Just Beginning

Hola a todos-
As (many of) you know, I'm leaving for Ecuador this coming Sunday for a sustainable agriculture internship with three professors from the AgEcon department at VT. There are seven of us in the group, all upperclassmen with a common interest in sustainable agriculture and a (soon to be improved) knowledge of Spanish. We'll be traveling and working for six weeks in Ecuador, beginning with two weeks in the capital city of Quito and the rest of the time based out of a small city in the central part of the country called Guaranda. This is my first shot at a blog, but my plan is to make it a place to share stories and pictures and give you a taste of what I'm experiencing as I go along.

#1 on the map marks Quito, and #3 is the city of Guaranda

Last fall when I found out I had been selected to be on the team, I remember some of my first thoughts being warm, tropical, west coast, rain. It turns out that it won't be very warm (average temp in Quito for May: 19C, 67F), it won't be wet, as we are there during the dry season, and while parts of the country are tropical, the majority of our time will be spent in elevations 9,000 ft +. Not so tropical. The thing that surprised me most was that I'm not even leaving the Eastern time zone- go figure. It'll be just a skip and a jump from Richmond down to Miami and then to Quito.

During our first two weeks we'll be in Spanish lessons for five hours each day, with two classes of dance lessons to be included (???) We'll see how that goes. We'll also be meeting with several people that have been working on the larger conservation agriculture project in Quito (INIAP) as well as visiting experimental stations in the area before leaving Quito. Included in the plan is finalizing our survey questions and spreadsheets for questioning the farmers-we've been meeting every other week this spring semester to research and create survey questions to gather the information we need, but test-driving those questions will be necessary.   Once we arrive in Guaranda, we'll spend a trial day ensuring we are asking the right kinds of things in the right kinds of ways, and then off we'll go, heading to the upper and lower regions of Chimbo river watershed, interviewing farmers about every aspect of production, mainly for papas (potatoes) but for other crops as well. 

Excited? Supremely. Nervous? Definitely. Ready to have a new adventure in a foreign country? Yes, please.