So there I was in Cuenca, peacefully drinking the only liquid that really resembles beer in Ecuador, when these two adventurers from France sit down next to me, and one of them speaks good Spanish, so we start chatting. Somewhere in this conversation, I can’t remember how or when, I mention that one of the things I want to do for the school kids of Tolte is find out which of them need glasses, since Carolina has already offered to put up the money for them. That’s when Mateo, or Mathieu, says that he’s an optician, and he’ll be glad to come to Tolte just for the hell of it and do a vision test for all the kids in the school.
That was the last Saturday in January, and he and his pal Valentin were in Tolte (rainy, foggy Tolte) by Monday afternoon, armed with eye charts they had gotten off of the internet. This included near vision, distance vision, color vision, and the notorious “E” chart for kids who don’t know their letters yet. They started testing the kids Tuesday morning, and saw about half of them by the end of the school day. That’s ten minutes or more per kid, which is a lot more thorough than what they’d normally get in school. This became more apparent when the Ministerio de Salud crew arrived from Alausi the next day, armed, coincidentally, with an eye chart. When Mathieu asked them what distance the kids would stand at to do their test, they asked him what difference it would make. Mathieu is considering coming back to Alausi to explain this.
Mathieu and Valentin saw the rest of the kids on Wednesday, and promptly took off for the beach, having identified seven kids who need glasses out of the 52 in the school. Then it turned out that Clara, AVANTI’s new special ed teacher in Tolte, lives across the street from an optometrist in Alausi. Since we had a group, he was willing to test the kids for a prescription at $3 per child. Conveniently, Monday was the start of a two week, inter-semester, Carnaval-celebrating school vacation. So I tracked down the kids and their parents, told them to bring $3, arranged and paid for Mecias to drive us to Alausi and back, and told them to show up at school time, 7:30 AM, on Monday for their eye tests.
By 8:30, six of the seven children were there, but not the child whose mother called me at 7 AM to ask me when he should be in the plaza. I wanted to arrive when the optometrist opened at 9, so that we could efficiently get in and out of there without creating havoc or being mixed in with other patients and having to wait all day. At 8:40 we took off for Alausi one child short, although by the time we were halfway there we could see the family’s truck behind us, which made me feel like an impatient gringo.
We arrived at about 9:30, and only had to wait a few minutes for the optometrist to open his shop. Inside, it was surprisingly like a shop in the States, with computerized equipment and everything necessary to determine the prescription the kids needed. Interestingly, the child who didn’t seem able to read either close or at a distance needed the mildest prescription. But a couple of the kids have been walking around nearly blind, and I’m hopeful that glasses will change their lives. The optometrist offered to make the kids glasses for the bargain price of $30 a pair, and I’m hopeful that when school starts again on Feb. 18, these kids will finally be able to see.
This won’t be easy, though. There seems to be no social limit on the abuse that kids are allowed to heap on anyone who uses glasses, including throwing them on the floor and crushing them (the glasses, not the kids, or at least not always the kids.) And calling anyone who uses glasses “cuatro ojos” (“four eyes”) seems to be almost a requirement. Fortunately, Clara wears glasses, and the kids really seem to like her, so I’m hopeful we can create some good socialization around the sudden appearance of seven pairs of glasses in the school.
All of this does make me wonder about kids in other towns near Tolte, many of which are poorer than Tolte. Here, it might be difficult, but not impossible, to persuade a parent to spend $30 for a child’s glasses. Elsewhere, some families simply cannot invest that much money in one child. Health insurance here, which covers many things for many people, does not do glasses. There is an organization in Riobamba, called Vista Para Todos, that does eye testing and provides glasses at reduced cost, but I’m afraid that isn’t enough. I offer this as an example of how things we really take for granted in the US, like getting glasses for our children if they need them, can remain an unreachable luxury in the developing world, and Ecuador is a far more comfortable place than many other Latin American countries, to say nothing of Africa or Asia. I’ll just kick in that the percentage of the US budget that goes to foreign aid is lower than that of almost any other industrialized nation, so that those who complain about “foreigners getting while people here go hungry” can have something to think about.
On Thursday I delivered my semester grades. I had hoped to use these to really grab the attention of those kids who routinely treat my class as an extension of recess, but it turns out that the final grade will be a strict average of the two semester grades, and they need a grade of 7 (out of 10) to pass my class. And, if they don’t pass English, they have to repeat the year, which would be stupid, because next year, when I won’t be here, there will be no English class. So I tried not to give anyone a grade they couldn’t recover from, although there are a couple in sixth grade who are going to have to pull a rabbit out of their hats. By recess on Friday, school was dismissed, and I’ve been trying to stay busy doing aggie work ever since.
One of the most interesting days of that happened last Saturday, when I went with Juan Carlos to make a seed bed for out “natural agriculture” experiment. The soil in his field is, like most of Tolte’s soils, heavy clay. Now that it has finally started to rain, there is a great risk that any seed you try to plant will simply rot. But I tried to make do with the materials at hand. We made a little terrace, about one meter by five, shoring it up with a rock wall at its base, which looked nice, even if I’m not sure about the wall’s stability. I hope that this will improve drainage, though, and leave the soil less sodden. We mixed in some twiggy organic matter, too, which I also hope will help dry it out. The real thrill was that, by chance, there was a bunch of charcoal left behind from burning damp cornstalks. Yes, I have finally applied biochar, obsession of my Stony Brook Master’s thesis and partial theme of my one and only scientific publication, to actual soil. I don’t know if it will help, but again, the idea is that the charcoal will raise the soil pH, help to improve drainage, and promote a healthy microbial colony not dominated by seed-rotting fungi. It’s all an experiment. Then we went out and threw our less sensitive seeds every which way on the field. Our clover has not come up at all, and I am sort of afraid that this broadcast method is not going to work well. But it’s worth a try. When I go down again tomorrow, I hope to see a few sprouts, especially considering the vast amount of rain we’ve had this week.
In other cases, I’ve been making farm visits to promote the “granjas integrales” project, which has been absolutely dormant, not to say moribund. It’s been interesting—every farm has offered something slightly different as a project, from contour farming to soil rehab, as well as organic methods of disease and insect control. The project envisions organic agriculture in Tolte, but people here have developed an instinct to reach for a chemical to address whatever problem their crops may have. It’s hard to argue with this. People use chemicals because they work, and work fast. Crop failure is not an option, and I’m terrified of contributing to a situation where crops would fail. But these farms are small, often less than 2 acres, and hardly ever as much as 5, and people do work them quite closely. It does seem entirely possible to raise a crop here without chemicals, but it’s certainly a foreign idea at the moment.
I’m also proud to say that on Wednesday, I worked with the minga, or community work party. People asked me why I did it, since I’m not required to be there, but I said that I couldn’t picture hiding in my house from shame while everyone else was working. And work it was. I may have mentioned in a previous blog that the mionga few months back was to dig a ditch for the sewer line from the new restaurant/mirador that should face Nariz del Diablo but doesn’t. The ditch didn’t have to be very deep, but there is a soil layer here called concava, apparently somewhat common in Ecuador, of massive, packed clay. I’m curious as to how it developed, probably some ancient lake or sea bottom, but breaking through it dulls one’s curiosity. I was working with two women, one about 30 years old, one about my age, to dig a two meter length to an 80 centimeter depth (about six and a half feet long and two and a half feet deep). After the first 10 centimeters, it was concava all the way down. For a while, we could break into it with a pick, and shovel out the loose chips, but then we had to use the heavy vara to break anything loose. Frankly, the two women outworked me pretty thoroughly, but I did well enough to avoid total embarrassment. Certainly, I broke concave with the vara longer than I thought I could, and we did complete our reach of the ditch before lunch. After lunch, the sewer pipe was installed, and we had to fill in what we had just dug out, then go on and install the water line to the mirador. That didn’t require as deep a ditch, and I was mostly involved filling the ditch in after the pipe was installed. All in all, it was a satisfying, pleasant day in the company of the Toltenos, and I slept really well that night.
The next day I was almost involved in removing a dead horse from the rode. It apparently died by falling off of its pasture to the roadway. I was surprised that when I recommended making fritada out of it, nobody was really interested. Fortunately, by the time we got there, the owners had finally gotten themselves together to shove it into the barranco, where I imagine we’ll be smelling it for a while, even though it is quite a ways down the cliff. I think there’s a Monty Python routine in here somewhere, but I’ll leave it to my brother Jeff to figure out what it is.
