Dear Friends: Next year will mark our 20th anniversary of “half-years” in Cañar. As we missed most of our 2023-24 visit due to Michael’s hospitalization, it is all the sweeter that we’re here now for six months – and with an extraordinary arrival story. But more on that later…
First, I want to apologize for my last post, the fundraising letter for the Cañari Women’s Education Fundación, which was hacked by (it appeared) crazy Russians promoting gambling sites. Some of you received an email with a bad link. During the weeks since then, I’ve endlessly pestered my website host service, installed security updates, and deleted hundreds of unauthorized “users” that crept into the backend of my website. I hope this blog will land in your mailboxes clean and untouched by outside forces. (I’m also adding a link to the scholarship letter with a donate button you can trust.)
We have been in Cañar for two weeks now and, although it is peaceful, warm, and wonderful to be back in our southern community, Ecuador is suffering from severe power and water rationing due to the most extreme drought in the last six decades, which the government attributes to El Nino. About 78% of the country’s electricity comes from hydropower, and low water levels in the three major dams that serve Ecuador mean no electricity for several hours a day. 
The first week we had six hours of power, broken into two periods of three hours in the morning and the evening. That was workable. Then the second week we had six hours of power from noon to 6:00, but that left us sitting through long, dark evenings. Our moods improved considerably, however, when I discovered an old DVD reader and began sorting through the hundreds of movies I’d bought in Cuenca in the 90s and 00s before the days of streaming. Remember those? We’ve been revisiting some excellent movies to take us from dinner to bedtime, among them The Savages (Laura Linney and much missed Philip Seymour Hoffman), and Milk (Harvey Milk story); oh, and I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead with Clive Owen (shown below; that one was confusing). This week, the power goes off from 2:00 – 6:00, and I’ve come to anticipate the freedom that comes with no Internet. Hurray! I get to garden, draw, walk, or read a book.
Water is another issue. We have several hours of city water a day, after which we depend on our reserve tank and a pump. However, for that to work, we need power and water simultaneously. So we store fresh water in containers, like so many others in this world. But even more serious, this week the government declared a 60-day state of emergency over the forest fires that have devastated more than 10,000 hectares, mostly in our region in the south. Wildfires that consume crops, animals, national parkland, and the páramo, lands held in common by indigenous communities as ancestral territories.
We are seeing small fires in the mountains around us, but the worst one is out of control in the unique El Cajas National Park, 30 km above Cuenca, where some of you have visited. Volunteers are rushing to help, but the area is vast. (photo credit: Reuters). 
Ecuador is not the only country affected by climate change, of course. We can only wait and see what will happen with this new guy in the White House, who has previously called climate change “mythical,” “nonexistent,” and “an expensive hoax.”
But let’s go back to a simpler subject: our arrival in Cañar, We’ve discovered the best way to travel and settle in: bring friends! Bruce & Nancy from Portland came with us and spent eight days helping clean, organize, shop, wash, prune, haul, change lightbulbs, and much more. Their idea, not ours! They had visited Cañar in about 2009 with their daughter Miranda and proposed they make another short visit to accompany us our first week. A few photos tell the story:
Thank you dear friends. Now we can never come without you!
In other domestic news, maybe Michael felt cheated of his ladder time? So this week, he put on his old Carhartts and, with Marco, cleaned the chimney from the top down. Taking lots of photos allowed me to not appear as the hovering spouse (which I was). 
Not to end on a downer, but I’d like to add a sketch that I made the day after the election. (I think there were a couple of “pink” states I didn’t get in.) The text below the image, a quote by Justice Louis Brandeis, says: “We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.” (I might add that being out of the country and without Internet evening of the election helped a little.)
There’s lots more, but I’ll save some news for next time. I have a new/old project to tell you about, and Michael has a new deviled egg recipe to share. Everyone who tries them asks for his secret.
The Cañar Book Club
“I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.” –Jorge Luis Borges
Dear book club members. It’s been so long since the last book club, I’m afraid I’ve lost some of your recommendations. I need fresh input. For myself, I find I’m drawn to a new genre: comfort books. At the moment, just loaded onto my iPad from the library: The Life Impossible, by Matt Haig; and on my bedside table: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (both will be re-reads, always a comfort).
But on to testimonials and reviews: I’ll start with the most recent – Margaux and the Vicious Circle, an intriguing novel released in October by my Aristata Press partner, Anne McClard. “A young writer living in Lower Manhattan has penned a semi-autobiographical novel about her traumatic early childhood in Colorado, including the unresolved disappearance of a friend from the apartment complex where her family lives…..” (Read on with the above link to learn more and to order the book – Yay, Aristata Press!)
Regina from Cuenca: I just finished The Queen of Water by Laura Resau and Maria Virginia Farinango, a novel based on a true story. “Born in an Andean indigenous village in Ecuador, Virginia lives with her family and works in the fields. When, as a seven-year-old, she is taken from her home to be a servant to a mestizo couple, she has no idea what the future holds.” (Judy adds: This could be a story from Cañar.)
Poppy in Portland: I just finished reading/looking at Nicholson Baker’s Finding a Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better at Art. I appreciate his commitment to learning to draw and his various approaches to keeping the learning process interesting.
Arlene in Toronto: Brotherless Nightby V.V. Ganeshananthan. “Set during the early years of Sri Lanka’s three-decade civil war, Brotherless Night is a heartrending portrait of one woman’s moral journey and a testament to both the enduring impact of war and the bonds of home.” The Ministry of Time (by Kaliann Bradley) is funny and touching. The conceit is that a recently established government ministry is gathering “expats” from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time. Six people from different periods of history are chosen for the experiment.
Pat in Bend: Here are three books I loved. Knifeby Salman Rushdie is a memoir/meditation on his recovery from a stabbing by an Islamic radical at his lecture at Chautauqua August 12, 2022. In part, he writes an imagined conversation with his assailant, who was a child when the fatwa was issued, yet he carried his violence so long and so far. Flight Behavier by Barbara Kingsolver tells the many stories of monarch butterfly migration interruptions due to climate change, along with dynamics among scientists’ religious beliefs and traditions. The third book is a poetry anthology, “You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World,” edited by Ada Limon. It features short poems by different poets that often stopped me in my tracks.
Finally, Claire in London reports: I strongly recommend Maurice and Maralyn: A Whale, a Shipwreck, a Love Story by Sophie Elmhirst. It’s the most beautiful piece of narrative non-fiction I think I’ve ever read. An utterly compelling, true story of a couple who were shipwrecked in the Pacific Ocean in the 1970s, but also a tender study of an unusual but very loving marriage. I couldn’t put it down. (If any book clubbers know of anything similar please point me in the right direction – I want more!)
That’s it, dear friends. I plan to send a chronicle at least once a month while we are in Cannar, so please stay in touch, stay well, stay hopeful, and send news of good books you’ve read (comforting or not!)
Here we are in May 2023 after our first full scholarship meeting in three years. One of the present group in the photo has graduated, and three others are on the brink of 2025.
I can’t resist including a photo of an early group, circa 2008. Of the women pictured, all are now professionals working in Cañar; three have master’s degrees or the equivalent. And the two little girls in the front row? Tamía and Saiwa have just started university, at the University of Cuenca, studying medicine and architecture.
Physician Luisa Duchi (2016) recently completed a specialty course in “aesthetic” dermatology and opened her own consultorio. I understand her office is near my house, so I may soon visit her for some skin care consultation (high altitude sun, dry air, aging skin). Previously, Luisa was the director of a small rural clinic where Kichwa was the predominant language of her clients – a language she speaks fluently.
I could go on, but you get the idea. As far as I know, not one of our graduates has left Ecuador, and nearly all are at jobs in their fields, contributing to their communities, local businesses, organizations and municipal and village governments.
Our committee in Cañar manages the program so efficiently that they can do it very well without me, except for one critical piece: the letter you are reading.
As a teenager, I learned of the wider world through Mad Magazine and movies at the West Theater (my first job). My escape came after high school graduation, when I narrowly escaped death in an open-air jeep accident but made it to the University of
Colorado in Boulder, two mountain passes away. But that is a story for another time.
