Trip to Carabuela

The biggest thing that happened last week was my trip to Carabuela. Its a small village outside of Otovalo. Otovalo is a cultural center in Ecuador and famous for its market. Carabuela’s primary source of income is making items to sell in the Otovalo market.

The reason we went to Carabuela is its water. The people of Carabuela came to HCJB’s water projects about 3 years ago and we have slowly been working on developing a plan of attack for this communities problems. I don’t exactly know why its taken so long, but I know that there is a long waiting list for this departments services, and this particular community doesn’t fit the type of projects they like to accept. I don’t exactly know the criteria, but I think its based on need and highest priority. This community has a lot more financial resource (comparatively) because of its close ties with Otovalo, and has large amount of water infrastructure already built. The problem is that it is terribly inefficient (common of government work), and costs the community a LARGE amount of money to run. Our department has committed to devising a plan for them and they are responsible for taking it to the local municipalities for implementation.

Beto is a pastor and graduate student working on his engineering degree. He is doing a version of his own of this project for his thesis. My job was to help him understand the survey equipment and assist in teaching everyone the new data collector. There ended up being more people than jobs in this particular situation so me and phil shared the duties of teaching and running the instrument. It gave me a good excuse to talk to some of the people of the village.

Over all the trip was fantastic. I got to eat some more Cui (I checked the spelling of this and this is the official way to spell it), take some pictures, talk to the people of the village, and sleep on a woven mat! This is probably one of the most beautiful valleys I’ve seen.

On the weekend I landed myself on the mountainside of Cotopaxi. The Harrison family invited a couple of us on a trip to Cotopaxi, an active volcano a few hours south east of Quito. I asked if had erupted recently and got the answer “not in 500 hundred years” but upon further research its been VERY active in the past 300 years. Just not in the recent past. “There have been more than 50 eruptions of Cotopaxi since 1738. Numerous valleys formed by powerful lahars (mudflows) surround the volcano. This poses a high risk to the local population, their settlements and fields. The city Latacunga has been completely destroyed at least twice in its history. Cotopaxi’s most violent eruptions in historical times occurred in the years 1744, 1768, and 1877. In the 1877 eruption pyroclastic flows descended all sides of the mountain, with lahars traveling more than 100 km into the Pacific Ocean and western Amazon basin. There was a major eruption in 1903 through 1904, and some minor activity in 1942.”

I have some good shots of us hiking up it. Hopefully I’ll get those uploaded soon.

So Phil brought along his GPS device and made some cool images from it. Hope you like them (I’m thinking my father will enjoy them quite a bit). Read my flickr for more information (click the image).

Oh yeah! I almost forgot… the weekend before last I went to Mindo, which is much lower than Quito and in the cloud forrest. Erin (holwerda) might remember her tube trip, and waterfall jumping experience when she came to Ecuador. Well, my experience of Mindo was wonderful. I went on these ginormous ziplines and had a blast. One of them was about 400 meters long and I took it going stomach down which was an incredible experience. We then went to a hike to see some waterfalls which you can see my whole experience via flickr. Anyhow… please keep praying. Me and Sarah need some prayer seeing as this distance thing can be rather stressful. Thanks… love you all.

Will

P.S. Mr. Van’t Land… the people in the office do remember your daughter. Bruce and Roberto send their greetings. The work she did is still functioning strong, and they were very happy with it…

This entry was posted on February 12, 2007 at 7:34 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.