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…