pollos pollos pollos!

Just got back from a tech exchange to one of my friends sites up on the coast…. It´s amazing the things you learn in the peace corps, jack of all trades doesn’t even describe it.
The other volunteer lives in Santa Elena in a really great little fisherman´s town right on the beach. Not gonna lie, kinda jealous I saw the most amazing sunset I’ve seen in Ecuador right from the bed room window of the apartment.
You never know what you are getting yourself into when your Peace Corps volunteers… and I can definitely say I never imagined learning what I learned on that trip.
One of the microenterprises of the youth in the site is to raise and sell chickens. Just happened to be my friends day to care for the chickens when I was there. Chicken duty starts at 6 am, then you have to give them food and water in the middle of the day, then again at night and once the sun goes down you close all the tarps around the barn. We get to the chickens bright and early, and they have an order placed to sell 12 chickens. They have a tricicleta, like a bike but the front is a big bin to put things, and who would of though you can stuff 12 live chickens into that. My friend was a pro at this, she grabbed the chickens and had them in the bin like it was nothing. I on the other hand, would scream, get scared, almost drop the chicken, grab it by the wrong part so its wings would be going crazy, struggle to drop it into the bin, I didn’t quite master my chicken carrying skills. But we got the chickens loaded up and stuffed into the front of that bicycle and off we were to sell chickens. Once you are actually selling them you hang a weight from a string, and then put three chickens into a bag and hang that bag from the weight, then you´ll know how many pounds of chickens you´re selling. It was quite the site… two gringas going through town still in their PJs, on a bicycle with a bunch of chickens, getting stuck in the occasional mud and pot holes, let’s just say we got lots of looks. But mission complete, chickens sold, feed, giving water, and closed for the night.
That weekend a group of kids living with HIV or affected by HIV, came to visit my friend´s site also, they were doing a CARE interexchange with her youth. It turned out great. I had started to kind of despise kids after trying to run a summer camp for 40 kids in my site, but after spending the weekend with these kids I realized not all kids are little diablitos or malcriados (little devils or badly created, as they call them here), just the ones in my site are this way. These kids came from really rough family situations and parts of Guayaquil, but they were some of the coolest kids I´ve met here so far. Of course, they had their malcriado little boys in this group too. But the cool thing is they called everyone brother or sister, and they all looked out for each other. Like when we did activities or were out on the beach, the older youth were looking out for the younger ones and vice versa. Or when we were out swimming I was paying attention to the wave coming, and a little 8 year old grabbed my nose and pushed me under the wave, so I wouldn’t take in water or get hit by the wave.
I also saw the best scavenger hunt ever, so the two youth groups were broken up into teams and had to find 5 things, a pair of blue pants, a crab, salt water, a red flower, and a puppy. I couldn’t imagine how they were going to find these things, I think if I told kids in my site this they would just look at me like I was crazy and not move. These kids though were awesome, next thing you know there are little boys sitting in chairs, pantless holding shirts over themselves since their team members took their blue pants, there are live crabs crawling in the room, somehow they really did find 5 new born little puppies and got the owner to let them borrow them.