Sunday, January 29, 2012

Eden's Rose Foundation

Last summer, 2011, Kara, Jess, and I along with a handful of good friends went to the All Good Music Festival in West Virginia. A weekend spent with amazing people, amazing music, amazing experiences also happened to include Jess stopping by a vendor's tent outside the music stage area. Drawn in by poles outlining the entrance stocked with beautiful handmade macrame jewelry, she struck up a conversation with the guy sitting inside the booth, Gregory Sheldon, from Albany, New York. Greg began explaining where the bracelets came from, who made, them, and where her money would go if she bought one. As their conversation continued, stars began to align.

Greg introduced Jess to the Eden's Rose Foundation, a non-profit started by Greg a few years ago to promote gender empowerment, improve basic health, provide clean water, and support entrepreneurship to small communities throughout Ecuador and in the Himalayas. Naming his foundation after a close friend who had passed away in the states, Greg dove head first into creating a sustainable non-profit built on the principles of trust, honesty, and responsibility. Greg does not have a master's in non-profit management. He doesn't have a bachelors. Greg didn't finish high school, let alone go to college. But when Greg sees people in need, he pours every ounce of his soul into finding a way to help. While telling Jessica all about Eden's Rose in Ecuador, Jess brought up our plans to be traveling througout South America in the coming fall. "When you're all in Ecuador, come on down to Tosagua and check out our work!" Of all our plans, or lack there of, througout our trip thus far, this was one we held true on.

After spending Christmas and New Years in dirty Quito, we spent a week at the beach only an hour and a half from where Eden's Rose in Ecuador is based out of, a small city called Tosagua. We called Greg, told him we were making our way to Tosagua and asked if it was still possible to volunteer with Eden's Rose for a week or so. He told us he wasn't quite sure what we would be doing as volunteers but we'd find something. Good enough for us! We caught a bus from Canoa to Tosagua, arrived around ten in the evening to a town that doesn't see too many gringos. People thought we were lost, or waiting for a connecting bus but not actually meaning to be in Tosagua. The town sits next to a river that floods every rainy season creating a mix of contaminated drinking water to mud filled streets filled with breeding mosquitos transfering dengue fever and malaria to a community already full of its share of problems. The surrounding area is the chicken feed capital of Ecuador, meaning they grow primarily only corn to be pulverized and fed to chickens. Sometimes working for these huge factory farms is the only work a man can find to make a small amount of money to support his family. Unfortunately that work means 365 days a year. Oh, you're sick one day, no worries, you're fired! And the work is not pretty. The reason all the drinking water is contaminated is because these farms use heavy amounts of herbicides and pesticides mixed by men with no protection, often times in their homes, contaminating the cooking area as well leading to all sorts of health problems ranging from cancer, to birth defects, to reduced immune systems leading to more deaths from dengue and malaria. Not pretty.

So Greg found this town and this community and decided to act. A close friend of Greg a couple years back in the fetal stages of the foundation was from Colombia and happened to know how to make creative and beautiful macrame bracelets out of a wax string from Brazil. They set out to train some local women in a class on how to make macrame bracelets. Each woman who makes a bracelet gets paid for said piece. Once the women graduate from the macrame class, they're available to create their own small business of training other women and children or selling their jewelry as they see fit. The jewelry from the women associated with Eden's Rose gets shipped back to the United States where Eden's Rose volunteers (read here: summer and fall job? Check) travel from music festival to music festival and follow band tours to set up these merchant tents and sell the jewelry and other products associated with the foundation. All of the money raised from selling the macrame in the states is brought back to Tosagua to build community basic needs centers. 2011's music festival season brought back around $50,000 which funded the first community basic needs center in the outlying community of San Ramone. A basic needs center serves as a place of refuge in times of heavy flooding, a safe and clean place for the women to gather and work while providing a safe place for them to supervise their youngest children, and a place where they can access clean water. On top of all of this, giving the women an opportunity to make some money to support their families empowers the women, builds confidence which has a correlated reduction in domestic violence, and allows the fathers to not have to work 365 mixing deadly chemicals in their kitchens for a penny salary.

So...that's the lay of the lay of the Eden's Rose Foundation ( http://www.edensrose.org). When we arrived in Tosagua and caught a truck taxi to the house where it's based, we found Greg, Terra, a girl from Canada working with the foundation, and the family of Cecilia. The foundation is run out of Cecilia's home. She was one of the first women to graduate from the first macrame projects. Once while Greg had been back in the states raising money and things were falling apart organization-wise in Tosagua, it was Cecilia who took the responsibility to keep things together at the community level. It was Cecilia who began teaching the other women how to make the jewelry. Cecilia is one of those women who can do everything, make it look like nothing, and then do some more. She cooks for her family, and Greg, and volunteers when they're staying in Tosagua, she teaches daily macrame classes to women and children, she breastfeeds her infant son, she watches after her young daughter and her 10 or so year old son with what I would guess is autism as well as her husband, Mario, who has a heart problem, most likely from working 365 in the chemical-laden corn fields spraying. Never complains. Never yells. This is a "woman who runs with the wolves." We would go to the market every couple days, buy a bunch of veggies and rice or quinoa and Ceci would turn it into something delicious, normally a typical soup with a dish of rice and salad and meat when there was some and a fresh juice. Always delicious, always something different. Kara and I were given a room in Ceci's mother's house who lives next door. Jess was given a bed in one of the rooms in Ceci's house. No questions asked, no money asked for, just 100% pure hospitality, a part of the fam. We would help clean dishes and clean the kitchen and little chores here and there where we saw we could lighten the load off Ceci's shoulders. We sat down to speak with Greg about possible ways we could help out. We mentioned how we had just spent a week at the beach and witnessed the artists and vendors hawking all kinds of handmade jewelry to panama hats (made in Ecuador surprisingly) to trinkets most likely made in China. We talked about the opportunity for women to sell some of the macrame here in their own country in touristy places like the beach. We volunteered to head back to Canoa (had to really twist our arms for that to happen) and spend another week selling the macrame or at least seeing if there was a market of tourists to sell it to. We scrapped together some junk wood to make tables and bracelet poles out of and hit the malecon, or boardwalk. Kara, Jess, and I often took just the bracelet poles and walked down the beach stopping at sun bathing potential clients, introducing ourselves and explaining the foundation before trying to sell anything. We would explain how everything is made by hand and all the money goes back to the community to provide clean water and basic needs to families and especially children. This, being the truth, was a great advantage over some of the traveling artists from Colombia, or Brazil who sat in the street with their table and used their money from sales to buy beer or weed or what not. I'm not saying we didn't have our share of beer throughout the week but people are more likely to buy something when they know it supports a good cause. We met some amazing people walking around as well. In one restaurant, we sat down and met a group or paragliders from Oregon rockin out some sweet winds off the cliffs south of Canoa. They got into what Eden's Rose was about and each bought a couple bracelets, one woman particularly, Jane, this 50 or 60 year old ball of energy paraglider bought two $15 dollar bracelets but gave us $40 and just said put it all to good use. So generous. Another day in the week, met Kelly, a larger than life oil rig boat capitain from the bayou of the pan handle of Florida. Kelly didn't speak a lick of Spanish but that doesn't matter when you're as friendly as Kelly and drink beer like he does. You make bi-lingual friends fast. I met Kelly on the beach when he asked if Kara or I spoke Spanish and asked us to help him rent a beach chair. Easy enough. While doing so we struck up a conversation about the foundation and the next thing you know Kelly comes by the table and drops over $120 bucks on different pieces of macrame, all of which he would soon give away as gifts to new friends throughout the night. All in all, over the course of the week at the beach, we raised around $800 dollars for the foundation, quite a success. Ceci and her sister Loly came down a couple of the days to get an idea on how we were talking to people, what we were explaining, because one of our advantages to selling much of the macrame was our ability to speak English. Many of the people that ended up buying one or two bracelets at first when we greeted in Spanish just said "No gracias" or "No thank you" but when we asked where they were from and they said Canada or the U.S. or one couple from Germany who our friend Michael explained everything in German and sold them on the foundation (Thanks Michael!) their mood towards us changed. So....what we discussed at the end of the week was creating a volunteer role for Eden's Rose where future volunteers could teach classes of English to the women who were interested in selling at the beach. How sustainable will this small part be in the long run is unknown at this point but I'm excited to see the progress Eden's Rose makes in the next couple years.

From Canoa, we headed back to Tosagua for a day to recount all the bracelets, discuss the future of sales at the beach (Carnival, which is happening as I write this blog would be a great time to go down and sell), and make plans to head back north circa Otavalo to visit some indigenous Quichua artisans making hand knit hats, sweaters, hoodies, and wood carvings which Eden's Rose also incorporates into
their music festi sales. While in Otavalo, the three of us helped Greg and Veronica, the director of Eden's Rose in Ecuador, designing a new Grateful Dead baby alpaca hoodie using the GD turtles. And since Eden's Rose has a contract with the marketing company Rhino who sells official Dead gear, no one else can make and sell these alpaca hoodies. It will be kind of cool to sell these new hoodies at festies this summer and fall and know we had a part in designing them. We met a indigenous wood carver making Grateful Dead's Blues for Allah pic hand carved into nice slabs of wood. We met this cutest Quichua grandmother knitting hats. We sat in these people's homes, drank tea with them, ate maize with them, met their families. It was a truly rewarding experience and something I will be able to relate when volunteering with E's Rose back in the states.

From Otavalo, our time with Eden's drew to a close here in Ecuador. Greg headed back to the states to hit up a gem festival in the southwest to bring back rocks and gems to be wrapped and made into bracelets to be resold in the states this summer. We would be heading into the Amazon jungle with Charlie, the ethnobotanist we met through Greg in Tosagua, to spend two weeks teaching English and living amongst an indigenous Shuar community but that's for another blog. This was all catch up on the blog scene and a weight's been lifted from my shoulders. Thank you to everyone who contributed to buying a bracelet while we were in Canoa. You've made more of a difference than you can imagine. Thank you to everyone working with Eden's Rose Foundation especially Cecilia and Greg. You opened your hearts to three traveling vagabond volunteers and changed our course for the better. Through running into Greg and Eden's Rose, we met Charlie, and through Charlie, we met the community of Nantar where we arrived as strangers and left as family. I cannot believe this is our life. This is not a vacation but life happening. Let life happen. Let life happen.

Monday, January 16, 2012

No Thank You Mr. "Real Job." We'll Take Our Chances On Our Own

"Wow?" Is that the word to explain and express such intense feelings of inspiration, awe, and love for the country of Ecuador? We are overwelmed. We are joyous. We are happy. We could be working behind a desk in a cubicle for a company whose priciples tell you to screw over your fellow human being in order that they can produce a dollar profit...but it's a "real job." It has benefits. What benefits? Health insurance? You still have to pay incredible co-pays, prescription fees for medicines whose side effects may include insomnia, depression, suicidal thoughts, skin rash. You get one week vacation a year so you can rationalize not killing yourself. But it's a "real job!" What kind of sick, dimented culture have we created. We call ourselves civilized yet we take harmful drugs, destroy our environment, distrust our neighbors, create wars over oil. It's civilized! I choose this life any day of the week. It's not even a question.
Since leaving Colombia and entering Ecuador, we've spent three weeks in an indigenous community volunteering at a local primary school run by a German foundation. We've experienced medicinal ceremonies of ayahuasca, san pedro, and peyote giving thanks to the Great Spirit and Mother Earth with Quechua shamans and a grandmother holy woman from Mexico. We've visited a biological reserve tucked away in the Andean mountain cloud forest. We spent Christmas and New Years in Ecuador's capital, Quito, where I fell violently ill, shit my pants (two years in the Peace Corps in Senegal and nothing but three months in South America and I get my Peace Corps merit badge and now my pack is a couple ounces lighter) but rang in 2012 with love pouring in and out of our hearts. We couch surfed with an amazing and inspiring Italian couple, Cecilia and Francesco, who are building a sustainable house out of cob and bamboo in Tumbaco (follow their story at www.ilalocobproject.info/posts/blog_home), outside of Quito. We spent a week at the beach (finally!) in Canoa watching the sun roll over the western horizon of the Pacific ocean, hike to secret beaches, learn to surf (or begin the process at least), pick up over 100 lbs of trash off the beach in exchange for good vibrations and free frozen cocktails and meet some amazing fellow travelers and locals alike. All of which leads us to now, present, mid January, an hour from Canoa and the beach, in a town called Tosagua volunteering for an amazing non-profit organism (it's alive and constantly growing, changing, learning, becoming better) called Eden's Rose Foundation (www.Edensrosefoundation.org) working with community women and children creating self empowerment projects of macrame jewelry (http://macramebracelets.com) and organic chocolate production (best chocolate I've ever tasted...and made by hand from Cacao bean to melted chocolate bar in my stomach) to be sold back in the states come music festival season and everywhere else Kara and I wander to. Last years money brought back from the sales in the states directly funded the construction of a community center to create space for more community projects. We have been here staying with llocal families, learning how to make macrame jewelry (something we've been striving to learn since seeing Argentinian backpackers/vagabonds selling them throughout Colombia and Ecuador. We've learned how to roast cacao beans, shell them, grind them to create pure organic unsweetened chocolate, mix and pulverize sugar into powdered sugar, mixing the cacao and sugar together, tempering it so it doesn't melt in this 100% humidity, pour it into some plastic molds, throw it in the fridge or freezer and you have delicious, hommade chocolate bars thirty minutes later. It's been great because the chocolate project is new, and the perfect formula of tempering (how long & at what temperature) hasn't been perfected for this climate (some has melted faster than others) so we've just been making alot of chocolate and eating it. If I didn't have a sweet tooth before this experience, I do now. Speaking of which, I'm going to go grab some chocolate.
(5 minutes later) O.K. so where was I, oh yeah, this organization is awesome. So Kara, Jess, and I have been discussing possible markets for this jewelry and we decided that there are alot of gringos in Canoa...and the beach is sweet...so why not live the perfect life, for a week at least, and go BACK to the beach (any complaints? Didn't think so) and see if the vacationing gringos who hang out around the gringo restaurant and bar (which will be playing the Ravens/Patriots game on Sunday) and see if they like the product, want to buy some for themselves or their kids or friend or whatnot. Best case scenario is that the bracelets sell well, the bar sees this, and they buy a bunch of the jewelry wholesale, jack-up the price for them (what gringos do best. Capitalism) and sell them inside their bar. While doing so, we'd be spreading the word about Eden's Rose Foundation, an hour and a half bus ride from Canoa, where people can come visit, see the projects and learn macrame for themselves! Canoa is going to be a pilot marketing program this week. If it goes well, then some of the women themselves can come down once a week or so (weekends when it's busy?) and sell their own product directly, from the hands that made them to the hands that wear them. We've discussed if we have a good week in Canoa, which is a small tranquillo beach town, then we'll road trip it down the coast to the really touristy, party beach town of Montanita and sell like madmen.
Kara, Jess, and I have already joined on the fundraising bandwagon when we get back to the states this summer (talk about the perfect summer job...) and travel from music festival to music festival, then follow the big fall music tours of Furthur (remaining members of the Grateful Dead) and some other big shows, setting up vendor's tents and spreading the good word of Eden's Rose while selling macrame which is exactly how we found ourselves here. Jessica met Gregory the founder of Eden's Rose last summer at the All Good Music Festival in West Virginia. His organization happened to be in Ecuador and we happened to be traveling to Ecuador. "Boom goes the dynamite." Get it? We'll also be traveling around visiting university campuses, the beaches of Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware, and of course Canada Lake.
We also met a ethnobotonist who works as a consultant with Eden's Rose who has connections to the Shuar indigenous tribes of the Amazon where we'll end up whenever we decide to leave the coast. Our plan, if it's possible that we have a plan when our plans change day to day, is to take a boat through the Amazon to cross the border into Peru at the end of February when our visa is up...or buy a canoe and paddle into Peru but you never know!

Monday, January 2, 2012

Walden

So, I have been fond of Thoreau`s writing since my senior year in high school. It was the first time I had read something in an English Lit class that struck me, hit a chord. Since then, whenever I travel for long periods of time, I always bring with me a copy of Walden, his most memorable work. While I was living in Senegal with the Peace Corps, I would often open it in my hut when I had finished all the other books I had brought from the regional house library and read a few pages or a chapter but I had yet to sit down and actually read Walden cover to cover. When we were packing for our South American adventure, I of course threw in my pack once again a small copy of Walden & Civil Disobedience and recently had the patience and time to sit, read, and let it sink in and oh has it. I have a tendency while reading to use a pen to mark passages or quotations that I find stirring to the soul and Thoreau is a pro at putting those types of passages down on paper. I wanted to take a few minutes to share some of the remarkable series of words puzzled together to form something, well, transcendental.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. -Economy

But I would say to my fellows, once and for all, as long as possible live free and uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail.
-
Where I Lived and What I Lived For

I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father`s or his mother`s or his neighbor`s instead. The youth may build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like to do. It is by a mathematical point only that we are wise, as the sailor or the fugitive slave keeps the polestar in his eye; but that is sufficient guidance for all our life. We may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we would preserve the true course... -Economy

...for a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone. -Where I Lived and What I Lived For

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. -Where I Lived and What I Lived For

And not til we are completely lost, or turned around - for a man needs only to be turned around once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost - do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature. Every man has to learn to points of the compass again as often as he awakes whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not til we are lost, in other words, not til we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations. -The Village

The wind which passed over my dwelling were such as sweep over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or cellestial parts only, of terrestrial music. The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted, but few are the ears that hear it.

The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour.

Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.

The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred million to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?

It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!

No wonder that Alexander carried the Illiad with him on his expeditions in a precious casket. A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only read but actually breathed from all human lips; not be represented on canvas or marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. The symbol of an ancient man`s thought becomes a modern man`s speech. Two thousand summers have imparted to the momuments of Grecian litereature as to her marbles, only a maturer golden and autumnal tint, for they have carried their own serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to pretect them against the corrosions of time. Books are the treasured weath of the world and the fit inheritence of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand natually and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. -
Reading

I am convinced, that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, theiving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough.

The fruits do not yield their true flavor to the purchaser of them, nor to him who raises them for the market. There is but one way to obtain it, yet few take that way. If you would know the flavor of huckleberries, ask the cowboy or the partridge. It is a vulgar error to suppose that you have tasted huckleberries who never plucked them. -
The Ponds

A lake is the landscape`s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth`s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next to the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are the overhanging brows.

What I have observed of the pond is no less true in ethics. It is the law of average. Such a rule of the two diameters not only guides us towards the sun in the system and the heart in men, but draw lines through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a man`s particular daily behaviors and waves of life into his coves and inlets, and where they intersect will be the height or depth of his character. Perhaps we need only to know how his shores trend and his adjacent country or circumstances, to infer his depth and concealed bottom. -
The Pond in Winter

We should be blessed if we live in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of pat opportunities, which we call doing our duty. -Spring

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endevours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a sucess unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary, new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. - Conclusion

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault finder will find faults even in paradise. Love you life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleaant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor house. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man`s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring.

It is life near the bone where it is sweetest.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

Everyone has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple tree wood, which had stood in a farmer`s kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut and afterwards in Massechusetts - from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a ressurection and immortality strengthened by hearing this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodeness in the dead dry life of society, deposited first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well seasoned tomb - heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board - may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society`s most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last! -
Conclusions