Getting Started

Three weeks ago I met my boyfriend Gabe and his uncle at the airport in Lima on a heavily overcast day. We spent the week exploring the gray city with his family, from the ritzy mall in Mira Flores to the flowery hills of Pachacamac. A week later Gabe and I made our way down to Ecuador, where we plan to spend six eventful weeks. We are working here to write eco-tourism guides for the non-profit CASA Inter-Americana (www.casainteram.org). These small books will hopefully provide in-depth descriptions about the culture, traditions, history, flora, and fauna of the three indigenous communities we are working in: Pijal, La Chimba, and Pucara. All three communities are close to the touristy hub of Otavalo, an indigenous city made rich off of its booming craft markets. From this central point we now find ourselves spiraling out into the mountains to start our work. My Spanish is getting better out of necessity, and hopefully by December I will be a little less of a gringa.

Quito:

Quito is a beautiful but thorny destination, with colorful houses strewn all over the hilly terrain and many sketchy people drawn to the inflow of money and goods accompanying planeloads of naïve tourists. We stayed in a hostal called the Secret Garden with five stories of flowering plants and a breathtaking rooftop deck overlooking the city. We were content to spend the majority of our time there, rather than to wander the streets sticking out like sore thumbs. After a night in the noisy hostal (someone managed to kick one of the million potted plants down the five flights of stairs) we happily got on a bus to Otavalo, and then on to Pijal.

Pijal:

We spent the past two weeks living in Pijal, a Cayambi (indigenous group) agricultural community of about five thousand scattered people (though truthfully it seems more like 200 people) close to a large lake (Lago San Pablo). The scenery here is breathtaking with the lake, Imbabura volcano, and rolling hills surrounding. We arrived in the community with the director of CASA, Pete Shear, and were greeted with a very formal reception in the community tourism center. The community of Pijal has put together its own grassroots tourism group named Sumak Pacha (Quichua for ‘Pure Nature’). The group seems to consist of about a dozen middle aged members and a few college students. The women here all dress very traditionally, in fancy embroidered blouses, felt hats, colored skirts, and felt black shoes. When I first saw everyone dressed up I thought it was some sort of a gimmicky welcome for tourists, but it turns out this is the everyday attire. The feminine appearance of the women can be very misleading, especially when it comes to hard agricultural work. In the same skirts and dainty shoes these women can wield a machete with lethal force and carry impossibly heavy bags up the steep hills of the community. They often complete much of the hard agricultural work, taking care of the livestock, planting and harvesting, in the absence of their husbands. Many of the men and younger people have left the community in search of work. The father in our host family has been in Spain for seven years sending back money. As a result we found ourselves in a house full of three young generations of women (the young daughters have small daughters of their own, another issue in the community).

Our host family was great, providing us with accommodations and three hot meals a day at eight dollars a night. We were stuffed every meal with massive portions of potatoes, rice, corn, bread, and fresh juice. Most all of the food we ate was grown in the backyard or came from the family cows. The community grows almost everything 100% organically with no pesticides. This is a part of their appeal as an alternative tourist location. They hope to teach visitors about their traditional agricultural practices, as well as their usage of medicinal plants and other natural resources. It seems that everything sprouting from the ground has a variety of uses within the community. This is all the more reason for Pijal to start a tourism project that includes the natural environment. In this way they can hopefully better preserve their surroundings.

All of these things we learned about through wandering around the community and interviewing people. We needed to collect as much relevant information as we could to include in the tourism guide. The actual accumulation of this info was a slow and scatterbrained process, but in the end all of the little bits and pieces came together more or less nicely (I will post the guide as soon as it is edited!).

Some things were more difficult to learn about than others in Pijal. For example, we learned a little more than we wanted to about rituals and traditions using animals. Our first jarring experience was with the festival of Rama de Gallo, where twelve live roosters were paraded through the streets by a drunken crowd. Towards the end the poor animals were being flung every which direction and dropped by inebriated partiers. That was hard to watch. Even harder to witness was the ‘Cuy Diognostico’ they performed on Gabe. This involved rubbing a cute, fat guinea pig all over Gabe until it died, and then watching the shaman dissect it with her bare hands to determine if he (Gabe) had any ailments. This was a nauseating process, but she completed it all without a pause in her pretty skirt and pink sweater. This is what I’m talking about with the women: They are not to be underestimated.