Quehueri'ono part IV...the finale

So most of my blog stalkers have undoubtedly given up on me by now…I don’t blame you…I mean, the cruelty of it all. Making you wait weeks for one lousy story…the nerve! While I cannot promise it will be worth the drive to Richmond (sorry for oblique slogan known to few outside a 150 mile radius of Fort Wayne Indiana) I do promise to conclude my recollections of this trip so that I can eventually move on to tell the tale of other interesting misadventures.

Around mid-morning on the second day of the handicraft workshop, my compañero, Antonio and a small group of women from the stranded group walked into the classroom, totally drenched in sweat. It turns out that because of the perpetual shortage of canoes, they had ended up walking to the community. At some time around noon, the last of the group and the food supply showed up. The group looked hot, haggard, and hostile. And rightly so. Most of them had left Puyo on Tuesday morning…and were just now getting to the community on Friday afternoon. Quite a commute. Those that came by canoe loaded down with the food and supplies actually arrived after the walkers because the river was so low and the canoe advanced at a snails pace as it maneuvered around the many logs and tree limbs. Their trip was really quite ridiculous. It turns out they had spent the entire day Wednesday by the bridge waiting for canoes. When none came, they camped on the side of the road for a second consecutive night. On Thursday two canoes came and transported them only ¾ of the way to Quehueri’ono…(as far as the river level and the daylight hours would allow) and then they spent the night on a sand bar on the side of the river. Another half day of travel later, they finally arrived at their final destination. Only one of the two canoes made the final trip to the community; this displaced a subgroup of people who were then forced to walk. Incredibly, some of them had walked the entire way from the bridge to the community.

Meanwhile, back at camp, I had recruited a couple ladies to help me with lunch duty. We were at least an hour into the process when the food supply arrived. We incorporated lentils and the produce that hadn’t gone bad en route into the menu…but somehow this was unsatisfactory to my counterpart. After 2.5 hours around a wood fire in the hot, mid-day equatorial sun I was not in the mood to hear critiques about what we prepared. Everyone was edgy. I was annoyed. She was frustrated. But I guess I would be cranky, too, after such a ludicrously long trip. Nonetheless, the chemistry of the group changed from a happy-go-lucky small baby boat contingent …to a mass of hungry, tired, moody mujeres.

The final day of the workshop actually went fairly smoothly. I gave a presentation which included a report on the store’s sales, an explanation of my mini-census of the artisans (i.e. tracking who knows how to make each type of handicrafts sold), the importance of quality and the need to produce handicrafts pictured in our new catalog, and finally, a brief explanation of the webpage the Waorani Women’s Association will be launching. The latter topic required me to be extremely creative considering my audience was women who live in jungle communities largely without electricity.

In between sessions, talk turned to just how exactly we were going to get out of the community. There was only going to be one canoe available on the day we planned to leave. It would fit 12 people. There were over 40 of us. Uh…yeah…. THAT will be interesting…But we had received word that a group of tour operators from Great Britain would be coming in to check out the new Eco-Lodge. Smelling a potential sales opportunity, I helped the women prepare their handicrafts for sale to the tourists. It was somewhat improvised but in the end adequate effort. I had large sheets of butcher paper that we use to wrap up the handicrafts to transport back to Puyo. On each sheet I wrote the artisans name and then organized their wares on top of it. The papers stretched around the entire room. The women changed into their traditional dress, painted their faces, donned their feather crowns and continued weaving while we waited for the distinguished guests. Meanwhile, some of us had packed up our stuff in hopes that we could catch a ride on the plane that would be transporting the tourists in and otherwise flying back empty. But the sky was gray and a rain shower had passed through (and sent my stomach sinking with despair I wouldn’t make it out on the plane).

Somehow all our luck wasn’t bad. We soon heard “Evo, evo, evo” the Waorani word for airplane. The plane touched down on the grass landing strip. It happened to be a spacious 5 passenger plane AND it turned out that the plane would be returning with another load of passengers immediately after dropping of the first load. Score! Five women jumped into the plane and took off down the grass runway. This landing strip happened to have the skeleton of a plane that had crashed there years ago. Incidentally, it was the plane that my counterpart had been a passenger in. She and the others onboard miraculously escaped with minor injuries. Even with this knowledge, the sight of the wreckage was a little unsettling.

While the plane was shuttling the first load of passengers back to the Shell airport, I was helping to translate for the British women tour operators who were checking out the wares. I was able to explain to them the entire process of making the handicrafts, which added value to their experience and in the end I think it helped to encourage them to buy more items. They seemed like very hip, interesting people. I would have liked to have talked with them more…but our conversation was cut short by the sound of the plane returning.

As the second batch of tourists unloaded their backpacks we pushed past to quickly load ours onto the bright yellow plane. Because I was the tallest passenger by a good 8 inches, I got to sit in the co-pilot seat. In no time at all we were taxiing back down the runway and then were up, up and away. The view below was stunning. I was totally mesmerized by the sea of green below…until we flew into a very dark rain cloud. Water started bubbling around the area where the windshield meets the dashboard of the plane… hummm… that didn´t seem normal. Then all the sudden we hit a patch of turbulence and the plane suddenly and violently bumped downward. One of my compañeras screamed. I grabbed my seat out of sheer terror. We made it through the cloud and touched down in the rain at the airport in Shell without further problems. We chatted with the pilot afterwards and he admitted that he, too, was scared by the bump. Then he confesses, “but that´s mostly because I ´m still jittery from when I wrecked a plane two weeks ago. But I only got scratched.” Hum…that´s comforting. So, all of the sudden I was back in Puyo, just 35 minutes after being deep in the jungle. I think that stark transition is in some ways a more difficult dose of culture shock than going from Ecuador to the States.

Anyway, there you have it my friends, my final chapter of our trip to Quehueri’ono. My apologies again for dragging it out so long. I promise to try to post shorter, more timely posts in the future. The operative word being “try.” Chao for now.

Quehueri'ono Part III

We pick up today’s post where we left off yesterday…recounting my recent trip adentro with the Waorani Women’s Association. Our protagonist was stuck on the side of the Via Auca oil road with 30+ women waiting around for our ride (canoes) to the community of Quehueri’ono…. At some point in the morning a canoe finally pulled up to the bridge and the Waorani leader Moi gets out. Notice I said ONE canoe. After some negotiating with Moi (he claimed he didn’t know anything about our trip and only came to the bridge to make a phone call from the guard station…) he agreed to take a boatload of women to Quehueri’ono. Of course everyone was jockeying to get on the first canoe. They decided they would send all the women with babies first. “Hey, anyone want to lend me a kid for the day?” I joked. It turns out, there was one seat left on the baby boat. Manuela motioned for me to get in. I turned to my friend Noemi who I know really wanted to get moving and offered her the spot. Manuela then overrode her and said, “No, I send Susan.” Ok. She’s the boss. I quickly grabbed my backpack and slid down the slippery bank and into the front of the canoe loaded down with Waorani women, each with a baby in a sling around their shoulder or small child by their side. Although it didn’t feel like it at the time, I was really lucky to have got that last seat…

We ended up taking off around 10 a.m., leaving the other group behind to find their own way. The first half hour of the trip we motored past colono (colonists, mostly Shuar) settlements along the river. Although the houses weren’t visible from the river, I could tell that we were not in Waorani territory because of what was planted in their chacras (gardens). Finally we entered Wao territory, which was actually marked with a sign, part of a project to delineate the borders of their territory. Over the course of the next 5 hours or so, we motored up the Shiripuno River, making stops at a few Waorani houses along the way to say hello and to eat their food and drink their chicha. I goofed around with these two kids who were sitting behind me. The girl was at first scared of me, but eventually warmed up. When I wasn’t playing with them, I was scanning the banks for critters. I was excited to be able to see some cool wildlife, including a caiman, an agouti and a sunbittern. Always happy to see wildlife actually alive…rather than on a plate in front of me… It was slow going. The river level steadily dropped throughout the day and by the end of it we were having to go really slow to avoid hitting logs. One of our stops was at the new Huaorani eco-lodge outside of Quehueri’ono operated by TROPIC in cooperation with the Waorani community. I got to peek around a bit. It looked very nice, but it didn’t look very new. The wood had a time-worn look to it… a testament to how quickly things erode in the rainforest, I guess. We finally pulled up to the community in the late afternoon, unpacked our stuff and hung out in the school building waiting for the canoe to come back with some food that TROPIC had donated for our workshop. After we unloaded our stuff, one of the women said that there was a boa by one of the houses and asked if I wanted to see it. YES, of course! As long as I can keep a distance… She led me through a wooded area to where some of the houses were located…and there in a grassy by the house was a huge boa constrictor. And it was not happy. Evidently one of the men came across it while he was working in the chacra and brought it up near the house so others could gawk at it too. A group of kids kept throwing sticks at it, and one of the boys had a red t-shirt on the end of the stick and was taunting it. I got to witness the speed and the force of its jaws (and just how wide it can open its mouth) when it went after the t-shirt. I took another step backward. The comical part was watching the Waorani try to call a chicken that was wandering dangerously close to the boa. Meanwhile, one of the same boys came over to the house where I was loitering outside of, and showed me his gigantic pet rhino beetle. I know it was a pet and not just some straggler because he actually had a string around its leg. A beetle leash, so to speak.

That night I helped make dinner for our group, which consisted of rice, pasta and tuna. For breakfast the next morning we made rice with sardines and oatmeal drink. That’s all we had to work with. Cooking took forever because it required wood fire cooking…which required walking really far to get firewood. The women gave me a huge basket of wood to carry. I think they did it just to watch me struggle with it. The basket had a strap to put across your forehead, with the basket balanced on the small of your back. I walked like that for a couple hundred meters until it felt like a vertebrae was going to be compacted and crushed in my neck. I then grabbed the straps to take the pressure off my neck and continued walking until I saw some teenage boys who were willing to carry the wood for me. Whew! Quite a workout, really. The next challenge to the cooking spree was the fact that we did not have any spoons OR cups. Like any good Peace Corps Volunteer I improvised. I made a makeshift spoon out of a drink box, while the women just used their hands. For cups, I washed out the sardine cans and then filled them with the oatmeal drink to offer to the women, yelling “sardine juice, sardine juice, get your sardine juice for only 25 cents,” which they thought was hilarious. (They are an easy audience.) We made an extra large batch of rice and sardines in anticipation for the other group to come. They never came. So for lunch, we ate MORE rice and sardines and drank more oatmeal drink out of sardine cans. For dinner we ate more rice and canned seafood, again making extra in hopes that the other group would show up. They still did not show up. I was starting to get very worried about them.

During the day, I had tried to organize the “baby boat” group to have at least a mini-workshop (the trainers were among the group that were left behind waiting for the other canoes). I led what I thought was a good session with them where we talked about the importance of good quality handicrafts and we rated some of the things they had made. I also worked with them to collect information for a project I’m doing to document the natural materials (bark, leaves, roots and nuts) they use to dye the fiber. Interestingly, I have often found that my Spanish flows when I am talking among other non-native Spanish speakers for some reason. I am embarrassed to say that my wao-terero is still non-existent, however.

So, despite the transportation challenges in getting to the community, and the fact that we didn’t have much food or utensils… and the fact that I did not having any of the materials I needed, nor were the trainers there… despite all this…I was actually having a good time.

But things changed the following day (to be continued).

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)

Quehueri'ono part 1

(typed Saturday) I’m reclined on pillows, relaxing, eating bonbons in bed as I type this. It is true. Now before you start getting grandiose ideas about the rough life of a Peace Corps Volunteer, let me explain. I am “relaxing” in bed because I have no energy. I am eating chocolate Ecua bon-bons because I am hungry...and mostly because I am trying to get this awful taste out of my mouth. You see, I have giardia. Yep, I ate or drank something very contaminated recently and those nasty little protozoa have attacked my intestines. Before I received this diagnosis, I was convinced I had worms. More like a colony of worms. I was certain that two opposing factions were warring over who was going to take over my small intestine. Let’s just say that there were many strange sensations, sounds and odors emanating from my body. But, it turns out I don’t have worms...I have giardia. Whew. That’s a relief... I think. Actually, I don’t know which would be worse. Worms sounds worse to me. And Giardia is supposedly very easily treatable. One dose of Fasogyn and it clears it all up by killing all the bichos. Yesterday afternoon I picked up the meds at a local pharmacy and eagerly took the dose recommended by the PC nurse. On my walk home I bought some bread because I realized that I should probably not take it on a totally empty stomach...and because I started getting a metallic taste in my mouth. The stale bread didn’t help. Neither did the plantain chips I bought at another store. I got home, made some soup and drank some Sprite. The taste remained. It tasted like I had been licking the dirty door of a stainless steel refrigerator. That’s the best way I can describe it. It was disgusting. I kept drinking more sprite to try to get rid of the taste. No dice. Nothing seemed to work. I plopped in our hammock and started reading some of the recent Columbus Dispatch articles Jer’s mom had sent us to try to take my mind off my stomach...and now mouth...issues. Then the power went out. I scrambled to find a flashlight and light some candles and then grabbed my headlamp to continue reading. The power went off and on several times before finally being restored. Then I peuked my guts out. Damn. There went all my meds down the drain. I was wiped of energy by this point, so I decided to crash in bed and watch a movie. (I happened to pick up a few new ones at my new fave dvd store in town. The lady sold me 4 movies for 5 bucks...and even guaranteed that if I didn’t like one of the movies that she recommended I could bring it back no problem. Deal!) So, I started watching In Good Company (I have a mini-crush on Dennis Quaid). All was going great...until with 5 minutes left in the movie, the dvd grinds to a halt and the screen is blurred on the final scene where Topher Grace is jogging and gets a phone call...and then I don’t know what happens...I don’t know how it ends! Argh!!!!!!!!!!!!!! So disappointing. Damned pirated dvds...

Okay, so I have been putting off my telling of the story of my latest trip adentro. I have been living in Procrastination Nation this week. Not that I am obligated to share with the world my misadventures... I just don’t want to disappoint the three of you that are actually interested in what I am doing and the other two of you that are just killing time surfing the web while on the clock.

So...here goes. Last week I was travelling with the Waorani Women’s Association to the community of Quehueri’ono (also sometimes spelled Keweriuno...and pronounced roughly “Kay-where-eee-uuu--no” ) where we were to have the last in a series of workshops aimed at improving the quality and consistency of handicrafts made by the women. Quehueri’ono is home to arguably the most famous Waorani, Moi, who’s photograph is on the cover of the book Savages by Joe Kane and he once graced the cover of the New York Times Magazine (I think that was the one) in the 1990’s when the Waorani were fighting against U.S.-based Maxus oil company. (Fast forward 17 years and you find Moi still living and working in Quehueri’ono on a recently opened Eco-lodge...for details check out www.huaorani.com).

It was going to be a long trip to get to the community. We were scheduled to meet at the Women’s Assoc office at 7 a.m. As per usual, I was the first one there and the only one on time. Despite this, we managed to get the gas and the food without much delay and we left town within 15 minutes of the ETD. Remarkable. The average delay prior to this trip was easily 1.5 hours. I had a glimmer of hope that things maybe, just maybe, would go according to plan...

Once we were on the road, the bus driver put in a movie. As the opening credits began to roll I had this sinking feeling. “No! It couldn’t be... I CAN’T be... Please tell me you’re joking!!” Oh, no. My worst fears were realized. The bus driver put on the worst movie ever made: Little Man. I have ranted about this movie in previous posts. It is just inexplicably popular on Ecuadorian buses. I just don’t get it. I have seen it no less than 5 times here. Wait. Correction: It has been played on no less than 5 buses in which I happened to be a passenger. It is kind of comical, really. Every volunteer has a movie that they claim they’ve seen many multiple times on Ecua-buses. My friend Elliot once told me that he had seen the movie Shooter with Mark Wahlburg no less than a dozen times on buses. He proceeded on telling me where he was going on each of these bus rides to prove it to me. He was so outraged by it. Meanwhile I was just incredulous to the fact that he a) had been travelling so much; and b) was complaining about watching Markie Mark. Then again, I have a mini-crush on Mark too (right SMK?). I also had the bad luck of sitting below one of the speakers and had to really concentrate on not being distracted by the bad-dubbing job. Instead I focused on reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. It was a book that my RPCV friend sent to me...saying that it is something that should be read in Peace Corps or something like that. Thankfully I was only about 400 pages into the 1069 page behemoth when it was still moderately interesting and before it teemed with anti-government and anti-public service rants. To be continued...