The Last Comuna

Comuna La Peripa: two full days. My visits are getting shorter and shorter. At this pace, I could have easily finished the six unmapped Tsachila communities if I had a full semester instead of the Dartmouth quarter. Still, I’m happy with the three we managed and I’m glad I got to squeeze in Peripa. In this last comuna I had some good conversations, saw some beautiful countryside and finally got to ride a motorcycle without straddling another man. Friday afternoon I took out Eddie’s (short for Edison, the 28 year-old president of the community) Suzuki to mark roads. Although it took me a good 5 minutes to start the bike on an uphill (after pushing it across a river), I still felt pretty damn cool riding home with a backdrop of banana palms against a sunset.

Walking the boundary in Peripa

I was pushed to an interesting conclusion recently (no, not about my vanity as I set up a tripod to pose with the motorcycle). The Dickey Center, benevolent providers of funding for this internship/adventure, sent me a short check-up including a seemingly mundane question; “What kinds of daily/weekly routines have you established? How are these helping or hindering your experience of the local culture and customs?” After writing the obvious, “I wake up around 8:30 and go to the office…”, I got stuck on the second part. I had been pleased with the routine I’d established and the efficiency I accomplished, but pondering it more, I couldn’t help thinking there was some negative correlation between efficiency and ‘experience of culture.’ Work in Naranjos was anything but efficient, but the extra time allowed me to get to know the family and learn about daily life in the comuna. Peripa may have been a deviation from the rule; during my short stay I engaged in more social activity than my four days in El Poste, though I wouldn’t say it was an exception. Saturday night I attended a huge graduation party for the son of the vice president. I was dropped off early, got to help set up, and then was fed the famous guanta while I talked about mapping with a member of another community. It was fun, but I probably would have stayed for the raucous later party if I had known more than one face in the crowd, that is, if I had been in town for more than 48 hours.
So in my philosophical musing I decided efficiency might not be all it’s cut out to be. We hold efficiency as a synonymous virtue with productivity, but maybe productivity, with some necessary redefinition, is a more appropriate goal. If ‘product’ is broadened to include the intangibles, correctly weighted above physical goods, then we have a more useful metric. Judging by this standard, I was as productive in Los Naranjos as in El Poste, where I mapped twice the area in half the time, because I made friends and learned a ton.

Hostel de Luz

It’s now long past due that I wrote a blog about my hostel. I have a small private room at the Galapagos Natural Life Hostel in la Mariscal, the main tourist district of Quito. Although the combination of iffy location and cheesy name seem the recipe for a gringo trap, this hostel has become almost a homestay. An Ecuadorian family owns it and receives help from relatives now and then. Vivienta is the youngest daughter, in her thirties, and does the majority of the work around the place. But it is Luz, the house matriarch, that imbues the hostel with its character. She ensures that every guest feels “en su casa” and calls everyone “mi joven” or “m’hijo.” The times that I have fallen sick or injured (food poisoning last weekend and a twisted ankle this Sunday), I have been dotingly and frantically attended to in that way only mothers can do. When I hobbled in the door after coming back from hiking, she insisted that I sit down while she fetched an ace bandage and all the remotely relevant medicines. Now, it’s necessary to point out that Luz inches around the building with a walker because she broke her ankle several months ago and still has metal screws in the bone. Regardless of her worse injury, she wouldn’t let me get up.

We spend quite a few evenings together since I’ve started cooking instead of eating out and have thus solidified our friendship. She gives me leftovers and makes me coladas and I open jars and reach high things for her. In my relatively short time living with them I have apparently proved my merit; she wants me to manage the hostel when the family is at her son’s wedding this Saturday evening. Luz told me there is a nephew available for the job, but he is quote, “less known.” Maybe I’ve been spending too much time here…

It’s unlikely that I’ll be able to help out though, because I leave tomorrow morning for Peripa and would have to complete the entire boundary in one day to make it back in time.

The rest of my time is pretty much planned out: I return to Quito sometime on the weekend, work in the office till Wednesday on the Peripa map, return Thursday and Friday with other Yanapuma staff to the communities to present them with the finished product. Then next Sunday, Molly arrives and we take off to tour Ecuador! Squeak!

More Maps

This map shows the locations of all seven Tsáchila communities as well as Santo Domingo and Puerto Limón. Red boundaries are mapped, doubled dashed lines are not mapped. I'll be going next to Peripa (in purple) which you can see shares a line with El Poste. For your reading pleasure I translated this one to English.

Once again, roads and unmapped communities provided by Victor Torres.

Map #2

This map I made to show the portion of the boundary that follows a river or stream, which adds up to 11km.

I have to thank Victor Torres for the road file. He has a blog at http://tsachila.blogspot.com/ with photos and entries about different communities.

Part Two

Last night I returned from a very efficient trip to El Poste. I was dropped off Monday evening during the middle of a small meeting and met the town council. My host family came to pick me up (in a truck!), and the next morning we were on the boundary at 9. We followed a similar routine Tuesday through Friday: meet up with community members who knew the area (often traveling with a group of 8 or more) at 9 am, stop for lunch after noon when a group of women would carry in food to border, then continue work until 3 pm. So working roughly 6 hours a day we finished in just 4 days. After marking the roads on motorcycle Friday afternoon, I got a ride into town and took the first bus back to Quito.

A couple significant differences between Los Naranjos and El Poste are that while Naranjos has some jagged edges, the community limits are roughly rectangular and often follow a road. More than half of El Poste’s property lines follow a river or a stream and we only walked on a clear path for a total of a few hundred meters. Needless to say, I spent a considerable portion of this week soaking wet. 

Wading the Rio Nile

So I actually only have two weeks of work left. I had been planning on pursuing a third project in a nearby community, but between finishing this map, printing and delivering it, then writing up reports to make my data usable by later volunteers, I might not have any extra time. That said, the next community I would visit does have a shared border with El Poste, so I already have some of it done, and I might just be able to squeeze it in.

The Commute

I think with the amount of time I've spent in transit, this topic deserves its own post. This last trip to the comuna went pretty smoothly. I walked up to the terminal just as the bus was pulling out (no thats not a cause for alarm, just means you're on time), some three and half hours I stepped into a taxi, once downtown I boarded an already full colectivo, and when I got to my stop, Richard (a motorcycle taxi friend) was waiting for me. On the way back, the whole trip takes an extra hour because we arrive at the south town station, which is two public buses from my hostal. For a journey 30 times shorter than an Oregon visit from school, it has twice as many legs.

Heading out of Los Naranjos (and marking the road)

Its interesting to change 7000 feet in altitude so frequently. I now anticipate some degree of explosion of my Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap when arriving in the low pressure Andes, after the death of a roller-tip deodorant stick that lost its ball. Another curious consistency has been the medical treatises given to a captive audience on the bus out of Quito. Instead of just extolling the benefits of their given product, ginsing or noni and maca tablets, these tag-a-long vendors deem it necessary to teach the passengers about the dangers of cancer, the intricacies of sexual health and any other attention-grabbing ailment. I was up front for the first talk, and it was riddled with misinformation. According to the lecturer, Asians can reproduce into their 90s (the ginseng of course) and skin cancer is ravaging the Ecuadorian population. I found it hard to believe that one, reproducing into my 90s was a good idea, and two, the sun was a bigger threat than the driver (judging by the uninhibited view of the valley floor thousands of feet below and the lack of seat belts). I pondered the mortality (or at least injury) rate of health lecturers standing in the aisle of a bus careening down a mountain road. Did I mention the rock slides? I've already had to return and take an alternate route once because the road was suddenly out of commission, a common occurrence if the bare hills are any sign. With all this entertainment, and killer views to boot, my commute is at least not too boring.

On this last visit, the main goal was to get revision suggestions on the map draft. We're ready to print off a final!

Aerofoto

Here it is. The # symbols were supposed to be plain dots and the black dash is actually a north arrow, both features were somehow lost in the conversion to pdf. Other than that though, this is a pretty complete draft.

All is not lost

Well, the GPS is functioning again. I suppose 4 years is too long to go without a software update. I walked around the block and the track log was recording correctly.

More good news, we finally located Los Naranjos on the aerial photo that I bought. Even the folks at the IGM couldn’t find the community; the photo was taken from pretty high up, and there aren’t very many easily recognizable landmarks in the area. I overlaid the boundary line on the photo, but wasn’t able to project it very accurately, because I only have sample points (spots on the photo I know the coordinates of) from a small section of the photographed area. Another bonus is that I should be able to trace the roads off of the photo, so at least I won't have to collect that data again.

It's not my fault

I swear.

Okay, maybe if I should have had the foresight to perform an intense check-up on my GPS unit beforehand, but I'd never noticed anything wrong before; how was I supposed to know that it would malfunction? The track log, which essentially leaves a breadcrumb trail of waypoints, was lying to me. I told it to record coordinates every 5 seconds, more than enough to accurately portray the curves of a road while walking. The little graphic on the screen showed little white dots accumulating behind me, and since there is no way to manually check the coordinates saved before uploading the data to a computer, I had to trust that. How naive. After three days of slogging through tropical streams with GPS in one hand and machete in the other, after logging miles and miles on dirt roads, I'm left with unseemly, inaccurate, jagged lines; poor excuses for the nuanced bends of a creek or trail. Basically, the data I collected is worse than I could do with paper and pencil. 

The treacherous GPS

So my next step for my sorry excuse for a GPS will be a master reset, full software update and a series of tests. Then it will be back to Los Naranjos for a second go.