A Final Message from the Semester - December 14, 2013

Dear Friends - Due to severe snow warnings, we have slightly altered tomorrow's graduation schedule.

The program will now begin at 12:45pm with the Key Note Speaker, followed by the presentation of diplomas. There will then be a slide show and at 2PM the students will give their Presentation. Our goal is to have families depart by 3PM to begin their drive home in the light.


            “We used to call our life at home the “real life”, but now it feels like the other way around,” Asha reflected during our meeting before leaving our home in Palugo for the last time on semester. We’ve created our own reality, our own community that has made up the entirety of our lives for the past three and a half months. We’ve lived together, eaten together, slept together, cooked together, cried together, laughed together and grown together. Every day, we rise together, and every night we fall asleep together. Now that is changing, our community is splintering and we’re transitioning back into our old lives. But really, they are not our old lives at all, for we return to them with new perspectives.

            The past week or so has been spent wrapping up, or rather opening up, the semester. We finished our semester book and had our last permaculture classes (with the help of lots of coffee and a CD player that we bought with our group money). We stayed up late dedicatedly studying away...at least some of the time. In reality, a solid portion of our academic nights was spent laughing, drinking coffee, eating desserts, dancing, and generally going completely insane. Asha only slept half an hour the last night before the semester book was due, but we all made it through in the end and it was awesome to finish.

We cleaned the chozon, closed down our big job duties, and made a presentation about our experiences. We watched the slaughtering of a cow, an intense experience that certainly made us think about death and where our food comes from, and we went shopping in Otovalo. We even graduated and left our home, but we didn’t wrap up the semester. It’s not an experience that can be wrapped up, tied with a bow, and left to sit on a shelf in the back of our minds, neat and tidy and closed.

            The last three and a half have been intense, beautiful, difficult, and so much more that I can’t describe or summarize. And every day has been immensely different for each of us, so the rest of the blog will be dedicated to the words of some of my fellow semester students. Before I close up however, I want to thank everyone who reads our story. It has been a pleasure to write to you every week. I couldn’t have done it without the help of Toby, Marcea, Hannah, Emily, Robin, Jack, and everyone who contributed towards the creation of this blog.

           Thank you, goodbye, and happy holidays,

                        Sonya  

Quinn carving a spoon

Yarrow working on apple crates

Happy Birthday to Samuel, Isaiah's brother 
and to my mom!

Julia finishes an apple crate

Nacho carving a spoon

Spoons crafted at Kroka

On Thursday evening the 2013 NH/Ecuador Semester joined Emily, Joe, and Toby at their home, Vinylhaven, for dinner. They were given the option to add their own messages on the very last blog post. The following are their reflections.

Enjoying dinner at Vinylhaven

Don’t Forget by Sosanna

Don’t forget every second of our great

adventure.

The glory of it all lies atop the

tallest mountains within you.

Remember the hell, and the heaven.

Remember the tears, but please

don’t forget the cold dark rain when

we were so far lost there was

nothing to do but sing.

Remember the glistening eyes and

the shining hearts like the sun.

And please don’t forget how the laughter

echoed in the moment you knew you could not take one more

step, but you did.
Remember, because those

foot steps, no matter how far behind

us now will pave your way through

the dark storms.

Remember it all.

Remember when you’re away.

Asha, Sosanna, and Robin sharing a laugh and a couch

Angus - Kroka has taught me more than I can write about in a paragraph. Kroka has shown me that my mind has far more power than my body does and that I can use that power to do more with my body than I ever thought possible. Kroka has also taught me how to live in the wilderness.

Isaiah - The last three months of my life truly cannot be boiled down into one beautiful general realization about the world. While I’d love to sit here and spew through this beautiful machine about all the valuable lessons I’ve learned, the beautiful relationships I’ve created, and the vast array of knowledge I’ve acquired, the time and space necessary for such a piece is only accessible after 5:00PM on Saturday night, by then we will all be happily reunited with family and these blog posts will no longer be the only form of contact after letters. Regardless, not the most important way of thinking I’ve taken away from the last three months but certainly extremely meaningful is my newfound mindset in [rough] situations.

I’ve experienced lows I’d never thought I’d experience as well as highs that make me look back upon those lows with the utmost respect. This may not make sense to you, whoever are reading this, but it is something I’ve been thinking about pretty heavily the past few weeks.

Having comforts all of us take for granted taken away for weeks is an incredibly powerful experience. When you come out of it very much alive, you immediately look at life through new, refreshed eyes. It’s a beautiful feeling that I’m looking forward to feeling again. This is a quote from a poem Soe (Sosanna) wrote while we were traversing around Cotopaxi, one of the hardest days of the semester that also happened to be Thanksgiving. “...but don’t forget the cold dark rain when we were so far lost there was nothing we could do but sing.”

Jack - Whether we all have been led or tricked into believing in panaceas or we naturally lapse into holding romantic and unrealistic hopes; that one panacea, for all your deep, biting, and amorphous feelings that rip your insides into a scarred and battered emotional landscape, hangs on the foreground of your thoughts.

We think in terms of “If only” and “then”. But the “if” never comes, and the “then” never happens. Cure all’s, as in life as in medicine, are practically myths. Personal problems cannot be solved in an instant. Solutions take constant work and struggle. Life is a struggle to keep breathing on our dismal and remote rock in the middle of vast, hard, nothingness. And it is hard, from birth to cold death. As much as society tries to remove pain and difficulty from the equation of life, the math will never work without them.

There is nothing on the top of the mountain, but a windy spot of rather unspectacular bald rock or ice. The reward for reaching the summit is the knowledge you climbed it, and the view of the land beyond and unknown, that tempts your mind into fantasies of the adventures ahead.

Jackie - As this experience comes to a close, the memories of the past three and a half months come flooding back to me, full of excitement, love, tears, hardships, and new life lessons. No one memory stands out as better than the rest, since all were crazy and amazing, but one specific mental image appears: the sight of Cotopaxi and the Andes at 5am from the frozen, unzipped door of my tent at high-camp on Antisana.

The clear cloudless skies held onto the last glimpses of sunrise, leaving the sky bright blue with a hint of purple. The snowcapped mountains surrounding us stood clear and bright against the lit up horizon, showing us the path we had taken the day before, which had been previously covered in fog. The still and serenity-filled picture, the most beautiful sight I have ever experienced. I rose my fingers to my eyes to shape a box with my thumbs and pointer fingers and gently clicked my tongue against my teeth to replicate a shutter sound, the framed picture was engraved into my mind forever. I already miss Ecuador and the ever-present warming embrace of the Andes so much. I will definitely be going back to visit soon. I promise.

Spencer (Nacho) - Upon arriving on the first day of semester, I was apprehensive about meeting the people I would be spending the next few months with. And now, at the tail end of our time together, I realize how lucky I was to be in such a great group. Everybody brought something unique to the group, and we came together to make quite an amazing family.

We have been through everything together, hardships and triumphs, happy and sad moments. From the lowest moment of biking in the freezing rain not knowing where we are, to the highest moment of looking at the world stretched out below us from the summit of Cotopaxi, we have worked together and stayed tight as a group. It is hard to believe that semester is almost over, and soon we will all have to say bye to each other. I will certainly miss everybody, and look back at all of the moments in semester fondly, the high and the low. This has certainly been a powerful experience, and it will be quite a change going home and not seeing the same people everyday. I hope that someday all of us can gather again somewhere and reminisce about our time together.

Julia - Going into semester, I had no idea what to expect. I had never slept outside before, except for one time when I slept on a beach for a night, and I had never cooked on an open fire. There were many things that I was worried about, and the first week of semester I thought there was no chance that I would be able to live the way we were living for the next 3.5 months. Now that it is the end of the semester I couldn't imagine having lived any other way with any other people. The 14 of us have gone through intensely difficult and amazing times that have brought us closer and closer together.

One of the most incredible times that we spent together was the afternoon when we arrived to Papallacta. Papallacta was the light at the end of our extremely long, dark, rainy, uphill tunnel that was the beginning of our biking portion of the first expedition. We arrived around midday to a beautiful sight of a steaming natural hot spring pool. We were told that we would have to take showers before going into the pool, which no one was excited about because up to that point all of our showers had been ice cold. To our surprise, the shower water came directly from the hot spring and was just as hot as the pool.

Papallacta was exactly the emotional and physical boost that we all needed. From Papallacta on we had a glorious decent into the jungle, whipping downhill while watching the landscape change from highland scrubs to lush jungle. All of the experiences I had on semester have made me grow immensely as a person. I have a whole new respect and appreciation for everything: from water to my family to washing machines. This has been a life changing experience and I am so grateful to have met and become so close to all of the people on semester that became my temporary family.

Chris - For me, this semester was eye opening. We partook in many long and arduous journeys that tested our self resolve, strength and patience. Over the mountains on foot and bicycles and through the jungle on rafts, our first expedition held many trials and tribulations from rainy walks through the mountains to chilly rides on the river.

The biking part of the first expedition was the best part for me. Though many people hated or disliked the bikes I loved pedaling through the highlands and over the mountains. There were days that I felt nothing could stop me, hill after hill no matter how steep just lowest gear and a nice steady, slow pedal got me to the top of the mountains and across the continental divide. We crossed the Andes Mountains on bicycles.

Descending from the mountains into the jungle was a fun ride where we could reap the benefits of our long climb with long, sweeping down hills that never seemed to end. It was a speedy descent to the river below. I missed the bikes from then on.

We boarded our rafts and hit the water after the bikes were sent away. The rafts were a lot of fun; it was such a powerful feeling to crash through waves on the river, moving with incredible speed and stability through such powerful water strewn with submerged rocks and other hazards. The second expedition had quite a different feel. We weren’t supervised to such a degree and had much more freedom. We chose what to bring instead of having our instructors give us a packing list.

With many more navigation solos scattered throughout the endless trudges from Palugo to mountain, and from mountain to mountain, all accomplished in rubber boots, I felt a sense of freedom brewing. Climbing the mountains was exhilarating, I was unaffected both times by the altitude and was never quite chilly. It was quite an experience to climb two real mountains. Cotopaxi was harder and colder than Antisana for me but it was more or less because it was colder and windier on Cotopaxi.

All in all, I know my limits are much higher than what I thought they were. I was pushed far past what I thought I could muster through endurance and patience. I now know that I can go a lot farther than before the semester just because I have walked or ridden that far. We rode 45 miles one day, which seems like a long way until it only took six hours to ride. This has been an appreciated, marvelous and changing experience and though there were tough times both emotionally and physically, I would not change my decision to embark on this journey or discourage others from taking it.