Monday we spent most of the day in Otavalo touring with the Benson Institute. It was set up in 1982, and they teach able families how to farm and use their land well. Ezra Taft Benson was the president of the LDS church and was also the Secretary of Agriculture for the U.S. So the Benson Institute was formed through BYU as a way to see how to improve agriculture in developing countries where the death rates were high. The people from the institute go and teach the people about how to use their land. We visited 4 homes, and they all seemed to have chickens, and cuy(guinea pig) and grow corn, herbs, and other vegetables. Yep, these cute little guinea pigs are some sort of delicacy here. (We tried one later, but there was hardly any meat on it. Pretty sick...all organs and teeth intact. But you could guess that yep, it still tasted like chicken..like everything else!)
We also met an 89-year-old midwife up in the farmlands who had been delivering babies since she was 20! She was pretty funny. We asked her a lot about her techniques, and she just sat on a stump for a half an hour talking...although not many of the fluent speakers understood her too well. I think she was combining 2 languages. But one thing I did understand was that she buried the placentas in the field behind her...so this is the midwife and the placenta field! She also had a pig that I obviously wanted to pet. Then we were told to leave him alone or we might get swine flu...bring it on.
The last great thing we did yesterday was take a little boat ride in a lake by a volcano called Cuicocha. A dormant volcano, that is. One crazy thing about the lake was that you can see gas emissions bubbling up from the bottom of the lake! Wished I would have seen some T Rexs or Brontosauruses because it felt like Jurassic Park. It was so beautiful though. Everything yesterday actually. There's just so much up and down when we drive...SO MANY mountains. We said bye to Otavalo and then headed back to Quito where we'll be until we go home.
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