Otavalo On My Mind

Awoke in Otavalo and headed north on the train tracks (now defunct) toward Peguche, a little town that´s about 100% indigenous. Most of the way there we met up with an Ecuadorian couple, whom I flagged down to ask if they knew how to get to the waterfall we were looking for. They said they were looking for the same place, and that they wouldn´t mind giving us a ride. So we all piled into their Rav4 and trundled down the cobblestone road to where it turned off and then got out to explore the falls. They´re lovely, set in a eucalyptus grove (which is always just about empty of birds, since local insects and birds don´t eat the introduced eucalyptus), and after seeing them, we walked to Peguche itself. There we met a man who had a tiny little store in the bottom floor of his house, an Indian, who, after selling us some bananas and soft drinks, let slip that his family members were in the back working on their weavings. I asked if we could impose on him to let us in to see, and he said sure. Three were in the back, one slicing up a long strip of woven material for children´s sweaters, another winding yarn ont a spool, and a third upstairs weaving on the hand loom. He talked to us about how a lot of artisans now have automated weaving, and made a somewhat lame argument about how that´s still handicraft. BUt the equipment is a big investment, and it´s all old industrial stuff from defunct factories in Quito so it breaks down a lot and you have to order spare parts made because the machines are out of date...A very informative conversation. We thanked him and left.

Across the street, Chloe went into a store to use a bathroom, and while we waited for her we struck up a conversation with the store´s owner, an Indian who told us that with every generation, they speak Quichua less and less well, and he thinks it will eventually be lost. We compared that with my experience raising Quinn in Spanish...Again, a very interesting conversation, cut short by the arrival of our bus, which took us up through a couple of the mountain Indian towns before taking us back to Otavalo.

We had lunch, and I set the students free on the market for the afternoon, saying we´d meet back up at the hotel at 5:00.

In the meantime, I called Melissa, my friend in Tumbaco, who said she hasn´t been able to organize a family stay, but would still love to host us for lunch and show us Tumbaco, a rural / suburban town where she lives with her husband, who teaches music at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, which we´ll be visiting Friday. Jeff is giving a concert in Quito on Friday with a pasillo group, pasillos being traditional Ecuadorian songs, so we´re also planning on doing that. But since there will be no home stay, we set an agenda in a group meeting (all present except Quinn, who was watching Sponge Bob in Spanish in the next room) what our agenda for the trip would be.

Having asked the owner of the hotel what was going on in Otavalo this evening, I took the group to another mass just up the street, and they paid very strict attention to a lot of details, picking up on things like a painting depicting three people being thrown from a vehicle in a grisly accident on a curve in the mountains here and being saved by the Virgin Mary, complete with rays to catch them as they fell. The sermon was about evangelicals, and the priest said they have left their faith for another and abandonded Mary, which leaves them as orphans, the poor devils. He said they weren´t true Christians, etc., and the students had understood a very good percentage of it when we left. It dovetailed very nicely with the evangelicals we had seen going door to door on the outskirts of Otavalo earlier this afternoon, Bibles in hand. The struggle for the souls of Ecuador goes on.

So now we´re doing our usual wind-down in the Internet cafe (which, as Tom pointed out, is not a cafe - they don´t bother to serve any drinks), and tomorrow we´re off to Quito again. the students have requested that we stay in La Mariscal, the touristy district where we had supper with Juan and Maria Eugenia. I´ll see what I can do.