Quehueri'ono part II

(continued from my previous post, below. Read it first if you haven’t already. It is more entertaining, anyway.) After the worst movie ever made ended, we stopped in the community of Meñepare in order to pick up women who had walked from other villages to this meeting point. This was the same community where we had built the plant nursery. The plan was to take advantage of the little time we would be there to do some maintenance on the nursery by installing special screening to block some of the harsh rays of the ecuatorial sun. Plus, I was anxious to see how many of the seeds we planted were still alive. Of course when we get there it is during a seriously hard downpour. I threw on my rubber boots and jumped out of the bus and made my way to the nursery and was pleasantly surprised to see that almost all of the seeds we planted were sprouting and had grown quite a bit. Only a very few seedlings that we transplanted had bit the dust. Success! It was raining so hard that we couldn’t really do much of anything. So, we basically looked around, then headed back to the bus. Our hour-long stop to do a little work turned into a 20 minute pit stop. It was a little surreal…leaving BEFORE we had scheduled to. I was starting to get a little dizzy. This never happens.

We continued on to Tena to stop for a late lunch. More than 30 women, approximately half of which carried babies in sheets slung across one shoulder, got off the bus and piled into our usual spot, the Galpón (which means, literally, chicken coop) restaurant for an overpriced lunch (now $2.50—previously $1.50---and it didn’t even come with soup!!!Yikes!). After lunch I slipped away to stock up on some supplies for the long trip that still lay ahead. Chocolate bar, chocolate cookies and peanuts. Check. Once we got back on the bus and started to pull away I realized that I had meant to buy a couple DVDs for the next leg of the trip lest we tempt fate and let anyone put the worst movie ever made on for an encore. Against my own rules, I made the driver stop the bus. Two of the other women jumped out and helped me pick out movies. We wanted a comedy. The lady at the store made a few recommendations and we made a hurried decision and walked away with Game Plan and What Happens in Vegas. Because we were rushed, we didn’t try the DVDs out before hand, as is normal custom (to make sure they worked). By some stroke of strange luck (for me that is), both movies were good quality and ONLY in English. Not even Spanish subtitles. The Waorani were disappointed. Meanwhile, I was trying to disguise my glee. So, I sat back, munched on my cookies and watched two not-great-but-not-awful (and thus good enough for me) movies. It made time fly by. I didn’t even hardly notice that we had to stop twice because of tire problems. Once to inflate…the other to completely change the tire. I also was so absorbed in my little world that I didn’t notice that we evidently kept driving into gas stations, but not stopping for gas. As I said, I was engrossed in my movies and didn’t pay much attention. Before we knew it, we were in the city of Coca. I did a double-take at my watch. Wait a minute, we are still early! How can this be? Then I realized, wait, my butt doesn’t hurt nearly as much as it should after sitting on a bus all day. Hold on…I don’t remember being bounced around for 7 straight hours on a bad road. Woah. They must have done some serious road repair or opened a mostly paved shortcut…whatever happened, we got there crazy fast.

As we sat down for yet another plate of chicken and rice and French fries, I was told of our newest transportation challenge: we needed to get gas (for the bus) and none of the gas stations in Coca had any, hence the reason we went to all those gas stations but were waved on because there wasn’t any gas. Huh? Oh. Coca, of course, is one of the bigger oil towns in Ecuador. Large quantities of heavy crude that is pumped out of the Ecuadorian Amazon passes through Coca toward the coast. Very little, however, returns in the form of processed gas needed to fill up the car, or in our case, bus. Humm… this presented quite a dilemma. Thankfully my friend Noemi is pilas (smart) and she negotiated with the bus company (which happened to have an office in the town) to simply swap one of their buses that had gas in their tank, with ours, that was on empty. So, what could have been a major crisis, ended up being a very temporary delay. Even after unloading all of our stuff off of bus and re-loading it onto another and even with all the normal delays with managing any large group, we got on the road ON TIME according to the itinerary we had planned. Incredible.

Once back on the road around 11 p.m. or so, I drifted off to sleep…and then woke up when we the bus was stopped and the lights went on. I looked at my watch: it was 1:20 a.m. We had arrived at the bridge. Early. Very early. The trip that used to take 3.5 hours had been dramatically reduced to a little over 2 hours because of this crazy thing called asphalt that had been put on the road. We weren’t supposed to leave in the canoes (that would take us to the community where the workshop was to be held) until around 6 a.m. But instead of sitting in the bus and catching some zzzzzz’s until sunrise, the bus driver kicked us out of the bus. Yep, he dumped us and all our stuff on the side of the road by the Shiripuno River bridge at 1:30 in the morning.

It was cold and damp and awkward. No one knew what to do. It basically sucked. The only good thing was that it wasn’t raining. I donned my headlamp and started to put up my tent. As relieved as I was to have a tent and a foam mat, I simultaneously felt bad for the women, because they didn’t have anything but a change of clothes. I started digging around my stuff trying to find plastic bags at least for them to sit on and invited a couple of them to stay in my tent. Even with a foam mat the ground was bumpy and uneven with rocks and not comfortable at all, but I would never think to breathe a word of complaint. At 6:30 or so, we finally crawled out of the tent and looked at the scene around us. Hungry faces, big bags of food, but no way to cook the food. Oh, and no canoes. So, there we were, more than 30 people standing by the bridge, tons of supplies and gear, the sky threatening rain… and no canoes. (to be continued)