Between the Wheels

2003-06-16, Chicana, Ecuador

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To live between the wars in our time
Living in real time
Holding the good time
Holding on to yesterdays

Well, I have found a place to live. I´m living in a tiny village in the Amazon, consisting of about 250 people.

I rent two rooms in the house of the village mayor. She has three small children, and the grandmother lives there too. We all share the outdoor bathroom.

Water supply and electricity are both sporadic. Sometimes there´s water and electricity, and sometimes there´s not. For the water situation, I always keep a huge trashcan full of water, cuz ya never know when the water will get cut off. I also keep candles on hand, cuz nearly everyday the electricity gets cut off for reasons unbeknownst to me.

This village is truly tiny. To give you an idea: nobody has a telephone. There is only one single telephone line, for the village´s one single public telephone. I happen to live in the same building as the phone.

There are no traffic lights, cuz there´s no traffic. Oh, about every two hours or so, a truck will drive by but that's about it. There´s public transportation: about every 3 hours, an old bus will amble by to pick up the villagers who want to travel to the county capital 30 minutes away.

There are no supermarkets, no policemen, no dentists, no lawyers. However, there are two schools, one foreigner (me) and one midget. There is also one nurse in a tiny little house where medication is distributed, and one hair stylist (her full-time job is as vice-principal of the local high school).

Most people live in wooden shacks, although the "rich" people live in cement or brick homes. All homes have rats, spiders and lots of cockroaches in them. Why just the other night a little mouse was crawling around in my bedroom as I sat reading.

Everybody is dirty here cuz they all work in farms. It´s normal to shower once a week here, cuz even though it rains like crazy here, the water tanks don´t work properly. Someone has to climb up a mountain everyday to pull all the dirt out, cuz it gets plugged up all the time. The roads here are dirt, er, that is, mud, cuz it rains so much.

There´s a public toilet for people who don´t have a bathroom, cuz lots of folks don´t. The public toilet is very elegant. It´s a little wooden structure, perched over the river. People just kind of squat in the little wooden structure, and their poop falls through a hole, directly into the river. Good hygiene!

For food, most people grow their own. Also, on Sundays, most people travel 35 minutes to the tiny little town of Yantzaza, which has a little market which sells all sorts of good stuff, such as fresh guinea pig meat and wilted lettuce.

O.K. The trash collection system. What I am about to tell you is true. I´ve watched it. You can see the pictures on my photos page. I´ve actually accompanied the village trashman. Every morning he walks around the village with a jumbo sized "shopping cart", picking up everybody´s trash from their little plastic buckets (yes, everything is little here, even the people -- I´m the tallest person here). Then he walks over to the village river, which is about 3 minutes away, them he dumps all of it directly into the river. He gets paid by the municipality to do it. It's a nice government job!

In the last two weeks, I´ve been working about 15 hours a day on 4 different projects in three different villages (this means waking up between 4 and 5 A.M., depending on the day, and working until about 9 PM). One of the projects consists of going into the rainforest with a Shuar indian who has been helping me gather seeds from a variety of native tree species. I´ll be using the seeds for a new tree nursery project in one of the villages, called San Vicente de Caney.

In San Vicente, I am working with the local Saraguro Indian nurse to implement family planning classes.

In Chicaña, which is where I´m living, I´m doing a feasibility study for a local organization that wants to open a tiny supermarket. I´ve been leading the study at night time with the organization.

In a village called Los Encuentros, I´ve been working with a woman´s organization to build a tree nursery, and help them find funding for income generation projects.

My learning curve is steep. I can´t believe how quickly I got the ball rolling here. I thought I´d be sitting around, but I´m actually starting to accomplish something.

Even though I´m not Catholic, I went to the village mass last night so that I could socialize and meet people. The priest (The Padre)is a young Argentinean, who is actually Jewish. Don´t ask me how he became Catholic, but he preaches the Word with much fervor. The church was full of people. Probably half the village was in attendance. It´s an old, beat up church, put the people love the Padre.

The Padre has asked me to redesign the village plaze. For now, it´s got a few trees and too much concrete. He wants me to design it so half the concrete gets ripped out, and twice as many native trees are planted.

I had a little accident. While moving some wood on Saturday, I stepped on a nail that was sticking out through a piece of wood. I was wearing rubber boots (that´s what everyone wears here cuz there is mud everywhere and it comes up to the knees), but the nail went through the rubber sole and into my foot. I hurt like crazy and it was bleeding, but I´m O.K. now. No risk of tetanus since I got a shot for it a couple of months ago.