Christmas Shopping In Puyo

With a little more than two weeks until Christmas, it is obvious that the retail sales ¨big deal¨ that is so common in the USA is not a big deal here. It seems that at least three economic factors come together to help explain this.

First there are very few large retail establisment. ¨Large¨ here would be considered a mom and pop type store in the US. Only recently did Puyo gain a department store that sells both food and an asortment of other items. It is the largest store in a town of 30,000. The little shops mostly have their specialties and only a few carry items that would be considered hot Christmas items.

Secondly, there is little discrectionary income. Most families work for the basic necessities of life and there is little money left for anything else. We really don´t know what a ¨large¨Christmas expenditure might be, but it is safe to say that $100 would be huge.

The third factor that limits Christmas buying is that there is no credit card use here. The concept of using plastic to pay for things is only something people hear about. They find it difficult to believe.

Credit card use and purchasing on the internet are now closely related in the US. Purchasing on the internet is unheard of here. When we explain how this works, people see it as some sort of magic purchasing. It seems to them that purchases must be sort of ¨free¨if they can be made this way.

So how commercial is Christmas here? We really are not sure, but it is certainly a different kind of ¨commercial¨than we know in the US.

Changing Tradition

On Wednesday and Thursday late afternoons we used our usual teacher English class time to discuss student grading and grading systems with small groups of teachers. Both of our co-teachers were present and explained the technical stuff in Spanish. We just forget what information and experience we have about how systems operate.

Explaining what appears to be fairly simple grading systems is a total revelation to teachers here. I had a summary of all grades given for the second grading period on a spreadsheet. One of the teachers inquired as to why I would make up such an example. She was in total shock to find out that nothing was made up and it was a picture of what the staff had collectively just done.

Change in a fast moving society is a challenge. Change in a very traditional society is a shock. There is immediate fear of what the reaction of the "powers that be" will be. A control of the tradition by this fear is a huge factor to deal with. Again, we might be learning more than we are teaching.

No Mail Service

Sometimes you have to live in a culture a while before some things become obvious and you wonder why you didn´t see it before. Such was the case in a recent 8th grade class.

Students were required to read a passage where a character needed to fill out a form with his name and address on it. 8th Grade students then were required to fill out the same form for themselves in English. The name went ok, but the address was a real problem.

Only about half of the class had any idea of what their address was. Others knew the name of the street on which they lived, but nothing more. The it hit me that there is no mail service here. All mail is picked up at the central post office. This begs the question of when to go to the post office because how would you know if you had mail or not?

The non-existence of mail delivery creates an entire chain reaction of other problems just in the school setting alone. How do you communicate with parents in writing? In a culture where there are a lot of things floating around in the first place, it is good to have school communication in writing. When I explained that in the USA, a teacher could mail a note to parents or they could email them immediately about the child´s performance, they were in shock.

Getting mail, even junk mail, is something we take for granted. Imagine absolutely no mail service!! Or, maybe you can´t.

Volcano!

In the land of ¨what can be next¨we had a ¨next¨today. We had been watching a distant volcano spit out a plumb of steam for about two days. MJ took the two pictures below. The pictures are taken from the second story of the school just outside the English offices & work room.


This morning we had a fairly strong wind coming from the volcano. Sure enough, the black, sandy ash was coming down on everything. The top picture shows a little pile of this collected from two normal size sheets of paper. The tile floor in the English room was glazed so that I could skate around the room on this stuff. The problem is that this fine little ash gets into everything leaving a gritty feel. I call it an ash, but it is more like a very fine black sand.

All of this is happening about an hour away by bus. I have no idea how many miles as the crow flies. It is the same volcano that has really dumped the ash down on the highway out of here on the way to Quito in the past year. They just keep building the highway higher over the top of the ash flow. Hope this thing doesn´t cause a problem with our travel plans out of here a week from this Friday.

As the winds decreased today, the ash deposit also seemed to decrease.

Arajuno, The Last Posting

This is the last of a three part series about Arajuno. The tree above is a chonta which belongs to the palm family. The wood is extremely hard and dense. The shaft of the blowguns made by the Huorani are made of this wood. A close-up of this picture will show thousands of berry like blooms near the trunk.



It is small, so take two. Actually, I made a download error and I ended up with two Protestant churches (the same one). Those of you in to church renovation need to take a lesson from these people. Don´t spend the money on a fancy place.

Every town needs a ¨cock-of-the-walk¨. This guy is about as nice a bird as I have seen anywhere. Not sure the size of his kingdom.

The Catholics always have to have the grandest structure in town. And so it is here in Arajuno! Two colors on the sides and old and new tin on the roof. Again, don´t spend the money on the building.

When I first saw this horse and saddle, I thought ¨man this equipment could have you singing soprano in a minute¨. The saddle is not for humans but for hauling lumber from the mill. You need to click this picture once to get a close-up of the saddle.

A typical Saturday afternoon in Arajuno. A careful look at the picture will indicate the street lights. A kid or two and a dog or two is the heaviest traffice they have. The bus we rode back made a loop around town honking to let people know it was departing. A couple people got on. Front door service!!!

And finally, the butterflies. Don´t know what kind of plant they are on, but they really attract the butterflies. Click on this picture to see about five of them on the same plant.

Gardening In Arajuno

The people of Arajuno have a great place to raise all their food. People along the way in the mountains had to carve out enough space for a vegetable garden. the river flood plain is a great gardening area. This picture shows the footbridge across the river.

The river is wide and shallow. I am not sure how much rain it would take to get this thing to flood, but it appears as though it seldom floods judging from the permanent "truck gardens".

the entire family does the gardening. As is the case here, older children often take care of the younger ones and even the babies

The picture below shows a well managed footpath for the beginning of the huge gardening area. The picture above shows how the path narrows and is just dirt as you get a greater distance from the river.

The crops include bananas, and a lot of manioc (tapioca). The locals dig the large tubulars out of the ground and mash them. The leaves are poison and need to be boiled for some time to take the toxins out. Some type of pole bean was also growing in some patches.

The plants are all huge because of the rich flood plain soil and because of the frequent rains. We are not sure if all the food is eaten or if some is used as a cash crop. In any case, all is carried out on the backs of people. The river bank path was a five minute walk for two people not in good shape. It appeared that it was a five minute walk for people carrying full baskets of produce on their backs who were in shape.

Arajuno; Out In The Jungle

This will be the first in a series of several postings of pictures and comments about Arajuno, the Arajuno River and the jungle around it.

Saturday December 1, was a good day to take a break from school problems and teaching. We decided to take a bus ride northeast of Puyo as far as the road would take us. The road ends in the rainforest village of Arajuno (ara hOOn o). The two and a half hour ride was as close to riding a jackhammer as I hope to experience. The road was graveled with large round river rock for the most part. The final 10 miles was a single lane road cut into the mountain side and yes there was two-way traffic. Because Arajuno is located on a major river, the last five miles was a fairly steep decent into the valley.

One of the major reason we wanted to travel to Arajuno is because it is one of the few roads one can take into Huorani territory. We had heard and read of the very dense rainforest and the very rugged mountains in which they live. None of the descriptions were exaggerated. The Huorani were called “savages” or Aucas by the neighboring Indian tribes and then also by the Spanish and other white people. They came to the attention of the world in general when they speared five American missionaries to death some 50 years ago in the general region in which we traveled today. They not only had a history of spearing outsiders, but they also got caught up in revenge spearing among their own clans. As late as the 1960’s, 60% of Huorani deaths were due to murder within the general tribe. Those of you readers who have seen the movie or read the book End Of The Spear will know all about this.

We saw no older Huorani today. The young generation has tended to melt into local society. The older men have grossly wide feet at the back of the toes and a huge space between the big toe and the next one. This is due to climbing trees barefoot. Also, the older generation of men and women had ear lobes larger than a quarter because of implanted balsa wood flat plates.

The pictures today show the airport at Arajuno. This is a major airport with transfer of supplies here from larger planes to smaller ones which can land on very short village landing strip.


We walked out on the runway just in time to see a plane coming at us. A careful look at the picture shows the nose wheel not on the ground yet.

In the space of about four hours, five planes came in and took off again. The airport was originally built in the 1940's by the Shell Oil Co. to act as one of the bases for oil exploration. It was abandoned in the 1950's and was frequently used by missionaries and government officials.

We enjoyed watching the children act as "cargo hands" in loading the planes. The plane is fueled out of plastic drums. An electric pump is used. The dropcord is run from across the nearby road.

It appeared as though the Ministry of Education was getting supplies into remote villages by air. These supplies include food for the school food programs which may mean two or three meals a day for the kids.

The very first picture shows a solution to MJ's problem when we first arrived in the village. Men are often seen standing partly hidden doing their thing. MJ just used a local resident's outhouse. No harm, no foul.