Chickens, dogs and babies. And some water project.

Settled in more now in the village, and got down to a few different things last week. Less of the fiestas (probably a good thing) but have now had a very sad tummy for 9 days and counting. Am now not eating fish, chicken, meat or pretty much anything that isn´t boiled and a safe shade of white...

Anyway, more interesting.. Found the small town Palora early last week. This involves crossing the Pastaza river in a cable car - very exciting when you realise that what you believed to be a nice safe way of crossing heights is now a small precarious hanging basked on what can only be described as a very high and speedy zipline. With maybe 12 Ecadarians hanging on for dear life, accompnied by the obligatory chickens, dogs and numerous babies.

Speaking of babies - a nice thing. One of my friends, Alyssa (aged 15...very young), had a baby a month ago which they hadn´t named yet, and they have decided to call it Hayley! Which makes me happy. Though I think its mainly becuse they couldn´t think of anything else, but its nice that there will be a little Hayley in the Amazon. Full name - Hayley Lilbet Tapia Evatatuca (though I having a feeling that the spelling of Hayley will end up changing by the time the paperworks done).

The chicken at the front door has now been removed (after it lost a leg because I kept walking into it, it was decided to be a bit old. Its now hanging on the wall instead). Ate ants last week, you fry them and eat them a bit like an afterdinner snack. Like peanuts, except you crunch the bones -do ants have bones? or shell - savour the insides and then spit out the rest. They were nice but I couldn´t get over that they were ants. Also had quite a lot of fresh fish (but not any more) - the men like to get up at 5 or 6 and go fishing, and then come back with them for breakfast. Mmmmmm. Also been visiting the rivers lots of swimming and washing (usually with many small dogs and children but no chickens). Yesterday went for a walk in the "tropical parque" - a big ecoloigical project near where I live with one on the boys from the village. He worked as a guide in the jungle for 10 years so knew an enormous amount about all the plants and animals etc. He found some stuff for my (hundreds of) mozzie bites and we visited a sacred waterfall where he has felt lots of good spirits.

Have been working lots also! We spent time cleaning out the filter in the water sysetm - I found out that currently the system was bypassing both the filter and chlorinator, so any water that does make it to houses was basically river water probably plus some rust. One problem is that the filter seems to get dirty enough to clog pretty much every 2 weeks, so am looking into some pre-filtro type mechanisms and ideas to help out there, and hopefully tomorrow we will get the chorinator going again. Also been running lots of tests of the water and then talking to people about the results - trying to raise awareness etc (ie bacteria = not very good, lots of bacteria = very not very good, boiling = very good indeed). Tomorrow should be coming back to Puyo to get health videos for the community to run a video evening on water awareness and stuff (it hopefully will be more popular than it sounds like it should be - not a lot else goes on in the evenings). Will also be holding some more meetings with the water board committee, and planning to get the community together for a day of work where everyone pitches in ("minga") to work on the distribution lines to the houses.

Ok could go on and on, but out of time and written too much anyway. Maybe update a little tomorrow. Or next week. xxx