Wildcat Day Off

Much to my surprise, there is no school today. Apparently, there was some need for the teachers to do something at their headquarters in Riobamba, and I guess they didn't feel it necessary to let me know. Or maybe I put out the wrong kind of vibe. Anyway, I have spent the morning huddled by my internet connection, taking care of some odds and ends that require long wait times at the speeds available to me.

As I was sitting here, I thought I'd respond to the question posed to me yesterday evening regarding whether the universe pays you back for doing the right thing, or being on the right path. Here's an experience from Tuesday, which ties in pretty well with the last blog.

As you will recall, Joaquin entrusted me with a bottle of brutal homemade trago that wound up being consumed, in its entirety, by the futbol players. Consequences were unattractive. But Monday evening, Joaquin found me in the plaza to tell me that he needed the booze to offer to the crew of people working with him to dig holes for light poles. I can understand this, since the holes had to be five feet deep in soil that has enough rock in it to be a pain to dig through. But, of course, I no longer had the alcohol he had donated to the futbolistas. Since he couldn't go, I guess he felt that I should be the one to make the trip to Chunchi to get more.

Going to Chunchi, as going to Alausi, is no big deal. getting back is always a drag. In addition, Joaquin was not working near his home in Tolte, but in another sub-village of Pitishi called Achaisi, about halfway down to the train station, maybe 45 minutes walk. he was also not working near the main road down, but in some unknown location above the road. But, feeling that I should deal with things one at a time and wanting to maintain his excellent good will (although risking the possibility that he would think i was a doormat), I went on to Chunchi, found the store that had sold us the rotgut, was told they were all out, bought a bottle of Zhumir, which is the commercial version of moonshine, and actually managed to catch a bus back to Tolte, all in the space of about two and a half hours. That is near record time, but keep in mind that Chunchi is less than 10 miles away.

So now I was back on the Tolte road heading down to Achaisi, a community that may or may not have 7 full time residents, but where several residents of Tolte have property. As I walked along, I noticed a young woman ahead of me carrying her baby on her back, as women do here. They wrap a shawl around their shoulders and under the baby's bottom, tie tightly, and march along. The baby never slips out, which is sort of amazing. But in this case, I did find a little white bonnet on the road in front of me. I picked it up, caught up with the woman whom I have seen before, but whose name I don't know), and handed it over, for which I was rewarded with "Dios le pague," (May God reward you), the Ecuadorian phrase for "Thank you."

I continued along my way, wondering how I would find Joaquin when I got to Achaisi. A truck came up behind me, and at the wheel was Pablo, the carpenter, who was meeting his wife Martina for lunch in Achasi. She was working with her mother and a child at a field task that i was too distracted to identify, but looked awfully demanding. Pablo not only brought me to Achasi, but also told me what route I should take to find Joaquin, how to avoid the fierce dogs that guard one of the houses. Finding the route took some additional shouting and hand-waving on Pablo's part, because the entrance involved some climbing of the sort that I find frightening. But, armed with my bottle of booze, I made it up and onto the main path of Achasi and started looking for Joaquin. After 15 or 20 minutes of walking, and with the help of the hole diggers, I found his wife in a little house that must have been a family residence in the past. I handed the bottle over, and she told me where Joaquin and Augustin were working. As I walked in the direction, I realized I was in a mountain meadow of pure rural beauty. Naturally, I never would have seen it had I not gone on this fool's errand. Joaquin directed me back to the path, and I made it down without being bitten by the dogs, who decided to attack this time. They did seem crazy, but stuck to a certain distance from the house, and did not chase em down the road. I was in time to catch a ride back to Tolte with Pablo.

So there you have it. A trip that would have been impossible without guidance, and difficult without a ride, became fairly easy. Was it because I retrieved the baby bonnet, or because I was delivering booze? The world will never know.

A few unrelated notes follow, so if you want narrative coherence, stop reading now. If you really care about teaching English in Tolte, you can take your chances.

This week, I have been teaching the children words for clothing. They are particularly fascinated by teh word "sunglasses," I think because the sight of someone in sunglasses seems so exotic. No one here uses them, in spite of all the dust and UV light, which is probably why so many people have vision problems as they get older. But this is information for some other time.

The kids have done a pretty god job learning the words, and yesterday I got into the phrases "Take off" and "Put on" as a way of forming sentences. I had brought some of my stuff, and they put on my cap, sunglasses, sweater, and jacket. It finally occurred to me that what they needed was some physical connection, so I put the jacket and sunglasses on one line, and the sweater and cap on the other. I split the class into two relay race teams. The first person had to put on the jacket and glasses (or the sweater and cap), run back to the next person, who had to get the clothes on, and run to deliver them to their original places. Repeat as necessary until everyone has had a turn. All I can say is that i wish I had video. I don't know if it will help them learn English, but it sure brightened my day.

In other news, the adult English class has been struggling to maintain its existence. The past three times I gave the class, no one showed up. But last night I had six of the young folks in my computer room, and things were a lot livelier. One left pretty quickly (he looked like he'd rather be out on a motorcycle), but the rest stayed long enough to make a pretty good class. Of  course, I'm going to be away in Quito and Portoviejo next week, so I'll lose momentum again, but I think that over the next seven months, this should get going pretty well. And maybe the universe is paying me for continuing to offer the class every Tuesday and Thursday. If you build it, they will come...

Quito and Portoviejo: Quito to get my visa extended so that I can spend the full school year in Tolte, and Portoviejo so that I can visit my cousin Amy Summer, interchange high school student (although she has already graduated from American high school and accepted to Wellesley College, talented young person that she is). Portoviejo will be my first exposure to the Ecuadorian coast, reputed to be quite different in nature from the Andean highlands where I live. Also far away. I'm not sure how far Portoviejo is from Quito, but it will take me 10-12 hours to get back to Tolte on buses that go from Portoviejo to Guayaquil to Alausi and then to Tolte. Considering the difficulty of getting out of Alausi, I might be better off going back through Quito. We'll see. If you don't here from me for a week or so, it's because I'm on the road.

Futbol nuevamente

I haven't had the chance to mention that Tolte is hosting a futbol championship of teams from Tolte and the neighboring villages. the game they are playing isn't actually futbol, but "indor," which is payed in the village plazas, which are about one-quarter the size of an actual soccer field. Teams include six players per side, and action and scoring are greatly accelerated compared to true futbol. Scores of 10-6 or so are pretty common. The payers are so densely packed that it can be difficult to sort out the action, but some of the players show an incredible ability to move with the ball over the concrete surface, where the ball moves a lot more quickly than it does on grass.

One of the teams, Los Vecinos, is composed of many of the same players as the Tolte travelling team mentioned in previous blogs, though that team is spread out among four or five teams playing in the tournament. In any case, Sunday night turned out to be the night for Los Vecinos to celebrate their victory, along with some players from the other teams. As usual, frightening amounts of beer were consumed, but that wasn't the worst of it. In the course of the afternoon, Joaquin and I went to Chunchi. he had some errands to run, and invited me along for the ride. One of the errands was to find a place selling homemade trago, moonshine made from sugar cane. In the end, he found one, but asked me to carry the bottle (probably for fear of what his wife and family might say). In the end, I not only wound up with the bottle, but the bottle became the group possession of the futbolistas.

How can I describe what this stuff tasted like? I have had other homemade tragos, and they range from pretty bad to pretty good. But if I tell you that this stuff tasted like turpentine, I might not be conveying the full horror of what we were drinking (washed down with beer, of course). Fortunately, they all had a tremendous head start on me, or I might not have survived. Everyone did his best to break out whatever English he knew, and it was all pretty entertaining, until it was time to go home.

because I have helped to carry some of these boys home before, I got roped into doing it again. But this wasn't the one at a time trip of the previous event, but sort of a mass migration uphill to the vecinario the Vecinos come from. And during this migration, one of them decided that what he really needed to do was fight with his cousin.

I don't know if I have described this cousin before, but his name is William (or maybe Alfonso or Patricio, code name Pato). He's short, in the way one expects Ecuadorians to be, but is so powerful that, like the young Arnold Schwarznegger, he "has muscles in his face," to quote someone I knew long ago. He's an incredible athlete, definitely one of the stars of the futbol team, and not someone to start a fight with. Except that he was incredibly drunk and didn't feel like fighting. which his cousin Gonzalo absolutely did.

I'm not a brave man. It's just that simple. But somehow, keeping these two guys apart suddenly became incredibly important to me (maybe because of my own level of inebriation, though I wasn't as far gone as most). Maybe it was the high school teacher in me emerging in an alien environment. And that's how I found myself both trying to hold William back and get him home, which required going forward. This is comparable to trying to stop a HumVee by holding on to the bumper.

Fortunately, another futbolista named Cristian (an easy-going soul, maybe a bit more grown-up than the rest) also got involved in holding Gonzalo back. Otherwise we never would have gotten anywhere. But I wound up in the middle of things more than once, and was lucky to escape with a scraped knee and a scratch under my right eye. Not bad, considering. And Gonzalo and William got home largely uninjured, which was a real miracle. I guess that puts the "peace" in Peace Corps. Of course, all my students noticed the scratch under my eye this morning, because the brawl was the biggest news to hit Tolte since the brawls of last year's fiestas. These fiestas are coming around again in about three weeks, and I guess there will be more of this kind of thing, but worse, so I'm going to try to take my leave earlier. Happy Dia de San Marcial to all.

But I did wonder, as I walked home and went to bed, am I braver than I thought? Was I just heedless, so that I didn't have time to overcome any fears? After all, I didn't stop to consider whether anyone was armed (no one was). Or was I motivated by the idea that William trusted me to get him home? If I knew what to conclude, I suppose there would be the chance to learn something about myself from this, which is why a person takes a job teaching in Ecuador for $360 a month. But I'm sort of mystified, myself.

A (nearly) perfect day

Yesterday was my idea of a perfect day. Yes, things seemed to go wrong after the sun went down, but it still seems so clear to me that days like this don’t come along often enough.

The first great thing was that I didn’t teach English yesterday. Instead, Angel invited me to pick potatoes with his family. Picking potatoes is a festive occasion, as I suppose most harvests are in most places. That’s not to say it isn’t brutally hard work. We may all be farmers, as my permaculture friends like to say, but few of us really have the stamina to live the life.

We didn’t get the earliest start, which was sort of too bad, because yesterday was hotter than most. Weather here generally follows a basic pattern of hot morning sun, followed by a cooler midday overcast, and fairly chilly nights. Yesterday was bright sunshine al day. The temperature never gets very high, but this is Ecuatorial America, and the intensity of the sunlight can microwave you pretty quickly. But it took a while to pack up the donkeys and retrieve the cattle (a young cow and a younger bull of the beef sort—most of the cattle here are dairy), and then a while more to walk down the mountainside to the potato field. Oh, yes, I did say donkeys, which are the pack animals here. Sure, there is plenty of truck transport, even in Tolte, but once you go off the road, a donkey can be pretty handy. They can carry about 200 pounds for about as long as they need to over any sort of terrain, which beats the heck out of carrying that weight yourself.

Angel and his wife Gladys and I reached the potato field to find Damasio already there. Damasio is one of the most cheerful presences in Tolte, which is saying a lot—most people here have a pretty sunny outlook. Damasio was already at work in the basic potato harvesting process: undercut the potato plants with a pick as if you were digging a shallow irrigation ditch, use the pick to dig out the potato plants, then scratch through the soil with a pick or azedon to find any potatoes you’ve buried. As you might imagine, this can take kind of a toll on the back that isn’t trained for it. Damsio is a pretty roly-poly sort of fellow, but a look at his forearms will tell you that he’s also very, very strong.

Naturally, our arrival was a chance to take a short break, which was celebrated first with a cup of chicha—that’s one cup, filled successively for each of us—followed by a shot of some kind of moonshine mixed with Fanta. That’s quite a way to start the day. Chicha is a fermented beverage, and topping it off with “trago” can really get one’s motor running. But we got right to work, some doing the main picking while others gathered potatoes and scratched through the loose soil looking for more. And every hour or so there was another round of chicha and trago. I can’t say it was exactly refreshing, but it did seem to make the work go a bit easier.

More people started to arrive. Augustin, star of a previous blog entry, is Angel’s uncle. I had understood that he was going to bring a pair of oxen to plow out at least some of the potatoes. This didn’t happen, but he did do some of the heavy picking for a while. Then Angel’s father, Joaquin (Augustin’s brother) arrived and took over the heavy pick work. Meanwhile, I tried not to experience too much shame picking up potatoes and scraping through the loose soil. Augustin and Joaquin are my age, but they generate a lot more force with a pick for far longer than I ever could.

Even so, by noon, my lower back was pretty much shot, and I wasn’t ashamed to say so. The remedy? Damasio picked a big lemon, cut it in half, and told me to rub it up and down my back. I have to admit that it did actually make me feel a little better, and smell a lot better, so it’s not a solution to take lightly.

By the time lunch came around, I was more desperate for a break than for food. But, as promised, the food was abundant and good. There were potatoes that we had just harvested with or without ahi, the local hot sauce. Of course there was cuy, which by now you know is guinea pig. But there were also small, bony fish that I found a lot more appealing than cuy. As with all real Ecuadorian emals, there was mote, big boiled grains of corn. The real taste sensation was a soul made out of roasted, ground up seeds of a squash called sambo.

So there we sat, in the shade of an avocado tree, with a present breeze blowing, sharing this food. And I do mean sharing. There were no plates, and the only utensil was a single spoon in the soup pot. And the one cup for chicha. Eating a meal here is a truly social experience. Everyone puts his or her hand in the potato pot, the mote bowl, the lettuce bin, the fish pot, and shares the soup spoon. So there we were, sharing the food, in the shade, with the breeze blowing, and the huge, lightly vegetated face of a mountain in front of us, and a blue sky over its edge, and I thought, holy smoke, this is one of the best days of my life. I’m so glad I realized it.

Lunch lasted about an hour, and by then it was about 2 o’clock. Back we went to picking and scraping, maybe a bit more slowly than before. A few more people showed up from parts unknown to pitch in, and that was a good thing, because they were all, men and women both, a lot sturdier than I am. And one of them brought more trago, this time flavored with some sort of grapefruit flavored stuff, and Damasio made sure we finished that, too. And just about the time that I thought I couldn’t take any more picking (because by now Joaquin made sure that I had a chance to do some of the real work), the day was over. Potatoes were being distributed among the sacks to make donkey loads. Ivan, one of the boys in fifth grade, led the donkey up and down to the road so we could catch a truck back to the center of Tolte.

While we waited for Ivan to finish his work, Damasio, Segundo and I talked about English and Kichwa. Segundo taught me a new phrase in Kichwa, “hukunyukan,” which mean’s “Let’s go.” Damasio and Segundo were very pleased to be able to speak this much English. And soon they were saying, “Let’s go” for real, and up to the road we went.

Somehow, Damasio found some trago to buy that we hadn’t consumed yet, and here’s where things became more difficult for me. This stuff was brutally string, and uncut with anything else. By the time I got off the truck, I really was feeling that I had gone too far—but I still had a PTA meeting to attend, because AVANTI had sent clothes down from Quito for the children. This meeting, as most meetings here, was brutally long and inefficient, although we did manage to give out the clothes, which was a good thing. Still, there was a point about midway through the meeting when the whole room seemed to be revolving in a most unattractive way. I remember Paul Battaglia telling me,” Stay off the moving sidewalks,” but I couldn’t stay out of the writhing room. I may have dozed off for a while, but I was coherent enough to give out the clothing when the time came.

The meeting started at 7, and didn’t end until about midnight. By now it was really cold, but I had left my sweater at Joaquin’s house. But I live near the meeting room, and I was looking forward to getting into bed. I was cold, tired, and ready for rest. But this was not to be. Jose and Narcisa have the habit of putting the key inside the house at night, especially if they think I’m already inside. And that’s where it was, and I could wake them. After a while of shivering and pounding on the door, I went back to the plaza, where I figured I’d have to hole up in the library if I couldn’t get into the house. But some of the parents were still in the meeting room, and Martina, the president of the group, took charge. First she tried to wake Jose and Narcisa, but had not luck. Then she borrowed a sweater from a neighbor so that I wouldn’t freeze. Unfortunately, this garment was clearly a woman’s clothing, but fortunately, no one was awake in Tolte to see me put it on. And we did walk all over Tolte, because Martina had an idea that Jose and Narcisa might be at the church. The church turned out to be closed, so we went back to Martina’s house. She also had trouble getting into her house, but eventually Pablo, her husband, heard us and let us in. Martina called Jose on the phone, managed to wake him that way, and by the time I got back to the house, the door was open for me.

So was that a rough ending to a perfect day? Well, sure, but consider the effort that Martina went to to get me back in my house. And how well taken care of I am here in so many ways. It has taken me less than two months to have the day I had yesterday, and I expect that there will be several more before this experience runs out.

Post Script: I woke up Saturday with sore muscles not in my lower back, but in my backside, hips, and hamstrings. It's like they told me at the gym--I'm a string guy with a weak core.

Acrophobia

I have always suffered from a terrible fear of heights. It shows up in odd ways, For example, I worked several summers painting houses, and going up ladders, at least to a certain point, never bothered me. I think it was having something to hold on to that made it easier. But I was never able to work on scaffolding, or anywhere else where I had to walk along any height at all without a handrail. I remember when the handrail fell off of the log bridge that crossed the Rio Uruca in Matinilla. The bridge was only about 5 feet above the water, but I could barely get home.

Twenty of the 65 school children are off on adventure provided by AVANTI and LAN airlines. The idea is to give rural children a chance to experience air travel; I can't say 'm clear on why this is considered beneficial, but it is certainly exciting. But this means that about half of the foruth through seventh graders are not here. Yesterday, the teachers of those classes (both named Luis) decided to walk the children down to the train station as a kind of nature walk. I can't say I heard much nature discussed, but it was nice to get out, and it spared me having to teach anything in particular (except for taking the opportunity to teach one of the Luis that the Eucalyptus tree is native to Australia, not Ecuador).

Normally, when I walk down to the train station on my own, I take the dirt road that is wide enough for cars. It's quite the magnificent view, but it is certainly the long way down. Yesterday we took a short cut. Not the shortest cut, but definitely more direct than the road. This is where the acrophobia comes in. I can't recall ever feeling the creeping terror hit me when I was standing on the ground. But on this short cut, if you look out on the "downhill" side, you don't see anything other than empty space. It's like walking along the edge of a cliff. Actually, I think it may be a walk along the edge of a cliff. But there I was, surrounded by little children, and I have to be Dave when I am teaching, which requires a certain level of fearlessness. And so I walked down the shortcut, and later I walked back up again, doing my best to look as fearless as possible. Inside, the adrenalin was surging so hard that I could hardly move. I couldn't decide whether to throw up or just have a heart attack. But I made it in both direction without hesitation. A couple of kids even held my hands as we finished up on the road, because I seemed to be hiking along more strongly than they felt.

I wouldn't make too much of this experience. I don't think it proves you can do anything you set your mind to. There is a shorter cut that I never want to get on to, because I don't think I could handle anything even slightly more provoking than yesterday's trail. But I will say that my mood seemed to pick up quite a bit when we were done. Maybe we all need more adrenalin rush and less prozac.

Lunch in Alausi

What with one thing and another, Avanti hasn’t had a chance to pay me my monthly salary yet. Since I don’t have an Ecuadorian bank account, direct deposit is out of the question . That’s too bad, because I have always been quite dedicated to direct deposit back home. But getting to the bank is sort of an ordeal, and I have asked them to pay me in cash. This requires that Angus bring my salary with him when he comes down from Quio, which isn’t something that happens every week.

This is all leading up to the idea that the money I got when I was in Riobamba was just about gone by today, and my salary won’t be here until at least the middle of next week, so I had to go to Alausi, capital of the canton (sort of the county level of government), where there are two banks with ATM’s, and one of the ATM’s actually works. There is no bank here in Tolte. Most people work at the margins of the cash economy, eating food that they grow and selling other things, without much in the way of savings that would merit a bank account. There’s no post office here, either—in fact, the postal service seems to be almost unused, which may bode ill for the US postal service. I think I’d have to go to Riobamba to mail a letter, although it’s possible that there is a post office in Alausi or even Chunchi. Of course, the letter would take well over a month to arrive, so it’s not clear of mail is even a form of communication. Other fairly typical components of a US town that are not present here include: food market (though the stores do sell a few food items), restaurant, laundry/dry cleaners, movies, lending library, bus stop, auto mechanic, police of any kind…well, really, there isn’t much of anything besides houses, farms, the school, the municipal office, and the two churches. It’s a bit like a typical village on Long Island, if you think about it—except with much more communal life. And, on the plus side, I haven’t seen a McDonald’s or a Starbucks since I got here.

Anyway, going to Alausi is sort of an ordeal—you never know how long it will take for a bus to show up. As it happens, I only had to wait about half an hour to catch a bus to Alausi, which is just about record time. I walked straight down to the bank and got some money, bought some bread in one of the superior panaderias of Alausi, and treated myself to lunch (comida Alausena autentica) at a restaurant called “La Fuente,” which was the name of the landmark store that marked the end of Salitral and the beginning of Matinilla in my Peace Corps neighborhood in Costa Rica. For $1.75, I got a big bowl of soup that included lentils, potatoes, something cabbage-like (maybe a local green called celga, which might be chard or collards) and some mysterious pieces of mammal flesh, which made for some fairly tough chewing. The main dish was a similar piece of meat, but thinner and pan fried, over white rice with a beet salad on the side. That Alausi cuisine probably makes for pretty hardy, uncomplaining folk. And you don’t hear me complaining either. Lunch like that for $1.75? Awesome

Because I had to open the computer room at 3:00, I went right back to the bus stop to wait. I’d say it was about 12:00. No one was at the bus stop, and I think that encouraged me to make a real mistake. I decided to walk up to the highway. When I got there, I realized that I was not really in the right place, and would have to walk some more to get there. While I was doing that I saw a bus pass the bus stop I had left. And so I earned myself a two hour wait for the bus at the bus stop, because, in the end, that seemed like the smartest place to wait for a bus. I knew I was in for a long wait when I started seeing tourists. They must have come down to take the Nariz del Diablo train ride. But I figured the probability of seeing them was so low that a long wait must be required for that eventuality to arise. I certainly was right. There was a great moment when the bus arrived, though, and the driver told the students to wait until the “people” got on. Yes, it warms a teacher’s heart to hear remarks like this. The bus also happened to be new and clean, and it got me back to Tolte in time to open the computer room at 3:00, with a little help from Ascencio, who gave me a ride in the back of his truck instead o my having to walk into town. All I can say is, I hope I don’t have to go back to Alausi any time soon. It’s kind of a nice place, but it’s too hard to get home.

Coming of the Cuy

As mentioned in a previous blog, cuy is the word for guinea pig here in Ecuador. And as mentioned in the most recent episode, every family in Tolte is receiving a clutch of guinea pigs as an economic boost. I was wrong about the cages and pigs being given out on different days. In fact, it seemed that everyone was given a plastic crate full of guinea pigs first, and the cage materials (hardware cloth with a corrugated fiberglass roof) afterwards. A variety of methods were used to transport the guinea pig crates. The most picturesque involved elderly women who would wrap their all-purpose wool shawls around the crate and carry it on their backs. This method is used to haul everything from babies to loads of alfalfa, and it seems to work pretty well. I think it also reflects the astonishing strength of the women involved.

In any case, it's quite astonishing to seem people handing out crates full of guinea pigs as an agricultural commodity. I don't know if I'll ever be able to think of guinea pigs as pets ever again. Meanwhile, i can't quite think of them as food. When I got home, there were about six roast pigs being served to the road crew for lunch, and a less attractive group of animals it would hard to imagine. Let's face it: as efficient a system as this is, the things still look like rates, especially with their fur off. Not that appetizing to the outsider.

In response to the perceptive comment from Skee Jones, people here have their own land, though some have more, or better, or flatter land. This is a fairly recent phenomenon. Until the 1980's, most farmers here worked in a kind of share cropping system, or worse, for the owner of the local hacienda. They weren't really paid, but received a certain amount of access to water to grow food for themselves. Reforms have given the land over to the local people, most of whom grow a certain amount of alfalfa as food for their guinea pigs and cattle. I have been told that a good alfalfa field will last ten years before it needs renewal. I don't yet know what "renewal" consists of, though. The main thing is that, as I mentioned in the lats blog, the alfalfa-cuy system produces meat quickly without requiring much in the way of fertilizer (though I imagine phosphorus, in some form, has to be added now and again.) On a small farm, a family could probably feed itself with half the land in alfalfa and the other half in potatoes, with a little space for the guinea pig coop and a vegetable garden. It might not be the most appealing diet, but the food security would be pretty good.

In other news, there seems to be a problem with the paperwork for the 4/5 teacher, and I spent the day subbing again. I can't say I liked it much, but just when things seemed hopeless, the fifth grade uncorked a really good English class, and I felt like I was getting somewhere. Kids are so inventive when it comes to finding new ways to torment a person.

Azedon

This has been a strange week. It’s hard to describe a week of school as rough when school has been closed Monday and Friday, but I’d say this was a rough one. On Tuesday, the grade 4/5 teacher was out because of a transportation problem. I wound up taking his class, and it was pretty horrible. What, exactly, does a teacher do when the children really don’t care what you tell them to do, and do what they want to anyway? There’s no office, no one to call to remove anybody, and no point in telling anyone to leave the room because they won’t until they feel like it. But things never degenerated to the point they did the last time I took the fourth grade alone, so I thought that was a reasonable outcome.

Then, on Thursday, the k/1/2/3 teacher was out. I’ve been in there before, and I knew I didn’t want to go. I held on almost until recess, but by then they weren’t doing anything I asked them to do either. This time, I was told a substitute teacher was on her way—but no one ever came. After recess I went back to teaching English, which I can always manage for about 45 minutes with grades 4-7 (it used to be 3-7, but the third grader was moved down to the primary classroom, which makes perfect sense in this case). That cheered me up a bit. We learned to say “Here it is,” “Here they are,” There it is,” and “There they are.” We won’t remember these things on Monday, but there it is. We also learned to play “Rock, Paper, Scissors” this week, in a kind of random spur of the moment bit of inspiration. Oddly, the first two classes really enjoyed it, and the second two wouldn’t give it a chance. But I thought it was cool. Maybe that’s because I won all my matches…

Anyway, After yesterday’s round with the primary grades, I was glad (if surprised) to get the day off. I ran into one of my students, Augustin, who seem to like to invite me to work with him. Augustin is a seventh grader, but, given that his brother Juan is also a seventh grader, and much smaller, it seems possible that Augustin has not run through school in seven years. Still, I’m flattered that he likes me enough to invite me into his home life, so I went along with him to mound soil up around rows of potatoes using an azedon. An azedon is a mattock, and clearly the preferred tool around here, which is sort of unfortunate, since my shovel skill are way better. The azedon has a heavy steel head, like a hoe, and a short wooden handle. I can pretty much guarantee that any of my reader’s lower back would start to hurt in just a few minutes, as mine did. But I persisted for about three hours until just before lunch, when I didn’t feel like I was moving around very well any more. This was too bad, as only my lower back was tired. But that was enough—no more sciatica for me, thank you.

At lunch, I got to meet Augustin’s parents and older brother, and found out that Angel, whom I’ve met before, is his cousin. Angel and the older brother were spreading cement over the surface of a house made of cinder block. It turns out that Augustin’s father (also Augustin) is a man I’ve seen around town withut ever actually meeting. He looks a bit like a circus roustabout, circa 1930: felt hat, friendly, weather-beaten face, little and wiry. I’m glad I really got to meet him. Augustin’s mother sat next to me at Wednesday night’s community meeting, working the entire time shelling something that looked like roasted squash seeds, but I’m not sure. In any case, lunch was relaxed and friendly, my day a bit painful but stress free, and it was a nice finish to a tough week. Well, finish may be too strong a word. My week won’t be over until the beginning of the Great Guinea Pig Giveaway this evening.

The giveaway is the result of a government project to foment development in rural areas. Each family in Tolte will get a guinea pig coop tonight, and eleven guinea pigs (that’s one male and a harem of 10 females) on Monday morning. Since guinea pig is everyone’s favorite food here in the Andes, this has the potential to be a kind of local gold mine especially because everyone already grows guinea pig food, otherwise known as alfalfa. Permaculturists take note: guinea pigs raised on a diet of alfalfa, a nitrogen fixing plant, may be the most sustainable agricultural system going. It will be interesting to see how this pans out over the next six months or so.

Riobamba weekend

Last weekend, I decided to give myself vacation points for completing my first month in Tolte. I figured it would give me a chance to clear my mind, maybe entertain myself a bit, and force me out of my tendency to stay put once I make the big trip. I’m not sure what I’m afraid of, but I’m not much of a traveler once I’ve arrived. I hardly ever left Santa Ana when I lived in Costa Rica, and I stick pretty close to Tolte now that I’m in Ecuador. Of course, Tolte is a lot farther from Quito than Santa Ana was from San Jose, but I still felt like I had to shake things up a little.

My original idea had been to go to Riobamaba, which is the nearest big city, and where some of the people who work in Tolte, like the school teachers and Daniel, the agronomist, come from. Angus suggested I not bother with Riobamba, and head straight from there to Banos, a more touristy town about an hour to the west. But Daniel invited me to Riobamba, and I figured local guidance beats touristy every time, so on Friday afternoon, we hit the road.

The trip to Riobamba from Tolte is simple: you take the bus up that Pan-American Highway for about two hours. It’s a bit more complicated when you get there. Riobamba is a surprisingly big place, and yu have to catch a cab to the center of town. Daniel said that he doesn’t know how the city survives. It’s his impression that the only business is clothing stores. I’m sure he’s wrong. I saw plenty of places to buy cell phones and make copies, too.

Anyway, Daniel set me up in a very pretty little hotel in his neighborhood, Barrio San Francisco, and introduced me to his parents, who run a small coffee shop. Of course I had coffee, but a friend of his Dad’s also offered me a shot of bootleg sugarcane moonshine, so I tried that, too. It was smooth at the beginning, but certainly had a fiery finish. At least I’m sure no microbes could live in it.

The plan was for Daniel to pick me up and take me to a little piece of land he has in Chambo, just outside the city. But his 30 year old VW was not behaving nicely, so we didn’t meet up again. Instead, I walked around Riobamba, looking for odds and ends to see and do. I bought potatoes, oranges, tree tomatoes, and blackberries in the open market, underwear (I wish I’d brought more), and got a haircut. What was the best bargain? The haircut, of course, at $1.50, one tenth the US price.

Of course, this inspires a brief political statement. Ecuador is not so much poorer than the United States because market prices are low. Food prices are comparable to US prices. Underwear prices are brutal. The part of the economy that lags is labor prices. Work is worth almost nothing. My feeling is that right wing policies in the United States are aimed at producing the same condition there, where unemployment is chronically high and people will work for any wage at all. It is clear that this does not produce prosperity. The experiment is ongoing in Latin America, and it doesn’t work. Or at least, it doesn’t produce a thriving economy with a sense of social equality. By the way, this economic model has been largely imposed on the developing world by the United States. We might be getting a taste of our own medicine now. In case you haven’t noticed, no one seems to like it.

Anyway, back to Riobamba. By the time I had walked about the city Saturday, I was sort of tired of the place. I mean it was nice enough, but I don’t know anyone there. I cut the edge by taking advantage of the hotel’s nice wireless connection to do a bunch of skyping, but I was glad to return to Tolte Sunday morning. And I guess that’s what a vacation is for.

Nice pics

"Nice pics" is one of Fredi's favorite phrases in English, due to his exposure to Facebook. Today, thanks to a fast internet connection in Riobamba, where I am vacationing for the weekend, I give you some nice pics of Tuesday's trip to Nariz del Diablo, and some others of key people and places in Tolte. Here goes:

Two of the three buildings that make up the Escuela Arenillas Tolte. The other is to the right of this picture, at the other end of the plaza. The library and Laboratorio de Computacion are just to the right of this pic.

 Nariz del Diablo is the small, steep mountain at the left of this picture, just above the truck tailgate. This picture was taken in the back of Francisco's truck as we rode to Alausi

This is Angus Lyall, tireless development worker and unflappably good-natured. Of course, he made this whole adventure possible by hiring me.

Nariz del Diablo from the train station. You can see a bit of the zig-zag track. It's hard to figure out how anyone managed to work on the mountainside at all. It's also easy to understand from a physical perspective why there were so many fatalities in its construction (though perhaps harder to understand from an ethical perespective.)

The touristic railway cars, quite handsome indeed. I'm not sure how closely they resemble the originals.

Some of my friends and neighbors: From the left, a partial pic of Mariana Chogllo (Jose's sister, I think), Maria Elena (Narcisa's mother, talented farmer), someone blocked by a pole, Mesias, the teniente politico, who is responsible for certain official paperwork functions in Tolte, a friend I haven't met yet, Ascencio, Francisco's brother and former community president, Mesias, my store-owner friend featured in previous entries, Francisco, persidente de la junta directiva de Tolte, and Christian, farm laborer, futbolista and occasional adult English student.

A quick shot of mixed Agriculture in Pistishi. I believe that this is Alicia's farm, next door to Maria Elena's (actually, her brother in law's land). You can see naranjilla and cabbage at the low level, fruit trees (maybe Cherimoya--I can't remember from this pic) above. Note scenic burro in background. Jeff will be disappointed to learn that no one here keeps llamas--they are regarded as more appropriate to higher altitudes with colder climates.