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.