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.