Feb. 18, 2015 Work of Human Hands

February 18, 2015

After our first night in a real bed for a while, all I can say is, hurray for mattresses! Alberth picked us up at the top of the hill and we went to his house for the day. They have four bedrooms, one for each of the two grown sons in university, one for Albert & Magdalena and one for Alberth’s 87-year-old grandmother, who also lives with them. This morning, Alberth’s mother came in wearing a toddler on her back. Later on, two nieces on vacation from school arrived to spend the day in one of the bedrooms playing and listening to music. With us on the couch in the living room using our laptops, and the artisans popping in to speak to Alberth, it was Grand Central Station all day. 

I was engaged nearly all day in financial tasks for the business. After paying our mortgage online (yayyy!), I tried unsuccessfully to download a repaired file from QuickBooks which I had received a week previously. I was on the phone nearly all day (at 20 cents per minute, this is going to be a big expense!) trying to download this file. Intuit on January 14 said it would take three days. It took more than 30 days. Guess what, my friends—the case had been closed, the file disappeared and I had to upload it to them again to wait another putative 3 days for it to be fixed. QuickBooks—now there’s an oxymoron. I can only hope it won’t take another 30 days, the case closed and the file disappeared again. I feel like the movie Groundhog Day. 

While I was wasting my day online, Vincent was in the workshop photographing the process of producing beads for another order. It came home to us both how much work is involved in the production of a single bracelet or necklace. Juanita and Andrés purchase their beads from suppliers on the coast. Alberth and Magdalena make theirs from the raw dried seeds. Alberth is a gifted mechanic and has designed and constructed most of their machinery. The women wear all kinds of protective gear—masks for the dust, safety goggles to ward against any flying chips, ear protection against the noise of the equipment, aprons, gloves, etc. The room in which they work is murky with dust—they are working toward purchasing evacuators. One fact which came home to us today in a much clearer way—every single bead is cut, shaped and smoothed individually by hand. It is literally unimaginable. As many as 10,000 beads for one order of 400 bracelets! Tomorrow they get dyed in different colors for each type of bead.

Next time I look at a tagua bracelet, I am going to remember this. This isn’t really mass production. The tools make the drilling, cutting, sanding and shaping simpler and quicker, but that is all—there aren’t any automated processes, or molds or anything. Vincent noted that this jewelry really is the work of human hands.

Once the beads were finished, Magdalena pulled out her clipboard and told Alberth how many of each color there should be. Alberth, Vincent and I did the counting, assisted by Alberth’s grandmother, who could not be dissuaded from helping. She struggled with the task for about forty minutes and then quietly put all the ones she’d tried to count back into the bowl for us to count. Bless her, she tried her best! 

After supper, the four of us had a conversation about the workers, what their incentives are, how the training is done and what the challenges are (getting them to wear their protective equipment, for one). 

In 2007, there were four workers in the shop. The business has grown significantly in the last 8 years. Most of their output is sold in France. Only about 25-35% of it is sold in the U.S., with the remainder going to England, Switzerland and Japan. None is sold in Ecuador. In October of 2014, there were so many orders that they had to hire nine temporary workers to complete them. 

They remember the difficult years. They try to hire people who need the work most—single moms, mildly disabled folks, people without many opportunities for employment. We noted yesterday that most of the people in the shop had found out about the opportunity through friends, neighbors, and relatives. This makes for a friendly team of workers, but there are problems, Alberth and Magdalena noted. She does all the training and most of the discipline. In October, when she had nine new employees to train, she devoted most of her time to them, resulting in the senior workers feeling abandoned. They said she didn’t care about them any more, just the new people. She had to explain to them all that she did still care about them, but that the new people needed to be trained so that they could get all their tasks accomplished. She also noted that as the disciplinarian, she is sometimes called “bruja,” as she has to keep the work on schedule, prevent the women from coming in late or manufacturing excuses, and so on. To me, the fact that the senior workers felt she didn’t care about them indicates just how much they normally feel she DOES care about them.

It’s not a job she takes lightly, and she related how hard it is to hire temporaries, because it is so challenging to tell someone, “We don’t need you any more.” Of the nine, four left for one reason or another, and they have employed the other five full-time. It is a challenge to keep the orders coming in, and they feel the responsibility for the now 15 women who work for them, to keep them employed and able to take care of their families. Work is so hard to come by here. The women in the shop related there are many, many more women whom they know who are looking for work and can’t get any.

They feel lucky to be in a place where they are treated well, paid well, and have a friendly, relaxed atmosphere in which to work. We discussed the benefits the Espins provide to keep trained, skilled workers. They include excursions, an annual trip to the coast where families are invited, help with school expenses in May, an annual bonus (if profits allow), insurance, lunches brought in on occasion, 15 days paid vacation with an extra day for each year worked above 5. These all make the production costs higher for them. They feel that without making their own beads, the quality would suffer so much that they would lose customers. They feel the pressures of the market to lower costs, to keep people employed fairly, innovate new designs, cover their costs and increase their sales. At times they get tired, Magdalena noted. But their passion is to keep their 15 employees, and more if possible, in good work as long as they possibly can. We can only applaud—and try to sell as much of their jewelry as possible.

Friday the 13th of February Bouquets of Friendship

We got up early this morning (5 a.m.) to drive to Quito to visit the flower market to try to order flowers for Juanita's niece' wedding next weekend. The market is a large open square of blacktop which is surrounded by large trucks around the edge, with their tailgates facing the open square. Vincent took a lot of photos and counted more than 30 vendors there. I was dying of curiosity to know how things are run at this market. It seems to be a city project, as there is a manager of the whole market, and each vendor wears a red vest that has the name of the market on it and a badge.  Our visit was mostly unsuccessful, as the bride's chosen colors are a blue-purple only found in nature in statice and asters, plus white. We did see some dyed roses, but the vendors said there was no way they could guarantee those would be there next week. So I told Juanita how I would do it, and she agreed that that would probably work best. When I suggested the alternative of dying the roses herself, she said, no, she liked the first idea better. Why complicate her life, was her question. Why indeed? I wish I had thought of that question more often myself.

Afterwards, we drove to Camari's office. It is another fair trade group which Andrés jokingly called, "the competition." The offices were extremely nice inside, the place was swarming with employees, each of whom greeted us (I could swear some of them, more than once), and each other, with tremendous warmth and friendliness. Juanita's interview lasted about half an hour and happily, resulted in an order for samples. When that business was concluded, we visited Camari's shop downstairs, which had an amazing array of foods, especially vegetarian and organic things, and also the crafts they export to other countries. We asked Andrés to show us some of the things he and Juanita make for Camari, and he did. We are very glad they have more than one outlet.

We drove then to Sadecom to deliver the products for shipment later this month. All went well until the end, when we realized that one of the bags of product had been left at home! Here is one answer why things that were on the order and on the list for the shipment don't actually arrive (it happens sometimes, and no one could figure out why). Very important when you're driving an hour into Quito to remember everything you're supposed to bring.

Then we drove to a shop similar to a Home Depot and bought three light switches for the new part of the house and I promised Juanita I would show her how to use a paring knife for arranging flowers rather than gardener's shears, which is more tiring.  Our final stop was a home supply place, where Andrés bought a few more tiles to finish the red bathroom, then we drove the hour back home. I want to try to describe the way things are done here. On every corner is someone selling fruit. On every other corner is someone selling textiles, housewares, jewelry, kids' clothes, anything you can conceive of is brought to the sidewalk and hawked either in the street or on the sidewalk or both. It's hard to see how driving is even possible. There are frequent contretemps, but no one blows his horn, and people just slam on their brakes and wait for the other car or bus or taxi to get out of the way. Every time we've been out on a major highway between towns, we've seen an accident, and this morning was no exception--a four-car pileup apparently involving the car in front stopping suddenly.

By the time we returned, shortly before noon, Vincent had shot his wad, in terms of energy, and Juanita made him a bowl of soup and rice with fresh garlic (which everyone in the world knows is good for killing all kinds of bugs.) He stayed home while we picked up the kids and went to the local restaurant for lunch. My stomach is not in really good shape, either, so I had only the soup and rice. When we came back, everyone was exhausted, even the kids, so we all had an hour nap.

We were off again then to Quito and an extremely large mall, where I think Andrés was trying to find a bank that was open. When I say large, I mean really, really large. All the banks we saw were thronged with lines and lines of people. So after walking up and down the mall twice (exhausting), we gave up and continued on. Because it is the day before Valentine's Day, the mall was filled with displays of flowers. We had to stop and admire each one, because Juanita and I are both flower nuts. Then we needed to take pictures of everyone at each one, really needed to.

From there, Andrés dropped Juanita and me off to buy sheets for the new bed, different size rings for the new jewelry piece they are introducing and a mysterious errand to a place where there was a cashier in a cage and Juanita exchanged five single dollar coins for a piece of paper. I feel at times as if I am simply bobbing along in the wake of all that passes and after the occasional swamping, I find a quiet space to wonder what is going on.

At last, we reached Juanita's sister's house, where I was swallowed up by her sister Olgita, parked on her couch and interviewed in the typical kindly, Ecuadorean fashion, shown the photos from the last wedding two years ago, and surreptitiously kicked and pinched by the two-year-old granddaughter, who took an immediate dislike to me, I don't know why. As the waves of family washed back and forth through this room, Olgita's husband returned home from work and talked with Andrés for a while. When Andrés was summoned back to the wedding flower planning, Papi, as the granddaughter, Sophie, called him, took up the host's duties and asked me about where things were in the U.S. He knew it was between two oceans, Canada and Panama. So I filled in a few missing points for him. There were a LOT of people in this house, kids and adults, grandparents, parents, cousins, sisters, boyfriends. I sat there for a while by myself when the hosts answered the phone, and I have to say I was grateful for the time out. Vincent says he really misses hearing English spoken, and although I do not have the same feeling, I do need to pause for breath from time to time and try to sort it all out--who is who and what is happening.

We drove home, arriving about 8, found Vincent awake and started making bread and tea for supper. Vincent related that the electricity had been out about two hours in the afternoon in the whole neighborhood. I've no idea how frequent this occurrence may be, but Juanita didn't seem at all surprised. In terms of length and busyness, this rivals any day we spent with Chris! Juanita gave me another hug, again making me glad we have come.

I have only to keep my eyes and my heart open, and I believe eventually I will figure out what's going on. Certainly this country seems to open its arms to us.