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…