So long, and thanks for all the llamingos

This is certainly the (almost) last entry I will post from Tolte, although I may have to ice this cake somehow after I leave. It is Saturday, July 6, 2013, and yesterday was the last day of school. Early tomorrow (unless potential festivities tonight get in the way), I will travel to Cuenca, future site of Ecuador: La Segunda Vuelta. And while this second year in Tolte has produced some disappointments, mostly in my own inability to make more things happen, the final moments of the school year were certainly touching. And I hope that I reached a few hearts in those moments, too.

The greatest outpouring of affection came from the third grade/fifth grade classroom, because Clara (Avanti’s special ed teacher) got in there with Luis and made a project out of it. And so I received a big pile of classic childhood projects, hand-folded and decorated envelopes with genuinely endearing notes inside. Against the background of what each grade has been like, it left me with complicated feelings.

The third grade has been a wonderful and exciting class for me to teach this year. This was a surprise, because last year I didn’t teach the kids younger than fourth grade. This was in part because I just couldn’t manage them at all. But this year I was asked specifically to teach all the kids, and the third grade turned out to be either my best or second best group, depending on what kind of day the seventh grade was having. The note that really made my eyes water came from Myra, the best student in the class—and also one who is occasionally very difficult. There are days when, mid-class, perhaps due to some small frustration, she slips into a silent fury, absolutely refusing to cooperate or play along, speaking only to show that she knows the answer to a question directed at another child. The envelope she made for me was tiny, with three little plastic jewels down the flap. I think these were culled from dinosaur stickers I gave out on Tuesday. The note inside, in typical Myra fashion, didn’t say too much. But wrapped in the note was a small, pink balloon. And that pink balloon may be the most touching, heart-breaking present I’ve ever received.

And then there was the fifth grade. The fifth grade is simply an awful class full of otherwise likeable children. The problem seems to be that they really dislike each other. There is a general boys against girls war, but there can also be nasty conflicts within those groups. They love to tattle on each other, yell at each other, argue, but I’ll give them credit for not hitting each other. Still, of the three classes I had last year, this one lagged far behind the other two. This is perhaps more surprising because when I came back in September, I didn’t feel that there was a clear difference between what the fifth and sixth grades remembered from the year before. In essence, the fifth grade is so focused on who’s doing what that they can hardly learn anything, and this applies to all of their school work, not just English.

But it was these children who were writing and saying, “David, no se vaya (David, don’t go).” They thanked me for teaching them English, they apologized for their behavior, and they hugged me and told me that they wished I could stay with them always. And this clutched at my heart, too, because I also recognize how much these children need and appreciate my affection, especially because they know they don’t treat me very well as a group. Again, as individuals, they’re adorable. When they come to the library in the afternoon, we chat, we laugh, I read them stories, and it’s clear that they love me. In those moments, I can’t help but love them, too. And then comes the next morning when we’re in school, and I can’t bear the 45 minutes we spend together.

I suppose this issue of the children’s behavior leads logically to what may be the most important thing I said yesterday, maybe the most important thing I said in my two years here. I have always known, and complained, that the only sort of discipline that parents use here is corporal punishment. It is only recently that my too-innocent brain has grasped the idea that this corporal punishment often goes beyond the bounds of what should be considered appropriate discipline. And once the idea dawned on me that some of this discipline should be called abuse, I seemed to see and hear of it with an alarming frecuency. A couple of boys came to school with bruises on their faces, a girl mentioned being whipped with an extension cord, a father came to punish his child for injuring another kid, threw him to the ground, kicked him, got his belt out and would have used that, too, if Clara and I hadn’t gotten in the way and told him it was enough already. I had to do more first aid on that child than the kid he accidentally hurt.

Since then, I have waited for some sort of opportunity to speak to the parents about this. I did speak to the father who came to school a couple of days later, but he just didn’t seem that receptive. But finally, there was a padres de familia de la escuela meeting yesterday. And when they thanked me, and I had a moment to thank them, I spoke to them about how much their children long for their kindness, how necessary it is to talk to their kids when they do wrong instead of hitting them for every silly kid thing that they do, and how much it matters to me that they at least try to hold back the next blow. Certainly, if I had another year here, I would try to form some kind of parents’ group to develop some alternatives for getting what they want in terms of their children’s behavior. And I had the satisfaction of seeing some faces light up with recognition, an show some reaction to what I was saying. I know it won’t last, but maybe a few kids will get off with a warning this week.

Maybe someone reading this will say, “Dave, kids in the U.S. never get spanked anymore and they’re animals. Maybe a bit of what they’re doing in Ecuador would help.” And I suppose that there’s some truth in this. Many parents don’t spank they’re kids, but they don’t do anything to impose limits, and they’re kids are no fun to be around. But the effect of constant physical discipline is also awful. While I love the kids of Tolte, who have many good qualities, I also feel that they’re sneaky, grabby, and, paradoxically, lazy. Children in Tolte work very, very hard, often five or six hours a day of hard farm work after school. But they do this because they don’t feel they have any choice. When presented with school work, or any other task not imposed by force, their instinct is simply not to do it. The sneakiness come in when they confront rules, like my rule against eating in the library, which I have explained is necessary to protect the books. The children almost seem to feel a compulsion to eat in the library, because they so desperately need to do what they want to do sometimes. As far as grabby, it seems to be a psychological truism that kids are grabby or steal things when they feel they are short-changed in other ways. And in the high school in Chunchi, are the kids from the countryside, who are more frequently raised this way, the respectful, serious students? No, they’re the kids who tear the school apart and are rude to the teachers, reinforcing all the prejudices against the rural zone. So the next time someone tells you how important it is to control their kids through hitting, ask them what his or her kids are like when they’re out of the house.

My last adult English class did not fare well. The two high school girls stopped coming during their final exams, and didn’t come back for the last week. The two adults had urgent business in Riobamba, and although one came each night on Monday and Tuesday, attendance at the last class was zero. I don’t know if that reflects a lack of charisma on my part or a lack of commitment on theirs, but I was sorry to see the class end that way. I am confident that everyone learned something, especially the adults. If I had to do it over again, I think I would insist that the class be made up of adults, because the high school kids don’t have the time.  But the ongoing struggle to maintain an adult literacy class also demonstrates how difficult it can be to get adults to leave their houses in the evenings as well.

But one of my adult students did have an eye-opening experience (one that may have opened my eyes, too). She was watching me do my oral final exam with one of the seventh graders, a good student but not my best. When we finished, the adult students said, "David, she speaks better than the high school kids in the night class." Yes, she does. When I leave, that ability is doomed to fade or disappear, but it hasn't been an empty experience. 

I would like to mention the gift I was given in the last school meeting, now that I’ve explained how I used it as an opportunity to get up on a soap box. It was a folder of the kind that children in the U.S. use for their book reports, containing 8 pages. Each page had a class photo, and a message from each student. For first and second grades, the message was simply their names. That’s all the writing they can do independently. But the comments get more interesting, and the emotions more complex, as the pages turn to the seventh grade. The last page contains two photos, one of Tolte, and one of the train running on the Nariz del Diablo track. I wonder what I will think when I look at it in the future—or even if I will look at it in the future. But right now, it seems the most precious object I own.

Post-script: At the parents’ meeting yesterday, the idea of finding some way to pay me to work in Tolte next year came up. Avanti offered a 50/50 split of my salary a couple of months back, an idea that didn’t seem to have much appeal then. But perhaps the emotions roused by seeing me head for the highway have shifted the balance. There is now some possibility that I could return to Tolte.  This might be difficult, as I am fairly committed to starting anew in Cuenca. But I’m willing to accept whatever offer the universe makes.

ESTASIS: Live in Huigra!

Time is running short, but I wanted to throw something out there once more before my last blog from Tolte. It’s hard to believe that after the time I’ve spent here, and the way I feel abut living here, that there could be any sort of end, but the end comes in just over two weeks, with the end of the school year on July 5. Avanti has decided to end its involvement in Tolte’s school to focus on other projects in Tolte and elsewhere. There was some hope that the community might take over and pay my salary, but that really isn’t a possibility. Keeping me here, even at last year’s lower salary, would cost about $15 a month per school family. While no one is going hungry in Tolte, cash is in short supply. Frankly, although I think I provide pretty good value, I’d feel badly taking $15 a month from any of my neighbors, so, as Avanti withdraws, so must I.

This doesn’t mean that all is gloom and doom. My laughable rock band, Estasis, has a cool event at the beginning of June. Some friend of Freddy’s (our drummer) got us invited to play at the event to choose La Reina 2013 of the high school in Huigra, a pretty down about an hour away by car. Huigra is a lot lower than Tolte, and has a lovely, eternal spring climate. We were told to prepare a minimum of a half hour of material, for which we would be paid the astonishing sum of $200.

An added element in this was that I invited my girlfriend Yadira to this event. She’s from Cuenca, and had never been to Tolte (nor had she heard of it before she met me). I thought she might be OK with Estasis, because we play some of the same songs that she has stored in her telephone, but of course, the way we play is nothing like a professionally recorded, internationally recognized, band.  So inviting Yadira along was more about giving her some insight into the way I’ve lived that past two years than about music.

Because we hadn’t rehearsed with our vocalist for a long time (he’s from Sibambe, and it isn’t easy for him to get to Tolte), we wound up practicing from about 3 in the afternoon until 5:30, an idea I didn’t like much, fearing that we would expend too much emotional energy practicing and not have enough left for the show. The hilarious irony is that the vocalist again had trouble getting to Tolte, and didn’t show up until almost 5. It also turned out that he had a sore throat, and couldn’t afford to waste much energy singing in practice. But, between 3 and 5:30, we did run through everything we know, to make sure that we had half an hour or more of material. Much to my amazement, Yadira said, “You know, this band isn’t at all as horrible as you pretend.” (That’s a translation.) I’m not sure whether or not she’s right, or hasn’t heard enough real rock bands to form a rational opinion. Or maybe love really is deaf, not blind.

We had arranged transportation beforehand (doing anything beforehand is weird for Estasis) with Mecias, but he almost didn’t make it. In case you think only gringos suffer from all sorts of horrible gastrointestinal illnesses in Latin America, I can assure you it isn’t so. Mecias is very strong and tough, but he was almost overwhelmed by how bad he felt. And driving to Huigra wasn’t easy, especially the first half an hour or so in the dense Andean fog. But at least when we got to Huigra there was a health center open, where they gave Mecias an injection for his ailment, and he felt better almost immediately.  Truth be told, I think his injection did more to alleviate our guilt for dragging him out of his house than it did for his stomach, which wasn’t fully better for another three or four days, but he did seem a lot more comfortable in the moment.

The high school was kind enough to feed all of us in a restaurant near the school, and a pretty nice restaurant it was. The beef wouldn’t have passed muster in an American steakhouse, but it was a real luxury by Ecuadorean standards. You could tell because we cut it up with forks and knives, instead of attacking it directly with our teeth.  Normally, there would have been a case of beer involved in this meal, but since we were getting ready to play, we stuck with Coca Cola.

After dinner, we all hiked up to a popular shrine in Huigra, La Virgen de la Gruta, which is a large statue of the Virgin parked in a kind of hollow in the bedrock of the mountain behind the statue. By now it was around 9 o’clock, and I had thought we were supposed to play at 8, but nobody seemed to be in any hurry. Rather than any praying, we all mostly just enjoyed the lovely view of Huigra in the eternal spring-like air, and strolled back down to the high school gym where the event was underway. A guitar and piano duo was playing some sort of pop music with a semi-classical sound, and then the candidates for Reina came out representing various regions and ethnic groups of Ecuador in costume and dance.

As we neared 11, we were finally given the go-ahead to set up and play. We gathered our stuff out of Mecias’ car, and hurried onstage. There was an excellent sound system to plug into, and techie types who were prepared to try to make us sound good. It took a bit of doing, but soon we were all organized onstage and ready to play. That’s when I noticed that the vocalist wasn’t there. After some swapping of cell phones to find someone who had enough credit to make a phone call (Cell phones here are pay as you go. I’m usually the only person I know who has any credit in my account.),  Mario told Javier to get a move on, and he strolled in a few minutes later.

We had organized our set to build toward the stuff we do best (sort of messy punk rock) at the end of the set, so we opened up with the easier-listening, more sensitive stuff. We always open with “A Mi Lindo Ecuador,” a pop tune in praise of Ecuador that is sort of in the style of the national music, and our twist is my high-distortion guitar solo. We went on to play four or five pop songs where our approach is less distinctive, but generally includes a high-distortion guitar solo, because I’ve only got a Tube Screamer and a Wah-Wah pedal.

We had played about 15 minutes when the organizers told us that they were running behind and we had to get off the stage. I was very disappointed, because the really distorted guitar solos were yet to come. I was just getting warmed up. So we shut everything off just as the techies were getting the hang of how to deal with us, and off we went. And they didn’t pay us $200, but only $100, although dinner might have been worth $50. After we paid Mecias $30 for driving, and $10 for his visit to the health center, we each walked away with $10. This should be evidence enough that it is more profitable to be a taxi driver than a musician, and let that be a lesson to us all.

But the show is not really over, because one of Javier’s friends got video of us doing whatever it was that we did, and now it’s on Youtube, where all sorts of things that should never have been recorded go after they die. The sound quality is pretty harsh, because the gym we played in was made out of cinder blocks, and we play loud, so notes are bouncing all over the place. But if you feel the urge, you can actually hear the Estasis experience, you can type ESTASIS (you have to use all capital letters, or Facebook can’t find us) in Facebook for all of the songs in our set. If that seems like more than you can bear, just go to this link for what I think might be the best of what we did, even though I’m hidden behind Javier and Mario: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eX0NQuh7Ml0

Frankly, I’m not sure what I’ll do without Estasis. I’m going to leave Tolte, but after a brief trip back to New York, I’ll be moving to Cuenca. I doubt that too many bands would give me the freedom to solo any crazy thing like Estasis does, and the relationship that I have with each of the members of Estasis is also different from what I would have if I just join a band of strangers. But somehow, as hilariously awful as we are, I think I’ve improved as a rock guitar soloist in my time with the band, which just goes to show that if you want to play in a certain style, you have to be in a band that plays in that style.  I wonder what would have happened if I had figured that out 40 years ago…

Two more weeks, and time is winding down quickly. It is going to be so hard to leave here, even though my future in Cuenca does look bright. But the tranquility of being part of a small community of yeoman farmers will be gone. It sort of makes me wonder if the modern world is organized on a completely dysfunctional social model.

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.”

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.

Cuatro Ojos

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.