Busapalooza 2009 : Imbabura et. al

Spent last weekend scouting out the province of Imbabura, in the northern highlands of Ecuador, for sites and organizations which might be interested in collaborating with the Project next year.

Ibarra, the provincial capital once known as the La Ciudad Blanca because of its beautiful white buildings, has lost a bit of its luster over the past few years: I have never in my life seen as much graffiti as there is to be seen downtown. The parks, though, are still gorgeous and leafy, and many of the historically significant buildings are very well maintained. We stayed in a nice little hotel with truly awful interior decorating, including a hideous lit-up nativity set in the stairwell. (In Ibarra, it seems to be Christmas all year long, as one poorly-stocked supermarket still offered red and green tissue boxes, and I saw at least one little kid dressed in a Baby´s First Christmas romper.)

However, Ibarra has one thing that makes up for everything else: la Señora Noemi, head of the local association for folks with disabilities. She is an absolute force of nature: works five days in the downtown office, spends her weekends taking the bus (ah, the bus...) to canvas the outlying communities, is known by absolutely everyone in sixty miles, all directions, and has utterly changed the way people with and without disabilities view the participation of these folks in work and in school. She hates, hates, HATES welfare, has developed truckloads of microbusinesses so that the people have other options, and thinks the world would be a better place if we shut down all the special ed schools and went totally full-inclusion. (For our first two days in Imbabura, Gladys and I were utterly baffled as to why Noemi kept whisking us off to things that weren´t special education centers: as it turns out, she´s worked actively to keep most kids with special needs OUT of the centers and in regular schools.) She´s managed to link rural communities to urban universities, so that folks in the middle of nowhere are now learning from the media department about how to run a radio station, and is now working on developing a tilapia farm. And it almost seems patronizing of me to say this, but she´s done all of this as a blind Columbian woman in a machisto Ecuadorian culture.

All of Imbabura, actually, has been an inspiration to me. We visited the community of Salinas, in the Chota Valley: this area, settled by the Afro-Ecuadorian descendents of former plantation slaves, has historically been the Ozarks of Ecuador: a beautiful, peaceful landscape where almost everybody suffers because nobody has enough. The director of the pueblo´s Junta Parroquial has utterly transformed the place: it now has a community center, a youth orchestra, a chocolate factory, and a gastronomical center, and they´re working on developing community tourism. In sharp contrast to the city, the walls are as clean as if newly painted: someone dropped their suitcase once while climbing on the bus, and found it, untouched, in exactly that spot the next day.

Then there´s Pimampiro, a middle of nowhere little Andean town that´s managed to build a sparkling swimming pool complex, including a sauna and Turkish bath. They´re using the admission fees to subsidize physical therapy and rehabilitation, and using the office as a community training and gathering space.

People often think of what I do in Ecuador as something noble, an act of giving--a difficulty, a sacrifice. The honest truth, though, is that coming to Ecuador helps me connect with how incredibly selfish and simple my life can get if I don´t take care of it: how easy we have it in most parts of the US, and how few excuses we really have for not making more of ourselves and our communities. Every time, I´m inspired by the people I come in contact with, and I try to bring a little of that back with me.