Another Death in the Family

When I wrote my last entry, about a month ago, I thought it would probably be my only “in memoriam” post during my time in Tolte. But the way people’s lives end in Tolte is so different from the orderly progress of events that we are used to in the States. Death is never unexpected here; people are comfortable with the idea that God will call you home in His time, not yours. And maybe this attitude is a result of the random way the death arrives here, not to the old, or the sick, or the weak, necessarily, but to whomever runs out of time, for whatever reason.

And so, almost exactly a month after Venancio died so suddenly, we were burying a little girl named Monica, whise life lasted just 20 months, or almost exactly the amount of time I have been living in Tolte. My contact with Monica was limited, because she was younger than the children I teach, but I remember her as a happy, healthy little child playing in the Guaderia with the other little pre-schoolers. And although it is possible, as the Toltenos say, that our days are numbered and hers were simply few in number, I do feel the need to mention the medical care that Monica received in the days before her death.

As I said, Monica was as healthy and strong as the rest of the children of Tolte ups to about a week and a half before she died. And the children of Tolte are much, much healthier and stronger than the suburban children of the United States. But one night she was sick. She had a fever and her sore throat caused her to drool uncontrollably. Her mother brought her to the hospital in Chunchi, where she was attended by an intern. I gather that this is pretty typical in rural hospitals, which cannot usually attract the professional staff that you find in the cities. The intern gave Monica’s mother cough syrup and told her that Monica’s condition was “normal.” But Monica didn’t get better.

Three days later, Monica’s mother brought the nearly unconscious Monica to the hospital in Chunchi again, where she was seen by another intern who told her that the baby was “normal,” even though she had never been this sick in her life. She was given another medicine that made her even sicker. Monica’s family brought her to a curandero, who said the baby was sick from the medicine she had been given, which might not have been too far from the truth.

When Monica’s family brought her to the hospital in Chunchi for the third time, she was finally seen by a doctor. The doctor recognized immediately that Monica had pneumonia. She was rushed by ambulance to Riobamba, where she was placed in an oxygen tent. After several days there, she was taken by ambulance to Quito. But Monica was unconscious by the time she reached Riobamba, and declared brain dead shortly after she reached Quito. Carolina, president of AVANTI, made the arrangements for Monica to be brought back to Tolte in her tiny white coffin.

While I found this series of events enraging, Toltenos seemed to take it more stoically. This is not to say that Monica’s death was routine. Jose told me that while a child dying was a common event thirty or so years ago, he couldn’t remember such a thing having happened since then. But the routines of thought were still very much in place: our days are numbered, she is with Diosito (that’s Dios, God, with the affectionate “ito” diminutive tacked on), Diosito took her to be with Him, this is life. And the children, and many adults, seemed to find something endearing, almost humorous, in the tiny coffin, which seemed so awful to me.

Monica was buried in the Tolte cemetery, which happens to be across the street from her house, a big pink house that holds a large number of members of her father’s family. Children ran about in the cemetery playing tag, as they held flowers that they would later put in the grave. There was no clergyman; I was asked to say a few words but declined, both for an inadequate command of the kind of ritual language that is used on such occasions and an inability to separate the event from my own feelings. So two of Tolte’s farmers asked God to bring Monica to Him and watch over her until the rest of us could get there. We ate candy and drank trago and cola during the burial, then went back to the pink house and ate soup and drank trago and did all the things we usually do at a party in Tolte except dance.  And I haven’t heard anything more about Monica, or the care she received or didn’t receive in Chunchi, since.

I suppose that the people of the rural zone all over the world have to contend with the neglect of their nations. The action and attention are urban, and rural people are expected to live their romanticized country lives feeding the urban zone with little mutual support of respect from city dwellers  and politicians, who are also overwhelmingly from the urban zone. My understanding is that the Correa government has boosted services in rural areas tremendously, but there is still so much to be done, especially in hospitals, schools, and economic diversification. I hope to hang around long enough to see some of this happen, although I don’t know yet how I will continue to support myself once my AVANTI contract runs out in July. I suspect that my future in Ecuador will be closely tied to my willingness and ability to teach English professionally.

I suppose there is more to tell about how I have spent the month of March, but it all seems so pale in comparison with the loss of a little child. There are changes in garbage collection that may allow me to employ skills and knowledge I gathered at Stony Brook, much to my surprise. I am the local expert in organic waste disposal by default. I have been trying to maintain the momentum created by the first aid course with a review meeting every Monday evening, but attendance has been depressingly poor. I have actually been teaching some English grammar to the sixth and seventh grades, and find it amazing how difficult it is to use the past tense correctly in English—there are so, so many “irregular” verbs in the past tense, that it almost doesn’t make sense to talk about rules for forming it. The shower in my house has been under repair for four weeks now, I sort of clean myself in the tiny bathtub, but believe me, it’s not the same. And I turned 55 last Friday, not with the hilarious fanfare of last year’s 54 party, but with a romantic weekend in Machala in the heart of Ecuador’s banana zone. Yes, romance can come even to such as I in Ecuador, where my life seems to be blessed, even touched by a kind of magic, every single day. I may not be accomplishing much, but the consequences of that seem to be mostly internal.

Life and Death at Carnaval

I’m sure that this blog entry will continue the usual dose of silliness. After all, t does discuss Carnaval, a gloriously silly time of year here in Tolte. But this entry also deals with the passing of one of my friends, Venancio Dobla, the day after Carnaval. I doubt that this blog has the capacity to do him justice, but I do want to pay my respects to him in whatever way I can.

Carnaval in Tolte is a playful, merry time. There are two great customs: splash everyone you can with water, and get soaked yourself in the process, and go from house to house singing the ribald Carnaval song, every verse of which ends “Que bonito es Carnaval!” I suppose that second tradition wouldn’t mean much without a third tradition, hosting the Carnavaleros when they come to your house. Hosting involves offering up generous quantities of food and alcohol, fueling the Carnavaleros for the next lego of their journey.

This year, Carnaval seemed to get off to a slow start.  I was in the middle of a two week school vacation that capped off the first “quimestre,” or five-month stretch of school. I had never really thought about the fact that “semester” means a six month period, which of course is far longer than any half school year in which I have ever participated. Here in Ecuador, we’re more specific about these things. Last year, the school year was broken up into three “trimesters,” so the quimestre system is new. Personally, I worry that it doesn’t provide enough feedback to parents, especially of elementary school kids, because they only get two report cards a year. Parents do occasionally stop by the school as they go from one field or errand to another to ask how their kids are doing, but there’s nothing like a report card to capture a parent’s attention. Report cards were not handed out on the last day of the quimestre, though, so the kids got to experience their holiday without the cloud of doom that hangs over vacations preceded by report card day.

In any case, during the first week of the vacation I carried out a number of farm visits in support of the local agrotourism project, going from one farm to another to see what each had that might interest a tourist, or what could be incorporated that might make for more functional organic farming. Few, if any, of the farmers here are committed to organic farming as a concept, although some are suspicious of agrochemicals. Still, agrochemicals give fast, if unsustainable, short-term results, and almost everyone likes a quick cure. I have focused on trying to get people to develop and use organic fertilizer, since few of my neighbors use any fertilizer at all, and yields tend to reflect this. So I went from farm to farm encouraging people to establish worm bins, an idea that already seems to have some acceptance. I’m looking for the “gimmes” in this process. I doubt I’ll be here long enough to promote a full-on organic farming/permaculture revolution.

By the Monday before Carnaval, though, my farm visits were done, and things were a bit slow. Estasis, my notoriously unmusical rock band, had talked about doing something together, but by 8 or 9 in the evening, we still hadn’t gotten started. I went out one last time before going to bed, and there, finally, was a group of Carnavaleros. I grabbed my guitar, and off we went in the drizzly weather typical of invierno in Tolte. I didn’t have any real singing responsibilities, but everyone counted on me for the guitar parts. The fact that I can actually do this seems to amuse everyone no end. It’s not that the music is difficult to play, I think it’s just a surprise to find that the gringo can do something so typically Ecuadorean. We didn’t go at it too long on Monday, because it finally got so rainy that we had to call it quits.

On Tuesday, Don Juan was quite insistent that I come to his house to play old songs that he knows and I don’t. I could sort of figure them out, but then he would get frustrated and kind of strum the guitar himself, which is kind of amusing because he doesn’t actually know anything about how to play the guitar. The old songs he sings are cool, though, and he and his family and I did this for a couple of hours until another group of Carnavaleros picked me up at about 2 in the afternoon. This led to about 8 hours of Carnaval guitar playing, which started to be too much even for me. One of the guys proved very clever at inventing Carnaval song verses for the presidential election of February 17, then less than a week away. These verses praised President Correa over his opposition, previewing the eventual outcome of the campaign. The President garnered 60% of the vote, while none of this crew of opponents could gain as much as 20%.

The party went on and on into the wee hours of Wednesday morning, though I had to give up before midnight on Tuesday, not having the iron constitution of my neighbors. I was relieved to finish Carnaval in a nearly euphoric state, without having to suffer any important health consequences. Wednesday got off to a weary start, although there were still a few hard core revelers delaying the entry of the Lentan season. Venancio was not really among these, he was on his way to work, but he ran into a group of these holdouts, who had been invited to eat something at the home of one of their children. And, in a moment, Venancio was gone, choking on a piece of meat before anyone could do anything. The Heimlich Maneuver had not yet reached Tolte. The crushing irony is that it would in the following week, when we received an Avanti-sponsored first-aid training from the Red Cross of Quito. But Venancio was already gone by then.

I’ve mentioned that Venancio was my friend. He wasn’t someone I spent lots of time with, I never did any agricultural work with him, his kids are adults and even his grandchildren have graduated from elementary school. He was a typically sturdy fellow in his mid-60’s, who could easily have lived another 10 or 15 years if not for his sudden accident. But I can say that he always seemed happy to see me, always gave me a warm greeting, and always invited me to a drink if he was drinking. He lived his whole life in Tolte, although some of his children migrated to the United States. And thinking of him makes me appreciate the importance of living a positive, ordinary life, being a good and cheerful family and community member, and brightening someone’s day with a hearty “Buenos Dias.” My exotic life here in Tolte is entirely dependent on my neighbors’ embrace of these ordinary virtues, which contribute so much to the sum of happiness in the world. And I deeply regret that Venancio cannot enjoy these things any more.

This was Wednesday, Feb. 13, and by Monday, 25 of us were studying first aid with Noe Zuniga, a trainer from the Red Cross. Noe is a fascinating character. He grew up poor in a rural area near Riobamba, and left home when he graduated from elementary school. He found work as a ticket taker on a bus, an excellent entry level job when he was a kid. The bus driver sort of adopted him, and helped him finish high school. Noe eventually finished college degrees in both nursing and paramedicine, and has gone to the United States to participate in training at the invitation of the Red Cross. He speaks Kichwa, Spanish, and English, and is completely happy with where life has taken him. He is also an excellent trainer, and spending 8 afternoons with him was a great experience for me. I re-learned many of the things I learned in an EMT course 25 years ago, and did some things I didn’t think I could do, including intramuscular and intravenous injections, things they don’t even teach you in EMT school. But out here in the rural zone, we might have to do these things to save someone’s life. We will actually be receiving equipment from Avanti, thanks to a grant from the British Embassy, that will provide us with all sorts of life-saving equipment that we never had before, but now actually know how to use. Since the nearest hospital is in Chunchi, 15 to 20 minutes away by car, these skills and equipment really could save someone’s life. The graduates of the program are going to meet once a week to review what we have learned, and I think this will be an important way to create a really unified community organization.

Now we have been back in school for a couple of weeks, and I am probably in my last quimestre as Tolte’s English teacher. It does not appear that Avanti will have the funds to keep me going. Perhaps this is just as well. I think it would be hard to face the school day without the present seventh grade, who will graduate in July and go on to Colegio.  I may investigate the possibility of teaching English in Chunchi, which could keep me in contact with them next year. I have also asked for work with the Ministry of Agriculture, and am looking into other volunteer possibilities similar to what I do now. Everything that I have needed in Ecuador has always turned up, and I imagine my next job is hiding just around the corner. We’ll have to see what happens.