Community Service, part 3

We also spent two of our days at San Clemente away from our service project. One of these was spent engaged in a full-day attempt at the summit of the Imbabura volcano, up to an elevation of about 14,500 feet. I was forced to skip out on that climb, due to a nagging ankle injury I picked up in the Pinan lakes. I´ll try to get one of the kids to fill in that blank here on the blog, if and when time permits.

Another day was our ´cultural day´arranged by our local hosts. This was a fantastic day, from start to end. We were met at the house by Manuel´s son, Atik, and Atik´s inexplicably German wife (whose name escapes me at the moment) and together we traveled down to the big town of Ibarra. We walked part of the way, to the town of La Esparanza, and had a bit of a history lesson along the way, learning about how all of San Clemente had been part of a huge hacienda, owned by a single wealthy landlord, all the way up until the 1980´s. At that point the locals--who were basically serfs, working as tennant farmers since colonial times--organized themselves and, in effect, went on strike. They had help organizing loans through some of the church groups in Ibarra, and with some capital, and maybe a little bit of a threat of violent resistance, forced the landlord to sell out and let the people buy the land their families had been working for countless generations. This led to the self sustained community that San Clemente is today. Many of the local areas remain landlord-owned haciendas to this day, almost like medieval manors in their economic structure, with farmers paying their rent with crops, and having no property rights at all.

So we made our way by bus back down to Ibarra, and had breakfast in the huge, fantastic covered market there. I could never do justice to this place in words. In many ways it was very much like the big markets you find in the bigger towns all over the developing world. Hundreds of market stalls selling every kind of local produce imaginable, a very graphic section of meat stalls selling things most of us would prefer not to think about at all, all of this crowded in under sheet metal and corrugated plastic roofing, people loudly hawking their products in singsong voices. Just simply awesomely fantastic.

taking breakfast in the Ibarra market

So we had breakfast in one of the countless restaurant stalls, enjoying wonderful cheese empanadas fresh out of the oil, and some tea and eggs and whatnot. Los catorce gringos were definitely an attraction unto themselves, but we´ve gotten kind of used to that. After breakfast we strolled the city a bit, which is apparently known for its sweets, and then we returned to the market where the kids were broken up into pairs and given little lists of items that they had to go procure in the sprwaling marketplace. Everything from dried oregano to baskets of potatos to quartered fresh chickens. This went pretty well, despite the language barrier that affects almost all of us here, and we eventually regrouped and bussed it back up the hill.

The rest of the day was spent preparing and enjoying a traditional meal. The ubiquitous potato-and-whatever-you-have-handy soup, roasted and boiled maize and potatos, chicken grilled over coals, dessert of small home-made tortillas with the local sweet fruit jelly and watermellon slices. We cooked outdoors, using the traditional stoves built into the ground outside our house--basically small, deep holes dug next to an embankment, so that you can fit a pot onto the top, and build a fire below--and had a great afternoon chopping, cleaning, and cooking together as the day wore on.

stoking the fire & cooking on the traditional stove

Later in the afternoon some of the women from town came by to demonstrate their embroidery, which is an important cottage industry, and some of the kids tried their hand at doing some of their own, and we were able to buy some really sweet items--shirts and placemats and table runners, etc.--as souveneirs (sp?)

working on embroidery with women from San Clemente

Our already excellent day was capped off by a visit from some of the community members who form a traditional band. This was absolutely one of the highlights of the entire expedition. They set up in our house: six string guitar, fourteen string guitar, fiddle, two recorder-pipe players, a little boy on a simple bass drum, three women and a little girl to sing and dance. FANTASTIC rootsy andean pipe music, strings filling in with a stomping rhythm, pipes and high voices floating over the whole like the clouds over the valley below us. There´s no way, again, as always, that I can do this justice in words. We caught alot of this on video, which will help you picture the scene, but it was such a perfect moment, the kind of moment you can´t create on purpose, an emotional high, the kids up and dancing, the stars sparkling in the flawlessly black sky outside our little house on the hill, smoke from our cookfires flavoring everything eucalyptus.

awesome local band jamming in the hills

Delicious in every possible way.

Unforgettable.

It´s moments like this that keep me coming back for more, and make me dream of expedition even when I´m surrounded by the clean, pilow-soft luxury, comfort and love of my own home.