I spent 4 weeks at El Terreno, and loved my time there! I volunteered in the mornings with the manual work at the house (building barbed-wire fences, digging ditches, chopping trees, building a gate), and spent the afternoons doing my internship in the form of research for my bachelors dissertation in anthropology. I loved the community that I became a part of in Atandahua, both with the neighbours as well as with the volunteers that lived with me in casa communal! My time there involved a lot of different activities: cooking classes learning to make tortillas and empenadas with a new local friend, minga’s, class-prepping for the kids in the afternoon, visiting the nearby communities for research, as well as celebrating both the project anniversary and a local lantern festival that I was lucky to have been a part of my time there! (They love celebrating in Ecuador as you’ll come to find in your own time there too!) I spent my free time with the other volunteers, and we would sometimes go into Guanujo to have dinner together, celebrate each others birthdays, watch football matches, danced salsa and whatever other fun activities we came up with doing together. (The volunteer community is really what you make it yourself which is always fun!) And then of course playing with all the dogs that became a part of my time there too! The internship was really flexible which was awesome in my case for collecting research and needing to alter it over time and follow what opportunities would come up! I also got better at Spanish during my time there as I was practicing everyday, and the neighbours were always up for a chat! This project is great if you want to do research in a lot of areas!! Mine was in anthropology and so I looked at the project holistically, but there are many avenues for doing research here, and I am sure, as with me, the owner is more than willing to accommodate your research/project whatever form that might take!
