Ecuador 2012

Its been a crazy summer. I spent about 3 weeks in Ecuador during July, mostly mapping roads. What does that have to do with public health, you ask? Its a long story. We work in some pretty isolated communities, where good roads are few and far between. A lot of the villages are only accessible by river. So my task this summer was to map the roads in the area, and comment on the quality, etc.

Here is in an interactive map (thanks to ArcGIS online!), that shows where I was. The dots are the villages where we work, and the lines are the roads that I mapped.

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I asked about when roads were built, and when the surface changes (for example, from dirt to gravel). So I was able to create a time lapse of roads being built and changed over the past 60 or so years.

Enough with the boring stuff...

I spent a lot of time in a pickup truck, wandering down dirt roads that seemingly lead to nowhere...

some that led to mud...

   

Others led to beautiful rivers...

or quaint little towns.

All in all, it was a great summer, except for the toilets.