Travel Day

Angus is in town for the “hospitality test” at the train station, and Saturday (Sept. 24) turned out to be a big traveling day for us, totally unrelated to the train test. First of all, I wanted to go to Alausi, capital of the canton (sort of like the county seat), to get some cash and buy a few things. I especially needed a pair of jeans, because one of the pairs I brought with me just doesn’t fit well enough to count on. I also needed a towel, something I have been scraping by without since I arrived. You want to know how—okay, in what I regard as the sort of thing people expect me to do, I have been drying off with yesterday’s T-shirt before putting on today’s clothes. Come on, once I said I didn’t have a towel, you knew that’s what I was doing. Angus really needed to use the internet, and I wanted to, because I can’t get used to checking my e-mail only two or three times a week.

Anyway, off we went to Alausi in the back of a pick-up truck, because that’s what people do here when the bus doesn’t come. Sure, it’s stupidly unsafe, but that’s part of the thrill of living in the developing world. We got to Alausi and found an actual cash machine, something that doesn’t exist in Tolte or Chunchi. It didn ‘t work. But there was actually a second cash machine that did. With money in our pockets, the first thing to do was get breakfast, scrambled eggs, bread, and coffee. I get coffee very rarely because I keep forgetting to buy any, and it’s only instant anyway, but I was glad to have some. Then we went to an internet portal we had used a coupe of weeks ago, and it was closed. The reason was that they were doing some kind of transmission maintenance. The electricity has been off from 8-5 every day since Thursday. So no internet yesterday, either.

But I was able to buy jeans, an additional pair of underwear, and a towel. Only the jeans were a bargain at $18. It’s been a long time since I bought a towel, but at $7, I was really sorry I hadn’t packed one. The underwear, at $4.25, were no bargain, but are unquestionably the nicest pair I own. I also bought a children’s book (Aesop’s Fables) for the library. It dawned on me last week that we do not have anything like a good set of graded reading material in our tiny library, which has maybe 50 books in Spanish (and maybe 60 in English) for children. Aesop’s fables are useful at around the third grade level because the vocabulary is a bit bigger than in lower level reading, but everything is very short, so you can finish before you get worn out. I’m also sorry I didn’t bring the children’s books in Spanish from home, but you can’t carry everything. I’ll have to hit a book store in a big city on one of my “weekends out.”

From the bookstore we went to the hospital so that Angus could coordinate, or communicate, with the director of the TB program. There are two or three cases of TB in Tolte, and there is supposed to be a program to make sure that the patients are taking their medicine every day for three months as directed. The medicine, by the way, is free to the patient, to help ensure compliance and TB eradication. Angus got the phone number he needed, so we got lunch ($3 for a healthy plate of chicken, rice, and vegetables with more coffee) and headed back to Tolte, this time inside a bus.

When we got to Tolte, it was almost 1. Mesias, who owns one of the three general stores and a small passenger van, had invited us to a community festival where he had been “invited” to give away prizes to the crowd. Mesias is one of my favorite people in Tolte. He’s unusually short, even by Ecuadorean standards, and built like a wrestler. I think I find him so likeable because he’s really open and affable at all times, and gives the impression of being a genuinely contented family man, with a young wife and four little girls ranging from babyhood to the seventh grade. He’s also a font of information about local history and events.

The civic fiesta was in a tiny place called Toctezimin, a half an hour above Chunchi. And I do mean “above.” In all that driving time, I doubt we moved more than a mile or two east or west. The rest of the distance was all up. Driving is much more three-dimensional here than on Long Island.  Toctezimin has about 80 residents, wich makes it even smaller than Tolte. Farming is a little different, too. The extra altitude means the climate is colder, with even more emphasis on potatoes, wheat, and barley than in Tolte.

The fiesta included food booths, a soccer tournament, and bull fighting, the setting for Mesias’s largesse. Bull fighting here is not much like he Spanish art. It involves bulls being let out of a truck into a make-shift bull ring, where local boys with matador capes try to lure the animals into attacking without getting trampled. Somewhat to my surprise, no one was. Mesias had regaled Angus and me beforehand with stories of fatalities at other civic fiestas, which didn’t sound too festive to me. But people here seem to view risk in a very different way from North Americans. In any case, after the bull fighting, Mesias’ brought out a bunch of stuff an started tossing it to the crowd like a one-man Mardi Gras parade: soda, candy, wine, liquor, all tossed into the air to whomever could grab it. He was a big hit.

After that, the man who invited him to give all this stuff away invited us to dinner. And, as the occasion demanded, dinner was Cuy con Papas, Guinea Pig with Potatoes. Having been sick all week, I wasn’t too enthusiastic with my piece of the Guinea Pig, but I did my best with the accompanying bowl of soup and its lump of pork, and the mote (big kernels of boiled corn). I also risked a glass of chicha (corn “beer”), something I am trying to get someone to teach me how to make. It involved boiling corn meal, adding an appropriate amount of crude sugar, and waiting a few days. More on this as it develops. Anyway, to top it all off, we were given a 12 bottle case of beer (that’s 1 liter bottles, by the way) which we had to find a way to finish off. Fortunately, the Tolte soccer team (there they are again!) had just finished their last game and were able to help us. They also took care of the rest of my Guinea Pig.

By this point, I knew that if I weren’t desperately ill, my stomach troubles were over. And indeed they were. I woke up fine this morning, worked on my laundry, and prepared for that practice run of the train station hospitality test which will happen Tuesday. This test is being run by the train company to determine if the Nariz del Diablo station is ready to receive overnight visitors and handle guided tour experiences into Tolte. One of the particular concerns were to see if our two young guides, Fredi y Fredi, were up to the task. We sort of dragged one seriously hung-over Fredi from his house. The other was nowhere to be found. Also, one of the two people who are supposed to cook told us yesterday that he didn’t really feel like doing it. But we ground ahead with a trip down the mountain in Mesias’ van working on guide patter with the Fredi we had. We picked up some of the cafeteria staff, and rode back up trying to figure out what we need to be ready to go on Tuesday. Weirdly, it seems as if everything is going to be fine. That is, after Angus has sort of an anxious day tomorrow.

I have sort of an anxious Monday, too. It seems that the third teacher really is going to arrive tomorrow, which means that I’ll lose my classroom space. I should be able to set up in the breakfast room or in an open room upstairs in the municipal building. And tomorrow night, I start my classes for adults, which will mostly focus on the train station personnel. As of tomorrow, I’ll have been in Ecuador 3 weeks. I can’t figure out why, but it seems like I’ve been here for months.