As I said yesterday, in this town of 14,000, there are 3,000 artisans, mostly woodcarvers. One of them is our hostess' brother-in-law, Pablo. We walked down the main street with Aida until we reached Pablo's workshop, near the main highway. Pablo was carving a large statue of a priest, and he demonstrated how the arms and head would be attached later. Most of the wood is pine, as the government prohibits cutting the harder, darker woods of the rainforest, such as teak.
Afterwards, Aida showed us how to get on the bus to Ibarra. As my phone was working, but no longer charging, we went with her to the Apple store with my phone charger, which appeared to work with other phones, so the agent told us to bring the phone in tomorrow to check out why it wouldn't charge. On the way out, we encountered a friend of Aida's who was wearing a very pretty necklace-and-earrings set which Aida had made for her. We took a stunning photo of it.
When we returned we continued our interview with Aida. She showed us a newspaper article which had recently been written about her. One of the things she said in that interview is that "art is in my blood." It is true--just about everything in her house was designed or made by her. After she got married, she learned jewelry making in alpaca, copper, silver and stones. Her sales were good at first, but after dolarización (where the currency was replaced by U.S. dollars), a lot of the Latin American tourists stopped coming as things were now too expensive, so in 2000, she started making glass jewelry. Her income really helped the family and gave her a bit of independence with money, which she appreciated. She would work for a while, then use the money to construct their home here in San Antonio, then work a bit more and construct some more. After five years of this, she had completed the house to the point they could move in and finish the work while they lived there. She really loves the freedom and company of living in this house, closer to nature and the real world than she ever felt in the big city. She had a shop in Ibarra for years, but gave it up because her sales had dropped, rents had increased, and she could no longer afford it.
She still thinks of running a shop in town, but most of her income comes from the glass pieces she makes for export, or from sales in Otavalo on market days.
She showed us some photos from St. Maarten, in the Caribbean, where a French couple used to invite her to spend time with them. She was very happy on those occasions, she recalls, with a sigh and a lingering smile.
Now she is working all the time, a thing which I discovered when I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom--Aida was up and working with the tiny pieces of glass on her worktable. Her hope is to fulfill her daughters' dreams of an education. Anaís, 18, and Yamani, 22, are both in college hoping to land professional jobs, one as a dentist, the other as a film sound producer. As we saw, these things are almost out of reach for so many Ecuadoreans.
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