4th September- Zumbahua

Hello everybody, sorry I haven´t written for a bit- this week has been a bit hectic!

At the beginning of the week I met Claudio, who runs a secondary school in the village- like all of the foreign volunteers here except for me, he´s Italian. It turns out that, aside from the hospital, there are lots of things waiting to be done here. On Monday we drove for over an hour and covered the last part on foot to take supplies and firewood to a very old indigenous lady in a remote village called Chicho. Her house, like the others in the village, was just a wooden hut with a straw roof and a few chickens. She seemed happy to see us, and luckily there was someone there who could interpret from Quichua into Spanish!

On Tuesday I drove a pickup truck down to Latacunga to get supplies, as part of a convoy- a lot of things are unavailable up here. On the way back we stopped off at Guangaje, apparently the poorest parish in Ecuador, to deliver something. Why anyone decided to build a village there in the first place I´m not sure- it´s basically an extremely high-altitude dust-bowl where the wind never seems to drop below gale force, which blows away what little soil there is.

For the rest of the week I´ve been helping to build houses, along with another Italian (Mauro) and two local builders, Ramiro and Juan. They´re nothing special but at least they´re built out of bricks and cement, generally replacing decrepit wood and corrugated iron shacks for people who are too old to rebuild their own houses, and whose children have gone to find work in the big cities. One day the wind was so strong that it ripped the sheet-metal roof off of one of the neighbours´houses and carried it away down the valley. Everything has to be done by hand, from loading pickups with sand by shovel to hauling sand and cement to the building site in sacks, to mixing the cement- as they don´t have a cement mixer. It´s very hard work, and I feel like a bit of a soft-city dweller next to the locals- they´re half the size of me and about three times as strong!!! The lady of the (soon to be) house keeps us going with what appear to be cups of hot water with about 15 spoonfuls of sugar in them.

Apart from all that, I´m continuing with the English lessons for the doctors, and Adele is working in the hospital every day. At the weekend we went down to Baños for two nights- it´s a city that would be about 2 and a half hours from Zumbahua, but is actually about 5 hours away due to the roadworks. It´s much lower down than Zumbahua, however, meaning it´s much warmer and more humid- it´s basically the start of the Amazon Basin. We rented some bikes and visited some big waterfalls, one of which you could crawl in behind along a rather cramped tunnel-pathway, which was brilliant but we both got absolutely soaked!

So that´s about all the news I have for now, Adele´s at work in the hospital with the new batch of Ecuadorian students and I´m about to teach my first lesson of the week. I hope everyone is well, send us some news!!

Ross