Safety Issues

This blog entry, at least in my mind, is overshadowed by the murders in Newtown, Connecticut. I can’t get the image of someone shooting little kids out of my mind. I don’t care if the NRA thinks this is a necessary price we have to pay for their version of freedom, or whether or not the answer is a society where everyone capable of picking up a weapon is packing heat—although I can’t say that I think that would be a society worth living in. There’s little question in my mind that we adults allowed this to happen to little kids, and we’re all going to hell for it. And I’m not sure that’s adequate punishment.

And so it was difficult to come to terms this week that, more than anything else, I am an elementary school teacher here in Ecuador. There were only two days of classes following the Newtown shootings, but there was the AVANTI Christmas party on Saturday, Dec. 15, and the school Christmas party on Thursday the 20th. Fortunately, life here in Tolte is far removed from the violence prevalent in other parts of Ecuador and the world, and kids here much as children did in the US about 50 years ago, playing wild tag games in the cancha and growing up in an atmosphere of safety and security. But it was hard for me to look at the little kids I teach and separate them from the distant horrors of life in the U.S.

Coincidentally, we did have a sort of village-wide panic over the issue of child safety, induced by AVANTI’s gift of playground equipment to the school and day care center. For reasons known only to the junta directive, and in site of Carolina’s explicit request that they not do this, the entire area under the school’s playground equipment was covered in paving blocks the day that the playground arrived. Explanations that this was a bad idea did no good; apparently this had been contracted as part of some renovation of the center of town. But that wasn’t enough. The playground purchased for the day care center, which was described as appropriate for 3 year olds, was just as high and risky as the one for the school, Prompting one of my friends who has recently been given certain responsibilities for the day care program to wonder if he should denounce the thing as unsafe to his superiors. All of this led Carolina to demand that everything be made safe in time for her visit with her guests on Saturday. Francisco and I passed a bad day together wondering what, if anything, we could do about this mess. Needless to say, we did nothing, apart from worry about what Carolina would say to us when she got here. Well, we did come up with plans to improve the situation at both playgrounds, but nothing was actually done.

Just when we were thinking that things looked dim, Pablo showed up with an L-shaped crib setup Carolina had hired him to build and install in the day care center. Because of the way he measured the space, and then built the two pieces outside of the day care center, there was no way to put the pieces inside the crib room. What we thought looked dim before now looked like merely the start of total humiliation. But Pablo managed to cut one of the pieces in half, and somehow wedge the now three pieces into what turned out to be a not square space by 8:00 Friday night, sparing all of Tolte further embarrassment.

Carolina turned up early Saturday morning with Carla and Terance, and started distributing and organizing various giveaway events of the day. I slipped away to join the pig-killing crew and helped to make the fritada for lunch, but had a moment’s glory involving one of the giveaway items. Carolina had purchased 80 first aid kits, or at least what she thought were kits. Instead, what she got was only kit contents, not individual packages. Terance and I were left to sort the stiff into 80 plastic bags. Fortunately, the Tolte kids are incredibly curious, so, Tom Sawyer style, I invited them in to help us pack the bags. We were done in less than 15 minutes, and Terance was completely astonished.

But that was only the prelude to my great victory. I have always been hesitant to teach any of my students anything just for show, but the opportunity to teach Christmas and other songs in English had sort of presented itself a couple of weeks before Carolina’s visit. I think I gave the song list in the previous blog. While Carolina and her guests were eating their lunch, I brought the grades in one at a time and we sang their prepared songs. The reaction could hardly have been better: “What a great teacher you are!” “Oh, you have a wonderful way with the children!” “I cried, it was so sweet!” I may not have guaranteed myself another year in Tolte, but I sure earned myself a good reference.

And, in spite of the unsafe conditions, the sight of the children playing merrily in their risky new playground was also so heartwarming that no one could stay upset for long. I have mentioned before that Toltenos perceive safety very differently than I do, and the new playground is part of that picture. I have actually seen children walking around on top of the highest beams of the monkey bars.  I’d just like to add that these beams are round. And no one seems at all nervous about this—except me.

I’d also like to mention that one of my micro-enterprise projects actually presented itself in public the day of Carolina’s visit. On Wednesday, some of my friends and I made a shampoo based on medicinal plants, and had it ready to sell on Saturday. I really think this could become something important for Tolte, if we can get the whole thing together. It would provide a solid market for the medicinal plants everyone grows, it is very much a value-added product, and it could provide employment to quite a few people if our marketing is good.  I have never tried to do anything like this even in the US, and navigating the legalities of this project is going to be tricky, but it appears that we can operate in a kind of “gray market” way until we get everything in place. I have high hopes.

The following week did include something new for me. I started going down to the train station to give English classes to the adults who work there, both those from Tolte and those from Nizag. It’s kind of a long way to go, but they give me lunch, and it beats waiting around in the cancha every night for adults who never show up for English class. I’m also giving this information to the people who need it most and can use it every day. I’m happy that at least a couple of afternoons a week will involve something other than hanging around in the library, waiting for kids to take an interest in reading. But I do have plans for initiating a pro-reading campaign in January, and I hope that will change the reading picture.

Of course, going down to the train station and back seemed awfully pleasant last week, with the rainy season still refusing to arrive, weeks after it should have. There has been some foggy rainy weather the last two days, and the trip up and back could get awfully slippery and muddy. Time will tell—I hear the rainy season is different in the station than it is in Tolte, and I’ll have to see.

And now, I’m going to go  to New York. I will travel to Quito tomorrow, and fly to New York Wednesday. I’ll have four days in New York to celebrate my Mother’s 80th birthday, and then two more days of travel to get back. The idea of being able to do this astonishes my neighbors. We Americans enjoy such freedom of movement compared to Ecuadoreans. But I’m glad that my circumstances allow me to spend a couple of days rendering homage to the one who brought me here. Thanks, Mom!

Slow Times

Somehow, it’s December already and I have little to show for my time here since August. I suppose I take my English teaching for granted. There has been nice progress in the second, third and seventh grades, acceptable progress in the sixth grade, some have learned much and most have learned little in the fourth and fifth grades, and the first grade simply keeps me awake at night, without it doing any good. I am preparing the second through seventh grades to sing songs for Carolina and her AVANTI entourage when they visit next Saturday. The second grade will sing, “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes.” The third grade will sing five verses of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” (How many of my blog readers can pull off that many verses? I thought so…) The fourth and fifth graders will sing “Jingle Bells,” including the “Dashing through the snow” verse. I have had serious trouble teaching that song because the idea of these kids singing about a ride through the snow in a horse-drawn sleigh gives me cultural fits, which I express by bursting into laughter as I try to sing. But they already seem to have had a start on the tune, due either to movies or some long-lost instructor.  The sixth grade will sing “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” chosen mostly because it doesn’t have too many words. Apart from the first grade, the sixth is the hardest to teach anything to. And finally, we have the seventh grade, singing, “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” chosen in part because of my fondness for the Bruce Springsteen version and in part because it has plenty of words they actually know. (“He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake…”) They can also sing, which helps a lot. Astute readers will notice that I did not teach “Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel” to any grade. I have my reasons.

Meanwhile, my work with adults is at a standstill. No one comes to adult English classes, probably because they are simply too tired at the end of the day to focus on learning anything. The adult English classes had always focused mainly on high school and college age students, but it seems that when the high school workload got into full gear, the high schoolers couldn’t make it any more. I’m less sure what happened to the young adults, but one family that had provided the bulk of my students moved from the center of Tolte to the edge of town about a month back, and I think that sort of killed my program. But hope lives (as we will see with regard to several projects). Last night at the PTA meeting, one of my friends who speaks English quite well told me that a consultant from Quito has been working in the train station, and hearing of my existence, asked if I could come down to the train station to teach relevant tourist English to the various groups that work there, such as the cafeteria workers, the dance troupe, the people who sell craft items, the horseback riding group, and the llama wranglers. I told her I’d be happy to do it. Now we’ll have to see if they actually remember to contact me the next time the consultant comes, so we can get this underway. You may ask why I don’t just go down there and start teaching English, and I suppose I could. But when it comes to the train station, there are so many rules and regulations that I’m hesitant to get involved. And it’s a long enough walk that I don’t want to go down there for nothing, although the exercise would do me good.

The “granjas integrales” group is also in suspended animation, as are my agricultural ambitions. Almost every week, a meeting is promised with a chance for me to pitch alternative agriculture ideas, but, in the end, nothing happens. I’ve done a few little projects since last year, but nothing hat will really have a lasting effect on how people treat their soil and manage their crops here in Tolte. But yesterday and today saw me drawn back to this area in weird new ways.

Yesterday saw the start of a new project started with parroquia funding which is aimed at helping Tolte’s “most vulnerable,” the elderly, the disabled, and single mothers, to develop some income. Each identified member of this group, or their families, in the case of the disabled, received 10 laying hens to develop an egg business, which will be handled on a community basis. The hens are still too young to lay, and will need another 4 or 5 months of growth, but they were of a good size, vaccinated, and seem likely to survive to adulthood given everyone’s experience with chickens. What’s funny is that this is where the junta directiva brought me in. I’m supposed to provide the follow-through, to make sure that everyone is doing what he or she is supposed to do to make sure that these chickens do their thing in a profitable way. I, of course, have never raised chickens, nor do I have any technical training in the matter. But I can drop by everyone’s house every week and make sure things are going along all right. This is especially interesting because I have had little contact with Tolte’s elderly, who seem to do their own thing largely out of sight of the rest of the community. A few months ago, I commented to some of my friends that I now knew almost everyone in Tolte. “Do you know Don Shaiko?” one of them asked. Well, I had to admit that I didn’t, but I do now. And soon I’ll know just about all the rest, as well. I did a little online research today about starting an egg business, and found it hilarious that in the US, an extension pamphlet suggested starting with a flock of 1000 as being manageable and possibly profitable without too big an initial investment. The agricultural scale is so different in Ecuador. But I’m afraid that the emphasis on income in this project also means an emphasis on production, which probably rules out the free-range system of chicken rearing normally used here. This is too bad, as it produces an egg of incredible quality, with a brilliant orange yolk. I wonder if we could get a higher price for such an item.

Another ray of agricultural hope came today in the form of one of the high school students, who has a small piece of land at his disposal. He invited me to see what he has as part of a micro-enterprise project he has to do for school, which involves a fruit and vegetable stand by the side of the Inter-American highway where it passes Tolte. But he went on to ask me if I had any bright ideas for the little piece of land where he and his cousin have been growing carrots. Since I have been discussing Masanoba Fukuoka’s “Natural Farming” system with Diana, the polytech student who is doing here undergrad thesis research in Tolte, I pitched that. Juan Carlos says he’s interested in trying it. It would be great to start right away, but, weirdly, my next three Saturdays are committed to other things, so it looks like we’ll get going upon my return to weekend action when I get back from my lightning trip to New York at the end of the month. This really could be something exciting, because the Fukuoka method greatly reduces daily labor to produce its yield. We’ll have to see if I can make it work in Tolte.

Other rays of hope have to do with the business ideas I’ve tried to encourage in Tolte. One of these involves producing soaps, shampoos, and whatnot using Tolte’s ample supply of medicinal plants. The method for doing this is something known primarily to one family that I’ve been quite close to during my time here, but they would like to develop the enterprise as a project for the Evangelical Church, which would include about a quarter of Tolte’s families. Our goal is to present a product line to Carolina’s entourage when they get here next Saturday. Naturally, the first samples of these things that I will see will be produced Wednesday or Thursday, so I hope they come out looking good. A Quito market for these things could be one heck of an outlet.

I have also heard that Vicente, the guitar maker, is taking a loan to equip his workshop to make guitars. Now I have to figure out how to help him market them. I have consulted my cousin Edward Summer about this, and I’m eager to see what he suggests. (It’s great to have knowledgeable family members in easy reach of the internet.) My idea is that we will try to reach consumers through the ‘net, where they will be able to order custom-made nylon string guitars at an affordable price. Thanks to Terance in The AVANTI office, I think we have solved the shipping cost problem. So with a direct-to-customer approach, I think we can offer a pretty impressive product at an amazing price. Now we’ll see if I can put all the pieces together.

The final project, is, as usual, the band ESTASIS, one of the world’s truly comical rock bands. I have been working on a song for a while, one that sounds wildly different from the rest of our repertoire, if it can be said that we have a repertoire. Mario finally insisted that I write the lyrics already, and, somewhat to my astonishment, they popped out about as fast as I could write them down. It is a somewhat maudlin number about a fellow who waits all his life for the girl, and later woman, he loves to come out of her house, which she doesn’t do until the day she dies. I also had to arrange the rhythm guitar and bass parts behind my own lead playing, and, because the vocalist shows up to rarely, I have had to sing the damn thing, too. Fortunately, our drummer is getting much better at keeping a beat. My band mates believe that this song is a sure-fire hit, and will make guitar heroes of us all. Even the vocalist, when he finally heard it, was afraid to try to sing it, fearing he might not give it what I do (although his accent would certainly be better). At the same time, we are now covering a song called “No Me Arrepiento de Este Amor,” by the band Ataque 77, which sounds a lot like The Clash at their most furious. Practicing my song, “Juliana al Fin del Mundo” and “No Me Arrepiento de Este Amor” one after the other and back again is enough to produce whiplash. But this is what ESTASIS is all about, wild rock abandon and depraved sentimentality, all at once, like the adolescents we are. And while we may not have much in the way of talent, we do have a facebook page with 100 followers, so go ahead and like us if you dare.

Fiesta!

I don’t know why I haven’t felt much like blogging lately, but I haven’t. I don’t really feel like blogging now. What I really want to do is take a shower. But, as occasionally happens in Tolte, there is no water today, only trago, and I can’t bathe in that, because my skin would dissolve, so I figured it was high time for me to blog.

Very high time, because once again, I have survived the fiesta de Tolte. In some ways, this is even more difficult than surviving Mardi Gras and New Year’s at the same time, because not only is the trago handed out free, but people are quite insistent that you take it. Or beer, if they happen to be offering that. Or Pajaro Azul de Guaranda (“Blue Bird of Guaranda”). Or Canelazo (sweet cinnamon tea spiked with trago). Let’s just say I wasn’t really sober from Friday afternoon until Monday afternoon, and leave it at that.

In that interval, I was probably clearest when I was playing with my poorly regarded garage band, ESTASIS. We were going on at 8 PM on Saturday night, so we arranged to practice starting at 5. Our band now includes a vocalist from Sibambe who works as a guard in the train station. You might think that this would put him in convenient reach of the rest of the band, but no, to get from Sibambe to Tolte by car, you have to go through Alausi, which means that it is a nuisance. So Javier never arrived in time to practice with the rest of the band. Our bassist is on permanent leave due to the fact that he managed to break two strings on his bass. The fact that he actually doesn’t know how to play the bass is probably secondary, considering the overall level of the band. So Mario, Fredy and I practiced as well as we could. I had just figured out how to get a fairly convincing rock sound out of Mario’s guitar, our new sound equipment, a wah wah pedal, and the tube screamer that Al told me to buy instead of the fuzz pedal I foolishly thought I needed. Fredy had heard it, but Mario hadn’t, so all in all it was a pretty revealing practice session that Javier missed out on.

Javier arrived about 15 minutes before our 8 PM show time, but it turned out that we needn’t have worried, because before they let us go on, they decided to do Saturday’s fireworks. I described these “castillos” last year. The most remarkable thing about them is how close the crowd is to things that are exploding and shooting out sparks. Naturally, none of the things we are always warned will happen if you do this actually did happen, and the sense that you are inside the fireworks display really is kind of a thrill.

But we did finally go on. The look on the sound technician’s face when I first stepped on the tube screamer pedal was probably worth the price of admission, and I’m sorry it cannot be reproduced here. It seems that ESTASIS is in the process of inventing a new musical genre called “electronacional,” where we play musica nacional, a sort of lively, minor key dance music, with hard rock sounds effects and solos. Since you all know that I am not really a rock guitar god, this has its ups and downs. When I hit, it’s pretty cool, but when I miss, earplugs and powerful anti-nausea drugs are required. We also play a certain amount of pop and rock en espanol, with the same risks as the electronacional. Overall, I was hitting more than missing Saturday night, and Javier is a big improvement over our previous vocalist, although his crowd-pleasing skills still have a long way to go. But there I was, playing rock guitar solos to a crowd of about 500, so I guess I’m finding a new way to live out my fantasies. The funniest thing is that we got three performance offers as a result of this, including one that we turned down because they wanted us to play musica nacional in the normal way. Since we only know about four nacional tunes, and we can’t play them normally, I can’t imagine what the inviters for that fiesta were thinking. But we’ll be rocking the colegio tecnico next Friday, and the fiesta de Dalin (I’m not sure where this is, but everyone says it’s really high up) in early December.

I suppose I should admit that while the ESTASIS performance was my fiesta high point, it probably was just a blip on everyone’s inebriated radar. For example, there was the coronation of the Reina de Fiesta on Friday night. My “oficio,” or gift request (everyone gets one, including most of the Toltenos living abroad) was a gift for the Reina. So, with a good will, I went to Chunchi the previous Sunday and bought an appropriate piece of costume jewelry for $45, which I lost on the way home. So the Reina got a pair of earrings I had bought for other reasons at a much lower price, but happened to have available without going back to Chunchi. Poor Reina. She really deserved better. I feel compelled to mention that the Reina is a beautiful young woman named Rosita who represents the typical appearance of Toltenas in a lovely way. I also feel compelled to mention that no one actually calls her Rosita, but rather “Caperucita,” or “Little Red Riding Hood.” This has gone on for so long that no one can remember how it started, and even this nickname has been replaced by the short form “Capy.” But she made a fine Reina, no matter what you call her. Her parents, whom I know pretty well, invited me to their house more than once during the fiesta. This was good, as real food was helpful in calming my system, but it was also bad, because the Reina’s father, “El Loco,” (I kid you not) is a little fellow but a very heavy drinker. Friday night’s dinner, in particular, concluded with much more trago than I can actually handle. But it’s hard to reject things offered with such a cheerful good will.

Also on Friday, the Tolte “indoor futbol” club, 15 de Noviembre, won its second local championship by defeating San Luis de Rompe in dramatic fashion. After a scoreless first half, Rompe went up 2-0. But Wiliam scored a goal, and that seemed to rescue Tolte from its hopeless state. Pancho scored the tying goal in the last thirty seconds of regulation, and the game went into overtime, two more ten minute periods. Tolte seemed to wake up then, going up 4-2 before finishing 4-3. It was tense to the last second, as Rompe looked good for a tying goal, sending the game to penalty kicks. But Tolte squeaked by, and we are the champions again.

The early part of Saturday, before the ESTASIS barrage, included a visit from Carolina and three members of the AVANTI staff. They brought along some great stuff for the day care center, as they had promised earlier this month, with more to come when they return in December. But the highlight of the day may have come when we reached the new mirador restaurant, with its spectacular view of Nariz del Diablo. Let me make distinction here: the restaurant has an incredible view. But restaurant patrons have no view, because the only wall of the building with no windows is the one that faces Nariz del Diablo, an architectural error of such staggering inanity that I laugh every time I think about it. Carolina was horrified. She may put up the necessary money to punch a couple of holes in that wall and install some windows, but I’m not sure if she can. We’ll have to see. I was also treated to the sight of the AVANTI staff confronting cuy for lunch. I had been eating stuff that was far more horrifying than cuy (chicken parts I didn’t know that the chicken had, cooked sheep’s blood with mote (corn), cuero (fried pigskin), tripe), and generally risking acute gastric distress, so I dug into my cuy with gusto. After a slow start, they did okay with theirs, except for Carolina’s new project manager, Carla, who, in spite of being an Ecuadorean gal from Quito, had once had a cuy as a pet, and couldn’t eat hers. I also want to point out that although several of my Tolte friends suffered serious stomach upset during the fiesta, I was fine. I assume the trago killed any germs.

I would also like to point out that although I have had a great deal of trouble finding dancing partners in the past, I did somewhat better this time around. Some of them kept to a safe distance, but others did kick up their heels with gusto, as did I. I have no idea what kind of dancing this music actually calls for, but I don’t think I did much worse than most of my pals. My social life here doesn’t involve anything like dating, so these dance events felt a lot like high school mixers, with all the attendant discomfort. But at least I was among the dancers and not the wall flowers, which was a relief, if nothing else.

Monday saw all of Tolte soothing its aching head. I did get out and install the television that Carolina brought onto its wall mount in the day care center, but that was about it for me. There was a certain amount of cleaning up, and aimless wandering around, which seemed to set the tone for the week. I have hit a slow patch where the hopes of a month or two ago are fading fast. The granjas integrales group has not been meeting with me every Thursday as promised, or any Thursday. No one is coming to English classes at night. I have had another good idea for a business, and we’ll have to see if that moves forward. This involves Hilda making soaps and personal products using the medicinal plants that grow all over Tolte, with Mario, who is studying business administration, as the “entrepreneur.” It is convenient that they live next door to each other. The idea is to show products to Carolina and her guests (she says she is bringing 30) when they come on December 15. And I have heard that Don Vicente is getting a loan for the guitar factory. Let’s see what I can do to promote that…

Things happen, and then they stop

Where last week seemed to hold the promise of frenetic activity for me, this week has seen things slip into their usual slow pace. I confess that it seems to be very difficult for me to make things happen on my own. I can push a certain amount, but I have to back off at the point where I start to feel like I’m behaving more like a gringo than a member of the community.

For example, if the integrated farm group feels like it just can’t meet with me on Thursday, because everyone had to participate in a really difficult community work project on Wednesday, there is little I can say against their choice. They have work to do, and listening to me was a luxury they couldn’t afford this week. So maybe we’ll be a worm compost bin next week, and maybe we won’t. I did get to go out to a piece of land with one of the farmers on Monday, lay out planting locations for apple trees in triangles, dig a few individual terraces, and dig a few planting holes. That, at least, is something. I also had the experience of trying to dig the planting holes in what people here call “concava,” although I have seen the word spelled “congagua” in the Permaculture Bible.  What happens is that you dig down through the plow layer, maybe 8 to 10 inches, and reach a material that looks and feels a lot like adobe. It is a kind of hard-packed clay, a foot or more thick. Hitting it with a pick or shovel doesn’t work. You have to use a breaker bar, a tool I have described before as something I am not very good with. It’s a thirty or so pound steel bar with a chisel point on one end and a trowel tip on the other. In this stuff, the chisel point was the end to use. I confess to not knowing if I penetrated deeply enough to establish a fuit tree. Don Juan told me that his neighbors have planted right on the concava surface and their trees flourished, but I think they’d do better if they could get their roots into the soil below the concava. Fortunately, I am told that the rest of the field doesn’t have this nearly impenetrable layer.

But this only sheds light on the community work project on Wednesday. The project was to dig a ditch for the sewer line from the new restaurant/Mirador.  A certain amount of community labor had been promised for this cooperative project with MCCH, and this turned out to be what was necessary. Part of why it was necessary is that the ditch runs through a concava layer. Previous experience has shown that this layer cannot be broken by machinery, which should give you some idea of what it is like to dig through it. The 240 meters were divided by the 80 Tolte community members into 3 meters per family, more or less. Surprisingly, most people got their 3 meters done by the end of the day, though some were still working on it in short stints into the weekend. It appears there was also some angry disagreement about the route of the ditch, which has resulted in some stretches of the ditch being in the wrong place and needing to be dug a second time. Much as I love Tolte, I do want to make it clear that it is not some sort of utopia, but a place where ordinary human emotions sometimes produce poor results. But they’ll be out correcting their mistake as a community next week, which puts them ahead of most communities I’ve heard of in the U.S.

Another disappointing area has been attendance at my evening adult English classes. Three days a week I give classes to high school and university students, who have some background in English but have never had the chance to really speak it. This is little different from U.S. students who study French or Spanish, spend a number of years grinding out repetitive grammar exercises, and still can’t ask for a glass of water in the foreign language. This class got off to a great start, with about fifteen students, but has rapidly dwindled to perhaps 4 or 5, depending on how many members of the Satian family show up on a particular evening. In general, they are learning the same things that I am teaching to my sixth and seventh graders, with additional emphasis on potential interaction with tourists. I wish I could say that we are down to a committed core, but I think it is more a case of they’ll come as long as they think I’ll entertain them with zany gringo antics.

The beginner class has been one person, Wiliam. You may remember him as the brawling futbol player from one of last year’s blogs. His consistent attendance and good achievement in English have been a source of amazement to the rest of Tolte. He certainly doesn’t come across as studious, but he seems to have a prodigious memory and does very well with new vocabulary, 10 to 15 words at a time, from one class to the next. After weeks of teaching him alone in the beginner class, he was joined by two other young people last night. It would be an interesting development if Wiliam turned out to be the core of a thriving beginner English program.

There has been an interesting side project for me here, though. The technical advising group includes three students from the Polytech in Riobamba. One of them has been assigned to work with me to find out about good environmental practices and sociocultural aspects of life in Tolte. Diana was here from Thursday afternoon until Friday afternoon, interviewing mostly the older people about the past in Tolte, life cycle traditions, games, stories, and other folklore. For me, the most interesting story came from Senora Petrona, who told us that Tolte changed greatly due to the influence of Fundacion ALA, which seemed to greatly enhance the role of women in the community. This resulted in a kind of vigilante women’s group that would hand out rough justice to men who abused their wives. A group of ten women would seize the offender, and lash him with a belt until he repented, on his knees, to his wife. Senora Petrona named a surprising number of my contemporaries as recipients of this correction (although most of the names didn’t surprise me as much as I wish they did.) I have to say that I think it unfortunate that this practice has died out over the years. There still seems to be more need for it than one would wish.  Diana will be back next week to collect more folklore.

It looks like I’ll be taking a trip to Riobamba on Monday to try to recruit a special ed teacher for Tolte. AVANTI has funds to support the teacher, but not with the benefits or salary level typical for this work. I’m going to the university to see if they might send us an intern or recent graduate for the wage we offer. My hopes are not high. I sent the dean an e-mail over a week ago and got no response, but maybe my personal gringo appearance will make more of an impression.

And a final piece of news about ESTASIS, Ecuador’s least talented rock band. Mario recruited a new singer from Sibambe, one of the other towns that participate in working at the train station. Javier can actually sing in tune, something unheard of among previous ESTASIS vocalists. We are now practicing with renewed enthusiasm, and it appears that we are going to play at the high school in Sibambe on Tuesday (or is it the next Tuesday? It’s hard to know anything for certain with ESTASIS.) It appears we will be paid $50, of which at least $15 will go towards getting us there and back. I figure we’ll each get about $1 a song, which compares favorably with playing for loose change in the Subway, I think. The boys think this will be good publicity, and I suppose it will be, if we sound very much better than usual.

Things are happening

One unusual aspect of my life as a teacher and rural development promoter here in Tolte is that I am not alone. For such a tiny place, Tolte has a lot of friends. I am here with Fundacion AVANTI, but Fundacion Maquita Cushunchic (MCCH)  (“helping hand,” in Kichwa) is even more active here, providing training in all aspects of the things that need to be done to turn Tolte and its view of Nariz del Diablo into an attractive tourist destination. The MCCH coordinator is Jorge, a tremendously capable person who gets more done in his visits here than I do by living here. The junta directive also has a technician, Dani, who has brought three students from the Polytech, who are finishing their studies in community tourism, with him. We also have occasional visits from a Ministry of Agriculture technician, Gonzalo. When we are all present at the same time, we actually represent 2% of Tolte’s population.

So about a week ago, at Jorge’s instigation, we various technicians became the Technical Working Group of Tolte. The idea is that we’ll meet regularly, actually assign ourselves tasks and goals, and get the whole Tolte project moving along in a single, unified direction. Since I know nothing about tourism, except certain aspects of the gringo mentality, having someone tell me what the community tourism here is supposed to look like is tremendously helpful. I’m even being allowed to focus on the integrated farms group, which is the project that most intrigues me. Of course, our first meeting ran a couple of hours, and then was repeated for the benefit of the junta directive, which I found wearing, but I’m glad to be included in this stage of events.

The best part of this, for me, is that my project is to give a series of talks to the farmer group about soil and water conservation, organic farming, and permaculture. I happen to be here at just the right time, because I major aspect of this project is the planting of highly subsidized fruit trees. Of course, the trees arrived long before I was given a chance to say anything about site preparation, but I am hopeful that I can successfully install the various earthworks and plantings in reverse of their proper order. This Thursday, I introduced a kind of permaculture, multi-level planting, vision of what I’m trying to encourage, along with some reasons why. I also mentioned individual terraces for fruit trees planted on sloping land. The original plan had been to make some of these terraces as part of the class, but we weren’t able to organize that ahead of time. Next Thursday, when I do a worm compost bin, we’ll also make some terraces. The surprising part is that I’ve arrived at a point where people are willing to listen to my heavily accented Spanish for an hour or more, in hope of gleaning some useful nugget of information. I’m terrified of disappointing them—even more than of having them reject all my suggestions as insanity.

Speaking of insanity, last Friday saw the band ESTASIS, world’s least talented garage band, in Riobamba buying an amplifier and speakers. This should have been turned into some kind of movie. Here are some highlights: 1) looking for our eternally missing bass player, and finding him far out in a hayfield cutting grass for the cow; 2) our rhythm guitarist and bad leader, Mario, attempting to buy cool sunglasses and having one lens or another fall out of pair after pair, much to the shop owner’s horror. Hey, it wasn’t our fault; 3) our drummer Fredy’s repeated and increasingly desperate attempts to get his bank card to work. It finally did, at another bank; 4) the absence of our vocalist, whom nobody knows how to tell that we want someone who can sing; 5) our arrival at the music store where we had arranged to purchase the system, only to be told that we would have to wait a couple of hours—make that four hours; 6) the band’s urgent need to buy little, individually wrapped, pieces of cake, because the girl selling it was so cute; 7) my impromptu rock ‘n’ roll show in the music store, under the guise of testing out an electric guitar. It couldn’t have been too bad, the store owners asked again what the band’s name was; 8) deciding to go to a bust stop on the edge of town, instead of the main terminal in hopes of catching an earlier bus, only to realize that it was a holiday, and all the buses were full. We and our equipment crammed into a microscopic taxi to get back to the center of town; and 9) the walk from the bus stop down into Tolte carrying the amplifier and two bulky speakers. We have actually practiced a couple of times since then, but we still seem to be suffering from a lack of musical talent or even a sense of what we would like to sound like. It’s hard to be ESTASIADO.

In one more great piece of news, it looks like the Ministry of the Environment is going to give us all the trees we need to plant windbreaks wherever anyone wants them in Tolte. This is good news for me, because it means I can go around finding out who wants these things, and how much land they have to give for them. Nothing like a new project to get the sap running…

Huequeando

Huequeando
Huequeando means digging holes, and that’s been an exciting part of my life in Tolte during the past couple of weeks. Really, the digging was confined to a couple of days so far, but they were stand out satisfying ones, so I think they bear some description.

The participants in the integrated farms project have been expecting a delivery of fruit trees for a couple of weeks. At a recent meeting, I offered to go into some detail about soil preparation and permaculture/organic methods of regulating the orchard ecosystem for sustainable results. I was waved off at the time because all of this was going to be revealed at the next meeting a week later. For reasons that are obscure, but I think had to do with the MAGAP technician’s schedule, that meeting never happened. The fruit trees arrived anyway, producing what I have been telling people quite bluntly is reverse order. I have explained that you prepare the terrain first, a process that can take a year, or possibly more, and then you plant the fruit trees. There should be windbreaks, leguminous ground covers, and water-storing swales or canals on the contour. But the trees were here, and now I’ll have to try to get everybody to install these things afterwards. We’ll have to see how that goes. If my credibility is much stronger than I think it is, people will do the best practices because they believe me. If not, I’m going to really regret not having the fruit trees to use as an incentive.

So off I went last Thursday afternoon to Senora Carmen’s plot of land within Tolte to plant avocadoes and apples trees. Unless I have failed “Tolte Family relationships, Phase 3,” Carmen is Damasio’s daughter, which would account for her sunny personality and optimistic outlook. We laid the trees out 6 meters apart on the contour, which didn’t seem to produce as much surprise as my insistence that we dig really large holes to plant the trees in. It seems that people have simply been opening holes the same size as the little earth ball that surrounds the seedling’s roots, which is not the recommended practice even in conventional farming. We opened holes about 0.5 meter wide, and a little deeper than the earth ball. Fortunately, Carmen has some nice worm compost to put in the bottom of each hole. Again, due to a lack of foresight in the farms project, she is one of only two or three people who have a compost bin, something which should have been built on every farm as a first step.  As usual, I had trouble keeping up with Carmen in the hole digging process, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. I finished the day “plumb tuckered out,” as they say in story books about farming, and we got our sixteen trees planted and watered.

On Friday, I headed over to Senora Belena’s house. She had to go to a meeting of wheat farmers in Alausi, but she assigned her daughter Marta, who is about 20, and her son David, one of last year’s seventh grade students, to help me. Or, perhaps I should say, I helped then. We again laid out holes on the contour, but the soil was hard and dry like concrete. Again, I was probably outworked, but we got 32 good-sized holes dug in about six and a half hours. The good part about this piece of land is that it is actually big enough to accommodate all the trees at 5-6 meters apart. Many people are trying to cram too many trees into too small a space, simply because they received a certain number of seedlings.

Just when I thought I could take no more, and would simply crawl into bed at 6, Vicente told me that Winari, the Evangelical Christian Folk band that I play guitar for, had a gig at a prayer meeting in Chunchi. So we practiced for a couple of hours, and headed over to the municipal multi-purpose room in Chunchi to save our souls—well, theirs are probably already saved, and mine may have checked out some time ago, but you get the idea. I was told that these are big events, with maybe two or three hundred people, but something must have gone wrong because there were only 14 people, of whom the band was half. This didn’t stop the woman who was doing the preaching from using a PA, which quite loud. The echo in the nearly empty room made it difficult for me to understand much. We eventually got up and played (now, of course, the listeners could be counted on one or two hands), and I did pretty well, except for forgetting the funky break in one of the songs. After it was all over, around 1 AM, we drank tea and ate bread and my presence was investigated. The great moment was when the minister asked me if I was comfortable, or settled in (the word in Spanish is “Ensenado,” with a tilde over the second n). I looked at my neighbors and said, “Ask them,” and they all started to laugh. Nobody is ensenado like David,” they said. Another interesting moment was revealing that I am Jewish, a fact they seemed to absorb with considerable enthusiasm. “Jewish, you mean, like Jesucristo?” Well, maybe not much like, but sure, like.

On Saturday, Carmen invited me back to improve her compost bin. She already had a big bin near her one-pig sty. The problem was that the single bin didn’t provide any way to separate finished compost from newly dumped organic matter. We arranged three good sized bins out of hardware cloth. In one we applied a layer of stones for drainage and in the other two we raised the piles on little wooden platforms. Probably the biggest job of the day was to shovel out the old bin and sieve the contents to separate finished compost from still chunky materials. We also had to go on a worm hunt, as the pile had become very dry in the windy summer weather. But we did find plenty of wriggling worms (“like noodles,” Carmen said) once we got down to a moist soil layer. We sifted out the humus and shoveled the unfinished material into the new bins, along with a few shovelfuls of worms.  Then I soaked the dry, dry compost until I thought the worms would be happy living in it. We’ll see how it works out in a few months. I headed home. On the way, Reccion invited me in to shell peas and have a few shots of trago. Watching the sun set over my waning consciousness, I felt that things in this little part of the world were a heck of a lot better, at least for me, than most places.

By Sunday, I was feeling pretty good. I got to Chunchi later than usual, and did some slightly unusual shopping. I had promised my seventh grade class that we would have a birthday party in English for one of the girls on Tuesday. I had promised the class a birthday cake from Chunchi, and I actually got one for the princely sum of $7. Considering my usual estimate of things in Ecuador being one-tenth the price of the United States, this is sort of like buying a birthday cake in the US for $70. But the price was not the issue. Getting back to Tolte was. I had missed a late afternoon window of transit opportunity, and now found myself trapped in the Mercado in Tolte. But Don Miguel and his wife, senora Luz Maria, invited me to sit with them in their market booth, and gave me fruit while I shelled peas with them. After sunset, Reccion and his wife Carmen were ready to close down their booth and go home in their truck. I seized the opportunity and helped them load up. Senora Carmen kept asking me if I were able to carry the sacks. I may be a wimp, but couldn’t wimp out. “Sure,” I said, only throwing my back out slightly carrying the big sacks of vegetables.

On Monday, Wilson invited me to help him plant fruit trees, so I ducked out of school and headed down to the hacienda with my level to plant trees on the contour. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel so well by now. Also unfortunately, Wilson didn’t really have enough land to plant the trees, and some of the land he had was really, really steep, if not frighteningly high up. We also arrived without fertilizer of any kind. Fortunately, Wilson had been grazing his horse in this area, so every tree hole got a helping of dried horse dung. I can’t say it looked very rich, but I figure it was better than nothing.  We didn’t stick to the contours very well, but we did get a bunch of tress tucked away around the property, even as it became clear to me that I was developing a nasty sinus infection.

I’ve said this before, but anyone who travels from the US to the tropics is sure to be grateful for over the counter antibiotics. My immune system just cannot match the fierce resistance of my neighbors’ antibodies. I suppose that the dripping green mucus of the little children, often called “mocosos,” or “runny noses,” is a sign of a hearty ability to crush future sinus infections. Or it may just be a sign of where I picked up my own nasty infection. Still, people here seem to be able to drink water from any local source, work like demons, drink frightful quantities of gut-burning alcohol, and never be sick. I wonder if I’ll ever get to that point.

The birthday party on Tuesday went well. I was teaching “May I have” and “Would you like” last week, so the timing was perfect. We ate popcorn, drank soda, and ate birthday cake—not healthful, exactly, but festive. We also played “Bizz Buzz” and “Simon Says,“ games I taught them last year.  Yes, soda was spilled on the floor of the library, where I generally prohibit food of any kind, but I knew it was coming. It was fun to give my best class something special, despite the expected resentment of the sixth graders, with whom they share a classroom. There turn will come, someday—maybe.

Tuesday also saw me visiting the forestry teacher at the technical high school again, this time with Jorge of MCCH. Ingeniero Auki was the force behind April’s windbreak planting project. I had mentioned him to Jorge, and we went to ask him whether he could plant a windbreak next to the new mirador/restaurant that MCCH is building in Tolte. We found him in the greenhouse, tending to his enormous organic, drip-irrigated tomato plants. As usual, he was all enthusiasm. Aside from the windbreak, I hope to involve him in the retro-fitting of good practices, like interplanting leguminous trees, in the new orchards. He sounded enthusiastic about that, too. I guess that’s what makes him such an admirable teacher.

Thursday brought a visit from the director of MCCH, whom I had never met before.  Maria Jesus is a pale, thin, elderly woman who genuinely radiates a kind of religious generosity, without the religion part. I got to say my piece, as all the leading Toltenos did (Not that I’m a leading Tolteno, just a noticeable one) in gratitude for all of MCCH’s and Jorge’s good work in Tolte, and stuck in my own bit about promoting the granjas project. Chicken soup and guinea pig with potatoes were served, which is how we roll out the red carpet in the Andes.

Friday afternoon saw three of the five member of the band Estasis, world’s most lamentable rock band, in Riobamba shopping for a PA system with inputs for three electric instruments and a microphone. We found one that delivers 450 gruesome watts for $450. A dollar a watt in Ecuador is a pretty fine price. Now more neighbors than ever can resent the band’s existence, although everyone is too affable to complain. The best part was that, on the way back, Dani the sort of bassist treated me to an in person description of last week’s exorcism of the 17-year-old girl (his cousin) who lives across the street from me. This included the girl speaking in a man’s voice while her eyes were fixed on some undefined object across the room, powerful reactions to the exorcism that took eight strong people to control, a sudden chill that passed from one member of the exorcism party to the other, and a wind that rose from indoors to almost blow the roof off the curandero’s house in Zunag, two towns up along the Inter-American highway from Tolte. Results seem to have been positive. Dani went on to tell me how, 50 years ago, Tolte was a nest of witchcraft, with witch and anti-witch activity lasting into the period of time when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Costa Rica. Imagine if fate had brought me to Tolte then, instead of now. I wonder what that would have been like.

Meanwhile, ever since planting on Monday, we have had a weeklong visit of rainy season weather two months early. I confess that I am not ready, and had been counting on no rain until December. But it certainly looks like our planting efforts have met with the approval of Mother Nature.

Back to School

Monday, September 3, was Back to School Day in Tolte, and things went just about as one might expect. Instead of the carefully prepared introduction to life, in Miss Peach’s classroom, massive traffic and bus delays meant that Sonia arrived 15 minutes late, while Luis and Luis arrive an hour and 15 minutes late, having had to wait for the next bus. The day lasted about an hour, most of that spent in an impromptu meeting between the teachers in the plaza, and then the kids went home. This may be a more authentic representation of a school year than most teachers would dare offer on the first day, but maybe the kids got a truer picture of their year than children do on the first day of school in the States.  And in some cases their answers seemed more  I offer this for US teachers as an introductory statement: “This year, children, I will work in an atmosphere of blame, chaos, and insecurity, doing what I can for you while satisfying the irrelevant demands of a bunch of grown-ups so that I can keep my job. At the end of the year, you will take a test, and you and I will be blamed for the results. Recess for the rest of the day!”

On Tuesday, though, I did show up ready to work. I mean, I was ready to work Monday, but knew I wouldn’t because of first day events which never happened. I was completely prepared for the kids to have forgotten everything. After all, I took off for the US a month before the actual end of the school year, and had not given them a class in 3 months when I saw them on Tuesday. I was ready, armed with Simon Bolivar’s famous quote, “He who serves the Revolution plows the sea.” He who teaches children a foreign language that they will probably never use does the same. And yet they remembered. The children remembered almost everything that I ever taught them, and in some cases their answers seemed more correct and fluent than I remember hearing before. Children who couldn’t respond to me during their final exam (a 5 minute oral response to my questions) managed to respond brightly on Tuesday. How about that? I may have to accept that what I say and do in front of a classroom matters. Sorry, Village School, the message got through a little too late.

What this means is that I have started teaching English pretty much from where we left off in June. I’m using a textbook that is a little more advanced (and useful) than the one used for the first year English course in Ecuadorean public high schools. My new approach is to amplify what they learned last year. For example, last year we learned how to respond to “What is your name?” This year, the children can now respond to “What is my name?” “What is her name?” “What is his name?” “What are your names?” and “What are their names?” With the building blocks apparently in place, the sky’s the limit. In addition, the children’s nightly homework is to teach the day’s lesson to their parents. English as community education: “Yes, it’s cultural imperialism, but the intention is good.”

The good news doesn’t stop there. I finally seem to have a steady flow of customers for my night school English class for adults. We will assume, for the moment, that the motivation to study English is to participate in community tourism, not to flee to “El Jhonny.” The first night I had a good mix of about 14 students, ranging from the seventh grader who was my best student last year up to the AVANTI University scholarship students. They all promised enthusiastically to come back the next night, and if only a few of them did, well, we’re still settling in. But I have had a workable group of 6-10 young people ever since, and things are going well. As the high school kids develop the ability to use the dog’s breakfast of grammar and vocabulary they have been taught, things could get really exciting.

A little side note on language acquisition. Adults both here and in the US are always saying to me, “Isn’t it wonderful how rapidly little kids learn a foreign language?” This year I am not only teaching grades 4-7, but grades 1-3 as well. Trust me: the high school kids are picking things up much, much faster than the little kids, who are only managing to learn about a word a day. When you can’t sit still, have the attention span of a mayfly, and can’t use reading or writing to jog your memory, you’re going to have a tough time learning a foreign language. Sure, the little kids might do better in an immersion situation, but that’s not what we have here. So I’m content that they all know the word “pencil” after four days of instruction, and we’ll leave it at that. If I ever get to the point where I can manage the first grade for more than 15 minutes at a stretch, things may improve. I can handle the third grade for about half an hour, and they’re doing pretty well, I think.

I would also like to mention that Tuesday and Wednesday were big days for concrete. Damasio lured me into mixing and shoveling cement at Mecias, the Teniente Politico’s house on Tuesday, and I was astonished at how much cement it took to cover the roof. Cement alone totaled over 2500 pounds, with equal amounts of sand and gravel to make concrete. Add the water, and something like 5 tons of material were shoveled into buckets and hauled by single pulley (two men pulled on a metal bar at the other end of the rope) up to the roof. Let’s say the buckets held 200 pounds of cement. That’s about 500 bucket loads. All I can say is, I can’t understand why the whole building didn’t just collapse. I also got to know Mecias’ father, Jesus, somewhat better. Here’s a 75 year old man who comes up to my armpit who moved a lot more cement last Tuesday than I did—and then went back to his regular farm labor on Wednesday.  His nephew, the other Mecias, once told me that Jesus used to be really strong, but that his health had been damaged by drink. One can only wonder.

Wednesday was community cement day, as we applied paving blocks to the road nearest m y house. This was difficult as the underlying dirt road is very rough and uneven. Sand was smoothed over it by hand, as one might do for a custom kitchen floor back in the States. We did get the pavers we had placed, but there’s still a ways to go before we reach my house. I can’t say that I was very useful; in this task, as I kept losing track of where I was and walking over recently smoothed areas. But between Tuesday and Wednesday, I don’t suppose I should have been surprised when I threw my back out reaching for my hat on Saturday.

Saturday was another round of the “indoor” championship in Iltus. Tolte defeated Los Tigres del Norte 12-2, which required us to consume more beer and trago than was good for us. I left before the serious trago fest started, thereby saving myself much, though not all, discomfort. I have heard that later that night, there was a rematch between last year’s battling cousins, as reported in an early blog entry. Apparently, this time Wiliam got the expected victory over Gonzalo, which I hope means that Gonzalo will not be challenging for the championship again anytime soon. My theory is that Gonzalo tries to fight with Wiliam because he knows that Wiliam won’t really try to hurt him, being that they are cousins. Except that this time, he was wrong.  Somehow, the Tolte team recovered sufficiently from this experience to win its quarterfinal match on Sunday, with a 15 year old as the goalie. I guess the fighting spirit is not quenched with Pilsener.

Sunday included the usual trip to Chunchi and a farewell party for Ramon and his family, who headed back to England on Monday. I was very sorry to see them go; who knows when or if I’ll ever see them again. Ramon is definitely one of the most loved Toltenos out in “el Extranjero,” and he has a beautiful family. It was hard for me to watch all of his relatives saying goodbye—it must have been even harder for them, although they seem pretty stoical about it. They busied themselves making packages of all sorts of local fruits and vegetables, just in case there’s some sort of food shortage in the UK. Ramon’s nephew David (one of last year’s seventh graders, now at work full time on his mother’s farm) and I carried the luggage out, maybe not the smartest thing I could do considering that the back spasms that started Saturday had not let up in the slightest. But you can’t wimp out in Tolte, so I took myself and my back spasms to school, where my sudden gasps of pain seemed to amuse my students no end.  I’ll have to remember that next time I need to raise their spirits.

So now I am alone in Ramon’s house, which feels very big and empty.  I am expecting an engineer named Gonzalo, from the Ministry of Agriculture (hereafter referred to by its acronym MAGAP) to move in during the next week or two, which should break the silence. I am hoping to persuade him to include some organic agriculture ideas in his extension work. We’ll have to see how that goes. He seemed receptive when he came to work on the integrated farms project that gave me my start in soil conservation in Tolte. I‘m hoping for another lift.

Missing Memories

So much for my new resolve to record my adventures daily and blog weekly. I haven’t done either for almost two weeks, and I can’t say that I have a clear impression of what has happened during this time, although certain moments do stand out. On the bright side, I was concerned about being under-occupied until school starts on Monday, and that hasn’t happened at all. I’ve found things to do every day—I can’t recall exactly what they were, but they happened.

One notable change since I arrived is my internet connection. I bought a wireless modem from the Claro mobile telephone people, and now I have internet access whenever I want it. On the downside, it doesn’t seem to be able to connect to skype, which may be more a function of my location amid the mountains than any technological limitation. I may try hiking up to the highway to see if I can improve my reception. Of course, since my computer’s battery life is down to about 10 minutes, it may not be much of an advantage. But I can still skype from Chunchi if I need to, so I’m not entirely cut off. And I wonder if Facebook chat or Google chat will work, even though skype doesn’t. I’ll have to test this out.

One of the more memorable experiences occurred directly after my last blog. I went to Chunchi as usual that Sunday, with the barber shears I had promised to bring to my friend and barber, Don Lucho. This wasn’t even a gift, exactly, I just brought the particular brand and model that he asked for. The look of delight on his face, though, was absolutely on the order of “child on Christmas morning” joy. Whatever effort it cost me to bring it was very, very well spent. I’m sure there’s a lesson in there somewhere about joining gratitude with joy, but don’t look to this blog to try and draw it.

The next Sunday, Don Lucho regaled me with a tale from his time as community president of Llarucun, a little place between Chunchi and Tolte that make Tolte look like a booming metropolis. At its peak, Llarucun only had 24 families—it is now down to 8. But back in its peak days, there were enough children that they wanted their own school, because the walk to the school in Yuquillay was a long one. Lucho took a scientific approach to this problem, applying trago in sufficient quantities to gain cooperation and manpower from the surrounding communities. Twelve dump truck loads of material were brought to build the school, but Llarucun is quite a ways up the mountain where the trucks could not go. But 300 men, 180 horses, and 50 liters of trago got the material to where it was needed in about 48 hours. I think this is a story worth keeping in mind, although for the moment we will say that it reflects Ecuador’s past more than its present.

I have been more dedicated to attending community meetings since I got back, because I think it is a real responsibility of my new and improved Avanti job to participate in these things. Community meetings are difficult. They start at 8 PM and rarely last less than three hours, which is sort of hard on a community that wakes up between 5 and 6 AM. Much of the content of recent meetings has had to do with tourism, which is seen as critical to Tolte’s future.

Let me digress for a moment about why people are looking to tourism for salvation. Although there are about 350 people living in Tolte, as many as 500 Toltenos are scattered across the globe in pursuit of employment. In the two months I was away, Bolivar, Alberto, Narcisa, and Laura and Cristian and their little boy Ariel all moved to Quito. One of my students went to Cuenca and another to Naranjito (both of these children were older than usual for seventh grade—graduation was the sign that it was time to get a job). I might be aware that a couple of people went to the US illegally, or at least tried to go. Jose Manuel Guaylla, also known as Carabali, died when he crashed his motorcycle head-on into a truck on his way back from Chunchi one Sunday. He left a wife and five little children, and there is no life insurance in Ecuador. Jorge’s wife went home to her mother. It is not clear if this situation is permanent. Graciela has simply disappeared, but was clearly suffering from overwhelming financial problems. She may be in Cuenca. The bright spot is that Mariana’s husband, Jacinto, came home from Spain after ten years away. The trend towards emigration and loss from Tolte is overwhelming. Those without land to farm cannot get enough work to stay, and everyone is hoping that tourism can change that.

One of the biggest elements to this tourism is construction of a mirador/restaurant with a great view of Nariz del Diablo and the train station a quarter-mile below. There have been a certain number of tourists coming through Tolte in cars during these months of school vacation. The hope is that they will decide to stop and spend a little time and money in Tolte itself. I confess to doubts about this. Restaurants are tough businesses, and while the location is good, there is certainly more choice a short drive away in Alausi or Chunchi. But Nariz del Diablo is a big tourist attraction, and the train ride is very expensive, so there may actually be a niche for a family restaurant serving those who would access Nariz del Diablo by other means.

All is not well and peaceful in the world of Tolte tourism, though. After going through months of tests and other delays, Tolte was finally allowed to start taking tourists from the station on a short horseback ride to a nice vista point above the station. In a cruel twist, however, the railroad company decided to give the people of Sibamabe, on the other side of the river and considerably more affluent, the right to do the same. Not only that, but they gave Tolte Tuesday through Thursday, and Sibambe Friday through Sunday. It is not hard to understand that the value of these days is very different. What is hard to understand is why the railroad people did this. Other aspects of the station, such as folk dancing, are shared equally between Tolte and Nizag. One might say there is something rotten in Denmark, or, more likely, in the railroad headquarters. I find the dependent relationship of Tolte with the railroad a bad one, but there doesn’t seem to be anything to make it more equal in the short-term.

The agrotourism group is experimenting with a fruit stand at the point where the horseback ride ends, and I spent the first day of this experiment with them. Of course, in placing the stand at this point, they see only a tiny minority of the tourists, but that don’t have permission to sell in the train station and there seems to be some problem with getting it. The train people seem obsessed with the idea that tourists will get sick if they eat anything other than the “lunch,” a ham and cheese sandwich on white bread. My thought is that the fruit stand might do better up on the Pan American highway, which is closer to Tolte than the horse trail. I’ll have to try to get them to test this theory one day. Alicia and Elena spent the whole day at the fruit stand and sold less than $20 worth of fruit, mostly cherimoyas (“custard apples”) which are going out of season. The group had decided to emphasize avocadoes, but these really didn’t sell at all. I suppose the riders wanted something more refreshing after their trip.

The last meeting I attended was the one where the junta directive reports on how the budget money was spent during the past year. Most of it went to paving some of the main street of Tolte, and putting up a couple of cement retaining walls. I’m proud to have participated, at least a bit, in these projects, as you will know from reading previous entries. I had wondered about the emphasis on these things, but it turns out that each level of government is assigned certain “competencies” in the Ecuadorean system, and planning and maintaining roads is a major responsibility of the parroquia. An especially notable part of the meeting was that when the vocals spoke about their “portfolio” area, including roads, education, environment, and health, all of them mentioned litter as a focal point. Tolte has some litter baskets, but apparently not enough. We are in an evolving mode of trash disposal, where we now bring our trash to the plaza to be hauled away by the Chunchi garbage truck every Tuesday, as opposed to the old method of throwing it into the ravine. Maybe our consciousness has not quite caught up to that fact.

I have been practicing with the Evangelical Christian Folkloric band, Winari, and the garage band, Estasis, on a regular basis. Needless to say, Winari sounds a heck of a lot better, and I am learning a few things about Ecuadorean folk music. Estasis, as usual, sounds awful, especially since I brought overdrive and wah-wah pedals from the States. But we are practicing with renewed enthusiasm, and maybe something good will result from that. We’re still looking for a kind of music that our vocalist can actually sing. Finding such music, if it exists, will be critical to our success.

I also have survived a sick day of the sort one should expect when one lives in rural Ecuador. I have to say that the Cipro I was prescribed for this condition worked like magic. When I think back to the kind of long term suffering I have experienced in the past, sometimes takes a week or more to fully recover, having a medicine that worked within an hour and restored me to full health by the second dose seems miraculous. Hats off to the inventors of Cipro.

And I got a day of farm work in yesterday. Joaquin and his wife were picking beans that had been nterplanted with corn on one of these near-vertical fields that I find so disturbing in Tolte agriculture. Bean picking isn’t as demanding as potato picking because you can do it standing upright, if you can stand upright on a field with a 70% slope. It was a long, hot, windy day, and I was glad when we finished. I was also glad to find that I could handle the heights and steep slopes about as well as I could when I left in June, and far better than when I arrived last year.

In other agricultural news, one of the Ministerio de Agricultura technicians is going to be assigned to work full time, Monday through Friday, in Tolte. I am hopeful that this will help my work in sustainable and organic agriculture. If I can convince Gonzalo to work more in that direction, these ideas will seem more reasonable coming from him than coming from me. Sometimes when I propose stuff like mulching, I feel like my farmer friends are looking at me as if I had just grown a third eye, or something. It may seem less alien coming from an Ecuadorean.  And that might mean I could get something good done

Now it is Friday, August 31, and I’m not sure how I will fill today. I suppose I could use it to prepare for the English classes that will start on Monday. There seems to be more interest in English for tourism this time around, so I may finally have the adult class or classes that I wasn’t able to put together last year. We’ll see if my new TEFL certification helps at all. I imagine it will, because the course reminded me that preparation is not optional, just because you have a curriculum. We’ll see how that goes. As far as regular school teaching, the same cast of characters will once again be present, somewhat to my surprise. This year, Sonia wants me to try to give some kind of English lessons to the children in her class (grades 1,2,3) as well. Last year, I didn’t think I could manage them. This year, I’m willing to see what happens. If it’s really awful, I can always tell her that I’ll be happy to do it once she gets them under control. Since that didn’t happen last year, it should keep me safe this year as well.

I'm Back!

Maybe you can’t go home again, but at least I have gone to Tolte again, and I’m mighty glad to be here. On the one hand, everything is just as I left it, sort of: same long bus ride from Quito, same difficulty getting the bus to stop at Tolte when we approach from the north (why this doesn’t happen from the south, I’ll never understand), same ring of mountains looming above us, same unpaved road into town, switching over to paving blocks in the center, same boys playing “indoor” in the plaza.  On the other hand, everything looks strikingly different from when I left. The dry season is now in full force, and all the green has faded to a straw-colored yellow everywhere I look.

As usual, when I needed to see someone, he appeared. I got off the bus with all my baggage, including my guitar, computer, handy backpack, and new army surplus duffel bag. Years ago, I swore I would never travel this heavy. Now it seems unavoidable. I did manage to cover the two or three hundred yards that the bus overshot my stop, but I was starting to wonder if I hade the Tolteno load-carrying fortitude to make it all the way to Francisco’s house, where I’m staying for now. At that moment, Dani and Fausto appeared on a motorcycle. I think they were more surprised to see me than I was to see them. They took my duffel first, which made walking down the road a lot easier. But then Dani came back for me. We know from previous episodes that I’m not a person who trusts his coordination too much, but there seemed no choice but to throw my computer over my shoulder with my backpack, and hang on to my guitar as I struggled my way on to the motorbike. I didn’t even fall off before we arrived at our destination.

I had intended to arrive earlier in the day, but Carolina was not able to meet me as early in the morning as I had hoped. When I got to the Avanti office at 11:30, I was astonished to find the place full of bright young men doing smart looking work on computers. They even have specializations, though I’m not clear on exactly how that works. It looks like Terrence and Juan Carlos focus on research and planning while Esteban handles event planning. This is a big change from when Avanti was Carolina alone, and the whole enterprise seems much more vibrant and exciting.

Carolina and I talked for about two hours about our hopes and dreams for Tolte. It appears that this year, my role is going to go far beyond English teacher to include the acme of the new international development model, social entrepreneur. This is going to be hugely challenging for me. I’ve never really been a business person. I don’t know how to write a business plan and carry it out. This is not to say that I’ve never had a business idea, but going over the wall to make it happen never occurred to me. But here is a situation that may melt my opposition to capitalism. I’m not doing this for myself, but so there will be steady employment for the next generation of Toltenos. As always, this blog is meant to be a place where I can solicit the help of my few, or should I say, “hand-picked group,” of readers. Those of you with business experience, I need you desperately.

And I do have some ideas, although they are not entirely my own. Or maybe none of them are my own, but they seem pretty good to me. I was introduced to a woman named Florence in Port Washington, coincidentally married to an Ecuadorean, who told me to stop thinking about exporting farm products and export craft items instead. She emphasized that her customers want items that are “authentic” and “natural.” Maya also emphasized the start-to-finish aspect of what people regard as a true craft product these days. So my first thought was that the existing artesania group, which sells knitted items in the train station, could start spinning their own yarn out of llamingo wool, and knit it in its undyed state for an all-natural, organic product (yes, my mother actually pointed out an ad for extremely expensive organic clothing in the New York Times Magazine.)

The second idea revolves around the ambitions of Tolte’s luthier, Don Vicente, leader of the Evangelical Christian folkloric band, of which I form a small, but weird, part. One day, Al (he who calls himself Pierce) was out visiting his friend Mike in Port Jefferson, so I went out there, too. I got into an interesting discussion with Mike Sr., without question the most entrepreneurial person I have ever met. He asked me what we could export out of Tolte that he could sell. I suggested musical instruments, hand-made in Tolte. He liked this idea, and asked me to pursue it. I like the idea, because if it worked, a guitar factory in Tolte would be both a source of employment and a tourist attraction. And Carolina liked the idea, too. Now I just have to find out if Vicente has any interest in doing something like this at all.

The final, and by far most grandiose, idea was courtesy of Tom Hastings, who does development work for the College of Natural resources at UMass Amherst. I had made a little donation to the Student Enterprise Farm, a brilliant student-initiated and run project where the students actually learn what it means to run an organic farm as a business. When I made my donation, I was invited to visit, and I surprised myself by actually doing so. I have to say that Tom treated me like visiting royalty. While we were chatting over the nice lunch he treated me to, I described the tourism situation in Tolte. The problem is that although tens of thousands of tourists a year take the Nariz del Diablo train ride, none of them makes it into Tolte. The train ride is organized so that the tourists have only an hour and a half in the station, and then have to go back on the same train. Tom’s answer? “Build a cable car.” Absolutely brilliant. If Avanti pulls this off, will be on the social entrepreneurship map for sure.  Yesterday I got a look at the likely route from Tolte to the station, and while I’m not 100% sure that such a thing could be built, it would be absolutely spectacular.

But for me, what is truly spectacular about Tolte is its community of people. When I go home to States, there are certainly people who are happy to see me, but they are few and far between. Here in Tolte, everyone has welcomed me back not only with warmth, but a kind of joy. My coming back seems to make them feel loved and appreciated, emotions which they amply return to me. Naturally, this also led to a semi-spontaneous welcome home party of the classic Tolte style, but I managed to substitute a bottle of duty-free Jack Daniels for trago this time. It is possible that Pilsener beer makes a better chaser for trago, though.
So now it’s time to get started. I’m living with Francisco and Elena until I can move back into Ramon’s house. Ramon is home again and has brought his children with him, so I may have to wait until they leave a few weeks from now before I move in. On the other hand, during the heat of the fiesta last night he was quite insistent that I move in now. So that may happen sooner than I expected. I also need to get my keys back from Elvia, but I will no longer have the same kind of computer access that I did. The infocentro that I thought would never open did open on the day I left New York. I had always said that it would never open during my first stretch in Tolte, and it didn’t. I think it’s funny that it did finally open when I returned. Anyway, I’ll have the same Monday to Thursday infocentro access as the rest of Tolte. I also bought a wireless connector for my own computer that I can use anywhere, anytime, as long as I have enough megabytes in my account to support my connection. I hear that this thing works better than the infocentro, but recharging it may be a nuisance. Reaching me may take some planning.

Now it’s Saturday, and enough has happened that I think I ought to write it down before I forget. I am sitting in my room in Ramon’s house, because the move really did occur right away. Somehow, there is a spare room downstairs, which has the distinct advantage of being right next to the bathroom. I always hated having to find my way down the stair in the middle of the night.

I have also had a conversation with Vicente about the guitar business. He needs equipment, and that’s going to take an investment that is sizeable by Tolte standards. But he thinks that he could employ perhaps five helpers if the business gets moving, which is to say making a guitar a week. I’m a little less worried about him making a guitar a week than I am about finding someone to sell a guitar a week, but I’ve got some ideas about how we could get that going. I’ll have to see if I can make that happen. So much depends on my internet connection these days.

I also took a trip with the indoor team up to Iltus, a nearby village that I heard mentioned frequently last year, but never got to. Iltus is close to Tolte in highway terms, but is way up the mountain on the other side of the Inter American Highway. Iltus seems to be running on an economic model similar to Tolte’s, because you can see the large houses of people who have spent time working abroad surrounded by traditional adobe homes. The indoor team played against the Yuquillay team that I met at Tolte’s tournament last year and earned themselves a 4-4 tie. The Toltenos had plenty of chances to win, but the Yuquillenos are a good team and kept coming back. Everyone on the Tolte team managed to earn a yellow card, too. I think the referee called a good game, as far as I could tell. It looked as though the Toltenos were having a rough day to top off their rough night.

This evening I’ll practice again with El Grupo Winari, the folkloric Evangelical Christian musical group run by Vicente. Some readers have seen a picture of this group, but I still haven’t managed to get it in a form I can post here. We’ll see if I actually remember any of the songs he taught me. I sort of suspect that I don’t, so I’ll have to get up to speed quickly. We usually practice for hours and hours, so I’m going to have to find some source of energy to carry me along now that the Jack Daniels has run out.
In other words, all the things I think of when I think of Tolte continue to make me happy. I was saying to someone that living here is a kind of second chance for me to achieve some of the things I didn’t manage to do in my “first life” in the United States. I never really developed much of a social network there, but I do have a great one here. That’s a good start. With the raise that Carolina has promised, I’m going to be more well-to-do than I was in the States. I’ll have Ramon’s big house to myself. And I’m going to have to be a successful entrepreneur, at long last. It would certainly be nice to put this all together, even if it does seem a long distance from agricultural extension.

Quick last look around

I've started packing, a job I'll have to finish before I go to sleep tonight. I've got to catch an early bus out of here tomorrow morning, so I can get in Quito in time to have a meaningful conversation with Carolina about the past nine months and the upcoming school year. Yes, I'll be back. The job that I thought it would be sort of humiliating not to get didn't even think I was worth interviewing. It's a good thing that being the sort of international development worker that I am means never allowing yourself to admit that you've been humiliated. I'm not sure whether this implies that I will never be able to step up from what I am doing to the professional level, but it's too soon to admit defeat. I've got another guaranteed year here, which should provide enough time and additional experience to work from.

The days since my last entry have been dominated by school and the flu. I was about as sick as I can ever recall being on Monday, after two preliminary days of feeling lousy. Improvement was slight on Tuesday, but I felt almost back to normal by the end of the week. Still, it made it difficult to produce the kind of year-ending wrap up that every teacher hopes for. I did manage to finish reading "The Cat in the Hat" to my sixth grade class, and they enjoyed it very much. We struggled for understanding--it's amazing how you can work for a year to produce broad conversational skills in English and still find that your students lack such fundamental words as "know," "can," "then," and "should." It certainly leaves the door open for "Dave in Tolte Again: Second-year English."

I also was able to give each child a brief final conversation test on Friday, as they were filling their notebooks with the last words we learned this year, in the nick of time. Results were not, overall, thrilling. The best student in the seventh grade did respond correctly to everything I threw at him, which was nice, but not surprising. The second bast seventh grade student did so well that I raised her grade to a perfect 20, which was a little surprising. My sixth grade students, the best as a group, did quite well individually. The fourth and fifth grade didn't provide too much evidence of having learned very much, but I got decent responses out of three fifth graders and one fourth grader. A few kids who I really looked forward to talking to couldn't seem to understand questions they routinely answer correctly in class. Maybe my flu made me hard to understand, since it left me very nasal and hoarse.

The big question, of course, is what they'll remember next September. I'm cutting out a month early on the end of the school year, mostly because I'm needed at home right now, but also because of some confusion as to how many months of salary were available when I started. The kids will have to get by on what's in their notebooks, and speaking to each other in English, for three whole months. If they remember much in September, it will be a big surprise. I'd better start planning my review now.

Just so you know, the Padres de Familia de la Escuela give me a big send-off Friday afternoon, featuring home-made, home-raised chicken soup and, once more with feeling, guinea pig with potatoes. They also gave me a handsome picture of all the school kids, teachers, and me together, which I cannot show here because it's attached to a piece of wood. The meal was washed down with way too much trago afterward, which has slowed my packing progress today (Saturday, June 2). But can it really be coincidence that my last day teaching in Tolte coincided with the first New York Mets no-hitter? I think not--everything here turns up when you really need it.

Time to pack up my computer, my guitar, put my rubber work boots in storage, pack my duffle, and come back to my family for a while. Here are some people things I'll miss when I'm away:

• being called "Naichu Michu." Don't try it when you see me; your accent is wrong.
• Damsio's wit and wisdom. They don't call him "Alcalde" for nothing.
• being invited for 15 cents' worth of trago with my barber, Don Lucho
• playing guitar with Winari
• playing guitar with Don Sauce
• playing guitar with Estasis, better known as "La Banda de Miercoles."
• watching the children's folk dance class
• Chunchi on Sunday
• watching Bryan, a fifth grader the size of an Ecuadorean 5-year-old, play center forward for the kids' "indor" team
• speaking English with Rosalinda, my favorite student
• jogging in the Andes
• exchanging "Buenos Dias," "Buenas Tardes," and "Buenas Noches" with the good people of Tolte. 

It's no wonder I have to come back.

Last licks

My time in Tolte may or may not be entering its final phase. It may be, because I have two weeks left on my "contract," and I'll soon be heading back to the U.S. But it may not be, because Carolina has found the funds to keep me here another year, teaching English, digging in the dirt, playing the guitar, and drinking trago when the situation requires it. The only remaining question is whether any of the jobs I applied for come through. My best chance for an actual professional position is in northern Ecuador. I have been told that my application is being reviewed. We'll have to wait and see what they think. Considering that I am already doing the work of that job, it would be a bit humiliating not to get it, but to be a do-gooder foreign volunteer is to put humiliation aside forever.

Far from humiliating, this week has been uplifting. First of all, I have finally built my first bench terrace in Tolte, and have been promised the chance to build more on the same piece of land. The enterprising farmer in this case was my housemate Jose, who is a member of the granjas integrales group. I think his major motivation for doing this work is that he thinks it will appeal to tourists, and it might. Terracing is a farming technique that was known to both the Incas and the Canaris (there's a tilde over that n, but I can't get my computer to produce it), so no one has to know that it was reintroduced by a gringo. Considering that I haven't done work like this in over 20 years, I think we did a very fine job. Jose seems quite happy with it, wants to build more, and believes that his neighbors will follow suit. And here's a picture of Jose doing the work (I did some too, but you'll have to take my word for it), and another of our completed project. Actually, we did a bit more, sectioning the terrace into boxes for easier irrigation, but this is a better picture.

I think the main thing about this project in my own mind is that I have wanted to do work like this since I left Costa Rica, and saw the need for the work here. It took my entire stay here to build the first one. If I come back, I'll be able to do more, and possibly advance to other soil and water conservation work. I can't say that I have much experience of setting out to do something and getting it done. I'm not a "closer," as they say in the world of salesmanship. I think I have had my fair share of decent ideas, but never quite had the technique or the nerve to bring them to completion. Although I built bench terraces in Costa Rica, the technique was already popular with the farmers I worked with. I was only offering a refinement, and my own labor. Here in Tolte, no has a terraced farm. I am quite proud of myself for keeping at this idea until someone got involved with it. Of course, now we see why the Peace Corps is a two year job. I would really need a second year to get the idea to take off. And, as I said before, maybe I'll have one.

Other excitement has been provided by the hilarious Banda de Miercoles, more properly known as Estasis, the rock band of Tolte. I have been recruited as music teacher and lead guitarist. We had our first performance Thursday night at the high school in Chunchi, where there was a kind of massive fund-raiser talent contest. We did not participate in the contest, I'm glad to say, although I think it would have been interesting to try to win a talent contest without any talent. After all, anyone can win a talent contest if they have talent. Winning without any, well, that's a real challenge.

We also almost had to appear without a drummer, which would have been ridiculous (or miercoles, depending on your point of view). The boys had the idea that there were going to be lots of bands, and that there would be the opportunity to share a drum set. So we showed up with two guitars, a bass, three cables, and two drumsticks, only to find that we were the only band and the colegio doesn't have a drum kit. After some uncertainty, we got Mecias to bring us back to Tolte, where we picked up the drumkit and went back to Chunchi again. The weather was surprisingly cold, and Mario, Freddy, and I hung out in Mecias van trying not to freeze before we had to perform. Much faster than I expected (maybe in deference to my advanced age, but possibly as a result of some weird scheduling confusion), we were onstage in front of about 500 kids and their parents. We performed two songs, "A Mi Lindo Ecuador," which is sort of folk-song-like, and "Musica Ligera," a basic four-by-four rocker by a band from Argentina. Yes, there's a whole world of rock en espanol, and it's really pretty good. Or it would be if a band other than our were playing it. Our most obvious deficiency is vocals, but we also have a bassist who doesn't know how to play his instrument, a drummer who routinely drops beats, and a lead guitarist who is as old as the rest of the band put together--okay, so that last is a bit of an exaggeration, but not as much as I could wish. But I did pull off a pretty good solo on "Musica Ligera," and no one actually left the scene with bleeding eardrums, so I think we're getting better.

We got to play those two songs and three more yesterday night at the evening portion of the Fiesta de Parroquializacion de Tolte, which turned out to be a pretty cool all day party. For me, it was a big day of music. I also sang the famous "Today is Monday" song that I used (at the suggestion of Ms. CZ of Brooklyn) to teach the kids the days of the week. I have taught them a couple of other songs since, but nothing has quite caught on like "Today is Monday." So all 45 of my students sang "Today is Monday" as part of the morning program. I had played a couple of songs earlier with Juan Vicente's band, which I now know is called Winari (there's a tilde over that n, too), which means "growth" in Kichwa. The first one went a little rough--we couldn't hear ourselves or each other through the sound equipment, which is fairly lethal for any band. This was particularly frustrating as we had spent three and a half hours rehearsing it in the morning. The second song went a lot better. I once spent about five hours rehearsing that one, but the presence of a drummer who could actually keep a steady beat made a huge difference there.

During the afternoon, there was a small "indor" championship, starting with the 9 and 10 year olds of Tolte giving a royal drubbing to a group of 9 and 10 year olds from the school where our sixth and seventh grade teacher used to work. There were several games of women's teams, which make up for whatever skills they may lack with plenty of aggression. One of those teams calls itself "Las Mamis," which has had everyone in Tolte laughing for weeks, but I sure wouldn't mock them face to face. There were also men's games, the last of which produced the traditional Tolte fiesta fistfight, which was broken up quickly with no injuries.

And then it was countdown to Estasis, which produced the usual comedy of errors. The cable I borrowed from Juan Vicente, which worked fine in the morning, stopped working during our evening rehearsal. I was lucky to get another one. Our bassist finally showed up, and I spent most of the rehearsal time teaching him a line for "Un Par de Palabras," rock en espanol from Spain. Needless to say, his bass stopped working when we got on stage. We had already told him that his main job was to "hacer lampara," (pretend to be doing something when you're really doing nothing, an honored rock tradition), but we didn't know he would have to take it to such an extreme. He turned out to be really good at it, and we have put him in charge of all of our lampara needs. Our vocalist had even more trouble than usual hitting the high notes (or the right notes). But the guitars and drum were reasonably tight, and they let me spin out a nice long solo on "Musica Ligera." I'm not sure how I am suddenly able to create a convincing rock guitar solo, but I suspect it has something to do with the idea that no one know what a rock guitar solo should sound like. I never experience the slightest nervousness when I play with Estasis, although it was the bane of my existence when I played flamenco concerts. I guess I'm learning something from the Estasis experience, too.

In other comic events, the hot water has stopped working in our house. The temperature of the water that comes out of the tap is probably similar to the air temperature in the morning, about 50 degrees. I hope the people of Tolte appreciate my cleanliness, given how much a hate cold water. But I suppose this gives me a chance to feel that I'm living the Andes experience. After all, until about ten years ago no one here bathed in hot water. Jose claims to prefer it, in fact. I honestly can't embrace this opinion, but I don't think the cold water will kill me. And it doesn't change at all how much I do love living here.