Whew, what a wild week that was!
I arrived in a small village in the high sierras with my English tutor after a three- hour bus ride on Monday. I moved in with an indigenous woman and her delightful, young son, Luis, and my tutor stayed at another house in this village of 2000. The terrain in the Ecuadorian sierras in absolutely breath-taking. Huge green, lush mountains adorned by yellow and green patshwork quilting. Happy cows everywhere and beautifully-clad indigenous people going about their daily chores. Picture your most idealistic buccolic setting...and that´s La Chimba.
The main economic activity of this community is the production and sale of milk. You are kind of a nobody without a cow here. The milk they produce is eventually made into powdered milk and sold in Colombia, Venezuela and Peru. And this is some really hard work.
My hostess gets up every morning at 4:00 a.m., walks for 45 minutes to a pasture where the family cows live(she has five cows herself, but the whole family has about 20), milks her cows and then gets on a milk truck which carries the peasants and their milk to a purification center. She then comes home and does all the chores around the house which include gardening a small family plot, then takes off again at 3:00 to repeat the milking process. After all that she comes home and makes dinner and cleans some more! Hortensia and I and Luis got along famously, in fact the most fun I had in La Chimba was the time I spent with them.
The foundation with whom I am taking classes, is helping this community to develop community-based tourism projects as an extra source of income. So, one of the ¨Fun¨activities they arranged for me was to climb the local volcano. Now, the village is situated at around 9000 feet, so already the air is pretty thin. When we arrived at the base of the mountain, I heard Vinicio (head of tourism in La Chimba) tell our truck driver to pick us up in an hour. ¨Oh, an hour" I thought to myself, ¨Thats good, because that volcano look awfully high. I guess we are only taking a small hike¨¨ To my utter horror, I realized ten minutes in that we were to climb 1000 feet! And that we did. But it didn´t take an hour to get me up and down the first 1000 feet of the gigantic volcano. It took three and a half. I guess they will think twice before they invite the next approaching-sixty year old for a jaunt up the volcano.
Of course, the views were spectacular, but I would say this climb is a close second to the Virunga Volcano near-disaster in Rwanda last year. I must say though, that through the course of the many, many, many, rest stops we made, the three of us had some excellent discussions on politics, economics, and philosophy. When we finally made it back, I had to lay down for two hours to recuperate.
As if that wasn´t tortuous enough, the next day they took me to a fishing project they were working on. That entailed me riding horseback for one hour in the rain (the two guys went in the truck!) At first I was embarrased because I explained to the little nine-year old boy who accompanied me, that I was terrified of galloping horses, and that he was, under no circumstances, to engage his horse in a gallop, or even a trot for that matter (His horse was the alpha male, so my horse followed behind him.) However, after 45 minutes of cold rain, I told the kid that we needed to get a move on and so we began to move somewhere between an trot and a gallop for the last 15 minutes, and it wasn´t so bad after all.
The other terrifying thing about the horse ride is that from the road we took there was a 1000 or so feet drop to a river below, and these horses didn´t have shoes on, so they prefered to walk in the extremely narrow path of grass right at the edge of the cliff rather than the rocky road. A number of times, I tried to get my guy back on the road, but he always wandered back to the grass strip, so I just stopped looking over the edge and hoped for the best.
When we reached the fishing project site, I had to climb down about 800 feet to the fish ponds on an 85 degree path so thick with mud, that it was impossible to use, so we had to crawl down on the grass next to the path. Very harrowing, not to mention embarrassing. Then they had me fish! I hate fishing. But these ponds were so thick with fish that with a bare stick and little string with a hook on it, I caught three fish in about two minutes. Hortensia was very proud of me. So was Luis, and with great fanfare they cleaned and cooked the fish for lunch. That´s when I told the fellows, I had had enough of their outdoor tourism, and was going to spend last two days of my visit with Hortensia. And that was where the fun began.
More on all that later as I need to get home now.
Finally, Great news. Camila was accepted into Hastings and starts mid August. Que viva Camila! As they would say here.
cheers
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