Bus meanderings

Laguna Quilotoa

I have just got back from a trip to Latacunga (a town about 2 hours south of Quito) and Laguna Quilotoa a nearby amazing lake in the crater of an extinct volcano at 3900m. On Friday I left work and went to Latacunga with Fernando, another Progressio development worker who lives there with his wife and two sons and they warmly welcomed me into their home. After a good nights sleep, lots of chat and a delicious breakfast of 'arepas' - special Columbian bread products (which I foolishly said were a little like British muffins!) Fernando took me to the bus station to head to Quilotoa.

Quilotoa is a weird tiny village whose existence is pretty much only justified by the lake that formed there 200 years ago and the tourism created by it. The lake is stunning though – a proper stereotypical volcanic crater that looked to me like it ought to have dinosaurs roaming around it. I had a great half an hour stomping down into the crater to reach the water and a puffing, panting and wheezing hour climbing back up to the rim. Below are a few of the many many pictures I took – the colour of the lake changes constantly throughout the day.

I think the purple plants in foreground are quinoa which grows wild here as well as being cultivated

It gets very cold there because of the altitude, but I spent a cosy night in a hostel with a group of cyclists crushed under a cosy mountain of blankets. I've concluded that one of the reasons for my settling in Scotland must be my love of the cold. I'm so much happier with 4 layers on in a cold wind than in the baking sun. People here seem to hate it. I had an amusing conversation with the elderly lady next to me on the sweltering bus to the Quilotoa when I opened the window, assuming everyone would want to reduce the heat and the smell of the two children being sick next to us. She told me that it was dangerous to open the window when the bus was ascending to altitude because the cold high altitude air would rush in suddenly and make us sick. I couldn't help noticing she was wearing what looked like 5 layers of wool whilst I was in a thin t-shirt. I suppose its just what you're used to.

Buses here are a lot more entertaining than buses in the UK. There are always people leaping and off to sell you strange plastic bags of food and other weird and wonderful products. Lots of them do a huge long sales pitch where they apologise loudly for the inconvenience but explain that they would other wise be unemployed and have a large family to support etc...then launch into a mammoth monologue about the merits of whatever product they are selling.

On the first bus of the weekend where a guy was selling cereal bars I stupidly made the resolution to buy one of whatever such vendors were selling in a sort of solidarity like buying the Big Issue. I stuck to my decision when the second guy got on selling pirate dvds (Volver) but quickly revoked my pact when the third guy began peddling a packet of herbs to cleanse men's urinary system and improve their sex drive. The 4th guy pushing children's literacy text book reinfirced my decision to be a bit selective in my solidarity.

Apart from the heat and the vomit though, the journey there was interesting to see all the tiny villages on route and the amazing patchwork of fields of cereals which reach to the very tops of mountains which would be bare in Scotland. I got a much better (and pleasantly cold) view on the way back in the back of a pickup truck.

Vertical agriculture

Other than that I have been working and settling into the mundane office realities which seem to be one of the few things that is the same in Quito and Edinburgh – setting up and fixing glitches in email accounts, writing budgets and workplans, cursing slow internet connections and fiddling around with tables in excel.

The joys of food

I am finding writing a blog a bit of an odd thing- producing a rambling monologue with no clear audience...but anyway, I'm going to carry on regardless.

I have now finished my orientation program and on Monday I start 'proper work'. The orientation has been amazing – lots of really interesting meetings and a huge quantity of information to absorb. I feel like I now need another two weeks with absolutely no new input in order to take everything in.

The orientation included a trip to Cuenca, Ecuador's third largest city, which is in the Andes like Quito but in the south of the country. As soon as I arrived there I went to the birthday party of one of the Progressio development workers who live in the city and met the development workers and a group of other foreigners. It was nice to feel part of a little community of similar folk and they were wonderfully welcoming despite the fact that after a long hard day of Spanish my overstretched brain had given up and the best communication I could manage was mute grins and nods.

After meeting them informally on Tuesday night I had a marathon of non stop meetings with each of them in their workplaces and learnt lots more about the work of Progressio's partner organisations there. It was useful to learn about some of the differences in context between Quito and Cuenca e.g. the challenges of HIV AIDS work in a place where everyone knows everyone compared to in the capital. I also learnt that it is now winter in Cuenca and cold and rainy and that it would have been good to take a coat.

Today I've spent getting lost in lots of parts of Quito buying bits and pieces to make my new room more homely and on a long quest for a fruit and veg market. When I was in Cusco the market was the centre of life – for lunch, juice, mountains of fresh fruit and veg and friendly faces. Here it seems things have moved much more towards our supermarket monopoly lifestyle: everyone who can afford to goes to Supermaxi and markets aren't so easy to find in the city centre.

I met with someone from CEA this week, a network of agroecology organisations which works to support small scale sustainable production. He told the familiar story of farmers being squeezed by the big supermarket monopolies and pressurised into intensive production of large quantities of a limited variety of vegetables, resulting in loss of crop diversity, contamination, dependency on bought seeds etc etc. It was really interesting too to hear to their objections to organic certification schemes which are seen by many small producers here as another form of northern tyranny and control where head offices in the US/Europe set the criteria, charge unmanageably high fees for registration and place very stringent demands on producers. They feel the criteria have a lot more to do with the interests of the consumer than the interests of the communities and environments the crops are grown in and are seeking to set up local certification with a greater emphasis on social and environmental criteria.

So, I finally found the market in the end and got slightly carried away with happily purchasing serious quantities of unfamiliar tropical fruits from the colourful mountains on display. I also stumbled across a fairtrade/wholefood shop with lots of grains, nuts and pulses and soy products (very exciting for a veggie in this meat-orientated culture). Having staggered home with far too much food, I will now have to hurry up and make lots of fruit and tofu-loving friends to eat it all...

The first week

I am happily sitting in my new house watching the sunset and listening to the howling of dogs and the shouts of a game of volleyball below. Its a good feeling to have unpacked my cases and moved in. I am renting a room in a beautiful house in Guapulo, a little town which is now a suburb of Quito, perched on the hillside on the eastern edge of the city. It has great views down across a green valley whose name I forget and up to the snowy peak of Cayambe when its clear.

Guapulo

Guapulo Plaza

My first week here was packed with newness and learning - learning on every level: from the importance of taking a map everywhere with me even if I think I know they way and the value of factor 30 sun cream, to lots of background about the history and culture of Ecuador. I have felt really privileged to have a personal orientation program with talks from experts in the fields of politics, social movements, gender and other subjects.

I've also been having Spanish lessons in the afternoons from a brilliant teacher Maria who is a linguistics lecturer at the Catholic University here. To practice speaking with fluency and using tenses in the past I have been retelling two very different stories: one a huge serious analysis of the modern day reality of Ecuador, and the other, The Hobbit (which I have been listening to on my ipod thanks to Colin). So, my vocabulary is expanding rapidly in terms of words to do with exploitation of the peripheries, globalisation and unequal terms of trade, as well as magic, dwarfs, dragons and elves.

Yesterday I went to Otavalo, a nearby town to visit Rocío, another development worker who works in environmental education. She took me to see a market of organic produce from small scale producers in the local valley, a great new project supported by CEPCU the organisation she works with, and then on a really interesting tour of schools in the area (see photos below).

The farmers' market

Rocío at one of the schools she works with

View down to Otavalo

Of all the new sights, sounds and information, I think the most striking thing for me in my first week here has been huge social inequality. There are massive USA- style “malls” which are far more glitzy and scary than anything Edinburgh has to offer with expensive branded clothing, lattes and enormous supermarkets, whilst outside throngs of people desperate for some form of income clammer to run up to the windows of cars or leap onto buses to sell chewing gum or joke moustaches for 50 cents each.

In one of my orientation talks I was told that the average household income is $250 a month whilst the basic basket of necessities is $430. Unemployment and underemployment is huge and many thousands of people leave every year to seek work elsewhere. It's fascinating and frightening seeing immigration to Europe and the USA from the other end of the process. The first message you see on arriving in Quito airport is a huge billboard saying “say no to coyoteism” (they call the networks of people smugglers who try to get immigrants into the USA coyotes).

I'm told the going rate is $12,000 to have three dangerous attempts to cross the border where the USA is busy building a wall and creating laws just as draconian as Europe to allow in only as many cheap, exploitable workers as they need. Whilst the migrants used to be mostly men, in recent years, lots of women are heading to Europe, especially Spain to meet the demand for care workers. The money which immigrants send back is apparently the second biggest source of income here after petrol and the impacts on families and society are huge.

It's pretty sobering to compare my happy adventuring journey over here to the frightening forced migration of people in the other direction. I feel a bit like a cheerful, innocent little hobbit.

I made it!

I made it! The flight was long, dull and disorientating and mostly involved half-watching films whilst sympathising with the elderly Ecuadorian lady next to me about her very long catalogue of horrible ailments. (Looking on the bright side, I have now improved my vocabulary of illness and disease in Spanish)

But I then had an easy smooth arrival in Quito as Luis, the Country Representative for Progressio in Ecuador collected me from the airport in his car and delivered me to a hostel. Since then I have been doing lots of sleeping (can´t decide whether to blame jet lag, the mental effort involved in speaking Spanish or the altitude for my tiredness) and I had my first day in the office and a day of wandering around the city.

I am staying in a hostel in a super-touristy part of Quito in the new town where there are almost more tourists than locals and every block seems to house several internet cafes, bars, laundries and a hostal or two. Yesterday I had a tour of other parts of the city with Jenny, the administrator in the office and her husband. The old part of Quito is beautiful (lots of photos below) and we climbed el panecillo (the little bread roll) a rounded hill in the south of the city with a huge statue of the virgin Mary on top. There are amazing views down over the whole city which is a long thin strip running north- south, 40km long and 3-5 wide with volcanic mountains to the west.

On Monday my two week orientation programme starts with meetings with some of the other development workers and lots of interesting-sounding people from other NGOs, trips to visit some of Progressio´s partner organisations and Spanish classes in the afternoon.