Just the break I needed

A little over two months cooped up in my town of 14,000, I needed a break.

So I took that much-needed respite.

In a community of 140.

Thursday night, I attended the community bank meeting in Batanes. And as you learned from my previous post, the municipality’s fleet of vehicles is not reliable.

As is usual, the car was at its second home — the shop. (I joke around with my coworkers that its first home is the mechanic and that its second home is on the road.)

There is no bus that goes to Batanes — you have to ford a river three times to reach the community. Relying on public transit, you have to take a 90-minute bus from Santa Rosa to El Carmen and walk half an hour.

The bus route runs twice a day — 11:30 and 3:00. Bear in mind that these times are merely estimates. Anything within 40 minutes of them is still considered “on time.” And to go from El Carmen back to Santa Rosa, there is just one bus per day (sometime around noon but I heard 11:30, 12:00, and 12:30, so I figured I’d take the average and say it leaves at noon)

Well, without a means to get us back to town, we (My municipal coworker and I) had to spend the night. And since the annual fiesta in Batanes started Friday, we figured that we would aprovechar (to take advantage of) this opportunity and spend a couple of days in the campo (as opposed to the ciudad).

Instead of waking up to the sound of clucking roosters and the sight of a chicken coup out my window, I got to wake up to the sound of clucking roosters and bit of the Ecuadorian countryside out my window.



(By the way, having to worry about whether the chickens enter the bathroom when you are going is a hilarious thing to worry about.)

We arrived a little before 5:00 and helped them prepare for the fiesta. Their current project was putting up poles on which to put lights. There was using a rebar and concrete to put them in place and would wait until the lights and connecting wire arrived on Friday. (The lights and wire never arrived. We joked that they weren’t putting these poles up for this year’s party, but that they were already thinking about next year’s party and had a year to conseguir (get or acquire) the lights.)

At 6:00 was the community bank meeting. This was a momentous meeting for this group because it was their first opportunity to take out loans from the community bank. And well…. that is exactly what happened. This is kind of like the community bank equivalent of the first radishes I harvested from my vegetable patch.

Everybody was very excited about the first loan and combined with the excitement surrounding the town’s fiestas, I would describe the emotion in this sleepy town as ‘sleepless.’

Speaking of sleepy, when one is out in the campo and there isn’t much light or anything to do once the sun goes down, I got really tired really early. This is much like what happened during training, when I was in my training village outside Cayambe. So after the meeting, we hung out with our hosts for the weekend.

The next day, we played soccer with the students at the local school (The local school only has six students, and even though they are in different grades, they all have class in the same classroom. Their map still has the Union Sovietica) We also took a stroll up to the recently constructed water tank.

In the afternoon, there was a soccer match between the Batanes team and some of the neighboring communities. I got to help chalk the lines for match, which involved pacing off the distances between the goal and the corners and pouring crushed up chalk along the string we set down .

(The municipality was supposed to field a team for this match, but because of car difficulties and a strike that has kept most of the staff out of the office for the last week and a half prevented its participation {What happened was that the striking workers couldn’t leave the strike to play in the match, but if there had not been a strike, they would have been able to leave work to play in the match. For some reason, this logic doesn’t make too much sense to me}).

I almost played for the Batanes team, but after the other members of the team saw me play and then saw the 13-year-old nephew of my host mom play, they opted for the 13-year-old nephew. My soccer coach from my days in the BBSC jokes about how he might have the lowest winning percentage in soccer history. After watching me play, I think it’s more obvious that his teams lacked talent than technical know-how.

Well, I spent the rest of the afternoon noshing on banana and shmoozing with the family that so graciously hosted me for a few days.

The tranquilidad (tranquility) of the campo is incredible. Being able to wake up and look out the window at lush mountainside (even though most of it was deforested for cattle, there are still some trees left) and being able to breath the fresh air, instead of the respiratory-problem-inducing dust of the city was a great break. It gave me time to clear my head and almost finish a book.

But that tranquilidad ended after my conversations with the host family, because that night, the fiestas got under way.

And seeing as I am already two pages into this blog post, we will have to save the fiestas for my next dispatch.