the shrimp farm and some soul searching...they´re connected.

well, having just finished 10 days on a shrimp farm i think i can say with some confidence that i will not be a shrimp farmer. these things have to be figured out at some point right? better now that later i guess.
all in all, my experience on the camoronera was one of the hardest mental things i have ever done. physically it was completely manageable however the remoteness (two and a half hours by small boat from a small pueblo two hours from the next major city. remote), my differentness (only female on a farm of 30 men and just being white) and the difficulty of communication made it a struggle to say the least.
first of all it has to be said that the people were nothing but very friendly and nice. don´t get me wrong. however, it isn´t exactly their fault that they work for two week stretches a long way from their families and that my arrival was probably the most exciting thing that had happened in months. thus, it was only natural that they pay me a lot of attention. however, on my side of things it becomes quite difficult to be the constantly at the recieving end of unending stares and just generally the attention.
also, because of the nature of the farm, there was really only stuff for me to do when someone went with me or i went with me. there was not really any plain physical labour that they could put me to work on and so while i had three hours of feeding or so to do every morning with a guy named pancho, after that i had little to do unless something else came up and that they deemed suitable for me in my unfortunate state of being female (and thus unable to lift, get dirty etc. in their eyes).
thus, i spent a lot of time writing in my journal and reading (although the only book i had with me was a book in spanish written by a mother who´s daughter is in a coma...hardly uplifting and put me deeper into the immersion situation). day three was spent devising impossible escape plans. that was definitely the low point.
however, i was lucky. organic shrimp take more or less three months to grow enought to be harvested and sold and it just so happened that this last week six pools were ready to be harvested. quite a process in itself, the entire thing is exacerbated by the fact that it must be done in the night time because the shrimp, once out of the water, must be kept on ice all the way to their destination in order to be of any value. the reason for this is just so that the ice doesn´t melt right away because of the sweltering heat during the day. we would start at seven or so pm. the gates of a pool would open and on the other side, in the mangroves, a net would be covering the opening and the water with shrimp would rush through, the shrimp are caught in the net and transferred to crates which are then dumped into big bins of ice water, removed in other crates, weighed and placed on ice and straight onto the boat to guayaquil where they are then somehow put on their way to northern europe. these particular harvests were mostly going to belgium. it was a very interesting process to witness and on the second and third nights, to participate in. however, the long nights awake were hard and it was very muddy and stressful at times.
because of harvesting, a whole bunch of jefes, or bosses, arrived as well and moved into the house where previously just carlos (i think he was kind of the everyday boss guy record keeper...tiny little guy who i actually really liked mostly because he took the time to just sit and chat about normal stuff with me) and i had been living. this was awful...all they did was sit around the house and smoke and talk about money and how much the harvests were making. and they talked to me incessantly about canada and how much money can be made there and how much money i must have and about my ¨boyfriend ¨(who naturally took on quite a life of his own...studying biology currently in canada and unable to travel but will be meeting me soon blah blah blah). anyways, by that point i was much preferring to deal with the attention of the thirty trabajadores rather than these guys in their innapropriate shoes. but it was interesting to talk to pancho about his views and the general worker views on their bosses. not that great.

so, i think it is too hard to explain here right now, but on the other hand i don´t really need to, however i have decided to return to canada at the end of april in order to work for the summer and just generally move on from this life of wandering that so many people here get lost in. hard as it was, i feel that the experience helped me to figure out some of my goals for the next little while, if not just by virtue of forcing me to sit for a long time and think about myself and my situation.
all that said there are still a good three or more months left and i have lots that i am very excited about doing. the plan so far is to spend another month or six weeks in ecuador and then go north through colombia and eventually to find my way by water to panama and then to costa rica from there, where my flight leaves from.
it has been awesome to hear from those of you who are also in far off places, namely cara and leah...it´s very interesting to compare experiences.
i hope everyone is doing really well and i would love to hear from you!

the waterfront. and the view from ¨my¨hammock.
the camaronera at sunset from the roof of the house
heading to dinner along the mud river.

some of the guys heading to dinner
the guards hanging out with their guns.
the kitchen building, dining room, storage sheds and mud path from the house where i stayed to said kitchen.
the football field where in summer apparently the competition is quite fierce. now it is a complete mud bath.

sorting and checking average size.

sorting out an assortment of shrimp to examine them for health.

the line of men handing crates of shrimp up from the nets where they were flowing out of the pool. the round like bin things are where the shrimp are dumped into ice cold water to die.
although it is hard to see, this is the water flowing out of the gate in the side of the pool into the nets where they are caught and put into crates and then passed up the line.
the hole on the pool side of the gate where the shrimp are all funneled through in very fast flowing water to the waiting nets on the other side.

some interesting things

well, now I am Guayaquil which is on the south coast of ecuador after an eight hour overnight bus ride. Tomorrow morning I leave bright and early for the shrimp farm which is on an island just off the coast of here. I am looking forward to doing something instead of sightseeing and wandering around being stared at but man it is hot and humid here. I am told that it is a lot better off the coast out of the city a bit.

Yesterday I did one of the most interesting things I have ever done. I had met an irish guy at the hostel who had told me about his visits to the jails in quito during his time in the city. He told me that I absolutely could not go to the men´s prison (not that I at all wanted to) but that I should definitely go to the women´s prison to meet and talk to some of the foreign women there who are being held on drug related charges. So after gathering my courage about me I convinced an Israeli girl to go with me and we went to the Quito women´s jail to meet a woman named Zoe Savage from Dublin Ireland. There are 600 women in this prison built for 300 and there are also 200 children of prisoners living there because they have no other place to go.

We arrived with nothing on us except a bag of food and our passports (which we very nervously had to give to the prison guards...there were other visitors passports there, I could see them, so I felt ok about it). We were very thorougly searched and then had to bang on this big metal wall to get entrance to the actual prison itself. Once inside we had to ask someone to find Zoe for us and then had to pay them for the task. It ended up she was waiting with her roommate at the dentist´s office and we sat and chatted a bit until her roommate came back out and told us that the dentist had told her it would be eight hundred dollars (they use US dollars here) to get one tooth replaced. Needless to say she doesn´t have that kind of money. It also turns out that she has some kind of bleeding in her brain and is basically dying.

The main reason I went though was because of Zoe´s apparent story. You can read a version of her story here: http://www.fairtrialsabroad.org/?m=View&action=DocumentContent&L1=5&L2=19&id=204&secId=5&PHPSESSID=b841885fe4e4255a13e0f389e51c9e8d
or here: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/8/prweb429768.htm or by typing her name into google (there are a few articles about her...she was a journalist for the bbc).

I know that there is a choice about whether to believe it or not, but I think that by meeting her I have chosen to believe in her innocence. There are 16 women foreigners in the quito jail, all there on drug charges. We met another woman from Bulgaria who was at least 45 and who didn´t speak english but Zoe told us that she had been on holiday in ecuador and had been arrested for reasons she doesn´t know. She has been in jail for three and a half years and has not yet recieved a sentence. The minimum sentence is 8 years and pretrial jail time does not go towards your sentence. Zoe´s sentence is eight years and she has already been in jail for almost four years and while she is not very hopeful any more, there is a chance that she will be out within the month on a direct pardon from the president. She has two children, age 7 and 9 I believe who she talks to everyday but who do not know she is in jail and think she has been working abroad. They have obviously never visited her there and she does not want them to.

Unlike in Canada, jail costs money in Ecuador. You must buy food and anything else that you may need but you have to rely on people from the outside to come in and bring you money and things that you can´t get inside. Drugs are very very common and the male prison is a centre for distribution of drugs and firearms. I asked her if there were any canadian women and she yes but that she wasn´t doing very well and that I shouldn´t talk to her. We also met a little girl named Naomi who was four and who was born in the prison. Her mother is from indonesia and when asked, Naomi also says she is from Indonesia although she has never been there. She has never been outside of the jail either so her official existence is generally a little bit up in the air.

When I am back in Quito I will definitely go back to see the women again. They need things like toothpaste and toilet paper and were made very happy by my chocolate orange I found in my bag fr0m home. All in all, an experience that I would recomend to anyone.

Well, it might be time to venture out into the heat again to see what I can of Guayaquil. Heard about the new snow in BC, bummer.

pics

Quito, Ecuador

Hey everyone, so the foot´s pretty much all better which i know you will all be thrilled to hear. Right now i am in Quito Ecuador. I arrived a few days ago into the scene that this city is. It´s pretty hoppin. Quite a change from guatemala that´s for sure. Yesterday I went and stood with one foot in the northern hemisphere and one in the southern. pretty coooool. but it´s also pretty hilarious because there is a big monument with an official line that was put there a long time ago and it´s a big deal buuuut it´s WRONG. haha. the actual equator is about 250 metres south (worked out using military gps). I don´t know, for being what it is (a place on the earth) it was pretty cool...they did some tests to ¨prove¨that it was acutally the equator. they took a basin of water and drained it on both sides and then in the middle and the water swirled in different directions on either side and straight down, i kid you not, on the line itself. tomorrow i am going to leave for guayaquil, a city on the coast where i will take a boat the la isla de puna to start working on a shrimp farm. i hope it will be good. i forgot my camera cable, so i can´t put up any photos, but i will. i will. peace out.