at long last, the story about my latest trip adentro PART I

So, at long last, I am getting around to writing about my latest trip "adentro." Settle back with a refreshing beverage, as this is going to be a long one... So, I go to the office early. 7:45 or so. I am rushing around getting supplies and emailing off a report to Peace Corps. Anyway, at 10:00, the bus shows up and we load up without any incident. We then had to load a bunch of jugs of gasoline into the bus. Traveling so far with 150 gallons of gas made me quite nervous. It is dangerous, not to mention illegal… We had the usual chaos of loading the food into the bus and didn’t get on the road until 11:30. Not 20 minutes out of town, we have to stop for construction. The bus driver turns the bus off. Some people get off to take a leak. An ice cream salesman gets on the bus and tries to sell Ecua- icees at twice the price as those in Puyo. About 25 minutes later, we get rolling. The road was absolutely horrible. It was pure potholes. The kind of bone-jarring, teeth-rattling, butt-chafing bumpy ride that is just pure misery. The kind of ride where it is hot and sticky and you just want some fresh air, but if you open the windows, you choke on the dust clouds the billow up behind the vehicle traveling in front of you (and which the buses always choose to tailgate, so you get an extra dose of exhaust and dust). So, you suffer in silence and marvel at the fact that even though the windows are shut the dust still finds a way into the bus. It creates a fine layer of grit that settles on top of the greasy layer of sweat that clings to your face and all other exposed skin. Meanwhile, I had taken an extra-long and extra hot bucket bath/shower that morning, figuring it would be a while before I could bathe in clean water again. That ultra-clean feeling was long gone. It just doesn’t last on a bus ride like that.

We get to the village of Meñepare around 4:30. Everyone got off to stretch their legs, go to the bathroom and relax a bit. We were instructed by the Association President (who, incidentally, couldn’t go with us on this leg of the trip because of some supposed conflict, so she was planning on meeting up with us later) to wait a while to make sure that all the women who wanted to go had actually arrived. In the meantime, we were to leave exactly 50 gallons of gasoline in the village for the women who would return to their villages via canoe. This presented an interesting math challenge, however, as the big plastic jugs that we used to transport the gas were either unmarked or only had liter measurements. It was further complicated by the fact that the jugs were various sizes and filled to differing levels…so we were not sure how many gallons were in each jug. I entered stage left about 20 minutes into the measurement discussion. There was no clear consensus how much gas we had. We were fearful of miscalculating how much we had, because that could spell disaster if we shorted this group of women and they ran out of gas on their way home. I remembered that I had a measurement converter feature on my cell phone and, by estimating the number of liters we had based on one of the jugs that had liter hash marks, I then converted this estimate from liters to gallons. Yay! Problem solved.

I had wanted to check in with the President and with Jer, but Ifigured there was no chance in hell there was a cell phone signal. But I happened to be wrong. I was informed by one of the guys that lived in the village that in fact there WAS a signal… but only IF you stood in a very specific spot. He invited me into his house, and told me that if I stood right inside the doorway and then rested the phone on a wooden shelf, stood on my left leg, raised my right arm, and winked three times with my left eye that I could get one signal bar. Okay, the body motions are a lie, but the whole standing in one particular spot and putting the cellphone on the shelf was true. Sure enough, it worked. So, there I am crouching down in a weirdly awkward position yelling into my phone that is perched on the shelf, wishing I knew how to turn on the speaker phone function (although I am not entirely sure that the super basic phone even has that feature). I didn’t get ahold of the prez, but I did get to talk to Jer and share a bit about my adventure thus far. It felt like I had been gone a week already. Little did I know what further adventures lay ahead.

I hung out with two of the Warani Women’s Association members who were at another local Waorani’s house. It was a very basic wooden framed house, that unlike some of the others in the village, was built at ground level. It had basically two rooms. One had a hammocks and what looked like makeshift beds of blankets on the floor. They offered me an overturned bucket to sit on and a big chunk of sugar cane to suck on. The woman, then went around offering a big aluminum bowl of their traditional platano drink to everyone. The drink has an almost stew-like consistency. It is mushed up sweet-ish plantains essentially, and who knows what else. It is sort of chunky and filling, and really hard for me to drink fast…or drink at all when I start to think about the fact that it was likely made with water from suspect sources….and then I started thinking about the 10 hour bus ride ahead of me and the drink felt like it kept getting thicker and thicker.. I drank as much as I could, as it is considered impolite not to take what is offered to you. I asked where the bathroom was, and they sort of chortled and said, “el monte” (the forest) which I actually did, of course, know…I just didn’t know if there was a particular spot where I should cop a squat. I mean, I didn’t know if there was some garden or other area where it might be considered rude, sacrilegious, disrespectful or otherwise unwise (not to mention potentially dangerous) to take a leak. The woman told her little girl, who was maybe around 5 years old to show me where to go. The girl slowly and silently walked behind the house and casually pointed to a place under what looked like a banana plant, not 15 feet from the house. She then walked slowly back toward the house. I was relieved that she didn’t stick around to stare at my ultra white self scout for snakes and other undesirables before ungracefully yanking down my wick dry hiking pants to take a leak. There was really nothing very private about it, as I could easily see the bus, the drivers and the two dozen other women milling around the bus…so that meant they could likely see me, too, if they wanted to.

After returning from the “bathroom” I noticed that the women were getting a little restless. Some had walked long distances to get to the village and catch our bus and some had been waiting in the town for us for almost an entire day. I could tell many were hungry. I passed around a couple packs of crackers, while one of the other women passed around cups of the syrupy sweet orange soda that had been baking in the storage compartment beneath the bus. Several of the plastic containers had exploded or had slow leaks. We were told that there were some women that were still on their way, so we ended up waiting around hoping that they would magically appear from the forest. They did not. We waited around the village a good hour and a half or more, and then one of the women made the executive decision to press on and get to the town of Tena to have dinner.

Two hours later, we arrive in Tena and begin the process of deciding where 30 tired, hungry Waorani women can get dinner. We found a restaurant called el galpon, which means chicken coop in Spanish, that said they could handle our big group. All things considered, it went really smoothly. We ordered the set dinner and they got us all in and out really fast (too fast: less than an hour!). As I ate my tomato-ishy soup that I piled popcorn into (an Ecuadorian tradition that I am quite fond of) I looked around at some of the women and marveled at our motley crew. There were the young, hip Waorani women with tight jeans, makeup and cellphones. There were the reserved ageless women who toted their infants on their hips in slings fashioned out of sheets. They could look either 20 or 40, depending on what they were doing. Mostly they breastfed in silence. Then there were a handful of women elders… They were all petite, with wrinkled hands, calloused and wide barefeet, long perforated earlobes and shy, hesitant demeanors. Some of the older women tentatively sat down at the tables and I couldn’t help but wonder if it might just be the first time they have eaten in a restaurant.

I was given the responsibility to pay for everyone. Some might say that I should feel flattered that they trusted me with their money. However, I think the reality is that they didn’t trust each other with the money. But that’s another story. I honestly did not want the added worry and risk of carrying around a fairly large amount of cash. I mean, if someone wanted to rob us, I would be the FIRST person they target. All gringos seem to walk around with neon signs above their heads that say “I have cash and cool gadgets, so please rob me!” For added security, I had the money divided into three different wads. The cash wad for food was tucked away in the right cup of my bra (the money to pay for the canoes was in the left cup). The third wad was hidden somewhere else…

I was instructed to call my boss when we got to Tena so that she might be able to catch up with us and hop on our bus there, instead of the next big town, Coca (another 6 hours away). Well, come to find out, she had not even left Puyo yet. She said to wait for her in Coca. Hummm… well, I guess we keep going? We bought some big jugs of water and a little bottle for one of the women who was pregnant and very nauseous and then got back on the road. The road between Tena and Coca was more of the ultra-bumpy variety. I dozed on and off during this portion of the trip. The bus driver tried play a DVD on the small TV at the front of the bus, but the road was just too bumpy. Around 2:00 a.m. we pull into the city of Coca, about an hour before we had calculated. The bus driver and helper look back at us and ask, “what do we do now?”

“We wait. The president won’t be here until later. She said we must wait for her,” we reply.

“When will she get here?” they ask.

“She left on the 9:00 bus from Puyo.” Their fingers twitch, as they do the math on their hands.

“But that means she won’t be here until almost 6:00 a.m!” the driver exclaims, not shielding his annoyance. “We can’t just sit in downtown Coca in the middle of the night. It is not safe! And I am really tired. We will wait at my house. I want to get some sleep.”

So the bus driver takes us to the outskirts of Coca and parks alongside what we assume to be his house. He directs a group of waorani women to the outhouse behind the building, then turns to me to show me how to turn on the interior light of the bus and how to shut the door once everyone is back on. Then he leaves.

At this point, I have one of those what the f*&# am I doing here??? moments. As I have tried to describe to people back home, our Peace Corps experience has featured equal parts this is one of the coolest things I’ve ever done!!! moments, and what the f*&# am I doing here??? moments. This was definitely the latter. In fact, I would say it was a top 3 what the f*&# am I doing here??? moments. I mean, there I was just sitting and sweating in a hot, uncomfortable bus with 30+ other women in some dude’s driveway in the middle of the night, in flipping COCA!!! This is not a good situation. I had to get permission from Peace Corps to go on this trip, in part because I would have to travel through Coca, one of the country’s seedier cities, where the FARC is rumored to go on “vacation.” There was no way in hell I was going to be able to sleep, even after taking over the more comfy co-pilot seat on the bus. Everyone was restless and uncomfortable and hot. I was wired and anxious and, as I would later realize, P.M.S.-ing. It didn’t help that I had had a series of weird bad dreams in anticipation of this trip. I had fought back tears as I said bye to Jer that morning. I had some weird anxiety and hormone fueled emotional moment where I irrationally feared that I wasn’t going to make it back from this trip alive. My over-active imagination started getting the best of me again.

The windows steamed up. I muscled open the window by the driver’s seat in hopes of getting some fresh air into the increasingly stuffy bus. The two inch opening only seem to let in au de outhouse, however. I dug out Jer’s fading headlamp and started to write in my beat-up journal. Sometimes venting through writing helps me to relax and focus. Sometimes, it just gets me fired up even more. That happened to be the case this time. I started listing the many colossal planning failures that had occurred thus far (many of which I will refrain from detailing because they really aren’t that interesting and they will reflect poorly on certain people) and then enumerating all the reasons why this trip was a bad idea. Then, something caught the corner of my eye and my heart skipped a beat. I looked up and saw a man standing beside the bus, seemingly looking directly at me. I quickly clicked off my headlamp and moved away from the window. I sat in the middle seat where I could scan the rearview mirrors on either side of the bus. He meandered back towards the street, and then just stood there for a long time. My eyes flitted back and forth between the big mirrors, following his every move. It felt like everyone on the bus was holding their breath. Absolute silence. Finally, the guy wandered away. He looked like he was staggering, so he might been just some random drunk, lost dude.

The minutes and hours dragged on. We watched the national police pull over a big truck on the street behind us. We watched in silence, hoping that a busload of Waorani women and some random gringa wouldn’t catch their attention and cause any more unnecessary stress. Around 3:30, one of the women asked me to open the door so as to allow her to go to the bathroom. I crawled into the drivers seat, clicked on my headlamp so as to see the release switch and then pulled up on the handle. The swoooosh of air and grinding noise made it sound like the door would open. But nothing happened. I pulled up on the knob again. The sound of air swooshing out, but the door didn’t budge. Instead of panicking, I let out an incredulous chortle. How can this be happening? One of the women pried open a window, precariously leaned half her body out the window while trying to push the accordion door open from the outside. No dice. I tried calling the cell phone of the bus driver asleep next door to see if he could help us open the door. No surprise, he had turned his cell phone off. So, there we were…literally trapped on a hot, sticky bus at 3:30 a.m. in a sketchy Ecuadorian city… Lovely. We just all sat in silence.

By 4:30 a.m. more of the women had to go to the bathroom and were getting extremely restless. Perhaps pressured by her bladder, or perhaps her peers, Laura, one of the Women’s Association officers made the sudden executive decision that we were just going to leave. Now. She started screaming out the window to the bus driver, “Chofer, ya vamos! Apurese!” Hey driver, let’s go! Hurry!!! Suddenly, out of the blue, we were in a hurry to go. I did not agree with this rash decision, as there was nowhere for us to go. If we left Coca without the Association President and the three other women that were traveling with her, we would be going against her explicit instructions. I suppose we could have continued down the Via Auca to the bridge over the Shiripuno River where we were supposed to load into canoes to take us to the Waorani village where the workshop would be held. If we did that, we would just end up waiting for hours there, as the canoes were likely not even there yet (although no one could tell me exactly when the canoes were supposed to be there---a maddenly frustrating factor). As we waited for the bus driver to get dressed and ready, I receive a call from my friend Noemi, who was with the delegation en route from Puyo.

She asks, “Did you get my text message?”

“No,” I reply. “What text message?”

“I sent you a text message to tell you to just continue on to the Shiripuno Bridge without us. We need to make sure someone is there, so they don’t think we’re not coming”

“What??!?!?” I started to freak out. “I didn’t get any message.”

“Really? I sent it to you. Oh, hold on. Let me call you back in 5 minutes.”

I frantically scrolled through my messages in my inbox. Nothing. I sat there staring in disbelief at my phone. I shared the information with Laura. Then my phone rings again.

“Wait for us in Coca. We’ll be there in 40 minutes. Maybe an hour.” Click.

The driver climbs into the driver’s seat and then leans back and asks us (while looking directly at me) “where are we going?”

I make Laura answer him, since she is the one that woke him up prematurely. She tells him that our companeras are on their way, they’ll be here “ya mismo” (please refer to previous blog posts about what this phrase means, and other reflections on Ecuadorian concepts of time) so let’s go to the bus terminal. I had hoped that the long line to the bathroom would help kill time to allow the other group to get to town. Well, it did kill some time, but only about 15 minutes. We loaded up in the bus and drove back into downtown Coca. The driver parked the bus on the street, turned the engine off, then proceeded to try to sleep again. By this point, it is around 5:00 a.m. or so. The sun is just starting to rise on the city, and it was not a welcoming sight. All the shops were shuttered with steel garage doors, iron bars or guards. A few cars rambled through town. A lone guy rode a ramshackle bike outfitted into a concession cart. A few drunks ambled about aimlessly. We just sat there, watching out the windows still unable to sleep. Finally, around 5:45 a.m., the bus from Puyo rolls in. The president gets on the bus and announces to the driver, “let’s go to breakfast.” So, after all the drama and hurry to get back to town so we can rush off to meet the canoes at the bridge, we instead go 1.67 blocks (in the bus, of course) to a broaster chicken restaurant to try to scrounge up breakfast for 35 people. Yeah. I helped direct traffic to the tables in shifts. Noemi helped set the tables, as the place wasn’t even officially open until 6 a.m. and was clearly not accustomed to handling entire busloads of people. Breakfast consisted of roasted chicken, rice and some mystery vegetable. I had zero appetite even before watching this poor teenager trying to pierce plucked chickens with the iron rods of the broaster oven.
As the last shift of breakfasters was finishing up, I tried to flag down the haggard, sweaty server in order pay for everyone. I asked for a receipt, which was required for the funders who were underwriting this adventure. In a scene played out too many times before, I painfully watched them try to first add up the bill and then search in vain for a receipt. They sent one of the kids off to god only knows where to get one…or so they told me. In the meantime, Noemi is trying to track down some live chickens to take with us to the village. She had made several calls earlier in the week to try to find a business that would sell live chickens to us and had largely struck out. She had found a place that would send us criollo chickens…if we were willing to pay $13 each, a ridiculously outrageous price. This latest part of the process involved lots of people standing around waiting…and waiting…and waiting. Finally, the same chicken broaster place that provided breakfast for the masses offered us a few live chickens. They sent their people to get them…wherever that might be. Probably best not to ask.