The Will of a Volcano

If you are interested in the politics in Ecuador or Bolivia or Latin America in general, there is a lot happening. Check it out here: http://www.csmonitor.com/world/americas.html

I’ll try to compress what happened over the past week as well as I can. Here goes:

My group of students and I had the opportunity to spend about a week with indigenous families in the town of Cotacachi, which is next to South America’s most renowned textile market town of Otavalo. The only other male in the group, Tim, and I stayed with Alfonso De La Cruz, his wife Carmen Farinango, and there three boys (whom we rarely go to see or spend time with….oddly enough). They had a small one-story house and had a guest room for Tim and I that had two beds and a bathroom. When at the home we spent time only in our rooms to sleep or clean up and in the dining room to eat. On the second to last day we got to watch Carmen cook my favorite dish the kitchen, which was basically curried veggies from their garden wrapped in an egg wrap. Simple and mind/tongue-tingling! So basically, Carmen always cooked and cleaned our dishes, even after many offers to help with both activities, and actually only ate soup with us on the last night we were there… “This is different.” I thought. They were all super sweet to us and obviously had tourists/students staying with them often. The group that organized our stays was great: Runa Tupari.

This is a picture of Carmen (and Alfonso) making corn tortillas on a tiesto, basically a terra cotta pot with smoldering wood for heat. They were AWESOME….15 cents for one.

This is the goodbye day….Alfonso’s grandmother was such a trip! Classic sweetness and borderline senile, in a cute way….is that weird?

The pic below is of a few neighbors homes…laundry drying and washed by hand.

Runa Tupari took us a few great adventures: we saw and climbed a few volcanoes and saw lakes that were created only 3,000 years ago by violent volcanic activity….wow! The main fellow from Runa Tupari, Fausto, and I became the guys that couldn’t ever stop slamming each other with below-the-belt jokes. (When my Spanish teacher asked how to say “loser” in Spanish….I said “Fausto” so automatically that it scared me….I bet many of you are not surprised, eh?) He called me Senor Nino, or Mister Boy….so I had to call him Senor Hombre, or Mister Man. It was all in good fun and near the end of our time together I dropped the bullshit and told him as best as I could in Spanish that I appreciated his energy and what Runa Tupari was doing. He oftentimes picked Tim and I up in the morning and zipped us, very very VERY rapidly (Whoa, where is the “oh shit bar” in this truck?), to meet the others in the group…but in Ecuador things are a bit more fast-and-loose. I had to quickly get used to vehicles passing each other at anytime, usually causing the oncoming traffic to drive on the shoulder or practically come to a stop to avoid a collision. It happens all day everyday here. Oh, and there are usually no lines on the roads between the towns…yeeeeeehaw!!!

Ecuador (an OPEC country) has a gargantuan amount of buses and vehicles that use diesel…happy ol’ diesel! Oh yeah, it’s dirt cheap, too. I thought about gifts….maybe a few 50 gallon drums of gasoline would be better than a bunch of locally-crafted colorful clothes...

Mis amigas y yo (my friends and I) rode our bikes past the volcanically created Laguna de Cuicocha, or Lake Cuicocha.

Two days later we hiked up another mountain with another lake nearby (I forget the names so I don't want to try and be incorrect.)

This is a local midwife who, after losing her first child in birth, decided to learn to help local mothers and allow them to birth their children in the village…and not in the quite scary and dirty hospitals (so I am told). Red Cross donated funds to build this small yet cozy one room birthing house. She is standing next to an alter full of all sorts of things: lots of bleeding and upward staring Jesus’, Mother Mary, candles, rocks, toys, muchas cosas (many things). It is neat to notice that the Christian religion is blended with the indigenous worship of nature…all of the mountains are male or female gods in their own right. The blending of mono- and polytheism is clear and present here. “It is all the same God to us…” She had the most diverse garden I may have ever seen: lots of medicinal herbs, fruits, flowers, vegetables…and a huge field of lemon balm and mint.

Lots of people ran their animals down the streets…two women with their group of piggies….and a long switch to guide them.

Tomates de arbol, or tree tomatoes, in Alfonso’s garden….which also contains lemons, avacodos, limes, peaches, papaya, and lots of vegetables that are also common in the USA.

On our way out to meet Fausto and to meet our bus back to Quito I snapped this shot of a man placing his mud bricks out to sun dry before getting fired. There are large mud brick furnaces fired by wood, sometimes eucalyptus, to finalize the blocks.

Here is a picture of a field of habas, or broad beans. There are strings tied horizontally from the tops of the poles and then down to the ground for the beans to grow up, of course. This picture doesn’t do the size of this field any justice…

On our way out of Cotacachi our professor Nick Biddle surprised us with a stop at a massive rose growing operation. Believe it or not, when you busy roses in the USA, I’ll bet you a dozen that they came from Ecuador. This operation had about 20 hectares, or, for we non-metric whackos, about 50 acres, of greenhouses FULL of roses. One greenhouse had 300 rows and each row had 300 rose bushes. The roses are very carefully crafted and well taken care of. 75% are doe the nasty agro-chemical method, and, due to consumer demand (hey, perhaps we CAN demand better and make it happen) they are now growing 25% organic.
The first thing we saw was a three day old llama (pronounced yama…since two “l’s” makes a “y” sound in Spanish…comprende?) My friend Tim wanted to get close to them…the parents didn’t. They were definatley moving aggressively close to him and he was warned to back off. What a cute creature! Faultless symmetry and a regal posture.

This woman is picking out the perfect roses for bunches. Depending on the size and the quality the roses would go into basically small, medium, and large groups and the rejects…blemishes? Toss it.

Here the roses are basically being flash frozen for a trip to the airport…then to either the USA or Russia. That is the only tow places that they go! Not even anywhere in Ecuador.

The next picture is, perhaps for some, strong proof that nature has a design and a logical structure….or its just really damn pretty, or both!

After the tour we were each given a dozen roses. I noticed a black X on the cardboard surrounding the flowers…factory seconds that are still quite majestic.

After returning to Quito, tired yet excited to meet my new and more permanent host family, I was introduced to Magus, or Maria Augusta, the 19 year old daughter in my new family. We proceeded to jump into a cab, roses and all, and were zipped to the Rodriguez residence, which is about 2 miles or so from The Mango Tree, the restaurant below/classroom above/storage even higher that is owned and operated by the sweet couple that is putting on this magnificent program, Lori and Juan Miguel Espinoza.

Today we got our first big taste of the Professor Nick Biddle’s class about “the post-corporate world”, which is the title of a book we are using that was written by David C. Korten. Needless to say, I have a ton of things to learn about economics, history, business, politics, oh oh OH the endlessness of understanding. It is fun. I hope that I can keep that attitude.

Being that I believe that there are no coincidences, I will end this post with a quote from the song that I am listening to right now, by one of my favorite bands:

“May your lives be long,

and may your wishes all be simple.

And may your hearts stay stroooooong!” – Cloud Cult

Paz, CC