Enjoying the canyon

This past week I walked down into the canyon that my town sits on the rim of. A lady who lives down there wanted me to come look at her gardens and try to figure out what was wrong with her carrots. She is one of the few people around here that has a pretty extensive vegetable garden, with everything from strawberries to cabbage. The neat thing about the canyon is that it is a lot warmer that on the rim, so you can grow avocados and various other fruits that you can't grow up higher. I'm probably going to go down there every two weeks to help out with her gardens and see if we can get the carrots going better (after I'm done with this post I plan on researching various carrot problems). The problem is that the hike out of the canyon totally kicked my butt. Here I thought I was getting in better shape since I'm walking everywhere, but climbing back up left me totally winded and sore the next day. Oh well, I guess I still have a ways to go until I can keep up with the people around here. Plus the hike down isn't easy since I'm paranoid about falling since it's so steep. More so now that one of my training buddies is back in the states having knee surgery because of all the hiking down hills. A couple of other people in my training group have left which is a bummer. We were excited to have all made it through training but now we're slowly loosing people. It seems mostly due to the fact that the larger organizations that people are working for seem to view peace corps volunteers as free office help. I'm very glad I don't have to work in an office!
In other news I just watched the entire 20K racewalking competition in the olympics. They haven't really shown much of the olympics here, but an ecuadorian had a good chance of winning so they showed the entire race. My host brothers were totally getting into the race and freaking out at the end. I was just trying not to giggle since I find the racewalkers funny doing their weird little stride. In the end the ecuadorian won silver which was very exciting and now my little host brother is pretending to be a racewalker.