« The People's Health Assembly, Cuenca Ecuador | Main | Nature, God, Health and everything »
July 17, 2005
A note of warning: this blog will be written as a narrative of events from a personal perspective, possibly mixed with analysis, commentary, news releases from the PHM media team, etc…Which is to say, I´m not counting words, so expect me to ramble on..
Upon arrival…
Arriving in Quito, my traveling companion Pam and I are met by a friend of a friend named Rafael Campoverde, a Chilean artesano. Pam catches a flight onward to Cuenca, where the assembly will be, and Rafael loads my bags into his car to drive me to his home a few hours south for a brief visit before he’ll take me onward to Cuenca in another day. Rodrigo’s car is a blue 1978 Ford Granada, a big old American sedan. He tells me the car is named “El Blues Brother;” with the biggest car and the biggest V8 engine in Ecuador, he doesn’t have to be afraid of the crazy roads and the crazier drivers.
We race through Quito traffic and out through town after town sprawling across the high Andean plateau. The valley stretching from Quito south is known as the Avenida de Los Volcanes, after half a dozen still active snow-capped rumbling volcanoes that reach to 14,000 feet and dominate the horizon: Chimborazo, Pichincha, Las Altares, Cotopaxi, Tumburahua. As we drive and the sky shifts and darkness falls, Rafael tells me about his work doing environmental education with children – “because they are the only ones capable of learning anything” – and of his studies with Ecuador’s oldest shamans. My connection with him is through past work helping to buy and protect land for an indigenous Kichwa/Shuar community called Amazanga, where I’ve visited for a week at a time on a few occasions. Rafael works with Amazanga, but more importantly, he tells me, he is one of a handful – literally five or so individuals – who are studying the medicinal plant knowledge and the spiritual healing arts of the Secoya people, a now very small indigenous group in the Amazon. The Secoyas’ situation is dire, he says: they are, or were, a people renowned for their profound knowledge of the plants of the jungle, and their elaborate ceremonies and rituals – and all of this knowledge now rests with a few elders who are no longer respected by the rest. The oldest, the grand-shaman of the Secoyas, is between 115 and 130 years old. The others are in their 80’s and 90’s, and not long for this world. And the only people dedicated to learning from them are a handful of foreigners – Rafael, who is Chilean, an Austrian, a Gringo, and a few more. And the knowledge they gain, though important, can be superficial at best.
The younger Secoya all receive money and favors from the oil companies to sell their land, to remain passive, to buy alcohol. The culture is on the verge of extinction.
I ask Rafael, in his opinion, what can be done to revert the situation, to slow it down, to help. Nothing, he says. “Ya se termino la cosa:” it’s over.
It seems that every time I arrive in Ecuador, I am greeted by this kind of bad news.
Baños, where Rafael lives, is halfway between Quito and Cuenca, and at one of the earth’s incredible edges where the Eastern side of the Andes begins to spill down into the upper Amazon. The town, named after its hot springs that cascade from the side of a cliff, is in the shadow of the volcano Tumburahua, which erupted as recently as 2000, causing the entire town to be evacuated. Rafael takes me immediately to the baths, to recover from 12 hours of travel. Here, a massive pool of hot water coming straight out of the mountain sits below a waterfall hundreds of meters high. It is Friday night, and the place is “full” as they say in Ecuador: families, children, teenagers, everybody here splashing and laughing and enjoying the gift of the volcano. After a brief “relax”, as they say in Ecuador, we head to his house to talk and sleep. But before sleep, he leads me outside, when the night is quiet and says: “Listen…you can hear the volcano.” In the silence of the night from the mountain that rises directly behind his house and blocks the horizon, I hear a slight groaning and bubbling. The volcano is mixing its brew.
Day 2
We leave, by car, for Cuenca, six hours or so to the south. Beneath the majesty of the volcanoes and mountains encircling the horizon, the road from Quito to Baños is all urban sprawl, dirty towns of cement buildings and diesel fumes. In contrast, from Baños south to Cuenca we enter more rural terrain – indigenous villages of wattle and daub houses with thatch roofs interspersed with the more common cement block “missionary style” houses, and huge rolling, tumbling valleys patchworked with farmland: potatoes, onions, quinoa, wheat, barley. Women and children in typical Andean clothes tend sheep and cows along the roads and up in the hills. They wear brightly colored shawls, and Rafael tells me, laughing, that this is so that they can see each other from one mountainside to the next.
Our journey takes us high, over 12,000 foot passes and down into 8000 foot valleys, and up again through terrain both spectacular and brutal. Everywhere the mountains are almost completely without trees, aside from scattered patches of eucalyptus – an invasive weed planted for quick firewood but not even good for burning. Most of the patchwork of fields is bare and brown, and entire mountainsides are nothing but dead soil. At the height of our journey, through the desertified high sierra at 12,ooo feet, the pavement ends and along the dirt road we pass an old man, tiny with his back hunched and his hand held out to any passing vehicle. We stop and give him a dollar, and he blesses us. After this, every 200 meters we run across the same, only now they are children. Bands of children stretch a rope across the road to stop our car, and we stop, ask their names, and hand out tangerines and small coins. At one such roadblock I get out of the car and raise my camera to take a picture. The children all remove their hats and cover their faces. I put down the camera, and hand out more fruit and more coins. Looking around, there is nothing but hard-packed clay soil, rock, and small bands of children.
The whole way we are talking, madly, me asking questions about the political situation here, Rafael telling stories of the riots, of the past presidents, of the indigenous movement. “Every government lasts less time than the one before,” he says. “This is the only country,” he says, “where the politician, at the end of his term, packs suitcases full of cash and quietly slips out of the country, and the next one does the same.” “Cash, really,” I ask? “Si,” he says, “no one will give them a credit card.” En fin, he tells me that the common name for Ecuador is Absurdistan, and bursts into laughter.
Descending into Cuenca, we arrive at nightfall, and Rafael leaves me at my hotel, where – muy de repente – all the delegates to the People’s Health Assembly are checking in. We part, and suddenly I am cast into a mass of people from India, from the US, from all over the Americas. Hundreds of others from Europe, Asia and Africa are in hotels around the city. I am handed a program packed with more talks, workshops and cultural events than 1000 people can attend in a single week. It is clear that my slow arrival across the mountains is over and a great chaotic week is about to begin.
On Sunday, the welcome ceremony: an elaborate ceremony with music, dance, blessings of the four directions by curanderos from various cultures, 1000 participants dressed in white and traditional clothes, calling for a blessing of the week´s events and for unity of purpose, vision and a devotion to the earth. This sort of thing is better left undescribed, so that´s that. You had to be there.
Posted by jeff at July 17, 2005 07:51 PM