Endings

1966-68 Peace Corps letter correspondents: Hugh and Gertrude Graham.
On top of the Helderberg escarpment just before leaving for Montana.

Mom was renown for the long letters she wrote to her parents, siblings and to her children, when they were away to college or living on the other side of the continent. Two or three pages single spaced every week was not unusual to my experience. The Peace Corps gave me my first real opportunity to emulate her writing longevity and news worthyness.

 

Solid Endings

 

Maria and Bob's marriage in Quito

The conclusion of our service in the Peace Corps created a number of endings; some solid and others less so. Most of these endings would lead to new beginnings.

 

Two weddings among our group were among the solider kind.  Both marriages were between a Volunteer and an Ecuadorian woman. In so far as I know, both couples remain happily married more than 50 years later. 

 

 

Another solid ending was our summer training session in Montana and Ecuador's future credit cooperative experience. 

 

The training goal was to provide the new Volunteers, who would be our cooperative program replacements for the next two years, with a solid foundation upon which to build a stronger cooperative movement in Ecuador. 

Taking a break from training in Montana

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Over the intervening fifty plus years, we heard positive news from knowledgeable people and sources  about the progress of Ecuador's credit cooperative movement. Sources such as the 2014 document; The Feeling is Mutual: Financial Cooperatives in Ecuador supported that conclusion. Mutual support of cooperatives at an international level is growing according to a 2018 source.  Another document discusses the strengthening of Ecuador's rural credit cooperative system. I am confident that the service of Peace Corps Volunteers had a significant role in that success.

 

Disturbing Ending

In 1968 I surveyed farmers participating in the Julio Andrade pilot project during two weeks in Carchi. Analysis of the gathered information indicated farmer attitude toward the pilot project and farm production success; an increasing potato harvest for the participating farmers. 

 

Regrettably, key questions were left out of the survey. Significant environmental and health findings were missing. 

 

To be frank, in 1968 it was probably too early to accurately answer such questions. Harmful impacts associated with pesticide and fertilizer use had not yet risen to our attention level. 

 

An important use of the production credit loans was to purchase chemicals to spray over the crops to protect against debilitating and lethal pests and to fertilize for maximum production. The farmers and ourselves were ignorant of the adverse environmental side effects of these chemicals.

 

Chota valley home

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An analogy would be an evaluation of the success of spraying DDT to reduce insect pests. Clearly, limiting the evaluation to the impact on the target insect pests would present a false picture. Such a narrow evaluation would completely miss the impact on the total environment, including the effect on other animal species such as birds and human beings.

According to "Learning from Carchi, Agricultural Modernisation and the production of Decline" by Stephen G. Sherwood early agriculture production success in Carchi did not have a happy ending. The following quotes from that document help explain why.

During the second half of the twentieth century, farming in Carchi evolved towards a market-oriented potato-pasture system based on a three to five year rotational system.Between 1954 and 1974 potato production increased by about 40 percent and worker productivity by 33 percent (Barsky, 1984). Until recently, the potato growing area in the province continued to swell, with yields rising from12 t/ha in 1974 to 21 t/ha in 1992, a remarkable three times the national average (Crissman et al., 1998b).  

Indian child walking beside bus in Carchi

Essentially every farmer with whom I have talked since arriving to Carchi has made the same general claim: pest problems are getting worse with time. Pesticides have not only become a necessary part of the production system, but each year farmers must make a larger number of applications to sustain production.  

Pesticides were carried in the environment and reached homes and people, leading to potentially costly environmental and health consequences. 

Active surveillance of hospital records revealed that pesticide poisonings in Carchi were among the highest recorded anywhere (Cole et al., 2000). While there were some suicides and accidental exposures, most poisonings were of pesticide applicators. Clinical studies found that both applicators and their family members were at risk.

 

 

 My Loose Ends

This blog conveys my perspective on our volunteer group's two year Ecuador service ending in the Spring of 1968. At this point, I have nothing much to add regarding our group's impact on Ecuador.  

Another area of examination would be the impact of the two year service on the volunteers themselves. I limit that examination to myself, the volunteer I knew best.

The following words from two 1968 letters home give a sense where my mind was at as my Peace Corps service neared its end. I would call it loose with occasions of extraordinary focus.

February -  I have become a member of the fanatical group of hobbit fans, having completed the first book, the Fellowship of the Ring, of the Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien. Today by luck I found the third book of the trilogy and I’m looking madly for a copy of the second book, the Two Towers, since I refused to start the third without having read the second. The trilogy totals about 1500 pages in all. 

March - A Volunteer lent me my missing copy of the middle book of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and so I was able to finish all 1400 pages of this fascinating, imaginary epic.

In the six years following my service in Ecuador my life had a lot of ups and downs, resulting in many loose ends.  

In 1968 I was 'engaged' to a German volunteer whose service in Ecuador ended in the summer of 1969. After a year of long distance correspondence and a rendevous on the Isle of Wight in England, our marriage prospects ended on those shores, unhappily for both of us.  

In 1970 I earned a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Wisconsin. Having reached the magic age of 26, I survived the military draft thanks to a most unfair bureaucratic system. 

My life experienced a bit of chaos during the four years following receipt of that planning degree. I took residence and worked in numerous places; San Francisco; Concord, CA; Milwaukee, WI; Mexico; San Francisco again; Olympia, WA; and finally, San Jose, CA. I was employed for three short periods of a year or less in my new planning profession; city, social and environmental planning. In San Francisco I attempted to write a book about the future. Did not get very far, mostly research, not much content.  In 1973 I married for the first time.

In the year 1974 I began a job in what would become known as Silicon Valley. This employment provided a variety of planning assignments over the coming decades. It marked a new beginning for my life, with new friends and work that I found both interesting and stimulating. 

Thirty years later I  retired and am still going strong. Hope to live long enough to see habitable planets or moons circling other stars and friendly aliens who find some humans worthy to operate technology which appears like magic to earthling eyes.