lumps under the arch are sealions.

The candelabra (The guide didnt really explain what this is - its huge and he said it was either linked to the Nazca lines, or made by sailors as a compass/map, or an ancient holy symbol related to the halluconogenic cacti or made by aliens.)

Pelicans on the beach in Paracas

Pisco

Being in Picso was depressing. It was very near the epicentre of the earthquake in August and, six months on, looking at parts of the town, you'd think it had happened the day before.

Heaps of people's possession and furniture.

A service in the remains of the church which collapsed in the earthquake killing 200 people.

Articles on seedsaving and agroecology

Hello
If you'd like to read about some of the work I've been doing in Ecuador, I wrote several articles in Progressio's magazine Interact on seeds, food and agroecology (pages 7-12).

Beaches and conference

Hello, taking advantage of being stuck in an airport to put up some photos from the last month or so. There isn’t going to be much commentary I'm afraid as I’m not finding thinking coherently very straightforward.

Honduras

Utila - one of the Bay Islands off coast of Honduras

The ferry on the way there

Snorkelling with Marcos, Carlos and Scarleth

Big spiders ( which you probably cant see)

La Ceiba

A real live pinapple growing ( I thought they grew on tress...). There are huge commercial plantations of them near La Ceiba where we were for a Progressio conference.

The beach at the hotel where we had the conference

Juliette and Silvina on the beach

Myriam on the beach

Most of the Ecuador partyDancing the punta

Trip to Pico Bonito foundation demonstration farm

Main Square San Pedro Sula

View from hotel room

The beach in Ecuador - Canoa

Resting after long bus trip

Cycle trip to organic farm through mud

Making chocolate

Amy running

Mompiche

Mark in little canoe

Cotopaxi

Climbing to refuge (as far as we went!)

Talking to farmers

In the last week I've been having a really interesting time interviewing farmers about seeds to collect case studies to use in Progressio's campaign against terminator technology.

Its fascinating getting to quiz people all about their daily lives, how and what they produce, how much they make, what the problems are etc. I love that kind of work. On Thursday I was sitting in the back of a pickup truck travelling back from a little community in the jungle having had a fascinating conversation with almost all the female side of a huge extended family (the men are away doing money work whilst the women farm) and grinning as the banana trees whizzed by, feeling amazed that somehow I was there in that place so far from Edinburgh, and that this was part of my job!

First I spent a couple of days in Cuenca which is high up in the Andes like Quito, but further south. I went round peoples farms and the markets in the city with Juliette, the lovely French Progressio development worker there. I was back in Quito for one day and then headed out to Tena which is low down in the Amazon and a totally different world.

In Cuenca people are growing much the same crops as you'd grow in the UK: root veg, chard, lettuces, kale, cabbages, tomatoes etc (plus some exotic fruits that you couldn't manage in Britain and guinea pigs for meat, chickens and lots of medicinal herbs). People's land looks a lot like market gardens or allotments in the UK- small plots with a real mix of produce. The people work hard all day everyday in the fields.

Agroecological producers at market in Cuenca


In Tena, people's farms looked to me like jungle. It wasn't till they pointed individual crops out to me that I could see yucca, cocoa, coffee, plantain, bananas etc. and various medicinal and sacred plants. There, it is hot and steamy and the people were very laid back. They told me that they basically work when they have to and in groups- when something really needs doing they set a day and everyone puts in a concerted effort for a morning or a day.




Nelson Ramon Mamallacta Alvarado at his farm near Tena

They welcomed me into their houses and cooked for me and were the ideal anthropological subjects/interviewees, being willing to talk about every detail of their lives in huge detail.(In Cuenca in contrast we stood outside or under people's porches in the rain, but were never invited in and people answered my questions politely and willingly in a few sentences then stopped to see what else I wanted to know).

The famous stereotype of closed mountain people versus open gregarious jungle/coast people seemed to hold very true. Amazing what the climate does to people- arriving in Tena at 10pm it was hot- I was sweating sitting still in a t-shirt and looking out the bus windows it was a real culture shock to me to see people out in the streets eating and laughing and joking, women in hotpants and strappy tops, men in shorts, some without t-shirts, everyone with bare feet or flip flops. Lots of bare skin and lots of lounging around in the open, laughing.

The other huge contrast with Quito was hearing the constant noise of insects and birds- the air always seems to be humming with life. Waking up to a cacophony of bird racket made me realise how fews birds you hear in Quito (and being eaten alive by insects made me love how few bugs there are in Quito).

Now I'm back in Quito, in the office its strange writing the interviews up- the realities of people's worlds here are so far away from London and the UK government and the EU and the people who might hopefully read the little stories I am writing and think briefly about the impact GM seeds might have on these people's lives. Most of them had no idea what 'genetically modified seeds' were let alone terminator technology.

The decisions of some international meeting on biodiversity about whether to permit the commercialisation of terminator seeds seems on the one hand utterly irrelevant to producers who are thinking at the level of growing enough to eat and maybe a little more to sell to be able to buy other bits and pieces...But then on the other hand, the possible impacts are chillingly relevant and its scary to think how little decisionmaking power or influence these farmers have over the big decisions whose impacts will eventually reach them.



If you're interested you can see some video clips of interviews