Up early this morning to go to work with Juanita at the shop. Sunday night she was up till 2 a.m. finishing an order for Minga. She seems quite tired this morning. She works so very hard. She has been having severe pain in her heel, the doctor told her it was from stress and being 40 lb. overweight (which she isn’t). She’s been suffering quite a bit from it lately and was worried about what to do. Last night, her niece gave her a massage, which seems to be helping immensely. She said it was almost 100% better, and we both rejoiced. I know what that pain is like having experienced it myself for many years.
She showed me a wedding invitation from her niece, who visited last night with her fiancé, Christian, and several family members. We talked about flowers—it’s something she does for family weddings, and she invited me to go with her to the flower market on Friday morning. That will be fun! She showed me a church she had decorated for another wedding—she is very skilled.
When we arrived at the shop, we had a bit of kerfuffle when the security guards chased us into the parking lot and wanted to know why we gringos were not paying the entrance fee for tourists. I kept hearing the word pasaporte, as more and more park employees with stern looks and badges arrived and departed. We are not allowed to work in Ecuador without a special visa (as is true in the U.S.) I asked if it made a difference if we were volunteers, which seemed to launch another round of visits from authorities frowning and repeating the word pasaporte. Finally, Juanita went to the park office and came back after about half an hour with a signed permission for us to enter the park with her until next Monday. I think everyone felt relieved that they were not forced to be unpleasant to the strangers.
By this time, Yadira and Isabel had arrived and were ready to go to work. Isabella is actually an employee of the Flores family. Yadira works in the shop next door and helps out as a volunteer when business is slow to mitigate the boredom of working all day with few or no customers. They spent the whole day making necklaces (collares). Vincent and I helped, he by packing finished pieces, I by cutting cord for stringing tagua beads. He noted how striking it was, the human passion for measurement. Here we sit at the park denoting the exact location of the middle of the earth, measuring string to the exact length required. Nearby is a museum relating the fact that although Everest is the tallest mountain on earth, measured from the earth’s center, the volcano Chimborazo is taller because of the equatorial bulge. Ironically, that passion for measurement and exactitude does not seem to be universally shared—the wall in our bedroom, for example, is built around a cement column, and one of the columns in the adjoining room covers part of the window.
The style we were making is called “lilypad,” and we had fun later showing Juanita what a waterlily looks like in the Chicago Botanic Garden in summer. We spent most of the day interviewing Juanita, and when Andrés came, we interviewed him, too. Yadira and Isabel chipped in with their views. Yadira is a high school student, and Isabel is the mother of three, two of whom arrived in the afternoon. Isabel’s youngest, Sarita, has asthma and wasn’t feeling tip-top. Isabel worries about her, as the traditional remedies (breathing steam, for example) don’t seem to help her. She needs an inhaler frequently. The extent of Isabel’s concern indicates the seriousness of her daughter’s condition. The work with Juanita helps her to pay for critical medical expenses. We asked her what she liked best about her work, and she replied that she felt really good that the work with tagua saved elephants’ lives and was good for the environment. Juanita answered this same question by saying that she just loves working with tagua and really enjoys telling customers about how good it is as a food when it is fresh and how hard and durable it is after being dried. It just seems marvelous to her—to us, too.
The interview dissolved into laughter when we asked Andrés what he liked best about his work. His immediate reply was, “When the check comes.” After we recovered, he added that he really likes teaching and helping the workers improve their skills and the quality of their products. He is a soft-spoken, patient man. He does all of the administrative work for the business while Juanita designs and manufactures the product by hand and supervises and works with three other women who work both at home and at the shop with her. She was jubilant that the order for 480 necklaces was completed by nightfall.
Mateo had been feeling unwell at lunch and was still under the weather by the time we returned home. We had a nice snack, and I typed up the notes from the interviews until my class (internet) began at 8 p.m., so I sat in the living room/dining room/kitchen/bedroom/office (where the server is) while Andrés, Juanita and Emily went to a meeting at church. Just as they arrived home, Mateo threw up, and it seemed as if he would be better after that, so as the impromptu babysitter, I was relieved.
It was a day of many mixed feelings. I had a small taste of what it is to be a foreigner. Nothing so bad as what immigrants experience in the U.S! I also felt vicarious relief from chronic pain, family pride, admiration for the family’s resilience and cohesion, strain from trying to understand Spanish, relate what I thought had been said and correct my initial understanding. Instead of writing today’s experiences, I fell into bed and slid straight into sleep, exhausted by emotion.
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