Welcome La Navidad

I realize that it's been over a week since my last entry--perhaps things are reaching a level of routine that doesn't seem to merit daily commentary. But interesting things are always happening, if only I can remember clearly what they are.

Monday brought some disappointment. I didn't feel that the antibiotics had completely killed off the infection in my foot. But I wrote to Dr. Shanley at Stony Brook, as he had invited me to do. I did feel a bit guilty about asking for free medical advice, though. Anyway, he recommended that I extend my 10 day course to 15, so I kept plugging away. By Friday morning, I decided that I had to be cured because my gastrointestinal tract couldn't take any more antibiotic. And everything seems better now. Anyone who doubts the value of science and modern medicine should try and get through a year in the tropics without antibiotics.

Teaching continued to go well, because we were covering numbers, which is something nice and concrete. Also, the larger numbers borrow sounds and vocabulary from the smaller numbers, so things shape up nicely. I made a nice display board out of poster paper, with four rings running from 0 to 9 that allowed me to display the numbers from 0 to 9999. I'm not sure my students know all of these numbers in Spanish, though I know it's something they're learning in the 4/5 classroom. But it all went pretty well.

The evening English classes didn't happen this week. Maybe cold, rainy weather kept people at home, or maybe they don't like the way I teach. I'll never know; people are too polite. In any case, English class is not enough of an attraction to lure people out of their houses, at least not yet. Maybe if I slaughtered a sheep once in a while...

So, without an English class to teach on Wednesday and Friday, I went up to rehearse with the band from the Evangelical church. Jose invited me, with the idea that we would perform a number or two at the AVANTI Christmas fiesta on Saturday. We practiced and practiced, and did improve, but perfection seemed just beyond our grasp. And we put in about 5 hours on Friday night. This is a new experience for me, because I have almost always played alone. It turns out that I have a pretty good idea of what to do with this music, which isn't all that tricky. But for the guy playing the pan pipe, things are more difficult, and he's the most noticeable performer. We also had trouble finding a drummer with the right sense of timing. After we had put in about five hours, it occurred to us that we would probably need some kind of amplification down in the plaza, because we were practicing with amplification in the church. We took a shot at playing outside without amplification, and it didn't carry too well. I suppose it's just as well that we left the situation unresolved. The power was out Saturday afternoon, and we didn't perform anyway.

The AVANTI Christmas Fiesta Saturday was an interesting event, almost as anticipated as the Fiesta de Tolte last month. The AVANTI Christmas fiesta is a big giveaway of all kinds of stuff to the community. The junta directiva got a new refrigerator and two new stoves in the municipal office, the kids all got bags of candy and most got some additional present, and I got books for the library. There were also clothes, which are still being given out today. I was especially excited about the books, because the adult fiction section went from one shelf to two, and the children's chapter book section also doubled in size, or maybe one and a half-ed. We didn't get as many beginning readers as I hoped, but we did get some, and it's a lot more than I had. I also got a big pile of books to read and color, which I'll give away today and tomorrow along with some duplicate books. It's funny, with such a small collection, you wouldn't expect to receive anything you already had, but it did happen. Maybe some of the books were assigned in schools in Quito.

I did hear that not all was joy at the fiesta. This may have been occasioned by competing attempts to figure out how to distribute the gifts among the children, given that there weren't enough to go around. Tempers may have grown short, particularly among the givers. I'm more than a bit skeptical of stuff that looks too much like charity, but the AVANTI gifts are certainly well-loved by the people of Tolte. So three cheers for AVANTI and Carolina, who cooked it up in the first place, because AVANTI has made my presence in Tolte, and the happiness it produces in me, if not my students, possible.

And let me not forget my two trips into Chunchi in relation to my "invitation" to the school Christmas fiesta, coming Wednesday to a pueblo near me. You may recall that I was invited to buy a sash for one of the retinue of the Princesita de la Navidad, specifically la Nina Confraternidad. By chance Belena, Narcisa's mother, said she was going into Chunnchi on thursday. She had to buy a sash for her son, who was elected to the student government, for the various installation ceremonies. She had mentioned that she had found a place that did it much less expensively than the others, and I followed her deep into Chunchi to find it. They knew just what to do, and it was ready fro me by Sunday, when I went and got it, a mere $15 (more than a day's pay) later. Being invited to a party here can be a bit costly, but I have no complaints.

It occurs to me that I've forgotten to mention the really good news. Belena is the guardian of her granddaughter, both of whose parents are somewhere in the States. Gisela is a very unusual little girl. She seems pretty bright, as far as I can tell, but cannot handle being in groups of other children. On the other hand, she is very attached to me. I have been trying to help Belena figure out what sort of help Gisela needs so she can attend school, which she should have started at least a year ago. Fortunately, through David at the Eastern Farm Workers Association, I was connected to Zully Alvarado, who runs Causes for Change here in Ecuador, an organization focused on helping children with all sorts of disabilities. She and I have been exchanging e-mail about Gisela, and on Saturday, she said that a woman who works part of the time in Alausi would call Belena to talk about what can be done for Gisela. This is the first good news that Belena has had on this topic for a while. Personally, I am interested in the improbable chain of connections that have brought us to this point, from the Farm Workers on Long Island to Gisela in Tolte. And it will be even more interesting to see what comes of the contact between Zully's connections and Belena. I think this will be an ongoing story throughout the rest of this blog--at least, I hope so.

Education Week

I was originally going to entitle this entry "Guayaquil," but after a little more thought, I think this represents the week better. Although I have not really entered the agricultural world of Tolte very deeply, my teacher instincts are starting to pay off in a way that might have lasting value.

The week started with me implementing an idea that i came up with last week: the new rules for computer room access is that you have to read early in the week to have minutes to spend in the computer room later in the week. This frighteningly simple idea resulted in about half of the schoolchildren coming to the library to read--or in the case of k-3, look at pictures in books, which is better than nothing. And the more they came to read, the more they liked it--although they also showed how much they need it. Two girls in the fourth grade took turns struggling through the Spanish language version of "The Very Hungry Caterpillar," a book that I would place at the first grade level. One of the most capable seventh graders (the cantonal school president) handled a book at the third grade level, but found a book at the fourth/fifth grade level too demanding. It all goes to show that this is a really necessary project, one that could make a big difference in the lives of the children of Tolte over the next couple of years. I have asked Carolina to link a book drive to the upcoming AVANTI Fiesta Navidena in Tolte, to take place on Saturday, the 17th (yes, that's next Saturday for regular readers of this space.) I don't have enough books for early readers (which encompasses about 95% of the kids) and I don't have any alphabet books. I am trying to teach a fourth grade boy to read using flash cards I made after talking with Nick the Peace Corps Volunteer in Chunchi. Things are sort of desperate.

On the other hand, the program got off to a great start. Over thirty of the 65 school children did some reading, and many averaged half an hour each day. One boy read slightly more than three hours in three days. There did seem to be some positive competition for who could pile up the largest number of minutes, and behavior was surprisingly focused and positive. We'll have to see how long this lasts, but I have high hopes. I have more and better reading material if the kids can cross over to the third or fourth grade reading level.

But the victories didn't end there. This week had me teaching the children to cont in English, generally an easier thing to teach and learn. Most of them could count to 10 already, but 11-15 are genuinely tough. I taught them to play "Bizz Buzz" (okay, so it is sometimes abused as a drinking game), where you count around the group and every time you reach a multiple of 3 you say, "Bizz" and every time you reach a multiple of 5 you say "Buzz," "Bizz Buzz" if it's both. I started with just the "Bizz" portion. The game requires a lot of attention, because if someone messes up, they're out, and the next person has to say what the person should have said. So you always have to know what comes next. The fifth graders repeatedly failed to get past 6, and I realized that this was excellent training for them in general, reaching far beyond an English lesson. It might teach them to pay attention. And, in their final try, they did get to about 15.

Where's the victory I mentioned? Well, on Friday I had two. The first was that a fourth garder who was my most difficult behavior problem, something that he apparently carried over from all of his previous years in school, won the behavior prize this week. He seemed to make a big turnaround after the Fiesta de Tolte. I described in a previous blog praising this improvement to his mother as she castrated piglets. I actually have a hope that a different child is beginning to emerge. This would be good PR, as my housemate Jose is his uncle. He and I have had a lot of conversation about Sergio, and I think it's paying off. I should add that Sergio probably has the best retention of English vocabulary of anyone in the fourth grade, so this is meaningful effort.

The second big victroy occurred after I taught the sixth graders how to respond to the question "How old are you?" I asked if anyone thought he or she could be interviewed in English. A really great kid named Rosalinda answered the call, and responded perfectly to these questions: Hi, How are you? What is your name? Where are you from? What do you do? What do you want to be? How old are you? It actually sounded something like a conversation in English. Yes, I was excited. Wouldn't you be?

The topper to all of this was the trip to Guayaquil, where a former Village School student of mine, Kelly, had arrrived with her friend Andrew. Kelly graduated from VS about 10 years ago, went on to Nassau and Stony Brook, and then spent three years teaching English to preschoolers (a process that sounds more effective than mine here, but Korea and Ecuador are not the same). She also got to travel all over Southeast Asia and parts of China, and is heading to a teacher certification program in Australia in February. To fill the time until then, she and Andrew have been backpacking from Argentina to Bolivia and Peru, and they reached Ecuador on Thursday. I have been afraid to go to Guayaquil (other than to pass through). It is reputed to be the most dangerous city in Ecuador, with all kinds of criminal shenanigans that sometimes target gringos. But I got the name of their hostel, and made a wonderfully smooth trip from Alausi to Guayaquil in far less time than it took me to get back when I went to Portoviejo. This is certainly because I used the scheduled bus direct from Alausi instead of detouring through Riobamba, which is entirely unnecessary.

So what's it like to see a former student after so much time and in an exotic environment? Startling. I don't have much of an impression that Kelly retains anything I taught her ten or more years ago, but she certainly retains the VS experience, and remains close to here classmates. We did talk about old times and old friends, but I was much more interested in how she had become the world traveler that she is, since this is so close to my own interest. Employment opportunity played a big role, I'm sure, but Kelly's ability to enjoy an unusualy situation might just reflect the VS years, and the sense of the school at the time that life should be an exciting adventure. She does have me thinking more about taking my Chinese friends up on there offer of employment, though I do wonder what my life would be like in an environment where I do not speak any of the local language. But she and Andrew speak little Korean, and managed to find a community of English teachers (There is apparently an army of them in all Asian countries). In any case, it looks like Kelly's high school experiences did her no harm, and probably plenty of good, which is more than can be said for most high school experiences. Maybe I should take some pride in those years, too--they seem to have given me some useful instincts to use in Tolte.

I'll just mention that the ride back to Alausi today was beautiful--little of the heavy fog and overcast of yesterday's trip down. And I got a great $3 haircut in Alausi. Pricey compared to my haircut in Riobamba, but pretty sharp for a guy with as little hair as I have.

Rubber Boots

Again, the most notable thing about this week has been the sudden and drastic change in the weather as we enter the rainy season.  A dense layer of cloud settles into the river valley every night. Although the day dawns clear, as the air mass heats up, the cloud layer rises, just the way you learned in science class, and envelops Tolte. Rarely in my life have I see fog so thick. It can be difficult to see the houses across the street.

Naturally, this means that everything is wet. If you are lucky, and your timing is good, you can get your laundry dry in a couple of days by shifting it to a covered location when the fog closes in, then out to a sunny spot in the morning. Socks are a particular challenge, made as they are of a thick tube of water absorbing cloth. I haven’t tried to wash any jeans lately; that just seems futile. I have been told that this wet, foggy period is part of the beginning of the rainy season, and that as it starts to rain more frequently, the sky will open up a bit.

But we did have rain Friday, and, as promised, the plaza filled up promptly with water. It was around this time that I realized that I couldn’t continue living here with just my one pair of sneakers and my crazy barefoot running shoes, which I cannot use because the road is simply too rough and rocky. Today I went o Chunchi and bought a pair of rubber boots of the kind that everyone here wears at the bargain price of $8.50. I’m not sure exactly how I’m going to use them, but it does make it possible for me to visit someone’s farm in this weather and not worry about the mud. I can just rinse it off later, or walk through a couple of deep puddles.

On a slightly scarier note, my right foot became infected on Friday. I’m not sure how this happened. I imagine a piece of dirt got into my shoe and embedded itself in the sole of my foot. Fortunately, the wise travel doctor I saw before I came down here gave me a prescription for a couple of rounds of doxycycline. The primary reason was to hold off a malaria attack if I was unlucky during a visit to the Amazon, and buy me some time to get more complete treatment. But doxycycline is a broad spectrum antibiotic, and I was told it can be used for all sorts of nasty wounds. It’s sort of a nuisance to take, because you have to take it on an empty stomach, which requires some planning. But it is working quite nicely on the injury to my foot—no one need worry. I only report this as part of the complete picture of living here in Tolte. By the way, if I weren’t allergic to penicillin, there are antibiotics in the municipal office that would have worked fine. There may be no doctor here, but all is not lost. And there is a Centro de Salud in Chunchi.

And one more thing. Last night, Jose took me along to the Evangelical Church, where Juan, the guitar maker, and his brother Pablo, the carpenter, were working on some music. Jose’s job is to beat the big drum. This was the first time I had brought my guitar with me when they were playing, and I had a good time. Juan has enough sense of what he’s doing to be able to tell me the chords to play. In other situations, I have to guess along by ear, and there can be a lot of uncertainty on everyone’s part as to what is actually happening in the music. So I got to participate in learning a couple of Andean Evangelical songs, which might not be my first choice in music, but it did introduce me to some of the chording and sounds of Andean music in general. I was also a big hit, because I could remember the chord changes pretty much form the first run through. Of course, there was a rhythm that gave me fits, but it’s exactly the sort of thing I need to work on if I’m going to get a feel for the local sound. I’m pretty sure they’ll let me come back, especially because I was able to use my limited knowledge of music theory to show Juan the easiest way to change from a D major to a B minor chord on the piano. Juan and Pablo can switch easily from guitar to Cherengo to Pan Pipe to piano. As a “guitar only” guy, I’m certainly impressed.

Rainy Season

I think there’s been sort of a gap in my blogging. I don’t think I mentioned the Fiesta de Yuquillay, which I attended on Saturday night. I had wanted to go earlier, to see the futbolistas from Yuquillay, a talented group of younger players, face off against Ambato, a city north of Riobamba. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get a ride until after 7 PM, by which time Ambato had been defeated. But I still wanted to show up, partly to see another town in the Tolte zone, and partly to show people from other places whom I had met in Tolte that I cared enough to visit where they were form.  Apart from Fernando and the other Yuquillay players, I also ran into Ivan and his crew. The usual drinking ensued, with fairly severe illness on Sunday.

I didn’t feel anything like normal until Tuesday, so it was a good thing that I didn’t have to teach English Monday. The other teachers decided to show a movie, which spared me having to accomplish anything. I did make some helpful visual aids to teach professions and careers, but I didn’t have to whip them out until Tuesday.

Of course, Wednesday was another day without classes, as the student government had a local installation ceremony. I’m not sure whether the student government merits this much school disruption, but that’s the way things are. The ceremony lasted an hour, and substituted for five hours of school, which isn’t a bad trade from a personal effort point of view.

More interesting, in many ways, was the PTA meeting held after the ceremony. The first surprise was that I am among the “invitados” to the school Christmas fiesta. Being invited means that you are expected to make some kind of financial contribution to the event, and I think it shows increasing comfort with my presence that I could be invited. I’m to provide a “banda” or sash, for the “Princesita de La Navidad” or one of her entourage. Details will emerge. Obtaining the sash involves a couple of trips to Chunchi and about $14, from what I understand. $14 may not seem like much, but I earn about $12 a day. Of course, other people were hit a lot harder during the Fiesta de Tolte, so I’m certainly not complaining. Heaven help the family of the child who is chosen “Princesita de La Navidad.”

Also interesting were the comments of the other teachers in reference to the computer room, for which I am partially responsible, and my desire to mount a pro-reading campaign. The teachers of grades 4-7 have been offering extra help to their students, who are all somewhat to greatly below grade level in all subject areas. As with my English classes for adults, no one has been attending. Instead, the kids have been going to the computer room or playing in the plaza. This made me a little uncomfortable. On the other hand, they did mention my desire to encourage reading, and that this was very important. I got the chance to say that from now on, children would need teacher permission to use the computer room, and that children should read at least half an hour every day. I offered to lend library books for this purpose, and the teachers seemed very happy with all of that. Later, I cooked up the idea of opening the library on Mondays and Tuesdays and clocking the kids reading time. For every minute they read, they can have an equal amount of computer time on the other three days of the week. My guess is that no one will read, and no one will use the computer room, but we’ll have to see. Again, the teachers liked the idea. Of course, now I really need to get more books.

But, outside of the world of school, I now live in an entirely different environment. The rainy season seemed to arrive a couple of days ahead of schedule on Sunday, and the Tolte I have been living in no longer exists. The days of bright, hot sunshine piercing the mountain air are over. I now live in a place that resembles the Scottish Highlands, a land of heavy mist and fog, punctuated by periods of rain. Visibility this morning was less than 100 feet. In some ways, the town seems even more enchanted than before, a place existing in a tiny bubble of light surrounded by cloud. On the other hand, drying my laundry has become extremely complicated. Nothing dries outdoors on the line anymore, and I haven’t figured out a functional indoor system yet. I imagine the bathrooms will have an important role to play, or perhaps the upstairs balcony. But at 100% humidity, it’s going to be a slow process. 

Odds and ends

As we recover from the Fiesta de Tolte, there have been some surprise events that have prevented me from feeling that I am simply sliding back into a routine. We had hardly gotten back to school on Tuesday when school was closed again on Wednesday. The reason for closing was the installation of the student government in Chunchi. Student governments from schools all over the Canton de Chunchi were there. I think it was sort of strange that we were there. The Parroquia de Pistishi is, if I understand this correctly, part of the Canton de Alausi, even of the actual town of Chunchi is closer. I decided to go along for the ride so that I could get some things done, like get some money from the bank to over come continuing salary delays, get a cell phone, which everyone seems to think is necessary but I have trouble identifying a use for, buy some fruits and vegetables for the first time in weeks, see if Nick, the Peace Corps volunteer, was around, and get lunch. I was also curious to see what sort of event the installation ceremony would be.

The ceremony was very official looking, with important politicians from Chunchi lined up one the dais in the auditorium. I know it is wrong of me to even let this thought cross my mind, but I thought they bore a resemblance to party apparatchiks in a soviet. However, their messages wree much more focused on the importance of participatory democracy, so I'm sure the resemblance was only a passing one. Remarkably, the girl who was elected president of our school's student government was also elected president of the Canton de Chunchi student government in what was apparently an election among all the schools in the Canton. I can't quite figure out how a girl from Tolte would have enough name recognition to win her position over children from the heart of Chunchi, but there you have it. It was also interesting to note that all of the members of this year's Canton level student government are girls. I'm not sure whether this reflects the nomination process, the lection process, or girls' more advanced social skills, but there you have it. In a society where men still seem to have most of the advantages in social life, the student government is all girls.

So I left the ceremony, went to the drugstore (a month and a half of prescription strength cholesterol medication for $5), and then went to the store where Joaquin got his cell phone and got one of my own. I paid $40 for a new phone, though it has no exciting features, which is fine with me. The cheapest phones in Quito were $50, so I leaped at the chance to have this phone at $40. There are cheaper phones available, but they're second hand and might not last the 6 months I have left here. I also will get $10 of calling credit within my network, which Carolina and Angus are on, for each of the next 5 months, which means I may never have to buy a recharge. I also bought 160 text messages for $3, which should probably also last me pretty well. It is now Saturday, and I haven't made or received any calls, so I think I invested all I wanted to in this item.

From there, I shopped in the market, and bought tomatoes, peppers, clementines, bananas, tree tomatoes, and the local version of a pomegranate, all for about $5, and then went to look for Nick, the Peace Corps volunteer, who I met a few weeks back while wandering Chunchi with Joaquin. He was fresh from a fairly unproductive week in Quito that Peace Corps had required. Anyway, it turns out that he is working with a program for the children of parents who are living abroad, as many parents here are. And, like me, he has found that the biggest problem is that the children do not read at grade level. Unlike me, this (and basic arithmetic) are more the focus of his work, instead of teaching English. Still, I think my situation here reflects something important about development aid, which is that the projects that get funded are not necessarily a direct response to what is needed. In Tolte, the children need a reading specialist and about 400 children's books in Spanish at a variety of reading levels, including classroom sets of graded readers for reading groups. What is funded is a maniacal gringo English teacher and software to teach reading in English (which we do not have the internet access to use.) But Nick gave me some good ideas for card games and the like to help the children with letter recognition, and that willl have to do for now.

nick and I also had a discussion of food. I have eaten more of the local cuisine than he has, but while the thing he doesn't like are the little potatoes that turn up in soup, I told him that the Yaguarloca soup, made of sheep innards, was my personal least favorite. Needless to say, when I went to buy lunch at a busy local restaurant, it turned out to kick off with a bowl of Yaguarloca (though maybe less awful than the bowl I enjoyed at home.) I got a lucky ride back to Tolte fairly quickly, and was in time to open the computer room.

Thursday seemed like a quiet day. I felt that I had a very successful English class that morning. I have been teaching the children words about feelings and emotions (cold, hot, thirsty, hungry, sleepy, sick, happy, sad, angry, and scared), and this led to a little drama of going to the doctor. I would ask about how they were feeling, and depending on their "Yes I am," "No I am not" answers, I would announce whether they were sick or not. It was the first time that we have had anything resembling a conversation or a dialog. Still, I think it's not bad for three months work. We may be getting to the point where I should start inviting parents in to see their kids in action.

Maybe more notable is the stunningly improved behavior, at least during English, of Sergio, Jose's nephew. This is a kid who spent every day hitting somebody, and I decided to make him sort of a project of mine at the beginning of the year. Two of the last four school days, he managed to comply with all three of the classroom rules (I stayed in my seat, I was quiet, I didn't touch anybody.) Given that I once complained about his behavior directly to his parents, I thought this was a good chance to tell his parents that something good was happening. Unfortunately, they weren't at home Thursday afternoon so I had to wait until Friday morning.

When I got home Thursday night, a party seemed to be brewing. Lots of Ramon's friends and family were gathered around the dining room table. But I was tired, and it was late enough to go to bed (since I had been skyping to New York and Oregon for Thanksgiving greetings,) so that's what I did.

 was awakened a couple of hours later by Ecuadorian dance music and the urgent need to use the bathroom. I considered peeing off the balcony instead of going downstairs, because the bathroom is right next to where the party was. But I decided to be a civilized person and go downstairs, where I was immediately grabbed and pressed to down several shots of trago, beer, and trago mixed with beer. I also wound up dancing with a woman wearing an Andean fedora. All this before I managed to get to the bathroom. Before I could flee upstairs again, on Miguel's wife grabbed me and had me down another shot of trago. I doubt that I ever drank so much in 15 minutes in my life, and staggered back to bed. Much peeing off the balcony ensued, and I woke up with a mild hangover.

I ran into Sergio at the school, and since it was early, we went off in search of his mother. She wasn't at home, or at her mother-in-law's house, but we did find her helping Jose's father to castrate a pig. I had a strong sense of acting out a scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail as I stood next to the pigsty and praised Sergio's new behavior. Still, she did seem highly gratified, and he seemed very proud and happy, and it may be the first good news ever to come out of school, so I'm glad I did it.

I made short work of school because I had an invitation from Damasio to pick potatoes again. I surprised myself by finding my way to the potato field, where Joaquin and Damasio's son, Augustin (the youth who had so humiliated us in soccer on Monday) were using a yoke of oxen and a plough to harvest potatoes, a much easier method than the pick and azadon method of last time. Of course, the oxen weren't really oxen, but a cow and a bull yoked together, something I had never heard of before. Perhaps the breed, a dairy variety, is tame enough to allow this. The potatoes we were harvesting were also different from the previous time. While those were a good sized red variety, these were the little micropotatoes that Nick doesn't like to find in his soup. Still, bending over to collect them all is a wearying task. Damasio turned up a little later, and before long we had two big bags of thumb-sized potatoes. Joaquin and Augustin slung these 100 lb. bags over their shoulders and hiked off to leave them by the road. Later, I would  the the same route with a bag that weighed about 25 lbs., and I can't imagine how they did it. The road was very steep and rocky, requiring careful stepping to avoid falling on my face. I also had to carry the bag that Augustin carried when we unloaded the truck that brought us home at the end of the day. I only had to go about 15 feet over level ground, and that was about enough for me. I think I could have carried it farther, but I don't think I could have carried it more than a few feet uphill.

But, once again, harvesting potatoes made for a nice bucolic day, and this time there was no trago consumption, which was easier on my stomach. We had a nice lunch of cuy and mote, and although we shared from the same pot, we each got our own spoon. And we sat under the same shady avaocado tree,, with the same beautiful view of the mountains. After lunch, Damasio and Augustin and the cattle plowed the field up and down and then across to prepare it for planting. I assume it will be potatoes again, though I'm not sure. I followed along looking for any potatoes that the process turned up, and we did get about another 75 lbs. My legs below the knee were very tired from walking over the rough and rolling earth, but I enjoyed listening to Damasio lead the cattle, calling, "Esa! Esa!" punctuated by Augustin's shouts of, "Jala vaca pendeja!" or "Adonde vas, pendejo?" as he guided the plow.

In school we learned that plowing to clear fields leads to soil erosion, especially on sloping land. On the other hand, not plowing, or no-till, requires a lot of expensive, unwholesome herbicide. The premaculture method of using pigs and chickens to clear land would work well in this situation, because the last 75 lbs. of potatoes we turned up would induce the pigs to root around deep in the soil, but then Damasio and his family wouldn't get the 75 lbs. of potatoes. If the land were terraced, it would be difficult to plow with cattle, and would require far more human labor. This is the sort of situation I have to think about seriously if I am going to make any sort of useful agronomist-style recommendations to the people here.

I got back to the plaza at about 5, loaded down with the 25 lbs. of potatoes that Damasio's wife had rewarded me with. I felt this was over generous, but they wouldn't hear of anything else. I did open up the computer room, and, because it was Friday, I let the kids watch a movie they brought. I kept nodding off to sleep, and was glad to get home. There was a PTA meeting I should have attended, but I knew i couldn't stay awake for it. I made some scrambled eggs for dinner, and slept soundly through the night for maybe the first time since I've been here, and woke up feeling a bit sore and stiff, but well-rested. I went running as far as Achaisi and back, the farthest I've gone since I started running again about two weeks ago. I don't think it's all that far, but the hilly terrain does make it a challenge. And I haven't had any of the irregular heartbeats that bothered me a year ago. So I'll keep at it.

A side note: Estefany pointed out last night that I have been here only during the dry season, and the rainy season is coming. In contrast to what Angus said, she says you don't see the sun for six months. It will be easy to relate to Maya living in Portland, Oregon. I'm not sure how I'll dry my laundry.

Fiesta--The Pictures

                    The tough guys from Chunchi. Ivan is second from left. Mario the bullfighter is on the right.

Bullfighting, Ecuador-style. 

Sunset on my street.

Fiesta de Tolte

I know that you all have been awaiting a report on the Fiestas de Tolte as eagerly as I have been looking forward to participating in them. With a five-day fiesta, it’s hard to capture all the action, so I’m going to try and organize this by activities—at least my personal activities.

Day 1, Thursday, Nov. 17: Much to my surprise, there was school today. Even more surprising, I actually had a lesson plan to use, and I taught the kids how to respond to questions about physical feelings (hot, cold, hungry, etc.). Keep in mind that no one has been teaching the fourth and fifth grade class this week because there was another problem with the teacher’s paperwork. There was an early dismissal so that the children involved in the folk dance performance could practice their routine, which is darn cute, and pretty sophisticated for something thrown together in a few days. Needless to say, the boys here are much better folk dancers than my friends and I were at their age.

The actual fiesta kicked off with a performance of traditional music by a good size semi-local band. This isn’t the traditional music that Americans normally associate with the Andes, which involves guitars, cherengos, and pan pipes. This music is made on brass and woodwind instruments. Naturally, there are some drummers, too. I’m not sure how to describe the sound. It’s definitely in a minor key, and has sort of a military band quality. It’s a bit like the music they play in movies when someone is facing a firing squad in Mexico. A fairly short theme is played repeatedly for up to ten minutes, first to a sort of resolve ending, and then later to a kind of rising fanfare kind of ending. It isn’t hard to imagine bullfighters or gladiators entering the arena to music like this. And, in fact, the band does play during the bullfighting.

The afternoon was filled, at least for me, with more pig and sheep butchery. I have to say that Segundo made a neater job of this than Damasio did, but I still got blood on my pants. At least I didn’t have to eat any innards afterwards.

Meanwhile, the football championship was winding up, with a losers match for third place featuring two teams from Tolte. Fredi, who was playing goalie, actually pulled off a “loco” charge and scored a goal, but his team lost to a team that included both of my brawling futbolista friends. The championship game was played between Chunchi and Iltus. The most interesting thing about this game was that it was interrupted for mass. The padre seemed to find it offensive that people were watching football instead of attending the service to honor the patron saint of Tolte, San Marcial. He was almost certainly right, given that the fiestas are supposed to honor San Marcial, a saint best known, according to the padre, for solitude, prayer, and penitence, which does make for an ironic contrast with the Fiesta de Tolte. I actually wound up attending, because Augustin, who was already “bien chumado,” as people here say when someone has been drinking all day, asked me to come in with him. I thought he probably needed some kind of support. The football team from Iltus attended mass, too. Naturally, the team from Chunchi won.

By this time, preparations were being made for the first night of dancing. I hung around for a while, but nothing seemed to be happening. Since I have been struggling with a cold all week, I gave up and went home. The dancing started about an hour after that, I think, and went on until four in the morning. The most notable event seems to have been another fight, started by the same guy who started the fight a couple of weeks ago. Alcohol does not affect everyone the same way, I suppose.

Day, 2, Friday, Nov. 18: The morning was dominated by the quest for mote. I believe I have described mote before. It’s a dish of boiled corn kernels, but not of the sweet kind that Americans prefer. These are big kernels of something that looks a lot more like food than some kind of treat. Anyway, Joaquin, fairly chumado in the early morning, was somehow responsible for getting a community sized pot going. As usual, he recruited me for the job. We took a couple of trips up and down the hill behind the school to bring firewood, but then realized we didn’t have a pot or a stand to do the cooking in. We did some half-hearted looking around, and then just sat down on the bench in front of the office and waited. About an hour later, Luis, who has a community position both within and slightly outside the junta directiva, arrived with pot and stand loaded into a wheelbarrow. He had hauled it a pretty long way, so it’s probably no wonder that he left it for us to navigate the crowded area behind the school to the cooking location. Joaquin was comfortable with telling me where to push the wheelbarrow. I came close to dumping everything on the ground more than once, but didn’t, almost certainly exceeding Joaquin’s expectations. Of course, in loading the soot-blackened pot onto the stand, I did manage to cover my pants in black carbon, but since it washes out pretty easily, I thought it was a small thing. We got the fire going, and I carried enough water to fill the pot, which made me feel sort of like the sorcerer’s apprentice. By the eighth or ninth bucketful, I was looking around for a broom to do the work. But if you’re going to cook up about 50 pounds of mote, you need a lot of water. The actual cooking was done by Augustin’s wife—I apologize for not knowing her name, but women here seem to be reluctant to say what their names are, a cultural artifact I haven’t quite figured out yet. I’m glad she did the cooking. I don’t think Joaquin, Augustin, or I was up to the task.

About this time, Elvia, the junta secretary, came out of the office to tell me that Carolina, of AVANTI, needed the Chirstmas cards I had had the kids work on this week right away. I would have to pick the four “best,” and take them to Chunchi to have them scanned and e-mailed. As I’ve mentioned, it’s hard to make a quick trip to Chunchi, but I didn’t do badly. A bus came by only a few minutes after I reached the highway, and  the computer place is right at the bus stop. Unfortunately, no scanner in Chunchi was big enough to handle the A4 size paper that Carolina had asked me to use. We would have been much better off with 8 ½ x 11. But we scanned as well as we could, the fellow in the store was very helpful in compressing the file, and we sent it to Carolina by e-mail. Of course, when I got into my e-mail I found that someone had used Facebook to launch a character assassination plot against me, which again, is sort of ironic; in order for such a plot to work, one actually has to have a character, which is very different from being a character. So I knew I was safe. Amazingly, I didn’t wait more than 10 minutes for a bus when I got back up to the bus stop, and I was back in Tolte by about 1:30.

My timing was good. A few people were waiting in the plaza for the bullfighting to start at 2:30, and passing the time by drinking trago. Naturally, I had to drink some, too (it goes down a lot harder since the events of last Saturday), but I did get to hear Segundo make a fairly long declamation in Kichua, which was definitely worth the price of admission. I don’t have the slightest idea what he said, but it certainly had a noble sound. And then it was time for the bullfighting, certainly the most eagerly anticipated part of the Fiesta.

Bullfighting here is nothing like bullfighting in Spain, as I think I explained in a previous blog. Here, a truckload of bulls is backed up to the corral, and bulls are released one at a time into a crowd of amateurs, mostly young men, who wave things at the bull to attract its attention, and then jump over the fence if the bull turns in their direction. It is the rare individual who actually lets the bull rush by him. There is serious risk of injury, though, because if an older man is sufficiently chumado, he will get into the ring with the young guys to show them how it’s done. People do get killed in that situation. A bull is about the size of an NFL offensive lineman, but runs about twice as fast and has sharp points on one end. A fellow named Juan was hurt, and I guess he should have been warned that there’s nothing a bull likes better than making a hole in Juan. I know, one shouldn’t joke about these things. If the injury had been more serious, I wouldn’t dare.

And yet, the performance of the day was turned in by Damasio, who definitely could be described as an older guy showing the young guys how it’s done. He wasn’t totally chumado, but there’s no doubt that he was warming up to it. In any case, he strolled into the ring, where the young guys were busy leaping over the fence, picked up a cape, and stood like a tree trunk as the bull passed close by several times. There was really something admirable about it, even if you question the morality of teasing animals in this way. Still, it does seem better than simply cutting them up and eating them. And Ecuadorean bullfighting does not end with the bull being killed. The bull is simply returned to the truck.

I ran into Damasio in the plaza as the sun was setting, and told him that he really enjoyed seeing him “dance with the bull.” His always happy face broke into an even bigger smile. I wish I could recall word for word what he said then, because it seemed so worthwhile. But it went something like this: “This is what life is all about! To try things like bullfighting and do your best without being afraid, to eat well, to enjoy some trago, and of bitterness, nothing—nothing at all.” Is it any wonder that he is one of my favorite people in Tolte? He reminds me of the Hassidic proverb, “Only Fools Are Sad.”

Because I was feeling better, I went home, put on some clean pants, and went back for the dance. Everyone must have been worn out from Thursday’s events, or saving themselves for the big dance on Saturday. I drank some more trago with Juan, warm, mixed with some kind of tea, and simply horrible. We also ate some chicken and rice. But things were very quiet, and by about 9:30, I went home.

Saturday, Nov. 19: I got up early to do some work over the internet in relation to the AVANTI scholarship students and their hours and pay. There are some glitches here that have not been worked out yet, and I probably need to offer more supervision, but I think these are problems resulting from the fact that the program is entirely new. The students have been having trouble paying their term bills, and two students had their program pulled out from under them by their university. Anyway, I sent some e-mail to Angus, and decided to go jogging, which went pretty well. If I get consistent about jogging here, it would be very good for me. At over a mile of altitude and with steep, long hills to climb, it’s more about going the distance than speed. So far, I’ve liked it. I only hesitate to do it because it is so weird in relation to the way people live here. But, as Maya pointed out, people here expect me to do weird things because I’m a gringo. I might as well enjoy it.

As I was out, I ran into Jose Manuel, someone I’ve wanted to work with for a while. He’s a little fellow, sixty-two years old, but whenever I see him he’s banging away mightily with pick and shovel. So I told him I would come back in a little while, and he said he would still be there. The little while got to be a bit longer than I expected, because after I finished running and changed into my soot-covered pants, I headed back along the same road again. Juan lives there, and he saw me and invited me in for breakfast. So I did that for a while, and met his son who lives in Cuenca, whom I have seen before but didn’t connect to Juan. But I did get to Jose Manuel before he left his spot along the road. He warned me that he was going “muy adentro,” way into the farmlands, but I told him that was fine with me and off we went.

And muy adentro it was. I would never have reached Jose Manuel’s farm by chance on my own. It was way into the lower part of Achaisi, the mostly uninhabited part of Pistishi where many people have farmland. And this piece of land was entirely different from anything I have seen so far. It was in sort of a chasm between two hills, and most of the land was frighteningly steep. But a natural spring-fed stream runs through it, and it was probably about 300 meters lower than Tolte, so the impression was much more tropical than anything I have seen here before. Jose Manuel used water from the stream to irrigate his chard and lettuce, while gathering cilantro, parsley, and chard for market. He also used a sprinkler to water beans that were growing on an incredibly steep slope. Although I like to be involved, I had to mostly sit around and watch. He did show me a pest that is eating his Cherimoya trees—maybe my work will come later, when I try to figure out if there’s anything specific to do about that.

The time came to go back up to Tolte. Jose Manuel intended to carry his greens and some lemons up to the road and wait for a car to go by. But there were no cars; everyone was at the fiesta. We sat for a while, and then I offered to carry the bag of greens while he carried the lemons, and we started walking. Naturally, the route we took back to Tolte was the one described in my blog about acrophobia—and now I was carrying a big sack over my shoulder. It wasn’t very heavy, probably less than 20 pounds, but it was a nice little spike in my insecurity vein. Still, we made it back to Tolte without me pissing myself, and I was pleased to have made myself useful. I also learned how to say “Good morning,” “Good evening,” and  “How are you?” in Kichua. Jose Manuel awarded me a very nice avocado for my trouble, and did seem sort of surprised and grateful that I had been there, which was all very nice.

It was again time for bullfighting, so I went home, showered and changed, and headed over to the corral. Frankly, I was sort of bored with bullfighting, but it was the best entertainment available, and it was where the people were, so off I went. I ran into some people from Lluquiyai, a neighboring village, and we had a couple of beers together. These weren’t the young football players I had met before, but some much tougher young men. Still, they were friendly enough, and invited me to the Fiesta de LLuquiyai next week. I’ll have to try and figure out how to get there.

So, the bullfighting was proceeding in its usual fashion, with a lot of jumping over the fence, when one of the bulls got out of the corral. It seems to have slipped through a space between the truck and the fence. What was sort of dull now became entirely too exciting. The bull attacked a food vendor, overturning his stove, which caused a fireball of grease that fortunately did not catch the awning over the stall. Then the bull ran into town, pursued by men on horseback who almost ran me down because I didn’t hear them coming. Someone I had been speaking to earlier pulled me out of the way (stupid gringo, no sense). The bull was actually captured back near the corral, and the situation was restored to normal, but the bullfighting ended soon after that.

As I left the ring, the school teachers, who are not normally in their residence on the weekends, waved me into their place behind the school. I was surprised and very happy to see the fourth and fifth grade teacher. I guess his paperwork is on the march again. We drank quite a lot of beer, and listened to music, and talked about things educational and personal for well over an hour. These guys are very young—the sixth seventh grade teacher, an unusually tall Ecuadorean, is only 26, and I think the fourth fifth grade teacher is a year or two younger. They seem to have been friends in university. It was interesting to hear their perspectives on some of the kids, and to share mine, but we also talked about sports, college drinking bouts, and other manly whatnot until the fiesta got going again.

We went out to the plaza just in time for the fireworks. The plaza was packed with people, many from villages other than Tolte. Without doubt, this was one of the most dangerous fireworks displays I have ever seen—which probably also made it, in some ways, one of the best. Sure, the Fourth of July displays over the beach in Port Jeff are far more sophisticated and dazzling, but they just can’t compare to a deer on wheels spewing sparks into the surrounding crowd, or the “vaca loca,” a cow-shaped item the fireworks guy wears over his head, doing the same. There were rockets, and Catherine wheels, and two big fireworks towers that were like small volcanoes right there among us. It takes some faith to stand still and watch something like this, let me tell you.

It was surprisingly cold out, so I went home to get another sweater. I couldn’t find the teachers when I got back, so I went and mixed with the dance crowd. This dance featured live performers, mostly, I think, from Riobamba, and all quite good. The atmosphere was a lot like a college mixer, with way too many guys trying to find a girl to dance with. I did not prove to be any better at that now than I was when I was 18, although I think I was worried about violating some kind of social norm here. Maybe I was then, too. But there was plenty of warm trago to be consumed, and I did my share of that with both old and young. Well, maybe not my share. Friends of mine who rarely drink were way ahead of me. And all to honor San Marcial.

Day 4, Sunday, Nov. 20: This morning seems pretty quiet. I tried to wash some clothing, but we don’t seem to have much in the way of water. There are a few people scattered about the plaza, and I spent a while watching a group of men trying to get their truck started, which they did after some heavy effort. A think there’s a minga this morning to clean up the plaza, which definitely needs it. And don’t forget, the fiesta continues into tomorrow.

I headed back to the plaza about 10:30, and Segundo, Mario, Joaquin, and Augustin were there. It appeared that they had been drinking all night, or, in Augustin’s case, since Thursday. Segundo and I did some chatting, and the band did some playing, and all was pretty relaxed. Joaquin fell asleep on the spot, and Segundo spoke some more Kichua. Segundo does not look as markedly indigenous as many other residents of Tolte, but he is more apt to speak Kichua in my presence than just about anyone else.

After a while, the tough guys from Lluquiyai showed up. As we were chatting, I managed to make the potentially offensive remark that people from Tolte and Lluquiyai seemed more easy-going than people from Chunchi, who seemed more tough. That was when the tough guys from Lluquiyai turned out to be from Chunchi, both confirming my remark and requiring me to find a way out of it. But there were no hard feelings, because we were drinking beer together, and all was convivial. If all goes well, I’ll post a picture of the group with this blog entry.

The leader of the pack was a guy named Ivan (second from the left), who is certainly a tough dude. He’s a professional motorcycle racer, but has been out of the game for a while due to an injury. He broke his leg quite seriously in a motorcycle jumping competition that must have been something like ski jumping. He claims that he achieve an altitude of 200 meters, but couldn’t control his bike when he landed, which cost him 5 months in physical therapy. He now runs a dairy and cockfighting farm in Chunchi. His wife has been living in Spain for 5 years, but comes home for about a month every year. I gather that he spends the rest of the year doing the things that tough young men do when there is no female supervision.

I also spent quite a bit of time talking to Mario, who works as a security guard in Chunchi. His wife and son live in Cuenca, about three hours away. He works in Chunchi 11 days out of every 14, and spends the other three days in Cuenca. This seems like a lot of sacrifice given that his wife earns about three times as much money as he does. Family life in Ecuador is certainly not easy. Many families are divided across the country or across the world as they try to earn a decent living. Mario was especially interested in the bullfighting, and it seems the group was in Tolte specifically to watch him do it.

And, as it turns out, he was really good at it. Agile and fearless, he flagged down bull after bull, even touching their horns as they passed. He did go through the fence once, when a bull actually managed to scrape his body and tear his pants. I don’t think I got a decent picture of him, unfortunately, but I there are bullfighting pictures from this afternoon that I will try to post with this entry.

The afternoon was also tiring for me because we were drinking beer steadily. The way this is done is that you buy a case of beer and get one plastic cup. Then you pour out about half a cup, and give it to one member of the group, who drinks it, tosses out the dregs, and hands it back. Repeat with the next person, and continue at a steady pace until all your beer is gone. Never slow down or stop. It’s amazing how much beer you can go through at that rate. I wished Mr. M.I. of Colliersville, NY, had been there to help me out. Our drinking was briefly interrupted when another bull got loose, but this was less exciting than yesterday’s bull. No fireball, no horses, but they got the bull back, nonetheless, without any injuries.

By now, it was getting dark, and the guys headed back to Chunchi. I stayed in the square, continuing to drink beer with the father of one of my students, a young guy whose name I have never managed to catch. His wife, who was running one of the food stalls, didn’t seem too happy with either of us, and I can’t say I blame her. As we were bathing in her disapproval, the sound system and fireworks were being set up for the night’s dance.

Although the fireworks weren’t as spectacular as the previous night’s, they still had much of the same manic quality. Spinning, twisting balls of fire shooting out in every direction at ground level are very different from chrysanthemum showers exploding far overhead. And the tall tower spewing out a cascade of sparks really is something to see. It certainly is a heck of a way to kick off a dance.

If Saturday’s dance reminded me of a college mixer, Sunday’s was more of a family event like a wedding or a Bar Mitzvah. There were few outsiders, and this produced a nice familiar and familial feeling. Fredi’s brother (also sometimes known as Fredi, which is funny, because their first names are actually both Luis) was one of the performers. He sings professionally in Riobamba, and he really is very good. He once described himself as having “a voice with a volume that goes up to 13,” but it wasn’t the loudness that impressed me so much as it’s tunefulness and his stage presence. It’s always nice to see someone you know do something really well. I even managed to find a few dance partners, ranging in age from 16 to 60. I feel compelled to mention that the oldest woman (William’s grandmother—you remember William; he’s the really powerful futbolista that I tried to keep out of a fight) is traditional enough to wear the felt hat that is part of the traditional garb of the Andes. It seems a notable cultural achievement, or like crossing into some new level of integrating myself into the community.

Day 5, Monday, November 21: Today is off to another quiet start. I thought there might be school, but the K-3 classroom and cafeteria are crowded with fiesta junk and sort of a mess, so the teachers got the day off. The band that has been playing in the plaza all week has gone home. No one is in the plaza, or visible anywhere else. I think Tolte is just resting its aching head. It seems almost like a ghost town.

There was supposed to be some kind of program in the afternoon: greased pole and greased pig contests, as well as cockfighting, but nothing much was happening. Some of the older guys (that is to say, guys my age) were kicking around a soccer ball. They insisted that I come join them. The first thing that happened was that I went crashing to the ground. A soccer ball on cement doesn’t behave like a soccer ball on grass. This one sort of glued itself in place, and my monmentum (and generally poor balance) threw me down. It got worse. They begged me to play with them when they faced off against some younger guys. I warned them that I was terrible, but they probably already knew that, and that’s why they made me play goalie, until it was obvious that I couldn’t do that. In the end, a good young player, a young guy who was pretty drunk, and a little kid beat about eight of us older folks 10-5. The bottom line was that we couldn’t stop the good player at all, and we had no goalie. Nobody gave me a hard time, but I don’t think they’ll be in a rush to ask me to play again. I’m glad to say I was quick enough to keep up, but with zero soccer skill, it didn’t make much difference where I was.

Although I had been told that the fiesta would end in the late afternoon, there was an evening program. The highlight was a soccer game played by grandmothers, or women over 45. They looked very dignified in their hats, and showed great enthusiasm. And none of them fell down trying to kick the ball, either. The game ended in a tie, and there was a shootout to determine the winner. One of the women on the winning team received a pig as a prize. But no one showed up for the cockfighting, or climbed the greased pole. The weather was cold, and the plaza emptied out early. I was tired too, and was home before 9. The fiesta is over for this year. I don’t think I could take much more, but I will be sorry to see it end. Of course, the Fiesta de Lluquiyai is next weekend…

Carnicero

Warning: This entry contains graphic descriptions of animal dismemberment and inappropriate alcohol consumption, and is not appropriate for anyone, really.

Saturday is a day when I always go looking for something to do, because there is no school to fill up the day. I definitely wanted to go shopping in Chunchi, but I also wanted to meet up with Nick, the Peace Corps volunteer there, and he was going to be in Alausi for the day. The football campeonato semifinal was scheduled for Saturday morning, but had been postponed to Sunday afternoon. So the day was not off to a promising start.

On the other hand, the wee hours of Saturday morning saw the return of Don Ramon, owner of the house I live in. He and his family live in Spain, but he came back to Tolte on his own. And since about a quarter of Tolte is related to Ramon, it was only reasonable that he receive a big welcome home fiesta. So when I got back from finding out that the football semifinal was postponed, I found a group of five or six women surrounding a medium-sized pig. Being curious, but not knowing anything about pig slaughter except what I had witnessed in Costa Rica over twenty years ago, I kept a respectful distance, but didn’t leave the scene. After some discussion about who should do what, the women pinned the pig to the ground on its left side, and the grandmother of about half a dozen of my students stuck one of our dull, dull kitchen knives between its ribs. I think the idea was to pierce the pig’s heart, but my personal post mortem suggested that this did not occur. It definitely took the poor animal a fair stretch of time to die, but it did so in a quiet, dignified way not typical of pigs. Once they had it pinned down, it sort of gave up.

But wait, there’s more. Once the pig was dead, they brought in a sheep. This animal was slaughtered with the traditional cutting of its throat, which seemed to work a lot better. This, in fact, is what I had seen used for pig slaughter in Costa Rica, and I’m not sure why it wasn’t used for the pig here. I was invited to help carry the pig to the grill where its hair would be singed off, and, in classic gringo fashion, I got blood all over my pants. No one else got even slightly dirty. Of course, I was holding the leg closest to the death wound.

At about this time, Jose and Narcisa came home from an all-night brick firing at the kiln along the highway. This was handy, because, as Jose explained to me, his father had taught him to skin sheep starting from about the age of 10. We hung the sheep up by its hind legs from a carport rafter, and Jose made a series of cuts (incisions would quite describe the process, because the knife was too dull) that allowed us to peel the sheepskin off in one piece. This is not effortless; you have to keep pulling quite hard, and occasionally making additional cuts in the underlying tissue to maintain momentum. Also, the wool was absolutely filthy with mud and shit (again, excrement is not the right word), so we had to work in a way that kept the skin from touching the meat. Jose finished the process by cutting through the spine to remove the sheep’s head with the skin, and then cut the head off the skin. The head and forelegs were then put on the grill to have their hair singed off. Good for soup. After that, Mirian brought out a washtub and we disemboweled the sheep, a process that involved a long cut down the abdomen and then tapping the knife through the ribs by hitting it with a rock. The important thing is that all the guts slide out into the washtub without any rip or cut in the intestines, which would make a big mess. Narcisa and I had to hold everything in until Jose could finish cutting through the ribs. The science teacher in me rapidly identified heart, lungs, liver and intestines. I can’t say I ever say the kidneys bladder, or reproductive system. I probably touched them, though.

Most of the next several hours involved singing the pig’s bristly hair off and scraping the skin clean. The goal was to produce a skin with an even, yellow color. Straw and eucalyptus leaves were brined to produce a high flame, though not a very hot one, and we rotated the pig and scraped at the skin until it was more or less clean and yellow all over. Then it was time to skin the pig, though the goal here was not to get a single piece as it had been with the sheep. This surprised me a little, as I thought that the skin might be sold for leather, but that is probably a different process. Anyway, you get the skin of by making an initial cut at the location of your choosing, and sticking your fingers between the dermis and the underlying layer of fat and lifting the skin off. Everyone came out of the kitchen and we ate “cuero con mote,” leather with kernels of corn. I think most of my neighbors chewed and swallowed the leather, though I only managed to chew it and spit it out for a nearby dog to finish off.

Then it was back to work. Around this time, Damasio came in and was given the job of disemboweling the pig. Because I had been a good assistant on the sheep, and because my pants were already filthy, I got to help with this, too. The process was slightly different from the sheep, in that Damasio made two cuts from the pig’s chin to its anus, so that a larger piece of flesh would be peeled off and more of the inner cavity exposed. He used the same rock to drive the knife through the ribs. We stopped for a moment so that Mirian could ladle out the blood from the cavity. The blood was cooked; some of it was stuffed into sausages and some of it was served out on a plate. But more of that later. E opened the pig’s ribcage and Mirian came back with a bit pots, and we slid all the guts out into that.

Now Damasio got into the main butchering. I held the pig still while he cut off the four legs at the joints, and separated the ribsand head from the spine. We also broke the jaw off of the head. It was at this point that the fact that we had no running water since the night before presented itself as a real problem. There was some kind of cleaning up that Damasio wanted to do, and we needed water for the process. Fortunately, Pablo and his wife Martina arrived then. Pablo is the town carpenter and handyman, and I know Martina as the president of the local equivalent of the PTA. Pablo went right to work fixing the broken water supply, while Martina used a bucket of water that we did have to wash out the sheep intestines. But Damasio left because the pipes needed an hour to set.

On the other hand, Jose didn’t seem to need water for the next step in the butchering process as Damasio felt he did, so I went back to work with Jose cutting the meat from the bones. A pig has a lot of meat, and this was a long process. But we weren’t cutting the meat into cuts of pork the way a butche would do in the States. We were just chopping off portion-sized chunks to be turned into fritada. We started with the surface pieces that had the most fat, which were tossed into a pot to render the lard that would be needed to cook the fritada. Then we got into the deeper layers, cutting off random pieces about half the size of my fist. The funniest moment during this process was when Jose innocently commented that the meat he was cutting off the pig’s hnd leg looked just like ham. He seemed genuinely surprised to learn that what he was cutting really was ham.

Once we got down to the bone, we passed the bones over to Pablo, who busted them up with an axe. We took the bony mass back and cut it into more fist sized pieces, until we had a big pot full representing about half the pig. The lard was ready, but it wasn’t enough, so we added another couple of pounds of vegetable shortening and a couple of pots of salty water, garlic, and cumin seeds to the cooking pot, and then tossed in the content of our meat pot. Mirian and Laura, under the direction of Elena, stirred the mass with a stick every now and again to prevent it form burning.

Jose and I went back to work on the rest of the pig, which had a lot more bone than the first half. We would cut, and Pablo would chop, and then we’d cut some more. I was somewhat surprised that the ribs, which are such a delicacy back in the States, were given the same treatment. Before long, we had another pot of raw meat waiting for the first round of fritada to finish cooking. I expected that we would deal with the sheep the same way we had the pig, but I was wrong. Pablo just battered it with the axe for a while until everyone was satisfied that it could be cooked, and that was that. Elena called Jose and me for lunch.

Lunch was an Ecuadorian dish called Yaguarloca. I have to say that this was the most challenging thing I’ve tried to eat in Ecuador. I thought it was a soup with potatoes and macaroni, but the tubular objects resembling macaroni were actually tripe, or sheep intestines. Jose chewed and swallowed his, but I couldn’t quite accomplish this feat. I chewed all right, but never seemed able to break the intestines into smaller pieces. I thought the soup tasted like something between sweat and urine, but Jose said it was one of his favorite foods. I have a long way to go before I’m and Andean.

By the time lunch was over, it was time to top the first batch of fritada off with a big bottle of beer, which is said to produce a desirable golden color. And the fritada did look pretty good, especially compared to the Yaguarloca. We all had a little, and then got to work preparing the next pot of fritada. Weirdly, I was sort of put in charge of this pot, I think because it was believed that I could follow instructions. Segundo turned up, sort of just in time, because I definitely would have made a mistake or two. I think that the first mistake was that too much water was added, and we had to wait for a long time for it to boil off so we could add the lard. This meant the meat cooked more by boiling than by frying. But, in the end, it looked pretty similar to the first batch. Stirring this batch was more exciting, because chunks or identifiable bones would come to the surface, giving the whole thing sort of a Halloween feeling.

It was now about six o’clock, and I headed over to the computer room to skype Maya. We chatted for a while, and then one of the university boys came in and asked for help with an English assignment. After that, the folk dancers were meeting in the plaza to go over a dance for the upcoming Fiesta de Tolte, which starts this Thursday and will last until next Monday. If I survive that much partying, it should make for a nice entry.

And I say that advisedly, because when I got back to the house, the actual welcome home fiesta was already underway. I was treated to some soup that was not Yaguarloca, and a big plate of fritada. But I had hardly gotten through the door when Segundo poured me a shot of trago. And then  the beer drinking started as well. I knew that the evening was likely to end badly for me, but it was a great party anyway. After we ate, the drinking continued fast a furious, with more and more beer and trago appearing every few minutes. Then the dancing started. I had been concerned that my dancing skills were in no way adequate to Tolte, because my friends in Costa Rica had all been skilled salsa dancers. How wrong I was. The dancing here is much simpler, sort of marching back and forth as a couple in time to the music. And we did this until people were so drunk that they had to go home. Unfortunately, the party was in my home, so I danced around until I had to go outside and throw up. I am “chuchaqui,” (hung over, in Kichua), and I never did get to Chunchi to buy fruits and vegetables. I think there is another market day Wednesday or Thursday, and maybe I’ll go then. I hope it’s Wednesday, because the Fiesta starts Thursday morning, and I can’t miss that. But I was sorry to miss the first semifinal game of the football campenato, even though I did manage to pull myself together enough by four in the afternoon to attend the second one. Tolte teams lost both games, and will have to play each other for third, while Chunchi and Iltus face off for the championship on Thursday. 

Minga

Yesterday (it occurs to me that I ought to date these entries, since I don’t write every day and I can’t always post them the day I write them, so “yesterday” means Wednesday, November 9, 2011) I participated in a “minga,” or community work detail. I had finished teaching early, because the fourth and fifth grades had the day off. Their teacher was taking a training course in Chunchi. I’m glad they don’t try to have me substitute for him anymore; it doesn’t seem to be worth the trouble. So I taught the sixth and seventh grades, and was finished by about 9:30. I noticed that lots of people were gathering in the plaza, all armed with azedones, picks, or shovels. This implied a minga, and I went to join the crowd.

A minga seems to be a tradition with indigenous roots. It is a way of accomplishing some task for the community without having to depend on outside aid or spend tax money. Very often, mingas in Tolte have to do with roads or the drainage and irrigation system, which is related to the roads in many spots. As I stood in the plaza without any tools, I really wasn’t sure how or whether I could contribute anything to the minga beyond my silly gringo presence, but I decided to wait and see. After a while, we hit the trail that drops down behind the school, reached the new road, and kept walking. Sooon we were on the road down to the train station. This made me nervous; the downhill side is dreadfully steep in some places, and I wasn’t sure I would be able to participate in any useful way.

We finally reached the work location, a culvert under the road with steep mountainsides at the entrance and outlet. It was plugged with debris from a minor landslide that ust have occurred Monday, the day it rained all day while I was traveling in from Portoviejo. That must have been a heavy rain, because I also saw small slides along the highway from Alausi to Tolte. In any case, I got immediate relief from my worries. I could work standing on the road (though some people did go over the edge to work on the outlet side), and I didn’t need any tools, because we were passing rocks, bucket brigade style from where the slide had clogged the inlet to an out of the way spot along the side of the road. A few people did work to pull the rocks away from the inlet, but most of us were passing rocks from hand to hand.

The effect was similar to the days I spent working with bricks. The first hundred rocks or so don’t seem like a big deal. I did pick up a couple of real big ones so as not to seem like a total loser, and carried them to the other side of the road. But mostly, it was fairly light work for the first hour. Then things start to change. The weak area between my shoulder blades definitely started to tighten up, and continued to do so for the next three hours. I didn’t fail to hold up my part of the rock chain, but I suspect that the local people didn’t feel like they were having as hard a time as I was. One young woman was working with her toddler slung on her back, and didn’t seem to mind much. I need hardly add that the women here are very strong. To say that they work like men would be an insult—they work much harder than almost any man I know, and harder than many of the men here. If a man picks up a big rock, a woman is likely to pick up a bigger one to show him who’s boss.

And the mood throughout was cheerful. People laughed and joked as they worked, though I can’t say I understood much. I got the impression that these were long-standing jokes based on the known characters and relationships of the townspeople, which are still largely a mystery to me. But I was glad to be there, working along with everyone else, because it was the sort of civic obligation that it just doesn’t pay to dodge if you want people to treat you like a real friend.

We were near the end of the work by about 12:30. More debris is likely to slide into the culvert in the future, but at the speed the water moves, some of it will wash out. Segundo, a stocky fellow about my age, and Petrona, a very big, tall woman, were clearing the opening of the inlet, which had finally open up now that we had taken away so many rocks. Suddenly, Petrona disappeared. The rock pile had given way, and she fell to the bottom of the culvert. The mood shifted just as suddenly, as everyone wondered if she were all right, and how we would get her out. But a couple of minutes later, she climbed up the outlet side to the road again, looking no worse (although a bit embarrassed) for the experience. And so the whole event finished in the cheerful mood that had dominated all day.

Victor, who has spent time in Spain, pointed out that in the US, this would all be done with machines, and of course he’s right. And maybe it’s better that way—there’s much less risk of anyone getting hurt. And there were plenty of ways to get hurt yesterday, including the possibility of another rock slide. You can’t just romanticize this sort of work. But the community spirit is a good thing to experience and be part of. So I wish the people of Tolte a future full of safe mingas.

My Vacation

You will all have to pardon the lengthy interruption in my blogging. I have been on the move, first to Quito and then on to Portoviejo to visit my cousin Amy (and to do some vacationing, not that I’ve really earned it yet). One of the positive results of all this traveling around is that I now feel that the bus system in Ecuador is not as out of reach as it was, and that six or seven hours in a bus is no big deal. This may or may not make me more mobile—we’ll have to see.

The trip to Quito was necessary because my tourist visa was running out (hard to believe, but I’ve been here over two months). The tourist visa was only good until December 5. But because I work for a stipend, and not a salary, I am eligible for a volunteer visa. Volunteers are lumped in with clergy and missionaries, which makes me feel a bit strange (the gospel of English is the World’s Second Language?), but the visa lasts a year, which will easily carry me through the next seven months. And this is a good thing, because the visa costs almost $200, requires 8 different documents to confirm my volunteer status, and required me to wait four hours in the Ministerio del Exterior to get it. Once again, the Peace Corps sheltered me from all this in Costa Rica. We had a special visa, and never had to deal with the details of where it came from. But, because Angus has become very good at preparing the paperwork, all went smoothly and the visa was I believe) ready yesterday.

I also got to know the touristic area of Quito a bit better. I took the trole (an electric bus with dedicated lanes) to the historic center of Quito, which is really quite nice. I spent some time in the Catedral, which is richly decorated inside and has the tombs of the presidents of Ecuador arranged all around one wing. It was sort of eerie to be in a room that contained the mortal remains of Mariscal Sucre, Ecuador’s counterpart to George Washington. I was kind of glad to get back out into the open air.

I did the visa paperwork before noon on Tuesday, and should have just headed to Portoviejo then. I didn’t because I understood it to be a ten hour trip, and didn’t want to arrive late. How foolish I was. Wednesday was the start of the national holiday, and when I got to the bus station at 6:30 AM, the whole country was there—and trying to go to Portoviejo, or at least the province of Manabi, because that’s where the beaches are. So at 6:30 AM I bought a ticket for a bus to Portoviejo at 4 PM that was supposed to get me there at midnight.

The thought of spending the day in the bus station didn’t appeal to me, though, so I soon bought another ticket to Guayaquil. This would be a longer trip, but I figured that leaving at 10:30 AM would be less boring than standing around the bus station, and would be enough time to get me to Portoviejo earlier than midnight. How wrong I was. The police stopped the bus because its tires were bald, and we didn’t leave until 11:30. And I still got to Portoviejo at midnight. But I didn’t sit around the bus station, and I did get a good look at the countryside between Quito and Guayaquil. Once you get ut of the Andes, of course, Ecuador is tropical, with big oil palm and banana plantations, and denser vegetation than I am used to in Tolte. On the other hand, the coastal zone seems more impoverished than the Andes. People live in houses made of cane and bamboo, and there isn’t the same sense of a society of independent farmers that I have in Tolte. Other than that, I can’t say I know much about exactly what is happening in the lowlands.

But when I got to Portoviejo, I was entirely vaulted out of my rural development mindset. My cousin Amy is a high school exchange student in Portoviejo, where she lives with a host family whose own son is on exchange in Switzerland. Her papa, Jose Luis, very kindly picked me up from the bus station in Portoviejo at midnight, which I felt sorry to have to ask, but couldn’t do otherwise. Jose Luis is the Gerente General of a bank in Puerto Lopez, and his wife, Nancy, sells imported clothing, so their lifestyle is outside of my Latin American experiences. They have two cars, a lovely modern home in a gated community, and a beach house in San Jacinto. My visit was spent almost entirely in the beach house, and each day we visited different beaches from San Jacinto up to Canoa.

You all know I’m not a beach guy, but these beaches are something special. They are on the Pacific ocean, but the water is Caribbean turquoise. The water is also temperate, cool enough to refresh but not at all cold. I particularly liked the beach in San Clemente, which was framed by a high cliff at one end. The walk I took along that beach was truly the sort of relaxing experience that people escape to tropical beaches for.

Our days at the beach were fairly similar one to another, so I won’t go into great detail. We had gorgeous weather, surprisingly mild for a tropical coast, and excellent food. The cuisine of Manabi is popular all over Ecuador, with many Quito restaurants offering “comida Manabita.” The food is based on plantains at various stages of ripeness, maduro (fully yellow) or verde (still green), which are used sort of the way we use potatoes in the US. The platanos are mashed, fried, toasted and served at almost every meal. They seem to be delicious in any form. I think Amy and I have a particular weakness for chifle, which is like thin platano chips, and easily as addictive as potato chips.

I suppose a highlight was that Amy and I cooked dinner when we went back to Portoviejo on Sunday evening. This involved a trip to SuperMaxi, an American style grocery store, to buy the ingredients to chicken cacciatore. I think Amy and I did a pretty good job, but the food seemed a bit bland to our hosts, although they did praise it. I don’t know when I’ll eat anything like it again.

And then it was Monday morning, and I was overdue to return to Tolte. This trip went more smoothly, though: Portoviejo to Guayaquil, a 15 minute wait to catch a bus to Riobamba, Riobamba to Alausi, and then lucky enough to catch a ride from Alausi to Tolte after les sthan an hour’s wait. Door to door, I made the trip in 12 hours, which is not at all bad. I also arrived before it was completely dark. I seem to have missed the opening shot of the rainy season, as it rained all day in Tolte, but it had stopped by the time I arrived. This is a good thing, because I desperately need to do laundry today.

This week will involve me moving from the house I live in to the other Narcisa’s house, where I often eat lunch. We’ll see how that goes.

Wildcat Day Off

Much to my surprise, there is no school today. Apparently, there was some need for the teachers to do something at their headquarters in Riobamba, and I guess they didn't feel it necessary to let me know. Or maybe I put out the wrong kind of vibe. Anyway, I have spent the morning huddled by my internet connection, taking care of some odds and ends that require long wait times at the speeds available to me.

As I was sitting here, I thought I'd respond to the question posed to me yesterday evening regarding whether the universe pays you back for doing the right thing, or being on the right path. Here's an experience from Tuesday, which ties in pretty well with the last blog.

As you will recall, Joaquin entrusted me with a bottle of brutal homemade trago that wound up being consumed, in its entirety, by the futbol players. Consequences were unattractive. But Monday evening, Joaquin found me in the plaza to tell me that he needed the booze to offer to the crew of people working with him to dig holes for light poles. I can understand this, since the holes had to be five feet deep in soil that has enough rock in it to be a pain to dig through. But, of course, I no longer had the alcohol he had donated to the futbolistas. Since he couldn't go, I guess he felt that I should be the one to make the trip to Chunchi to get more.

Going to Chunchi, as going to Alausi, is no big deal. getting back is always a drag. In addition, Joaquin was not working near his home in Tolte, but in another sub-village of Pitishi called Achaisi, about halfway down to the train station, maybe 45 minutes walk. he was also not working near the main road down, but in some unknown location above the road. But, feeling that I should deal with things one at a time and wanting to maintain his excellent good will (although risking the possibility that he would think i was a doormat), I went on to Chunchi, found the store that had sold us the rotgut, was told they were all out, bought a bottle of Zhumir, which is the commercial version of moonshine, and actually managed to catch a bus back to Tolte, all in the space of about two and a half hours. That is near record time, but keep in mind that Chunchi is less than 10 miles away.

So now I was back on the Tolte road heading down to Achaisi, a community that may or may not have 7 full time residents, but where several residents of Tolte have property. As I walked along, I noticed a young woman ahead of me carrying her baby on her back, as women do here. They wrap a shawl around their shoulders and under the baby's bottom, tie tightly, and march along. The baby never slips out, which is sort of amazing. But in this case, I did find a little white bonnet on the road in front of me. I picked it up, caught up with the woman whom I have seen before, but whose name I don't know), and handed it over, for which I was rewarded with "Dios le pague," (May God reward you), the Ecuadorian phrase for "Thank you."

I continued along my way, wondering how I would find Joaquin when I got to Achaisi. A truck came up behind me, and at the wheel was Pablo, the carpenter, who was meeting his wife Martina for lunch in Achasi. She was working with her mother and a child at a field task that i was too distracted to identify, but looked awfully demanding. Pablo not only brought me to Achasi, but also told me what route I should take to find Joaquin, how to avoid the fierce dogs that guard one of the houses. Finding the route took some additional shouting and hand-waving on Pablo's part, because the entrance involved some climbing of the sort that I find frightening. But, armed with my bottle of booze, I made it up and onto the main path of Achasi and started looking for Joaquin. After 15 or 20 minutes of walking, and with the help of the hole diggers, I found his wife in a little house that must have been a family residence in the past. I handed the bottle over, and she told me where Joaquin and Augustin were working. As I walked in the direction, I realized I was in a mountain meadow of pure rural beauty. Naturally, I never would have seen it had I not gone on this fool's errand. Joaquin directed me back to the path, and I made it down without being bitten by the dogs, who decided to attack this time. They did seem crazy, but stuck to a certain distance from the house, and did not chase em down the road. I was in time to catch a ride back to Tolte with Pablo.

So there you have it. A trip that would have been impossible without guidance, and difficult without a ride, became fairly easy. Was it because I retrieved the baby bonnet, or because I was delivering booze? The world will never know.

A few unrelated notes follow, so if you want narrative coherence, stop reading now. If you really care about teaching English in Tolte, you can take your chances.

This week, I have been teaching the children words for clothing. They are particularly fascinated by teh word "sunglasses," I think because the sight of someone in sunglasses seems so exotic. No one here uses them, in spite of all the dust and UV light, which is probably why so many people have vision problems as they get older. But this is information for some other time.

The kids have done a pretty god job learning the words, and yesterday I got into the phrases "Take off" and "Put on" as a way of forming sentences. I had brought some of my stuff, and they put on my cap, sunglasses, sweater, and jacket. It finally occurred to me that what they needed was some physical connection, so I put the jacket and sunglasses on one line, and the sweater and cap on the other. I split the class into two relay race teams. The first person had to put on the jacket and glasses (or the sweater and cap), run back to the next person, who had to get the clothes on, and run to deliver them to their original places. Repeat as necessary until everyone has had a turn. All I can say is that i wish I had video. I don't know if it will help them learn English, but it sure brightened my day.

In other news, the adult English class has been struggling to maintain its existence. The past three times I gave the class, no one showed up. But last night I had six of the young folks in my computer room, and things were a lot livelier. One left pretty quickly (he looked like he'd rather be out on a motorcycle), but the rest stayed long enough to make a pretty good class. Of  course, I'm going to be away in Quito and Portoviejo next week, so I'll lose momentum again, but I think that over the next seven months, this should get going pretty well. And maybe the universe is paying me for continuing to offer the class every Tuesday and Thursday. If you build it, they will come...

Quito and Portoviejo: Quito to get my visa extended so that I can spend the full school year in Tolte, and Portoviejo so that I can visit my cousin Amy Summer, interchange high school student (although she has already graduated from American high school and accepted to Wellesley College, talented young person that she is). Portoviejo will be my first exposure to the Ecuadorian coast, reputed to be quite different in nature from the Andean highlands where I live. Also far away. I'm not sure how far Portoviejo is from Quito, but it will take me 10-12 hours to get back to Tolte on buses that go from Portoviejo to Guayaquil to Alausi and then to Tolte. Considering the difficulty of getting out of Alausi, I might be better off going back through Quito. We'll see. If you don't here from me for a week or so, it's because I'm on the road.

Futbol nuevamente

I haven't had the chance to mention that Tolte is hosting a futbol championship of teams from Tolte and the neighboring villages. the game they are playing isn't actually futbol, but "indor," which is payed in the village plazas, which are about one-quarter the size of an actual soccer field. Teams include six players per side, and action and scoring are greatly accelerated compared to true futbol. Scores of 10-6 or so are pretty common. The payers are so densely packed that it can be difficult to sort out the action, but some of the players show an incredible ability to move with the ball over the concrete surface, where the ball moves a lot more quickly than it does on grass.

One of the teams, Los Vecinos, is composed of many of the same players as the Tolte travelling team mentioned in previous blogs, though that team is spread out among four or five teams playing in the tournament. In any case, Sunday night turned out to be the night for Los Vecinos to celebrate their victory, along with some players from the other teams. As usual, frightening amounts of beer were consumed, but that wasn't the worst of it. In the course of the afternoon, Joaquin and I went to Chunchi. he had some errands to run, and invited me along for the ride. One of the errands was to find a place selling homemade trago, moonshine made from sugar cane. In the end, he found one, but asked me to carry the bottle (probably for fear of what his wife and family might say). In the end, I not only wound up with the bottle, but the bottle became the group possession of the futbolistas.

How can I describe what this stuff tasted like? I have had other homemade tragos, and they range from pretty bad to pretty good. But if I tell you that this stuff tasted like turpentine, I might not be conveying the full horror of what we were drinking (washed down with beer, of course). Fortunately, they all had a tremendous head start on me, or I might not have survived. Everyone did his best to break out whatever English he knew, and it was all pretty entertaining, until it was time to go home.

because I have helped to carry some of these boys home before, I got roped into doing it again. But this wasn't the one at a time trip of the previous event, but sort of a mass migration uphill to the vecinario the Vecinos come from. And during this migration, one of them decided that what he really needed to do was fight with his cousin.

I don't know if I have described this cousin before, but his name is William (or maybe Alfonso or Patricio, code name Pato). He's short, in the way one expects Ecuadorians to be, but is so powerful that, like the young Arnold Schwarznegger, he "has muscles in his face," to quote someone I knew long ago. He's an incredible athlete, definitely one of the stars of the futbol team, and not someone to start a fight with. Except that he was incredibly drunk and didn't feel like fighting. which his cousin Gonzalo absolutely did.

I'm not a brave man. It's just that simple. But somehow, keeping these two guys apart suddenly became incredibly important to me (maybe because of my own level of inebriation, though I wasn't as far gone as most). Maybe it was the high school teacher in me emerging in an alien environment. And that's how I found myself both trying to hold William back and get him home, which required going forward. This is comparable to trying to stop a HumVee by holding on to the bumper.

Fortunately, another futbolista named Cristian (an easy-going soul, maybe a bit more grown-up than the rest) also got involved in holding Gonzalo back. Otherwise we never would have gotten anywhere. But I wound up in the middle of things more than once, and was lucky to escape with a scraped knee and a scratch under my right eye. Not bad, considering. And Gonzalo and William got home largely uninjured, which was a real miracle. I guess that puts the "peace" in Peace Corps. Of course, all my students noticed the scratch under my eye this morning, because the brawl was the biggest news to hit Tolte since the brawls of last year's fiestas. These fiestas are coming around again in about three weeks, and I guess there will be more of this kind of thing, but worse, so I'm going to try to take my leave earlier. Happy Dia de San Marcial to all.

But I did wonder, as I walked home and went to bed, am I braver than I thought? Was I just heedless, so that I didn't have time to overcome any fears? After all, I didn't stop to consider whether anyone was armed (no one was). Or was I motivated by the idea that William trusted me to get him home? If I knew what to conclude, I suppose there would be the chance to learn something about myself from this, which is why a person takes a job teaching in Ecuador for $360 a month. But I'm sort of mystified, myself.