Parroquializacion

My life in Tolte continues to drift towards its end, with my mornings teaching English to school kids, my afternoons spent playing the guitar in the library, and most of my evening teaching English to the rectly organized class of adults. I haven’t done anything agricultural in a while. I did offer a talk about truning household waste into organic fertilizer, but nobody attended. I wasn’t surprised, but my hopes are fading.

On the other hand, it appears that this is not entirely some failing on my part. About a month ago, a young guy from Chunchi named Carlos turned up at the general meeting. He was sent by the Ministry of Education to organize an adult literacy class. I helped him round up the interested people, about twenty-five of them. I asked him what his schedule would be, and he told me five nights week, two hours a night, for four to five months. I asked him if he actually thought people would do this, and he said, sure, he had done it in a village called San Francisco, where of the thirty adults who started, twenty-five finished. All I could think was, if he pulls this off in Tolte, there really is something wrong with the way I work. But sure enough, by last week he was down to three students, and on Thursday of this week no one showed up.  I don’t think Tolte is exceptional is this behavior, but I think it points to problems in social development in rural areas. People work long days, and don’t really have the time or energy to participate in community development projects that require daily follow through. One-off training days would probably be better, if I could get people to come to those. Maybe I’ll try to offer my composting talk again this week.

Meanwhile, my evening class of four young folks is still ticking along. Attendance isn’t perfect, but I have always had at least two of the four of them at every class. They’re definitely making progress, although what they don’t know after four or more years of English classes in high school or university continues to amaze me. I really believe that my post-Tolte life may involve teaching English to Ecuador’s English teachers. I could at least stop them from pronouncing the silent “e” at the end of words as “ay.” After what I think is three weeks of classes, my students are able to introduce themselves, identify objects and locations in their environment and town, say where things are located, give directions, describe their physical and emotional states, say what they like to do, and use the past tense to a limited extent. It’s not much, but it’s more than they could do before. But I deeply regret that this class has only started now, in my last two months in Tolte, instead of September, 2011, when I got here. When I think of how much farther along they’d be, I feel a kind of pain that only teachers who have not reached their students can know.

And reaching students was difficult this week, because of the five potential school days, we only met on two. Tuesday was the Fiesta commemorating the founding of Pistishi as a parroquia in 1941, Wednesday was recovery from the fiesta of Tuesday, and Friday was a national holiday commemorating the Battle of Pichincha, a key event in Ecuadorian independence (about which I know precious little—I read novels in Spanish, but taking on a history text seems too intimidating). The Tuesday fiesta was classic, though, and made me feel real regret that in the future, I will come to parties in Tolte from the outside, not as a resident. The day started with a parade of something like 12 different civic groups, everything from dignitaries from the Municipio of Alausi to the touristic llama wranglers. This was followed by a celebratory “Sesion solemne,” during which various members of the junta directive and the municipio told everyone how proud they were to be celebrating the day, and what a great job they were doing for everyone. And it ended just about the time when I thought I couldn’t take another speech. Everyone got corn and roast pork for lunch, and, after a little while, the local indoor team, regional campeones in several tournaments, took on the team from the municipio. The locals looked rusty at first, they haven’t played together for a few months, and their shots weren’t going into the goal. I think the municipio even scored first (the locals were playing with their second-string goalie). But then they found their groove, and scored ten goals to easily defeat the municipio.

For me, the biggest event of Tuesday was the music at night. This was Estasis’ first performance since the Fiesta de Tolte in November. Our bass player was in Riobamba doing his auto mechanics internship, our vocalist was working at his job as a guard in the train station, but Freddy, Mario, and I had more or less prepared for this by practicing together with Mario doing the singing for the past month or so. Mario isn’t much of a singer, but at least he doesn’t have my gringo accent. We offered five songs, including two originals and one cover that we had re-arranged from sort of a ‘60’s style flower-children sound to grinding punk rock (ok, I re-arranged it, I’m not afraid to admit it).  The key song was one of the originals, my slightly country-ish ode to Tolte. And we really did almost sound like a band instead of a trash can falling downstairs. People said they were excited to hear us, and liked the Tolte song, and the MC, the owner of a radio station in Riobamba, recorded our Tolte song on his phone, and appeared pretty enthusiastic about it. It’s still hard for me to describe Estasis without mocking it, but we are better than we were a year ago, and I have almost learned how to produce a convincing rock guitar solo (although I fear that all of my solos are pretty much the same thing).  We are actually invited to play at the Fiesta de Huigra on June 1, and the vocalist swears he’ll show up. They even say they’re going to pay us, although I think we’ll have to give everything to the guy who’s going to drive us over there. I know I didn’t come ti Ecuador to play in a garage band, but it’s become a surprisingly big part of my life here. At least most of the members show up to rehearse with some enthusiasm a few times a week.  My band mates say I can’t leave Tolte because there is no band without me, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to eat or pay rent on what people will pay to hear Estasis. But I actually will miss playing with them—I don’t know if any other band will have me, or allow me as much freedom to do whatever as Estasis has to.

And after the Estasis performance, the fiesta went on into the night, no matter that it was a Tuesday. As usual, there was plenty of beer and trago to sustain the merriment, but my body sustained the attack better than usual. In tribute to our performance, Estasis was allowed to buy a case of beer for the crowd. I even got to do some dancing, and serve out the beer and some of the trago, and in general party as though tomorrow would not be Wednesday—which it kind of wasn’t, because school was closed so the teachers could recover and the kitchen be cleaned out. I didn’t do too much myself on Wednesday, but I did open the library in the afternoon, and give English class at night. So there.

Do Not Go Gentle

I suppose the long gap in my contribution to this blog reflect the fact that my time in Tolte is winding down, and there doesn’t seem to be a thing I can do to slow that process. The high (maybe too high) hopes I had of making some lasting impression during my second year here, some micro-enterprise, some excellent project with the granjas integrales group, have produced nothing, and now there is not enough time to change that.

A sort of inertia seems to have possessed everyone. I have been trying for two weeks to give a talk about turning organic waste into fertilizer. This was inspired by the fact that the Municipalidad de Chunchi, whch picks up Tolte’s garbage, now requires that organic and inorganic garbage be separated. In the meeting where this was announced, I immediately offered to help people compost their organic garbage, and explained that this should not be shipped off as waste, but rather used as fertilizer. Since only the president of the junta directive took me up on that (he already wanted a worm bin to make vermicompost for his fruit trees; it was an easy sell), I decided to offer my talk to whomever might be interested. And it seems a million things have conspired to prevent me from even notifying the community that this is going to happen. The latest is that the public address system isn’t working, making notification difficult, if not exactly impossible. To dodge the PA problem, I was going to offer my talk during the community meeting on Tuesday, but the meeting was cancelled due to lack of attendance. I also have to do this on the terms of the junta, because I need the salon communal. I can’t give my talk in the library, because the electrical system that includes the library and the school burned out three weeks ago, and hasn’t been repaired yet. And so, the dominoes keep falling, and the days keep passing, and if I give my talk before the end of May, I’ll have to be grateful. Unfortunately, compost takes longer to mature than I have time left, so who knows what will happen with any of this.

Another project that is long delayed is my effort to make biochar out of animal bone. The delays here are somehow more comical, because they involve my stalwart drinking companions, Reccion and Damasio. Reccion really has the interest in making the fertilizer, and has accepted that it’s a good idea that he wants to try, which is an incredible step forward in a community that hardly uses any fertilizer, whether organic or chemical. Damasio is the one who really knows how to make charcoal, and my dedication to biochar makes me prefer to make the bone phosphate fertilizer this way rather than simply burning the bones and grinding them up, although the advantages may only be slight. To top it off, Reccion has a llama skeleton we can use for our experiment. I never imagined that any of the comical touristic llamas of Tolte could come to this. We keep scheduling the process for Friday, or next Friday, and one or another demand on either Reccion’s or Damasio’s time prevents it from happening. I haven’t lost hope yet, but I doubt that I’ll be here long enough to see Reccion’s avocado or orange trees flourish in their organic phosphate bath.

There was a note of encouragement this week, though. When the French guys were here testing the kids’ vision, they came with me on a farm visit to a piece of land that belongs to Alicia. Only one of the French guys is an optometrist. The other is an organic farmer. The organic farmer and I agreed that to manage a pest problem in one of Alicia’s fruit trees, she could try spraying the tree with milk. Of course, that was back in February. The other day, I saw Alicia’s son Joel, a boy so flimsy he could pass for an American child, struggling to haul a tank of gas up to his house on a two wheeled cart. I gave him a hand, which turned out to be somewhat tougher than I expected, and got him, the gas tank, and the cart up the hill to his house. Alicia, of course, insisted on feeding me fava beans, cheese, and some kind of extremely grassy tasting herbal tea, and it occurred to me that I didn’t know how the milk thing had gone. It turns out to have been a home run success. The tree is doing much better, the pests are gone, it felt funny spraying milk instead of drinking it, but what a good result! Maybe I need twenty years here instead of two.

There is talk about finding some way to keep me here. The Fiesta de Parroquializacion de Tolte is coming May 21, and several people are talking about pressuring Carolina on my behalf. As I understand it, she simply doesn’t have the money, and maybe has grown tired of providing an English teacher when so few in the community have taken advantage of my presence. So I’m not sure that popular demand will do much good. But the Fiesta should be excellent. ESTASIS has a new song in praise of Tolte (yes, I wrote it, but I won’t be singing it once Mario learns it), and we’ll be performing it during the festivities. I suppose my pride was injured when I heard that the junta had purchased a Himno Parroquial (sort of a town anthem) for $1500. I told Francisco that I would do it for $50 and a case of beer, but I guess he felt that he had to go a more formal route. We’ll see which song captures the popular imagination when they face off on the 21^st. But I know that there are already children singing the chorus of my song from having heard ESTASIS practice it. And this in spite of how appalling ESTASIS sounds, no matter what we play.

And I suppose there is a glimmer of hope on the English teaching front. Mario came to me the other day and said, “David, I have to learn English, it’s urgent.” I suppose having a pregnant teen-aged wife in England might contribute to that urgency. I told him that since I couldn’t charge him, I wanted him to find three other people who would study English all out for the next two months. We found three, but one dropped out right away due to some religious study even that is occurring at the same time. So I have Mario and two high school girls, Elvia and Yolanda, studying English all-out three days a week. At least, I think I have them, but this is only the first week. The first two days have gone pretty well. I’d still like a fourth person for pair work, but let’s see how far we can go. Maybe this will be my lasting contribution to Tolte—three young people well-prepared to speak English when they emigrate…

One more parting thought. Spending every Sunday in Chunchi as I do, a couple of people asked me to teach English to their kids, and that’s how I spend my Sunday afternoons now. It’s very different teaching these kids from teaching in a school classroom situation. The kids are more motivated, and they know that their parents are right behind me—sometimes literally. And while I’ve been horrified at some of the mispronunciation their teachers have taught them in school, they seem to be making good progress with me. Best of all, the father of one of my students has a land development project going in Navon, a town south of Cuenca. He’s mentioned me to the woman who’s the equivalent of County Executive there, and she seems to be interested in the things I know and could bring to Navon. So perhaps the end of my time in Tolte will carry me to the beginning of my time in Navon. For some reason, I never seem to run out of hope here in Ecuador. “David,” people tell me, “hope is the last thing you should lose.”