Things happen, and then they stop

Where last week seemed to hold the promise of frenetic activity for me, this week has seen things slip into their usual slow pace. I confess that it seems to be very difficult for me to make things happen on my own. I can push a certain amount, but I have to back off at the point where I start to feel like I’m behaving more like a gringo than a member of the community.

For example, if the integrated farm group feels like it just can’t meet with me on Thursday, because everyone had to participate in a really difficult community work project on Wednesday, there is little I can say against their choice. They have work to do, and listening to me was a luxury they couldn’t afford this week. So maybe we’ll be a worm compost bin next week, and maybe we won’t. I did get to go out to a piece of land with one of the farmers on Monday, lay out planting locations for apple trees in triangles, dig a few individual terraces, and dig a few planting holes. That, at least, is something. I also had the experience of trying to dig the planting holes in what people here call “concava,” although I have seen the word spelled “congagua” in the Permaculture Bible.  What happens is that you dig down through the plow layer, maybe 8 to 10 inches, and reach a material that looks and feels a lot like adobe. It is a kind of hard-packed clay, a foot or more thick. Hitting it with a pick or shovel doesn’t work. You have to use a breaker bar, a tool I have described before as something I am not very good with. It’s a thirty or so pound steel bar with a chisel point on one end and a trowel tip on the other. In this stuff, the chisel point was the end to use. I confess to not knowing if I penetrated deeply enough to establish a fuit tree. Don Juan told me that his neighbors have planted right on the concava surface and their trees flourished, but I think they’d do better if they could get their roots into the soil below the concava. Fortunately, I am told that the rest of the field doesn’t have this nearly impenetrable layer.

But this only sheds light on the community work project on Wednesday. The project was to dig a ditch for the sewer line from the new restaurant/Mirador.  A certain amount of community labor had been promised for this cooperative project with MCCH, and this turned out to be what was necessary. Part of why it was necessary is that the ditch runs through a concava layer. Previous experience has shown that this layer cannot be broken by machinery, which should give you some idea of what it is like to dig through it. The 240 meters were divided by the 80 Tolte community members into 3 meters per family, more or less. Surprisingly, most people got their 3 meters done by the end of the day, though some were still working on it in short stints into the weekend. It appears there was also some angry disagreement about the route of the ditch, which has resulted in some stretches of the ditch being in the wrong place and needing to be dug a second time. Much as I love Tolte, I do want to make it clear that it is not some sort of utopia, but a place where ordinary human emotions sometimes produce poor results. But they’ll be out correcting their mistake as a community next week, which puts them ahead of most communities I’ve heard of in the U.S.

Another disappointing area has been attendance at my evening adult English classes. Three days a week I give classes to high school and university students, who have some background in English but have never had the chance to really speak it. This is little different from U.S. students who study French or Spanish, spend a number of years grinding out repetitive grammar exercises, and still can’t ask for a glass of water in the foreign language. This class got off to a great start, with about fifteen students, but has rapidly dwindled to perhaps 4 or 5, depending on how many members of the Satian family show up on a particular evening. In general, they are learning the same things that I am teaching to my sixth and seventh graders, with additional emphasis on potential interaction with tourists. I wish I could say that we are down to a committed core, but I think it is more a case of they’ll come as long as they think I’ll entertain them with zany gringo antics.

The beginner class has been one person, Wiliam. You may remember him as the brawling futbol player from one of last year’s blogs. His consistent attendance and good achievement in English have been a source of amazement to the rest of Tolte. He certainly doesn’t come across as studious, but he seems to have a prodigious memory and does very well with new vocabulary, 10 to 15 words at a time, from one class to the next. After weeks of teaching him alone in the beginner class, he was joined by two other young people last night. It would be an interesting development if Wiliam turned out to be the core of a thriving beginner English program.

There has been an interesting side project for me here, though. The technical advising group includes three students from the Polytech in Riobamba. One of them has been assigned to work with me to find out about good environmental practices and sociocultural aspects of life in Tolte. Diana was here from Thursday afternoon until Friday afternoon, interviewing mostly the older people about the past in Tolte, life cycle traditions, games, stories, and other folklore. For me, the most interesting story came from Senora Petrona, who told us that Tolte changed greatly due to the influence of Fundacion ALA, which seemed to greatly enhance the role of women in the community. This resulted in a kind of vigilante women’s group that would hand out rough justice to men who abused their wives. A group of ten women would seize the offender, and lash him with a belt until he repented, on his knees, to his wife. Senora Petrona named a surprising number of my contemporaries as recipients of this correction (although most of the names didn’t surprise me as much as I wish they did.) I have to say that I think it unfortunate that this practice has died out over the years. There still seems to be more need for it than one would wish.  Diana will be back next week to collect more folklore.

It looks like I’ll be taking a trip to Riobamba on Monday to try to recruit a special ed teacher for Tolte. AVANTI has funds to support the teacher, but not with the benefits or salary level typical for this work. I’m going to the university to see if they might send us an intern or recent graduate for the wage we offer. My hopes are not high. I sent the dean an e-mail over a week ago and got no response, but maybe my personal gringo appearance will make more of an impression.

And a final piece of news about ESTASIS, Ecuador’s least talented rock band. Mario recruited a new singer from Sibambe, one of the other towns that participate in working at the train station. Javier can actually sing in tune, something unheard of among previous ESTASIS vocalists. We are now practicing with renewed enthusiasm, and it appears that we are going to play at the high school in Sibambe on Tuesday (or is it the next Tuesday? It’s hard to know anything for certain with ESTASIS.) It appears we will be paid $50, of which at least $15 will go towards getting us there and back. I figure we’ll each get about $1 a song, which compares favorably with playing for loose change in the Subway, I think. The boys think this will be good publicity, and I suppose it will be, if we sound very much better than usual.

Things are happening

One unusual aspect of my life as a teacher and rural development promoter here in Tolte is that I am not alone. For such a tiny place, Tolte has a lot of friends. I am here with Fundacion AVANTI, but Fundacion Maquita Cushunchic (MCCH)  (“helping hand,” in Kichwa) is even more active here, providing training in all aspects of the things that need to be done to turn Tolte and its view of Nariz del Diablo into an attractive tourist destination. The MCCH coordinator is Jorge, a tremendously capable person who gets more done in his visits here than I do by living here. The junta directive also has a technician, Dani, who has brought three students from the Polytech, who are finishing their studies in community tourism, with him. We also have occasional visits from a Ministry of Agriculture technician, Gonzalo. When we are all present at the same time, we actually represent 2% of Tolte’s population.

So about a week ago, at Jorge’s instigation, we various technicians became the Technical Working Group of Tolte. The idea is that we’ll meet regularly, actually assign ourselves tasks and goals, and get the whole Tolte project moving along in a single, unified direction. Since I know nothing about tourism, except certain aspects of the gringo mentality, having someone tell me what the community tourism here is supposed to look like is tremendously helpful. I’m even being allowed to focus on the integrated farms group, which is the project that most intrigues me. Of course, our first meeting ran a couple of hours, and then was repeated for the benefit of the junta directive, which I found wearing, but I’m glad to be included in this stage of events.

The best part of this, for me, is that my project is to give a series of talks to the farmer group about soil and water conservation, organic farming, and permaculture. I happen to be here at just the right time, because I major aspect of this project is the planting of highly subsidized fruit trees. Of course, the trees arrived long before I was given a chance to say anything about site preparation, but I am hopeful that I can successfully install the various earthworks and plantings in reverse of their proper order. This Thursday, I introduced a kind of permaculture, multi-level planting, vision of what I’m trying to encourage, along with some reasons why. I also mentioned individual terraces for fruit trees planted on sloping land. The original plan had been to make some of these terraces as part of the class, but we weren’t able to organize that ahead of time. Next Thursday, when I do a worm compost bin, we’ll also make some terraces. The surprising part is that I’ve arrived at a point where people are willing to listen to my heavily accented Spanish for an hour or more, in hope of gleaning some useful nugget of information. I’m terrified of disappointing them—even more than of having them reject all my suggestions as insanity.

Speaking of insanity, last Friday saw the band ESTASIS, world’s least talented garage band, in Riobamba buying an amplifier and speakers. This should have been turned into some kind of movie. Here are some highlights: 1) looking for our eternally missing bass player, and finding him far out in a hayfield cutting grass for the cow; 2) our rhythm guitarist and bad leader, Mario, attempting to buy cool sunglasses and having one lens or another fall out of pair after pair, much to the shop owner’s horror. Hey, it wasn’t our fault; 3) our drummer Fredy’s repeated and increasingly desperate attempts to get his bank card to work. It finally did, at another bank; 4) the absence of our vocalist, whom nobody knows how to tell that we want someone who can sing; 5) our arrival at the music store where we had arranged to purchase the system, only to be told that we would have to wait a couple of hours—make that four hours; 6) the band’s urgent need to buy little, individually wrapped, pieces of cake, because the girl selling it was so cute; 7) my impromptu rock ‘n’ roll show in the music store, under the guise of testing out an electric guitar. It couldn’t have been too bad, the store owners asked again what the band’s name was; 8) deciding to go to a bust stop on the edge of town, instead of the main terminal in hopes of catching an earlier bus, only to realize that it was a holiday, and all the buses were full. We and our equipment crammed into a microscopic taxi to get back to the center of town; and 9) the walk from the bus stop down into Tolte carrying the amplifier and two bulky speakers. We have actually practiced a couple of times since then, but we still seem to be suffering from a lack of musical talent or even a sense of what we would like to sound like. It’s hard to be ESTASIADO.

In one more great piece of news, it looks like the Ministry of the Environment is going to give us all the trees we need to plant windbreaks wherever anyone wants them in Tolte. This is good news for me, because it means I can go around finding out who wants these things, and how much land they have to give for them. Nothing like a new project to get the sap running…

Huequeando

Huequeando
Huequeando means digging holes, and that’s been an exciting part of my life in Tolte during the past couple of weeks. Really, the digging was confined to a couple of days so far, but they were stand out satisfying ones, so I think they bear some description.

The participants in the integrated farms project have been expecting a delivery of fruit trees for a couple of weeks. At a recent meeting, I offered to go into some detail about soil preparation and permaculture/organic methods of regulating the orchard ecosystem for sustainable results. I was waved off at the time because all of this was going to be revealed at the next meeting a week later. For reasons that are obscure, but I think had to do with the MAGAP technician’s schedule, that meeting never happened. The fruit trees arrived anyway, producing what I have been telling people quite bluntly is reverse order. I have explained that you prepare the terrain first, a process that can take a year, or possibly more, and then you plant the fruit trees. There should be windbreaks, leguminous ground covers, and water-storing swales or canals on the contour. But the trees were here, and now I’ll have to try to get everybody to install these things afterwards. We’ll have to see how that goes. If my credibility is much stronger than I think it is, people will do the best practices because they believe me. If not, I’m going to really regret not having the fruit trees to use as an incentive.

So off I went last Thursday afternoon to Senora Carmen’s plot of land within Tolte to plant avocadoes and apples trees. Unless I have failed “Tolte Family relationships, Phase 3,” Carmen is Damasio’s daughter, which would account for her sunny personality and optimistic outlook. We laid the trees out 6 meters apart on the contour, which didn’t seem to produce as much surprise as my insistence that we dig really large holes to plant the trees in. It seems that people have simply been opening holes the same size as the little earth ball that surrounds the seedling’s roots, which is not the recommended practice even in conventional farming. We opened holes about 0.5 meter wide, and a little deeper than the earth ball. Fortunately, Carmen has some nice worm compost to put in the bottom of each hole. Again, due to a lack of foresight in the farms project, she is one of only two or three people who have a compost bin, something which should have been built on every farm as a first step.  As usual, I had trouble keeping up with Carmen in the hole digging process, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. I finished the day “plumb tuckered out,” as they say in story books about farming, and we got our sixteen trees planted and watered.

On Friday, I headed over to Senora Belena’s house. She had to go to a meeting of wheat farmers in Alausi, but she assigned her daughter Marta, who is about 20, and her son David, one of last year’s seventh grade students, to help me. Or, perhaps I should say, I helped then. We again laid out holes on the contour, but the soil was hard and dry like concrete. Again, I was probably outworked, but we got 32 good-sized holes dug in about six and a half hours. The good part about this piece of land is that it is actually big enough to accommodate all the trees at 5-6 meters apart. Many people are trying to cram too many trees into too small a space, simply because they received a certain number of seedlings.

Just when I thought I could take no more, and would simply crawl into bed at 6, Vicente told me that Winari, the Evangelical Christian Folk band that I play guitar for, had a gig at a prayer meeting in Chunchi. So we practiced for a couple of hours, and headed over to the municipal multi-purpose room in Chunchi to save our souls—well, theirs are probably already saved, and mine may have checked out some time ago, but you get the idea. I was told that these are big events, with maybe two or three hundred people, but something must have gone wrong because there were only 14 people, of whom the band was half. This didn’t stop the woman who was doing the preaching from using a PA, which quite loud. The echo in the nearly empty room made it difficult for me to understand much. We eventually got up and played (now, of course, the listeners could be counted on one or two hands), and I did pretty well, except for forgetting the funky break in one of the songs. After it was all over, around 1 AM, we drank tea and ate bread and my presence was investigated. The great moment was when the minister asked me if I was comfortable, or settled in (the word in Spanish is “Ensenado,” with a tilde over the second n). I looked at my neighbors and said, “Ask them,” and they all started to laugh. Nobody is ensenado like David,” they said. Another interesting moment was revealing that I am Jewish, a fact they seemed to absorb with considerable enthusiasm. “Jewish, you mean, like Jesucristo?” Well, maybe not much like, but sure, like.

On Saturday, Carmen invited me back to improve her compost bin. She already had a big bin near her one-pig sty. The problem was that the single bin didn’t provide any way to separate finished compost from newly dumped organic matter. We arranged three good sized bins out of hardware cloth. In one we applied a layer of stones for drainage and in the other two we raised the piles on little wooden platforms. Probably the biggest job of the day was to shovel out the old bin and sieve the contents to separate finished compost from still chunky materials. We also had to go on a worm hunt, as the pile had become very dry in the windy summer weather. But we did find plenty of wriggling worms (“like noodles,” Carmen said) once we got down to a moist soil layer. We sifted out the humus and shoveled the unfinished material into the new bins, along with a few shovelfuls of worms.  Then I soaked the dry, dry compost until I thought the worms would be happy living in it. We’ll see how it works out in a few months. I headed home. On the way, Reccion invited me in to shell peas and have a few shots of trago. Watching the sun set over my waning consciousness, I felt that things in this little part of the world were a heck of a lot better, at least for me, than most places.

By Sunday, I was feeling pretty good. I got to Chunchi later than usual, and did some slightly unusual shopping. I had promised my seventh grade class that we would have a birthday party in English for one of the girls on Tuesday. I had promised the class a birthday cake from Chunchi, and I actually got one for the princely sum of $7. Considering my usual estimate of things in Ecuador being one-tenth the price of the United States, this is sort of like buying a birthday cake in the US for $70. But the price was not the issue. Getting back to Tolte was. I had missed a late afternoon window of transit opportunity, and now found myself trapped in the Mercado in Tolte. But Don Miguel and his wife, senora Luz Maria, invited me to sit with them in their market booth, and gave me fruit while I shelled peas with them. After sunset, Reccion and his wife Carmen were ready to close down their booth and go home in their truck. I seized the opportunity and helped them load up. Senora Carmen kept asking me if I were able to carry the sacks. I may be a wimp, but couldn’t wimp out. “Sure,” I said, only throwing my back out slightly carrying the big sacks of vegetables.

On Monday, Wilson invited me to help him plant fruit trees, so I ducked out of school and headed down to the hacienda with my level to plant trees on the contour. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel so well by now. Also unfortunately, Wilson didn’t really have enough land to plant the trees, and some of the land he had was really, really steep, if not frighteningly high up. We also arrived without fertilizer of any kind. Fortunately, Wilson had been grazing his horse in this area, so every tree hole got a helping of dried horse dung. I can’t say it looked very rich, but I figure it was better than nothing.  We didn’t stick to the contours very well, but we did get a bunch of tress tucked away around the property, even as it became clear to me that I was developing a nasty sinus infection.

I’ve said this before, but anyone who travels from the US to the tropics is sure to be grateful for over the counter antibiotics. My immune system just cannot match the fierce resistance of my neighbors’ antibodies. I suppose that the dripping green mucus of the little children, often called “mocosos,” or “runny noses,” is a sign of a hearty ability to crush future sinus infections. Or it may just be a sign of where I picked up my own nasty infection. Still, people here seem to be able to drink water from any local source, work like demons, drink frightful quantities of gut-burning alcohol, and never be sick. I wonder if I’ll ever get to that point.

The birthday party on Tuesday went well. I was teaching “May I have” and “Would you like” last week, so the timing was perfect. We ate popcorn, drank soda, and ate birthday cake—not healthful, exactly, but festive. We also played “Bizz Buzz” and “Simon Says,“ games I taught them last year.  Yes, soda was spilled on the floor of the library, where I generally prohibit food of any kind, but I knew it was coming. It was fun to give my best class something special, despite the expected resentment of the sixth graders, with whom they share a classroom. There turn will come, someday—maybe.

Tuesday also saw me visiting the forestry teacher at the technical high school again, this time with Jorge of MCCH. Ingeniero Auki was the force behind April’s windbreak planting project. I had mentioned him to Jorge, and we went to ask him whether he could plant a windbreak next to the new mirador/restaurant that MCCH is building in Tolte. We found him in the greenhouse, tending to his enormous organic, drip-irrigated tomato plants. As usual, he was all enthusiasm. Aside from the windbreak, I hope to involve him in the retro-fitting of good practices, like interplanting leguminous trees, in the new orchards. He sounded enthusiastic about that, too. I guess that’s what makes him such an admirable teacher.

Thursday brought a visit from the director of MCCH, whom I had never met before.  Maria Jesus is a pale, thin, elderly woman who genuinely radiates a kind of religious generosity, without the religion part. I got to say my piece, as all the leading Toltenos did (Not that I’m a leading Tolteno, just a noticeable one) in gratitude for all of MCCH’s and Jorge’s good work in Tolte, and stuck in my own bit about promoting the granjas project. Chicken soup and guinea pig with potatoes were served, which is how we roll out the red carpet in the Andes.

Friday afternoon saw three of the five member of the band Estasis, world’s most lamentable rock band, in Riobamba shopping for a PA system with inputs for three electric instruments and a microphone. We found one that delivers 450 gruesome watts for $450. A dollar a watt in Ecuador is a pretty fine price. Now more neighbors than ever can resent the band’s existence, although everyone is too affable to complain. The best part was that, on the way back, Dani the sort of bassist treated me to an in person description of last week’s exorcism of the 17-year-old girl (his cousin) who lives across the street from me. This included the girl speaking in a man’s voice while her eyes were fixed on some undefined object across the room, powerful reactions to the exorcism that took eight strong people to control, a sudden chill that passed from one member of the exorcism party to the other, and a wind that rose from indoors to almost blow the roof off the curandero’s house in Zunag, two towns up along the Inter-American highway from Tolte. Results seem to have been positive. Dani went on to tell me how, 50 years ago, Tolte was a nest of witchcraft, with witch and anti-witch activity lasting into the period of time when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Costa Rica. Imagine if fate had brought me to Tolte then, instead of now. I wonder what that would have been like.

Meanwhile, ever since planting on Monday, we have had a weeklong visit of rainy season weather two months early. I confess that I am not ready, and had been counting on no rain until December. But it certainly looks like our planting efforts have met with the approval of Mother Nature.