Celary in Ecuador

There´s a colour and exuberance here in Quito that was missing in Santiago de Chile. The Ecuadorians haven´t had to survive Pinochet, although there have been plenty of military coups and a different Presidente every time you blink, until recently. Maybe it´s partly to do with the fact that capitalism doesn´t have the same stranglehold over the hearts and minds of ordinary people, because here it´s not a question of how much of the capitalist pie you can get, but whether you have any pie at all. There is a wealthy elite and a growing middleclass, but most people are still poor with little hope of change in the short term. The poverty is evident everywhere, but so is the optimism and spirit of entrepreneurship. In the respectable working class area where we live (a mainly native American Kichwa community), women turn their front rooms into cafés, people "borrow" crumbling kerb stones to hold down their corrugated iron roofs and women graze cows on the grass verges between blocks of flats. But the city´s streets are full of shoeshine boys who should be in school, yet aren´t, and youngsters performing juggling tricks at major traffic junctions to eke out a precarious and polluted living. In the markets of south Quito, where we volunteered, 5 year olds looks after week old babies so their mothers can work, and work they do. They sell everything from coal to 20 different types of potato (the potato was discovered here), to pigs heads piled up in neat pyramids grinning as the vegetarians scuttle past, to 120 different kinds of delicious fruit, most of which have no translation in English, to t-shirts with New York stamped across them, to women repairing your clothes on their sewing machines for 25 cents, to old men keeping the washstands clean or minding your truck while you load up with crates of tree tomatoes, granadillos (sweet, frog-spawn like fruit), lychees, physalis, a bright pink hairy fruit whose name I can´t remember, 10 types of melon, orange, coconut, pineapple, sweet corn, bits of pig, chickens and goats (alive), but not for long, as the cook pot awaits them. Oh! and maybe a cardboard box full of fluffy ducklings, also on their way to the great Daddy Duck in the sky.



There´s no state pension here for elders who haven´t worked for the government or some big company. So, if you´re poor, you work until you drop. There´s no safety net, either, if you lose your job. You rely on your family, or you work the traffic, or you hustle tourists. Tourism is HUGE here, far more so than Chile. There are definite benefits if you´re a chocaholic or caffeine addict (thank God, an end to Nescafé!) The downside is that tourists (amongst others), represent a wealthy target. We´ve discovered a mall downtown, full of all the stuff that´s been nicked from the gringos. You can even go and buy your camera back - at a great, rock-bottom price!



Maybe having the socialist President Correa running the government accounts for some of the optimism. He´s cancelled Ecuador´s debts to the first world, run up by previous corrupt administrations largely for their own benefit; he´s taking the oil back under Ecuadorean control (with the multinationals fighting him every inch of the way) and he wants to move the country away from over-dependence on oil. Many people think he will help the poor, except the local hairdresser´s Dad. He is by no means so sure. He reckons this socialist fandango is all very well, but does it put pig on the plate or get Eduardo a decent job? (All this declaimed at 100 decibels, whilst an amazing number of locals were squeezed into every nook and cranny of the hairdresser watching me get shorn, like I´d just won first prize at the Yorkshire Show!) So the long term transformations promised by a Socialist President may not be enough.



There are 3 women-led households in the adobe-brick apartment block where we live. The women wear traditional Kichwa dress comprising a brightly coloured, pleated, wrap-around skirt, a white blouse with frilly sleeves that also acts as a petticoat (in case the skirt unwraps?), a differently brightly coloured shawl that acts as either a baby sling or a sun shield, and the dark, Homburg hat when they go out. Black, plastic soled espadrilles and hand-strung gold bobble necklaces complete the outfit. Their sons all wear levis and sweat shirts but are not averse to hanging out the washing or sweeping the yard. From our roof top verandah we see plenty of young men doing the family wash by hand, using the ridged scrubbing boards I remember from the fifties. The daughters of the house wear mini skirts and croptops, except when Grandma is visiting! One of the compensations for having to hand-wash everything (until we discovered a laundry), was looking up from the wash tub to see Cotopaxi Volcano sparkling with snow on the horizon and Quito´s ragbag of eccentric housing, including the skyscrapers, flung across the valley below us and up the sides of Pinchincha volcano and countless other smaller mountains and hills, stretching back forever into the blue, misty yonder.