MAMA TUNGURAHUA IS UPSET; SONG AND FIESTA; ECUADORIAN HOSPITALITY; LIFE WITH MAGGIE; LEARNING SPANISH
Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Mama Tungurahua is upset

Ever since when, six weeks ago, we stayed in Baños at the foot of Mount Tungurahua we have been trying to catch an actual glimpse of the peak. Unfortunately, the several big peaks around that part of the country, some 200 kilometres south of the capital Quito along the so-call Avenida de Vulcános, seem to be cloud magnets. We never saw Tungurahua’s smoking head. Even after ten days in Riobamba - on the other side of the mountain from Baños - we still had not seen it.

At this time of year at least, Riobamba’s climate seems to run to overcast skies from just after sunset until midmorning the next day when the direct equatorial sun finally burns off the clouds. We are now well into the dry season and each noon when the skies had cleared around Riobamba, we were finally getting great views of Chimborazo and La Altar. But still no Tungurahua!

On our last “working” evening in Riobamba, Antonia, Kathleen and I are walking the ten blocks or so along the city’s cobbled streets to the Casa de Cultura to meet the choir that we had been working with for two weeks. It is shortly before 1800. Looking northwards back up one street at an intersection I realise that what I am seeing in addition to the usual cloud corona is a huge plume of grey smoke. Then I notice that other people are coming out of their houses to look as well. We are also able to see red at the bottom of the smoke where it issues from the crater. Our view is impeded by city buildings and the usual clutter of overhead telephone and power lines. But there is definitely something going on Tungurahua. When we arrive a few minutes later at the rehearsal room, Camilo, one of the singers, tells us that the Tungurahua has just begun to erupt.

Later, after the final rehearsal, we all go out for a dinner of platos tipicos, i.e. typical Ecuadorian food (in this case roast suckling pig with cheese-and-potato cakes) and later a visit to a karaoke bar. Each time we come outside the cars are looking greyer and greyer as cineza, volcanic ash, settles onto the city. Our Riobamba lady friends wrap their omni-present shawls around their nose and mouth when they step outside and some of the men pull up the collar of their jackets to keep from inhaling the ash.

We knew that Baños has been evacuated back in 1999 for three months after warnings by seismologists (volcanistas) that Tungurahua was about blow. Three months later nothing had happened and the citizens were allowed back in (to find in many cases that their belongings had been plundered). We are worried. The local papers of course are full of stories and pictures over the next few days. Smaller pueblos like Bilbao, between us and the crater, and pueblacitas on the mountainside have been or are being evacuated; parts of Baños too. The busses for Baños, which normally leave from the Terminal Orientale directly in front of our hostal, have all been cancelled because the roads are threatened and the ash fallout is too heavy along the route.

Riobambeños, on the other hand, are saying that, other than ash, Riobamba was not threatened by lava. Lava is indeed flowing down the mountain. But there is a valley between us and the flows, and the direction of the flows is a bit away from the city. The flume of ash rises six to seven kilometres
high, and it is drifting off to the southwest. While the ash fallout is heaviest near the mountain, of course, ash was also being measured in Guayaquil, some two hundred kilometres away on the coast.

Our hotel is pretty noisy even at the best of times. So we do not hear until late in the night the rumblings and tremors and explosions inside the mountain. Cleber, Maggie’s brother, tells me that there are lava plugs in the sides of the mountain that might (sic) alleviate the intense pressure inside the crater and allow lava to spill out. This would prevent the mountain from actually exploding like Mount St. Helen in Washington did some twenty or so years ago. Late at night when the market and bus traffic outside our hotel window calms, we can indeed hear the unsettling noises; a mixture between thunder and explosions.

Not that any of this apparently bothers anyone in Riobamba. Saturday dawns as usual. Everyone goes on with their lives. What else should they do? Shopkeepers are out sweeping up ash while others are brushing off their cars or trucks exactly as snowbound commuters would do in Winnipeg and Chicago. Although open sacks of grains and maize are displayed in some shops and tables of fruit and vegetables are everywhere around today’s weekly market, nobody bothers to cover up anything. Our innkeeper, Maggie, and her father are going to drive out to their piece of property in el campo (in the country) on Monday to check things out though they think they might have trouble getting through military roadblocks. Certainly the busses to Baños have not been running since Friday night. Who knows if they can even get through in their car. We leave for Quito on Monday morning so we haven’t found out yet.

The region is not exactly a stranger to natural catastrophes. Tungurahua erupted a decade ago, I am told by someone at the big family fiesta we are invited to on Sunday. But I read somewhere else that the last eruption was much longer ago than that. The whole sierra province of Ecuador has certainly been an active place for centuries. Severe earthquakes destroyed Riobamba in both 1711 and 1877 and, in living memory, a “super-earthquake” wiped out nearby Ambato in 1949. Tungurahua was first climbed in 1873, by Germans as it turns out. It had so altered its structure after volcanic and seismic activity that, in 1900, the new and now higher mountain was climbed again by an Ecuadorian. Maybe somebody will soon be able to climb it again for a new record.

A quick glimpse at the map of the Western Hemisphere reveals that the Andes in South America seems to be an extension of the coastal mountain ranges running up and down the coast all the way through Central America right up to Alaska, across the top of the North Pacific Ocean to Japan and down the other side to southeast Asia, Indonesia, et cetera. (This doesn’t even count the smaller fault lines out in the Pacific around, say, Hawaii, the Galapagos and elsewhere.) The circular Pacific line is wonky with earthquakes and smoky from active volcanoes. Along the coasts of the Americas, the various Pacific tectonic plates are moving eastwards, pushing themselves under the continents and raising up high mountains. Where the plates join and friction builds up to cause tremors and shakes, there are also leaks in the earth’s crust which allow molten earth to push up under pressure and burst out into the air to flow out of what have become volcano craters.

Although eruptions are plenty frequent in the Andes of Ecuador – there are I think some twenty-two active or semi-active volcanoes – to be on hand to see one is quite exciting. Every time I heard the earth rumble late at night I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. And although Pichincha, Quito’s own house-mountain, is an active volcano, I feel safer for taking the bus out of Riobamba and, four hours later being caught up in Quito’s bustle and noise again. (We are told later that the lava flows always go down the side of the mountain away from the town, a St.-Helen’s-type occasion would wipe out everything. Ah, hey, yup. That’s cool.)

Singing and Fiestas

As our time in Riobamba came to an end we celebrate two fiestas with our new-found friends. Our singers at the Casa de Cultura respond eagerly to Kathleen’s suggestion that we should have at least one party at the end of the intensive, two-week workshop. For several nights in the second week there are groups of singers huddled together trying to work out plans.

On Friday, Señor Franklin Cárdenas, the charming head of the Casa de Cultura, which has been the financial sponsor of our stay here (they covered our hotel expenses) is present as well as a few others. And so is Cesar Santos, the head of the Choral Association, down from Quito. After working our way through the Mozart, Morley and other pieces we have been practising, we are formally thanked first by the choir members and then by Señor Cárdenas. Kathleen and Antonia and I are each given gifts. Then off we trot in a gaggle to a restaurant where they are serving mote y mais rosado. Mote is a type of very hard and quite large white maize that is boiled for a very long time to soften it and then eaten either hot as a side dish or, as in this case, cold, as a starter. You pick at it with your fingers. It is mixed with roasted corn kernels and salted. The main dish is roast suckling pig or chancho, as it is called in this part of Ecuador: the pig is gutted and either roasted hooves, head, tail and all on a spit or baked completo in an oven. Usually you get some sort of onion and tomato salad with it and, if you are really lucky , llaphingacho, the favourite comfort food of the sierras. (To make them, potatoes are boiled and mashed, mixed with cheese and formed into patties. Delicious!)

We sit together at long tables. Although a few people drink Pilsener beer (one of the main brands in the country), most people drink fresh juices. (We have been enjoying the availability of tropical juices ever since arriving in Latin America. Freshly squeezed orange juice is old hat around here. In fact it is pretty tame compared to mango, papaya, cantaloupe melon, mora (a type of big blackberry), strawberry, lime (I haven’t seen many lemons in Latin America), piña (pineapple) and banana. Try guanábana! Wonderful!)

Since the chancho has been roasting for hours on the grill set up on the sidewalk outside and is therefore ready, the serving out starts as quickly as the staff can slice the meat off the carcass and bring it to the table. In fact, the food comes a lot faster than the staff can whip up the individual orders for juice drinks in the single blender behind the bar.

We are accustomed to the German approach to party meals when dinner stretches many courses over the whole evening, and where the Gesellschaft at the table forms over hours. Where the German dinner table might have lots of different eating utensils and crockery, here in Ecuador eating is pretty direct. All the food (except the mote snack) comes on one plate and you eat with a tablespoon. As one person told us, it has to be a pretty formal party to get knives and forks. I find trying to cut roast pork and crackling with a spoon is quite a challenge. But everyone tells me just to pick up the meat in my fingers.

We have hardly sat back to digest the meal when there is a sudden rush for the door. Reckoning that we would be spending the rest of evening in the restaurant, we are almost left behind in the stampede. Is the lava headed this way? No. Just headed for the next stop on our itinerary. Next stop La Barca Karaoke Bar!

Karaoke is really popular in Ecuador because Ecuadorians love to sing. The classical choral tradition may hardly be known, indeed any familiarity with the classical music tradition may not be well developed either. But there is a huge reservoir of popular Latin American song. If you think the popular music tradition is big in the U.S.A. – musicals, film music, rock and roll, big band – whatever comes to your mind, Latin America is at least as big and probably bigger. The music comes from so many countries- everywhere from Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, Columbia, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru and, yes, even little Ecuador. Safely arrived through the quiet streets at the bar, we are handed a thick catalogue to choose songs. There are page after page of Latin songs, none of which we know.

The bar is partially full of people when we arrive and the microphone is being passed from table to table. Some of the singers are all right, some downright bad (and drunk); most are kinda OK. A few of our own party actually sing with the Karaoke microphone too but, microphone or no, everybody follows the bouncing ball and sings lustily. They all seem to know the songs well and are having a terrific time. The karaoke is fun and Kathleen, Antonia and I join in where we can. There are lots of young people in the choir so the energy level is high, the laughing and clowning around is seemingly non-stop and the noise level, like everywhere in Ecuador, is off the scale. Nobody is drinking very much and nobody (at least at our table) is anywhere near drunk (one of the five young girls at the table behind us seems to be approaching obliteration). In fact, one pitcher of sangria, a few bottles of beer and singing seem to be enough to get everyone in our group on a high. Soon we are all up dancing between the tables.

Around 2200 the party seems to break up spontaneously. We all head out into the volcanic ash. The cobblestone streets are now nearly totally empty of traffic, the stationary cars are even greyer than they were when we went in, and the air by the light of the street lamps appears foggy from the volcanic fallout. After the thank-you’s, the hugging and the kissing and repeated farewells we pile into a taxi with Camilo, who apparently has been assigned to get us safely home, and rumble off through the city streets back to Hostal Puerta del Sol. More farewells while we are ringing the bell to wake up the night porter, and soon we are back in our rooms, unpacking our t-shirt gifts and collection of books from the Casa de Cultura and babbling about the whole delightful evening and the nearby volcano.

Ecuadorian hospitality

The choir experience in Riobamba was in one way very trying because many of the singers were novicios (beginners) and the musical skills of many of the others was not highly developed. But in nearly all other ways it completely met the goals that lay behind us attempting this sort of thing.

As I wrote elsewhere, we hardly got to know Mexico in the year and a quarter that we were there because, on a sailboat, we were restricted to the coast and coastal towns and villages. This is all right but it is such a tiny portion of the country and not always even the most interesting. We did spend two months on a rancho in Chihuahua State and nobody can deny that this is Mexico. But it was certainly not a Mexico that is widely known even to Mexicans. Since our hosts were Americans, two of the main characters there, Dutch and Alex, were respectively Dutch and American, and the live-in cowboy (Simon) was rather shy and retiring, we nearly always spoke English. So, both while on the boat and at the rancho, our Spanish therefore did not progress much.

As much as we loved being in Mexico, we wanted our Ecuador experience to be something more. We wanted to get to know the country and its people much better than we had succeeded in doing in Mexico and we wanted to improve our Spanish. Riobamba was our first “gig” and it met all our aims.

We met and came to like a group of about fifteen singers ranging in age from fifteen to fifty. Every night from Monday till Friday we rehearsed for two hours in the evening. We were invited to their houses occasionally and we partied with them at the end. Almost nobody spoke English so we were forced to struggle with Spanish. Sometimes it was too much and we would revert to English and sign language. Kathleen’s instructional language was a melange of Spanish, Italian (crescendo, piano, allargando, etc.), English and arm waving (that’s what conductors do anyway). It seemed to work.

Beyond the actual choir group, the workshop in Riobamba brought us immediately into contact with other people as well. First we got to know César Santos, the head of the Association of Ecuadorian Choirs in Quito, This association has the goal of improving and furthering the work of choirs all across the country. César is a professor of music at the Pontifical Catholic University in the capital. He comes originally from Riobamba and started the choir we were working with, still travelling down every weekend to rehearse them. Because his English is nearly as weak as our Spanish, he brought in Consuelo. Originally from Otavalo to the north, she works as an accountant at the same university and sings in a choir there. She speaks fluent German and English (she attended the German Schule in Quito) and took on some of the administrative work of our workshops. Through her we met Gerhardo Chacon, who also attended the German school in Quito, later studied for several years in Münster and is now a professor of philosophy at the Catholic University. Gerhardo spends part of the week in Quito to teach and part of the week in Riobamba where he is married to a local girl who is a dentist. She studied in Bonn for a few years as well.

As you can see, this music thing is creating a real network. It was Gerhardo who gave us a lift to Riobamba in his pickup at the beginning of the workshop (seminario). Over the four-hour trip we had an interesting talk and he was able to answer a lot of questions (in German) about Ecuador. I was eager to travel with him to one or two of the over 100 indígenas villages where he has organised educational projects, some of which have been sponsored by German foreign-aid donors. As we part in front of the Casa de Cultura, Gerhardo promises to contact us to come up to his house and/or to visit his projects in the country.

In addition to the daily choir workshop, both Kathleen and I are tied up with work via the internet, Kathleen with proofreading and I with German-English translating. Since we are not making any money on the Ecuadorian music gig, we are in urgent need some cash inflow. We are also taking three hours of Spanish lessons each day. So, unfortunately, we are not able to visit the countryside with Gerhardo. But late in the second week I get a call from him on our cellphone: Would we like to come to a fiesta familiar? Cecelia’s extended family will be assembling at someone’s house to celebrate someone’s 25th wedding anniversary. It is an all-day, come-and-go affair. He will pick us up at 1300.

I have my translation done as Gerhardo, Cecelia and their two little girls pull up in front of Puerta del Sol. The big house – it appears to be a work in progress - to which we are driven is out of town on the way to Guano. There we find about two dozen people including a lot of kids, assembled. We are welcomed warmly by the hosts and soon are seated at a dining room table with two of Cecelia’s brothers and the neighbour family with their three teenage daughters. More chancho! This seems to be the main festive meal in Ecuador! Or at least in Riobamba.

The large garden is surrounded by an eight or nine-foot brick wall. Ecuadorians are big on walls, usually studded on top with glass shards or iron spikes. Outside, some of the guys are playing Ecuadorian “Ecuavolley” (a nine-foot high net and only three players per side instead of six). A boom-box is blasting out salsa music and we dance in the sunshine for a while, men, women and children. Eventually we are all called inside to a large-screen television and --- Karaoke! For the next four or five hours a changing half of the crowd sings along with the pieces. The hosts must own some dozen or more karaoke CD’s. In between you drift off to talk to people, play volleyball, dance or find something to drink or eat. The men drink some beer and at some point, Antonio, the host, starts opening a flow of bottles of Glen Grant scotch. The men become increasingly beschwipst though nobody ever becomes in any way drunk or embarrassing. They just become jolly and sing all the more. Finally, after dark, when their tots start to unravel from playing all day with their myriad cousins, Cecelia and Gerhardo gather us all up and we pile back into the camionetta (a popular type of pickup truck with front and back seats) and are soon saying goodbye in front of the hotel. The little girls cry at the farewell. Our network is getting bigger and bigger!

Life with Maggie

Now add Maggie and her family to our friends and acquaintances in Riobamba. Maggie is mid-thirties and has an 11-year-old daughter named Daniele. Her family moved to Riobamba from near Guayaquil some years ago because they thought the town was safer. She lives with Señora Aida, her mother, and her father in a large flat downtown. She has a brother who is a civil servant with the forestry ministry, and a sister who is a professor of Spanish and French in Massachusetts. Like many middle-class families in Ecuador, she has relatives in the U.S.A. and Europe, where they have gone to find work and economic opportunity. Some never return.

Since we are staying in the hotel for two weeks, and since we are trying to save money, we are invited to use the kitchen. Every morning I get up before seven o’clock and stroll across the large open mercado, which is just beginning to stir, to pick up some fruit. The market ladies are beginning to recognise me and give me big smiles. Then it’s across the street to the panaderia for some of those delicious, freshly-baked enrollados (basically croissants). The customer section of the bakery is tiny. But the back room where you can see them through the door making the goodies seems to be going full blast day and night. The shop is open from way before dawn until very late at night and the working section at the back as well. The baker’s wife handles the sales and the baker himself is in back with the ovens. They never seem to leave the shop no matter what the day of the week.

The wife also manages several apprentice-age girls and the baker has several very young teenage boys helping with the baking. No doubt they are learning the trade too. Maybe they are his own kids. I then pick up some fresh milk (in plastic bags from a dairy) and maybe some mermalade, a not very common food in Ecuador, from the viveres, the mom-and-pop grocery store.

In Riobamba there are no stores whatever that can in any way be called supermarkets in the American or European sense. All the grocery stores are tiny but bulging with stock. There is a bakery on every corner, daily open-air fruit, vegetable and meat markets within five blocks of you no matter where you live in this city, a major market every Saturday and a somewhat smaller one on Wednesdays. That’s when live poultry, rabbits, guinea pigs, dogs and cats are sold. And, if you are in from the campo, that’s when you buy your clothes and shoes and farm tools and household wares and, I suppose your pirated DVD’s and videos. There are of course shops for these around town but the country people are in town on Saturdays and so are the travelling merchants.