Day to Day in Tena

Here is a list of some things I encounter as part of daily life in and around Tena:

Kids on parade

Dogs on rooftops

Vendors on busses selling fruit, shishkabobs, sunglasses, herbal remedies, CDs, razors, wallets, and anything else they can think of

The jungle and swimming in the river

Neighbors sitting outside on their patios chatting, literally, for hours

Fields of laundry

Musical garbage trucks—On garbage day, the trucks drive up and down the streets playing a music-box tune to let people know they should bring their garbage out to the curb. Although the streets are littered, people don’t leave garbage bags out because the trash will rot in the humidity or be torn to bits by stray dogs.

Entrails and meat cuts hanging in open-air butcher shops

Impressive insects—I discovered the black butterfly, with a wingspan the length of my hand, inside the house

The Pick-up Truck to Puyo

From Tena, capital of the jungle province of Napo, you can get to Puyo, capital of the more southerly jungle province of Pastaza, in two and a half hours by bus. If there are no buses running, as was the case when I traveled there recently, you can hop in the cab of a pick truck which will take you over a rutted, dusty, rock-strewn, unpaved road and get there in about one and a half or two hours, depending on how much confidence the driver has in his truck’s shocks. Or if you are particularly desperate, you can hop in the back of the truck, squeezed in with other people, electronic equipment, miscellaneous bags, and a spare tire, and hold on for dear life. Unwittingly, that’s what I chose to do.

I had scheduled a meeting in Puyo with a French pharmacist who had spent the last 20 years working with indigenous communities and creating a formidable practice in medicinal plants. I’d already postponed the trip once because of protests against the Andean Free Trade Agreement that the Ecuadorian government was negotiating with the U.S. Puyo had been virtually shut down, so the first day things were almost back to normal I jumped on the chance to make the journey.

After waiting for a half an hour for a bus I was told would come, a pick up with 5 grown men in the cab, 4 in the truck bed, a woman, two children, and the aforementioned electronics rolled up and offered me a ride. I jumped in and literally perched on the narrow rim of the bed like the others. A couple of people in the back got out within the first fifteen minutes, giving us a little more room, but the TVs and stereo speakers took up most of the floor space. At about that point the road, which had been partly paved, turned to dirt, and the driver hit the accelerator. Every 20 seconds or so my tailbone jammed into the metal rim, and I had to keep adjusting my grip to keep from falling backwards out of the truck. And every 20 seconds I glared at the driver and the guys sitting inside, though of course if I’d had an upholstered bench to sit on, I wouldn’t have given it up either. First come, first served.

Fearing I’d have lifelong spinal injuries if I stayed in that position, I stood on the spare tire and held on to the rail above the cab. Standing was much better on my back because my boots absorbed the shock of the road, and I just had to hold on tight to the rail. Meanwhile, a couple also sitting in the back grasped each other, both out of affection and for safety. The I realized that the woman held a beautiful green parakeet in the cuff of her shirt. She and the man handed it back and forth while they hugged and tried to reposition themselves.

Meanwhile, the two kids, whom someone had thoughtfully allowed to sit in the cab, got car sick. The driver stopped and promptly handed them to the couple, their parents, who began the repositioning all over, passing the bird, folding the kids into their laps. Practically before the driver started the engine, the two boys were limp and asleep. We tore out on to the dirt road again and soon pulled over for no apparent reason. One of the men got out, so I assumed we’d arrived at his stop. But then all of the men and one of the boys got out too, leaving me, the other woman, the youngest boy, and the bird. They surrounded the truck with their backs to us and their legs spread, and then came the sound of rushing water. It always disgusts me when I see men urinating in plain view, but this was the first time I’d seen a virtual chorus line of men peeing in the dirt. I actually laughed out loud, but I doubt anyone could hear me over the noise.

By the time we hit the road again, I was already sick of the truck ride, and it had only been about an hour. I was covered in dirt and my hands were red and sore. We hit top speeds, the road worsened, and small stones began hitting my face. I had the macabre, but probably accurate, thought that I could lose an eye. And then what would I do? But by that point I realized there were no buses running to Puyo that day, and since I was already half way there, I should just suck it up.

An hour later we rolled onto paved road and I was thrilled to see stoplights and gas stations. I jumped out at my stop, which was the first in town, and waited patiently for the French pharmacist to pick me up. He soon drove up in a white pick up with a gloriously spacious cab, and we rode off in comort to visit his medicinal garden.

Guayaquil: The Extreme City

If you spend much time in Quito, the political capital of Ecuador, you get accustomed to hearing stories about Guayaquil, the economic capital of Ecuador. The huge port city is twice as populous and sprawling as mountainous Quito, is sweltering with humidity much of the year, has an even more extreme gap between rich and poor, and is supposedly riddled with thieves and murderers. Being from Oakland, I wasn’t overly daunted by this last fact, plus I was going to get a brief tour of the city from a local whom I figured could help me stay safe and alert.

My guide was Lupe, born and raised in Guayaquil. She is a doctor who works in the city four days a week, then travels 3 hours each way by bus to work in rural communities every weekend. She’s a small woman (at 5’2”, I tower over her) but formidable. She speaks at close to the speed of light, tells you exactly what she thinks, and uses her hands to dramatic and sometimes dangerous effect, especially if you are a non-native speaker leaning in close to try to understand what she’s saying.

She met me at the airport and launched into a detailed, rapid-fire story about her work, all the while leading me across a busy six-lane thoroughfare to catch a bus to her house. I realized then that thieves and murderers would probably be the least of my problems. Following the story, keeping track of my belongings, and trying not to get run over by maniacal drivers gave me a new appreciation for the term “multi-tasking”. By the time we squeezed onto the bus and Lupe, my bags, and I wedged into the last two hard plastic seats, I was exhausted. I’d been in Guayaquil 15 minutes.

I still don’t know what exactly Lupe said or what exactly I saw on the bus ride to her house. My receptors were on overdrive. But once I let go of the hope that I could make sense of things, I started to enjoy the chaos. I know we passed a lot of small, crammed together cinderblock buildings with rusty signs. The storefronts were blocked by bars, like at a bank teller window, through which people exchanged cash for soap, fruit, beer, diapers, or whatever else was on the shelves. People were out and about in shorts and flip flops, and we passed a lot of small restaurants that grilled all kinds of animal innards in big street side barbecues.

Lupe lives with her mother, father, sister, brother-in-law, and eight-month-old nephew in a working-class neighborhood in Guayaquil, which means she lives in a poor, but not desperate, part of the city. Although Lupe comes from a family of professionals—one sister is a pediatrician, another is a teacher, and one of her brothers is an accountant—they earn less than an Ecuadorian middle-class wage. Their house is their only investment. It’s an attractive if quirky building: stairs take you up a flight so you can go down a level and doors seem to appear out of nowhere. After spending a few hours there, I got the hang of the layout, in which everyone has individual space, though most of the time the family is together in the living or dining room.

Lupe and I ate lunch with her sister and mother, who welcomed me like their favorite neighbor who’d just come back from a long trip. We talked about the kind of food I like, how Arnold Schwarzenegger ended up as governor of California, the pending Andean Free Trade Agreement, Ecuadorian celebrities, and the weather. They also made sure I knew what a fabulous city Guayaquil is, from the climate to the variety of things to do to the major economic interests controlling the country from their hometown. Later, Lupe took me on a tour that began as an errand to buy an AIDS prevention video for the health promoters she works with, and that’s when I got a taste of the city her family described.

A couple blocks from her house, we caught the bus near the tributary of the river that runs through Guayaquil, one of the filthiest I’ve ever seen. Trash floated on the caramel-colored water, which rose to the level of the houses that seemed to grow out of the weeds. The bus dropped us off somewhere near the commercial center. I followed Lupe through an immense warren of stalls selling everything, including more bootlegged videos than I’ve ever seen in my life. Lupe, of course, charged through the maze with utter confidence, while I clutched my purse to my side and hustled to keep up with her, lest I be lost in Ecuador’s answer to Marrakech. Then we emerged from the central market onto a vast tree- and skyscraper-lined boulevard and walked several blocks to the Malecon, which fronts the river. But here, the water gleamed a natural green and reflected the thick cumulus clouds and lush vegetation on the opposite bank. And the Malecon itself is a marvel—several miles of boardwalk comprised of botanical gardens, modern sandstone and metal architecture, impressive monuments to Ecuador’s founding fathers, museums, shopping, and gourmet restaurants. The Malecon is proof that Guayaquileños have a vision for a world-class city.

The Malecon leads to an artsy hillside neighborhood called Cerro Santa Ana, a collection of colorful houses, restaurants, shops, bars and galleries. We climbed more than 400 steps to the top of the hill where a new lighthouse, modeled on the original from the 1800s, sits. From there, you have a remarkable view of the city and where the money goes. Directly below the summit is a slum slated for redevelopment as a tourist complex, to the east is the Malecon and the business district, farther afield is the area where Lupe and her family live, which was paved with streets and sidewalks just a few years ago. Next on the city’s list, Lupe told me, is to clean up the river that runs through her neighborhood. Short as my trip was to Guayaquil, I got the impression that just as the people, the weather, and the pace of life are more intense, the process of correcting imbalances between rich and poor is probably that much more painstaking, and changes that much more hard won. But perhaps those incremental victories are part of what makes Lupe so proud of her hometown.

Bienvenidos al Ecuador

After sending travel missives in old-fashioned email, I finally decided to upgrade to a blog. Welcome to my first foray. I’m not sure what the larger purpose of Traveling Storywriter will be, but for now it will at least serve as a convenient way to share a few stories from my adventures in Ecuador and read your comments (yes, I’m prompting you!)

On this, my fifth trip to Ecuador in just over a year, I had a mission on behalf of Global Pediatric Alliance, the non-profit for which I work: travel to communities around the country and see what projects local people are cooking up to improve child and maternal health. In other words, I had come On Business. I had no illusions that I would simply send a few emails, leave a few voicemails, set up appointments and shazaam! everything would fall into place. After all, I’d inadvertently scheduled my arrival around Carnaval, the national holiday where people drink, dance, pelt each other with water balloons and spray each other with water guns or cans of pink foam for five days and then begin 40 days of lent. Even without Carnaval, I expected a few bumps. I did not expect a major paro.

The week after I landed in Quito I was due for a meeting in Tena, a town in Napo Province in the Amazon Basin. On Sunday, two days after I arrived, I discovered that the northern road to Tena through a small mountainous town called Baeza was closed due to a protest, or “paro”. Often, paros entail protesters with signs and chants and a smattering of burning tires. Sometimes if people are extremely frustrated, they use the backhoes that government repair crews leave along the side of the road, since roads in Napo are always in some state of construction, and dig massive holes or push boulders from previously cleared rock slides to block the way.

In my limited experience, paros usually last just a few days, enough to get the attention of the federal authorities who apparently don’t respond to other methods, especially from people from the Amazon. Most Ecuadorians from other parts of the country, public officials and private citizens alike, consider people who live in the Amazon to be inferior and primitive. I’ve seen this rampant racism almost everywhere people interact—on busses, in restaurants, on the evening news.

Since my meeting in Tena wasn’t until the following Saturday, I didn’t initially consider the paro to be a major obstacle in getting from Quito to Tena. By Tuesday I’d learned that Napo denizens were protesting the lack of federal financial support from oil drilling proceeds. According to my friend and colleague Natalia, who is from Tena but now lives in Quito, this dispute has been going on since oil drilling began in the Amazon basin in the 70s. There have been other flare ups, but in the past the protests had fallen along political party lines. Now people across all parties were united in demanding development money for oil extracted from their region.

On Wednesday, I’d gotten spotty reports from friends in Tena and bits on the news that things had gotten worse. A delegation from Tena had gone to Quito to meet with the President over the dispute, but he’d refused to see them. Next I heard that violence was breaking out in Baeza—protesters threw dynamite at police and police attacked, though I’m not sure in what order. In any case, things were deteriorating. The government declared martial law in Napo, and public officials including the mayor of Tena, who belongs to the same political party as the President, were arrested for inciting violence. Whether they did or not I’m not sure, but it seemed to me like at least a little bit of grandstanding from the feds.

People in Tena took to the streets, marching with machetes and torches. According to my friends there, in the melee the police killed 3 or 4 people and beat a 12-year-old boy in the head. People became more furious and threatened to arm themselves against the police (with more than machetes, I gathered) and to rupture the oil pipeline that runs through Napo to the coast. Some of my friends told me they’d been put on a list of people the national police would arrest for being affiliated, personally or professionally, with the mayor and other local officials.

By Thursday afternoon I nervous about my friends’ safety and worried this wouldn’t be just any old paro. I also figured there was no way I was getting to Tena for the weekend. Even my Quiteño friends, who expect these kinds of fires to die out rather than rampage, seemed concerned. This dispute looked more like what I’d seen and read about in Guatemala, where people almost never get justice through the political process and violence is the standard power tool for all sides.

But when I woke up Friday morning, the news reports said that everything had been resolved. Good morning Ecuador, you simply had a bad dream. The roads were open, the paro had been disbanded, martial law had been lifted, and the peaceful city of Tena was ready to receive thousands of revelers who usually descended on the city for Carnaval. Although I was surprised by this news, no one else seemed to be.

I hopped on a bus to Tena and passed through Baeza, where the remnants of melted tires were the only sign of what had happened the day before. When I reached Tena, everything appeared calm, though I everywhere I noticed signs people had printed with laser printers and posted in store and car windows: “Soy Primitivo” and “Somos Primitivos”—“I’m primitive” and “We are primitive.” I assumed the opposing side must have hurled that insult and people in Tena had decided to turn it back on them. Friday evening was quiet, but by Saturday the salsa music was pounding up and down the river where a good-sized crowd of partiers from other regions had put the news of the paro behind them. Though the fire had been doused, I suspect the embers are still glowing hot, and I assume I’ll learn more when I settle in Tena for a few weeks.