While I am riveted by the US Presidential Election, I am still a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ecuador. Most recently, I’ve been giving a lot of nutrition charlas to groups ranging from 50 hospital personnel (including the director!) to a regional meeting of priests. I’ve also started a hands-on nutrition course with a mother’s club, giving them basic charlas and then making a healthy recipe together. This week, we made carrot cake, which is easy, nutritious (if you substitute plain yogurt for oil), and the moms loved it!
In Ecuador, it’s still rainy season, but it’s raining more like 12 hours out of every day instead of 16. I took advantage of the brief sunshine today to take some photos. The landscape is strikingly green after two solid months of rain. These little kids were hanging out in the street, and I thought they were cute.
A military and diplomatic crisis erupted over the weekend when the Colombian military killed a leader of Colombia’s rebel group FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) in northern Ecuador last Sunday, March 2nd. This led Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa to expel the Colombian ambassador and to cut of diplomatic ties to Ecuador. Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez got in the mix as well, with Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe accusing him of giving las FARC $300 million; this prompted Chavez to also expel Colombia’s diplomatic personnel from Venezuela, and enabled him to engage in the international grandstanding that he loves. Today, Nicaragua’s President Ortega jumped into the fray as well, breaking ties with Colombia “in solidarity” with Ecuador. Lovely. The whole situation is very complicated and involves the US as well, because for years, Colombia has been the largest recipient of US foreign aid behind Israel and Egypt. Then Iraq and Afghanistan came along. Anyway, many of the leftist governments in South America view Colombia as a US proxy, given billions in US support for Plan Colombia and Uribe’s close ties to Bush. But I’m sure the situation will resolve itself shortly, at any rate, we haven’t felt any effects of the crisis down in my part of the country.
In other news, Hillary Clinton continues her quest to kneecap her way into the Democratic presidential nomination, caring little about the Democratic Party at large, nor all of the Independents and Republicans whom the Obama campaign have brought into the fold. Apparently it doesn’t matter to her whether or not Democrats win a Senate majority in November, as long as she is the nominee, by golly! This week, with Hillary engaging in scare tactics (the 3am phone call ad) and saying that, as far as she knows, Senator Obama is not a Muslim, we have Clinton politics-as-usual. No wonder people are so disenchanted with politics. Even more hilarious, after her Pyrrhic primary victories this week, winning the primaries in TX but not the caucuses, it turns out her campaign staff is plagued by bitter political in-fighting.
