email from Ecuador

I spent my first two weeks living with the North Americans who set up Casa Mojanda – the tourist inn/chalet business that funds local development work. Spoilt by good food, I effectively lived the life of a tourist.

Now though, I've moved into my own place. It's about half a mile from Casa Mojanda and next to the local school. The community here consists of some 100 families, dispersed through the foothills of the 4600 m Mojanda mountain. The majority are very poor, working their whole lives on the steep fields without any mechanisation to speak of.

The heavy rainfall at this time of year keeps the countryside green; eucalyptus trees dominate. It's very beautiful – a patchwork of cultivated fields that seen from afar could almost be Ireland.

Many people suffer malnutrition, and do not grow very tall. I often feel like a giant beside them. Many elderly people do not wear shoes, and you see them struggling up the hills with huge packs of produce or wood on their backs. Most families keep animals – a cow, chickens and a pig or two, but few can afford to eat them. Instead they sell them, mainly for export to Columbia.

Living so close to such hardship was difficult to deal with, psychologically. It's easier now that I live in the community, with a lifestyle more closely resembling that of the locals. But the physiological side is much harder.

I live in a very simple two and a half room building, constructed from breeze blocks and cement. It's unheated and uninsulated, and gets very cold at night. The temperature at this height varies from as little as 80C at night to about 250C during the day.

The building also lets in the rain, some comes through the roof, some penetrates the walls. Most of the time I have electricity and running water, though neither are reliable. I spent two days without power after a mud slide took out the power lines to my shack. The community worked very fast to clear the road, but it remains to be seen how long before the electricity company reconnects the power.

On top of this I've discovered that my closest neighbour, Umberto, habitually steals electricity from me. He'd have no light without running his dodgy-looking extension cable 100 m from my shack to his. When he runs it, my lights dim a little. I don't have the heart to tell him to stop.

I'm beginning to get prestame ("lend me") fatigue. When you lend money (or food) to people here, there's no expectation that you should be repaid. It took me a while to realise this – three loans, in fact.

In the local currency I am a millionaire, and the poorest people living near me seemed to grasp very quickly that the easiest way to put bread on the table was asking me for a loan.

So many people have asked me for money that I've lost the feeling of guilt I used to have when I said no. Now I only give food. But even this strategy is going awry. First, it complicates my own shopping – how do I know what food my neighbours will want? And second, my neighbour Umberto, the electricity thief, now calls me with a shopping list of things he needs.

Food here is uninspiring. The staples are rice, refried beans and corn. Eggs and milk feature prominently in most people's diets and are plentiful. Predictably, given Ecuador's position as the world's number one banana producer, banana and plantain are also popular.

The real highlight of the food though is the fruit juice: blackberry, papaya, mango, pineapple, and a half-dozen other fruits I've never seen before. Few Ecudorians drink coffee, despite it thriving in many forested areas. Apparently most of it is dried abroad and reimported, which pushes the cost out of reach. Instead, many people drink teas made from home-grown herbs. Jungle dwellers also drink stimulants made from wild plants found in the rainforest.

Alcohol is cheap. A 50 cl bottle of fizzy beer costs about 20 pence. Good wine from Chile sells for about $2.00 a carton, but there's no telling what chemical residues you are drinking – or how the pickers collecting the grapes may have suffered.

People in my community drink an aguardiente made from distilled sugar cane. It tastes foul, but this doesn't stop people drinking it until they fall over. Hungover casualties decorate the gutter on weekend afternoons.

The most common word I've heard since I arrived is ahorita. This literally translates as "little now". Ahorita is offered as a deadline for getting things done, or to say when meetings will finish. The actual meaning varies from anything between five minutes to a couple of weeks.