Monday, March 7, 2016

sweat

1. to perspire, especially freely or profusely.
2. Informal. to work hard.
3. Informal. to experience distress, as from anxiety.

 

Last week I worked on repairing stairs in the forest. This is not a small task – Cristian and I carried “palmas” down 178 stairs to the site where we needed to redo the steps. Palmas are large planks of bamboo wood, each weighing roughly 20 pounds, I carried 2 or 3 each time…Cristian carried 5. Through him I’ve learned how to carry the palmas like a “proper Ecuadorian.” The trick is to grab a canvas bag, fold it up and place it on your shoulder underneath the palmas so the weight is cushioned a bit. Even with the bag my shoulders were still ridiculously sore afterwards. After slinging the wood onto the ground we had to climb back up the 178 stairs and start all over again. After repeating this 20 times, we finally had enough wood to begin repairing the stairs.

 

I don’t sweat easily, even when I played basketball I only really sweat/sweated (I don’t know the proper past tense of sweat) in extremely hot gyms. Maybe this was due to my never actually trying terribly hard in basketball but I digress. In any case after one round of carrying the palmas down and especially climbing back up the steep stairs I was drenched. I’ve heard from several people that one never really gets used to the stairs here. After being here for 3 months both Jonathan and Jaimie still need ample time to catch their breath after an uphill hike.

 

There are several other things I’m not sure I’m going to quite get accustomed to, one of those being the spiders. At home I’m not really afraid of spiders. Even the bigger ones, the ones like the size of a quarter, don’t really scare me. But here the spiders that are the size of a quarter are the TINY spiders.

 

We have outhouses here, and I try to pee as much as possible when its light out. The few times that I muster up the courage to take a leak at night I’ve encountered some scary, hairy, octoleggedary beasts. The spiders that inhabit the bathrooms are the size, or maybe a bit bigger, than my palm…AND THESE ARE THE MEDIUM SIZED SPIDERS! I’ve yet to encounter a wild tarantula. I’ve just learned that the bathroom spiders are Wolf Spiders. One unfortunate night I came across a wolf spider party in the bathroom – or as my 6^th grade teacher calls it a “party in the potty.” There were 5 spiders. 2 on the inside of the door, 2 on the outside of the door – 1 of which had an egg sack and the last was ON THE TOILET PAPER!!! Like c’mon Mr. Spider really!?

I decided to use the other bathroom where there was only 1 spider.

 

The other small thing I can’t get used to is all the bug bites! I’ve spent hours and hours and hours scratching the gosh darn bug bites. There are mosquitoes, sand flies and horse flies…all of which I try at all attempts to slap smack and KILL!

 

Other than those two small blips everything is dandy here. I’m learning lots of things but most importantly I’m learning to not sweat the small stuff.