tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-223288312024-03-24T23:09:59.521-07:00traveling storywriterStories, observations, insights and photos about life in the Americas.Mary Fifieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15453259276607081478noreply@blogger.comBlogger19125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22328831.post-83154749234336861402009-07-19T14:26:00.000-07:002009-07-19T16:42:38.364-07:00Doing the "Monkey Walk"<span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">After a work-induced hiatus that has kept me from posting on my blog for a couple of mon</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">ths, </span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">I </span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">cleared my calendar this weekend and took a 5-hour bus ride into the jungle</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> to vi</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">sit my friend Kelly, a Peace Corps Volunteer who has the most remote station in the province and is ending her service in a couple of weeks. She invited me to join her and a local family she knows on a “monkey walk,” her last jungle adventure before she leaves.</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">We crossed the river in a canoe with Kelly’s friend Yolanda and hiked half an hour to the farm of Alirio and Edith.<br /><br /></span></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SmOXNUyQJBI/AAAAAAAAAJc/GpX6knOermg/s1600-h/IMG_2444.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SmOXNUyQJBI/AAAAAAAAAJc/GpX6knOermg/s320/IMG_2444.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5360294236674597906" border="0" /></a><div style="text-align: center;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >The "before" canoe.</span></div><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">After a breakfast of fresh chifles (fried plaintains), coffee, and bread, we departed for the hike with Alirio guiding, Kelly and I following, and Edith, Yolanda, and Nelly taking up the rear. (Kelly and I were impressed that the women joined us, since usually on these kinds of expeditions the women are either expected to or want to stay home and cook.) In between ran two of the most energetic eight-year-olds I’ve ever met. </span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">They scampered up and down the line and were the first to charge through the foliage after Alirio cleared the trail with his machete.<br /><br /></span></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SmOYQxAfKkI/AAAAAAAAAKM/DtPCcXh563M/s1600-h/IMG_4639.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SmOYQxAfKkI/AAAAAAAAAKM/DtPCcXh563M/s320/IMG_4639.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5360295395301730882" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><div style="text-align: center;">Alirio on the "trail."</div></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">I use “trail” here as a euphemism, as you can see in the photos. We were miles from anything resembling a marked trail or ranger station. Most of the four hours involved slogging, climbing, grabbing vines (watching out for thorns, spiders, and slugs), tromping, slipping and sliding (though I'm proud to say I didn't wipe out once), and sweating.</span></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><br /></span></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SmOXNz4tOpI/AAAAAAAAAJ0/RZb0m1-VI_I/s1600-h/IMG_2486.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SmOXNz4tOpI/AAAAAAAAAJ0/RZb0m1-VI_I/s320/IMG_2486.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5360294245023169170" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" ><div style="text-align: center;">Kelly contemplating whatever mysteries might lie beneath her feet.</div><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SmOYREpR6QI/AAAAAAAAAKU/n5ACdqzIxd8/s1600-h/IMG_4656.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SmOYREpR6QI/AAAAAAAAAKU/n5ACdqzIxd8/s320/IMG_4656.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5360295400573102338" border="0" /></a> <div style="text-align: center;">Me, making a middle-aged attempt to hang on a vine.</div><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SmOXN99It3I/AAAAAAAAAJ8/ppNnNoy1gd8/s1600-h/IMG_2489.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SmOXN99It3I/AAAAAAAAAJ8/ppNnNoy1gd8/s320/IMG_2489.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5360294247726102386" border="0" /></a><div style="text-align: center;">One of the kids, hanging on a vine for real.</div><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Although Alirio has cleared some of his land to plant corn, 100-acre plot we hiked through is primary rainforest. This kind of vegetation used to dominate the province, but especially in the last 40 years as oil companies and others built road to reach the eastern part of the country, small and medium farms began eating away at the native vegetation as farmers and ranchers converted it to cropland and pasture. Alirio’s father, who owns the land, has kept a good portion of it untouched so he could use it for occasional subsistence hunting (guanta, guatusa, some brids and probably a few monkeys) and collecting seeds, </span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">which the family uses for handicrafts and home medicinal remedies.<br /><br /></span></span></span></span><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" ><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SmOXNsyerMI/AAAAAAAAAJs/L6bAEBMK6YM/s1600-h/IMG_2470.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SmOXNsyerMI/AAAAAAAAAJs/L6bAEBMK6YM/s320/IMG_2470.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5360294243118001346" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> </span></span>The jungle "before", as primary rainforest.</span></span><br /></div><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" ><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">But Alirio’s father was recently widowed, so now the whole farm is up for sale, and it remains to be seen if the virgin forest we hiked through will stay that way. Sadly, it appears that this is how most of the primary rainforest in the Tena area has disappeared, no</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">t through massive clearing by state and multinational companies to grow corn and soya, as has happened in Brazil, for example, but chunk by small chunk, so gradual that it's difficult to realize that it's happening.</span></span></span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br /><br /></span></span><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" ><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SmOXNnCMjoI/AAAAAAAAAJk/N-E6oUgBz8c/s1600-h/IMG_2462.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SmOXNnCMjoI/AAAAAAAAAJk/N-E6oUgBz8c/s320/IMG_2462.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5360294241573310082" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:100%;">The jungle "after", in preparation for crops or pasture.</span></span></span><br /></div><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" ><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">The "Monkey Walk" is so named because Alirio has supposedly seen monkeys on occasion, though when we asked him if he thought we'd see any this time, he said, "What, with all this noise?" as the kids ran crashing through the foliage and our voices carried over their commotion. "Walk" is also a misnomer, since for those of us raised in cities such a tame verb conjures strolls on pavement or maybe in a groomed public park. If you live in the jungle, however, walking is simply what you do when you are upright in motion and not running.<br /><br />After four hours, we arrived back at the house to eat lunch with the family and recuperate.</span></span></span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" ><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><br /></span></span><br /><br /></span></span><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" ><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SmOYSFVnLoI/AAAAAAAAAKk/52EZkxHC2wc/s1600-h/IMG_4710.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SmOYSFVnLoI/AAAAAAAAAKk/52EZkxHC2wc/s320/IMG_4710.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5360295417938914946" border="0" /></a></span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >I only look dead.</span></span><br /></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" ><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SmOfHvvUqCI/AAAAAAAAAK0/4HCoDuJ3SwA/s1600-h/IMG_2497.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SmOfHvvUqCI/AAAAAAAAAK0/4HCoDuJ3SwA/s320/IMG_2497.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5360302936923875362" border="0" /></a></span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >At the lunch table.</span></span><br /></div><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" ><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">That afternoon, eight hours after we first crossed the river, we cleaned up to the best of our ability and headed back to "the city."<br /><br /></span></span></span><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" ><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SmOYb5PcfkI/AAAAAAAAAKs/-ozo4TJY_Pk/s1600-h/IMG_4713.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SmOYb5PcfkI/AAAAAAAAAKs/-ozo4TJY_Pk/s320/IMG_4713.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5360295586490515010" border="0" /></a><span style="font-family:georgia;">The "after" canoe.</span></span></span></span><br /></div><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" ><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><br /></span></span></span>Mary Fifieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15453259276607081478noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22328831.post-55635012023105470902009-04-10T19:57:00.000-07:002009-04-12T20:29:15.511-07:00Eye of the Beholder<span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Coming back from a recent trip to the States, I read a Newsweek article on beauty-obsessed “tweens.” First of all, I didn’t even know we were calling them “tweens.” (These are the </span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">people formerly known as children, right?) I had happened to see a commercial for the reality TV show that the article referred to (on TLC cable network, if you’re interested) and I </span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">thought it was a spoof. </span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Disclaimer before I go further: I was actually in a beauty pageant when I was 11, but the Our Little Miss pageant organizers had the marketing savvy to call it a “talent pageant,” which was more accurate anyway. Most of us pre-teens applied our make-up ourselves, and you can</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> guess the results.</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">It happens that Ecuadorians are crazy about beauty pageants, though I think the minimum age is 16. Every event imaginable features a <span style="font-style: italic;">reina</span> (queen) competition. You have the Queen of the Annual Tena festivals, the Queen of Carnaval, Queen of Tena’s World Eco-Toursim Fair (the "world" part is a work in progress), and so on. It’s to the point where I’ve actually toyed with the idea of having a Queen of the Dry Toilet festival to promote ecological sanitation. The marketing on that one might need a bit more work. . .<br /><br /></span></span><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SeAMw33G4oI/AAAAAAAAAJU/TJ4O7sECAjE/s1600-h/beauty+pageant.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 221px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SeAMw33G4oI/AAAAAAAAAJU/TJ4O7sECAjE/s320/beauty+pageant.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5323268793320268418" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:trebuchet ms;" >Finalists at a Catholic high school's reina competition</span><br /></span></div><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">The beauty pageants here are similar to those in the U.S. The ones for Kichwa queens are most interesting because the contestants usually have to dance in traditional Kichwa dress or sing Kichwa songs to promote their culture. However, the cash prizes and silk sashes are decidedly occidental.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">One big difference between American and Ecuadorian beauty pageants, though, is the definition of beauty. Lighter skin is almost always considered more beautiful, even by people with darker skin, which can be limiting and self-effacing to say the least. But in terms of body shape, Ecuadorians have a much greater appreciation for curves and meat on the bones. News anchors on TV actually resemble real people, and some actors on the most popular prime-time soap operas would be considered at least chunky by American standards. I see some evidence that this might be changing, but not drastically, and certainly being called <span style="font-style: italic;">gorda</span> (fat) is still a compliment or term of endearment. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">You see what a difference it makes when society at large accepts a range of normal to voluptuous body shapes for women. I realized how self-conscious I was about my body when I came here and discovered I could relax about it. For all the talk in the U.S. about the need to appreciate one’s own body, I have a new appreciation for how difficult that is to do when the message from mainstream media and culture is exactly the opposite, and coming from the gloss-covered lips of “tweens” no less.</span></span>Mary Fifieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15453259276607081478noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22328831.post-52088680894998466312009-03-05T20:41:00.000-08:002009-03-07T11:10:23.959-08:00Oil and Water<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SbCtOelOoyI/AAAAAAAAAIs/k2DJBZpUhps/s1600-h/IMG_2702.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SbCtOelOoyI/AAAAAAAAAIs/k2DJBZpUhps/s320/IMG_2702.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5309934424908800802" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">My friend Juan, who has a college degree and used to run a tourism project in the Kichwa community where he grew up, gave me two reasons that he is now working for Ivanhoe, a Canadian oil company contracted by the Ecuadorian government to drill in the most populous region of the province, where he and I both live: People in the cities benefit from tourism dollars, but not the communities. And heavy crude is breaking through the surface, so it’s a health hazard to leave it there.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">There are counter arguments to Juan’s statements, but I can't deny his concerns about work. I also know, as does he, the atrocious record that some oil companies have in the northern Amazon. Chevron-Texaco’s <a href="http://www.chevron-toxico.com/section.php?id=3">unfettered oil drilling</a> dumped 30 times more crude in the rivers than was spilled during the Exxon Valdez disaster, and cancer is rampant in that area.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Everyone here knows what happened in the north, and some trust that the government will implement sufficient controls to prevent widespread environmental destruction. Others see that the government has already broken its own laws, including allegations of “serious irregularities” in the Ivanhoe deal. And then there is the fact that Ivanhoe’s technology for converting heavy crude (all that exists here) into light crude has been tested only over the last few years and on a small scale in Bakersfield, CA. Living on a tributary of the Amazon River and in one of the most biologically diverse areas in the world, we are a long way from Bakersfield.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">It was one thing to read about these conflicts from my former apartment in the San Francisco Bay Area. Now I can watch them unfold right outside my door. Ivanhoe thinks it will be able to extract more than <a href="http://www.ivanhoe-energy.com/s/Ecuador.asp">100,000 barrels a day</a> about 2 miles from where I live in Tena.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SbCuLpYneiI/AAAAAAAAAI0/NMGc9phP5zE/s1600-h/oil+field.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 312px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SbCuLpYneiI/AAAAAAAAAI0/NMGc9phP5zE/s320/oil+field.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5309935475780712994" border="0" /></a><br />The government finance directors think the oil revenue will pay for health and education programs. Some locals think Ivanhoe will shower them with jobs or money for infrastructure. Politicians think they’ll earn extra cash and votes. I think it could be a disaster, and not just environmentally. Coca and Lago Agrio, in the heart of the Chevron-Texaco mess, are notoriously dangerous, drug-plagued cities. Tena is so safe that I don’t even bother to lock my door sometimes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">But rather than give in to fear, I’m hoping that the delicious incompetence of the Ecuadorian government, combined with falling oil prices, will buy a little time. Meanwhile, some friends of mine and I have started <a href="http://www.amazonpartnerships.org/">Amazon Partnerships Foundation</a> to help communities find practical ways to use and renew natural resources to meet their basic needs so that jobs promised by oil companies are not their only option.<br /><br />We’ll provide grants and project management training to communities that want to design and implement their own projects to protect the environment or promote the conservation values of traditional Kichwa culture. One grant could supply a women’s group with training to market their hand-made jewelry and baskets, earning them income to buy food and school supplies for their kids. Another grant could help a community start a sustainable forestry project so they could reforest part of their land for conservation and have a reliable source of income through lumber sales. </span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SbHd8nWXD7I/AAAAAAAAAI8/YL3_oAZPEiQ/s1600-h/P1030482.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SbHd8nWXD7I/AAAAAAAAAI8/YL3_oAZPEiQ/s320/P1030482.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5310269469071183794" /></a><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">For everyone, it's an experiment in coping during difficult times, and none of us has any guarantee of an outcome that will ensure happiness and well-being. But one thing this place teaches us foreigners is that small victories matter. And when I look out at the lush foothills and rivers and imagine what could disappear . . . whatever I might see ten years from now, I want to know that at least I didn't shy away from the battle.</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><br />Thanks to Sadie Funk for the river photo.</span>Mary Fifieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15453259276607081478noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22328831.post-88662930017312859722009-01-04T19:08:00.000-08:002009-01-10T15:03:56.415-08:00The Old Man Burns Again<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SWkpMmqeusI/AAAAAAAAAIU/yZI76VR0CWA/s1600-h/ManBurning"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SWkpMmqeusI/AAAAAAAAAIU/yZI76VR0CWA/s320/ManBurning" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5289804533837249218" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">On December 31, 2007 I was a mere observer of the “Año Viejo” tradition, the one in which Ecuadorians of all races and classes stuff old clothes with newspaper, scrap wood, and whatever other combustible material they can find to make an “old man,” who represen</span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">ts the year about to end. Sometimes they add a papier-maché mask—of a devil, clown, cartoon </span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">character, politician, friend or family member—and a cigar or other accessory and light the </span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">whole thing on fire at midnight. You purge what you didn’t like about your own or others’ behavior in the previous twelve months, but you can also celebrate the good as well</span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">. In true Ecuadorian fashion, the “old man” can be whatever you want him to be. <span style="font-style: italic;">No pasa nada</span>.</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SWa7NhnFsBI/AAAAAAAAAH0/M2tGcY447hU/s1600-h/IMG_2121.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SWa7NhnFsBI/AAAAAAAAAH0/M2tGcY447hU/s320/IMG_2121.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5289120653428240402" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">I decided that this year (last year) it was my turn to partake. Here you can see the sad but charming old man my friend Kelly and I made. We didn’t set out to make a Sponge Bob </span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">replica, but we’re beginners and I was fresh out of flour-and-water paste.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SWa7gRDvKuI/AAAAAAAAAH8/cSnbhf7T4yI/s1600-h/IMG_2119.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SWa7gRDvKuI/AAAAAAAAAH8/cSnbhf7T4yI/s320/IMG_2119.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5289120975402511074" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >Kelly composing last thoughts for 2008.</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Another part of the tradition is that you can stick notes on your guy. Again, these can be </span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">congratulatory or critical, but I opted for the latter. I’m not evolved enough to be able to burn what brings me joy. You can see that Kelly and I had a few things we wanted to bid adieu.</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SWa77CMJp1I/AAAAAAAAAIE/q-f8cttOrzw/s1600-h/IMG_2123.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SWa77CMJp1I/AAAAAAAAAIE/q-f8cttOrzw/s320/IMG_2123.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5289121435267737426" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">We burned our Sponge Bob and walked through the streets set ablaze as if Colombia had dropped a bunch of marionette bombs. New Year’s Eve here happens in the neighborhoods, and each usually has at least one bonfire into which everyone’s old man gets flung. Some people also write and post testimonies, either things they promise to do (or stop doing) or satirical send-ups of neighbors for everyone to see. On our way to the big bonfire in the central park, we passed one testimony of a man who promised not to complain to his wife so much when he comes home drunk in 2009.</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SWa8RKen9EI/AAAAAAAAAIM/vLDLXEKd9fU/s1600-h/IMG_2127.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SWa8RKen9EI/AAAAAAAAAIM/vLDLXEKd9fU/s320/IMG_2127.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5289121815449826370" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">It’s hard to decide which part of this tradition I like the most: making the doll, writing up my goodbyes-good riddances, lighting the thing on fire, or attempting to roast marshmallows over the glowing ruins. All I can say is that I felt liberated and optimistic watching our creation be reduced to ash. The people I allowed to upset me, my bad habits, the big global problems that are beyond my power to change were all transformed to the good in that fifteen-minute fire, simply through the recognition that it is never too late to begin anew.</span>Mary Fifieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15453259276607081478noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22328831.post-44817511002015342372008-11-21T10:23:00.000-08:002009-03-06T18:41:34.653-08:00Encounter with the President<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">No, not that President.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">It was an overcast Sunday, and I was hanging out with my friend Andrea, who lives in an upscale Quito neighborhood. As someone raised in U.S. suburbs, I found it all a little too familiar: paved sidewalks and tree-lined medians surrounding modern apartment buildings and some large houses, electronic gates around the housing developments, and inside everything finished and manufactured. I saw no naked light bulbs screwed into ceiling sockets, no slap-dash paint jobs, and no window cracks sealed with putty.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">We stood in line at the ice cream shop at an outdoor mall near her apartment, minding our own business, when the President of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, strolled in with his family and took his place two people behind us. Completely star-struck as soon as I laid eyes on him, I fixed my gaze on the chocolate-covered waffle cones for fear of gawking should I turn my head in his direction. Andrea casually mentioned that she had taken a class with the former professor of economics. Incredibly, he recognized her. More incredibly, he struck up a short, polite conversation with her. He was distracted, so I took the opportunity to gawk uninhibited.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">After finishing our ice cream a mere two tables away from <span style="font-style: italic;">el Mandatario</span>, who was not sitting in a bullet-proof chamber or surrounded by heavily armed men, Andrea approached him. She thanked him for inspiring her to pursue her current job with a leading environmental firm that analyzes financing possibilities for the emerging carbon market. It just so happened that the President’s team was reviewing a proposal for protecting one of Ecuador’s major jungle reserves as part of a global cap-and-trade scheme; he wondered, could her firm take a look and give his team suggestions? She handed him her business card.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">No, I’m not making this up.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">I watched the President shake hands and have his picture taken with the customers and store employees and kiss babies, all under the watchful eye of five or six policeman who leaned against their police cars. Of course a scene like this is more possible in a country of 12 million people, roughly eight times the number that will see Barack Obama be inaugurated in Washington D.C. in January. And there is certainly a significant downside to all of this familiarity. The Ecuadorian government is famous for its nepotism—I have a whole blog’s worth of stories about my dealings with inept bureaucrats who got their jobs because they are the son of the governor’s best friend’s daughter’s cousin.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">On the other hand, when six degrees of separation are reduced to two degrees, does that open the door to share new good ideas, not simply get you a fat government paycheck? After all, Rafael Correa was right there in the ice cream store talking to my friend about environmental policy. Would a casual conversation about dry ecological toilets over a bowl of mango sherbet be that far-fetched?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">I’ll keep you posted.</span>Mary Fifieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15453259276607081478noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22328831.post-52144504584515632982008-10-26T14:39:00.000-07:002008-10-26T19:40:02.067-07:00Uncertainty's Dance<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">My friend Natalia and I were talking recently about the world economic crisis,</span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> </span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">how it might impact Ecuadorians like her, and how it might impact foreigners like me with work-based visas from U.S. non-profit organizations that are already starting to brace themselves. “For us, we live with uncertainty everyday, so we’re used to it. But for you guys,” she sympathized, “it must be really hard.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Just to put it in perspective, in the last 18 months, the price of 40 kilos of chicken feed—corn—in Ecuador has gone from $10.50 to $24, an increase that is </span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">part of the story of the global food shortage. A lot of chicken farmers here feel the squeeze, as</span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> do corn growers in the region where I live, who have not gotten significantly more for their crops. Prices for basics like rice, sugar, and eggs, have shot up 30% accordin</span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">g to government statistics, a difficult burden for families who make on average about $250-$400 per month. And if you make $70, as thousands of families in the Amazon do, it’s just about </span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">insurmountable.<br /></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">From what I’ve read and heard, food prices are a perennial campaign issue in this country with its small middle class, weak educational system, and few large industries, though the government has been subsidizing staples for the last several months. As with many other issues, the uncertainty of whether the average family will put enough food on the table, (I mean food like a plate of rice and some plaintains, forget about vegetables or dairy or </span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">protein) is one people learn to live with. </span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">When my friends here who read about the chaos in the U.S. and world stock markets ask me if it’s really as bad as it sounds, the expression on their faces falls somewhere between stunned and vaguely concerned, whereas I know my face shows something more akin to dread. But I think that’s because I have not yet dropped that particularly seductive American viewpoint that we have total control over our destiny.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">So what else to do but learn how to dance with uncertainty,</span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> a process I started before I left the U.S. and one that perhaps subconsciously drew me to this place that could make one a master at it.</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><br />A couple of things I've been doing to improve my dancing skills . . .<br /></span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><br />1. Take a cheap vacation to a mini-utopia.</span><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SQUm_YU35bI/AAAAAAAAAHU/LFdCQgrwHJs/s1600-h/IMG_1807.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SQUm_YU35bI/AAAAAAAAAHU/LFdCQgrwHJs/s320/IMG_1807.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5261654609955906994" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">This is Salinas, a small town in Guaranda province that over the last 30 years transformed itself from a hamlet of straw and mud huts to a town of more than 20 locally run cooperatives that make everything from cheese and chocolates to essential oils.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">People don’t live high on the hog here, and the system is far from perfect, but unlike many places in Ecuador, most people have jobs and the young people come back to live after they finish their education. My short trip to this center of micro-economy helped me forget nettlesome macro-economic problems.</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><br /></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SQUnRvajlWI/AAAAAAAAAHc/oIdUcAsrXvw/s1600-h/IMG_1837.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SQUnRvajlWI/AAAAAAAAAHc/oIdUcAsrXvw/s200/IMG_1837.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5261654925391402338" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">2. Watch the sunset. Something that is both predictable and beautiful always brings me a sense of calm. And attention is all I have to pay.<br /><br /></span><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SQUoqj7u7UI/AAAAAAAAAHs/aPFx21o-OcU/s1600-h/IMG_1975.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SQUoqj7u7UI/AAAAAAAAAHs/aPFx21o-OcU/s320/IMG_1975.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5261656451317689666" border="0" /></a><br /></div><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><br /><br /></span>Mary Fifieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15453259276607081478noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22328831.post-52353433690038074782008-09-09T12:36:00.000-07:002008-09-14T21:58:56.912-07:00Picnic on the Rio Napo<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">When some Kichwa friends of mine </span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">invited my American friends Jason and Mary and me on a picnic, I knew enough not to expect a grassy lawn with a wooden picnic table and a Weber barbecue. But I wasn’t expecting that I should have worn my rubber, knee-high wading boots. I should have known better.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">We started off at Juan and Irene’s house, packed up the peeled oranges, papaya, and corn cobs from their farm, the old pots, knives, plastic cups </span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">and carving knives from their kitchen, plus the raw chicken, cheese, and chocolate chip cookies that Jason, Mary and I had brought</span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">. Then we crossed the paved road and headed down a steep slippery bank, where we had to proceed hu</span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">man-chain style to keep from pitching over the side. As we scaled down a rickety ladder that someone had built on the trail, I was wondering if there wasn’t an easier way to get to the river.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">It turns out that we were going to Juan’s mother’s field to h</span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">arvest some yuca that we’d be boiling over an open fire. With the tubers in our bag, we trekked another 20 minutes or so, fording a couple of slippery-bottomed streams, to arrive at a rocky bank on the Rio Napo.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SM3nW309HUI/AAAAAAAAAEY/lka96HOTz-w/s1600-h/coco+079.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SM3nW309HUI/AAAAAAAAAEY/lka96HOTz-w/s320/coco+079.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5246103521085693250" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;">Mary watches as Juan sets up the fire pit.</span><br /></div><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><br />We set up camp, complete with palm-frond sun shelter, improvised fire pit, and delicious </span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">cheese-stuffed roasted bananas (the less sweet kind, called “maduros”).<br /></span><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SM3nsp0vcII/AAAAAAAAAEg/55sOCOjrfQ8/s1600-h/coco+126.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SM3nsp0vcII/AAAAAAAAAEg/55sOCOjrfQ8/s320/coco+126.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5246103895283822722" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;">Peeling yuca in the shade of our natural umbrella.</span><br /></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SM3ns7-JDzI/AAAAAAAAAEo/cylCsQXjtHA/s1600-h/coco+132.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SM3ns7-JDzI/AAAAAAAAAEo/cylCsQXjtHA/s320/coco+132.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5246103900155088690" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;">Irene tending the maduros and chicken strips on our barbecue.</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">We feasted and some people swam </span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">(I waded) while Juan went fishing in the traditional Kichwa style with a hand-made net of thin palm fibers. I watched him throwing the net and diving in after it into the wide, fast Rio Napo.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SM3nswzFaYI/AAAAAAAAAEw/_FU0-DISf5A/s1600-h/coco+138.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SM3nswzFaYI/AAAAAAAAAEw/_FU0-DISf5A/s320/coco+138.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5246103897155922306" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Something about the river always makes me reflective, and I was thinking about how striking it was to watch someone with a college education and a computer in his house fish in the same way his great-great-grandparents did.</span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> I can’t think of anything I do that my great-grandparents did. Except travel, I suppose.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Packing up in the late afternoon, we took a shorter path back. Our Kichwa friends led all of us white people by the hand so we wouldn’t slip crossing the river. You learn to swallow your pride in situations like this. Groggy from the sun, I was glad to arrive and Juan and Irene’s house, where we drank chicha and ate the chocolate chip cookies, a novelty to our friends. As I heard a familiar distant roaring engine, I realized that I've adapted more to this environment than it might have seemed when the day started: I could distinguish from all of the other car noises the sound of the bus back to Tena.<br /><br />Thanks to Jason Kaminsky for the great photos.<br /><br /></span>Mary Fifieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15453259276607081478noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22328831.post-15577255746026963552008-07-19T12:08:00.000-07:002008-08-19T20:10:42.450-07:00Things I Miss, Things I Don't<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Two things happened to me recently: I just returned from a three-week trip to the U.S., and friend of mine in the blogging world (and the real world), <a href="http://mjennings26.wordpress.com/">Melanie Jennings</a>, just "tagged" me in a more sedentary but just as fun adult version of the kids' game. So combining the two experiences, I'm going to play--who doesn't like to be "it"?<br /><br />So I have to:<br /></span><ul><li><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">link to the person who tagged me</span></li><li><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">post the rules on the blog</span></li><li><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">write six random things about myself*</span></li><li><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">tag six more bloggers at the end of the post</span></li><li><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">leave a comment on the blogs to let the bloggers know they've been tagged</span></li><li><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">let the tagger know when my entry is posted</span></li></ul><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><br />* Random information has its place, but since this blog is mostly about my experience living in Ecuador, I thought I'd list the surprising things I do and don't miss about living in the U.S. Having just returned, I now remember . . .<br /><br /><br />1. <span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(255, 204, 0);">I do miss Alaskan Amber Ale</span>, and a handful of other good microbrews. I'm not a beer fanatic by any stretch, but drinking Pilsener (the watered-down Budweiser-esque Ecuadorian beer that is the only thing available in Tena) week in and week out tends to deaden the tastebuds.<br /><br />2. <span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(255, 204, 51);">I don't miss advertising</span>. Of course we have ads in Ecuador, but not on the table tops at the food court, and not on the <span style="font-style: italic;">outside</span> of the jetway ramps at the airport (fly into George Bush International Airport in Houston and you'll see what I mean), and not on the sidewalks. Nor do we have big billboards (except shameless self-promotion for the local government's great construction projects) marring the stunning vistas.<br /><br />3. <span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(255, 204, 0);">I do miss The Daily Show and The Colbert Report</span>. For those of you who are fans, no further explanation is required. I don't know if that kind of humor would go over well among Ecuadorians, but there is certainly a cast of politicians here who would make great fodder for an Ecuadorian version of Jon Stewart.<br /><br />4. <span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="color: rgb(255, 204, 0);">I don't miss straight hair, much</span>.</span> A few friends commented when I was in the States, "Oh, your hair is so nice and curly!" Although I appreciated the compliment, I was disappointed (and technically, gentle readers, it was "wavy"), having spent an hour blow-drying and luxuriating in the fact that for a few weeks I would be in a climate that wouldn't make my hair look like an electrified q-tip. But the futility of trying to keep my hair straight in 90% humidity is helping me reach a state of quasi-Buddhist acceptance of my hair's place in nature, and keeping my hair dryer coiled up in the corner of my medicine cabinet is an attempt to adapt to my environment. It's a growth experience.<br /><br />5. <span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="color: rgb(255, 204, 0);">I do miss technology</span>.</span> A friend of mine in San Francisco showed me his new iPhone, and I was dazzled. All the pretty pictures! Only lawyers, politicians, and bankers can afford the iPhone in Ecuador. Money is scarce here, but time is plentiful, so we spend it waiting in line at the bank, the electric company, the water company. We spend far too much of it getting people to follow through on what they say they will do. Automation technology, if it were implemented across major institutions throughout the country, would free up time to make us more productive of course, but it would also free us from the stress of dealing with smug bureaucrats.<br /><br />6. <span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="color: rgb(255, 204, 0);">I don't miss technology</span>.</span> On the other hand, I almost never have to punch through the options on a phone tree. I never speak to someone at a call center on the other side of the globe. I never get into fights any more with the insurance claims adjusters who lied about the status of my claims so the company could delay payment. In Ecuador, people can't hide behind technology as an excuse not to do their jobs, and companies can't use technology to obfuscate their customers until they give up demanding the service they were promised. And the fact that most of us don't have iPhones or that level of consumer technology means we're not multi-tasking as much, which at least in my case means less chatter in my head and more room for thinking, not to mention eavesdropping on the chatter of people in line at the bank.<br /><br />*******<br />Now, who's "it"? <a href="http://www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/scienceking/">Jeremy King</a>, <a href="http://www.ciao79.blogspot.com/">Susan King</a>, <a href="http://readingwritingliving.wordpress.com/">Susan Ito</a>, <a href="http://inodoroseco.blogspot.com/">Chris Canaday</a><br />Those are all the bloggers I know . . .<br /><br /></span>Mary Fifieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15453259276607081478noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22328831.post-18488772606686245382008-06-18T20:16:00.000-07:002008-12-10T09:07:16.200-08:00The Beauty of the Dry Ecological Toilet<span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">This unassuming structure might look like any old latrine in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, but it isn’t. This little beauty is the dry ecological toilet, and I’ll tell you why it’s Mary’s Featured Development Project of the Week*.</span></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SFnaPmIZ9bI/AAAAAAAAAEI/RQzPV6DbIiw/s1600-h/toilet_girls.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SFnaPmIZ9bI/AAAAAAAAAEI/RQzPV6DbIiw/s320/toilet_girls.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5213438005126755762" border="0" /></a><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >(Rita and Denise will use this toilet as soon as the door is installed.)</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Unlike conventional latrines, the dry toilet, as you can guess, does not use water. You take a seat, attend to your business, and the toilet does the rest: urine is whisked away in a funnel (an old clorox bottle fitted with hose), and the poop falls to its graceful end in a chamber at the bottom. When you’re finished, you drop in one cup of dry material such as ash, sawdust, or those old rice husks you’ve got lying around, and the feces begins to decompose immediately. Six months after the last deposit, your waste has been converted to <a href="http://www.weblife.org/humanure/chapter6_2.html">100% safe and organic compost</a> that can be used for most crops and is especially lovely for</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> nutrient-poor Amazonian soil. To take advantage of the nitrogen-rich urine (most farmers have to buy nitrogen supplements), you can collect it in a jug and dilute it with water to fertilize your garden.</span><br /></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">When I describe the dry toilet to most people, they listen interestedly but with a scrunched-up nose and then say, “Wow, sounds cool. But it must stink!” I’ve used several of these, including one in the <a href="http://www.blacksheepinn.com/CompostingToilet.htm">most lush bathroom</a> I’ve ever visited, and I can attest to the fact that they don’t. In fact, my flush toilet in Tena, hooked up to one of the worst (and undoubtedly polluting) sewage systems in the area, often stinks the way one would expect a dry toilet to smell. Because the feces starts to dry out and decompose immediately (one of the reasons for separating the urine and “flushing” with ash or sawdust), the dry toilet doesn’t cause the nose to wrinkle.</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Contrast a clean, odorless, compost-producing toilet with the others we have in the campo around here: flush toilets that are usually built above a dirt pit (euphemistically called a “septic tank”, though we are conspicuously absent any RotoRooter services), sometimes connected to a water source, and sometimes not. You can imagine how many times you’ll want to use that toilet when there is no water to flush away what’s down there, particularly in a tropical jungle climate. Even if it can be flushed away, it will often come right back up in a flood.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">So in the name of health, not to mention the environment (the toilets also trap and reduce methane gas emissions), we’ve helped the Kichwa community of Cuya Loma build twelve of these, eleven for individual houses and one for the kindergarten.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">The best part of this project is that the community has taken charge. Occasionally they’ve needed my help in haggling with hardware stores and the City of Tena to get supplies and coordinating with the toilet designer, <a href="http://www.inodoroseco.blogspot.com/">Chris Canaday</a>, but overall they’ve done the lion’s share of the work and kept internal community politics to a minimum. </span> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SFnaP4Q11VI/AAAAAAAAAEQ/ux9590Eja8I/s1600-h/making_floors.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SFnaP4Q11VI/AAAAAAAAAEQ/ux9590Eja8I/s320/making_floors.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5213438009993975122" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" ><div style="text-align: center;">(Bending steel frames to make the ceramic and cement floors)</div></span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">They’ve even convened a “toilet committee” to manage the project, which includes regular household inspections and an environmental education curriculum for the kids (I hope to post some cute pictures from the classes.) In a region where paternalism is rampant and everyone participates in a system of handouts, the fact that the people of Cuya Loma pulled it together to plan and implement their own project may be even more dazzling and inspiring a feat than the beautiful dry toilet itself.<br /><br />If you want to learn more about dry toilets (I never thought I'd be so interested either!), you might start <a href="http://www.zoomzap.com/techniques/SES-eng.php">here</a>.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">*If in some parallel universe it were possible to do one development project a week. Why in this universe things move so slowly is the topic for another blog, or a book.</span><br /></span></span></div></span></span></span>Mary Fifieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15453259276607081478noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22328831.post-70517779494747891092008-05-01T10:14:00.000-07:002008-12-10T09:07:17.483-08:00A Long Way from Philly, by Lynne Cooke<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">When I met Mary in graduate school at San Diego State University about </span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">fifteen years ago, I never imagined that someday we would be on a motor powered canoe headed </span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">into the jungle. But there we were, on our way to Casa del Suizo, a lodge nestled in the Amazon.</span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> </span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SBn_nlY16NI/AAAAAAAAADE/iQmUis5gdzU/s1600-h/Lynne%26Me.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SBn_nlY16NI/AAAAAAAAADE/iQmUis5gdzU/s200/Lynne%26Me.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5195464700664867026" border="0" /></a><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">But, wait, maybe I should back up and tell you who I a</span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">m and what I’m doing writing on </span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Mary’s blog.</span> <span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">I’m Mary’s friend, Lynne, who lives in suburban Philadelphia, PA, which is, well, quite different from Ecuador. During my visit to Ecuador, Mary </span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">generously asked me to be a guest blogger, and, as you can tell, I accepted the offer. I teach technical writing, and unfortunately, my prose r</span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">eflects my profession. Stick with me through </span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">this blog entry,</span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> though. I promise not to use subheadings, bulleted lists, or forecasting statements, as we technical writers are apt to do. (On the pl</span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">us side, I won’t use wordy phrases such as “due to the fact that” or “it is important to note that.”) </span> <span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Mary and I met up in Quito on a rainy Saturday afterno</span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">on and stayed the night in La Mariscal, the happening part of the city – live music </span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">everywhere, great restaurants, and a bunch of hostels. The next day we began our trip to Tena by bus via a windy, hilly, hairpin turn,</span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> mostly unpaved road. I found the buses fascinating – people were in the seats, in the aisles, constantly getting on or off at unmarked stops. Scattered along the road w</span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">ere tiny shacks, some lit with a single, naked light bulb that hung from the ceiling. Although intellectually I knew that Ecuador was a developing country, I didn’t fully grasp what that meant until that moment. The contrast between what many Americans call home (5,000 sq ft. McMansions) and what many Ecuadorians call home is shocking. Don’t get me started…</span> <span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><br /><br />We stayed at Mary’s place in Tena for a day before heading out to the jungle lodg</span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">e. </span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Tena is a mix of urban and rural. Small specialty stores, hostels, and restaurants line the streets, dogs roam the neighborhoods, and chickens cluck from day to night. Mary is quite the local – we kept running into people she knew – and she’s got a great place within walking distance of downtown Tena. Mary lives on the second story of a concrete single-family home. Her</span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> three-bedroom home has beautiful hardwood floors, lots of windows, and a great patio conducive to wine drinking, book reading, and snoozing. </span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">As a westerner who had never been to a developing country before, I was surprised by the rebar sticking out of </span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">the patio. I thought, “Is this place still under construction?” </span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">But no, this is just the way things are in Ecuador. Part of the infrastructure is in place if the owners want to build on to the house. Sounds reasonable to me.</span> <span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><br /><br />From Tena we took a two-hour bus ride and then a 20 minute canoe ride to reach the jungle lodge, where we stayed in a room with a spectacular view of the river.</span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> </span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SBoD8FY16RI/AAAAAAAAADk/410M5mTffgY/s1600-h/CasaDelSuizo.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SBoD8FY16RI/AAAAAAAAADk/410M5mTffgY/s320/CasaDelSuizo.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5195469450898696466" border="0" /></a><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Sitting on that balcony was one of the most peaceful experiences I have ever had. </span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><br />The next day, we visited amaZOOnica, a preserve for monkeys, toucans, enormous colorful parrots, wild pigs, and the like. </span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">As recently as thirty or forty years ago, you could have seen these animals in the wild, but because of overhunting and habitat loss, most of the big mammals and birds are gone. </span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SBoAh1Y16PI/AAAAAAAAADU/7K2DUPJHWDM/s1600-h/McCaws.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SBoAh1Y16PI/AAAAAAAAADU/7K2DUPJHWDM/s200/McCaws.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5195465701392247026" border="0" /></a><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">AmaZOOnica is no urban zoo: volunteers live in on the grounds, give tours, and care for the animals, most of which were rescued from poachers or illegally kept as pets. Only about 20% can be reintroduced into the wild.</span> <span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><br /></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SBoAiFY16QI/AAAAAAAAADc/xr_Tc1csmbw/s1600-h/HangingMonkey.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SBoAiFY16QI/AAAAAAAAADc/xr_Tc1csmbw/s200/HangingMonkey.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5195465705687214338" border="0" /></a><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Before returning to Tena, I took a tour of a Kichwa village where I learned about some of the local customs, including the preparation of chichi, an intoxicating beverage which Mary has described as “tasting the way moldy laundry smells” (and she’s right). The tour also featured local artisans who create beautiful clay pots with intricate designs and parrots out of balsawood, all of which are for sale in the village. In this ecotourism model both the jungle lodge and the indigenous people benefit: The Kichwa have the opportunity to sell their crafts and educate tourists about their culture, and the jungle lodge can offer tourists a glimpse of Kichwa life that would otherwise be closed to outsiders.</span> <span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><br /><br />A few days later, I took a bus back to Quito. This time the woman seated next to me balanced a box of 20 or so tiny, yellow chicks on her lap that peeped the whole way to Quito. I found the peeping soothing, in part because I didn’t have any idea what people were saying around me. You see, I don’t speak or understand Spanish (shameful, I know, because I lived in San Diego for many, many years). I felt like such a typical American tourist, gesturing and pointing to things and hoping people might understand a word or two of English. Fortunately, people were very kind to me. I made it from the bus station to the hostel, ordered a meal from a menu with pictures, and flew back to the US the next day.</span> <span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><br /><br />I’ll end by thanking Mary for being an incredibly gracious host and by letting you know that the work she’s doing in Ecuador makes a difference. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mary decided to stay in Tena permanently because the Kichwa people I met think of her as a member of their community, which she is.</span>Mary Fifieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15453259276607081478noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22328831.post-13291105528186694592008-04-20T15:28:00.000-07:002008-12-10T09:07:17.661-08:00We Are Pioneers: Supermaxi, Biodegradable Bags, and the Women of Cuya Loma<span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Happy Earth Day from the Amazon! I’m celebrating by writing this blog and participating in the <span style="color: rgb(255, 204, 0);"><a href="http://www.lcv.org/earth-day.html">CALL FOR CLIMATE</a> campaign to demand that Congress act now to reverse global warming</span>. Any other earthlings who feel so inspired, please pick up your phones on <span style="color: rgb(255, 204, 0);">APRIL 22 </span>and dial your Senator and Representative: 202-224-3121.</span></span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(255, 204, 0);font-size:180%;" ><span style="font-style: italic;">F</span></span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">or five hours over a partially paved, mostly potholed “highway,” I sat on the bus from Quito to Tena with my plastic shopping bags trapped between my feet. I enjoyed the cloud forest whizzing by as we descended fr</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">om the Andes to the lowland jungle, feeling a little less guilty than usual after my trip to Supermaxi in Quito. As the name implies, Supermaxi is the largest nationwide grocery and household goods store in Ecuador and sells two things I find I can’t buy in Tena and can't live without,</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> despite my efforts to “live local” and “get off the grid”: dijon mustard and balsamic vinegar.</span><br /><br /></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SAvLmX8JVZI/AAAAAAAAACs/al2_cD2c_A8/s1600-h/BagRed.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SAvLmX8JVZI/AAAAAAAAACs/al2_cD2c_A8/s320/BagRed.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5191466855596381586" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Fortunately, Supermaxi has gotten the memo about the climate crisis </span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">and has replaced its</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> conventional plastic bags with biodegradable ones, which announce “We Are Pioneers.” In the grand scheme, it’s a small step of course, but it </span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">shows decent corporate leadership and helps me feel better about my carbon footprint:<br /><br />+ 6 jars of imported dijon must</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">ard<br />- 1 biodegradable bag<br />+ 1 5-hour diesel bus ride<br />- 1 4-hour trip in private car<br />= how much carb</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">on I’m putting into the atmosphere?<br /><br />Well, the math is beyond me, but that’s what these nifty <a href="http://www.carbonfund.org/site/pages/carbon_calculators/">carbon calculators</a> are for.<br /><br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:180%;"><span style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(255, 204, 0);">T</span></span></span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">hough excellent laundry services abound in Tena (80 cents a kilo gets even your underwear washed, dried, and ironed), most women (women) wash their family’s clothes in big cement sinks at home. Most people can’t afford to buy washers and dryers, and even the wealthy tend to relegate the task to their maid (again, a woman). Since I have a cement sink and clothes line, I do the same with most of my clothes. It took only two or three weeks of sudsing, scrubbing, wringing, and hanging for me to appreciate both modern technology and the feminist movement. All the books and articles I’ve read on gender roles seemed like abstract musings compared to what I learned washing my own clothes by hand in Ecuador.<br /></span></span></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SAvMz38JVbI/AAAAAAAAAC8/6Xm4Ov7oDA8/s1600-h/LaundryRed.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SAvMz38JVbI/AAAAAAAAAC8/6Xm4Ov7oDA8/s320/LaundryRed.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5191468187036243378" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Multiply that work by seven people (six kids and one husband, an average family size) and it’s easy to understand why, when I visit rural communities, the women are eager to have electricity, running water, and roads, even though they often come at enormous cost to a fragile rainforest environment. The men want those things too, but technology is more a matter of convenience for them. Though Kichwa men generally help around the house more than other latino men, domestic chores are still optional. Not so for the women. Technology could improve their daily existence dramatically, leaving more time for education, a professional career, or simply the freedom to choose what they want to do with their lives.<br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Does this freedom, as a result of modernization, inevitably lead to the production of trillions of plastic bags? That’s what I wonder when I talk with communities about building water or sanitation “systems” that solve one urgent and important problem but create ten others that burn on a slower, but no less powerful, flame.<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> I’d like to think that freedom—and creativity—can lead directly to solutions that improve the standard of living for the poor and marginalized and skip the step we industrialized nations have taken in the development process, the one in which industries pollute the planet and exhaust natural resources then later scramble to fix things.<br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">It has taken Supermaxi less time to adopt the biodegradable bag than it’s taken Wal-mart to demand its vendors reduce product packaging. And 13 women, including the president of the community of Cuya Loma, will be pitching in to build dry composting toilets for their houses next weekend (more to come on the marvel of the dry composting toilet). So perhaps these are signs of a new kind of pioneering spirit to work with the earth, not against it.</span><br /></span></span></span></span></span></span>Mary Fifieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15453259276607081478noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22328831.post-42640945907005419992008-02-08T15:43:00.000-08:002008-12-10T09:07:18.254-08:00Carnaval 2008: I Ate a Worm<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/R-8HXT8A5LI/AAAAAAAAAA0/zh59pDzUnlM/s1600-h/01-27-08-Delicias-012520.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/R-8HXT8A5LI/AAAAAAAAAA0/zh59pDzUnlM/s200/01-27-08-Delicias-012520.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5183369793197106354" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%;" >. . . and not for 2 million dollars or whatever those Fear Factor contestants get for their</span><span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%;" > repugnant dares. The <span style="color: rgb(255, 204, 0);font-family:trebuchet ms;" > Chonta Kuru</span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">, a short fat worm with a distinctly worm-like appearance even when smoked over a fire in a banana leaf, is a seasonal delicacy around here. I’ve known about it, and avoided it, for three years.</span><span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%;" > But at a meeting with some Kichwa folks from San Pedro, where </span><a style="font-family: trebuchet ms;" href="http://www.globalpediatricalliance.org/">GPA</a><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> is helping build a potable water system, I learned that the community</span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> was going to build a floating</span><span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%;" > bar and serve comida tipica (local cuisine) to raise some extra money at the Carnaval festivities just down t</span><span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%;" >he river in Misahualli. Wanting to support the group, I said I’d drop in for a bite to eat and </span><span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%;" >lat</span><span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%;" >er realized what I had committed myself to.</span><span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Really, the worm wasn’t that bad. Six came with my order and I could only bring myself to eat one, minus the head. It had the texture of overcooked shrimp but </span></span><span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%;" ><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">was nicely salted and served with tasty pieces of hearts of palm. I washed it down (pretty literally) with <span style="color: rgb(255, 204, 0);">chicha de chonta</span>, a semi-fermented drink made, in this case, of palm. Normally chicha is made </span></span><span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%;" ><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">with yuca (I think it’s the same as manioc, which is a bland, fibrous tuber), and traditionally women chewed the yuca and spit it into a vat to aid the fermentation process. I’ve heard (and choose not to learn otherwise) that people skip the chew-and-spit step nowadays. I’ve tried chicha de yuca, but the </span></span><span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%;" ><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">drink made with chonta </span></span><span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%;" ><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">is much better.</span><span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br /></span></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/R-8D0j8A5HI/AAAAAAAAAAU/cNHtL4Yb7o4/s1600-h/IMG_1247.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/R-8D0j8A5HI/AAAAAAAAAAU/cNHtL4Yb7o4/s320/IMG_1247.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5183365897661768818" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%;" >But food is just a minor part of Carnaval — the</span><span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%;" > real mission is to get as many people as possible, preferably strangers, soaking wet, covered with spray foam (kind of like Silly String), dunked in </span><span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%;" >the river, covered with mud, drenched with beer, or even slathered with raw egg. In the day and a half I </span><span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%;" >spent on the river at Misahualli, I was dry for about five hours. During the day there were bikini contests, concerts, canoe trips, and carnival rides, and at night there was traditional Kichwa music and dance, plus salsa and reggaeton, but always, always there was a spray of liquid coming from somewhere.</span><span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%;" ><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><br />A friend of mine from the US complained that in Ecuador, </span></span><span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%;" ><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">everyone is fair game at Carnaval—it’s not just about playing tricks on your friends. But that is one of the things I love about the holiday. In a society that is often strictly and blatantly segregated by race and class lines, Carnaval distributes the fun evenly for a few days. </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Little Kichwa kids can pelt mestiza ladies with water balloons, and most will shriek and laugh and possibly even return fire with spray foam. Taxi drivers will get squirted with water pistols if they leave their windows down, store clerks tag customers, neighbors chase each other with pots of water, and foreigners like me are probably the </span></span><span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%;" ><span style="font-size:100%;">easiest prey of all. At the beach Lionel, ten-year-old son of one of my Kichwa friends, found me in crowd of several hundred and after his usual sweet hello threw a bucket of river water in my face. I got him back, though.</span></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/R-8FNT8A5JI/AAAAAAAAAAk/cmfEl19rL4g/s1600-h/LlamaCrop.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/R-8FNT8A5JI/AAAAAAAAAAk/cmfEl19rL4g/s320/LlamaCrop.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5183367422375158930" border="0" /></a></span></span></span>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22328831.post-52439298883348868022008-01-06T16:56:00.000-08:002008-12-10T09:07:19.150-08:00Burning the Old Man<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/R-8SKT8A5XI/AAAAAAAAACU/dD5rR-ZCP7c/s1600-h/IMG_1127.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/R-8SKT8A5XI/AAAAAAAAACU/dD5rR-ZCP7c/s320/IMG_1127.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5183381664486712690" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">The first sign for me, never having spent the end of the year in Ecuador before, was the pile of <span style="color: rgb(255, 204, 0);">headless stuffed figures dressed in jeans and button-down shirts</span> on the street </span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">corner. I didn’t think much of it at first because on any given street corner, at any given time, you can find things from mangoes to DVDs to diet supplements. But when I started seeing stacks of the stuffed people on street corners all over Quito and an array of freakish masks, I asked. “Those are the old men,” my friend informed me.</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><br />The last few days of every year Ecuadorians pick out their old man, <span style="color: rgb(255, 204, 0);">give him a face</span>, <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/R-8NGj8A5RI/AAAAAAAAABk/o5e2GHUiksM/s1600-h/Faces.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/R-8NGj8A5RI/AAAAAAAAABk/o5e2GHUiksM/s200/Faces.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5183376102504064274" border="0" /></a>attach notes to him conveying whatever sentiments, thoughts, etc they want to get rid of, and then burn the whole thing on the street. The old man, 2007, is reduced to ash, and for added affect, men don party dresses and wigs and parade around </span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">as the widows of the old men. My guess is these are mostly straight men, based on the unsophisticated drag, but I’m sure some gay men get into the act to, since it’s the only time of the year when cross-dressing is widely accepted.</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><br />On New Year’s Eve I was in <span style="">Cuenca</span>, which I discovered is fairly buttoned-down during the holiday, but that afternoon people were busy </span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">preparing a massive float for the midnight parade. The old men to be burned were none other than the<span style="color: rgb(255, 204, 0);"> Spanish Prime Minister, the King of Spain</span> (am I the only person who didn’t realize Spain still has a king?), and <span style="color: rgb(255, 204, 0);">Hugo Chavez</span>. I didn’t get the joke until I saw the end-of-the-year news montages on TV: at a </span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">meeting in Chile earlier in the year, Hugo Chavez was insulting the Prime Minister, and the King, sitting between them, said, <span style="color: rgb(255, 204, 0);">“¿Por qué no te calles?”—</span></span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="color: rgb(255, 204, 0);">why don’t you just shut up?</span> It wasn’t long before the King’s phrase got ripped to an MP3 file and downloaded as a ringtone on millions of Ecuadorian cell phones. As my Ecuadorian friend put it, “Chavez is Chavez. We all know how obnoxious he is. But on the other hand he’s still a head of state. You (referring to the King) can’t treat him like he’s one of your servants.”<br /><br /></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/R-8RUz8A5WI/AAAAAAAAACM/hbUE6A5prcY/s1600-h/pipicho.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/R-8RUz8A5WI/AAAAAAAAACM/hbUE6A5prcY/s320/pipicho.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5183380745363711330" border="0" /></a><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">So all three went up in flames as Ecuador</span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> prepared for 2008. But not all the old men were politicians. Here’s a baby Shrek (the movie is wildly popular here—I don’t know why) named <span style="color: rgb(255, 204, 0);">Pipicho, the Kichwa word for penis</span>. Who knows what notes were attached to that one . . .<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:Chalkboard;"><o:p></o:p></span></p></span></span>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22328831.post-36725906005457304962007-10-29T19:46:00.000-07:002008-12-10T09:07:19.327-08:00Fruits of Change<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SAu1xn8JVYI/AAAAAAAAACk/GZVqfXbvxXc/s1600-h/AnonaRed.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_HxlSnUeeag0/SAu1xn8JVYI/AAAAAAAAACk/GZVqfXbvxXc/s200/AnonaRed.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5191442859614098818" border="0" /></a><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">After a long hiatus, the blog is back, and I am back in Ecuador, </span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">this time to live. I’ve chosen Tena, a city in the Amazon jungle with a population of 16,000, as my home base. When I tell people, especially Ecuadorians, where I live, I get a wide range of reactions, from impressed amazement to bewildered disbelief. Even though five years ago I never would have imagined myself taking up residence in the jungle, it’s neither as adventurous or as dangerous as it might sound. My comfortable apartment has wood floors and cement walls and a patio overlooking the mature fruit trees and ornamental plants that the landlords planted years ago. On mornings when I don’t have meetings or community visits, I sit out there with my coffee and observe the butterflies at work. I can go a week without seeing the same kind twice. </span> <span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">So when people ask, “Why Tena?” (or “Why Tena!”), here is what I tell them:</span> <span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /><br />Fruits that look like they come from outer space</span>: I discovered the anona when my landlady picked one from the tree that grows outside in the yard and brought it to me as a welcome gift. Though I haven’t been in the habit of eating fruit that resembles a porcupine, the inside of an anona is gooey and sweet, like tapioca without the disgusting globules. It’s great in cakes, and I plan to try to make ice cream with it next.</span> <span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /><br />Lazy birdwatching</span>: Again, with my cup of coffee on the patio. No binoculars needed.</span> <span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /><br />Inspiring neighbors</span>: Visiting different Kichwa communities for <a href="http://www.globalpediatricalliance.org/">Global Pediatric Alliance</a>, I’ve met a lot of people with little formal education but excellent ideas: One group wants to build dry ecological toilets so they not only will they have sanitation for the first time, but the toilets won’t contaminate the groundwater and will produce completely safe organic compost for gardens. A friend of mine, a father of six who has not had steady work for almost a year, has decided to take a huge risk and go into business for himself, converting a plot of family land into an Kichwa ecolodge. Another friend of mine, who has some university education, presented me with a ten-page proposal to train Kichwa women and young people to be community leaders after I casually mentioned that someday it would be interesting to collaborate on that type of project.</span> <span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /><br />Fewer distractions</span>: Yes, I’ve got t.v. (but not cable) and yes, I’ve got internet (but no high-speed line in my home yet), and yes, my neighbors play salsa music or a compiliation of 80s American music that's a bestseller at the bootleg CD shops here, but despite all of that, I often find myself surrounded by quiet or the noises of nature. Somehow, having fewer things plugged into the wall or running on batteries, I find it it easier to read, write, and think. </span> <span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /><br />Sunsets</span>: After a long, hot day in Tena fighting with the phone company or standing in lines to pay my utility bills, I walk home through town, across the airport tarmac (since the only flights are occasional a government prop planes, at dusk it’s turned into a running track and volleyball court), and watch the sunset over the lush mountains of Llanganates Reserve. Although many, many thousands of trees have been cut down in this area, the forests in the park are still in tact. The sun sinking behind those mountains reminds me that my human clock and the concerns it drives are, at the end of the day, insignificant. </span>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22328831.post-1144876357768009562006-04-12T14:07:00.000-07:002008-04-20T14:34:17.423-07:00This Is How We Dance in Caipirona<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">For as many times as I’ve suffered disappointment from plans falling through in Ecuador, I’ve also benefited greatly from that same lack of predictability. It was serendipity that recently delivered me to<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);"> Caipirona</span>, a Kichwa village in the jungle where big decisions were being made. And I got to be a small part of them.<br /><br />A friend of mine who works for the city of Tena spontaneously invited me to join him on a 45-minute ride in a pick up truck (this time inside the comfortable cab) to where the road ended at a wide river. Alone in the rain, we waited for a canoe. A thin, elderly, brown figure in wading boots approached from the opposite bank, and as she plowed unperturbed into the current, we realized there would be no canoe. We rolled our pants up to our thighs, took off our shoes, and crossed the river yelping every time we stepped on a sharp rock, which was often. I skipped the attempt to put on brave face, since my friend, who is Kichwa and has probably crossed rivers barefoot hundreds of times, was as much a baby as I.<br /><br />We arrived in the middle of a clearing with a handful of huts, the largest of which was an open-air and thatched-roof structure. About 40 people—babies, old people, teenage nursing mothers, barefoot kids, middle-aged men and women, and a few twenty-somethings—sat in a circle. This was a big political assembly, I discovered, and they’d been sitting in this circle for the last twelve hours discussing everything from the price of their farm lots to the lack of potable water.<br /><br />I slipped in behind my friend, who followed the custom of shaking the hand of every single adult present, and tried to figure out what was going on. On a dais at the front sat four youngish men speaking Kichwa into a microphone. Occasionally, a woman named Bertha would grab the other microphone and interrupt or correct them, eliciting laughter or cheers from the rest of the group, which was mostly silent. I watched this exchange for a good hour without having a clue what they were talking about. I wasn’t sure if the rest of the people knew either. To me they looked bored out of their minds, but how would I know? </span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><br />Eventually a bowl of chicha, mildly fermented yucca milk, reached me and I took a few obligatory sips. It’s a taste I haven’t acquired and probably never will—to me chicha tastes the way moldy laundry smells. At that point, my friend, representing the local government, got up to speak in Kichwa about projects, and then I heard my name mentioned. Before I knew it, he handed me the microphone and told me to explain to the group what I was doing there. This would have been easy except for the fact that I hate speaking in public, much less in Spanish, and I didn’t know what I was doing there. Somehow I managed to make something up, maybe thanks to the chicha.<br /><br />Hours passed. I vacillated between fascination at the social dynamic—who got to speak when, who got the most attention from the audience—and isolation and even a bit of fear. I was utterly a stranger there. But I also felt a little stunned. Five years ago I never would have imagined myself sitting in a straw and wood hut with 40 Kichwa people debating their issues of the day in the Amazon rainforest.<br /><br />Toward the end of the assembly, the group held elections for the new community president and officers. (The village officials usually have more actual power than the mayor of Tena because they have to face the community daily, though that doesn´t necessarily make them less corrupt or more motivated. Politics is the same wherever you go.) Bertha stood and announced, in Spanish, that she wanted my friend and I to count the votes since we were impartial. I found myself sitting at the dais, microphone in hand, reading off the names of each person in attendance so he or she could cast a vote. Meanwhile my friend tallied and certified the proceedings.<br /><br />Afterwards we were treated to a big lunch of beef soup, and the attention turned to the band of musicians playing traditional Kichwa songs. My piece of beef was too tough to chew, and since I didn’t have a napkin, I looked for an inconspicuous place to spit it out. I was still looking when a man approached me with his hand extended. To my horror, I thought he wanted me to spit it into his palm. First I show up at their meeting unannounced, then I butcher their names over the loudspeaker, and now I insult their cuisine. When I protested, the man pulled me into the center of the floor, where he told me in Spanish, “This is how we dance in Caipirona.” Still chewing, now mortified that everyone could see the enormous wad in my cheek, I danced with him. My friend and a few other people joined us, and I started to enjoy the stranger-in-a-strange-land role. The song went on and on. By the time we sat down, the meat was soft enough to swallow, which I did.</span>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22328831.post-1143656325620299622006-03-29T10:04:00.000-08:002008-04-20T14:35:09.908-07:00Day to Day in Tena<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Here is a list of some things I encounter as part of daily life in and around Tena:<br /></span><br /><p align="center"><span style="color: rgb(153, 0, 0);font-family:trebuchet ms;" >Kids on parade</span> </p><p align="center"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center;" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6409/2270/200/IMG_0155copy.jpg" border="0" /></p><p align="center"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Dogs on rooftops<br /><br />Vendors on busses selling fruit, shishkabobs, sunglasses, herbal remedies, CDs, razors, wallets, and anything else they can think of<br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(153, 0, 0);">The jungle and swimming in the river</span></span> </p><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center;" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6409/2270/200/Napo%20Tributary.jpg" border="0" /> <p align="center"><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Neighbors sitting outside on their patios chatting, literally, for hours<br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(153, 0, 0);">Fields of laundry</span></span> </p><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center;" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6409/2270/200/IMG_0198.jpg" border="0" /> <p align="center"><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">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.<br /><br />Entrails and meat cuts hanging in open-air butcher shops<br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(153, 0, 0);">Impressive insects</span>—I discovered the black butterfly, with a wingspan the length of my hand, inside the house</span> </p><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center;" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6409/2270/200/IMG_0139%20copy.jpg" border="0" /><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center;" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6409/2270/200/IMG_0196copy.jpg" border="0" />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22328831.post-1143226234965355252006-03-24T10:48:00.000-08:002008-04-20T14:35:53.295-07:00The Pick-up Truck to Puyo<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. </span>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22328831.post-1142379821571662732006-03-14T15:25:00.000-08:002008-04-20T14:37:07.764-07:00Guayaquil: The Extreme City<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6409/2270/1600/IMG_0072.jpg"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6409/2270/320/IMG_0072.jpg" border="0" /></span></a><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 ve</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6409/2270/1600/IMG_0071.jpg"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6409/2270/320/IMG_0071.jpg" border="0" /></span></a><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">getation 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.<br /><br />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.</span>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22328831.post-1141662968385393742006-03-06T08:34:00.000-08:002008-04-20T14:38:00.914-07:00Bienvenidos al Ecuador<span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%;" >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 <span style="color: rgb(51, 204, 0);">Traveling Storywriter</span> 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!)<br /><br />On this, my fifth trip to Ecuador in just over a year, I had a mission on behalf of <a href="http://www.globalpediatricalliance.org/">Global Pediatric Alliance</a>, 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /></span>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com2