Do Not Go Gentle

I suppose the long gap in my contribution to this blog reflect the fact that my time in Tolte is winding down, and there doesn’t seem to be a thing I can do to slow that process. The high (maybe too high) hopes I had of making some lasting impression during my second year here, some micro-enterprise, some excellent project with the granjas integrales group, have produced nothing, and now there is not enough time to change that.

A sort of inertia seems to have possessed everyone. I have been trying for two weeks to give a talk about turning organic waste into fertilizer. This was inspired by the fact that the Municipalidad de Chunchi, whch picks up Tolte’s garbage, now requires that organic and inorganic garbage be separated. In the meeting where this was announced, I immediately offered to help people compost their organic garbage, and explained that this should not be shipped off as waste, but rather used as fertilizer. Since only the president of the junta directive took me up on that (he already wanted a worm bin to make vermicompost for his fruit trees; it was an easy sell), I decided to offer my talk to whomever might be interested. And it seems a million things have conspired to prevent me from even notifying the community that this is going to happen. The latest is that the public address system isn’t working, making notification difficult, if not exactly impossible. To dodge the PA problem, I was going to offer my talk during the community meeting on Tuesday, but the meeting was cancelled due to lack of attendance. I also have to do this on the terms of the junta, because I need the salon communal. I can’t give my talk in the library, because the electrical system that includes the library and the school burned out three weeks ago, and hasn’t been repaired yet. And so, the dominoes keep falling, and the days keep passing, and if I give my talk before the end of May, I’ll have to be grateful. Unfortunately, compost takes longer to mature than I have time left, so who knows what will happen with any of this.

Another project that is long delayed is my effort to make biochar out of animal bone. The delays here are somehow more comical, because they involve my stalwart drinking companions, Reccion and Damasio. Reccion really has the interest in making the fertilizer, and has accepted that it’s a good idea that he wants to try, which is an incredible step forward in a community that hardly uses any fertilizer, whether organic or chemical. Damasio is the one who really knows how to make charcoal, and my dedication to biochar makes me prefer to make the bone phosphate fertilizer this way rather than simply burning the bones and grinding them up, although the advantages may only be slight. To top it off, Reccion has a llama skeleton we can use for our experiment. I never imagined that any of the comical touristic llamas of Tolte could come to this. We keep scheduling the process for Friday, or next Friday, and one or another demand on either Reccion’s or Damasio’s time prevents it from happening. I haven’t lost hope yet, but I doubt that I’ll be here long enough to see Reccion’s avocado or orange trees flourish in their organic phosphate bath.

There was a note of encouragement this week, though. When the French guys were here testing the kids’ vision, they came with me on a farm visit to a piece of land that belongs to Alicia. Only one of the French guys is an optometrist. The other is an organic farmer. The organic farmer and I agreed that to manage a pest problem in one of Alicia’s fruit trees, she could try spraying the tree with milk. Of course, that was back in February. The other day, I saw Alicia’s son Joel, a boy so flimsy he could pass for an American child, struggling to haul a tank of gas up to his house on a two wheeled cart. I gave him a hand, which turned out to be somewhat tougher than I expected, and got him, the gas tank, and the cart up the hill to his house. Alicia, of course, insisted on feeding me fava beans, cheese, and some kind of extremely grassy tasting herbal tea, and it occurred to me that I didn’t know how the milk thing had gone. It turns out to have been a home run success. The tree is doing much better, the pests are gone, it felt funny spraying milk instead of drinking it, but what a good result! Maybe I need twenty years here instead of two.

There is talk about finding some way to keep me here. The Fiesta de Parroquializacion de Tolte is coming May 21, and several people are talking about pressuring Carolina on my behalf. As I understand it, she simply doesn’t have the money, and maybe has grown tired of providing an English teacher when so few in the community have taken advantage of my presence. So I’m not sure that popular demand will do much good. But the Fiesta should be excellent. ESTASIS has a new song in praise of Tolte (yes, I wrote it, but I won’t be singing it once Mario learns it), and we’ll be performing it during the festivities. I suppose my pride was injured when I heard that the junta had purchased a Himno Parroquial (sort of a town anthem) for $1500. I told Francisco that I would do it for $50 and a case of beer, but I guess he felt that he had to go a more formal route. We’ll see which song captures the popular imagination when they face off on the 21^st. But I know that there are already children singing the chorus of my song from having heard ESTASIS practice it. And this in spite of how appalling ESTASIS sounds, no matter what we play.

And I suppose there is a glimmer of hope on the English teaching front. Mario came to me the other day and said, “David, I have to learn English, it’s urgent.” I suppose having a pregnant teen-aged wife in England might contribute to that urgency. I told him that since I couldn’t charge him, I wanted him to find three other people who would study English all out for the next two months. We found three, but one dropped out right away due to some religious study even that is occurring at the same time. So I have Mario and two high school girls, Elvia and Yolanda, studying English all-out three days a week. At least, I think I have them, but this is only the first week. The first two days have gone pretty well. I’d still like a fourth person for pair work, but let’s see how far we can go. Maybe this will be my lasting contribution to Tolte—three young people well-prepared to speak English when they emigrate…

One more parting thought. Spending every Sunday in Chunchi as I do, a couple of people asked me to teach English to their kids, and that’s how I spend my Sunday afternoons now. It’s very different teaching these kids from teaching in a school classroom situation. The kids are more motivated, and they know that their parents are right behind me—sometimes literally. And while I’ve been horrified at some of the mispronunciation their teachers have taught them in school, they seem to be making good progress with me. Best of all, the father of one of my students has a land development project going in Navon, a town south of Cuenca. He’s mentioned me to the woman who’s the equivalent of County Executive there, and she seems to be interested in the things I know and could bring to Navon. So perhaps the end of my time in Tolte will carry me to the beginning of my time in Navon. For some reason, I never seem to run out of hope here in Ecuador. “David,” people tell me, “hope is the last thing you should lose.”

Another Death in the Family

When I wrote my last entry, about a month ago, I thought it would probably be my only “in memoriam” post during my time in Tolte. But the way people’s lives end in Tolte is so different from the orderly progress of events that we are used to in the States. Death is never unexpected here; people are comfortable with the idea that God will call you home in His time, not yours. And maybe this attitude is a result of the random way the death arrives here, not to the old, or the sick, or the weak, necessarily, but to whomever runs out of time, for whatever reason.

And so, almost exactly a month after Venancio died so suddenly, we were burying a little girl named Monica, whise life lasted just 20 months, or almost exactly the amount of time I have been living in Tolte. My contact with Monica was limited, because she was younger than the children I teach, but I remember her as a happy, healthy little child playing in the Guaderia with the other little pre-schoolers. And although it is possible, as the Toltenos say, that our days are numbered and hers were simply few in number, I do feel the need to mention the medical care that Monica received in the days before her death.

As I said, Monica was as healthy and strong as the rest of the children of Tolte ups to about a week and a half before she died. And the children of Tolte are much, much healthier and stronger than the suburban children of the United States. But one night she was sick. She had a fever and her sore throat caused her to drool uncontrollably. Her mother brought her to the hospital in Chunchi, where she was attended by an intern. I gather that this is pretty typical in rural hospitals, which cannot usually attract the professional staff that you find in the cities. The intern gave Monica’s mother cough syrup and told her that Monica’s condition was “normal.” But Monica didn’t get better.

Three days later, Monica’s mother brought the nearly unconscious Monica to the hospital in Chunchi again, where she was seen by another intern who told her that the baby was “normal,” even though she had never been this sick in her life. She was given another medicine that made her even sicker. Monica’s family brought her to a curandero, who said the baby was sick from the medicine she had been given, which might not have been too far from the truth.

When Monica’s family brought her to the hospital in Chunchi for the third time, she was finally seen by a doctor. The doctor recognized immediately that Monica had pneumonia. She was rushed by ambulance to Riobamba, where she was placed in an oxygen tent. After several days there, she was taken by ambulance to Quito. But Monica was unconscious by the time she reached Riobamba, and declared brain dead shortly after she reached Quito. Carolina, president of AVANTI, made the arrangements for Monica to be brought back to Tolte in her tiny white coffin.

While I found this series of events enraging, Toltenos seemed to take it more stoically. This is not to say that Monica’s death was routine. Jose told me that while a child dying was a common event thirty or so years ago, he couldn’t remember such a thing having happened since then. But the routines of thought were still very much in place: our days are numbered, she is with Diosito (that’s Dios, God, with the affectionate “ito” diminutive tacked on), Diosito took her to be with Him, this is life. And the children, and many adults, seemed to find something endearing, almost humorous, in the tiny coffin, which seemed so awful to me.

Monica was buried in the Tolte cemetery, which happens to be across the street from her house, a big pink house that holds a large number of members of her father’s family. Children ran about in the cemetery playing tag, as they held flowers that they would later put in the grave. There was no clergyman; I was asked to say a few words but declined, both for an inadequate command of the kind of ritual language that is used on such occasions and an inability to separate the event from my own feelings. So two of Tolte’s farmers asked God to bring Monica to Him and watch over her until the rest of us could get there. We ate candy and drank trago and cola during the burial, then went back to the pink house and ate soup and drank trago and did all the things we usually do at a party in Tolte except dance.  And I haven’t heard anything more about Monica, or the care she received or didn’t receive in Chunchi, since.

I suppose that the people of the rural zone all over the world have to contend with the neglect of their nations. The action and attention are urban, and rural people are expected to live their romanticized country lives feeding the urban zone with little mutual support of respect from city dwellers  and politicians, who are also overwhelmingly from the urban zone. My understanding is that the Correa government has boosted services in rural areas tremendously, but there is still so much to be done, especially in hospitals, schools, and economic diversification. I hope to hang around long enough to see some of this happen, although I don’t know yet how I will continue to support myself once my AVANTI contract runs out in July. I suspect that my future in Ecuador will be closely tied to my willingness and ability to teach English professionally.

I suppose there is more to tell about how I have spent the month of March, but it all seems so pale in comparison with the loss of a little child. There are changes in garbage collection that may allow me to employ skills and knowledge I gathered at Stony Brook, much to my surprise. I am the local expert in organic waste disposal by default. I have been trying to maintain the momentum created by the first aid course with a review meeting every Monday evening, but attendance has been depressingly poor. I have actually been teaching some English grammar to the sixth and seventh grades, and find it amazing how difficult it is to use the past tense correctly in English—there are so, so many “irregular” verbs in the past tense, that it almost doesn’t make sense to talk about rules for forming it. The shower in my house has been under repair for four weeks now, I sort of clean myself in the tiny bathtub, but believe me, it’s not the same. And I turned 55 last Friday, not with the hilarious fanfare of last year’s 54 party, but with a romantic weekend in Machala in the heart of Ecuador’s banana zone. Yes, romance can come even to such as I in Ecuador, where my life seems to be blessed, even touched by a kind of magic, every single day. I may not be accomplishing much, but the consequences of that seem to be mostly internal.

Life and Death at Carnaval

I’m sure that this blog entry will continue the usual dose of silliness. After all, t does discuss Carnaval, a gloriously silly time of year here in Tolte. But this entry also deals with the passing of one of my friends, Venancio Dobla, the day after Carnaval. I doubt that this blog has the capacity to do him justice, but I do want to pay my respects to him in whatever way I can.

Carnaval in Tolte is a playful, merry time. There are two great customs: splash everyone you can with water, and get soaked yourself in the process, and go from house to house singing the ribald Carnaval song, every verse of which ends “Que bonito es Carnaval!” I suppose that second tradition wouldn’t mean much without a third tradition, hosting the Carnavaleros when they come to your house. Hosting involves offering up generous quantities of food and alcohol, fueling the Carnavaleros for the next lego of their journey.

This year, Carnaval seemed to get off to a slow start.  I was in the middle of a two week school vacation that capped off the first “quimestre,” or five-month stretch of school. I had never really thought about the fact that “semester” means a six month period, which of course is far longer than any half school year in which I have ever participated. Here in Ecuador, we’re more specific about these things. Last year, the school year was broken up into three “trimesters,” so the quimestre system is new. Personally, I worry that it doesn’t provide enough feedback to parents, especially of elementary school kids, because they only get two report cards a year. Parents do occasionally stop by the school as they go from one field or errand to another to ask how their kids are doing, but there’s nothing like a report card to capture a parent’s attention. Report cards were not handed out on the last day of the quimestre, though, so the kids got to experience their holiday without the cloud of doom that hangs over vacations preceded by report card day.

In any case, during the first week of the vacation I carried out a number of farm visits in support of the local agrotourism project, going from one farm to another to see what each had that might interest a tourist, or what could be incorporated that might make for more functional organic farming. Few, if any, of the farmers here are committed to organic farming as a concept, although some are suspicious of agrochemicals. Still, agrochemicals give fast, if unsustainable, short-term results, and almost everyone likes a quick cure. I have focused on trying to get people to develop and use organic fertilizer, since few of my neighbors use any fertilizer at all, and yields tend to reflect this. So I went from farm to farm encouraging people to establish worm bins, an idea that already seems to have some acceptance. I’m looking for the “gimmes” in this process. I doubt I’ll be here long enough to promote a full-on organic farming/permaculture revolution.

By the Monday before Carnaval, though, my farm visits were done, and things were a bit slow. Estasis, my notoriously unmusical rock band, had talked about doing something together, but by 8 or 9 in the evening, we still hadn’t gotten started. I went out one last time before going to bed, and there, finally, was a group of Carnavaleros. I grabbed my guitar, and off we went in the drizzly weather typical of invierno in Tolte. I didn’t have any real singing responsibilities, but everyone counted on me for the guitar parts. The fact that I can actually do this seems to amuse everyone no end. It’s not that the music is difficult to play, I think it’s just a surprise to find that the gringo can do something so typically Ecuadorean. We didn’t go at it too long on Monday, because it finally got so rainy that we had to call it quits.

On Tuesday, Don Juan was quite insistent that I come to his house to play old songs that he knows and I don’t. I could sort of figure them out, but then he would get frustrated and kind of strum the guitar himself, which is kind of amusing because he doesn’t actually know anything about how to play the guitar. The old songs he sings are cool, though, and he and his family and I did this for a couple of hours until another group of Carnavaleros picked me up at about 2 in the afternoon. This led to about 8 hours of Carnaval guitar playing, which started to be too much even for me. One of the guys proved very clever at inventing Carnaval song verses for the presidential election of February 17, then less than a week away. These verses praised President Correa over his opposition, previewing the eventual outcome of the campaign. The President garnered 60% of the vote, while none of this crew of opponents could gain as much as 20%.

The party went on and on into the wee hours of Wednesday morning, though I had to give up before midnight on Tuesday, not having the iron constitution of my neighbors. I was relieved to finish Carnaval in a nearly euphoric state, without having to suffer any important health consequences. Wednesday got off to a weary start, although there were still a few hard core revelers delaying the entry of the Lentan season. Venancio was not really among these, he was on his way to work, but he ran into a group of these holdouts, who had been invited to eat something at the home of one of their children. And, in a moment, Venancio was gone, choking on a piece of meat before anyone could do anything. The Heimlich Maneuver had not yet reached Tolte. The crushing irony is that it would in the following week, when we received an Avanti-sponsored first-aid training from the Red Cross of Quito. But Venancio was already gone by then.

I’ve mentioned that Venancio was my friend. He wasn’t someone I spent lots of time with, I never did any agricultural work with him, his kids are adults and even his grandchildren have graduated from elementary school. He was a typically sturdy fellow in his mid-60’s, who could easily have lived another 10 or 15 years if not for his sudden accident. But I can say that he always seemed happy to see me, always gave me a warm greeting, and always invited me to a drink if he was drinking. He lived his whole life in Tolte, although some of his children migrated to the United States. And thinking of him makes me appreciate the importance of living a positive, ordinary life, being a good and cheerful family and community member, and brightening someone’s day with a hearty “Buenos Dias.” My exotic life here in Tolte is entirely dependent on my neighbors’ embrace of these ordinary virtues, which contribute so much to the sum of happiness in the world. And I deeply regret that Venancio cannot enjoy these things any more.

This was Wednesday, Feb. 13, and by Monday, 25 of us were studying first aid with Noe Zuniga, a trainer from the Red Cross. Noe is a fascinating character. He grew up poor in a rural area near Riobamba, and left home when he graduated from elementary school. He found work as a ticket taker on a bus, an excellent entry level job when he was a kid. The bus driver sort of adopted him, and helped him finish high school. Noe eventually finished college degrees in both nursing and paramedicine, and has gone to the United States to participate in training at the invitation of the Red Cross. He speaks Kichwa, Spanish, and English, and is completely happy with where life has taken him. He is also an excellent trainer, and spending 8 afternoons with him was a great experience for me. I re-learned many of the things I learned in an EMT course 25 years ago, and did some things I didn’t think I could do, including intramuscular and intravenous injections, things they don’t even teach you in EMT school. But out here in the rural zone, we might have to do these things to save someone’s life. We will actually be receiving equipment from Avanti, thanks to a grant from the British Embassy, that will provide us with all sorts of life-saving equipment that we never had before, but now actually know how to use. Since the nearest hospital is in Chunchi, 15 to 20 minutes away by car, these skills and equipment really could save someone’s life. The graduates of the program are going to meet once a week to review what we have learned, and I think this will be an important way to create a really unified community organization.

Now we have been back in school for a couple of weeks, and I am probably in my last quimestre as Tolte’s English teacher. It does not appear that Avanti will have the funds to keep me going. Perhaps this is just as well. I think it would be hard to face the school day without the present seventh grade, who will graduate in July and go on to Colegio.  I may investigate the possibility of teaching English in Chunchi, which could keep me in contact with them next year. I have also asked for work with the Ministry of Agriculture, and am looking into other volunteer possibilities similar to what I do now. Everything that I have needed in Ecuador has always turned up, and I imagine my next job is hiding just around the corner. We’ll have to see what happens.

Cuatro Ojos

So there I was in Cuenca, peacefully drinking the only liquid that really resembles beer in Ecuador, when these two adventurers from France sit down next to me, and one of them speaks good Spanish, so we start chatting. Somewhere in this conversation, I can’t remember how or when, I mention that one of the things I want to do for the school kids of Tolte is find out which of them need glasses, since Carolina has already offered to put up the money for them. That’s when Mateo, or Mathieu, says that he’s an optician, and he’ll be glad to come to Tolte just for the hell of it and do a vision test for all the kids in the school.

That was the last Saturday in January, and he and his pal Valentin were in Tolte (rainy, foggy Tolte) by Monday afternoon, armed with eye charts they had gotten off of the internet. This included near vision, distance vision, color vision, and the notorious “E” chart for kids who don’t know their letters yet. They started testing the kids Tuesday morning, and saw about half of them by the end of the school day.  That’s ten minutes or more per kid, which is a lot more thorough than what they’d normally get in school. This became more apparent when the Ministerio de Salud crew arrived from Alausi the next day, armed, coincidentally, with an eye chart. When Mathieu asked them what distance the kids would stand at to do their test, they asked him what difference it would make. Mathieu is considering coming back to Alausi to explain this.

Mathieu and Valentin saw the rest of the kids on Wednesday, and promptly took off for the beach, having identified seven kids who need glasses out of the 52 in the school. Then it turned out that Clara, AVANTI’s new special ed teacher in Tolte, lives across the street from an optometrist in Alausi. Since we had a group, he was willing to test the kids for a prescription at $3 per child. Conveniently, Monday was the start of a two week, inter-semester, Carnaval-celebrating school vacation. So I tracked down the kids and their parents, told them to bring $3, arranged and paid for Mecias to drive us to Alausi and back, and told them to show up at school time, 7:30 AM, on Monday for their eye tests.

By 8:30, six of the seven children were there, but not the child whose mother called me at 7 AM to ask me when he should be in the plaza. I wanted to arrive when the optometrist opened at 9, so that we could efficiently get in and out of there without creating havoc or being mixed in with other patients and having to wait all day. At 8:40 we took off for Alausi one child short, although by the time we were halfway there we could see the family’s truck behind us, which made me feel like an impatient gringo.

We arrived at about 9:30, and only had to wait a few minutes for the optometrist to open his shop. Inside, it was surprisingly like a shop in the States, with computerized equipment and everything necessary to determine the prescription the kids needed. Interestingly, the child who didn’t seem able to read either close or at a distance needed the mildest prescription. But a couple of the kids have been walking around nearly blind, and I’m hopeful that glasses will change their lives. The optometrist offered to make the kids glasses for the bargain price of $30 a pair, and I’m hopeful that when school starts again on Feb. 18, these kids will finally be able to see.

This won’t be easy, though. There seems to be no social limit on the abuse that kids are allowed to heap on anyone who uses glasses, including throwing them on the floor and crushing them (the glasses, not the kids, or at least not always the kids.) And calling anyone who uses glasses “cuatro ojos” (“four eyes”) seems to be almost a requirement. Fortunately, Clara wears glasses, and the kids really seem to like her, so I’m hopeful we can create some good socialization around the sudden appearance of seven pairs of glasses in the school.

All of this does make me wonder about kids in other towns near Tolte, many of which are poorer than Tolte. Here, it might be difficult, but not impossible, to persuade a parent to spend $30 for a child’s glasses. Elsewhere, some families simply cannot invest that much money in one child. Health insurance here, which covers many things for many people, does not do glasses. There is an organization in Riobamba, called Vista Para Todos, that does eye testing and provides glasses at reduced cost, but I’m afraid that isn’t enough.  I offer this as an example of how things we really take for granted in the US, like getting glasses for our children if they need them, can remain an unreachable luxury in the developing world, and Ecuador is a far more comfortable place than many other Latin American countries, to say nothing of Africa or Asia. I’ll just kick in that the percentage of the US budget that goes to foreign aid is lower than that of almost any other industrialized nation, so that those who complain about “foreigners getting while people here go hungry” can have something to think about.

On Thursday I delivered my semester grades. I had hoped to use these to really grab the attention of those kids who routinely treat my class as an extension of recess, but it turns out that the final grade will be a strict average of the two semester grades, and they need a grade of 7 (out of 10) to pass my class. And, if they don’t pass English, they have to repeat the year, which would be stupid, because next year, when I won’t be here, there will be no English class. So I tried not to give anyone a grade they couldn’t recover from, although there are a couple in sixth grade who are going to have to pull a rabbit out of their hats. By recess on Friday, school was dismissed, and I’ve been trying to stay busy doing aggie work ever since.

One of the most interesting days of that happened last Saturday, when I went with Juan Carlos to make a seed bed for out “natural agriculture” experiment. The soil in his field is, like most of Tolte’s soils, heavy clay. Now that it has finally started to rain, there is a great risk that any seed you try to plant will simply rot. But I tried to make do with the materials at hand. We made a little terrace, about one meter by five, shoring it up with a rock wall at its base, which looked nice, even if I’m not sure about the wall’s stability. I hope that this will improve drainage, though, and leave the soil less sodden. We mixed in some twiggy organic matter, too, which I also hope will help dry it out. The real thrill was that, by chance, there was a bunch of charcoal left behind from burning damp cornstalks. Yes, I have finally applied biochar, obsession of my Stony Brook Master’s thesis and partial theme of my one and only scientific publication, to actual soil. I don’t know if it will help, but again, the idea is that the charcoal will raise the soil pH, help to improve drainage, and promote a healthy microbial colony not dominated by seed-rotting fungi. It’s all an experiment. Then we went out and threw our less sensitive seeds every which way on the field. Our clover has not come up at all, and I am sort of afraid that this broadcast method is not going to work well. But it’s worth a try. When I go down again tomorrow, I hope to see a few sprouts, especially considering the vast amount of rain we’ve had this week.

In other cases, I’ve been making farm visits to promote the “granjas integrales” project, which has been absolutely dormant, not to say moribund. It’s been interesting—every farm has offered something slightly different as a project, from contour farming to soil rehab, as well as organic methods of disease and insect control. The project envisions organic agriculture in Tolte, but people here have developed an instinct to reach for a chemical to address whatever problem their crops may have. It’s hard to argue with this. People use chemicals because they work, and work fast. Crop failure is not an option, and I’m terrified of contributing to a situation where crops would fail. But these farms are small, often less than 2 acres, and hardly ever as much as 5, and people do work them quite closely. It does seem entirely possible to raise a crop here without chemicals, but it’s certainly a foreign idea at the moment.

I’m also proud to say that on Wednesday, I worked with the minga, or community work party. People asked me why I did it, since I’m not required to be there, but I said that I couldn’t picture hiding in my house from shame while everyone else was working. And work it was. I may have mentioned in a previous blog that the mionga few months back was to dig a ditch for the sewer line from the new restaurant/mirador that should face Nariz del Diablo but doesn’t. The ditch didn’t have to be very deep, but there is a soil layer here called concava, apparently somewhat common in Ecuador, of massive, packed clay. I’m curious as to how it developed, probably some ancient lake or sea bottom, but breaking through it dulls one’s curiosity. I was working with two women, one about 30 years old, one about my age, to dig a two meter length to an 80 centimeter depth (about six and a half feet long and two and a half feet deep). After the first 10 centimeters, it was concava all the way down. For a while, we could break into it with a pick, and shovel out the loose chips, but then we had to use the heavy vara to break anything loose. Frankly, the two women outworked me pretty thoroughly, but I did well enough to avoid total embarrassment. Certainly, I broke concave with the vara longer than I thought I could, and we did complete our reach of the ditch before lunch. After lunch, the sewer pipe was installed, and we had to fill in what we had just dug out, then go on and install the water line to the mirador. That didn’t require as deep a ditch, and I was mostly involved filling the ditch in after the pipe was installed. All in all, it was a satisfying, pleasant day in the company of the Toltenos, and I slept really well that night.

The next day I was almost involved in removing a dead horse from the rode. It apparently died by falling off of its pasture to the roadway.  I was surprised that when I recommended making fritada out of it, nobody was really interested. Fortunately, by the time we got there, the owners had finally gotten themselves together to shove it into the barranco, where I imagine we’ll be smelling it for a while, even though it is quite a ways down the cliff. I think there’s a Monty Python routine in here somewhere, but I’ll leave it to my brother Jeff to figure out what it is.

A Tale of Two Weddings

I’m not going to get into the usual chat about my work and how its going, or whether teaching little children to sing “The Eensy Weensy Spider” is a responsible use of my time on earth. This is going to be about Grupo Winari (there’s a tilde over that n, and it means “growth” in Kichwa), and how it is taking me around the Ecuadorean Sierra playing the guitar, something I never could have imagined when I decided to come down here.

The group has been growing steadily, from its original lineup of Vicente, the band leader and major musical talent, and his brother Pablo, Tolte’s carpenter, and a rotating group of percussionists who couldn’t keep a beat. I think I signed on about a year ago (an American Jew in an Evangelical/Ecuadorean folkloric band, that’s novel), and not too long after that some of the church kids joined in, most notably Solomon, who is learning to play various sizes of pan pipes, and Rocio, who solved our percussionist problem because she can sing and keep a beat at the same time, maybe the only person in Tolte with this talent, apart from Don Vicente, of course. When I returned to Tolte in August, the group had found a new charango player, Wiliam, from Alausi. On Friday, as we got ready to rehearse for weddings in Palmira and Canar, we also had Rocio’s cute little sister Diana trying to figure out how to play the guiro, a wooden tube with a notched surface that you rub with a pointed stick, and Jose, displaced percussionist and my former housemate, as an additional singer.

Practice with this extended group took three hours, during which time we covered, I think, three songs. Getting everyone to start and stop at the same time, while the various percussionists kept a beat, was sort of brutal, though things improved when Rocio showed up. There was also a “nerves” element, as we were learning one completely new and another almost completely new song to perform the next day. But I caught on quickly to a song I couldn’t figure out in the previous practice session, and, although there was a lot of repetition and a few broken finger nails, I figured I could do what needed to be done in the next two days. But as we were leaving, Wiliam said that he couldn’t come on Saturday, and the kids also seemed to have work to do at home, so Vicente and Pablo invited me to go with them to the Palmira wedding, and all of us would go to the Canar thing.

The Palmira wedding was a family event for Pablo and Vicente. Their mother came from there originally, but her family moved to Tolte about 50 years ago for reasons that their father could not make clear to me. The family was not really from Palmira, either, but from a tiny village smaller than Tolte up in the mountains above Palmira, in the heart of the Ecuadorean Sierra. We were supposed to leave at 8, but by the time we got organized in the back of their brother-in-law Francisco’s truck, it was closer to 9:30, and I think we reached the little village of Chausan around 11:30.

Pablo used the words “National Geographic” to describe what I saw when I entered the ceremonies already underway in Chausan, and his accuracy made me laugh. There was a brief moment, I have to admit, when all eyes turned toward me with but a single thought: “Gringo!” and I looked back thinking, “Indians!” Chausan is much, much more traditional than Tolte. Everyone was dressed in their finest wedding party best, brilliantly colored blanket-weight shawls and long narrow skirts for the women, ponchos and dark pants for the men, fedora-like hats for everybody. People were speaking primarily Kichwa among themselves, and this was also the language of the religious service. Because this is an Evangelical family, there was no trago, but there was food, which seemed to be used as a kind of trago substitute.
They brought us into a little house built in the traditional fashion of the area, which doesn’t include adobe because the soil hardly contains any clay. At a guess, I’d say it was some kind of lake shore or river bed soil, very silty and soft, unlike the soil of Tolte, and in spite of being about 3000 meters up in the Andes. I think the word that they used for this kind of mud wall construction is “tapia,” but I’m not completely sure. In any case, the smooth earthen walls run up to a roof of straw supported with wooden poles. There were no windows, but there were a sheep carcass and a pig’s head hanging from the rafters. And that’s where the food started. First, chicken and rice, then sheep soup, then pork fritada and rice. I think Pablo, Vicente, and I played three songs between the sheep soup and the fritada. By the time the fritada came out, almost everything was going into the thoughtfully provided plastic bags so that we could take it home.

As we ate, the fellow who was padrino to the new couple started talking to us about “chopa,” a doughy mixture of machica (barley powder), sugar, and chicha. This was something that I think even my friends from Tolte had never heard of. It wasn’t long before we saw the Chopa in all its glory, though. Four huge bowls of the stuff were set out on a table, along with the usual assortment of Andean comestibles, chickens, guinea pigs, favas and corn, rice and peas. The abundance was, according to the pastor officiating, to represent the idea that the new couple, with the support of the community, would never go hungry. The funny part was that the coupe and padrinos were supposed to eat everything on the table, something I doubt they could do even if they were anacondas. But they dug in with a will (remember, we had been eating al morning), but soon began sharing out all the food to the assembled village. As a visiting gringo, I was among the first served, along with my Tolte friends, also considered visitors. It seemed sort of imposible, but eventually all of the chopa and other food was eaten, and the rest of the afternoon was spent identifying long lost cousins and other family connections between the Toltenos and the residents of Chausan. And, before we hit the road, we were given a container of chicken and rice, three liters of soda, and another 3 liters of chicha for good measure. Amazingly, we made it home without anyone exploding.

The next day was Sunday, and we had a wedding to play in Canar, a little over an hour to the south. We weren’t going into the heart of Canar, only as far as Zhud, which for some reason some of my neighbors call Gun. The wedding was at 4, so we decided to gather at 3. I think the idea was that we would take Pablo’s little mini truck, the Boogie Woogie, although with eight band members, additional family members, and all of our instruments I didn’t see how that was possible. Of course, it wasn’t possible, and when I got to Vicente’s house at 3 we talked about looking for someone with a bigger truck. But we didn’t rush, because no one else was there yet, and we didn’t know where Pablo and the Boogie were.

At 4, we had identified someone who could give the whole band a ride, but the whole band was still not there. Pablo was just bringing his family up from the hacienda in the Boogie, Rocio and Diana were in their house, although they were close, since they live next door to the church. I was waiting on the church porch with a couple of the other kids who play with us. I think it was about 4:30 or 4:45 when we all finally got into Antonio’s truck and headed for Chunchi to pick up the charango player and his family. By now it was densely foggy and raining, and I was relieved that we were in a covered car and not all hanging on to some part of the Boogie. But with one thing and another, it took almost half an hour to find the charango player, and it was about 5:15 when we headed for Zhud.

When we got to Zhud, there was a roadside stand selling fritada. Apparently this is a fritada of a very high quality, because everyone considered it essential that we stop and eat some. It was good, although I think there were bad consequences later from having eaten it. But it was all very festive, and we got to the wedding at 6:40. Apparently, this violated some unwritten lateness limit that none of us had ever run into before, because they would not let us play. The charango player and I would up playing some of the popular music that I play with ESTASIS while we sat in the back of the truck, but that was about it. So we never did make it to the wedding in Canar, and I can’t tell you anything about how it compared to the wedding in Chausan. But I guess I can say that getting a band of Toltenos anywhere does require more time than one might expect.

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.