Monday, Feb. 23, 2015 Faithful in a Little

Writing, writing, all day. Magdalena teased, "I think you are more interested in writing than visiting the workshop." Not true, but deadlines definitely loom large in my mind, and today is the deadline, both for the artisan interview and for the weekly report. Tomorrow we leave for Peguche. I feel so comfortable with Magdalena and Albert, I don't really want to leave. At supper tonight, they expressed so much kindness, welcoming us to come back to visit any time. We returned the invitation in a heartfelt way.

Their son Fernando has a birthday today, and they kindly included us in the modest celebration. His response: "Muchisimas gracias!" This just totally sums up this week here. Incredibly hard-working, dedicated, gracious and hospitable, they are nevertheless grateful for their family, friends, their business, and the opportunity of a new day. We have to leave early in the morning tomorrow, Albert is driving all of us to Otavalo, as has an errand there, too, and it fits into his schedule, or more likely, can be made to fit. What a blessing they have been to us, and teachers as well. If we keep on being faithful in the little we know to do, the road will open out and offer us more opportunities than now we can imagine.

Friday, Feb. 20, 2015 to Sunday, Feb. 22, 2015

Friday, February 20

We spent all day nearly writing reports on interviews and the past week. There was much to say and much care to be taken to get it right. After supper, we had a very good conversation with Albert and Magdalena. They are such good people, very kind, hard-working and hospitable. We are invited to visit Baños with them tomorrow. Albert's grandmother has a home there, very rustic, and we will visit the famous hot springs there. We are both looking forward to it.

Saturday, February 21 - Sunday, February 22

We were to leave at 6 a.m., but because Albert and Magdalena needed to deliver some finished products, we left closer to 8 a.m. With dismay, Albert realized that this was a work day, to make up for the holidays enjoyed earlier in the week. The traffic was pretty bad (not as bad as Manila, say, or Los Angeles). Albert was very, very patient, and as people took chances with their lives to get into the flow of traffic, there was a lot of sudden braking, but almost no honking of horns. Magdalena observed that people here were fairly "tranquilo," or calm. Not a lot of road rage! We drove for over four hours to reach Baños, stopping for brunch and an ice cream in a little cafe. The volcanoes (many of them snow-capped) were very beautiful, like exotic dancers disappearing behind veils of cloud, then tantalizingly reappearing against the dark blue sky. To me, Chimborazo is the most beautiful of all, its blown out peak looking like a silver crown. There's a whole line of them crossing the equator, but only a few are currently active.

We reached Baños in early afternoon, spent some time cleaning the house of ash, which is constantly falling on the city of Baños from nearby volcano Tungurahua (Throat of Fire), then decided to walk around the town. We had tea, fruit and bread for supper and then each couple sought one of the two double beds in the main room. A comedic scene in the middle of the night played out when Susanne, needing to find the outdoor bathroom in the dark, woke the entire household trying to open a door which was latched shut. Early Sunday morning, we walked to the baths and got in quite quickly with no line. A few hours later, the line was hours long, so it was good we had gone with Albert and Magdalena, who know the drill. The water was lovely, relaxing and the famous waterfall was mesmerizing, dropping nearly straight down 260 feet to feed the community laundry (dozens of stone basins free for all to do their washing). Toward noon it began to be very crowded, with people stepping on our toes to go past and kids splashing wildly, so we retreated to a restaurant for a very nice lunch. I learned not to spent five hours in a hot bath by becoming very dizzy and nauseous after exiting the pool. But really? The alternative was to plunge myself into an extremely cold waterfall for several minutes longer than I felt I could survive. So as they say here, "Vale la pena." It was worth the pain.  The church here is beautiful, and built of volcanic rock in the center. Afterward, Albert drove us up to the tree house on a high hill adjacent to Tungurahua, where there is a bit of a tourist attraction just sitting on the lawn looking up at the mountain, wreathed today in clouds, and watching the young people swinging out over a 400 foot drop into the ravine at the base of the volcano. There was a long line of people wanting to climb the tree house, while we demurred and simply enjoyed the view. Such beautiful views were available on the back side of the waterfall behind the town of Baños! We found ourselves to be totally relaxed, carefree and mellow--without any artificial aids. What a wonderful weekend this was.

Our generous hosts were pleased that we had enjoyed it so much, while we were blessed that they gave us such a treat. It is amazing, when life is pared down to the essentials, how simple and lovely it is. Thank you, Albert and Magdalena.

Monday, February 16 Redefining Success

We got up very late this morning--9:30! Not surprising for me, and Vincent had spent a good part of last evening playing basketball with the Flores family (while I devoted hours of painstakingly evacuating every part of my food processing plant), so he was very tired, too.

Today has been one of typing up loose ends, literally. We finished our report for Minga for this week (and the second half of last week), tying together the many parts of our interview(s) with Juanita and Andrés, and now Vincent has gone to bed and I am pulling together the last bits of our blog. Another beautiful, sunny and pleasantly cool day here. Juanita and I made an "ensalada" for lunch today. I have never had a part hot, part cold salad before. My contribution was to chop carrots, green and red peppers, cilantro, broccoli, celery, Bermuda onion (called cebolla colorada here) and other vegetables. Juanita cooked the carrots, peas (fresh ones!), broccoli, soaked the peppers, cilantro and onion in lime juice and added salt, white vinegar and avocado oil (yum!) to the mix and tossed it. It was delicious. She had made a soup especially for my poor, violated stomach, with rice and potatoes and a tiny bit of cilantro, which was very soothing, so I dared take two bites of the salad. It was really, really tasty.

Afterwards, we worked some more on our reports, and Juanita helped Emily with her homework. At four, we four adults drove to the shop at Mitad del Mundo and wound up our series of interviews asking questions which covered some of the gaps in their story. We noted how difficult it is with a natural product like tagua (which is a seed hardened to the consistency of wood) to achieve any kind of uniformity. The pink tube beads, especially, did not match the light pink interstitial beads. They had been bought at different times and contrasted too much. Rosita had been putting them together with white elastic as well, and black works better, as it doesn't show dirt as much. She grumbled (cheerfully) about having to redo them and made jokes about how she just wanted to go home and forget about her day. The place was packed with tourists, and Juanita and Andrés were kept pretty busy engraving names on tagua plaque bracelets for them. (At $1 each, it was a steal!)

While we were asking questions of the Flores, we watched Juanita making some changes to some of the samples we saw two weeks ago. It was amazing to see how much improvement there was. I am hoping they will sell very, very well for them and be new products they can be proud of.

Everyone was in a cheerful, relaxed mood, and we wound up the evening with a merienda (or what Juanita calls a cafecito) of tea, bread and peach marmalade. For the past five hours, we've been processing the experiences and conversations of this week. I am so grateful to feel better from my purgation!

One thing is crystal clear to me--health is by far the greatest possession one can have, and when it is lost, it doesn't matter how many other things I have, all I can think of is the suffering. NOTHING else registers. Juanita said a few days ago that every order she finishes is a success. Every item she sells is a success, and that it's important to celebrate all the successes, no matter how small, because it could so easily be otherwise. For me, every day I am healthy is a reason to celebrate with much gratitude. It's easy to forget how great it is to feel well. I vow afresh to remember as often as I can. I am thinking every day about what real wealth is--not what the media say, but being at peace, having meaningful work to do, having loving people around me, being able to touch and taste and smell and see and hear the sounds of joyfully living things. This is living life to the full. I am filled with gratitude and awe for the way Andrés and Juanita have taught me--again--the goodness of being alive.

Wednesday, February 11, Walking by Faith

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.