Back In Zuleta

“I am not rushing. No one is ever on time here.” As we walked up to the colegio for the minga, it became apparent that people actually were on time. We fell into a fire line of people passing heavy rocks from one pile to another on the other side of the field. The colegio (high school) is building a new office building. Although I was upset about this at first, being that they have no money for teachers, books, or other materials for their classes, I calmed down when I discovered that in Ecuador, as in California, school funding is heavily restricted by category. There is money to build this building, yes, and that money can only be spent on construction, nothing else. Yet, there is no money for heavy machinery or labor, so the school called a minga, a mandatory workday in which if you don’t participate, you pay a fine. It is an old practice here, and as I understand mainly only put into use by the indigenous communities these days. So we passed boulders and cleared the building site, composted the grass, and moved more rocks. When it was through I had a huge blister on the inside of my thumb and some very sore forearms. From there we wondered back through the hacienda’s cobbled roads back towards a milking station to Don Antonio’s house, where a party to celebrate potable water was in full swing. Upon arrival at the bottom of the hill, the Camilo, a man from the garden where Cameron sometimes works, started plying us with Punta, a god-awful cane alcohol. We accepted, not realizing what we were in for. La carrera de los coches de marera (the go-cart race) arrived, and Jose ran a herd of beautiful dappled horses through the crowd. We wandered up the hill, meeting Camilo’s adopted grandpa, and arrived to la banda blaring out of loud speakers and a crowd dancing. I saw one of the women from the minga who took my hands in greeting, then started clucking at my blister. Cameron told her it is because my hands are soft. She said, “Yes, we are strong here. We work with our hands.” A force of people rotated the party with a million different types of alcohol and little shot glasses- everything from Johnny Walker to cheap peach wine in a box. We tried to say no, and sometimes succeeded, but more often no was not acceptable. As a scary old man with a huge vat of Punta pushed another shot towards me, my friend from the minga looked at me in horror and said No lo chumes. Es un trago muy malo. “Don’t get drunk on that, it’s a very bad alcohol.” We danced, we ate, we drank, we watched them break small clay pots filled with candy and flowers, we reveled in the bright green mountains, muddy boots, and bright colors, and around 4:30 in the afternoon, we began the stumble home.