Otavalo and more

The thing about volunteering is that if you don’t like it, you can quit. So we did. Not because the market children weren’t lovely, but because the organisation was ropey, to say the least. So now we don aprons and brandish enormous, blunt knives in the kitchen of ‘Los Abuelitos de las Calles’, (Street Grandparents). We assist the tiny cook, Laura, to produce 100 breakfasts and 100 three-course lunches per day for the hungry grandparents who, despite the name, for the most part aren’t homeless, but who have to work in the streets to pay the rent. They do everything you can think of, from selling single sweets and biscuits out of the packet, to guarding your humvee when you decide to spend the evening in your favourite salsateque. So ‘Abuelitos de las Calles’ has to substitute for the non-existent (here) old age pension. All the food is donated and past its sell-by date, so the cook never knows from one day to the next what her menu will be; it all depends on the beneficence of Supermaxi (Tesco’s) and what middleclass Quiteños don’t want to put on their dinner plates that day (squishy fruit and slightly furry veg in our experience). Sometimes there is no rice, rarely is there meat, but a day never goes past without there being sackfuls of potatoes. Celine and I have now peeled enough to recreate the entire Andean range. Despite these drawbacks, Laura manages to produce highly nutritious meals from her set of gigantic cauldrons. Picture this – on our first day there was a fiesta and chicken was on the menu. The two gringa vegetarianas were set to work stripping the cooked and grease-oozing chickens by hand, without gloves, in a cold-water-only, soapless kitchen! Fernando comes 4 times a month to bake for the abuelitos. This is on top of getting up at 3.00am every day to bake for wages. It’s fantastic to watch a maestro work. Thick blankets of dough are rolled, punched, thwacked, slapped and tweaked into mouth-watering empanadas, crusty rolls, curled Chelsea buns and delicate croissants. Everything comes out of the oven absolutely perfect, except when Celine and I had a go – what we produced tasted great but looked like baggy monsters!

As everywhere, one of the oppressive social divides in Ecuador is race. At the top of the heap are the white descendants of the conquistadores (about 6% of the population), followed by the mestizos (the mixed white/indigenous people, who number around 65%), the indigenous population at 25% and at the bottom of the pile, the Afro-Ecuatorian people who, until very recently, weren’t even recognised as a distinct ethnic group. It is now thought the 2001 census was wrong in showing they only formed 5% of the population and new thinking reckons there to be double that number, or about 1.2 million people. Racism operates between white and indigenous, white and mestizo (we’ve witnessed a couple of unpleasant incidents of this aimed at our Spanish teacher), white and black and indigenous and black. How the different indigenous Kichwa groups rub along, to say nothing of how the Shuar get on with the Kichwa, or the Huaorani get on with the Chachi, we don’t know, but as colonialism is still a potent factor here, then the fall-out from the old colonial divide and rule tactic (whereby racism gets internalised), is probably still making its ugly presence felt.

It was interesting spending a few days in Otavalo (3 hours north of Quito) in the northern sierra, because it’s a mainly indigenous town. The hotels and businesses are run and owned by Kichwa people, as is the world famous textile cottage industry that operates in many of the surrounding villages, where weaving families have been perfecting their craft since before the invasion of the Incas. The atmosphere here is very different to Quito. The indigenous people here are the majority; they don’t have to tread carefully, but can walk tall and take up lots of (colourful) space. The Otavaleños Kichwa dress differently from the Kichwa women in our Quito compound. They wear long black skirts slit up one side to reveal a cream underskirt, the whole caboodle fastened together with a woven band. Their frilly white blouses are beautifully embroidered and set off with soft wool shawls. Headdresses range from the Homburg hat (less common here), to a long black cloth hanging down the back, like an old fashioned nun, to a dark, triangular headcloth (fachalina), reminiscent of an eighteenth century Dutch bonnet. Otavalo men don’t do bald and wear their hair in a long plait. Despite the bustle and dust of a prosperous market town, they wear spotlessly white, loose trousers and ponchos, always in one shade of blue. We saw two indigenous men wearing knee-length skirts which, we think, indicates they come from another part of Ecuador altogether. People here can tell precisely what village you come from depending on the way your fachalina is tied or the pattern of weave in your shawl.

Shopping hasn’t featured much in this blog to date, but that is about to change. You CANNOT visit Otavalo and not buy presents for friends and family you didn’t even know existed. We’re carpeted, ponchoed, hatted and pictured out! The huge market drowns you in the warm, earthy, home-dyed colours of carpets, rugs, wall hangings, hoodies, hammocks; your fingers tingle with the textures of alpaca and llama, honey-roasted peanuts assault your taste buds and your feet get tapping to the competing sound systems. The vendors chide you, their sister, not to waste your precious time buying from any other stall; they graciously forgive your attempts at bargaining and murmur that, for you, their first lucky customer of the day, the poncho is yours, despite the utterly absurd price you have offered. And that’s just the textile market (aptly called Plaza de Ponchos!) For early risers (5.30am) you can also experience the delights of the animal market – delights not shared, I may say, by the enormous porker squealing his indignation at the several farmers trying to prise him out the back of the pick-up truck he was clearly very attached to. The hens hanging upside down, five to each hand, demonstrated their distaste for the whole market shenanigans by a total absence of clucking. Even the cuys (guineapigs), being held up by the scruffs of their necks to show how fat and juicy they were, remained silent. Only the ducklings put up a spirited resistance to their date with the roasting pan by escaping from their baskets and scarpering in all directions, a gang of toddlers in hot pursuit.

With pavements prone to alarming changes of level, including total disappearance, it’s perhaps not surprising that since we arrived in Ecuador, we haven’t seen a single pushchair. Plus the tin can buses are not pushchair-friendly – you enter up a steep, narrow set of stairs, the driver always tears off before you’ve quite found a handhold, and woe betide you if you’re daft enough to imagine that grabbing the leather strap hanging from a rail above your head will assist, because it slides, and away you go – whoosh – down the aisle, until either you collide with another passenger or the driver brakes, which has the double effect of lighting up the Virgin Mary statue on his windscreen and sending you careering back down the bus on your movable handhold. So pushchairs are out of the question, but the bonus is that babies get carried and you rarely hear a child cry.