I moved here around the 13th of January and spent 4 weeks working there before returning back to Quito where I am now. Our placement was split up as 4 weeks and then 6 weeks with this week long break of classes in the middle. It's nice to have a break when almost halfway through my work experience. At this point I am only 2 months away from leaving Ecuador and venturing back to Canada. It's bittersweet and almost surreal.
One of my first tasks at the organization was to assist in the fields one Monday. We stocked the truck with sacks of wheat, oats and barley and drove up to a very large field. The men and women tied blankets around their bodies and held the ends to create a space in the middle to hold the grains. They then walked up and down the field tossing the grains in front of them as they walked. It looked like tough work as they each held a swelling amount of grain in their blankets that pulled on their backs. The land had an incline which I determined to be the main reason the work was as tiring as it was. My job was to walk around the field with the sacks of grain to fill up the worker's blankets when they got low. I learned to throw a bag of grain over my shoulder and lug it around. I was exhausted! I soon learned it wasn't efficient for me to follow the workers around as I was tiring myself out too quickly so I stood in the middle of the field and filled up the blankets as the workers passed me. This saved me a lot of energy! After we finished this field, we had lunch where I realized I was getting a bad headache from the strong sun and became very tired. After lunch however, there were still 2 more relatively large fields to plant. Just like the other workers who were likely just as tired, I had to push through it and finish out the days work. The week before I had helped working on a Minga. These are traditional farming systems in small areas where a group of people help someone work their land for no exchange of money but rather receive help on their land by the rest of the group when needed. It is an exchange of labor for labor rather than labor for money. I hoed the land and planted potatoes and then pushed the soil back over every potato. All work with the organization is manual. The organization owns a tractor which is used to till the larger plots of land and they just bought two small soil tillers to turn the soil on smaller plots to save time, hard labor and make the work more efficient.
I also work in their grain mill where we work through a series of processes to make products such as Arroz de Cebada (barley rice), harina de trigo (Wheat flour) and their local indigenous product called Uchu Jacu (a flour type product often used in soups). This flour is made from 6 grains and is extremely nutritious so it is highly valued in the town as people can eat that in their soup and receive many nutrients they need. We dump sacks of oats, barley, wheat, corn, haves (a type of bean high in calcium), and another type of bean as well as garlic into a large wooden barrel after they have all been put through the roasting furnace. We mix the ingredients and then take buckets full and dump that in the first grinder which breaks the mix down to a rough powder. The mix then goes through a second grinder to smooth it out and gets put back into the sacks. We then take these sacks and scoop some into a sifter and sift all the four to separate any bits of grain or sticks that didn't get ground or shouldn't be in the flour. After this we add cumin and mix the flour. I then scoop 100 grams into specially designed bags for sale and weigh it and then seal it using a hot plastic press to ensure the bags are closed and ready to be sold. I have also spent time picking through sacks of roasted barley to remove sticks, burnt pieces and anything that doesn't belong. Work in the mill can be tedious but it is work I never envisioned being involved in with my placements and it is some of my favorite work because it is all so new to me.
Our placements are based upon a research question which we use to discover and understand our organization and its relationship to the development of the community. My research question is "In what ways is agro ecological production contributing o food sovereignty?" I chose this question and my placement in general for a few reasons but mostly because of where I come from. In Canada and in my town, agriculture is extremely important in supplying food locally, in the cites, in the province, the country and even internationally. In the capitalist system in which we live, to be a farmer can be far less rewarding than we may like to believe. Farming is important to internal incomes to supply locally for the people but often is also important for export economies like in Ecuador where a great deal of production is concentrated in Cocao, Coffee, and Bananas for global export. However, across the world many people who rely on farming do so but only far for subsistence meaning they produce just enough to feed themselves and not enough to sell. Others produce entirely for sale but cannot feed their families because of the low return value as the government sweeps most of the export income into their own hands. Farming is one of the hardest jobs yet one of the least rewarding and is the thing which keeps us alive. Issues such as hunger, famine, and food security (which should be defined as all being different concepts) are all issues relating to the struggles and inequalities embedded within food. Food is unequally distributed globally and often the people who produce the food cannot feed themselves. For these reasons food sovereignty and now agro ecological production are important to me and something I think deserve and need to be understood better.
I am feeling more comfortable and welcomed in my community. I live with another host family of a mom, dad, ad 12 year-old girl. The father, Pablo, is one of the founders of UNOPAC and answers many of my questions regarding my 'research'. Upon arriving in Ayora I met an older Italian woman named Daniella. She welcomed me immediately and cooked me a welcome dinner that night. She has lived in Ecuador for a long time and is doing 3 years of research in the town regarding family dynamics and the roles of women. I considered her my closest fried, although we are many years apart, but to have connections and friendships in the community is comforting. The first while was overwhelming as the people were new, as was the work, and the community. I am feeling more settled now.
Overall, my placement is going well and I am trying o make the most of each experience I have. I must remember to keep myself open-minded, to observe, and take away as much as I can from everything I do, hear and see. I wish, however, that there was something I could give in return as my labor is little more than a extra set of hands which work slowly in comparison to theirs. I have learned so much and believe I will continue to as the things I do here will likely be unmatched by the things I learn elsewhere in my life. I hope that maybe some time, even many years off, that what I learnt can come back around and help the people of Ayora in some way, and if not them, than someone somewhere in the world can be a little happier or better off because of all that I took from this community. I hope what I take can someday be balanced by what I can give in return.
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