Dear Parents:

It’s me, Rachel. We haven’t formally met. I am not a licensed medical or psychological professional. I’m only a writer – a profession that requires little in the way of legitimate qualifications. Still, I hope you’ll hear me out. I’ve heard that your daughters – young women in their late teens and early twenties – have of late been considering the idea that they might be of the constitution and comportment to have some adventures. Maybe your daughter is a new high school graduate or in the middle of her college years or just graduated from some ivy-covered university where she spent hours poring over literature and philosophy and debating gender performance. Your daughter is educated and free-spirited and full of wonder, thanks in large part to the opportunities you have provided her.

A group of gap year students from Carpe Diem enjoy natural, organic mud masks at Rio Muchacho Organic Farm in Ecuador.

We spend most days working long hours under the hot Ecuadorian sun. Cold showers are usually not too painful, but I can never seem to get the dirt out from underneath my fingernails.

While life on the farm is relaxing, it is not necessarily a place to pamper yourself. But last Wednesday, a few volunteers and I decided to relax in the hammocks and cleanse our skin with organic facials.

"Baño Negro" face masks are made by grating a clay stone, mixing it with water and applying it to your face for about 20 minutes. After rinsing off the mask, we cut up fresh aloe vera leaves from the garden to put on our skin.

I sleep in an open-air cabana. There is no difference between inside and out. Each night as I close my eyes, I listen to the rustle of bats circling the room and the steady hum of a million different insects occupying the darkness. The frogs seem to croak the name of one of the workers on the farm: “Ed-garrrr,” they say, “Eddd-garrr.”

One night, a catfight ventured to the fourth floor where I sleep. The animals hissed and snarled while sprinting back and forth along the corridor of the room between sleeping girls. I shot up in my bed and attempted to shine my headlamp on the cats, but they were moving quickly and my pupils were still adjusting to the white light. I couldn’t catch a glimpse before they chased one another down the ladder-like staircase.

The next morning our floor was covered with fur and cat poop. We went downstairs for chores and found our fluffy farm pet lying dead under the bamboo sofa. It is still somewhat of a mystery what killed him. My guess is an ocelot.

Needless to say, the nights are never quiet, but they are always somewhat peaceful. I’m used to the sounds now. I find them comforting and familiar. I know the roosters begin to crow around 4:30 a.m. – even the little tan one with a broken vocal box. Leo usually passes by on his motorbike around 6 a.m. -- a signal for me to get out of bed. And I can now recognize the steady, high-pitched rumble of his moto, which is different from Edgar or Danilo.

I also know the sounds of the gates scattered around the property – the subtle, low drone of the main entrance or the long creak of the gate near the pigpens.

The ambient noise of this area is so different from what I know: there are no passing airplanes, no highways full of traffic in the distance, no TVs. At first the silence felt creepy, but now I think electric noise would be creepier.

One pineapple takes a year to grow. A full year. Or more. At the farm, we eat at least one pineapple for breakfast every morning. The outer peel is boiled in water to make tea and the rest is chopped up and served with other fruit and granola. Even the center core is eaten because it is fully ripe, soft and juicing with flavor.

I have much more appreciation for pineapple after realizing the amount of time it takes to grow just one fruit. I've found that working in the garden planting, weeding, seeding, etc. makes you better appreciate the food on your table.

It is always exciting when someone brings a fresh bunch of bananas from the garden into the kitchen, but I also now know that another one of our banana trees is now dying because they only fruit once.

While we usually harvest food from the garden and bring it to the señoras (two older women who live in the community and cook and clean on the farm), the other morning we decided to make our own lunch, so Laura (New Zealand), Angela (Colorado) and I brought a few kids along to the garden for a harvesting and snacking adventure.

We walked through the rows of vegetables sucking on chunks of sugar cane and the pulp of cacao seeds while picking what looked ripe and appealed to our grumbling stomachs. The final product was grilled onions, sautéed kale, a big raw salad full of peppers and tomatoes, and of course rice. We also froze bananas for some blended banana "ice cream" later on.

There is something special about growing food, harvesting it from the garden, cooking it yourself and sharing the meal with people you care about.

The inside of the cacao fruit

“The Skins are in first place right now,” my Dad’s voice echoed through a basic Ecuadorian cell phone.

Standing at the top of a hill, with one hand pressed against the bark of a tree, I could get sparse service to call home.

It was a steep, twenty-minute hike following an old barbed wire fence past grazing cattle to reach the top. Red ants, about the length of a nickel, carried leaves up and down the tree and over my fingertips. No person was insight. I gazed over valleys spotted with banana trees under a bluish-grey sky.

It wasn’t until this moment that I realized how much my daily life has changed and how remote the farm really is. We don’t have available phone service, television or Internet. To get to the closest town with these luxuries, you either have to walk two and a half hours to the paved road to catch a ride, or arrange some other alternative mode of transportation…. donkey ride, anyone?

As a person who is slightly obsessed with the Internet and pursuing a career in the media business, I’m shocked how easy it has been to transition into a world without modern technology. Somehow, long chats with new friends from all over the world, evening card games and late-night chocolate making serve as good distractions from the comforts of technology.

And while I wouldn’t mind watching the Redskins sometime, the only games I’m currently concerned with are evening football (soccer, of course) matches in the community. More on soccer in Ecuador soon…

Tucked between a few rolling hills on the coast of Ecuador, 14 kilometers from a small, two-street surf town, lies Rio Muchacho Organic Farm.

After a ride in an open-air bus, a bouncy truck bed, the back of a dirt bike, or on an old horse… you will eventually arrive at the gate of the farm, my home for the next seven months.

Spread across these 10 hectares of land is not only my home but the home for numerous herbs and vegetables, various animals, Ecuadorian workers and volunteers from around the world.

I’m here to work for Rio Muchacho as a marketing intern to promote the farm and other ecotourism opportunities through websites, blogs and social media. Since most of my work requires internet, which is not available on the farm, I spend about three days a week in a nearby town and the rest of my time working with the animals and in the garden.

While studying journalism in college, I never imagined I would be waking up every morning to shovel poop in peg pens, but this lifestyle seems to work out.

Days here start early at 6:30 a.m. for morning chores with the animals. Each animal (cows, pigs, chickens, guinea pigs, horses, dogs, a rabbit, a goat and a boar) serves a particular role to keep the farm running. And most of these roles involve poop.

Rio Muchacho is a self-sustaining, organic, pescatarian (we eat fish!) farm. We grow the majority of our food and use organic resources to build and survive. While the goal of the farm is to be sustainable, it also strives to educate people within the community as well as across the world with ideas of how an individual can avoid negatively impacting the environment.

So we begin each day shoveling poop. The food we eat comes from the garden. We feed all scraps and leftovers to the pigs. The pigs digest the food and we scoop their poop to mix with sawdust and excrements from other animals for compost. The compost eventually gets used to fertilize the soil in the garden where the process starts all over again.

The way we live works in circles. Everything we take from the Earth eventually gets returned.

I went bowling a few weeks ago with my hometown friends. The bowling alley where we spent
summer nights as kids. The same fluorescent lights. The same grey haired man behind the counter. The same ugly clown shoes. And the same group of friends I’ve grown up with over the last decade.

While sipping my beer and throwing numerous gutter balls, I realized how much I enjoy the time I spend with these people.

Sure, I’ve made many friends while traveling, throughout college and as a “young adult.” They are, with no doubt, great people. Hilarious. Motivated. Fun.

But for some reason they don’t pinch my heart like this hometown group. Maybe because I have never wrestled them in the basement. I have never locked their arms and ran into a winter ocean. I have never snuck in or out of the house with them or carpooled to the movies in their mom’s mini van.

This all must have something to do with why the friends we make in our “adult-ish” years are never as close as the ones we make as kids. I’ve shared so many “firsts” with these people I don’t think I’ll ever be able to let them go.

We didn’t know anything as kids, but thought we knew it all. We were awkward and confused. Our emotions were fresh and we explored them with our friends.

I’ve learned a lot with these people and have many times I wish I could forget. But instead we can look at those memories today and burst out laughing, or crying, or just shake our heads at the simplest things.

They will be the ones forever smiling in pictures on my wall. Even when, years from now, a new friend will glance at the photo and have no clue who the happy faces belong to, I still want to look at them everyday.

And when we’re back in the same town together, from different cities or time zones or countries, we’ll get together over a few cases of cheap beer and waste away the night. And laugh. Because I never seem to laugh the same way with other people.

That's what I get when I see my old friends. Cheep beer, bad jokes, good memories and a sense of home. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

When I first landed in Quito, my legs were shaky. The airplane was unable to touch ground due to strong winds above the city, so we flew South to Guayaquil to get fuel and sit in the runway... and wait.

At midnight on September 2nd, three hours after my scheduled arrival, I walked alone through the crowds in the Quito airport. Spanish conversations buzzed around me, but I couldn't seem to recall a single phrase I had learned in the previous weeks. I needed to take a taxi to find a hostel in La Mariscal District (A.K.A. Gringolandia), but thoughts ran through my head of dangerous cab drivers and petty crimes in the city.

A woman working the desk recommended the taxi of one older man, so I hopped in his van and trusted he would take me where I asked. While we drove through the desolate city, I sat clutching my backpack and attempting to swallow the knot that was forming in my throat. I couldn't help but question why I had chosen to move to this unfamiliar country where I had no friends and could barely speak the language. I had never felt so alone.

A combination of jet lag, frustration with my Spanish and a bit of confusion made me want to curl up in that backseat and cry. It took complete concentration to hold in the tears and convince myself that these uncomfortable situations help you to grow into a stronger person.

So, I sucked it up, checked into a hostel and fell asleep in the top bunk of a room full of strangers. $7 for a bed, a warm shower and free breakfast.

The next morning I staggered down to the dining room for toast and cereal with several other sleepy backpackers. The good thing about travelers is we are naturally curious people -- Why else would we want to see the world other than to satisfy scratching the itch of curiosity?

And quick friends are easy to make when staying in hostels. Everyone has their own unique stories to share of where they've been, what they've done and of course where they're going. So conversations at breakfast naturally flowed and initial plans for a walk in the park with some Ecuadorians also led to a trip to the outdoor market, sharing a burrito with an Australian girl, cervezas and broken Spanish around a patio table, failed attempts at salsa dancing and a secret after-party at an underground diskoteka.

Quito is a mix of the old and new cultures of Ecuador. La Mariscal district is full of young people, hostels, modern restaurants and bars, while the old town has colorful plazas, rows of old buildings and historic churches watched over by El Panecillo, the virgin angel statue.

Along the street, little boys with dirt on their faces want to shine your shoes for a quarter and young girls selling Chicklets look up at you with sad brown eyes. It's not easy saying no.

After spending a week in the capital city, I was able to get somewhat accustomed to the Ecuadorian lifestyle and also register my visa. But seven days of commotion left me eager to get to the tranquillo atmosphere of the farm.