When I realized today was the 11th, I thought of Anne--her birthday is today. Happy birthday, my beloved friend!
Our days are falling into a sort of routine--wake up at 5 when the roosters begin crowing. There is a neighborhood rooster who I swear is being strangled every morning. Either that or he was removed from the flock too early, because his cry is nothing like the other roosters.' I feel compelled to laugh at his poor imitation! We work on notes for the previous day (internet not available in our room) or sometimes have prayer together.
Around 8 or 8:30, Juanita makes us a huge breakfast--today's was papaya, fried eggs, and patacones (fried green plantain patties). (Monday, it was pancakes, and when I asked what they were called in Spanish, she replied with a smile, "pancakes." :) Some things don't need translation. We return to our room, cover everything to keep out the dust of construction and collect everyone together to go to the shop at the equatorial monument, help out with the work, ask questions and write answers (after repeating them in my minimal Spanish to see if we got the gist). Andrés is with the children this week, since they are on vacation, so he comes with them to pick us up for lunch, and afterwards returns us to the shop where we work and talk some more, then home where we get a "cafecito," which is a hot drink and a snack, such as chocolate bread, which we had yesterday--yum! Juanita often orders food for the folks working at the shop and brings it back for them. If they have food, they offer to share it with us as well. Very neighborly set-up.
No more trouble with the authorities this morning, and we set to work--I, cutting cords for the 480 pairs of earrings which go with the necklaces we finished yesterday, Vincent studying Spanish. A new person arrived this morning, Rosita, who works several days a week at home for Juanita making jewelry. She is older than the others, and a bit shy, I think. Isabel is there four days a week or so. Andrés stayed with us a while working on various tasks around the shop. He went to pick up the children and took us to lunch. On the menu was beef or "internal organs." I could see Vincent turn pale. Everybody had a good laugh at his reaction. It turned out to be intestines, but we ate the beef! Across from the restaurant is an ice cream shop--the ice cream is made not with cows' milk, but coconut milk. Vincent treated everyone to an ice cream (as he had yesterday) and it was absolutely delicious. Everyone chose the coconut flavor, because it is so yummy.
Juanita brought soup back to Rosita and Isabel, which they enjoyed with some of the patacones she had made for breakfast. (There was a small mountain of them). Another neighbor, Manresa (sp?), enjoyed them very much and kept coming back for more.) About mid-afternoon, another employee of Juanita's arrived to work on the earrings. Her name is Paulina. She has a fifteen year-old son (she married at the age of 19) and is from the countryside--the campo--12th of 14 children. She reminded me so much of my mother. She told jokes in Spanish, teased everyone, and laughed a lot. She had us laughing uncontrollable at times, so much so that Vincent teased them about being "borrachas," drunk. She retorted that he was a sapo, which when I looked it up was a "toad." We all fell off our stools laughing. Both of us tried a piece of the earring assembly which was to poke two ends of a loop of cord through the drilled tagua slices. Well! It looked very easy the way they did it, but it was hard! We each managed to get one or two loops through, but had to turn the ones that were stuck over to Pauli or Juanita to finish. We really grew in appreciation for the work the women do. Wow! just poking a loop through a hole is a whole process in and of itself.
It was time to ask the remaining questions of Juanita--what do you want us to say to our customers. She hesitated a long time, then replied that we should say how important the work is to the lives of the mothers who perform it. She related a fact which I had not known before, which is that her daughter, Emily, has a physical condition which the doctors say is permanent. She gets frequent intestinal infections, and in December had to be hospitalized for it (not the first time.) There is a preventive medicine her doctor prescribed, but it comes from the U.S. and cannot be imported to Ecuador. Government policy. So through her friendship with Chris, she has been able to obtain this medicine which allows her not to have to give Emily so many antibiotics, which is the only treatment actually available in Ecuador. She said that Isabel would not be able to deal with her daughter's severe asthma if she did not have the income and that this was true for many mothers. The money helps with food, clothing, schooling and medicine, so she said simply, "Tell them when they buy something, thank you very much."
The tears came to my eyes when I had understood what she said. What a difficult life! And yet, Juanita is almost always smiling, even when she is very tired. "God is good," she says, and she means it. We brought Paulina home, and Rosita's bags, which were too heavy for her to carry, then as we entered the house, Juanita sparkled at me with the words, "We have an invitation." We bundled everyone into the car (Mateo was feeling better) to visit her friend, who speaks pretty good English and prepares an excellent empanada! Her friend explained to us that although she was a journalist, she preferred to care for her two daughters at home. Her husband also is a writer, and she related how difficult it is now to express your opinion in writing. There is definitely censorship of the press and maltreatment of those who dare to criticize the government. She also spoke of the struggles of the indigenous people to protect the environment, the land, and especially the water, as those are what sustain them. They have been protesting actively against the government, especially over land and water rights, opposing the drilling of more oil wells. She said that non-indigenous people are not very actively protesting, but they ought to be supporting the protests, as the indigenes have it right. She told us about a cooperative in the countryside called Yunguilla which are working cooperatively and ecologically on everything. Maybe we'll get a chance to visit. We had already heard about the Intag valley, which is large and has a lot of support from other countries. Yunguilla is much smaller, and it has no outside support, many fewer people, but the idea is the same: protect the land, purify the water, work together.
She felt that tourism in Ecuador was not on the rise, as the government has stated. As we have heard before in other places, there is a lot of public unhappiness with the expensive Ecuador tourism ad during the Super Bowl (sponsored by the Ecuadorean government). For those millions, they could have built more hotels, more infrastructure to receive all the desired tourists and taught more people to speak English to deal with the influx of gringos. Nevertheless, she is content with her life, even with the restricted income of her not working, enjoys being with her kids and loves her husband. He is a good man, as Juanita says. We did not see him because he often works till midnight.
When we got home, I was able to reach Anne by phone, which was so good for me. What a blessing to be able to stay in touch with friends and family even though far away! I went to sleep thinking about how life unfolds so slowly, day by day. It is not often I have a sense of where it is going. But there are so many wonderful sights, sounds, tastes, smells and relationships along the way. When I am reminded of my mother (as Pauli did so strongly) and my father, both of whom are in the next world, I just feel so grateful for all the kind and loving people I have met and for their blessing. We truly do not travel this road alone, as the spirit of Love accompanies us all the way, even in the dark and unclear times. To all of you who are reading this, thank you for your kindness and friendship. We would not have made it this far without you.
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