Community Service in San Clemente, part 1

Getting to San Clemente was actually pretty easy. We caught a public bus and rode for a couple of hours to the fairly large city of Ibarra (maybe 50 km north of Quito, in the northern highlands) then waited a bit and caught another bus which took us basically straight uphill for about half an hour to the village of San Clemente.

San Clemente is a tiny little town on the slopes of the Imbabura volcano, an extinct, eroding cone whose broken hulk looms over everything in the area.

Imbabura, seen from the road in San Clemente

It is a primarily indiginous Andean community that is working hard to retain and reclaim its Inca-native american heritage. On arrival, we were brought to a sweet little house on the hillside (everything is on a hillside there) above the school  and village center and we found, much to our delight, that the house was ours for the week. So the kids piled their stuff into the very basic upstairs-attic area and the adults claimed spots in the little bedrooms, and we found that we had toilets and even a little kitchen area with a gas cooker and a sink, and life was indeed good .

casa Rosita, our home in San Clemente

After a short while we met Manuel, a community leader and our main man for everything in San Clemente. We discussed our schedule, and the nature of our project in the town, and decided that some folks would go back into Ibarra in the morning to shop for food and project supplies, and we spent the rest of the evening settling in and playing with some of the local kids and figuring out the kitchen and the water and so on.

So we spent the next seven nights at Casa Rosita. Our days were spent doing the project work and getting to know the community, getting an introduction to its traditional way of life, visiting with the irresistibly cute kids at the little school's summer camp, and generally falling into the languid, sweet rhythms of daily life in an Andean mountain village.

I love the community service phase of these World Challenge expeditions. Despite the intense awesomeness of the backcountry trekking, the unpredictable adventure of the bus travel, the fantastic chaos of the big marketplaces, the selfish thrill of being torn completely away from our daily lives and being so far away from home and everything we know, despite all of that, it is always the community service portion of the trip that stays with me, that lodges deep inside me somewhere and comes back to me weeks, months, even years later. This is the part of the trip that moves me most.

It's just so real. We're not tourists during community service. We're guests. We're not just taking. We're giving. We become a part of the community iteslf, and give back a little for everything we've taken. We experience the harsh and beautiful realities of daily life in a tiny little developing world village in a way that most visitors can never, ever see.

More later. Just writing this I miss the peace of San Clemente, and it's making me sad.