August 18th, 2006

Well, a day of reflection without being in the middle of an ash storm has really helped. While things here are bad, we are definitely not on the normal wind path, which means we don't have to worry about constantly getting more ash. So unlike places like Pillate, we will have time to recover from our modest (inch or two) ash fall. Today was sunny, though still hazy because the wind would pick up the fallen ash. There have been almost no audible explosions, though the volcano itself wasn't visible.

Rosa says that the news from places like Bilbao is terrible, she watched the news tonight while I went to a community meeting. Apparently the places that we helped are in awful shape, with the ashfall there being measured in feet rather than inches. I don't remember if I mentioned that the only big donation I ever saw being delivered while John and I made our deliveries was enormous quantities of mayonnaise (Nestle made the donation). Well, apparently too much was donated and so leftovers were sent to my neighborhood and we distributed it just now. I now have enough mayo for a lifetime. I hope I learn to like it.

I guess that's all. I feel a lot better today and things seem more bareable. Buses are once again in service and are allowed to circulate and we've had electricity all day. We've been told to give our animals a little sodium bicarbonate (which I think is baking soda in English) in their water so that their tummies get cleaned from the ash and to wear surgical masks we've been given. We'll see how things turn out and I'll keep you all updated.

August 17th, 2006

Well folks, I never got around to writing an update about our third and fourth deliveries to communities around Cotaló. I have posted on the blog an email that John wrote about them with a few comments in brackets where I correct him, but otherwise it is more or less what happened. One thing he didn't mention that I would have is that the president of Bilbao was asking around about where the members of the community could buy a chunk of land to build new houses. Apparently the government was offering a totally appalling option that involved impressive cold and lack of water. He said that he thought they would just end up living in the same place as before. That is exactly what happened with Cusúa -- they had new houses built for them in 1999 in Chacauco, when the volcanic activity began again. Of course, they kept living in Cusúa and when the eruptive process grew stronger, moved to a shelter in Pelileo rather than go to their free government built houses in Chacauco, which itself was struggling with ash. Not too smart an emergency plan. This detail that John didn't mention becomes relevent later in this email.

It's been almost three weeks since we last helped anyone out, because we finished off the money that people gave and have been working hard on our masters degree theses. We had both hoped that things were calming down and that we had done our part in helping people out. Unfortunately, our help turns out to be very small compared to the magnitude of the problem. I went to Quito on Monday and spent a couple of days there on vacation. Rosa returned to Salasaca a day earlier than I did, and when I spoke to her on the phone last night, she told me that there were incredible explosions constantly shaking the house, much stronger than the previous time that I described in my first email (strong enough to make a small crack in one wall). Just as with the last time, the big explosions began just before sundown. This time there was cloud cover, but Rosa says that you could still see that the mountain lit everything up like an incandescent light bulb (a red one) because the explosions were so powerful.

This morning, when I called her from Quito, she said that everything was covered with ash in Salasaca. The wind had changed and rather than going in a south-easterly direction, it went in a north-easterly direction. I put more photos on the blog (http://gabrielmany.blogspot.com) that she took this morning. They were taken just before seven a.m., usually there is plenty of light at that time, but not today. The photos speak for themselves. They look kind of like snow, and my father-in-law's now famous house clearly is covered. You can also see my spinach patch, a photo taken from my brother-in-law's roof and another of our alfalfa. The guinea pigs will have to get used to eating sawdust.

I immediately decided to get myself to Salasaca and caught a bus first to Ambato, where I planned to catch another bus home. Until we got to Latacunga -- about halfway to my house -- there wasn't much news (in Quito nobody cares about anything that happens elsewhere, and that includes the President). However, in Latacunga it became clear that there was a bit of ash in the air. As we moved on from Latacunga, there began talk of our bus not being able to get through to Ambato because of military blockades. The bus driver put on a news radio and we got some updates. People in Ambato are encouraged not to waste water nor to leave their houses. The entire province of Tungurahua and parts of Cotopaxi (to the north), Chimborazo (to the south), and Bolívar (to the west) were being declared emergency areas. In Pillate, one of the communities we've helped, the ash was so heavy that it was breaking the roofs of some of the homes. The people from Bilbao, one of the communities we had most helped and who had been staying in the church in Cotaló, had moved back to Bilbao with their animals the previous day because they had given up on a good offer from the government, and now there were various people with unknown whereabouts. The town of Chacauco, which was the community we gave the most help to, had been evacuated and the river that Bilbao is situated on and that separates Chacauco from the mountain has been damned up by a lava flow, creating flood danger to add to the problems. Finally, the lava had been mostly spraying towards Baños and had blocked the road from Ambato to Baños, leaving the town isolated.

As we headed towards Salcedo (about halfway between Latacunga and Ambato) the ash got somewhat thicker, though it hadn't yet accumulated in large amounts on the ground. The traffic got slower and there seemed to be periodic police check points, though we weren't blocked from advancing. There was an army man behind me who actually seemed to be pretty knowledgeable. From what I understood, he had left Ambato that same morning and was now returning again to help his family. He said that in Ambato, there had been about an inch of ash fall. We talked a fair amount, with his predictions not being too optimistic. We entered and were leaving Salcedo when traffic really slowed down. The army guy got off the bus to check things out and I followed him, figuring that following him was probably as good an idea as any to make sure I got through to Ambato. I knew that he was going to find a way to get there, even if it meant walking and I knew that I also was going to, so staying with him seemed smart. It was. Shortly after getting off the bus, the driver decided to turn around and go back to Quito. The army guy saw another army guy zooming by in an unmarked station wagon, as he had special permission to get through the blockades. He hopped into the station wagon and asked the driver to take me on board too, which he kindly did, and we were off, the official team to go fix the helicopters in Riobamba. No other traffic was being allowed through, I was extremely lucky, otherwise I'd probably still be walking to Salasaca right now.

When we got to the northern outskirts of Ambato, the ash on the ground was very thick. I'd say that the ash was at least the equivalent of the ash John and I had seen in Laurel Pamba, the least damaged place we helped, and was likely as thick as in Pillate. That may not seem like a lot, but it is a pretty big deal for a city of a couple of hundred thousand people. We didn't go through the downtown, but rather took a new road that goes around the city, since the driver was headed to Riobamba. This road goes through the more rural areas around Ambato. While urban Ambato mainly just has to worry about the water supply and cleaning the ash off the streets, the farmers in rural Ambato were harvesting everything as fast as they could before it became worthless. On this road (which happens to go to the eastern edge of Ambato, the closest part to Salasaca which was convenient) visibility became very low, like fog. Fortunately, there wasn't much traffic, seeing as how people aren't allowed to use the roads. Finally, we got to the turnoff for Riobamba and the army driver dropped me off, without charging me a penny.

There were a lot of people there, including a number of Salasacas walking away from Ambato, homewards. They had gone to Ambato in the morning, thinking the day might involve normal business, and now the buses wouldn't take anyone onboard because the police wouldn't let them through if they did so. So, I found people I knew and started walking with them. It's not too long a walk, a few hours would get me home, and my bag was very light. Of course, it wasn't a very comfortable walk, I covered up my entire face with my shirt, so that I was walking blindly, but there wasn't much traffic, so it didn't really matter. I had to do that because my eyes and throat were burning a bit. The ash grew thicker. After a little while, a person from Salasaca with a pickup truck saw us and picked us up. He had to take us back on back roads, because since he was carrying passengers he wasn't allowed to go on the main road. I guess the authorities think that it's better for people to walk ten miles in awful ash than for pickup drivers to charge 50 cents and take them back quickly.

By around midday, only 4 hours after leaving Quito, I made it to Salasaca. That means because of my luck with alternative transportation, it only took me about an hour longer than it usually does for me to get home from Quito. I doubt many other people were so lucky. I got back to the house and saw Rosa. We are both very worried. As I've explained in other emails, there isn't danger from things like lava and rocks in Salasaca because we are a couple of valleys away from Tungurahua. However, the economic livelihood of the community is still dependent on the land and the animals and we don't know what is going to happen with them. The ash is at least as thick as it was in Pillate (though of course now Pillate is in much worse shape than it was in a month ago) and the crops will probably die and the grass and alfalfa the animals eat will probably also die.

Right now, we have sawdust and tasty pellets for our animals, but almost nobody else does. Rosa and I are going to visit her grandparents tommorow and will probably buy food for their animals.
That doesn't help the rest of the population. There are 18 communities in Salasaca, and on average they are about 50% larger than the 6 communities that John and I helped around Cotaló. I am in the process of seeing whether there is some way to work in a more official way helping people out, but right now I am too shell-shocked to really think well. A volcano is really a big deal. Some of the supersticious people here blame the mayor of Baños for the problem. He, of course, had said that the volcano was no danger and that tourists should come see the spectacle. He probably isn't so smug now. I don't think that his words have much influence on where a volcano shoots its lava, but I do think that he could have helped seem like preparing for an eruption was not very important.

Certainly, the government has done nothing to prepare, even though as I've repeatedly said, the amount of preparation necesary is minimal. They just don't care. Now, the only people who helped the last time, rural communities like Salasaca, are also in need of help. The problem is that the size of the task has become so enormous that I don't even have an idea of where to begin. Since I got back, I haven't heard or felt a single explosion and the wind seems to have headed back towards the south. The sky has cleared a bit, though most of the south, east, and west continues to be brown. I can only see a bit of the base of grandma, I have no idea what she really looks like. I hope we sleep well. Last night Rosa slept with Leoncito, who panicked and ended up vomiting all over the place, so she is exhausted, as am I after my trip. I'll try to keep people informed, though we didn't have electricity for most of the day, so that could be difficult.

August 7th, 2006 (Written by John Polga-Hecimovich, I made a few unimportant comments in brackets)

Hello all,

It has been a week since I arrived back in Quito from Tungurahua and the volcano zone, and I finally have some time to sit down and write about the experience. That pesky thesis keeps popping up to take away time.

First of all, Gabriel put up some of his stories and pictures on: http://gabrielmany.blogspot.com/, just to get an idea of how things look and what we did. Secondly, and more importantly, an enormous thank you to everyone for being so generous.

We spent the last of the donated money on Friday and Sunday, buying balanceado and afrecho and quintales of rice for the humans. Thursday, arriving in Salasaca, the sky was clear and Tungurahua was belching out ash every sixty or ninety seconds, blowing west towards Chimborazo, but nothing as bad as the inital eruptions the weeks before. In fact, only two or three times did I audibally hear the volcano erupt in my four days.

Hanging out the back end of a closed dump truck [was not a dump truck, just a delivery truck], Gabriel and I delivered 44 quintales (hundred pound sacks) of balanceado, something that looks a little bit like dog or cat food, and 26 quintales of afrecho, which are like woodchips. We had ordered more, afrecho, but the factory lied to us, and switched the order up. In the end, we delivered these to Chacauco and Bilbao, two of the communites we had visited the previous week, as well as Laurelpamba and Mucubí, two communities we had not visited. The presidents of each community signed the acknowledgement act that Gabriel had written up, and with smiles and handshakes and obvious gratutude on their part, we returned to Salasaca.

Saturday was uneventful, save a broken promise from the animal feed headquarters in Ambato; we would have to go to the Mercado Mayorista in that city the following morning to bargain for products because the company had run out of supplies and lied to us about it (I believe they are called Eco-Bal, if you are ever in Ambato and decide on a company from which NOT to purchase animal feed.) Two more friends, Berry and Kasey, from the US via Quito, arrived to help with the purchases. We rode in the back of a dump truck [really was a dump truck this time] driven by a friend of Gabriel's, and he negotiated with the venders in Ambato for prices. Fed up with the constant back and forth Ecuadorianess of it all- we didn't get a damn thing done for an hour- I took charge, and started causing a scene. The last vender finally lowered his price, and with my constant badgering, he asked, because of my bargaining, if I was from Italy. I choked up in pride. We took off with 24 sacks quintales of rice, at $18.50 [actually 18.00] a sack, and 68 or 69 of afrecho, at $9.70 a quintal.

Our negotiation strategy was-- "We don't have much money, we're spending donations, this all goes to the volcano victims" etc. Berry observed that this was almost always followed by absolutely unresponsive, unimpressed Ecuadorians. In fact, in Quito and Ambato, not one person I told about the trip asked if they could donate. That is, not one urban Ecuadorian. In Ecuador, it was, instead, the poor coastal towns whose bananas and yucca has finally arrived, or the piles of lettuce and potatoes given my the rural highland communities. It is sad to realize that all the talk about the National Soccer Team uniting the country and providing a sense of purpose was, once again, merely middle- and upper-class rhetoric. Quito seems to be worrying only about itself again.

The last part of Sunday was the deliveries, and the communities had prepared for us. San Juan and Pillate were especially profuse in theri gratitude, and arriving and leaving town was, as Gabriel put it, as close to imitating politicians as possible. Not only do I now understand how rural clientelism and vote buying works, but I think Gabriel and I could have won elections had the voters been limited to those communities. We were greeted by close to thirty people in each village, a scene of worn peasants missing teeth, wearing tattered clothing and rubber boots, and smiling in thanks, sticking out their hands to each of us and blessing us. I had learned from Gabriel, and by now I was the one talking, joking about corrupt politicians, the continued lack of government assistance, and the fact that a guinea pig will eat ANYTHING. They, in turn, laughed, listened, and were probably the best audience I have ever had. Emboldened, we posed for pictures with the town leaders and left amidst shouts of appreciation. Yet the scene was not of singing birds and sparkling meadows. Ash continues to fall on the crops, and this season's harvest is totally gone. In San Juan we all wore our surgical masks becasue ash was floating in the air, scorching throats (Respiratory ailments have filled all provincial hospitals). After our picture, one gentleman handed us rocks that had come down in one violent explosion. They were as big as my head, and a whole lot harder. I thanked him, nearly speechless, and climbed back into the bed of the dump truck.

Futures are uncertain. Bilbao, a town across the river and literally on the hillside of the volcano (and buried in ash) is being moved by the government. The citizens are worried about their fields, being relocated to a harsh and cold mountaintop, and not a low lying area, and generally changing their lifestyles. Cusúa, totally destroyed, is also being relaocated, while Chacauco, Cotaló, Laurelpamba, Mucubí, San Juan and Pillate will remain, dealing with more ash fall, possible health problems and whatever other risks go along with living next to an active volcano.

In the end, the problems that face these economically poor people are structural, not temporary. That is: these people have been farmers for generations, and volcanic minerals make that land prime peasant real estate, which means they are against moving; a lack of education and so many decades of working the land means that few people are capable of anything besides farming, and options in urban centers, namely Ambato, are limited; the government has no space to offer these people- Ecuador has the highest population density in South America and one of the top three growth rates, depending on the year (if not for up to 10% of the population emigrating since the 1999 financial crisis things would be worse). So, without economic opportunity in a capitalist society, without education in a hierarchical, clasist society, without any other available land in a pinched nation, and with a high population growth, what are the options? My personal response is much mroe extreme than anything I could fathom before seeing this area, and I can only imagine things getting worse, and not better.

I watched the movie Super Size Me on Sunday night, after having soup and some chicken and rice for dinner, my only meal since bread at breakfast. I had purchased ten pounds of quinoa in the Mayorista in Ambato, as well as fifty pounds of high quality potatoes for $1.25 (fine, they were free, but they should have been $1.25 [actually they should have been $2.50]) that day, and had been with people who never enter a supermarket their entire lives and could not fathom the idea of overeating. This mail is about Tungurahua, and not my own personal trip, but I must end this by saying that four days in the countryside was a lot more education and introspection than I ever expected.

This was not as interesting a mail as the first one, but it is an update nonetheless.

Thank you all once again. If you have any questions or concerns, please send me a mail. Looking forward to hearing from you
john

August 3rd, 2006

This is not one of my email updates of the situation. Rather it is a set of descriptions of the photos I have put online on the blog. I received a request to put in captions but I have two reasons I am not yet doing so: 1) I don't know how and 2) I don't have good cheap Internet access, so it would be costly to do so. The descriptions are group by the date of the photo as listed on the blog, so you should be able to match things. I am sorry I haven't updated in a while, I had a pretty serious problem with my computer (hard disk died), and recovering has taken me a couple of days, but now I am back in business. Please note that the pictures are posted in more or less chronological order with the posts, but it isn't perfect (blogspot doesn't seem to put things in the same order as I do when I upload the pictures, and I don't care enough to fix them). That said, my descriptions I think are adequate.

August 2nd-3rd: This is a set of photos taken on July 27th and 30th, our last two visits to make deliveries. Actually there is only one taken on the 30th, which is the picture of us with the community of San Juan (my next post will explain more).

The rest were taken on the 27th, when we were able to get a spectacularly clear view of Tungurahua, despite spending the trip there enclosed in the back of a cargo truck. In one pictures you can see from a distance the community of Cusúa and the lava flows that frame it. In another you can see the menacing Mama Abuela towering over Cotaló (the local administrative center) and above Cotaló's church. Finally, there are a set of photos more directly related to our work, showing John in the truck as we left Salasaca and then later helping deliver the food, me with members of the community of Mucubí and later a picture inside the communal building in Laurel Pamba where the sacks of food were being left for the community (and other scarce donations are in the background).


July 26th: These are more photographs taken when I went for the second time to the disaster zone, this time with John and animal food bought with the money that our families and friends have helped with. In one photo, you can see a chicken leg, all that remains of the chicken. In another is the head of a cow buried in ash. One could see the entire body half buried with legs sticking up in the air, but I preferred to post the simpler image. There is then a picture of me in front of the little plot of land and house closest to the dead cows. The other picture is of me and John eating cuy that the community of Pillate prepared for us. The president of the community, Iván Ojeda is the man in a sweater, while the guy with the reflective jacket is the coordinator of the Defensa Civil in the community. The other guy sitting next to me is Rosa's uncle, Eugenio. The photo was posed so that the reflectors on the middle guy's jacket didn't look awful in the flash.



July 22nd: These are pictures from when I returned with John. There are a few pictures taken from the bridge across the river that divides Grandma from the rest of the world. It shows the greyness of the valley southward. These pictures haven't been modified at all from what they originally were besides the reduction in size. Things really were that grey, as you can see in the picture that has Rosa and John (and Milton, a guy who helped us out), who are fully colored. There is then a picture of the pickup we came in, parked about as closely as possible to the lava flow (the lava flow was behind me as I took the picture). The ash in the sky was astounding, it looks like fog. Finally there is a picture from a day or two later of Chimborazo, Tungurahua's lover and the tallest mountain in Ecuador, many kilometeres from Tungurahua (60 degrees on the horizon) and now covered in ash. Chimborazo is always brilliantly white, but not after Grandma threw a jealous fit.


July 15th: There are three pictures taken from my backyard on the night that the action intensified. It was the first time I was able to see lava during the daylight, let alone capture it on camera. The house at the bottom of a couple of the pictures is my father-in-law's. The pictures were taken from my house. As can be seen in one of the pictures, the smoke clearly was headed in a southwesterly direction over a set of hills immediately to the south of Salasaca.

August 2nd, 2006

Some photos. More will be posted in a moment.