Dear Friends: With travel companion Annie Tucker (an avid Portland birder), I made a “lightning visit” to Ecuador from February 22 – March 8. Twenty-two hours going and 22 hours coming, through Portland-Miami-Quito-Cuenca-Quito-Dallas/FW-Portland. Result: I’ve vowed not to do that route again. For the future, despite all the bad press Guayaquil’s gotten lately (more on that later) – landing there is so much easier. This is how Michael and I plan to travel in May/June (more on that later too).

It was disheartening indeed to see what the world news has done to Ecuador’s tourism – which plummeted to near zero after the first sensational reports. In fact, the violence has been limited to gangs in overcrowded prisons and a few coastal cities where the drug trade has fanned crime. (It would be like reading about violence in Chicago and deciding not to visit New York or Los Angeles.) But in rural mountainous areas such as Cañar, and urban cities such as Quito and Cuenca, daily life continues as usual, quietly hectic but secure. Only the tourists are missing, which is a great shame for Ecuador is such a lovely and easy country to explore and tourism has become so important to its economy. I just read that in 2019 it employed around 270,000 people, representing around 3.7% of total employment in the country. Even so, tourism has yet to reach pre-pandemic levels,

Crater Lake Quilotoa, which Michael and I visited years ago.

But back to our trip. Coming off the plane in Quito, I was slammed by the 9,350 ft. altitude and dehydration from the many hours sitting on planes. To recover and wait for our next flight to Cuenca, we walked across the street to an open-air terrace of the new airport. Stepping through the glass doors, Annie heard her first Ecuador birdsong: the beautiful trill of the russet-collared sparrow. Go here to listen: https://xeno-canto.org/274469

This homely little bird is very familiar to us in Cañar. It feeds mainly on seeds, herbs, and grains, of which we have plenty. And its song is described by most sources as “the sweetest and most musical” of any sparrow. This was the first of 77 birds that Annie would spot/record during our 10-day visit, of which 64 were new to her.

From Quito, we flew straight to Cuenca. At the end of our killer travel day, we checked into a small hotel and went out for bowls of ramen in nearby Plaza San Sebastian. The servings were huge, and as we gave up, exhausted and ready to go back to our hotel, an elderly street musician wandered into the tiny cafe, strumming a beat-up guitar. He zeroed right in on us, and our table, and asked if he could finish our ramen. Gladly! He also eyed the beer still in my hand, but I shook my head, “No, this is mine and well deserved.”

After three days of rest and recovery in Cuenca (8400 ft ahhhhh…), my friend Susana K. drove us to Cañar, bringing along Leonora, her employee, who, she said, wanted to help us clean and open the house. Welcome! Michael and I had left Cañar in June 2023, planning to come back as usual in December, so the house had been empty for nearly eight months. One purpose of my trip was to reconnect with and pay those who help us take care of the place – the gardener, our compadres who plant the backfield, our comadre who pays our monthly expenses, and for me to pay the land and irrigation taxes. Within a couple of hours of arriving on a beautiful warm day, we four women had removed the shutters, hooked up the gas for hot water and cooking, cleaned the kitchen, living/dining room, two bedrooms, baths, my studio – and made the beds.

“Women Should Rule the World!” is the title of this sequence. During the next few days, Annie and I also filled the fountain and got the pump running (with a couple of calls to Michael), made kindling, built the daily fire, and cooked several meals  (well, Annie did). When the Lewis & Clark students arrived on Friday the house looked lived in. Then, exactly one week later, on a marathon day, Annie and I closed up the house again – a bit like dismantling a movie set.

Other than the house affairs, I’d come to Ecuador for two projects: my annual job coordinating the 3-day visit of the Lewis & Clark College students to Cañar to experience something of the indigenous culture. The highlight is always visiting Mama Michi for a dramatic limpieza, complete with herbs and nettles, fire, and a little bit of brimstone (incense).

My other project is a book of the photos of Cañar town photographer, Rigoberto Navas, whose glass plate and early celluloid negatives I’ve spent years printing in my darkroom. After several exhibits and related projects, the photographs are finally coming together in a book to be published in June 2024 by the Catholic University of Cuenca. I was surprised on a Sunday visit to Ingapirca with the students to see a display of panels of images from the book. I think I was informed of the project y in October, while Michael was in the hospital, but I’d completely forgotten.

Meanwhile, Annie upped her count with more birding adventures in Cañar “hotspots.” We were able to visit one of these together, Chorocopte Lake. The taxi driver took such a long route to get there (around the outside of the green in the sketch below), that I wouldn’t let Annie go all the way around the lake as I was worried about the dark clouds and the long walk back. I later regretted it, as we came across an old woman who without a word pointed to another route down (the dotted line through the green) and we were home in an hour. (The birds in the sketch, by the way, are: Andean duck, Great thrush. Carunculated caracara, and Hooded siskin.) In the photo below, Annie is watching a pair of carunculated caracaras – say that fast a couple of times!

And now, back in Portland, after the sun and exhilaration of the Andes, I feared more winter. But today, March 15, the Ides of March bring- not a bad omen – but very good weather at last. Walking to my library today I came across this poem by Emily Dickinson, posted in a front yard. I share the first stanza, along with some spring-promising flowers.

To finish – Michael and I plan to spend May/June in Cañar to test out how he does at the altitude. If all goes well, we will return as usual in December for six months. I’ll plan a chronicle during that visit. Meanwhile, I love hearing from all of you and – again – I promise a book club report next time!

Dear Friends:

To begin at the top – here we are in May 2023 after our first full scholarship meeting in three years. And this was not all of us! We now have thirty graduates, four with master’s degrees, one in Mexico with (almost) a Ph.D. in veterinary medicine, one doing a dermatology specialty (in Russia!), and one newly minted Fulbright scholar at the  University of Illinois in Chicago. More on these amazing women later.

Before we get to the newbies, I want to tell you about this year’s three graduates. Two women got their degrees in economics at the same University of Chimborazo (UNACH) in Riobamba. Sara Duy sailed through four years without a pause, met her husband online, had a baby, and graduated in July 2023.  I love her group photo below as it captures the great importance of family support in our program. Riobamba is normally more than four hours by bus, and the road has recently been closed by a landslide, forcing an even longer trip. I count eleven family members at Sarita’s side as she graduated.

Like Sara, Nube Sumba also sailed through her courses in economics with high grades, and was so anxious to get a job that she began working with a financial cooperative in her community even before her degree was awarded. So, her mother came to tell me the news and brought me this hand-knit poncho with Nube’s name stitched around the edge. During the years that Nube was in Riobamba, her mother came faithfully every month, bringing fresh cheese, eggs or other offerings from her garden or animals. The poncho was her final gift. Felicitaciones Sara and Nube!

Aracely Quishpi has a different story. She started her studies in 2018 at the University of  Carchi, about as far north as you can go and still be in Ecuador. The distance made it hard for her to attend meetings, so when her coursework was done, and she was required to write a thesis – as are almost all the students – we lost touch. In January this year, I was surprised to run into her at a crafts fair in the park in Cañar. “Yes, I finished! I graduated in ecotourism; I have a child and I’m building a tourist lodge in my home village of Sisíd.” Congratulations Aracely!

Among the present scholarship women in the photo below, several will graduate in 2024. From left to right: Elizabeth (accounting), Kuya Killa (accounting), (me), Lucia (education), Jessica (agriculture), Elsa (environmental engineering), Vilma (accounting), Tannya (education), Nataly (economics), Estrella (veterinary medicine). Not shown are Pacari (business administration) Lourdes (medicine) and Sara (architecture). That brings our current number of scholarships to twelve, the perfect number we like to maintain to manage our program effectively. As our scholarship program approaches its 20^th anniversary in 2025, I thought you’d like to hear news of some of our early graduates and of our first (and hopefully not the last) Fulbright scholar.

Pacha Pichisaca (far right). Our dentist – Michael’s, mine, and many others in the community.  She graduated in 2011 and since then has completed several specialties, including orthodontia. Braces, or brakets, are newly popular in Cañar and Pacha has added two additional chairs to her clinic in town. Being a Quichua speaker also brings her many patients from the country.

Carmen Loja (2011, business admin) has created her own community tourism project with two other women from her village. Kinti Wasi hosts student groups from Amigos de las Americas, a prestigious program for teens in the U.S. She invites us all to visit at: https://www.facebook.com/kintiwasi.ec

Mercedes Guamán, lawyer and Alexandra Solano, agronomist, two of our earliest graduates, both members of our local foundation committee.

María Theresa Chimborazo (2020 tourism). In a sweet connection, she has the job managing the community tourism lodge in Sisíd Añejo, where I take the Lewis & Clark College students from Portland each year to spend three days learning about the Cañari culture and visiting heritage sites. I will be there again in March 2024 during my short trip to Cañar.

Paiwa Acero graduated from the University of Cuenca in 2021 as a civil engineer and worked for two years in municipal potable water offices in Cañar while applying to Fulbright for a master’s degree. What followed was an 18-month process that involved intensive English courses to pass the TOEFL exam; intensive prep courses for the GRE exam, and much more. She made it as a finalist and in September 2023 began her master’s in environmental engineering at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

Our local committee is as active as always. In 2023 we finally completed the byzantine process of becoming a legal non-profit foundation in Ecuador. This is an important step in making the scholarship program independent of our traditional base in Portland. We can now legally open a bank account in Ecuador, apply for grants, and accept contributions from local organizations and businesses.

CWEF is an official 501(c) 3 nonprofit, which means your contributions are tax-deductible, and every dollar goes directly to the women. You can donate through PayPal through the DONATE button you find below. (Next year I hope to have a Venmo link.)

Many thanks, dear friends for your continuing support. Best wishes for this year and in 2024. (Some of you will also receive a paper copy of this letter. Let me know if you’d prefer virtual only at: judyblanken@gmail.com)

Judy B.

(To end on a personal note: this year will be the first time in 18 years that Michael and I will not be going to Cañar. In September, Michael landed in the hospital for two weeks with a complicated lung/pleural infection. Although he’s doing better, he has a long recovery ahead. But we hope to go sometime in 2024. However, I will make a short trip end of February for work, to meet with the scholarship committee and take care of the house and other details. My plan is to continue my Cañar Chronicles, beginning in January. So – stay tuned!)

d

Dear Friends: The truth is I rarely think about our life in Cañar while we’re in Portland. Then, as we get closer to leaving, I’m preoccupied with renting the house, remembering and organizing what we’re to bring (two 8″ chimney brushes; exhibit materials for the Costa Rica trip, airpods for Paiwa), and preparing for travel. (At least no Covid restrictions this time.) On December 1 we’re off, with excess baggage ($168), four busy airports (bad food $$$), and three cramped flights (no food). Twenty-four hours later we land in Guayaquil, where the temperature is 82 F. We check into our usual silly Wyndham Garden hotel with endless Christmas carols in the lobby, two big beds, hot showers, cold beers. Ahhhhh. Sheer luxury to relax with nothing to do but relax after the past busy weeks.

Tulio, the man at the hotel who helped us with our bags, turns out to drive a taxi on off-hours, so even before we’ve settled into our room we’ve arranged a ride to Cañar the next day. He’ll take us after he finishes his shift at 3:00. We have a late lunch called a Tex-Mex bowl in the hotel’s dreary dining room, long rests with skipped dinner, and good sleeps. Next day for lunch we try the Magnolia Room on the 8th floor. World Cup games blasting everywhere, of course; I was briefly hopeful for Costa Rica. Terrible lunch, but I hardly noticed so distracted was I by the view outside and the decor inside. As long as Michael has a beer and his KenKen puzzles (printed out in Portland), he notices nothing but the tasteless fried seafood. The next day, with Tulio in his taxi, we take a familiar route out of chaotic Guayaquil, across the long coastal plain through the scrappy towns of Troncal and El Triumfo, with mile after mile of fruit stands on the side of the road. “Mango season,” Tulio says tersely. I’m grateful he’s a driver who doesn’t chatter; I like to read, Michael does his puzzles. Suddenly the road climbs and we begin the long ascent into the mountains. Distant clouds obscure the view, then clear to a blue sky, then lower to the ground for 50 feet visibility. Then repeat. We climb to up over 12,000 feet into the sierra of the Andes. As we reach the highest point, I avert my eyes from the bright red “love motel” that some idiot built here a couple of years ago, the sole eyesore in this magnificent landscape (also the turn off to Sangay National Park.) Past that, approaching four hours, I watch for signs of the inter-Andean valley where our town lies (big red dot on the map). Although the map barely captures what I’m describing, you can see the lighter areas where the Andes bifucate to create highland valleys. As we descend, I shoot a bunch of photos from the car on my phone. And there it is – the neighboring town of Tambo, looking celestial in the afternoon light. Only now do I start thinking  about our life in Cañar – how will we find the house and garden?  Will I remember people’s names? How are the scholarship women doing? I dig out my keys for the gate as we pull onto our road. We unload the bags, invite Tulio in for a beer (declined; he’s going straight back to Guayaquil), but we show him around the house. It’s dark from the closed shutters, furniture is covered with sheets, with a thick coating of dust everywhere, but otherwise pretty much as we left it six months ago. It’s too late for a fire, so Michael puts together a quick dinner with the groceries he bought in Guayaquil while I find a lamp, tablecloth and napkins to set us up in my office. Not only do we have a first dinner “in style” but the Internet is working so we watch the new Netflix film, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Talk about culture shock!  The next day we open the shutters and take stock. The layer of thick dust everywhere comes from constant traffic these past eight months on our dirt road due to a  construction/sewer detour that brings everything from buses to cattle trucks by our house. In the patio, we find two little fuzzballs hidden deep in the macho aloe. We see nests nearly every year, but this is the first time we’ve seen nestlings. In the following days we hear them chirping, and get occasionally sightings of them and their mother as she flies in under the roof to feed them. Then one day they are gone, flown away. For my birding friend, Annie Tucker: these are rufous-collared sparrows, (Zonotrichia capensis). “Widespread, common and familiar in shrubby and grassy areas throughout highlands, often around houses. Distinctive, with rufous collar, puffy-crested look. Streaky juveniles are often seen.” (The Birds of Ecuador Field Guide.)

Next day is Sunday, market day, and Michael has a yen for hornado or roasted pig. We trudge into town, stopping to catch our breath along the way, and greet acquaintances in the streets. “How do we know them?” we murmur to one another as we walk on. “What is his/her name?” But many know Michael by name – “Miquito” the taxi drivers yell as they drive by. And in the market, the pineapple man from the coast greets him with Señor Miko and the perfect fruit to eat today.

In the days that follow, we each make forays into town for groceries and supplies and to check out the state of this place, where dogs run free (I counted seven in front of our house one day)… 

Road/sewer construction never stops, which to go into town means running a guantlet of open sewer access inlets, fresh concrete (with dog prints), fresh asphalt (black footprints), and entire streets shut off with hoardings.

But that’s all part of life in Cañar, this homely town working to bring itself into the 21th century with potable water and sewer systems, paved roads (not ours), rabies vaccines for dogs, pink Himalayan salt found in our tiny MegaMarket (!), and nice people everywhere. We are happy to be back.

Cañar Book Club

Oh, how I’ve missed the Cañar Book Club, and I’m so depending on you, dear readers, to bring me out of my literary doldrums. I’m overwhelmed by all the “best of 2022 books” flooding my in-box, and although I’ve put several on hold in my library, when they come I’ll probably have no memory of why I got interested. I will mention one book I read in transit: The Wall, by Marlen Haushofer, and again, no memory why I choose this book. Published in 1963 it was recently reissued, so I might have read this review. But I was fascinated by the story of a women who finds herself cut off from the rest of humanity by a transparent wall, and has to create new skills to survive, accompanied by a dog, cow and cat. For some reason, I really enjoyed the repetitive mundane details of her life.

As for the books I’ve brought, it was a mixed bag (so to speak) of a couple of books I’d ordered (About Grace, Anthony Doerr, Butcher’s Crossing, John Williams), some taken from my shelves (Greene, Bryson, McPhee, Kidder), two that I’ve published this year (Ana Magarita’s story, Tell Mother I’m in Paradise), and another in Norwegian by my good friend Liv that I’ll be editing in the English edition (more on that next time). A paltry pile, so I’m depending on Kindle books from my Portland library to keep me happy these six months. And I’d also love to hear your recommendations for the next Cañar Book Club meeting in the new year, January 2023.

Until then, please stay in touch. I love hearing from you.

Dear Friends: Thirty years ago, on nearly every Sunday in a small house in San José, Costa Rica, Ana Margarita Gasteazoro and I sat side-by-side at a desk in my office/darkroom, a Sony recorder and a couple of glasses of wine between us. We were chronicling her life story, along with sounds of Michael in the kitchen, banging pots and pans and occasionally singing. Ana was 36 then, beautiful and vibrant and full of colorful tales of growing up in El Salvador as a rebellious girl in an upper-middle class family. But a more serious tone and melancholy pervaded at times. Ana was in Costa Rica as a political refugee, having spent nearly two years in prison in San Salvador.

She told of being violently arrested by the national police at the height of a bloody civil war that would cost 75,000 lives. After being “disappeared” for 11 days in the clandestine cells of the police, and repeatedly threatened with death, the first title of the book – Tell Mother I’m in Paradise – refers to Ana’s answer on the day she was delivered to Ilopango women’s prison, and the intake officer asked if she wanted to send a message to her family. Paradise, in this case, meant that she knew she was going to live, unlike so many of her colleagues and friends, but she was also already thinking about how she would continue her organizing work with the women political prisoners. (Header image above of women in Ilopango prison.)

Ana was an “organizer” at heart beginning with her teenage years, when her conservative mother sent her to Guatemala to a Catholic girls’ boarding school to “straighten her out.” Instead, Ana found herself surrounded by a group of Maryknoll nuns involved in resistance to Guatemala’s regime through liberation theology. The nuns didn’t tell her exactly what they were up to  – later Ana learned that one, Sister Marian Peter, became the famous antiwar activist in the US, Margery Melville. Ana was encouraged to volunteer in poor neighborhoods after school and on weekends, and it was here in Guatemala that her social consciousness began to take shape.

Ana went on to describe her young adult years as a rising star/activist in a legal political party in El Salvador, trips to Europe with Socialist International, a few affairs with famous men along with many unwanted advances from other famous men. There were some attempts to settle into a work and domestic life, and then, as the war escalated and she saw her political comrades and friends kidnapped, horribly tortured and left dead by roadsides, she made the decision to go underground and become a militant, while continuing to work “above ground” with her legal party. A very dangerous decision, as it turned out.At some indefinable moment on one of those Sundays in San José, I said – or she said, or we said together – “This should be a book!” With our mutual friend, Andrew  – who had introduced me to Ana – we worked together transcribing, editing, adding extra recording sessions to fill in gaps. Ana was eager but always ambivalent. This was 1988 and the war was still on in El Salvador. Should she be revealing all this?  And if a book came out, shouldn’t it be in Spanish? (My Spanish then was rudimentary; her English was perfect after years in the American School in San Salvador). We carried on, piece-meal, as I worked full-time with CUSO, and Andrew who worked with same Canadian NGO, returned to Canada.

Then, on a holiday to the Caribbean coast, Ana met Smokey. Always passionate and compulsive, she announced on her return that she had decided on a new life to realize a long-held dream. She and Smokey would open a bakery and cafe in Puerto Viejo. Ana had always loved to cook – she and Michael had quickly bonded over food – and Smokey owned land on the beach where they would build an open-air cafe with living quarters above. Michael contributed his labor with plumbing and electrical work; Andrew came back to Costa Rica, did more interviews with Ana and loaned her funds to buy a pizza oven. I stayed in San José working, and visiting when I could.

Cafe Coral was an instant success, with Ana’s granola (which I still make), and Smokey’s green-peppercorn-and lobster pizza. Within a year or so, Ana was chairwoman of the community of Puerto Viejo, promoting ecologically friendly development in the fast-growing tourism scene on the Caribbean coast.

There is so much more to this story, both sadness and joy, in Ana’s ebullient voice, but I hope you will buy the book so I’ll stop here. But with one more photo. In 1992 Ana and Smokey came to visit us in Cuenca, Ecuador. I took this photo of the two of them in the back yard of our house on the Tomebamba River. Another day, after we two went shopping and Ana bought a string of red coral beads, I took the cover photo in my upstairs studio. It was the next-to-last time I saw Ana.

In 2019, realizing Ana’s hope, the book was published in Spanish in El Salvador by the Museum of the Word and Image (MUPI) (with excellent translation work by her cousin Eva Gasteazoro), and on April 19, 2022, University of Alabama Press will officially publish the book in English. (pp 4-5 in catalog)

For those who like instant gratification, the book is already available on Amazon, but I’m hearing from friends who are getting it from their local independent bookstores such as Powell’s Books in Portland, Barnes and Noble and others. (I also hear that it is a beautiful hardback with dust jacket, cream-tone pages, and good photo reproductions.)

One last note. When Ana died prematurely at age 40 of breast cancer, I was still in Ecuador. Grieving, and remembering how much she had wanted a university education, like her brothers, I started the Ana Margarita Gasteazoro Fund for Women (now the Cañari Women’s Education Foundation). Since then, 38 Cañari have received full scholarships to state universities in Ecuador.

Any royalties from Tell Mother I’m in Paradise: Memoirs of a Political Prisoner in El Salvador will go to a similar fund in El Salvador. Ana Margarita would be pleased; she believed strongly that the education of women was one of the most important avenues for social and political progress in Latin America.

C a ñ a r  B o o k  C l u b

Well, unlike past book club meetings, I’ve had some good reads lately, and they sync nicely with recommendations from our members. The Wrong End of the Telescope by Abih Alameddine is about a transgender doctor, Lebanese in origin, who goes to the island of Lesbos with several friends to help support the immigrants arriving there. Interesting parallel with a book recommended by Chris in Ottawa: What a Strange Paradise by Egyptian-Canadian Omar El Akkad: “More bodies have washed up on the shores of a small island. Another over-filled, ill-equipped, dilapidated ship has sunk under the weight of its too many passengers: Syrians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians, all of them desperate to escape untenable lives in their homelands. And only one has made the passage…”

I read recently Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar and I’m still deciding what I think. Part novel, part memoir (now called autofiction), I was deeply drawn in to his life story, but put off by some of his long discourses on politics, art, money, sex, religion, and prejudice.  I say read it, and get back to me on what you let think.

A friend visiting from Mexico, Natalie, left her book with me: All the Frequent Troubles of our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler by Rebecca Donner. What a pleasure to hold a beautifully produced hardback book after months of Kindle reading! Incredibly well documented and written, a terribly sad book that reminds us how important resistance is to autocratic regimes, whether in the US, Russia or El Salvador.

Allison in Minneapolis has read and liked Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi. “An immigrant family from Ghana settles in Huntsville, Alabama in hopes of a better life in America. … a novel about faith, science, religion, love. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi’s phenomenal debut, Homegoing.”

Joanne in Mexico has recommended Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan, and after Michael and I listened to her read her short story, “So Late in the Day,” on the New Yorker podcast last week, I ordered her book on kindle and finished it in a few short hours. I agree with Joanne: “This beautiful, spare little book I read on the plane was so wonderful I wish it had been longer. Set in an Irish village at Christmas time, a local man confronts his past and the scene at a Magdalene laundry.”

Charlotte in Portland recommends Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, Edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain. “… a very readable 80 Black-authored essays and poems giving the reader a broad picture of how enslavement of Africans essentially built America (and Western civilization) and how those Africans managed to fight and keep fighting through the entrenched hypocrisy that is still very much with us today.”

Shirley from Cuenca: The Book of Lost Friends by Lisa Wingate. “Real page turner based on  three women in 1875 post civil war trying to find lost relatives, and current day teacher trying to bring history to life in a black southern community.  Did not want the story to end.”

She carries on the “book” theme with:  The Book of Lost Names by Kristen Hamel. “A historical WWII novel about a Paris student who uses her artistic talent to forge documents to help Jewish children cross the border. How she saves all the names in a book in code is amazing.”

And now she is reading How the Word is Passed about slavery. “Author Clint Smith visits important sites like Montecello, Whitney Plantation and a Louisiana prison to interview workers, visitors and inmates to see oppression past and present.”

Did I miss anyone?  If so, please remind me what you are reading, with a comment a two. I always love hearing from our Cañar Book Club members.

Dear Friends – Some of you have read “Letter from Ecuador” in a recent New Yorker, with excellent reporting by Daniel Alarcón (link is here).  Primarily about the pandemic tragedy in Guayaquil two years ago that sent horrible images around the world of the dead left on the streets as hospital and mortuaries were overwhelmed, Alarcón also writes of the courageous medical workers, affected families then and now, and Ecuador’s general response to the pandemic.

March 16 marks two years since the national lockdown in Ecuador, when airports, schools, universities were abruptly shut, inter-provincial travel stopped and the entire population advised to stay at home and only venture out when necessary. In Cañar, the streets into town were barricaded while police and volunteer security teams (mostly newly recruited young people) circulated to check on movements and masks. Cañari villages surrounding the town took their own security measures, blocking off access roads with dump trucks, chains, anything that said “Do Not Enter.” Here’s a sketch I did in town the following day.

The first case to appear in Guayaquil was late February, when an elderly woman flew from Madrid for a family visit and exposed 80 people in a few days of socializing. From that point on cases exploded until the city was simply overwhelmed, and families were leaving their dead in the streets in front of their houses. Alarcón quotes a Doctor Ortiz saying that Guayaquil likely had the world’s most lethal outbreak of Covid-19 per capita. “One day, there were no patients,” he told me. “The next, there were five thousand looking for beds in intensive-care units.” Ortiz estimates that about sixty-five per cent of the city’s residents were infected during March and April of 2020. (emphasis mine).

I remember the first case we heard about in Cañar, via the grapevine, maybe late March. Someone said a Cañari youth had been in Guayaquil for a social event or meeting and came back infected. After that, the indigenous rural communities basically shut down communications with the outside world. Although there were surely many cases circulating, no one wanted to be tested or go to the hospital (or talk about it), and unless someone appeared to be dying they were treated at home with “native medicine” that included eucalyptus vapor and herbal teas. Surely some older folks died, but death certificates depend on medical professionals, and indigenous families don’t call these to their houses. A death at home is quickly followed by an all-night vigil, funeral mass, and a quick interment the next day. So case and mortality numbers in Cañar stayed extremely low.  Eventually, I knew of only three dangerously ill Cañaris who ended up in the hospital in Cuenca – all men and all three recovered. Two were from the village pictured below, Quilloac. (It was a different story in the town, but I have no statistics for those.)

From Alarcón’s article: “Officially, more than thirty-five thousand Ecuadorians died of covid-19 in the past two years, but the total excess deaths for 2020 and 2021 number more than eighty thousand. Five hundred and forty-five Ecuadorian doctors died of covid-19, along with hundreds of other health-care workers and medical professionals.”

On March 16, 2020 Michael and I were half way into our usual six months here, with tickets already paid to Spain for the month of May and on to Portland in June. Like so many others, in the beginning we figured we’d still travel, that this Covid thing would quickly pass and life would return to normal. In the end we were not able to leave Ecuador until July, and then barely – on one of the first weekly flights out of Quito on a three-day trip from hell.

Two years later, a national mask mandate is still in place, and according to a taxi driver I recently chatted with, will stay until May. The other day we were asked to show proof of vaccination before getting on the bus to Cuenca, and Michael until recently had to show his card at his favorite supermarket in Cuenca. Vaccinations began in January 2021, and today more than seventy-four per cent of the population of Ecuador is fully vaccinated—one of the highest vaccination rates in the region and higher than that of the United States.

In Cañar, however, other than masks, life seems to have slipped back to pre-2020. After a Omicron wave following the Christmas holidays (which everyone here simply called grippe fuerte – strong flu – and seemed to recover after 3-4 days) schools are back in person, markets are open, traffic has returned – furiously. The universities are still closed to in-person classes, and our twelve scholarship women have continued to do OK with virtual classes on their laptops and cell phones. But of course they are anxious to be back with classmates and professors and all that a university environment provides. The produce markets are thriving and my only complaint is the shelves at our town markets were cleared of wine by holiday fiestas, and haven’t been restocked.

OK, about those small deaths in the patio: These past few days I could detect that unmistakable odor of dead animal as I passed along one side of the interior patio, though Michael could not. Finally, I could stand it no longer and made a serious search inside the monster aloe that dominates the space. I soon spotted two empty nests, but it took longer to see a bit of wing and a little gray carcass of a rufous-collared sparrow. Then, glancing down at a flower pot at the base of the aloe I saw another dead sparrow. Mystery solved. Michael the hero volunteered to extract and dispose of our little neighbors. We enjoy living with them as the come in through the space between the glass structure and tile roof to hop around, drink from the fountain, check for insects in the soil and sometimes visit our rooms. It’s the first time we’ve found dead birds in the patio, however, and my guess is it was due to the unusually cold weather – nights in the 40’s and rainy days in the 50’s. (Though Michael disagrees, says these birds have to live through even colder weather). However, until otherwise proven, I stand by my theory.

Finally, the garden:  I just wanted to add some color to this post, so I made the header image a collage of the flowers currently in bloom in our garden.

Cañar Book Club

Well this time it’s just me. After a flurry of reading suggestions last time that made a extra-long list, our dear members have gone silent – or maybe just disappointed in their books, as I have been. (photo: The Yellow Book by Vincent Van Gogh).

Lately I’ve been dependent on e-books coming through my waiting list from the library, so I read what comes and if I’m disappointed I drop and pick up the next one. I have just started The Promise by Damon Galgut (winner of 2021 Booker) and I’m definitely engaged. “This bravura novel about the undoing of a bigoted South African family during apartheid deserves awards.”—The Guardian

Waiting on my Kindle library shelf is: Brick Lane by Monica Ali (while anticipating her new one, Love Marriage), and the Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie.  Why?  I have no idea.

Flash: As I was writing this, a message came from Pat in Bend, Oregon: “A researcher sets out to discover what’s happening to Pacific Salmon. The wild Salmon’s wide range takes him from Canada, to the Arctic and, eventually to Kamchatka, Russia. There he sees undisturbed Salmon habitat and vibrant ecosystems. He forms the notion of creating protected Salmon habitats that he calls, “strongholds” Thus the title of this book, Stronghold: One Man’s Quest to Save the World’s Wild Salmon by Tucker Malarkey. Malarkey grew up with the researcher in their family cabins on the Deschutes River in Oregon, and she followed him as a journalist and friend in his endeavors to create an eco-organization. (non-fiction)

That’s it for now. Please keep your book suggestions coming for the April meeting of our beloved Cañar Book Club.

Dear Friends – coming up next month is the anniversary of moving into our “house in the clouds,” so I thought it would be fun to do a before/after look, remember the 14 months of construction, and realize again how much this home has meant to us, and all the visitors, friends and family who have come to share it with us over the years. I started thinking about this theme because this weekend we have our first visitor in two years – Emily – a fellow Fulbrighter and Portlander, now living in Ecuador. So, here we go…. (photos below: June 2005 and February 2022.)

We bought the land in July 2005, at the end of my second Fulbright grant and just as we were preparing to leave Cañar for what we assumed would be “forever.” Previously, for several years, we’d  been looking in Mexico for an alternative life, but as we talked about how much we would miss this homely place called Cañar, we had one of those “AHA -DUH!” moments when we realized everything we’d been looking for in Mexico was right here. Community, endless walking opportunities, good/bad climate (e.g. always chilly), and, for me, open-ended work as a documentary photographer. Only downside was how far we would be from friends and family in the U.S. But that very day Michael went out to look around, accompanied by a Cañari friend, and a couple of weeks later we had bought a cornfield in the comuna of Chaglaban, half-kilometer from where we’d been living in a little rental house. (There’s a lot more to this origin story in my  book, but for this blog we’ll stay with the CliffsNotes version.) Here’s Michael on the day we closed on the property. We left almost immediately for Portland, and returned six months later to find a few new residents.

But work had already begun with our architect, Lourdes Abad, from Cuenca, whom we’d hired after seeing the beautiful adobe house she’d built for a friend.Back in Portland, Michael had made a rough drawing Inspired by our many trips to Mexico of a simple square house with a central courtyard. We sent it to Lourdes, and by the time we came back to Cañar she had refined Michael’s design into a not-so-simple house, with three off-set rectangles to allow a larger courtyard, porches front and back, and a better layout.

After soil engineers determined that our land was not stable enough for an traditional adobe block house – this region is riddled with geologic faults –  Lourdes proposed a house made of “bahareque”- an old Spanish term for walls made of bamboo and soil. For us, it meant a house with a post-and-beam frame with mud walls, held by thin strips of bamboo. But I’m jumping ahead. We broke ground in 2006, and I have to say that, for me, watching a house being built from the ground up for the first time was a revelation. To begin, you draw an outline of house on the ground with chalk. No kidding.Then you dig channels around the chalk lines – with shovels, by hand.Then  you have a bunch of rocks delivered to fill in the channels and begin foundation walls.Then comes the wood for posts and beams, which Michael and the workers bought at the local wood market down the road. All eucalyptus. So you could say that making a house in Cañar, so far, is about chalk, sticks and stones, though we’ve yet to add the mud, straw and horse manure.

Dear readers: I’m going to break in here to speed up the process. In reviewing the photos I took during the construction period, it looks likes I documented every single day, and I’m having a tough time wading through the files. While I’m happy to have these images, I don’t think you will want to go through the entire construction with me. So I’m going to add a bunch of images with minimal text.

OR – you can always skip to the Cañar Book Club below, with some wonderful reading suggestions from our members.

I’m ending with before and after shots of our courtyard – March 27, 2007 – the day we inaugurated the house with a Wasipichana ceremony with Mama Michi officiating –  and today, February 21, 2022.

And if anyone should want more – the story of building the house and making a life in Cañar is told in my book, Our House in the Clouds, Building a Second Life in the Andes of Ecuador, University of Texas Press, 2013.

PS: Lourdes has asked me to add that in 15 years the house has not required any maintenance, inside or out!

C a ñ a r   B o o k   C l u b

Thanks to our dear club member Joanne from Patzcuaro, Mexico and Portland, Oregon, for the above photo. She recommends Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. “This beautiful, spare little book I read on the plane was so wonderful I wish it had been longer. Set in an Irish village at Christmas time, a local man confronts his past and the scene at a Magdalene laundry.”  

From Lisa in Savannah: I just read a fantastic, page-tuner entitled  Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art by Laney Salisbury & Aly Sujo.  It’s the fascinating non-fiction story of art forgers in 1980’s and 90’s London. Also,iIf you liked  Song of Achilles – you would love Circe by the same author (Madeline Miller).

From Sandy in Toronto: How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith. “Really beautifully written book that manages to talk about slavery in a way that is neither pedantic, nor preachy. One of the best I have read on the subject – the kind of book that might actually help others learn and change.”

From Maya in Portland: “Top of the list is Rabih Alameddine’s latest, The Wrong End of the Telescope.  I liked his An Unnecessary Woman quite a lot but I like the new one even more. A transgender doctor, Lebanese in origin, goes to the island of Lesbos with several friends to help support the immigrants arriving there. It is warm and funny and well written, all the while  showing the terrible plight of refugees from the Mideast in the Mediterranean.”

Maya continues: “To that I’d add Nawal El Saadawi’s biography, Walking through Fire: The Later Years of Nawal El Saadawi, In Her Own Words. She’s an Egyptian feminist and author who recently died after living a remarkable life. And last – The Art of Losing by Alice Zeniter, translated from the French, about three generations of an Algerian family who flee to France during the Algerian revolution. Very well done.

From Bruce in Tucson: “Been reading Seed & Dust: Life, Nature, and a Country Garden by Marc Hamer. (Judy adds, as she has just ordered it from the library:  “Hamer describes a year in his life as a country gardener in the same 12-acre garden in the Welsh countryside for over two decades. As he works … he reflects on his own life: living homeless as a young man, his loving relationship with his wife and children, and – now – feeling the effects of old age on body and mind.”

Bruce continues: Hamer also wrote another great book: How to Catch a Mole. David Mitchell’s  Utopia Avenue is also great, about a rock band in 1960s England.

Scott in Portland recommends The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War by Louis Menand. “In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand offers a new intellectual and cultural history of the postwar years.”

From Liz in Toronto: “I just finished Elizabeth Strout’s “The Burgess Boys in preparation for reading her new book, Oh William, and wanted to recommend it for your book club. Such a wise, deeply humane and psychologically acute writer! I might even re-read.”

From Patricia in Cuenca: “I continue to dwell in the 19th century although this takes me into my own lifetime.” I’ve read Margaret Fuller Ossoli: A Biography, by Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Not the easiest read until the later chapters, as Ossoli developed into a journalist, feminist, abolitionist, and revolutionary in Italy, before her tragic drowning off Fire Island. Now onto the Autobiography of W. E. B. DuBois.

From Natalie in Mexico, but coming to Ecuador and Cañar soon: “I’ve lately read two novels by Ecuadorian-American writers lately: The Spanish Daughter by Lorena Hughes. A telenovela-worthy historical family saga-drama set in 1920s Guayaquil; and The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina, a fun magical realism/female empowerment tale also
set in Guayaquil.

From Mary Day in Colombia, who seems to read a book a day: Como polvo en el viento, Leonardo Padura. On Juneteenth, Annette Gordon-Reed ( history of Texas and the rest of us). Drinking the Sea at Gaza, Amira Hass (vital book I should have read in the 90s when it first came out, but still bitterly relevant, by an Israeli reporter who lives still on the West Bank). Alec, William di Canzio (wonderful novel picking up on EM Forster’s Maurice). The Kingdom, Emanuel Carrere (French intellectual’s struggle to understand the politics and theology of the early Christian era). What Just Happened, Charles Finch (brilliant scream of anti-Trump outrage by writer most known for murder mysteries set in Victorian England. This is a very American book and also very funny). And, on the side, this was the year I rediscovered and reread all of Josephine Tey.

Finally, my dear sister Char in Austin is reading Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.“So compelling, so fearlessly imagined, that I wouldn’t have  put it down for anything.” –Ann Patchett. And Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy. “Propulsive and spell-binding…. the unforgettable story of a woman desperate to save the creatures she loves – if she isn’t consumed by a wild that was once her refuge.”

Whew! 

Given that long list of books that could keep us all busy for the rest of the year, I’m debating whether to add my own. I think I’ll wait until next time.

Until then, please stay in touch at:  judyblanken@gmail.com

Dear Friends:  Well, since it’s still barely the first week of 2022 I can say – best wishes to you all for the new year, and please let it be better than 2021!

Looking back this past month, the holiday season in Cañar is always mixed for us, without family, visitors from far away or Portland friends. Christmas and New Year’s here are all about family gatherings, and it’s rare to include outsiders. However, we had just enough special visitors and events to make us feel loved. Here’s a lunch with our favorite architect, Lourdes Abad (red necklace), and her sister Ana.

I debated whether to take part part in my first crowd event on December 31 (called Año Viejo, or Old Year), but it was a beautiful day and I knew the hours-long, outdoor procession would be in constant motion. In the Cañari world, this day is all about music, dance, masks, disguises and irreverent fun. So early afternoon I tried out my persona/mask – I think it’s Ugly Betty? – packed camera, water, sunscreen, and joined several hundred comuneros at the highest village of Junducuchu at about 11,000 feet,-truly up in the clouds.There, with a 10-piece band leading, and dancing women and girls called damas, we began winding down the steep mountain. I in heavy boots, concentrating hard not to slip on the loose gravel or tip over the edge where the roadway collapsed, hanging onto tree branches and an occasional fellow walker… …while the women and girls stepped alongside me in their little wedgies sandals and plastic slippers without a pause. We stopped in several other comunas on the way down the mountain where the band played, the damas danced, and others joined in, many in funny masks and disguises.Men dressed as women is the favorite (no Cañari woman would ever make such a gesture).

Along the way I saw various life-sized rag dolls propped up at the entrance to villages, called monigotes, with names tacked on representing known figures, to be burned at midnight in a symbolic gesture of “regeneration” (though history says these were often effigies of hacienda overseers or other hated authority figures). Past years Michael and I have stayed up late enough to burn Trump, but this year I bought two masks to add to my collection and I don’t want to burn any of them: the devil signifying the pandemic, and a Dr. Fauci representing medical heroes.

By the time we got to the next-to-last village it was nearly 6:00 PM, the temperature was dropping, I was tired and Michael was at home by the fire with dinner on the stove. I nodded goodbye to the last monigotes and started on down the mountain.

I’d like to give a last credit to the great mask makers of Cuenca, the Alejandro Flores family who have been hand-crafting these papier maché masks for seventy years. Made with scrap paper from schools and other sources, glue and paint, they show up in the markets in Cañar the week between Christmas and New Year’s, costing about $2 each. Pictured below is Susana Flores, one of Alejandro’s ten children, four of which have stayed in the business.

Cañar Book Club

Our Cañar Book Club members have awaken after their holiday stupor and are reading books like crazy. From my Wine and Whine girlfriends in Portland: The Master and the Emissary. “Iain McGilchrist presents a fascinating exploration of the differences between the brain’s left and right hemispheres, and how those differences have affected society, history, and culture.” Cloud Cuckoo Land. “Already in 100 pages; Anthony Doerr is certainly a master of simple writing that makes for page-turning.” Two memoirs of special interest according to reviews: Home in the World by Amartya Sen and Sentence by Daniel Genis.

From Bibi in California: Mothering Sunday, Graham Swift; Moonglow, Michael Chabon  and  Rescue, Anita Shreve. “All of them are intriguing stories well told. The kind that makes you sad when they’re over. But my favorite book of the year: Garlic, Garlic, Garlic, by Linda & Fred Griffith. Even if you are not a gardener or cook, it is a wonderfully informative and entertaining book.”

Bruce in Portland gets the prize for most complicated title:  “I’m reading The Standardization of the Demoralization Procedures by Jennifer Hofmann. It’s about a career Stasi officer in East Germany around 1989. So far, it’s a pretty good read. Very tight prose.”

Pat in Bend, Oregon: I am in the midst of The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot  by Robert Macfarlane, and it’s great. I picked it up after reading Mountains of the Mind by him, a geological and psychological  history of mountains and mountain climbing. Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Native American botanist and teacher of environmental biology, weaves science with indigenous wisdom and teaches us how to listen to plants. I wonder what your aloe has to say? Louise Penney recently co-authored a political thriller with Hilary Clinton called State of Terror that has details only an insider could know, and has cameos by Penney’s characters from her mysteries. Loved it! (Daphne from Edmonton, Alberta seconded this opinion.)

Alan the “The Avid Indoorsman” in New Jersey seems to be reading a book a day: Of Women of Salt, Gabriela Garcia. “It is beautifully written brutally honest and hard to put down. The story is brilliantly woven together and ends with unexpected hope.” Word By Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, Kory Stamper. “Finally, a book that tells the truth about our language. Here is why the rule against final prepositions is preposterous. Its bent and worn pages are a testament to how thoroughly I studied this tome.” Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, James Loewen, “…about how we remember and avoid the facts.”

Claire in London (with with a leek and lentil gratin in the oven, reminding me we need to start again with our recipes – Claire?). The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz. “Great fun, well structured with lots of twists and turns and very entertaining.” Love After Love by Ingrid Persaud. “If you don’t mind getting into the patois (it’s set in Trinidad) it’s a wonderful story of love and loss through food and friendship. I couldn’t put it down.”

Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. “It takes a few pages to get into it but I was soon gripped. Beautiful writing and so evocative.”   For those, like me, who LOVED  A Gentleman in Moscow, the new Amor Towles, The Lincoln Highway, might well be a disappointment.  Multiple characters, none of them that believable or interesting and a story that seems to be taking ages to get going. However, I see from Twitter reviews that people who didn’t take to Gentleman rather like this one!  I adored All the Light One Can Not See by Anthony Doer and was initially dubious about his latest – Cloud Cuckoo Land. But I kept going and it grew on me, though I still had reservations about some elements (and mostly skipped those elements). Next I might try The Promise by Damon Galgut which won the Booker last year.

Ed on Vashon Island noted my interest in walking books and sent this recommendation: The Salt Path: A Memoir by Raynor Winn, who with her husband walked 600 miles of coastal paths in southwest Britain when they found themselves homeless and broke. I read it earlier this year and loved the story.

I’ll finish with a couple from my own very eclectic reading list. Friend Liv in Oslo recommended Trieste: A Novel by Dasa Drndic that I have just begun to read and had a hard time grasping the jumble of facts/figures/time periods. But I’m just getting into “this many-layered novel of WWII combines fiction with a collage of facts to explore the fate of Italian Jews under Nazi occupation, through the intimate story of a mother’s search for her son.” For some reason I brought Old Filth by Jane Gardam with me to Cañar, and for some reason I loved reading about the last days of an elderly lawyer called affectionately by the acronym FILTH: Failed in London Try Hong Kong. First of a trilogy that I’m hooked on. I’m also meandering along with The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane, but yearning for a really great novel or thriller. I’ve already ordered several from the fantastic recommendations above.

That’s it, dear friends. Please stay in touch and write me with all your news and book recommendations at: judyblanken@gmail.com

Dear Friends:   Brrrr, it’s a foggy chilly day as I begin this – the inside temperature is 13C (55 degreesF). Although we yearly head south, no one can accuse us of being wimpy snowbirds on this, our 16th half-year in cold Cañar. We count on a little sun in the mornings to warm the glass-covered atrium and make the day comfortable. Not today. Michael wants to hold off to 4:00 PM before making a fire (he claims our woodpile is critically low), but once he has his KenKen puzzles, a beer and the fire, all is well in our little corner of the Andes.

We arrived a little over a week ago in Guayaquil, with a hard landing after a full day of travel from Portland. Turns out the Ecuadorian government changed the entry requirements for travelers the day before, so there was no way to know that we had to have a Covid test within 24 hours of travel. Nor did the hundreds of other travelers stuck in the airport with us at 2:00 AM. We finally emerged at 4:00 AM, after a quick and painful screw-up-the-nose antegen test. I laud Ecuador for being careful about the new variant, but it was unconscionable not to let us know what was going on, as we stood waiting 30 minutes in the jetway, then in a corridor, then another corridor, the in two waiting rooms. Finally, we were called to an improvised clinical setting and asked for our Covid exam results. Whaaaat? I’ve made a sort of cartoon of our travel day, with a nod to Roz Chast of the New Yorker. I hope you’ll be able to make sense of it.

After recovering in a Guayaquil hotel for a day and a night, we made the familiar drive to Cañar, leaving the hot and humid coast to zigzag up through the clouds to over 10,000 feet. Looking down on Cañar from the highest point, I thought back to my first writings about this place –  that I’d first called a village, then a town, and now I have to say it is a small city. A scrappy, homely and cold small city, where we are still the only extranjeros who choose to live here. (Though who wouldn’t want to live here with a view like this?)

This high and dry climate is kind to our house, however. Other than dust and spiderwebs, it looks exactly as we left it six months ago. In fact it’s pretty much in the same shape as when we moved in, in 2007. Our compadres Jose María and Narcisa have left an offering on our kitchen table of a big basket of dried beans (enough for a few years) and a bowl of mazorkas, dried corn in various colors. These are from the harvest of our back field, where they follow the custom of being partidarios – planting land not your own and sharing the harvests. Over the years we’ve learned to acquiesce to the custom of receiving our symbolic “share,” even though we can never use the amount they give us.

The interior garden requires little care, with it’s succulents, cacti, aloe, geraniums, ferns and orchids. While we’re gone, Andean sparrows take up residence and build their nests in the monster Aloe, and I can peer in and see at least two nests. They appear empty of eggs, but the mamas still make regular visits during the day through the six-inch gap between the steel/glass structure and tile roof, circling the space, hopping around the patio and sometimes checking out our rooms.

The yard is another story – the compadres‘ sheep and the neighbors’ chickens have pretty well decimated the flower gardens and much else. Last year I wrote about my Sisyphean garden: no matter how much love I pour into it while we’re here – planting, pruning, mowing –  it goes back to square one when we go away for a few months. Then, this time, after a few days of rain, just as I think the front lawn might recover, here comes Chirote in his heavy truck with a load of wood for Michael. Thirty-six vigas, or square wooden beams, some from old torn-down houses. Perfect heavy wood and truck tires to gouge out the grass.And because Chirote’s an old friend, Michael invites him in for a beer by the fire, where I can’t resist making a portrait of old friends.

And because it happens that the next day, when Mike finds his old chainsaw sputtering, he has a perfect excuse to make the trip to Cuenca to drop it off for repairs, and buy a new one. Although he will deny this, nothing makes him happier than to have a new toy – I mean tool.

(I want to stop here to say how much I love hearing from you all, and and ask that you respond to my Cañar Chronicles with my email judyblanken@gmail.com: Something is screwy with my MailChimp account and I know it’s been impossible to use the reply.)

That brings us to the moment we’ve all been waiting for…..

The Cañar Book Club

Dear Members – it’s been way too long, I agree, and I know it will be hard to make up for lost time trying to remember all we’ve read in the past few months. Speaking of memory – here and gone –  I opened the book I brought for the long travel day, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, by Anthony Marra, and within a few pages I realized I’d already read it. But I could remember almost nothing, so I kept reading through the week, and the next, and found it (again) to be a beautiful, moving, reading experience of a story that takes place in Chechnya – a place I knew nothing about. I’ll let the New York Times Book Review say it all: “Extraordinary…A 21st Century War and Peace.” It’s currently #1 on my list.

Otherwise, given that an extra bag now costs $65 on American Airlines, I brought way fewer books this time. Here they are, looking rather pathetic on their own nearly-empty shelf on my bed-side bookshelf. They are:

Little Failure, Gary Shteyngart memoir (after enjyoing reading his articles in the “New Yorker,” humorous but serious writing. (Just finished – loved it!)

Oh William, Elizabeth Strout – a gift from a reading friend. I love Strout and am holding back on reading it so I can keep anticipating it, like a delicious meal.

Meaning a Life: An Autobiography, Mary Oppen (after references read in Maggie Nelson book The Argonauts, which I found riveting. I felt the same about Nelson’s The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial, but she lost me with her most recent On Freedom.

The Book of Aron, Jim Shepard, because my serious reading friend Bruce said that he is one of the best authors he knows. Shepard also shows up on lots of best-of lists, but I don’t think I’ve read anything by him.

The Piano Tuner, Daniel Mason, because I read a later book by him, The Winter Soldier. Like “A Constellation…,”  it captures previous centuries and worlds I don’t know – Siberian Russia and Burma.

Old Filth, Jane Gardam, I don’t remember, but I think it was mentioned in a book I recently read and loved –To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface by Olivia Laing, about walking the length of the River Ouse from source to sea. The river where Virginia Woolf died, Laing muses on that history and much else that’s taken place over the centuries along her walk.  A slow meander to savor. And that led me to this strange title. Old Filth?  Will report in next book club.

The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, Robert MacFarlane – because I love books about walking. Part of a trio of books about landscape and how we live in it. “…Macfarlane sets off to follow the ancient routes that crisscross both the landscape of the British Isles and its waters and territories beyond. The result is an immersive, enthralling exploration of the voices that haunt old paths and the stories our tracks tell.”

Landmarks, Robert MacFarlane (same author), also walking, this one about terms that comes about from particular landscapes. Each section starts with a glossary of words you’ve never heard before, such as rife: small river flowing across the coastal plain, or  sike, small stream, often flowing through marshy ground.  “Landmarks is a celebration and defense of such language.”

And just so I don’t get nervous about running out of books, I loaded a few on my iPad. I must confess I have no idea when, where or why I ordered these titles.

Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds, Marisol de la Cadena

Bring Me Back, B.A. Paris. A novel, but I know nothing else

Still Life, Louise Penny. A mystery, because I read one of hers before and like it. Not my usual fare.

PLEASE SEND YOUR READS AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR NEXT CANAR BOOK CLUB, IN JANUARY 2022!

Dear Friends: I’m very happy to be back in touch. Michael and I made a short trip to Cañar in the spring, when we found the Covid lockdown in Ecuador still in effect and cases rising, though nothing like previous levels. Masks were required throughout the country and public transportation was back but varied according to infection levels. Vaccinations were just starting in Cañar for the elderly and are now available to everyone, including children. Otherwise, in Cañar, at least, daily life felt “regular” – a favorite expression said with dead-pan tonality. Twice-weekly markets had started up and the town streets were alive with traffic and shoppers. Since then, according to a recent post from the World Bank, “after a vaccination campaign earlier this year, Ecuador went from being one of the countries hardest hit by the pandemic to becoming an example for the world. This success story would have been impossible without the massive turnout of the population.” (Note: World Bank provided most of the funds for vaccines.)

Two posters for rural areas of Cañar. Text on the left: visits door-to-door to give vaccines to all persons from five years old. Second right indicates same information for local health clinic.

Last year I started this letter by saying that despite the pandemic our program was alive and well. I think this year I have to say that while still alive – we are limping. When the lockdown hit Ecuador in March 2020, our women were scattered across the country, some as far away as the northwest coast and in the Amazon, and they came home to face the challenge of continuing classes without Internet. Everyone had cell phones, however, and so at the outset the women “attended” classes and submitted their work on their mobiles. Imagine how hard that was! Our local committee quickly decided to continue paying full scholarships ($150-$160/month) to help families buy access to Internet and support additional children at home. Today, 18 months later, university classes are still virtual. One woman suspended her medical studies after struggling all year.

However, our 2021 numbers provide a positive overall picture: we have 25 graduates, four with master’s degrees, and one PhD student. Michael and I are headed to Ecuador on December 1 to begin the sixteenth year of our life in Cañar, so during the next six months I will send more up-to-date news of the scholarship program on this blog. Meanwhile, I’ve checked in with some of our graduates (mostly via Facebook) to see what they are up to.

Carmen Loja, (Economics, 2011), worked with several financial cooperatives before realizing her dream of building a community-based tourism program, Kinti Wasi, in her home community of Suscal. Along with her cousin and another partner, Carmen hosts groups such as this one of US-based Amigos de Las Americas: https://bit.ly/3BYzCNa) where “high school and gap-year students experience the Andean worldview in agroecology, gastronomy, architecture, ancestral medicine and spirituality.” And I see by the website that Kinti Wasi is an Amigos partner for 2022. Congratulations Carmen!  (She also welcomes individuals and small groups if any of you are contemplating a trip to Ecuador.)Margarita and Mercedes Guamán (with younger sister and brother), are both graduates of our program, and their subsequent careers reflect the employment situation in Ecuador. Margarita (l), now married with two children, works with the 911 call center in Cuenca, not what she was expecting when she graduated with a degree in natural resources in 2011. Her younger sister Mercedes (in cap & gown), also married with two children, graduated as a CPA in 2018 and has worked steadily as an accountant for local organizations. Without exception, our scholarship women choose careers aimed at jobs. Among our graduates we have several accountants, nurses and nutritionists, along with an MD, veterinarian, dentist, lab clinician, psychologist, agronomist, gastronomist, lawyer, business and communication specialists, but not one in the humanities. I’m sad about this, but the public university system in Ecuador is geared towards technology and science, and our scholarship women are geared towards professional jobs.

Juana Chuma is the only one of our women pursuing a PhD (so far). As a graduate in veterinary medicine from University of Cuenca (2015), she received our master’s support of $3000, but beyond that she has won scholarships and awards at UNAM in Mexico, including a training trip to Chile and a semester at University of Georgia in the US (delayed due to Covid but on track for 2022.)

The pandemic has meant good news for those already working in public health, as the Ecuadorian government has offered them full-time, permanent jobs in hospitals and community clinics. To be permanently nombrado in your workplace in Ecuador is something like tenure – you can stay for life. This is good for job security but not so good for new graduates trying to break into their respective fields. However, the world always needs doctors, nurses and nutritionists, especially those who are bilingual Quichua/Spanish as are all of these below.

Physician Luisa Duchi works in a community health clinic serving rural areas where many elderly speak only Quichua. Married with two children, she is from the Cañari village of Sisidhuayco

Mary Zhinin is a nurse in a provincial hospital in Ambato, in central Ecuador, where her husband also works. They have two children and are from the Cañari village of Quilloac.

Nutritionist/dietician Mariana Acero works in our provincial hospital in the city of Azogues, an hour from Cañar, which allows her to live at home in Correucu with her mother, the famous curandera Mama Michi Chuma.

Here is what graduation looked like in 2021: after five years in a very tough civil engineering program at University of Cuenca, Paiwa Acero sat in front of a laptop screen in my office in full graduation regalia (rented the day before), with script in hand, four people in attendance, and a Zoom program full of glitches. But that night her proud mother, Maria Esthela, organized an elaborate fiesta to celebrate with friends and family. Congratulations Paiwa!

Great thanks to the Circle of Giving in Bend, Oregon who for the past five years have supported women in a new two-year distance program called “Integrated Childhood Development” to train preschool teachers. It’s a government-created course to offer post-secondary education to those who can’t afford to attend university or have other barriers such as caring for young children or elderly parents.The “Circle” of eight women commit to a set amount each year to pay stipends to women who need assistance with childcare, transportation or meals, or to help the program outfit teaching laboratories at the facility. In May this year I was a surprise recipient of gratitude (to the Circle) when the program included me on a wonderful rainy “solidarity” day in the mountains, including a trout lunch

The Cañari Women’s Education Foundation (CWEF) is managed in Cañar by a local board of program graduates + me and the treasurer). Under normal circumstances, we meet two or three times a year to look over applications, review each scholar’s progress and decide how many spaces can be filled. Before Covid we also had a yearly meeting of all scholars, past and present; something we hope to do again in 2022. We keep the current group at about twelve, making it easy to manage monthly payments and monitor progress. Charlotte Rubin, our treasurer in Portland, keeps track of contributions and handles the banking here. We have no administrative costs.

CWEF is an official 501(c) 3 nonprofit, which means your contributions are tax deductible, and every dollar goes directly to the women. Please make your checks to CWEF and return in the enclosed envelope. We’ll send everyone thank you letters with IRS receipts. You can also donate through PayPal with this DONATE button at the end.

Please stay safe, stay in touch, and profound thanks for your continuing support.  Judy B.

Dear Friends – this will be the last of my Cañar chronicles for a while, as we are returning to Portland on June 7, with a plan to come back in December for our usual six months. But this quick two-month visit has been important to maintain continuity between our two worlds. We leave this one hopeful, as Covid cases are down, vaccinations are taking place daily near us (Sputnik the Russia vaccine just approved), and town life is beginning to feel, well, alive again.  So now my thoughts turn to things personal. I come from a family of (long-lived) women. I am one of three sisters; our mother was one of six sisters, all loving and supportive to the end of their days – two are still alive. (Photo above: our mother’s 90th birthday.) Following this pattern, I think I expected to have a daughter, in that vague early-20’s sort of way, though the boy I got has filled my life with plenty of joy. But then my younger sisters began to have babies – all boys! – until we had, between us, five sons. Then when THEY began to have children (e.g. our grandchildren), they produced seven boys with two girls sprinkled in, 20 years apart.This was not the dynasty of women we’d expected to continue.

However, we three sisters, all single mothers at one time or another as we stumbled through the 60’s and 70’s, set the bar high in terms of independence and showing our boys what women could do. We’d like to take credit for preparing five good men for the stable marriages and families they’ve all made.

But then, relatively late in life and from a surprise source, the gift of a girl. When Michael and I made our first trip back to Ecuador in the 1990s, and fierce little Paiwa came into our lives at age two, we never imagined we’d have a future with this creature. Although we’d made the trip especially to be her godparents, Paiwa wouldn’t allow us to hold or touch her at her baptism. Here she was about then…

But we kept coming back to Cañar, and Paiwa gradually got used to us. By kindergarten she allowed us to walk her to her school on the first day, and once Michael made some furniture her size, she’d stop by our house after school to read books.On her birthday, secure on the lap of her mother, Paiwa and Michael made an obvious connection. Our relationship grew over the next fifteen years as we moved every six months from Portland to Cañar and back again. (As did the photo collection. Her mother Maria Esthela was one of my first photography students and owns a photo studio in town.)

With no children of his own, Michael loved being a godfather, and as Paiwa’s father was not involved in her upbringing, she considered Michael her marcatayta, a stand-in for her father.

Well, Paiwa graduated from grammar school, then from high school,

…went off to University of Cuenca for five years to study civil engineering, wrote a thesis on waste water management using vermifilters, and then…This past week Paiwa graduated (virtually, in my studio) and has even landed a 4-month, paid internship at the local potable water office CENAGRAP. We couldn’t be more proud of her –  our goddaughter, our granddaughter, our daughter.

Well, it’s hard to top that, but as I was walking around town this week I was shocked to see the first sign of a US-based fast-food chain – KFC, yes, the famous Kentucky Fried Chicken, which doesn’t exactly translate to local fare here. Instead it was offering a “Tropiburger” from a big red tent in an upper town plaza.

Let’s hope it’s gone the next time I pass by, because I love the streetscape of constantly changing small shops here, all locally owned. One block might have 4 bakeries, 2 cell phone shops, one Cañari clothing store, and one corner store, none like the other, though we can’t imagine how these small stores survive when many sell the very same products.

Well, dear friends, that’s it for now. I’ve read several books from the last book club suggestions, but there’s no time or space to give a report, other than that most of our members are reading heavily on themes of racism, BLM, slavery, and colonialism. Maybe if I have time this week I’ll do a dedicated Cañar Book Club.

Until then, I send greetings to all, and please remember that l love to hear from you, whether while here in Ecuador or in Portland.

May 30, 2021

Dear Friends:As with other South America countries, a second wave of Covid19 has hit Ecuador, though nothing as serious as it’s neighbors, Colombia and Peru, covered by a NYT article here. Still, after the horrific initial outbreak while we were here last March, Ecuador has been cautious. With the recent surge, the government declared a four-week, “general quarantine” on weekends (8:00 PM Friday to 5:00 AM Monday) in sixteen of the country’s twenty-four provinces. It’s being strictly enforced, according to the news, with 516 arrests for curfew violations the first weekend, and more than a thousand fines to drivers on the streets without legitimate reasons. Nine brothels were also closed around Guayaquil, with the best quote of the week from the National Emergency Operations Committee. “Fornication or other sexual acts among strangers are not allowed during the emergency.”  Cañar was not included in the quarantine, so life goes on pretty much as usual here. We’ve just been to the local Saturday market to find it packed with wholesale vendors and buyers, food stands, cars and trucks. Almost everyone wears masks, however, and I was glad to hear loudspeaker announcements in Quichua and Spanish on the importance of the vaccine, which has rolled out in Cañar these last few weeks with “tercer edades” (elders) and teachers. Countrywide, it’s been slow and chaotic, with only 4.3 of population so far vaccinated.“We had it under control in our communities,” a Cañari tayta, or elder, told me yesterday, “and now it’s back. But mostly in the town,” he added, naming several of his neighbors who were infected at their workplaces. Still, this past year in his large comuna only four people have died, and although infections were widespread he could only name one or two people who’d actually gone to hospital. He wore a mask as we talked, but said he would not be getting the vaccine – something I’m hearing from almost everyone who lives in the country. As I wonder about it, a clearer (but speculative) picture begins to form: while those who’ve had mild cases feel they’ve “been there” and don’t need further protection, the rest feel that if they’ve avoided the virus so far, why risk the vaccine with its reported side effects. Also, many folks here use preventative home remedies as protection against the virus. The tayta described the concoction he drinks three times a day: a tea made up of three heads of garlic, three red onions, four limes with peel, five cypress buds, and a dash of honey. And people keep eucalyptus branches at doorways, windows and even in cars.

Some of you have asked about Michael’s cooking (and commented on his hands), so here’s an update on last week’s paella, made possible by the magnificent langostinos that sometimes show up in the Sunday market…

…and shared with out resident goddaughter, Paiwa.Otherwise Michael’s labors involve maintaining the endlessly needy woodpile, with delivery of wood followed by the sound of the chainsaw.

As for me, I have two projects in the works, one short-term, one long. The first is a brochure on Cañari music, part of the amazing outcome of ethnomusicologist Allison Adrian’s time in Cañar on a Fulbright grant here three years ago. Since then, she has been producing videos, translations and transcriptions of traditional Cañari music. The brochure, which I’m helping design and guiding to print during the next month, will give listeners a quick study in Cañari music, with photos, titles and lyrics, and a QR code to a Soundcloud site. And here is a link to her videos on YouTube – Watch and listen and learn!The long-term project is one close to my heart for many years: a book of archival images from the glass-plate and early celluloid negatives of Rigoberto Navas, traditional Cañar town photographer. I began about six years ago when his family gave me access to a closet in his last studio, stuffed with boxes of negatives, camera equipment, and odds and ends of his long life (1911-2001). In the beginning I was only looking for images with indigenous content, but I quickly realized that here was a beautiful visual history of a small market town in the first half of 20th century. Six years on, although local and even national institutions are firmly behind the project, the pandemic means zero budget for cultural projects. So I will soon be off on a private fundraising effort that will take me into next year and the six months we plan to spend here.

Photo by Rigoberto Navas

Another big transition in a photographer’s life: a week or so ago I sold my Cañar darkroom equipment and supplies, including some seriously outdated film and chemicals. A photographer and collector from Cuenca, an acquaintance of many years, came and hauled it all away in the back of his SUV.

The day before, as Michael and dismantled the large Beseler enlarger, we laughed remembering traveling to Ecuador with it as baggage about 12 years ago, when it looked for all the world like a strange rocket. Ecuadorian customs agents, more accustomed to plasma TVs, microwaves and computers, took one quizzical look and let us through. It has served me well all these years, as I loved darkroom work, but like many others these day, I no longer use film, and barely a 35mm camera. We did the same routine in Portland a few months ago – dismantled the darkroom and placed equipment and camera gear on consignment with Blue Moon Camera.I was surprised and how quickly it all sold.

Cañar Book Club

OK dear readers, settle into your favorite wing chair with a good light. I put out a call for fiction and had some great responses from our esteemed and fabulous club members.

From Joanne in Portland: What’s Left of Me is Yours, Stephanie Scott. “Wonderful novel based on a true story of a murder by a wakaresaseya (breaker-upper) in Japan. Innovative, engaging, lots of cultural details about Japan.”

The Door, Magda Szabo. “Fabulous Hungarian novel about a writer who hires a housekeeper who takes over her life and forms a deep bond with her.”

From Maya in Portlnad: Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann. “Apparently a medieval German legend originally, Kehlmann has transposed the story of Till Ulenspiegel, a trickster and performer, into a rollicking story set in the 17th century about a juggler/ tightrope walker/performer who travels through Germany’s war-stricken countryside. It manages to be funny, imaginative, and unlike anything else. Very enjoyable.”

Sworn Virgin, by Elvira Dones. “The only Albanian novel I’ve ever read!. There’s historically been a custom in Albania that a woman can chose to live as a man, with all the perks that come with it, IF she swears to remain a virgin. This is a story of a contemporary woman in the mountainous and poor region of that country who makes this choice to be able to care for the old man who raised her- and years later is released to join a relative in the US: who will she be? man, or, after all these years, woman? And if the latter, how? Short, well written.”

From Rick in Portland: Rumors of Rain, André Brink: “A Novel of Corruption and Redemption set in South Africa – amidst the shocking violence that brings South African apartheid to an end.” (Judy’s note: I read A Dry White Season by the same author years ago and I also recommend it.)

The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga: “Follows a darkly comic Bangalore driver through the poverty and corruption of modern India’s caste society.” (Judy’s note: we’ve just watched the film on Netflix. Entertaining but sad.)

Fracture, Andrés Neuman: “… an ambitious literary novel set against Japan’s 2011 nuclear accident in a cross-cultural story about how every society remembers and forgets its catastrophes.”

The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana, Maryse Condé: “Born in Guadeloupe, Ivan and Ivana are twins with a bond so strong they become afraid of their feelings for one another. When their mother sends them off to live with their father in Mali they begin to grow apart, until, as young adults in Paris, Ivana’s youthful altruism compels her to join the police academy, while Ivan, stunted by early experiences of rejection and exploitation, walks the path of radicalization.”

Days Without End, Sebastian Barry: “A true left field wonder: a violent, superbly lyrical western offering a sweeping vision of America in the making.”—Kazuo Ishiguro

 A Thousand Moons, Sebastian Barry: “From the two-time Booker Prize finalist …comes a dazzling companion novel about memory and identity, set in Tennessee in the aftermath of the Civil War.”

History, Elsa Morante: “The central character in this powerful and unforgiving novel is Ida Mancuso, a schoolteacher whose husband has died and whose feckless teenage son treats the war as his playground. A German soldier on his way to North Africa rapes her, falls in love with her, and leaves her pregnant with a boy whose survival becomes Ida’s passion.”

From Arlene in Toronto: Nothing to See Here. “Kevin Wilson’s best book yet — a moving and uproarious novel about a woman who finds meaning in her life when she begins caring for two children with remarkable and disturbing abilities”

Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Broedesser-Akner, about a marriage on the rocks. “…a marvel, full of shrewd observations, barbed wit, and deep insight. …reveals the twisted hearts of her characters—and the twisted soul of contemporary America—with an eye that is at once pitiless and full of compassion for our human foibles.”

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, “Two faces of the black experience A light-skinned twin sister constructs a new identity as a white woman in a clever novel that confounds expectations.”

That’s it for now. Please keep your reading suggestions coming, as I have a chronicle or two coming before we leave Cañar on June 6. (Note: I’m not sure my REPLY function is working, so write to me by e-mail:  judyblanken@gmail.com)

Dear Friends: It seems some of you didn’t receive my first Chronicle, Back to Cañar 2021. It is here. I had some trouble with my mailing list that I hope is now fixed.

Covid in Cañar: it’s not easy to find solid information, so I’ll pass on what I’ve learned from anecdotal accounts and a few very unreliable statistics. It appears that Covid infections are rampant in Cañar, both in the town and indigenous communities. Within Cañar, like small towns everywhere, news travels fast. “Five people died yesterday,” a lawyer tells me, “and there are many more cases.” As I walk around I see that everyone complies with masks and, as with last year, lye is sprinkled on pavement at entrance to stores, and I still receive change sprayed with alcohol.

Image from Cañar municipal website

But when I ask a Cañari friend about the indigenous comunas that surround the town, he says, “Nada grave. There are lots of cases, but no deaths, and everyone stays home and is cured with home remedies.” When I ask which home remedies, he says…inhaling eucalyptus steam baths and using medicinal plants for teas such as chamomile, ginger,

I believe this guardedness is in keeping with the insularity and reserve of the Cañari people, which goes back to hacienda days when maintaining separateness was a survival mechanism. The less the patron knew of your personal life, the safer you were. “No one wants to be treated in hospital or intubated,” my friend said. I’ve yet to hear of a single death in the indigenous communities although I suspect that there have to be some, especially elders, who by tradition die at home and are quickly buried, with no medical attention or death certificate. (Official statistic for Cañar county that includes the town and country comunas: 908 confirmed cases from Feb 29, 2020 – March 31 2021, a figure that has to be vastly under reported.)As for vaccines in Ecuador, some from Pfizer through the COVAX international plan and Sinovac from China, but the delivery situation is chaotic. Yesterday, as I walked home, the road to our house was nearly blocked with cars and people at a local school where shots were apparently available – or had been. People were crowded outside the closed gate, shouting at the soldiers on the other side. Everyone’s first question to me, when they learn I’m vaccinated, is “which one?” The second question is: “What was your reaction?” There’s lots of news, good and bad, circulating about which vaccines are the best (Pfizer!) and side effects. One elderly woman we love, who runs a store in town, said of her friend who had varicose veins, “She took the vaccine and she just died! I’m not getting it,” she concluded, maskless, “God will protect me.”

Michael’s big, beautiful beat-up Cañar hands. As many of you know, Michael was for many years a contractor in Portland, doing mostly plumbing and electrical work. His hands were always knobby and bloody, and now they are even knobbier with age and arthritis. Since I’ve known him he has not been able to open his hands fully, and now they look a bit like sweet bear paws, without the shredder claws. Lately, with retirement and Covid, his hands had grown soft and white. But now back in Cañar, what with taking down shutters, pruning bushes, building fires, cutting wood, moving compost (and using the Spanish dictionary), his hands are again getting beat-up. But they are lovely hands to draw or photograph.Otherwise, our domestic life is pretty much the same. Sunday market for produce and shrimp; daily forays into town for everything else; once a week to Cuenca for luxuries such as cheese and coffee. After our Portland life with Whole Foods and New Seasons and specialty stores, we returned from those first shopping trips with, “Look what I got for one dollar!” Here’s a photo from trip #1: eight tomatoes = $1.00; eight eggs = $1.00; five pounds of potatoes = $2.00 and a handful of maracuyá (a gift from the vendor).

 While Michael’s main domestic job is food and cooking, mine is laundry, carefully sorted into categories (a practice of most women I know) and hung according. On a sunny day, in this high dry climate, drying takes about two hours. Elections: Well, to the surprise of many, Guillermo Lasso won last week’s election on his third try for the presidency. Lasso, a banker, took 52% of the vote in the runoff following a campaign that pitted his free market economics against his opponent’s pledge to return to the socialist programs of previous president, Rafael Correa, that put the country deeply in debt.When Mr. Lasso takes office in May, he will have to deal with the Indigenous party, Pachakutik. While its candidate barely missed getting to the run-off, the party won half of all provinces (including Cañar) to become the second-largest block in Congress, going from nine to forty-three seats. “The politics of Ecuador will never be the same,” said Farith Simon, an Ecuadorean law professor and columnist. “There’s still racism, but there’s also a re-vindication of the value of Indigenous culture, of pride in their national role.”Cañar Book Club

Well, dear fellow members, I’m ashamed to say my reading has been pretty pathetic these last months. I didn’t keep track of the books read in Portland, and I brought only three paper books to Cañar (Michael refuses to carry them anymore, and I brought only one bag): Tana French’s police procedural, The Trespasser, which was a good interminable read for the 24-hour trip here, but not one I would recommend. Also Mountains of My Mind, for some unknown reason I’d bought months ago about a history of mountain climbing, which I’ll pass on to my friend in Cuenca who does climb mountains. I like Pico Iyer a lot, and just finished an ebook, The Man in the Head, also ordered from the library for some unknown reason. The man in Iyer’s head is Graham Greene, whose books I loved in the far past, but I’m not sure I’d recommend this book either.

So I have to give special thanks to a long book report from a 1960’s an ex-Peace Corps volunteer in Cuenca, now living in Florida, who has done some real quality reading over the pandemic months (unlike some of us). Here is his report, slightly edited:

“Two have Ecuadorian themes. The first is The Man Who Read Love Stories by writer Luis Sepulveda, a Bolivian-exile. The novela is set in the Ecuadorian Oriente and reminds me of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The second is The Undocumented Americans, by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio. Her parents brought her to the U.S. from Ecuador when she was a child and as an undocumented student she made it through Harvard and is now going for a PhD in American Studies at Yale. She got her green card last year and promptly had this book published.

The Bad Muslim Discount, a novel by Sayd M. Masood. Two Muslim families, one from Pakistan, the other from Iraq meet at an apartment building in San Francisco. Interactions and family conflicts are told in a somewhat comical way.

You might also try Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World, by Suzy Hansen.  She discusses living and traveling in Turkey for seven years.  Living outside the US makes us see the world differently.

Finally, I’ll briefly mention these nonfiction books that I felt are also more than just chewing-gum-for-the-eyeballs:  1) Jon Meacham’s biography of John Lewis, His Truth is Marching On.  2) David Michaelis’s “Eleanor,” a lengthy biography of Eleanor Roosevelt.  3) Barak Obama’s A Promised Land.”

Finally, a Portland friend piped in late to say she is reading George Saunders’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, based on his twenty years of teaching a class on the Russian short story. “He interrupts the story to pose questions and get us thinking about what makes great writing. It might not be for everyone but I find it intriguing and fun to read.”

So, dear readers, please send your suggestions for our next rousing meeting in two weeks. Until then, still well. I love to hear from you.

Dear Friends. We have been gone from Cañar for nine months, the longest time away since 2005, when we came to Ecuador for a grant year, bought a piece of land with a view of the Andes, and came back in 2006 to begin building an earthen and wood “barraque” house. We’ve returned every year since for six months until last year, when we left on July 4 amidst the Covid pandemic on our “trip from hell #1” to return safely to Portland, Oregon, our other home. (This time, we almost hated to leave our glorious cherry tree, which we hadn’t seen in bloom in 15 years. Thanks to our friend Carla who took this photo when she picked us up for the airport on Monday morning.)

With our two vaccine jabs plus two weeks for immunity, I booked flights for April 5. Our usual routes to Guayaquil were not available so I used the Travelocity website, and somehow (my mistake?) reserved COPA flights from LAX to GYE that included a 9-hour layover in Los Angeles, becoming the trip from hell #2. This taught us a good lesson in the new reality of flying with Covid. We came in to LAX on Alaska mid-afternoon, but couldn’t check in to our 1:00 AM international flight until 9:00 PM. Terminal B was so depressing that I forgot to take any photos, so just imagine us sitting in a line of chairs in a cavernous dark space with everything closed. Michael worked on puzzles and I read an interminable Tana French police procedual. Once we finally checked through security into the fancy international lounge, we found ONE small bar for two beers and a wine plus a required bag of stale peanuts – $35.00! Is this really Los Angeles? The luxury duty-free stores were all closed except for Gucci, where I saw a woman in full hazmat shopping. That’s Michael in the wing chair waiting for our Panama flight.

Once in Guayaquil we recovered in a large hotel with our first meal in 24 hours, an air-conditioned room, hot showers, two double beds, and a long night of sleep. The next day we hired a driver with car, and three hours later we were in Cañar and our ordeal was over.

Our house in the clouds was in perfect condition except for dust and cobwebs. Thanks to Cañar’s high dry climate, adobe and wood stay perfectly preserved (as long as the wood is treated for termites). As usual, some of the interior patio plants are reaching for the glass roof, but our compadres Jose Maria and Narcisa, who take care of things while we’re gone, have kept my ferns and flowers mostly alive. Here’s Michael bent over a crossword our first day. For me, the usual unwelcome signs: headache, light headedness, insomnia, but after a couple of days all is clear and life at 10,100 feet feels invigorating.The yard is another matter. Our compadres are only responsible for keeping the patio plants alive, and being a security presence around the property, grazing their sheep on the lawn.They use our back field for their crops – usually corn or potatoes – and they also plant a kitchen vegetable garden before we come, and we plant one for them before we leave. This arrangement has worked well since José María worked on our house construction as the maestro and we got to know the family. Here’s Michael having a first chat with José María, taking a break from his job as a sanitation worker with the Municipality.

But back to the yard: last year I wrote a chronicle about my “sisyphusian garden” and I was reminded again, on day two when I went out to survey, that no matter what new flowers I’ve planted, or how hard I weed kikuyu, the African grass that creeps everywhere, stasis is the name of the game: aggressive species take back control, new exotics get beaten and disappear. Nothing changes. Of course, those local dominant guys that stay busy twelve months a year ain’t that bad.

Paiwa, our goddaughter, has come from Cuenca to stay with us while she takes an intensive online English course to prepare for the TOEFL exam, necessary to apply for graduate programs. She has just completed five years of a rigorous civil engineering course, and her graduation from University of Cuenca on May 28 will be the culminating event of our visit. Michael and I walked Paiwa to her first day of kindergarten, and she has been an important part of our lives since. My fantasy has her coming to Oregon State University for a master’s degree, but she’s a long way from deciding where she will go next – or rather, economics and financial aid will most likely decide.

Today, national elections for a new president – rockets shoot off now and then while I write, making me jump. Mystery to me why loud noises are important for religious and civic events. This time, a run-off of two socially conservative candidates, Guillermo Lasso 66, banker and Opus Dei member, and Andrés Arauz, 36-year-old economist anointed by ex-president Correa as his successor. Arauz won 32% of the vote in February, not enough to avoid a run-off, though polls say he will likely be the winner today. The third and by far most interesting candidate was the indigenous leader with the Pachakutig party that we were all rooting for: Yaku Pérez. He came so close to Lasso in the February elections (within .05) that he has toured the country crying “fraud,” and many of our Cañari friends firmly believe the count was manipulated. (International observers called it fair.) But he’s youngish (52), politically savvy and very smart, so we hope he’ll run again in four years. Meanwhile, that an indigenous candidate should come so close is a bright point for the future, and the party’s numbers in the national legislature have increased from nine to 43. Read more in this excellent article from today’s New York Times: “Indigenous Party, Not on the Ballot, Is Still a Big Winner in Ecuador Election.”

Well, dear friends, there’s much more to say about the economic, social and health devastation of Covid in Ecuador, and other things, but I want to get this out today before my work week starts. Our stay in Cañar is only two months this time – we’ll come back in December or January for our usual six months – and I have two projects in the works, contacts to keep alive, friends to see and the scholarship program to coordinate with our local committee. I’ll try writing a shorter blog once a week or so, and I promise the Cañar Book Club will be in session for next Chronicle. Until then, stay safe and I love to hear from you and your favorite books read during lockdown.

Trips from hell update: our flights back to Portland on June 5 are cancelled and I’m looking for new routes that will avoid Panama and Los Angeles.

Dear Friends – we are back in Cañar as of April 6, 2021  and I’m in process of writing first Chronicle for next week. Stay tuned!

Dear Friends – we are ten days away from trying to leave Cañar for Portland. “Trying” because the trip is a complicated jig-saw puzzle that hasn’t quite come together. We have reservations on United Airlines from Quito to Houston on July 2 (their one flight a week), but the problem is getting from here to Quito. TAME, the national airline, was recently liquidated by President Morena in the face of “la crisis económica” (along with the postal service, the  railway and other public companies, as well as a reducing public sector salaries by 25%).

The other airline serving this area, LATAM (based in Chile), has just declared bankruptcy. While LATAM has this week begun a daily flight from Cuenca to Quito, it’s too late in the day to make our connection to United. So we’ll go the day before and spend the night in an airport hotel to make the flight to Houston, where a 12-hour layover means another night in a hotel. THEN, a flight to Denver, and finally home to Portland on the evening of July 3.

Of course we’re worried about exposure traveling 48 hours through two countries and three states, but we’ll take all the precautions I’ve been reading about, such as upgrading our seats so we don’t sit near bathrooms (too much human traffic). We’ll also try not to go ourselves. In any case, once in Portland we are planning to self quarantine for 14 days.

Update:  we’ve just been informed that we have to show Covid-19 negative test results from a laboratory within 72 hours of flying within the country. Michael went up to town to find the one lab in Cañar that provides tests – at $70 per person!  No wonder the statistics from Ecuador are totally out of whack; no one can afford to be tested.

All things considered, it would be smarter to stay here, but our tenant leaves our Portland house on June 29, Michael has medical appointments, we both have dental appointments, and so on. Also, we simply want to be with our friends and closer to family after seven months in Cañar.These last three months have been special, however – even relaxing. No more trips to Cuenca, no more running around the countryside with projects or climbing the streets into town for meetings. We’ve discovered we have everything but luxury food items here, and local commerce has really picked up with people selling their produce from doorways and driveways.

Michael marvels that he can find beautiful tomatoes on the Paseo de los Cañaris, the little commercial strip near home, and no longer has to wait for Sunday market. And, wonder of wonders – the giant langostinos are back after a three-month hiatus, looking fresh, and sold from a new storefront open to the street for $4.00 per pound. Michael cooks them on skewers in the fireplace.

It has been a delight to have our goddaughter Paiwa with us these three months. She’s 24 years old, in her 5th year of civil engineering at University of Cuenca, and spends up to 12 hours a day in her room with classes, homework and exams, emerging to join us for meals, practice her English, appreciate Michael’s cooking and do the dishes. It’s been like having a young but mature and engaging house guest. When we go to Cuenca to catch our (supposed) flight on July 1, she will return to her rented room near the university, although her classes will not begin again until September or October.

Masks are still mandatory in town, but I notice that folks continue to use them in almost all everyday activities in the streets and cars, except for in the fields or their own houses.

Cautious meeting with Soledad Quinde, teacher in a program the Bend Circle of Giving supports with stipends for women students.

Also, as the restrictions on small stores lift, I see a new mini-industry arise – homemade “hazmat” suits in various colors and sizes on mannequins (and in the streets), along with embroidered and beaded masks (I’m wearing one above in photo). Cañar has many seamstress shops – mostly owned by Cañari women making the beautiful elaborate Cañari skirts and blouses – so it was a no-brainer to switch to what is selling – masks and protective suits.

As for me, I’ve grown “garden proud” during the three-month quarantine, right down to obsessively plucking dandelion heads on the lawn (made up largely of tough African kikuyu grass that needs no watering) and digging up its long tendrils below my flower beds. But It’s been thrilling to see this:Become this:Normally I would not pay such close attention and simply let nature takes its course, but being in the house every day with all these windows to the outside, I couldn’t help but become obsessed with the flowers, the vegetables, hummingbirds, and the grass – which I insisted we have someone cut with the weed whacker every two or three weeks, for heaven’s sake!

Now with our leaving it becomes what I call my Sisyphean garden – I’ll come back in six months to find everything back to beginnings – grass raggedly trimmed by our compadres‘ sheep, flower beds filled with weeds, vegetable garden maybe still producing some of what I’ve planted. It’s the arrangement we’ve had for nearly 15 years – our compadres are responsible only for checking on the property and watering the plants in the patio. I don’t mind at all. I’ll start again with renewed hope and patience, like any good gardener.

By the way – those creatures at the top of this blog are a part of our coat rack in the patio. A collection of paper mache masks that are traditional around Christmas and New Year’s, bought for to make effigies to burn ( you’ll recognize Ugly Betty with the freckles and the guy who looks like Nixon was meant to be Trump).

Anyway, this will be my last chronicle from Cañar for 2020, unless our flights are cancelled, we fail the Covid-19 tests, the U.S. stops all in-bound air traffic, or the sky falls.

But there’s always meatballs!  Scroll down below the book club for Michael’s famous recipe, which he’s making for our first dinner guest Sunday evening.

Cañar Book Club

The Yellow Books, 1887 (oil on canvas) by Vincent van Gogh

Well, I’ll be sorry to miss you all and your wonderful reading suggestions, but I plan to be back for our last meeting of the year in December, when you’ll have lots more to report. So let’s begin…

Sandy in Portland: One I highly recommend is Heavy: An American Memoir, by Kiese Laymon. It is a memoir, though a friend said it should be called a reckoning, and I agree. It is challenging emotionally and really well written. Also I have just started reading Sapiens, A Brief History of Mankind by Yuval Noah Harari and am enjoying it. It overwhelms me, but does go into enough detail that I am learning a lot. Jill LePore’s 785 page tome, These Truths: A History of the United States, took awhile but it helped me deal with the current political situation – turns out Trump isn’t the first!

Bruce in Portland: The Wild Trees by Richard Preston. “Preston’s account of this amazing world, by turns terrifying, moving, and fascinating, is an adventure story told in novelistic detail by a master of nonfiction narrative. The author shares his protagonists’ passion for tall trees, and he mastered the techniques of tall-tree climbing to tell the story in The Wild Trees—the story of the fate of the world’s most splendid forests and of the imperiled biosphere itself.”

Arlene in Toronto: Mrs. Everything by Jennifer Wiener – I galloped through that one — tracing the lives of two sisters from the 1950s to the 2020s through the sexual revolution, the rise of feminism, the Vietnam war etc etc. I am currently reading On Earth We Were Briefly Gorgeous by Vietnamese-American writer Ocean Vuong, but slowly because I find it both beautiful and painful.

Char in Austin The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt, National Book Award and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. “An adventure story about
scholarship that locates the foundations of modern secular, scientific thought in the brilliance and heroism of our intellectual forebears.”
Yup, one for the quarantine.  Nothing but time.  It’s very engrossing.

Joanne in Mexico: did I mention A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar? I love his work, both novels and his memoir, The Return. Siena is about art and much more. A beautiful little gem. I just started Sea Monsters by Chloe Aridjis – “Winner of the 2020 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, this intoxicating story of a teenage girl who trades her middle-class upbringing for a quest for meaning in 1980s Mexico is ‘a surreal, captivating tale about the power of a youthful imagination, the lure of teenage transgression, and its inevitable disappointments'”. (And, after a recent trip from Mexico to Portland, she writes: The Night Watchman, by Louise Erdrich – good flight book)

Michael’s Meatballs (with a chance of clouds`)

• 1 pound ground pork
• ¾ cup fine breadcrumbs
• 5-6 good-sized garlic cloves, minced or pressed
• 1 egg
• Salt to taste
• Fresh ground black pepper
• 3 T chopped Italian parsley
• ½ cup finely chopped yellow onion
• ¾ t. fresh-ground nutmeg

In a wide bowl:

• Beat the egg
• Put the pork on top of the beaten egg, and with the back of a big spoon spread out the meat in a layer (this makes it easier to add the seasonings and later mix everything).
• Distribute garlic, salt, pepper, nutmeg, parsley, onion, crumbs as evenly as possible over the ground pork.
• With your hands or other implement, fold and mix ingredients, incorporating the egg throughout. Let the mixture sit a few minutes to allow the crumbs to gain moisture.
• Make a small sample meatball and fry it in olive oil until done. Taste for seasoning, especially salt.

Once that is done:

• With your hands, form the mixture into about 16 meatballs a little smaller than golf balls, and as smooth as possible.
• Brown all sides in a skillet in olive oil, as evenly as possible.
• I don’t finish cooking the meatballs in the browning process, but when they have a nice color I remove them from the pan to a plate.
• Using the drippings in the skillet, add white wine or stock or water (or beer).
• Bring the stock to a simmer, taste for salt. Now you can add tomato puree or paste, or cream, to make whatever sauce you fancy – and/or thicken with a little flour-and-water mixture carefully stirred in.
• Add the meatballs to the sauce and simmer in skillet for about 20 minutes.

Dear Friends – We are at Day 60 (now 62) and counting, with a strict quarantine and curfew still in place in Cañar and in all of Ecuador. Here, even the dogs are sheltering in place. (Couldn’t resist! We pass these guys every time we walk into town. We call them “the rugs.”)

News on the street says this will continue until end of May, with slow opening beginning June 1. A national newspaper says the airport in Guayaquil will open on that date. Good news, though we’ll keep our distance from that city for years to come, I think. But we do have reservations on Delta Airlines from Quito on July 1. We’ve not yet paid for the tickets – as we can’t get to Cuenca with the cash, which the airlines are demanding in place of cards – “en caso de mortalidad” (in case we die) – but as of now we are planning on traveling Cuenca- Quito – Atlanta – Portland on July 1.

On the work front, I’ve been contentedly engaged with two book projects. Last week co-editor Andrew and I sent off the final ms. of the “Ana book” – (Tell Mother I’m in Paradise: Memoir of a Political Prisoner in El Salvador), along with 28 photos and illustrations, to the wonderful editor at University of Alabama Press. The book now goes into the editorial pipeline and will, hopefully, emerge as a Spring 2021 title. It has been a great experience working with Andrew and Wendi. Here’s a photo of Ana that showed up in the Spanish edition that we’d never seen – Ana at about 20 years. This will go into the new book.

The second project on the work front, which came to a halt with the quarantine, is the culmination of years of darkroom printing, scanning and organizing the negatives of a town photographer, Rigoberto Navas (1911-2001). The cultural department at the Municipality of Cañar has committed to printing the book of Navas photos this year, although the reality remains to be seen. But I’ve had fun making a mock-up – cutting and pasting photocopied images into an existing photo book. At least this allows me choose the photos and their sequence, and to show a good facsimile of how the final book will look. 

On the pleasure front, six words: cocktail, sunset, fireplace, drawing, flowers and dinner.

As wine grew scarce (it’s back!) Michael began a new custom of 5:00 PM cocktails: fresh orange juice, rum and fizzy water. This, in the big room with the fire, flowers and Michael, keeps me happy while I try to make a drawing/ watercolor that relates to the day. Sometimes it’s a challenge, sometimes it comes easy. Something it’s as mundane as Michael cooking a chicken…

…as dreamy as where we “would have been” in Spain if all this hadn’t happened. 

or as serious as keeping track of the numbers (until I couldn’t)….

Or as homely as going for a walk, running into a neighbor washing her carrot harvest and bringing home a few for a carrot soup that Michael claims he had never made before, and was absolutely delicious.

Speaking of Michael, he has been stalwart in fixing lunch and dinner for three “cuarentinadas” every day for two months, with another month to go at least. With limited options, we’ve been eating pork in its many iterations. There’s a butcher shop here called Piggi’s where he buys sausage, cutlets and a kind of re-constituted bacon that’s not really bacon. Paiwa and I love it! Plus lots of our garden vegetables (we’re sick of broccoli and cauliflower) and an endless supply of potatoes from our back field that Michael finds way to fix almost every night.  Here he is making gnocchi.

For sweets he’s kept us in a near-constant supply of zesty orange oatmeal cookies, which he devised as an alternative to orange cake that takes longer to bake and uses too much gas. (* Recipe at bottom of this blog). The only kitchen disaster has been our espresso machine is kaput. Michael makes campfire coffee every morning, but it’s not the same. We’re dreaming of finding a new machine in Cuenca once the quarantine lifts, although we’re having a hard time finding a source from the Internet. (Cuenca friends – if you know of a store that has domestic espressos, please let me know.)

And that brings us to…..

The Cañar Book Club

This selection above of “plague books” appeared on a website a couple of weeks. I tracked down the source, then lost it – but credit went to an antiquarian book store with participation of artist.

From our own faithful book club members, some good recommendations.

Patty in Portland: “Enjoyed Minor Characters by Joyce Johnson, Kerouac’s girlfriend who was in the thick of that time with the Beats. The Topeka School by Ben Lerner is worth a read. Tessa Hadley’s Late in the Day the best of the three of her novels I read. She has a dark side which can be pretty funny.”

Maya in Portland: “I’m now on pp 657 of the 1000 page, one-sentence Ducks, Newburryport by Lucy Ellmann, which I’m enjoying greatly. It’s oddly addictive. Essentially about how you live a private life as a woman/mother when you are so aware of all that is wrong globally and locally. Also very funny. Beyond that I found How to be an Anti-Racist by Ibrahim X Kendi to be worth reading. He’s very methodical about analyzing all the different ways people objectify blacks and use that, often unwittingly, to discriminate in one way or another.”

Liz in Toronto: Madeleine Miller’s Circe is great argument for mortality! I read Milkman, found it terrifying but compelling, a tour de force; also recommend Miriam Toews’s Women Talking.”

Joanne in Mexico: “Now reading a wonderful collection of essays by a young Irish writer, Sinéad Gleeson – Constellations.”

Char in Austin: “Just finished Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein, illustrations by Maira Kalman. Published in 1933, this new edition includes Maira’s delightful illustrations. I loved every word of her endless sentences that brought to life Paris at the beginning of the century.”

Sher in Santa Fe: “If you’re looking for a beautiful distraction, A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles is apropos of our times, as this gentleman is under house arrest in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow (1922). See how he makes use of his time!!”

Anne in Portland recommends: The Hour of Land by Terry Tempest Williams.

Finally, my turn:  I can’t say enough about the riveting Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by New Yorker writer, Patrick Radden Keefe. As my words fail, I quote from the David Grann review: “Meticulously reported, exquisitely written, and grippingly told, Say Nothing is a work of revelation. Keefe not only peels back, layer by layer, the truth behind one of the most important and mysterious crimes of a terrible conflict; he also excavates the history of the Troubles, and illuminates its repercussions to this day.”

Did I miss anyone?  If so, please remind me, and keep your book news coming, dear readers. Until next time…

* Mike’s Zesty Orange Oatmeal Cookies

Mix dry ingredients thoroughly in one bowl:

• 1 cup oats
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 heaping tsp of baking powder

In another bowl mix:

• 1 egg, 3/4 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup oil such as safflower or sunflower
• 1/2 tsp salt
• finely grated rind of two unpeeled oranges with microplane. (If oranges are big, maybe 1.5 grated)

Beat the egg and salt with whisk, add brown sugar, beat again, add oil and beat again. Add grated orange rind and beat (yet again).

Pour the dry ingredients into the egg/sugar/oil/zest mixture, beat thoroughly.

Once everything is moistened, add carefully and mix throughout

• 1/2 cup coarsely chopped walnuts
• 1/3 cup raisins, well separated

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.  Carefully glob 12 piles of mixture onto greased cookies sheet, leaving space between each.

In oven, check after about 6 minutes for even baking. Should be done between 10-15 minutes; checking if browning around edges.

(Alternative: instead of grated orange rind, use 1/2 teaspoon each of nutmeg and cinnamon.)

Dear Friends. We are heading into Week Six of total lockdown here in Ecuador and in Cañar. Masks are mandatory, local streets are barricaded and interprovincial traffic strictly controlled by police, with a national curfew from 2:00 PM to 5:00 AM (sirens marking the beginning, reminding me of a school bell – how quickly we become adjusted to sound cues). In Cantón Cañar (the county), Covid-19 cases number only twelve, a very slow rise over three weeks. National rates are, I suspect, carefully controlled and under-reported by the government after some very bad press about the coastal city of Guayaquil. As of today: Ecuador’s “official” figures are 8450 cases with 421 deaths. (In contrast, today’s Guardian reported close to 7,000 deaths in Guayaquil alone, where so many die at home and are not counted.)

Our home routine is so fixed that I can barely remember life before. For Michael, little has changed – he makes morning coffee (although our little espresso machine just went kaput), works on the puzzles I print each morning (four KenKens; one NYT crossword), fixes lunch and plans dinner. If it’s a cold rainy day – as in the photo above – he builds an early fire. Once or twice a week he trudges up into town to go shopping and I sometimes go with him. Our little stores remain well provisioned, and the last couple of weeks we see a lot more sidewalk and doorway action as farming families set up spontaneous stands to sell their own products.

For me, the early morning routine remains the same – coffee in bed with laptop, an hour or so of email, news, articles and a bowl of home-made granola (*Ana’s recipe at end of post). From there, I move to my studio office or the dining room table if we have an early fire. Several projects keep me busy with full work days. In late afternoon, I take a break in the garden to hack some weeds and check what’s ready to eat (our first of many cauliflower this week). The big difference during lockdown is, of course, that I don’t leave the house for work. Looking back to last year’s daily journal for April, I’m amazed at the constant motion of my days – accompanying a visiting researcher to villages; recording interviews, trips to Cuenca, trips to town and to schools, getting ready for visitors from Cuenca, and visitors from Portland. I can’t believe I will ever lead such a non-stop daily life again. Not sure I want to.

The other member of our little lockdown household is Paiwa, our 24-year-old goddaughter. She’s nearly full-time in her room with her on-line classes in 5th year civil engineering, emerging for lunch and dinner and to wash clothes or the dishes. We’ve developed a nice routine of knowing when to socialize over dinner, when to practice English, and when to eat lunch in companionable silence, each with our device (Michael with crossword). Although we’ve known her and been close since she was about five, we’ve never had this much time with Paiwa, and it has been delightful.

But the most interesting thing these past couple of weeks is what we watched  from our living room windows, as our compadres Jose Maria and Narcisa, and their daughter Sara harvested and planted the back field. First they cleared the potato field of weeds to feed two cows tethered in residence for about a week. Two huge bulls arrived to pull the plow to uncover the potatoes, one section at a time, then stood tethered while the family collected the potatoes by hand. Then they plowed again for a couple of days and planted peas. It was fast and brutally hard work, some days in the rain, and dangerous in handling such large animals. Every day Michael and I ran from window to window, reporting on what we saw. In the end, not a single thing was wasted in that field – “weeds” that were not food for animals turned out to be medicinal plants, while others produced seeds for an additional crop (cilantro, amaranth).The most dangerous moment is when Narcisa and Jose Maria control the bulls and lash on the hand-hewn wooden yoke. The bulls know what’s coming and can resist by trying to gore or charge.

While plowing someone (usually a woman in bright clothes – in this case Sara) walks in front to guide the bulls. Jose Maria puts his weight into the plow – a long wooden eucalyptus pole with metal point lashed on, using a series of sounds to urge the bulls. He carries a stick with short whip.

When the bulls are at rest, tethered at the bottom of the field, they have to be fed and watered once a day. Jose María brings from his own fields a load of dried corn stalks and chops them into four piles for the animals. Watching, I was reminded of the tremendous responsibility of farmers with large animals.

The harvest – enough potatoes for the family for a year, Narcisa tells me, and which they insist on sharing with us. Beautiful reds called super-cholas, which Michael is preparing most days in some form or another.

Finally, another round of plowing on a couple of rainy days, and Narcisa plants peas. They quickly lead the bulls around the house and out the gate and it’s all over for the season.

Perhaps those who enjoyed the week the most were Narcisa’s four lambs, gamboling about the front yard, jumping on the rock wall among the cactus, running up and down the road outside the gate. They are left free because they never stray far from their bleating mothers, tethered up the road in a vacant grassy lot.

And to end with a flash update:  after many back-and-forth emails with our travel agent in Cuenca, we are able to make reservations for our return to Portland on July 1. We fly from Cuenca to Quito (avoiding Guayaquil) and Delta to Atlanta and Portland. When I wrote to thank Teresa and ask how I could get payment to her, the return message puzzled me. I read it over several times, and then to Michael, before we understood:  “the airlines are requiring cash payments “en caso de mortalidad.” In case we die.

We are certainly willing to pay cash, once transportation begins, and we are certainly not going to die. I hope you too are staying well and safe in your homes and looking forward to life after.

C a ñ a r  B o o k  C l u b

I promise you this was not a plan, but in the last weeks I’ve read Dutch House, by Ann Patchet, The Yellow House by Sarah Bloom and Great House by Nicole Krauss. The first was entertaining, the second was over-long but a good look into life in New Orleans pre-and post-Katrine; the third I’m having a hard time staying with. So to clear my palate of houses I started (on Kindle) The Promise of the Grand Canyon: John Wesley Powell’s Perilous Journey and His Vision for the American West by John Ross.  Why?  I must have read a good mention in my morning perusing. I think it’s probably good history, but bed-time reading requires something livelier, so I’ve started the book Hilary Mantel said she couldn’t put down: Death and Nightingales by Eugene McCabe, and that did the trick. “…an epic story of love, deception, betrayal and revenge, set on a single day in the Irish countryside in 1883.” It’s so gripping I can’t wait for bedtime to keep reading.

Jennifer adds that Five Wives won the Governor General’s award for fiction last year, equivalent of the National Book Award. I know the background of this story, and look forward to finding the book.

Speaking of missionaries, Michael just finished Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle, by Daniel Everett, which he loved and quoted extensively to me while reading. I look forward to that one.

That’s it for now, dear friends.  Please stay well and stay in touch.

* The recipe for Ana’s granola, which I have been making since visiting Ana Margarita Gasteazoro’s Café Coral in Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica circa 1988.  I just made it yesterday.

Ana’s Granola (2020 version)*

Mix in one large bowl

• 5 cups of coarse-ground oats
• 1 cup sunflower seeds
• 1 cups pumpkin seeds (pepitas)
• 3/4 cups sesame seeds
• 1 cup almonds or walnuts, coarsely chopped
• 2 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tsp sea salt

Separately, mix and stir (and heat slightly if honey is thick):

• ½ cup honey
• ¼ cup oil such as safflower
• ½ cup orange juice (or the juice of one orange)
• 2 T fresh grated ginger
• dash of vanilla extract
• orange peel cut into thin strips

Mix honey and oil, orange juice and orange peel into oats and seed mixture.

Spread granola on large cookie sheet and bake at 300 degree for 45 minutes. (I usually use a timer and turn granola with spatula every 15 minutes or so to make it uniformly toasty. When it looks uniformly brown on top, it’s done)

Dear Friends: We are into week three of a national lockdown in Ecuador, with obligatory masks, barricaded streets, and a curfew from 2:00 PM to 5:00 AM. That allows us to move about (on foot) in the mornings for groceries and other necessities. One of us goes out about once a week for shopping in town where only small stories, bakeries and banks are open. Soon after 2:00 I hear sirens go off for about ten minutes. It sounds to me that the police are circulating into neighborhoods and comunas with sirens blaring, but none has passed by on our road. But the other day when I was out in the front garden, I saw a man running down the road about 2:30 and I remembered that on government order we can be fined for breaking the curfew at $100 (first time), second time basic salary, and so on. (Though I wonder if it is being enforced in Cañar.)

The photo above is part of the agricultural cycle we’re watching from our living room windows – accelerated, I think, by the many country neighbors stuck at home during the quarantine. These images also help explain why we are literally surrounded by farm produce that gets sold on the streets and small stores through this crisis. So…on Day One we saw cows gleaning the cornfield after a harvest.

On Day Two, we saw the fires burning what was left on the field. On Day Three, plowing the field with yoked oxen. We took a walk that day and saw these bulls at rest (it was lunch hour), but you get a good picture of the hand-hewn wooden yoke, with the long neck of the plow tied between the bulls. On a later walk we stood and watched a farmer and his helpers try to tie a yoke onto a fiesty bull, who obviously knew what it meant a hard work day ahead- a difficult and dangerous job for the farmer. 

Day Four, we watched the family planting and fertilizing with bags of guano. Now we’re set for the cycle begin again.It’s comforting to see how much agricultural activity still exists around us, after years of massive out-migration, urbanization, and low-income production. Here is a field of potatoes in bloom just below our house.

On another theme: I got an email last week from the director of the Fulbright Commission in Quito with instructions on how to leave the country on April 7 on a charter flight for the U.S. (No commercial flights can leave or enter Ecuador.) Fulbright and Peace Corps students and volunteers have already been evacuated, and I guess the offer was extended to me as an ex-Fulbrighter, or maybe just as an American. In any case, it was a crazy scary scenario: (1) make a reservation on the flight to Miami with the U.S. Embassy; (2) then we qualify for a safe conduct pass on a special bus from Cuenca to Guayaquil (the epicenter of the Covid-19 outbreak). (3) Once in Guayaquil, the message read, the plane might be delayed, so be prepared to wait it out in a hotel.  (The flight is with Eastern Airlines – didn’t they go bankrupt about 20 years ago? Yes, but someone bought them and they now do charters out of Miami. No mention of cost of flight.)

I emailed back: Thank you very much, but NO WAY are we leaving Cañar. It seems to us the safest place we can be these days, and probably for the next few months…

Although I continued to believe Ecuador’s numbers were low, I read the news today (April 4) and see that the both the case numbers and death rates are high (3.4%). Ecuador reports 3465 confirmed cases, 172 deaths. Nearly 50% of our cases are in Guayaquil, the coastal city of 2.3 million that is hot, low, humid, with with much poverty and lack of basic services. The images I see today that have been shown around the world are appalling: cadavers left in the streets or wrapped in plastic in family homes, caskets or bodies left on the curb, even DYI cremations, as hospitals, morgues and funeral homes are overwhelmed. Guayaquil is our New York – people are fleeing for the mountains, avoiding roadblocks by taking back roads and “goat paths” as someone described it. Our first case in Cañar was someone who had visited Guayaquil, and today we are at 5 cases.

And that is why, in part, indigenous communities, or comunas, around Cañar are setting up their own roadblocks. Below our house we came across this chain, resting on the road, but obviously it is ready to be raised to prevent cars from coming in.

Michael wants me to mention his new theory: that dogs, realizing people are disappearing from the streets, are reclaiming their territory. “The dogs on my way into town are more aggressive” he said the other day. “They never barked before; now they do. One even ran out into the street and lunged.”  He is convinced Cañar dogs have been waiting for this moment. Most run free anyway, but they usually have a healthy respect for pedestrians. No more. Here we found them on our walk – having an organizing meeting, with minimal social distancing. (See the little gray mutt under the chin of the dog on the right?)

But our favorite dog from next door, Gordo, would never bark or lunge or join that group of ruffians. He guards our house, keeps other dogs away, and loves Michael for the morsels thrown his way every now and then. All it takes is a whistle and Gordo comes running.

To finish this update: my thought are with our scholarship graduates who are working in front-line health care through the crisis:  four nurses, one physician, one dentist, one medical laboratory technician and at least one current student who is set to work in a hospital as a nutritionist.  Here are photos of a few – we hope they all stay safe.

The Cañar Book Club

As I’m constantly reminded, books are even more important during our home confinement. I’ve been downloading lists of “must-reads,” reserving e-books from my local library and looking with alarm at the few unread books I brought from Portland in that lifetime ago. Our Cañar Book Club members are doing the same – and I’m happy to pass on these recommendations

Joanne in Mexico:- Gods of the Upper Air by Charles King:  “fascinating look at race, culture and the history of anthropology – very readable.” And A Woman of No Importance:The Untold Story of the American SkypWho Helped Win WWII by Sonia Purnell, “a biography that reads like a spy novel.”

From Joan in Leige, Belgium: “Just listened to audio book of The Milkman by Anna Burns and it was great.”

From Nancy in Portland:  Half Broke Horses, by Jeannette Walls, author of the Glass Castle. “This one is billed as a “true life novel” — the story of her grandmother, who led an adventurous life in New Mexico, Arizona and Chicago. It’s peppered with actual photos of the grandma and family, and she’s framed the narrative around authenticated family stories, but wrote it in the 1st person of the grandmother, so she’s created a lot to fill in where the record doesn’t. A competently written page turner.”

Lisa in Savannah: “I am reading Vera by Stacy Schiff (author of my favorite – Cleopatra).  “It is a biography of Vladimir Nabokov’s wife. I loved Cleopatra so much that I just read it again recently. Still mind-boggling exciting the 2nd time!”

Pat in Bend, Oregon:  “In my book club we were reading, just before the outbreak, The Great Influenza by John M Barry, a history of the 1918 pandemic. I don’t recommend reading this now, but it made me acutely aware of what can happen. I do recommend two beautiful books that sweep you away into nature: 1) Of Wolves and Men by Barry Lopez an 2) Edge of Awe, a collection of writing about the desert that includes William Kittredge and Ursula Le Guin.”

Laura in up-state New York: The Overstory by Richard powers and Underland by Robert Macfarlane.

Irene in Salem:  The Wright Brothers by David McCullough. “I found it a terrific read and well written.”

That’s it for now, dear friends. I need to send this off, so will wait until next time for my own recommendations.  Stay well, stay safe, stay in place, and stay in touch. Here’s where we’ll be for the unknown future (photo by our goddaughter, Paiwa, who is with us for the duration.)

Dear Friends:  As of this past week we are in complete shutdown in Cañar, and in all of Ecuador, with bus lines and airports closed, along with schools, universities, restaurants bars and non-essential stores. .As of today (03-22) Ecuador has 532 confirmed cases, 7 deaths, the majority in the coastal province of Guayas. In our small town, local police and security folks patrol the streets – today, barriers went up at all roads leading into the center – and even pedestrians are only allowed to be out and about (with a mask!) to go to food markets, banks or pharmacies.  The rest of us stay at home, and stay at home and stay at home.

I walked up two days ago and took these photos. As I stood in the the street, I watched four security agents knock on the closed, roll-up door of a bakery; when the door slid up they went in and sat down to have coffee and pastries. Small town! Another amazing sight is the Pan American hIghway empty – the commercial corridor in Ecuador that normally roars night and day with large trucks. (I know these empty-major-road shots look all alike, but I can’t resist.)

The day before the shutdown, I went up and bought the last four bottles of red wine ($5 each/12% alcohol) – see space on shelf below. Now nothing left but bad white wine (and lots of liquor, which we don’t drink). Michael feels sure his beer supply is secure, but he took pleasure in burning this carton of Corona, a gift from a friend before all this began.

Housebound with us is Paiwa, our 24-year old goddaughter who is in her last year of engineering at University of Cuenca. She came before the transportation shutdown and will be with us for the duration, I think. She visits her mother nearby, but the attractions of our household are (1) Michael’s cooking, (2) my Internet, and (3) our washing machine (I suspect #2 is most important). She’s doing some on-line classes but mostly staying in touch with friends. (Below – a late-afternoon scene when it grows chilly and we all gather in the living/dining room.)We’re delighted to have this time with her, as we’ve hardly seen her this year as she nears graduation. She’s helpful (up the ladder to gather blackberries while I glean those on the ground; does the dishes while we sleep), and smart and funny. She needs to pass a TESOL English exam to go on to graduate school, so we’re speaking English as much as possible, with some hilarious results. (Last night she asked what “it doesn’t matter” meant, when she heard me say it to Michael. He launched into a 5-minute explanation of “dark matter” while Paiwa and I looked quizzically at one another.)

As for food, we are surrounded by it – potatoes and fava beans in the back field, ready to harvest, and in the kitchen garden lots of broccoli and lettuce and red cabbage (and not much else). Our meals will soon be pretty boring without Michael’s weekly trip to Cuenca for delicacies such as cheese, butter, coffee, and salmon. Cañar’s little markets are open and the shelves are stocked, and Michael is good at being creative with what’s available. Last night: pizza with Italian sausage and onions. Remains to be seen if we’ll have the usual Sunday market, where products come from all over Ecuador. (Update – market cancelled, maybe first time ever – you can see by this photo taken a couple of weeks ago that social distancing would be impossible ).

One of my great pleasures, with all this extra time at home, is an hour or so in the garden late afternoons. Weeding the flower beds, hacking out dead limbs, doesn’t matter and doesn’t make much of a difference. It’s outside, it’s exercise, it’s visual comfort. So I will end with these images of nature’s beauty…. (but keep scrolling down for the (reduced but still kicking ) Cañar Book Club.

Cañar Book Club (in time of Covid-19)

Well, it was a sad turn-out this month at the Cañar Book Club, as members deal with the crisis in their individual countries or states. However, as we “shelter in place” for the next few weeks (please, not months!) we need reading suggestions more than ever, and resources for getting books. I am increasingly using e-books from my public library in Portland. I just checked – we can still order ebooks and audiobooks – up to 50 at a time! – also, movies on Kanopy and Hoopla.

So – I just finished – and loved –  Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells by Pico Iyer. I’ve known him as a travel writer but this is a quiet rumination on daily life in Japan, where he lives in two rooms with his Japanese wife, plays ping pong at the local activity center, and writes and takes walks. He also lives in California with his mother six months a year, and his steady lively description of his life had me captivated beginning to end. I’m on the waiting list for some of his other books. Otherwise, I’m totally entertained by Margaret the First, a quirky novel by Danielle Dutton. ( NYT Review says it best: “This slender but dense imagining of the life of Margaret Cavendish, a pioneering 17th-century writer and wife of the aristocrat William Cavendish, could be classified as a more elliptical cousin of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell novels.”)

And let’s give a feminist salute to Dutton’s other endeavor: In 2010, she founded the small press Dorothy, a publishing project named for her great aunt Dorothy, a librarian who drove her home-made bookmobile through the back hills of southern California.

. *. *. *. *. *. *.  *. *. *.

And now for suggestions from members who wrote before the great meltdown:

From Andrea in Portland: I just started Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng. (NOTE to Andrea: let us know what you thought)

From sister Char in Austin: Pachinko by Korean-American Min Jin Lee. An epic historical novel following a Korean family who eventually migrates to Japan. I leaned much from this and enjoyed the read.  Next, The Bear by Andrew Krivak: “A gorgeous fable of Earth’s last two human inhabitants, and a girls journey home.”   I loved this book. Makes you think. Last is a tall-tale romp by Howard Frank Mosher written in 1977. Disappearances
involving,  “about a thousand details of farming, timbering and whiskey-running life on the Vermont-Canadian border.”  It’s 1936, it’s winter and they drink a lot of Canadian whiskey. Best part: the paperback I ordered from Amazon came from the Paris-Bourbon Co. Library in Paris, Ky.  Our daddy would have loved this book.

From Donald in Toronto: “My suggestion for a good read – Richard Wagamese’s last novel Starlight (McClelland and Stewart, 2018). The descriptions of connecting with the land are spectacular, with scenes that conjure up walking in the hills and mountains around Canar, even though located in central British Columbia, Canada. The tenderness in the growing relationships between an Indigenous and settler man, and them and a settler woman and her daughter, are beautifully conveyed.

And from Joanne in Mexico: “Books! Yes, our salvation. I think you’ll love The Door by Magda Szabo. Now reading Girl, Woman, Other by Gernadine Evaristo – not great but engaging. And finished the John Berger bio. I learned a lot – a bit heady but still worth reading.”

Did I miss anyone? Let’s try for a rousing meeting in April, with reviews all the books we’ve read while sheltering-in-place.  Meanwhile, here’s a list of comfort reads from recent NYTimes

Stay well, stay inside, stay connected.  Judy B.

Dear Friends – February has been a wonderful month for books: read, launched, generated and dreamt of for the future. First, news from University of Alabama Press that they will publish Ana’s book: Tell Mother I’m in Paradise: Memoirs of Ana Margarita Gasteazoro, a Political Prisoner in El Salvador. As many of you know, Ana was the original inspiration for the Cañari Women’s Education Foundation (CWEF). Last October her story was published in a Spanish translation by MUPI (Museum of the Word and Image) in El Salvador. My partner in the project – Andrew Wilson, based in London – and I went to San Salvador, along with Eva, Ana’s cousin in New York who was the final editor. There, celebrating the book launch, Ana’s siblings gave their blessing for an edition in English (a requirement of University of Alabama Press).

An oral history made when we all lived in Costa Rica in the 1980s, Andrew and I have been trying – off and on – to find an English-language publisher for Ana’s memoirs since her untimely death of breast cancer in El Salvador in 1993. Now her story will be made widely known in her own words, complete with photographs and newspaper clippings, with an introduction by Dr. Erik Ching, author of Civil War in El Salvador: A Battle Over Memory. 

Here in Cañar we’ve had a more recent book launch. Juncal: An Indigenous Community in Ecuador, was first published in Denmark by two anthropologists who lived in the community of Juncal near here in 1973-74, and again in 1977-78.  Eva Krener and Niel Fock agreed to fund a Spanish translation and that edition was published three years ago. Here they are in the photos below in their first years in Juncal – with their young daughter, Felicia, on Eva’s back.

And now last week, after years of translation work by three Cañari bilingual educators, and funding by the Municipality of Cañar, we have a new edition in Quichua. It was wonderful to return to the community to give away books and reunite with the señora on the cover (right, with baby, and in the photos below with a pink shawl on park bench and beside me holding the book). She told me the baby in now a grandmother! The older folks in Juncal remember Niels and Eva, who sent greetings from Denmark that I conveyed in my little speech. Over the years Niels and Eva have donated 800 digitized photos to the Cañar archive, also included in the digital collection of AILLA, Archive of Indigenous Languages of Latin America at University of Texas, Austin, where my photographs will eventually be housed.

I’m hoping my next book project will be a collection of photos of old Cañar from the Navas family collection. For years I’ve been printing and digitizing glass plates and early celluloid negatives, and it’s time we make something of this traditional town photographer’s monumental work (he  lived into his 90’s). It will, of course, come down to a search for funding, but we never let that stop us.

Well, that’s all the book news this month except for…..the famous Cañar Book Club.

C A N A R  B O O K   C L U B

For me, reading this month has been a mixed bag, as they say. Some good books, some middling, some unable to finish. I read two young authors at the same time – both a bit self-conscious, newly minted MFAs seemed to me (lots of quoting Barthes and Brecht), and both focused on the urban experience of others or outsiders.  On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong was, I thought, beautifully written – as a long letter to his Vietnamese mother – and I was drawn in from page 1. There, There, by Tommy Orange, somehow never engaged me and I gave up about 3/4 of the way, as the various characters slowly traveled to the Oakland Powwow. I know it’s a big hit, and an Everyone Reads choice for Portland Public Library, so I don’t want to turn off fellow club members. Sometimes a book just doesn’t click with the reader. Also disappointing, for me, was the new biography of John Berger, A Writer of Our Times: The Life and Work of John Berger by Joshua Sperling. I discovered Berger with Pig Earth, the first of his Into Their Labours Trilogy, and was hooked by his novels (and film collaborations) up to his death in 2017. He was a sort of hero to me, so of course I wanted to know more about his life. But where the title says “…the life and work…” the emphasis is on “work” as it is in fact more of an intellectual biography with very little about his private and country life.

Otherwise, I enjoyed Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan and I’m just getting into The Patron Saint of Liars by Ann Patchett. I will count these as “middling.”

So – on to recommendations by other members:

From Joanne in Mexico: “I’m racing through an amazing bio of a one-legged woman who basically organized the French resistance during WWII (A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell, highly recommend). I loved “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk and Antonia Lloyd-Jones.I’ve put Flights by same author on my library list but I hope it doesn’t arrive too soon. Too many great books, which means life is good.”

From Arlene in Toronto: Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss. A gripping short novel, beautifully written, set in Northumberland that takes on issues of domestic violence, misogyny and what the Iron Age walls of the past have to do with the present. A slender, completely absorbing counterpart to Tara Westover’s memoir, Educated.

Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson. Two African-American families in Brooklyn, one middle class, the other headed by a single mother, are connected through their children who conceive a child. The characters are vivid and memorable, the language is exquisite.

Mrs. Everything by Jennifer Weiner is not just a story of two sisters and, eventually, their extended families, but also a novel about the coming of age of women in America. “It’s about the ’60s, civil rights and the drug culture; it’s about the ’70s and Vietnam; and it’s about struggles with weight, the Jewish culture, feminism and sexual freedom.” A read that is fun and absorbing too.

Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson. A touching story about 10-year old twins who have the disconcerting habit of bursting into flames whenever they get very agitated and the “loser” young woman tasked with caring for them who becomes their fierce defender. Reminiscent of Eleanor Oliphant is Perfectly Fine.

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie (can’t remember if I recommended this before). A reworking of the tragedy of Antigone, set within the context of a contemporary British-Pakistani Muslim family.

From Claire in London:  “We (book club) have read, and all really liked, The Dutch House by Ann Patchett.  For our next book club, William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy. It’s non-fiction, about the founding of the East India Company, it’s take-over of India and the beginnings of the British Empire.

From Mel in Vermont: “…reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered, which is good so far. Also, Down the Garden Path by Beverly Nichols? A jewel for gardeners!!

Macon in Boulder:  (forgotten last time, sorry Macon): I am reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s book Infidel – an interesting story about the upbringing of this talented woman, and her escape from the political and religious horror of Somalia and Islam.

And finally, from Maya in Portland: My recent reads: The Sun Does Shine, by Anthony Ray Hinton, who spent 30 years on Alabama’s death row before being exonerated. A compelling read. And Women Talking, the Miriam Toews about the women who were all raped in a Mennonite community in South America and have to decide what to do. Also strong. Unusual. And I’ve just started Ducks, Newburyport, by Lucy Ellman, the 1,000 page one sentence opus by Richard Ellman’s daughter. I’m hooked, and finding it quite funny.

Dear Friends – Sissinghurst Gardens in England, made famous (for me) by Virginia Woolf’s love affair with its owner and author, Vita Sackville-West, has nothing in common with my Sisyphus Garden in Cañar. But I like the sound of the two names together (and the coincidence that Sackville-West wrote a novella called Seducers in Ecuador). And another coincidence I just discovered: today, January 25, is Virginia Woolf’s birthday.  So I thought I’d start with that and see where it takes us….

I’m calling my Cañar garden the Sisyphus Garden because no matter what I do one year to the next to improve it, I come back to find it exactly as it was before – new flowers gone, same weeds back in force, kitchen garden eaten by the neighbor’s chickens, trees trimmed further up by the bulls brought in to plow the back field, scrubby grass front and back full of sheep droppings, and the aggressive vinca major (periwinkle) and bushy fuchsia voraciously covering the side yard, even though I cut them back severely before we left last June. And there’s the hedge of quinoa (a native bush, not the grain) that has grown to over 15 feet and blocked our view to the west.

When it comes to my Cañar garden, I start over every year, just like Sisyphus endlessly pushing that stone up the hill.  (Forgive my co-opting a suffragist image; couldn’t resisit.)

The fact is, we are living on a working farm operated by our compadres Jose Maria and Narcisa. It is their sheep that trim and fertilize the lawn while we’re gone, their bulls that eat the lower branches of the trees, their irrigating the back field that floods the front yard. But they have contributed so tremendously to our experience living in Cañar, and as compadres we are considered extended family, with responsibilities that go both ways.

As I write, I hear the pump, drawing from the irrigation canal that runs in front of our property. Yards and yards of black pipe snake around the house to irrigate the potato field behind. Jose Maria has access to the canal only today – it has been released from above – and there seems to be no control. Water gushes out of the pipes and into sprinkler heads in the field, soaking the back lawn, the kitchen garden, the back of the house, the neighbor’s clothes hung on the fence. In front, water overflows the canal and runs down the hill, creating rivulets in the dirt road that will become ruts, and creeps along the pathway up to our house and threatens to dampen our adobe walls. Jose María runs back and forth from the pump in front to the field in back; It appears to us that he is flooding the field. Yesterday, the canal was blocked, and we regularly saw neighbors in the yard, looking down into the canal and poking it with a long stick, trying to unblock it. For farmers, water is life and livelihood –  and in this part of the world as hotly political as property lines.

 Which is not to say that I don’t love things as they are in my Sisyphean garden. First of all, since I have no talent as a gardener – unable to plan or imagine or create a white garden, as Vita Sackville-West did at Sissinghurst – there’s little disappointment in coming back to find I have to start over again.

I never tire of pulling weeds, trimming back the crazy climbing roses, replanting things lost, digging out the crocosmia that is all over the yard because it gets distributed through the compost, cutting back the passiflora vine that threatens to take down the fence, tracking down and pulling up the aggressive kikuyu grass that grows over and under everything and is one of the most noxious weeds that somehow made it to Cañar from its native East Africa. But my pleasure comes from what I see when I look out the windows – flowers I’ve forgotten that bloom year after year; something I’ve stuck in the ground that makes an incredible display of tiny yellow blooms (photo #1), the aggressive fuchsia bush that fills our bedroom window, the white daises along the front that insist on taking over.

And for those who want to see the hated “creeping” kikuyu” up close, here it is.  Most often it goes underground, strangling the roots of good plants, or displacing flagstones, before springing up as tall grass. I’ve spent many happy hours chasing it down; farmers throw it in the road to fill ruts. But in fact our lush lawn is mostly made of it, cut short. 

Back to Sisyphus: Camus imagined him smiling while pushing the rock and embracing his situation without thinking of the past or the future. “He refused to surrender to gravity…he is remembered for his labor towards his purpose” Well, I’m not sure I’ve refused to surrender to gravity (I take a look in the mirror), but I certainly feel I have a purpose here in my Sisyphean Cañar garden.

And to finish with Virginia Woolf, from her diary, May 31, 1920: “The first pure joy of the garden . . . weeding all day to finish the beds in a queer sort of enthusiasm which made me say this is happiness. … We were out till nine at night, though the evening was cold. Both stiff and scratched all over today, with chocolate earth in our nails.”

CANAR BOOK CLUB (what you’ve all been waiting for)

The first 2020 meeting of the Cañar Book Club was a rousing success!  Our members were obviously anxious to reconvene after six months and share news of books. So I”ll start with our international members’ comments and save my own for the end.

Francie in Portland is reading  Like Falling Through a Cloud: A Lyrical Memoir  by Eugenia Zukerman, an internationally renowned flutist and writer facing a dreaded diagnosis of Alzheimer’s.

Joanne in Mexico: “I read The Topeka School, by Ben Lerner, on the plane and liked it a lot. Fascinating mix of voices and ways of thinking about language. Definitely recommend. I’m about to start Drive you Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarzcuk… and will report.”

Nancy In Portland: How to Catch a Mole. by Marc Hammer. “It’s about moles, but also about a Welsh book editor and gardener growing older, his love and deep connection with nature and determination to stop killing moles. A beautifully reflective book!”

Nancy Also read: Beyond the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo, 2012 National book award winning nonfiction centered around the lives of slum dwellers near the Mumbai airport. “Deeply empathetic. Harrowing, heartbreaking stories. Reminded me a bit in tone of Matthew Desmond’s book, Evicted. And I also enjoyed Full Catastrophe Living, by Jon Kabat-Zinn— the groundbreaking 1999 introduction to mindfulness meditation.”

And from an indefatigable reader in Austin: “Love your book lists, Judy, and always love how many of your favorites I’ve read and loved. A couple recent reads that I thoroughly enjoyed:” All my Puny Sorrows, by Miriam Towes, Severance by Ling Ma, The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obrent, Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli, Disoriental by Niger Dyaneli, Overstory by Richard Powers, The Museum of Modern Love, by Heather Rose, The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, Educated by Tara Westover, Meet me at the Museum by Anne Youngson, Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot, My Life of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, The Monk of Mokha, by Dave Eggers, Here in Berlin by Cristina Garcia, Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, The Nakano Thrift Shop by Hiromi Kawakami.

Liv from Oslo wrote, responding to authors I mentioned in our last meeting:  “Books: Towles- I have the same experience.  Patrick Modiano – mysterious and fascinating. Linn Ullmann- I read it fast – rather nasty to her mother, Liv Ullmann. It seems to be a trend in Norway right now.  I got presents:  Ruth First and Joe Slovo against Apatheid by Alan Wieder, and Upside Down. A Primer for the Looking Glass World by Eduardo Galeano.  To recommend: Trieste, by Dasa Drndic.-One of the strongest novel I have read in many years.  East West Street, by Philippe Sands.

Two Oregon readers, Shirley and Pat, both recommended  Deep River, by Karl Marlantes. Pat writes: “It’s about the Finns who settled both sides of the Columbia R., starting in the 1800’s logging and fishing. It’s 5-stars, very good.”

From Laura in Upstate New York: “What an ambitious list of books. I continue to recommend Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things. It’s also a great audio book, read by the incomparable Juliet Stevenson.”

From Bruce in Portland:  Marc Hamer’s How to Catch a Mole. Brilliant. He’s a Welsh writer and his luminous meditations on nature have strong parallels to Wendell Berry’s writing.

Claire from London: My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite is brilliant. Seemingly almost comic to start with, it’s actually a dark tale revealing much about life for young, educated women living and working in Lagos. Short and bittersweet.

Richard from Oslo: I am reading an amazingly constructed book, The Overstory, by Richard Powers, on a psychic revenge taken by trees, some of whom seem to have memories going back 4 million years, and who suddenly are being helped to save greenery in America by certain drop-out, off-the-bend, Americans who, once leaving civilization can groove with trees. For me it is his best since The Echo Maker and also The Prisoner’s Dilemma.

Sister Char in Santa Fe: This is How it Always Is, Laurie Frankel, “Frankel’s portrayal of even the most openhearted parents’ doubts and fears around a child’s gender identity elevates this novel.”  New York Times Bestseller, 2017

And from Arlene in Toronto, late last year, neatly presented as a bulleted list:

• The House of Names, Colm Toibin
  
• The Testament of Mary, Colm Toibin
• Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie
• The Children of Jocasta by Natalie Haynes
• What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence by Michele Filgate
  

Whew!  And now for those who’ve made it this far, my report:

Since our last meeting I have read A Gentleman in Moscow – charming in the end but such a time sink – it took me 3 tries to get into it; Bad Blood I ordered and read for the second time; an amazing memoir by the English academic feminist, Lorna Sage, growing up in rural England in the 1950s. Won many prizes when it came out in 2000, right before she died at age 58. The Wonder by Emma Donoghue – author of Room – about a “fasting girl” of 19^th century Ireland where I learned a tremendous amount about the power of Catholic belief, sin and redemption. Reads a bit like a mystery (nominated for Shirley Jackson Award). I’m now reading The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck, the German author I so admired last year with Go, Went, Gone and The Visitation. Jury’s still out on this one – I’ll report in next time.

I’m still struggling to connect with e-books. Those I download from the library I forget or barely start, then after 3 weeks they’re gone. I have bought and partially read Life in The Garden by Penelope Lively, a writer I’ve long admired but I find her essays on gardens a little boring (but she brought me to Virginia Woolf’s love of garden). Oliver Sack’s’ last book of essays, Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales, came and went. I love him, but I realized many were essays I’d already read.  Bottom line: there’s nothing like having a quality-paper book in one’s hands for a long bus ride, or those fleeting minutes before the lights go out at night.

Until next time, dear readers. Keep those book suggestions and comments coming for our February book club meeting.

Dear Friends: I have missed you these past seven months and I’m so happy to be back in touch, writing the Chronicles. (If anyone didn’t see the 2019 Scholarship update sent in November, you can find it here with a PayPal donate button or mailing information.

I start this on Christmas Day, when we have been in Cañar one week. After the cold, dark and short days of Portland, nothing compares to waking up that first morning in our east-facing bedroom to see early morning light coming through the giant fuchsia bush outside. A welcome back.

Before that, upon opening the door to our first sight of our interior patio, we saw plants grown wild. We had to take out one monster to get the fountain going, and days later I found three birds’ nests in the tall aloe plants. But what a safe place it is for nesting and hatching by the common sparrows that are a constant in our domestic life here – flying in and out at will through the opening between the glass and tile roofs, peeking into the bedroom door in the morning, occasionally getting stuck in a room.

That first day we walked around inside and out, opening shutters, checking lights, phone, gas, Internet, water. Amazing that everything works. Some years nothing does. One year we had lots of mice. This year just cobwebs and dust and a moldy fridge. Outside, I gather other evidence of months gone by – a broken wooden plow, the orchid that is finally blooming, a dry vegetable garden the neighbor’s chickens have ravaged, a beautiful crop of potatoes in the back field.

First Sunday market day, Michael takes the requested hat from Portland to his fish guy, César, and gets a pound of shrimp in return. And I visit my favorite lunch vendor – an 85+ woman who prepares and sells roasted pig and llapingachos every day on the street or in the market.

As I follow Michael in his shopping, I snap photos on my phone of the grand cornucopia that is the Sunday market.

*. *. * *

OK, here’s what you’ve all been waiting for – the first meeting of the…

Cañar Book Club

This year I have an eclectic batch of books, acquired in eclectic ways: some ordered online after reading reviews or on recommendations of friends, others picked up for $5 at the library sale at our annual Portland Book Festival, and even a couple found in a sidewalk Little Library. I’ve also given in to weight considerations (Michael says: “I’m not carrying another damn book in my luggage!”) and ordered some e-books for my iPad. (Only problem I’ve found is I cannot see text in bright sunlight of patio, where I always read while eating lunch. So I have two books going at once.) I’ve also started ordering ebooks from my Portland library. Problem is: you only get three weeks to read and don’t get to keep it!

So here is the list. Because I was impatient, I finished two of them before I got here, one on the plane –  marked by asterisks with notes. And because we don’t always get what we want, when we want it, I’ve added my wish list for 2020. Now – Dear Readers – I look forward to hearing book reports and recommendations from all of you. Until the next meeting…

(KINDLE)

• A Writer of our Time: The Life and Work of John Berger, Joshua Sperling
• On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong
• Margaret the First: A Novel, Danielle Dutton
• Life in the Garden, Penelope Lively
• Images and Shadows, Part of a Life, Iris Origo (follow-up to excellent WW II war diary War in Val d’Orcia.
  
• The Parisian, Isabella Hammand * (reading now and not yet engaged, will give it time)

(PAPER)

• There, There, Tommy Orange
• The Wrong Blood, Manuel de Lope
• A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles * (reading now – third try)
• In the Distance, Hernan Diaz
• Iceberg, Marion Coutts * (finished – excellent, moving memoir)
  
• Pure, Andrew Miller
• Mission to Paris, Alan Furst * (finished, not great, don’t bother)
• The Wonder, Emma Donoghue
• Frog Music, Emma Donoghue
• Manhattan Beach, Jennifer Egan
• The Patron Saint of Liars, Ann Pachett
• Saving Agnes, Rachel Cusk
• The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day
• Great House, Nicole Krauss
• Autumn, Ali Smith
• Bad Blood, Lorna Sage
• The End of Days, Jenny Erpenbeck
• Late in the Day, Tessa Hadley
• Dora Bruder, Patrick Modiano* (read on plane, very good and follow-up to Modiano’s The Night Watch)

WISH LIST

• Disappearing Earth, Julia Phillips
• The Club, Leo Damrosch
• Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe
• Olive Again, Elizabeth Strout
• The Accomplice, Joseph Kanon
• Unquiet, Linn Ullmann
• On Chapel Sands, Laura Cumming
• Essays by Lydia Davis
• To Calais, in Ordinary Time, James Meek
• Girl, Woman, Other, Bernadine Evaristo
• Permanent Record, Edward Snowden
• How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell
• Prairie Fires, Caroline Fraser
• The Witches, Stacey Schiff
• The Warmth of Other Sons, Isabel Wilkerson
• The Yellow House, Sarah Broom
• When Death Takes Something from You, Give It Back, Naja Marie Aidt
• Belonging, Nora Krug
• The Odd Woman and the City, Vivian Gornick
• Optic Nerve, Maria Gainza * (just got notification from library)

Dear Friends: We are not returning to Cañar until December, but I wanted to post blogs on current events: the recent protests in Ecuador (and resolution – with headline from The Guardian, October 16), and my recent trip to El Salvador for the launch of a book that was inspired by Ana Margarita Gasteazoro, for whom the Cañari Women’s Scholarship Program is named. So…first the protests and the resolution, in an online article published by my good friend Alan Adams, a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador in the 1960’s who has rekindled his Canari friendships in retirement, working with Mushuk Yuyay, a local community development organization and reconnecting with those local indigenous leaders he knew back then. Thanks to Alan, and thanks to his editor at https://www.esperanzaproject.com for allowing me to reprint the article. (I have edited lightly and added a few extra photos from various sources). Next chronicle about El Salvador coming soon…

UPDATE, October 12: At publication time, the Cañari caravan was in Quito joining the throng of demonstrators in a victory celebration. The Moreno government agreed to rescind the austerity decree and has promised to rewrite it with input from the people. Nicolás Pichazaca of Mushuk Yuyay wrote me: “Our work and strategy have not been in vain, not only for the Indigenous people, but for all Ecuadorians. It is one more story.”

“Superheroes don’t wear capes. They wear ponchos and sombreros.” The phrase is often repeated in the Andean highlands. And now as they see their lands and their culture under increasing threat, the Indigenous people of Ecuador are employing that phrase once again, as they go out into the streets in the face of danger, as they have many times during their history.

High in the Andes of southern Ecuador live the Cañari people, who have been struggling for their freedom and for Sumak Kawsay, a good life, for thousands of years. Their present challenge comes at the hands of the President of the Republic who made a pact with the International Monetary Fund and expects the poor of Ecuador to pay. When Lenín Moreno Garcés took office, the Cañari people were cautious, hopeful, and patient because he promised to break with the extractive policies of his predecessor, Rafael Correa. He humbled himself before Indigenous people in a solemn ceremony where he accepted the blessing of the many nations that comprise the State of Ecuador.

Slowly it became obvious that the winds in Quito had shifted, as the President began to move in a different direction. I often describe Lenín Moreno in Shakespeare’s words, “Commanded always by the greater gust…” The greater gust these days was coming from the IMF, which demanded austerity, and Moreno decided to find cash by removing fuel price subsidies that have been in place since 1970. Fuel prices shot up by a dollar a gallon, enough to wipe out the budgets of most small businesses as well as of most families. In addition to the gas prices going up, the IMF is requesting an increase in fees for all government services and for utilities, a new value-added tax, a consumption tax, and an increase in the ceiling on interest rates so that banks can charge whatever interest rates they want.

Immediately, the Cañari people responded with peaceful, but vocal, demonstrations throughout their communities. They joined in support of labor unions and other groups, but mostly in collaboration with other indigenous communities and organizations of Ecuador. They blocked roads and joined the general strike. They requested dialogue with the government. Violence began to erupt in the protests — which some, in civilian as well as governmental sectors, suspect was being incited by infiltrators paid by Correa. President Moreno declared a State of Emergency to quell the violence, which only increased the people’s determination to find a solution that would benefit all and lead toward a more secure future for the country. 

President Moreno responded that the austerity policies would not be changed. He said that the demonstrations did not originate with the people but were encouraged by the former president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, working with President Maduro of Venezuela. The statement only fanned the flames of resistance. However, there is evidence that Correa and other actors are taking advantage of the situation to sow doubt and suspicion. The Indigenous organizations need to weave through this confusion cautiously to keep the issues in focus.

Disrespect is not new for the Cañari people. After centuries of being used as beasts of burden, as the Cañari poet José Buñay put it years ago, they are determined not to go back to the abuses of the hacienda days. Last week, as the protests continued to escalate and began to grow violent, Moreno took his government from the capital of Quito to the coastal city of Guayaquil. When the demonstrators set out to meet him there, the mayor of that city stated bluntly that “Indians” are not welcome in her city. They should go back to the páramos, the high mountain grasslands. 

But Cañaris will not be humiliated. Indigenous people don’t take abuse lightly. A movement was launched to withhold  food from the highland farms to Guayaquil. Several Indigenous people posted photos of their páramo homes with pride. They also posted the reminder that Indigenous peoples can be found in the universities, the professions, government offices, elected positions, and everywhere in Ecuadorian society. They even live in Guayaquil.

The declarations that I read over and over again from Cañari friends are not simply that the price of gas should go down, but that neoliberal policies must end. The IMF must go. What they are demanding is a complex set of changes, each affecting the other, that cannot be oversimplified. There is no simple fix. They are proposing a comprehensive solution on the other side of the insults and accusations that will insure that a way toward a peaceful and lasting social and economic system can be secured. This solution will be sought by large numbers of determined and united people.

Faced with this necessity, the people of the Cañari communities, both those in Ecuador and those who have emigrated, decided to add their voices. Truckloads of people departed. They made laughing videos of people climbing aboard moving overcrowded vehicles. Wave after wave of men, women, and children declared their determination to protect their rights as Ecuadorian citizens.

The last trucks to departed Cañari on Saturday morning. It was not lost on anyone that this was Columbus Day, the day set aside to commemorate the beginning of the struggle that they have been involved in for over 500 years. They drove slowly over roads that had been blocked and made contacts with others along the way. On Saturday evening, the caravan announced that they had Puruhua People in their company now. They are the Indigenous Nation to the north of the Kañari in the province of Chimborazo. On Sunday they set off again in trucks, cars, buses, and on foot on a cold and cloudy day.

The plan was to arrive in Quito in time to lend force to the words of the leaders in a meeting with the President, to show the strength of a united people and to prove that hardship and danger will not deter them. We remember, too, that over the recent Ecuadorian history, Indigenous demonstrations have led to changes of government and policy changes. What sets this demonstration apart is its spontaneity and comprehensiveness.  The people responded immediately to a threat with thought and care to find a solution consistent with their goals. To get elected, President Moreno said and did some things he seems to have forgotten, but the people didn’t forget.

This is but one more chapter in the history of the people who developed their science and art over the millennia, resisted the Inca, survived the haciendas, rebuilt their lives through the Agrarian Reform, ended the agro-chemical-based Green Revolution, confronted (and continue to confront) climate change, and now are dedicated to help redesign the social and economic institutions of Ecuador. The significance of this continuing struggle cannot be overemphasized.

ALAN ADAMS