Edelstein Opens His Mind

So long, and thanks for all the llamingos

2013-07-06T09:35:00.001-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ESTASIS: Live in Huigra!

2013-06-20T11:08:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Parroquializacion

2013-05-25T10:44:00.003-07:00

My life in Tolte continues to drift towards its end, with my mornings teaching English to school kids, my afternoons spent playing the guitar in the library, and most of my evening teaching English to the rectly organized class of adults. I haven’t done anything agricultural in a while. I did offer a talk about truning household waste into organic fertilizer, but nobody attended. I wasn’t surprised, but my hopes are fading.

On the other hand, it appears that this is not entirely some failing on my part. About a month ago, a young guy from Chunchi named Carlos turned up at the general meeting. He was sent by the Ministry of Education to organize an adult literacy class. I helped him round up the interested people, about twenty-five of them. I asked him what his schedule would be, and he told me five nights week, two hours a night, for four to five months. I asked him if he actually thought people would do this, and he said, sure, he had done it in a village called San Francisco, where of the thirty adults who started, twenty-five finished. All I could think was, if he pulls this off in Tolte, there really is something wrong with the way I work. But sure enough, by last week he was down to three students, and on Thursday of this week no one showed up. I don’t think Tolte is exceptional is this behavior, but I think it points to problems in social development in rural areas. People work long days, and don’t really have the time or energy to participate in community development projects that require daily follow through. One-off training days would probably be better, if I could get people to come to those. Maybe I’ll try to offer my composting talk again this week.

Meanwhile, my evening class of four young folks is still ticking along. Attendance isn’t perfect, but I have always had at least two of the four of them at every class. They’re definitely making progress, although what they don’t know after four or more years of English classes in high school or university continues to amaze me. I really believe that my post-Tolte life may involve teaching English to Ecuador’s English teachers. I could at least stop them from pronouncing the silent “e” at the end of words as “ay.” After what I think is three weeks of classes, my students are able to introduce themselves, identify objects and locations in their environment and town, say where things are located, give directions, describe their physical and emotional states, say what they like to do, and use the past tense to a limited extent. It’s not much, but it’s more than they could do before. But I deeply regret that this class has only started now, in my last two months in Tolte, instead of September, 2011, when I got here. When I think of how much farther along they’d be, I feel a kind of pain that only teachers who have not reached their students can know.

And reaching students was difficult this week, because of the five potential school days, we only met on two. Tuesday was the Fiesta commemorating the founding of Pistishi as a parroquia in 1941, Wednesday was recovery from the fiesta of Tuesday, and Friday was a national holiday commemorating the Battle of Pichincha, a key event in Ecuadorian independence (about which I know precious little—I read novels in Spanish, but taking on a history text seems too intimidating). The Tuesday fiesta was classic, though, and made me feel real regret that in the future, I will come to parties in Tolte from the outside, not as a resident. The day started with a parade of something like 12 different civic groups, everything from dignitaries from the Municipio of Alausi to the touristic llama wranglers. This was followed by a celebratory “Sesion solemne,” during which various members of the junta directive and the municipio told everyone how proud they were to be celebrating the day, and what a great job they were doing for everyone. And it ended just about the time when I thought I couldn’t take another speech. Everyone got corn and roast pork for lunch, and, after a little while, the local indoor team, regional campeones in several tournaments, took on the team from the municipio. The locals looked rusty at first, they haven’t played together for a few months, and their shots weren’t going into the goal. I think the municipio even scored first (the locals were playing with their second-string goalie). But then they found their groove, and scored ten goals to easily defeat the municipio.

For me, the biggest event of Tuesday was the music at night. This was Estasis’ first performance since the Fiesta de Tolte in November. Our bass player was in Riobamba doing his auto mechanics internship, our vocalist was working at his job as a guard in the train station, but Freddy, Mario, and I had more or less prepared for this by practicing together with Mario doing the singing for the past month or so. Mario isn’t much of a singer, but at least he doesn’t have my gringo accent. We offered five songs, including two originals and one cover that we had re-arranged from sort of a ‘60’s style flower-children sound to grinding punk rock (ok, I re-arranged it, I’m not afraid to admit it). The key song was one of the originals, my slightly country-ish ode to Tolte. And we really did almost sound like a band instead of a trash can falling downstairs. People said they were excited to hear us, and liked the Tolte song, and the MC, the owner of a radio station in Riobamba, recorded our Tolte song on his phone, and appeared pretty enthusiastic about it. It’s still hard for me to describe Estasis without mocking it, but we are better than we were a year ago, and I have almost learned how to produce a convincing rock guitar solo (although I fear that all of my solos are pretty much the same thing). We are actually invited to play at the Fiesta de Huigra on June 1, and the vocalist swears he’ll show up. They even say they’re going to pay us, although I think we’ll have to give everything to the guy who’s going to drive us over there. I know I didn’t come ti Ecuador to play in a garage band, but it’s become a surprisingly big part of my life here. At least most of the members show up to rehearse with some enthusiasm a few times a week. My band mates say I can’t leave Tolte because there is no band without me, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to eat or pay rent on what people will pay to hear Estasis. But I actually will miss playing with them—I don’t know if any other band will have me, or allow me as much freedom to do whatever as Estasis has to.

And after the Estasis performance, the fiesta went on into the night, no matter that it was a Tuesday. As usual, there was plenty of beer and trago to sustain the merriment, but my body sustained the attack better than usual. In tribute to our performance, Estasis was allowed to buy a case of beer for the crowd. I even got to do some dancing, and serve out the beer and some of the trago, and in general party as though tomorrow would not be Wednesday—which it kind of wasn’t, because school was closed so the teachers could recover and the kitchen be cleaned out. I didn’t do too much myself on Wednesday, but I did open the library in the afternoon, and give English class at night. So there.

Do Not Go Gentle

2013-05-01T11:23:00.000-07:00

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

2013-03-29T09:07:00.002-07:00

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

2013-03-09T09:16:00.001-08:00

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

2013-02-08T07:19:00.000-08:00

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

2013-01-28T06:56:00.002-08:00

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

2012-12-24T14:05:00.000-08:00

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

2012-12-08T13:49:00.005-08:00

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!

2012-11-24T14:13:00.002-08:00

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

2012-10-27T08:54:00.000-07:00

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

2012-10-20T08:27:00.002-07:00

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

2012-10-06T14:55:00.007-07:00

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

2012-09-12T12:49:00.005-07:00

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

2012-09-01T06:01:00.000-07:00

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!

2012-08-22T09:51:00.002-07:00

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

2012-06-02T14:16:00.001-07:00

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

2012-05-22T13:35:00.001-07:00

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.

Guitar Hero

2012-05-11T05:05:00.001-07:00

Okay, so maybe I shouldn’t steal this title from a video game of questionable worth (but unquestioned popularity). But I confess that I have always wanted to be a guitar hero in some musical form or another. I have also admitted that, in contrast to Robert Johnson, who is said to have sold his soul to the Devil in order to gain his eerie guitar skills, I have simply gone to hell playing the guitar in spite of the fact that I have no particular musical talent. I’m mostly just thrilled that Allie is already the guitar player that I never was, and hope that talent sustains him somehow.

But here in Tolte, I’m the best guitar player available. I’m not the best musician; that would have to be Juan Vicente, local folkloric music expert, luthier, and multi-instrumentalist, who can play traditional Ecuadorean music on at least five different instruments. He can also manage a disorderly band of amateurs, and that’s how it happened that he invited me (as the best guitarist available) to join a group for a one-time presentation for a small group of tourism evaluators who came to Tolte on Thursday.

We started rehearsing Thursday morning at 8 AM: Juan Vicente, his brother Pablo (the local carpenter, also capable of playing at least four instruments), Jose, my housemate and their cousin, who had the drum-beating duties, and Giovanny, the best guitar player in Tolte, and the only non-relative (besides me on both counts), and me. We managed to learn instrumental versions of two songs, either because no vocalists were available or because it’s too complicated to get vocalists to do the right thing in a short amount of time. This took over two hours because a) I had never heard the songs before, and had to learn a couple of single note fills, and b) Vicente doesn’t like sloppy entrances and exits, and we had plenty of those. We hurried down to the new look-out point near the train station to greet the tourism evaluators.

At least for me, things started to make me laugh at this point. First of all, in a display of the kind of unconcern that the high and mighty generally reserve for the rest of us, the tourism evaluators showed up almost two hours later than expected, while all of my neighbors neglected the million demanding things they do every day to wait for them. I suppose it wasn’t really funny, but it so conformed to my most cynical expectations that I did kind of have to laugh. Then there was the organizing of the band into an appropriately costumed group, which included me wearing a woven poncho, just like my bandmates. I’m trying to get someone to give me a photo of this (I stupidly forgot my camera), but I’ve decided to go ahead and publish this without the photo, because none has come through yet. No sense letting this news get any staler.
The funniest thing, though, was that when the inspectors finally showed up, Vicente introduced the band by saying that we were all natives of the area, and before he got to explain my dubious presence, one of the inspectors asked, “Y que es eso?”(“And what’s that?”), indicating me. No, I don’t look very Ecuadorean, especially in a group where three out of five are close relatives. Vicente explained that I was an “invitado,” and we got down to playing the songs we had practiced. Our entrances and exits were kind of rough, but the music sounded pretty good in spite of it all, and we got high marks from all concerned.

Of course, the inspectors then went on to tell everybody that our touristic product wasn’t ready yet, for reasons that aren’t quite clear to me. I do have my own concerns about the tourism effort here, and whether it really will attract outsiders to Tolte, but I think people are doing about the best that can be expected. The idea is that tourists will ride horses down to the train station, where they’ll hear about life in Pistishi and see the Nariz del Diablo zig-zagging train route in action. They’ll also get spectacular views of the Andes from horseback, the chance to pet a llamingo, and maybe some folkloric entertainment. As touristic products go, it’s not great, but it’s pretty low-key and harmless. I’m not sure what the tourism inspectors are waiting for, but there has been a lot of testing and no income in sight. I think we’re all getting a bit impatient.

Now that the touristic presentation is over, it’s back to playing rock band with Freddy, Mario, Dani, and the other Freddy. We’re working on five songs, one of which I’ve actually learned the lyrics to and three of which I can play the solo from the recording. I don’t like learning recorded solos, but they’ve been easier than I feared and this is one of those things the lead guitarist with a garage band has to accept. I do get to do a solo of my own on the most “roquero” of our numbers, though. The truth is, I kind of wish Allie would play a solo and I could learn that, but I feel pretty good about what’s coming out so far. It isn’t really loud enough, but it is sufficiently horrible to attract attention. The boys are very pleased.

Oh, and my job? I’m into my final lessons with the sixth grade, and I hope to go into a more free conversation phase with them in about a week. Seventh grade, at least its functional members, are about a week behind. Fourth and fifth grade are about three days behind the seventh grade., though maybe at a lower level entirely. Still, there’s more English in the air these days in Tolte, and it’s coming from my students, not the high school kids, so I think I’m doing pretty well. Agricultural technology is at a bit of a standstill as we wait for the dry season to begin; you can’t build bench terraces in mud. But it hasn’t rained in a day or two, so maybe we really are entering verano as scheduled. It just hasn’t had the same sudden start as the rainy season did back in December.

As all of this winds down, I am looking for the next job. Nothing tangible has happened yet. The job at Yachana in the Amazon has been indefinitely postponed due to funding problems and program changes, and that was my safe play. Carolina is trying to get me funded for another year in Tolte. I have just spent the morning applying for jobs all over the Spanish-speaking world that I located through idealist.org. We’ll have to see what happens, but keep in mind that everything and everyone I’ve ever needed here in Tolte has surfaced just when I needed them. I’m feeling pretty good about my chances.

Long arm of the future

2012-04-28T11:11:00.002-07:00

I know that one of the important lessons of Tolte is that everything will turn up when I need it, and everyone will turn up when I need him or her. This was confirmed just today--I missed Damasio's departure from home, so I had to go looking for him down in the hacienda. I had just about decided that I wouldn't find him when he turned up, and we had a fine time considering what he should do for his fruit trees.

So I shouldn't be worrying about what my next job will be when I have a whole month left of this one. After all, I can't be entirely unemployed. I have a job offer in the Amazon, where I would return to being a high school science teacher, but also create curriculum for a k-12 science program that could be implemented in rural schools throughout Ecuador. Am I creative enough? No, but the internet is full of good ideas for teachers. I'm not bad at hunting and gathering.

In spite of this security, or maybe because of it, I have started looking for a job anyway. Angus is spreading my resume in a thin layer over Quito, where it may appeal to someone, but it hasn't yet. He says that my best chance to find worthwhile development work in ecuador is to work for the givernment, probably in the Ministerio de agricultura (MAGAP) or the Ministerio del Ambiente. I'd prefer to work for an NGO than the Ecuadorean government, but with looming cuts to USAID and the generally anemic state of charitable donation worldwide, the government is a better bet.

So I also took my resume by hand over to the MAGAP office in Riobamba. Daniel, the ingeniero agronomo who often works in Tolte, told me to try to get to speak to the director or the subsecretaria, but I only reached Talento Humano. But I did leave aresume, and went across to the Ministerio del Ambiente office and left one there, too. I had hoped to speak to the directora there, because her secretary told me it would be possible, but things didn't work out that way. When I got back to Tolte, Daniel told me that Mecias, the teniente politico, is good friends with the MAGAP director. He did put in a good word for me, but MAGAP is hoping to find a gringo with an engineering degree, for irrigation projects I imagine. So prospects there are also dim.

This left idealist.org, which provided me with the wonderful experience you are reading about. I found interesting jobs with El Nahual in Guatemala, Witness for Peace in Nicaragua, and SKIP in Peru. Witness for Peace and SKIP had lengthy applications, which I spent most of last weekend filling out (explaining the long stretch between blog entries, I hope). El Nahual only wanted a resume and cover letter, and they were the first to contact me for an interview. This was very exciting until I looked at the job offer more carefully and realized that it was unpaid, and provided only a place to live. Since I already have an offer of a paying job in the Amazon, I decided that I really had to bow out of what certainly would have been a cool experience in Guatemala. Maybe after my pension starts...what's that, another 11 years or so? The El Nahual people were very enthusiastic about me. I hope I've done the right thing.

Somewhat to my surprise, Witness for Peace is also interested in my application. I don't have a long or deep record of political activism, which is mostly what the work seems to be about. But I have had string feeling about American policy in Central America since before I went to the Peace Corps, so maybe that counts. Anyway, they set me up for an oral Spanish test via Skype, which made me sort of nervous. I mean, if I don't speak Spanish well enough for this job, what kind of fool have i been making of myself here in Tolte? But I passed, in spite of my inadequate attempt to translate "Central American Free Trade Agreement" into Spanish. I guess I did okay, in spite of the sort of political/economic sorts of sentences that I had to translate into both English and Spanish. Now I'm just waiting for them to interview me, which should be an exciting experience. The intellectual level will probably be more than a bit above what I'm capable of producing on a daily basis in Tolte.

Meanwhile, the new and exciting experience in Tolte has been my continuing integration into a sort of garage band that I have dubbed "La Banda de Miercoles." This is a double entendre--ask Maya to work it out for you. In any case, since I am the only person who knows how to play lead guitar for a rock or pop band, I get to be the lead guitarist. Our goal is to play at the big parroquializacion fiesta on May 21, performing covers of five (that may be too many) songs that are popular in Ecuador these days, though I think most of them are imported from Spain and Mexico. There is a serious risk that this will all be a big mess, because the guys in the band (I think the total age of the four or five of them might be equal to my own) are relying on my musical knowledge to prevent exactly that. Since I have basically zero band experience, things could get ugly. So far, I'm trying to teach them to count to four repeatedly as they play. It seems to be helping.

But in case I was about to get carried away by my own musical skills, The New Paltz Oracle named Allie musician of the week for April 26. Check out his performance of "Dear Prudence" with his amazing bass playing pal Sam on YouTube. You will love it.

So here I am, entering my last month in Tolte, unless Carolina manages to pull some sort of magical funding out of the bag and hire me for another year (the final job opportunity!) Francisco called her the other day to plead on my behalf. Of course, if I were really committed, I could probably open an English language school in Chunchi, and use that to fund whatever development activities I find interesting. I'm not sure I'm at that point. But May should be an exciting time both for my students and soil conservation practices as we move out of the rainy season and towards the end of the school year. bench terraces, anyone?

Amazonia

2012-04-13T09:15:00.000-07:00

I apologize for the delay. I know you’re all dying to hear what happened in the Amazon, and I’ve been slow to put it out there. This is partly due to my efforts to fill out a job application for Witness for Peace, without doubt some of the most difficult writing I have ever attempted, and certainly the longest and most arduous job application. Some of you may get the opportunity to help me with it. Winners will be informed by personal e-mail.

The Amazon is far. Maybe it isn’t far from itself, but it’s far from anywhere I have ever been, and specifically far from Tolte. School had been closed since Tuesday, so I didn’t have to try to make the whole trip on Saturday, which might have been impossible. I had to arrive in Los Rios early enough to take the half hour canoe trip to Yachana before 6 PM. I left Friday morning in cold, dense fog, which probably didn’t help my leaving. It was Good Friday and I don’t think the Chunchi bus company that makes hourly trips to Riobamba was running. The Patria bus didn’t even slow down as it passed me by. Fortunaately, I was able to get a ride in the back of a truck all the way to Palmyra, and catch a bus from there to Riobamba, so I only lost about an hour waiting for the bus. From Riobamba I caught the bus to Tena, a small city on the edge of Amazonia. From there, I used the internet to call my family for Passover. Once I was back on the street, I got to watch a “Stations of the Cross” procession that wound down the main street of Tena. Being Jewish in Ecuador has its limits.

The next morning, I caught the bus to Los Rios. This three and a half hour trip involved two and a half hours on a narrow dirt road cutting into the rain forest. If we met another bus or truck coming in the opposite direction, we had to back up until we found some place wide enough to let it by. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to get a good picture of us cutting through the jungle.

When I got to Los Rios, Diego was waiting for me with the canoe. Diego uses crutches to get around, but he was down the path and into the canoe a lot faster than I was. He very ably steered the canoe down to Yachana. The view from the river was incredible, and the picture that I share here doesn’t do it justice. Along the way, Andres, who came along for the ride with Diego, pointed out people panning for gold along the river. Apparently, when the river rises, it leaves behind material containing gold. People work all day to collect a gram or two, each gram worth about $30, which is a good day’s wage in Ecuador. Unfortunately, conditions don’t allow panning for gold every day, so it isn’t all that profitable.

We arrived at the Yachana Lodge, which is an incredible place. Tourists come from all over the world to visit the lodge and take day trips into the region. The lodge has a view of two volcanoes when the weather is clear, as well as spectacular views of the river and forest. The whole project, which includes a health center for the neighboring community of 27 families and the Yachana technical high school, is the life achievement of Douglas McMeekin, a Kentuckian who came to Ecuador 26 years ago. Douglas describes himself as an entrepreneur, always quickly adding that “it’s a personality type.” He started out working as an environmental consultant to the oil industry, moved on to a project that involved establishing schools along the river Yachana overlooks, and decided to invest in a location about midway along the path of the school project. Yachana and Douglas have one a number of prestigious awards, because Yachana is about as good an example of social entrepreneurship as one is likely to find anywhere.
Douglas was primarily interested in talking to me about Yachana’s educational projects. The high school attracts kids from al over Ecuadorean Amazonia. The program is innovative, with the kids studying three weeks without a break and going for work experiences for the rest of the month, which reminded me a bit of the Village School’s internship experience. Douglas has extensive contacts in the tourism industry, and some of the kids have even been offered jobs based on their performance during their internships.
Another interesting feature of the high school is that the instructors are all foreign volunteers, mostly recent college graduates. In spite of some minor language difficulties, these young people have been able to deliver an unusually high quality education by Ecuadorean standards, largely due to their exceptional level of commitment. Chris, Ryan, and Amanda, my hat’s off to you, or would be, if I could remember to wear a hat.
Douglas has a new project as well, on the other side of the river. It is the Yachana Technical Institute, which will offer both a junior college program and short certification courses. This has been funded through Douglas’ own painstaking fundraising efforts, most recently involving the Japanese Embassy and Schlumberger, the oil equipment company and one of the Amazon’s biggest employers. It certainly would be a great opportunity to learn how he does it. There has been concern that the high school would close for lack of funds, but Douglas is absolutely sure that this will not happen, if only because he considers the school the centerpiece of the Yachana program.
The job Douglas would like me to do is to teach science with an agriculture emphasis in the high school. There are certain curriculum points required by the Ministerio de Educacion. The general idea is that I would take care of those as quickly as possible, and then focus on experiential learning. I suppose one concern I have is that the students know more than I do about the practical end of agriculture. From what I understand, they’re all eager to stay away from it, and work in tourism. Also, there is a problem with certain neighbors harvesting school crops before the school can. This could be a serious obstacle to success.
An exciting aspect of working for the school is that the model of combining school with practical experience is of great interest to people in the Ministerio de Educacion, and there is a desire to replicate it elsewhere, possibly in the Galapagos. Yachana may become the brand name for a whole chain of innovative school programs, and I might have the chance to be a part of that.
On the other hand, I am not at all sure that I will take a position with Yachana. The school program is very intense and would take all my time, which means that I would return to my well-accustomed role as a science teacher. That’s not at all bad, but I’m down here because I keep hoping for something more, something new and different. I suppose that if I do take the job with Yachana, it will be because I can see a real opportunity to learn from Douglas. He and I will have to hash that out. But, for now, my job search is not over.
Nor is my search for daily work. Last week’s vacation (Tuesday through Friday) was followed by this week’s vacation (Wednesday to Friday). Wednesday wasn’t entirely vacation—the teachers and I took the sixth graders to a presentation by the Chunchi rescue squad. This took less than an hour, which I think was not a great exchange for a full day of school. Thursday there was some program for the teachers, and today, Friday, is Dia del Maestro, which we maestros are celebrating by not teaching again. I’ve only got seven weeks left to teach English. I’ve been warned that there will be a lot more days off during this time, but I hope it isn’t quite the learning blackout of the past two weeks.
On a more positive note, the windbreak project that Raphael and Carlos worked out with the Colegio Tecnico Agropecuario de Chunchi actually happened yesterday. I had discussed windbreaks with two farmers, but when Raphael went to the colegio with Carlos to look for appropriate tree species, they found that the agroforestry teacher had a bunch of trees in a nursery and was all ready to plant them. After a letter requesting them to do this and a month’s delay, the teacher showed up with 15 students and 125 trees and we planted a windbreak around Asencio’s property, conveniently located behind his house in the center of Tolte. While it wasn’t quite the technically perfect project I had hoped for, these are the first non-fruit trees planted here, and may be the first windbreak in Pistishi. There are 20 people in the granjas integrals group that Asencio belongs to—if all of them plant windbreaks, Tolte will gain 2000 trees or more. It’s not much in a territory this size, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction. And Asencio was certainly very happy with the result. No doubt, a successful project.

The Belgians are gone

2012-03-31T12:37:00.000-07:00

This week was not an especially thrilling or fulfilling one, but in some ways it has been quite deep emotionally. This morning, the Belgians, Rafael and Geraldine, caught the bus for Riobamba. As we were walking up to the highway, they stopped to say goodbye to Pablo, who immediately offered to give them a ride in his funny little truck, better known as the Boogie Woogie (probably spelled "Bugui Wugui" in Tolte). The kindness of Toltenos to us gringos is never-ending.

I confess that I found this heart-wrenching, not strictly because I will miss them, which I will. It was a real pleasure to spend time with them, partly because they're fun and energetic, and partly because they could give me some perspective on what I'm doing here. But their going reminds me that I only have another two months here, and then I will also have to leave this place where I am so at home. Where else will people call me "Naichu Michu" (that's "nice to meet you," if you didn't guess it during my previous blog entry)? Where else will I feel so well met? People here have accepted me as an odd part of the community. I'm almost not sure I have the right to leave them behind. Although the children have come a long way, they still don't speak English as well as I had hoped they would by this point. Have I delivered my end of this bargain?

So as I contemplate my job interview in the Amazon next week, I wonder if I will come back to Tolte afterwards and make a more serious effort to stay here instead. It doesn't seem right to go, but there are some aspects of my life here that are emotionally challenging. There is no one here in the same social category that I am (divorced man over 50), which makes it difficult for people to figure me out. I seem to be classed with the other single guys of Tolte, who are generally under 22 years old. So I get to play the guitar a lot, and stay out late sometimes, but I think my behavior does seem more than a bit strange to the grown-ups.

I'll return to this theme after reporting some interesting events of the week. On Tuesday, i got caught up in a community soccer game that included the school teachers, Rafael and Geraldine, and a large number of women and children. This turned out to be more my level than the distressing game I played back during the Fiesta de Tolte. By sticking to defense, I was able to compensate for my lack of skill by getting in everyone else's way. People declared me "better than one would expect," and I had fun for the first time in years playing a game that included a ball.

Wednesday I went to work to help a family where the father is recovering from a hernia operation. It seems this will take as much as a year. The man involved is the same one who, a few weeks back, carried about 50 pounds of corns from the hacienda to the center of Tolte, a physical feat I commented upon at the time. So losing his strength is a big blow for this relatively poor family. I can't say I was much compensation, but I did 6 hours of work on what was probably the steepest piece of land I have ever tried to stand on--and it was a cornfield. While Dona Sharita and Dona Lucia, both grandmothers, cut down the high weeds with machetes, I struggled to scrape out little rings around each corn or bean plants using a pick. Because the land was so steep, my back didn't hurt too much, but my feet and legs sure did. It's been a long time since I was that tired.

Thursday night was the beginning of the farewell to Rafael and Geraldine. This involved kooky games and more trago than I would like to admit, but at least I made it to school the next day. The teachers did not--although this is not because I am hardier than they, but less. I gave up about 1 in the morning, but they were still partying at 7 o'clock when school started. Geraldine commented that this was not like any professional behavior that she had ever encountered, and I'm inclined to agree. We wouldn't last long setting this kind of example in the United States or Belgium.

Friday was a healthier kind of send-off. Mario got the folk-dance kids together for their first real performance, and it was a great success. From there, he continued to play dance music until about 11 PM. We all had a great time dancing the night away, and I think Rafael and Geraldine were very happy with it all. I got to dance with the Toltenita of my dreams, but it's pretty clear that I'm not the gringo for her. I suppose I can live with that knowledge.

And then, this morning, the Belgians left. They're going to travel around Ecuador for a month, maybe spending some time at Yachana, where I have my interview, and then go back to Belgium. People here were really sorry to see them go--they brought a real rush of youthful energy to the place, and got a lot done in a short time. I'll have to follow up on at least one project, which seems to be mired in paperwork in the Colegio Tecnico, but I think it can be worked out. Meanwhile, I wonder how I will cope with my own departure, and whether or how I will find my way back. Even then, I will be on the outside again, not almost on the inside as I am now. It's a painful thought.

54

2012-03-26T12:39:00.000-07:00

Thursday was my birthday, and now I’m 54. I remember George Carlin talking about the AM radio dial, and how 54, down at the bottom of the dial, always with a big 5 and a little 4, represented some kind of netherworld where decent radio signals do not go. And that’s where I have finally arrived. Of course, as I move into the decent part of the AM radio dial, I’ll become even more decrepit, but I suppose I’ll have to live with that trade.

The day didn’t get off to a great start. A parent complained to one of the teachers about the way I manage the computer room, instead of complaining directly to me, which is always annoying. I did catch up with her later in the day, and found, as I suspected,, that the problem was not so much one of computer room policy as difficulty managing her sons, who are a handful. We agreed that they wouldn’t have permission to go to the computer room until 6, unless I knew that they had permission to be there earlier, and that problem went away.

I won’t even dignify the other problem by describing it, but I will note that it is fortunate that bitter, selfish people are a small percentage of the world’s population—even if they seem to be in charge much of the time. What they fail to realize is that the rest of us can live perfectly well without them.

But good news also arrived. Carolina, president of AVANTI, my employer, has been talking to me about the possibility of working for the YACHANA foundation in the Amazon. I think this would be teaching work, but perhaps more focused on agricultural topics. Needless to say, working in that environment is the sort of adventure I thought I would need years of low level toil to achieve. I have an interview in the Amazon on April 8th, and will need all day the 7th to get there (and all day the 9th to get back). The last half hour of the trip will be by canoe. I’ll just let that sink in.

There was a great birthday moment during my class with the sixth graders. I mentioned that it was my birthday, and they asked how old I am. I told them that I was 54. One of the kids looked at me and asked, “So why are you such a muchacho?” I said that it was probably just because I’m so silly.

After an afternoon in the computer room, Freddy and Florencio invited me for some celebratory beer at Francisco’s store. I was a bit hesitant, because I had heard that something was brewing in my house (no, not beer, some sort of fiesta). But, looking back on things, I think they were part of the plan. So we had a few beers, and bought some more just in case, and headed for the house. You’d think, knowing as I did that something was up, that I couldn’t really be surprised. But I really was. It wasn’t so much that there was a party, but that there were about 50 people at it. They were mostly people that Narcisa must have rounded up from among the folks who work at the train station, the cafeteria people and the folk dancers. But there was also a big bunch of my school kids, for the 6-60 effect.

And what a party it was—I don’t think I’ve ever celebrated my birthday with such enthusiasm. I certainly can’t remember the last time that I spent several hours dancing, but I suspect I’d have to look back to the Peace Corps years. And it took all night, because, as the birthday person, I had to dance with every woman present (not that this was a burdensome requirement). The kids who have been taking folk dance lessons with Mario, who teaches as part of his AVANTI university scholarship, also did their thing to great effect. Most of the adults there had not seen the folk dance class, and they were really impressed, if only by how cute the kids are, and how serious they get when they’re dancing.

I also have to mention the great contribution of the Belgians, Rafael and Geraldine, to the festivities. First of all, when I got to the kitchen in the morning, they had left a loaf of bread which was a highly accurate sculpture of my face. I’ll probably laugh every time I remember this for the rest of my life. They were also outstanding party people, dancing to great and cheerful comic effect. I think that they will be leaving at the end of this week, and I’ll miss them. They’re really a lot of fun. I regret any negative thoughts I ever had about their coming, because they’ve made a wonderful impression on Tolte, and accomplished a lot in a short time.

The party continued in increasingly haphazard fashion until 2 or 3 in the morning, until I truly felt that my faraway problem really can't touch me here. It really was wonderful in every way, although getting up at 6:30 to work on Friday was not easy. And, in a fit of I’m not sure what, but probably something to do with a desire not to look as old as I now am, I went ahead and shaved off my moustache, which Allie, at least, regards as great news. If all goes well, I’ll upload the first clean shaven picture of myself since my Bar Mitzvah. Forty-one years of hirsute splendor. I suppose it will return one day, if I ever come to terms with how old I really am.

Making It

2012-03-17T05:25:00.000-07:00

By any measure, this must have been my most successful week in Tolte. I think the key day was Thursday, (March 8), when I got to lead off MCCH’s granja integral workshop with a talk about soil erosion and how to reduce it. I talked about the different components of soil, and how easily they could wash away, especially the living components of microorganisms and organic matter. I gave examples of different land slopes that I had seen on my farm visits, and how they could be managed so as to reduce erosion. And I demonstrated the famous 1 percent land level that I learned to build in the Peace Corps, and asked to be allowed to use it with the attendees. And since they were there, I actually made appointments to see the ones I hadn’t seen.

But this talk was only the turning point of a week that saw five adults show up to study English on Wednesday, and four more on Thursday, giving me two fourteen hour workdays in a row. And on Friday, when there was no school, I did two farm visits in the early part of the morning,, attended the community budget meeting, and then, after lunch, I finally helped Asencio dig an irrigation channel on a one-percent slope, using the famous Peace Corps level. He was so enthused that he said he was going to make his own one percent level. It is also helpful that Asencio is a well-liked leading citizen—what he does is likely to catch on. I feel like it’s an historic moment, or at least a big moment in my history here.

I also took Rafael, one half of the young Belgian couple sent here as volunteers, with me on the morning farm visits. He is an agroforestry enthusiast, and he thinks that some trees, if they are of the right type, could fit into Asencio’s plot of land (the one that I leveled later that day). The only problem is that neither of us know much about the trees of Ecuador, and we were stumped (pun, hahaha) trying to come up with the right kind of tree. As usual, the universe coughed up an incredible stroke of good fortune, when Dr. Joe Peters, former Peace Corps Ecuador forestry volunteer, decided on that very day to send me an e-mail for the heck of it. Needless to say, I immediately asked him for an appropriate agroforestry species. He hasn’t responded yet, but I still think his e-mail was exquisitely timed, as are so many things that happen here.

The other half of the Belgian couple is Geraldine. Since I was told that she was a teacher, I took her to school on Tuesday. Geraldine, like me, is a high school teacher, and she found the grade 1-2-3 class a bit overwhelming (read: horrifying). I really hope that she’ll work with the kids one or two at a time on reading. I think that might be best. Her Spanish is actually very good, but 20 kids calling for her attention at once might have been a bit too much. She and Rafael spent most of the rest of the week putting down pavers in the streets of Tolte, which is the big community project right now.

The farming thrills did not end on Friday, though. I made a bunch more appointments for Saturday, and again experienced great satisfaction. Mesias has a little piece of land behind his house/store where he wants to plant the plants that MCCH brought on Thursday. He had already taken a shot at laying out contours by eye, but I did get to use the land level with him on another small area. He has a larger piece of land lower down the mountain, and I want to get out there, too, but I was glad to have a quick start on Saturday.

I had a much longer visit with Joaquin and his son Angel (better known as “Grande,” since he is easily the biggest person in Tolte). They were plowing a wheat field with a yoke of bulls, and I took the opportunity to lay out some contour lines for them to follow. Contour plowing is an essential soil conservation practice, but not one that I’ve ever gotten to work on before. In Costa Rica, it was always terraces. Anyway, they plowed until lunch, and I took over Joaquin’s part of the job after lunch. This consisted of walking in front of the bulls holding a long stick while Angel managed the plough, a job that he says makes the bicep in the arm that guides the plough really tired. I can well imagine. Anyway, it was sort of my job to use the stick to whack the bulls on the snout to turn them around at the end of the furrow, or get them straightened out if they went off track. I wasn’t at all good at this, but Angel was surprisingly patient and I did get better over time. And I only took one head butt. The word for this in Spanish is “embestiar,” a term I find particularly satisfying due to its inclusion of “bestia,” “beast.” Angel became concerned near the end of the job that the bull was determined to really get me, and he had his very pregnant wife Gladys come down to finish the job. The bull wouldn’t dare embestiar her, believe me. If I’m feeling ambitious, I took photos of some of this contour plowing, and you’ll also get a glimpse of Joaquin, who has been mentioned in quite a few of these entries.

Angel with the contour level

Joaquin and Angel and the Tolte Bulls

It was now much later than I expected, about 4 in the afternoon, but I went after one more visit with Cristian, one of the AVANTI becarios who has not had enough money beyond the AVANTI grant to continue his studies, his wife, Laura, who actually was the one who invited me to visit, and their little boy, Ariel, who looks so much like Laura that seeing them together makes me laugh out loud. I learned only this week that Cristian is only 21 and Laura a mere 19, which produced more culture shock than it should have. In any case, they took me down to pieces of land owned by Laura’s grandmother and Cristian’s father. Cristian’s father’s land was a very micely laid out orchard, with ample spacing between trees and the healthiest looking trees and fruit that I have seen here, which I think shows the importance of adequate spacing, an idea I have been trying to deliver for a while.

While the orchard was quite nice, the piece of land belonging to Laura’s grandmother was absolutely fascinating. The land is incredibly steep—we seemed to be descending into another world. But the otherworldy effect was compounded by the incredible mix of fruit trees and ground crops that covered the hillside. It was like being in a food jungle, or “food forest,” as the permaculturists say. It appears that Laura’s uncle and grandmother cooked up this way of working more or less by chance, starting with small fruit trees and planting other crops to cover the soil and give some kind of yield in the meantime. The result is that this farm produces citrus, avocadoes, bananas (very unusual here), spinach, parsley, chamomile, and dozens of other medicinal and leafy ground plants. I wish everyone in Tolte could have a farm like this. I know that Rafael will be thrilled when he sees it, and spend the rest of his time here trying to figure out why no one else works this way.

This week will see me out on more farms, doing the best I can to save Tolte’s soil, as I also teach English to as many people as possible. This is why I insisted that AVANTI give me nine months—it has taken me six just to get to this point, and I think I could be really effective for at least another six. But I’ll settle for the remaining three. On the other hand, people are starting to ask me to look for a way to stay here, and I’m considering it. Life here is, after all, really good. And now I’m off to jam Ecuadorean music with Don Luis. Music, soil, teaching—it’s true, there isn’t much else to want, except a predictable salary based on recognizable work. And maybe that’s attainable…

Ah, I didn’t post this right away, and now more things that are closely related have happened, so I’ll just toss them in. Rafael and Geraldine went to the Colegio Tecnico with Carlos on Monday, and met with the Forestry teacher there. He has a nice little tree nursery, and he immediately offered to show up with a bunch of students and plant the windbreak, with a few agroforestry trees for shade in the middle of the field. He wanted to come today (Friday, March 16), but the directora of the colegio put the kibosh on that. No, the students were too busy this week, and next week is exams, so we’re inviting them for the week of the 26th. I’ve also asked them for enough trees for a piece of land where I proposed a windbreak a couple of weeks ago. We also had to write a letter officially requesting the trees in the name of AVANTI. Elvia is now correcting our crudely worded letter into the excruciating official language of such letters, and we hope to get it to the school by means of one of the students on Monday. I have to admit, I’m enjoying having Rafael and Geraldine around. First of all, they strike people as even more “gringo” than I do, probably only because they’re newer. They’re also fun to be around, and know how to get things done. I really shouldn’t have questioned their arrival.

Also, two things make me notice the passage of time. The first is that my computer has informed me that Daylight Savings Time has returned to the United States. I suppose that means that I’ve been here a while, since I was already here when Daylight Savings time ended in the fall. Also, the weather seems to be changing, perhaps prematurely. We know longer have daily fog and rain, although the rainy season is not due to end until the beginning of May. I hope that we’re not looking at a drought, or all the trees in the windbreak will be reduced to withered sticks.