Ecuador

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

I started work at 7:30 a.m. today. At 8 o'clock, Marcelo joined Craig and myself for breakfast. It was one of my favorite breakfasts: crepes filled with blackberry jam. Yum!

Antonio and Marcelo worked on the house all day. Over the past couple of days, the amount of progress has been amazing. The third floor walls are growing taller by the day. It is so fun to be here when all of this excitement is going on.

Today we learned that one of the second story bedrooms is for us! We have been perfectly comfortable in the casita, but we are humbled and honored that our compadres want us to stay in the main house with them! We couldn't be happier! Our new room has views of the surrounding mountains and bucolic countryside, and we will have a view of the sunset! We are so blessed. How could we have ever imagined this when we booked our original homestay 5 years ago?

It is Tayanta's job to bring the organic kitchen waste out to the compost pile in the garden. Rosa called her and she dutifully picked up the plastic bucket, which was almost as big as she was, and took it out to the garden, stopping every few steps to put it down for a short rest. When she got to the compost pile, she turned the bucket upside down, hit it with her hand a couple of times, and then sat on it. "Ya!" She said, satisfied when she was done.

Sisa and Yupanqui got home from school as lunch was served. We had very tasty chicken and rice which was cooked over the fire. After lunch. Aida's half-sister Cecilia visited with her 7-month-old son Ariel. He is adorable and very good-natured, with wide eyes that take everything in. Craig was napping but I woke him up to meet them.

Marcelo's son Jung was back, as was his precocious 7-year-old daughter Ruby Natalia, whom I remembered from Yupanqui's baptism. At one point, everyone was hanging out on the unfinished 3rd floor. The men were building walls out of cement blocks. Rosa was helping Sisa with her homework. And the other kids were playing and observing.

I finished off my work day. The family worked like an assembly line to get all of the cement blocks up to the 3rd floor.

School uniforms came today for Sisa and Yupanqui. They have traditional Otavaleno style clothes (long skirts and embroidered blouse for Sisa, white button shirt, white trousers, and a wool poncho for Yupanqui). They also had nice heavy duty sweatsuits embroidered with the Ecuador logo for Fridays. The sizes were a little off - Sisa's blouse could probably have fit me, and Yupanqui's pants were too long. Good thing Rosa is such a good seamstress!

Dinner was soup, potatoes, mote (boiled corn kernels), and really delicious blackened pork.

Each night before bed, Craig has been reading Tuesdays with Morrie. Tonight he finished the book and asked me to write the following Facebook post:

Over 2 years ago, Greg Dann lent us "Tuesdays with Morrie," saying that he thought we would really enjoy it. Neither of us have much time to read these days, and it sat on our counter until we came to Ecuador in September of 2013. Craig started to read it the night before our godson Yupanqui's baptism. As he read the frontmatter, he started to feel dizzy. He was seeing double and started to feel nauseous. He put the book down, figuring he was overtired. Only it was much worse than that. It turned out to be his first MS attack. He missed the baptism and subsequent party, being mostly confined to bed for the remainder of the trip. When we managed to get him back home, he was hospitalized for 5 days, in physical therapy rehab for a week, and recovered at home for another 5 weeks.

Now, almost exactly 2 years later, Craig has recovered in a lot of respects, though he has retired from work due to unpredictable physical and mental fatigue. We still have Greg's book, and Craig decided to bring it here, and was determined to finish it. He has read it each night before bed, finishing it last night. He can't stop talking about it. It really affected him. He found it brilliant, beautiful, and poignant. Morrie echoed many of Craig's own thoughts about modern, impersonal, throwaway culture. He also saw parallels between Mitch Albom's weekly Tuesday meetings with Morrie and our own weekly Sunday afternoon meetings with our dear friend Frank Brown ( Karmilla Ali 's father).

Many of you may know this story, but after reading an article in our local newspaper about Frank, who had been B.B. King's bus driver for 20 years, but was at that time 79 years old and living in a nearby nursing home, we decided to contact Frank and visit him on Valentine's Day of 1994. This was one of the best decisions that we ever made. He won our hearts immediately, and after a lovely visit, he asked when we were coming back. It became our weekly Sunday ritual to visit Frank. His daughter Karmilla and the rest of his family lived in Mobile, Alabama, and although he had other friends in our area, we became his most frequent visitors, and it meant as much to us as it did to him. When he was up for it, we "busted him out" of the nursing home to take him out for soul food, blues concerts (he introduced us to B.B. King and Buddy Guy), the Ray Charles movie (since he was friends with Ray Charles), and to Craig's parents' house for Christmas dinner.

Like Morrie, Frank eventually passed away (18 months later). We arranged for him to return to Mobile to be buried with his mother, at his request. We traveled to Mobile for the funeral, where we met Karmilla and the rest of Frank's family. They were so gracious to us, and we are friends with Karmilla to this day. Frank had always wanted to take us to Mobile for Mardi Gras. We couldn't believe that he was gone, and when we got to Mobile, the first thing we wanted to do was to tell him that we were in his hometown. But we are sure that he knew.

Karmilla, if you want insight into our relationship with your dad, this book really hits the nail on the head. There was an indescribable deep human connection between people who needed one another. Frank's memory was not what it used to be, and some of the things that he had told us turned out to be incorrect, but that's not the point. We enjoyed one another's company. We learned a lot from him, just like Mitch Albom did from Morrie. The most important things in life aren't things, they are relationships. Now that Craig has finished the book, I am going to read it. By the time we see you agian, Greg, we will return it. Sorry for the 2+ year delay. But thanks so much for not allowing us to return it without reading it! If you want to read a more detailed account of our relationship with Frank, please see our blog.

Update

Since returning from Ecuador, I also read this wonderful book, which inspired the following Facebook post:

"If we saw each other as more alike, we might be very eager to join in one big human family in this world, and to care about that family the way we care about our own...we all have the same beginning-birth-and we all have the same end-death. So how different can we be?" - Morrie Schwartz

Just read all of Tuesdays with Morrie while getting my car serviced. Wow. This quote seems particularly appropriate given current world events. Thanks Greg Dann for recommending this amazing book!