Dear Friends:  It’s been an intense and productive couple of months documenting fiestas, raymis (kichwa for indigenous fiesta) and educational events with Buddy, my intern from Oregon State University. Working with a tireless 21-year-old in this rigorous business has kept me on my toes – and climbing mountains I might not otherwise have climbed. One way we kept track of our production of photo and video materials, and to share these with the community, was to create DVDs with covers using photos from the celebrations. So we began on December 21 with Kapak Raymi, the Andean winter solstice and Pase del Niño. As this is an event both profane (older kids dressed as Inca royalty) and religious (younger kids depicting bible characters), we made two DVDs.

On December 31 we ushered out 2017 with an all-day-into-night procession through the villages of Quilloac, called Año Viejo (old year). I’ve written before about this amazing ritual – filled with masks, music, jokes and fun. Because this event too had both religious and secular elements – my friend Mercedes carried “el Niño” or baby Jesus, in a little chair for hours – we created two DVDs, one of photos and one of video clips.

On January 12 the bilingual Instituto Quilloac invited us to document its 37th anniversary. I’m a big fan of this educational complex as it was created out of the Agrarian Reform in the 1960s at the behest (demand of?) the indigenous Cañari communities. “We’d never had a school before,” Tayta Antonio Quinde told me in one oral history session. “We wanted to preserve our language and our culture, so we made creating a bilingual (kichwa/español) institute a condition of the reform.”  The school grew to include all grades and at one time had over 2000 students, both indigenous and mestizos who came from other regions of Ecuador. It is now at about 800 students, but during the parade that wound through town we picked up graduates from all years and ended up on the grand patio of the school complex with a great crowd for a lively reunion of music, dancing, drinking and eating.

One benefit to me of these big events is that I come upon many old friends, reminding me how long I’ve been in Cañar. Pacari, for example, I’ve known since her birth. She’s the daughter of our compadres Zoila and Benedicto, and granddaughter of Mama Michi. I ran into her heading the parade as the ñusta, or queen, of Cañar Archeological Capital of Ecuador. Eighteen, beautiful, poised, Pacari is planning to study voice in university.

January 20 we filmed and photographed the Fiesta de San Antonio de Padua – in my opinion the best fiesta of them all. Although it lasts eight days, Buddy and I dedicated only one day to documenting the hours-long desfile (procession) climbing up to a height of 11,000 feet in the paramo (foggy highlands). I confess to catching a ride in a truck this year, while Buddy walked it entirely.

That left one final celebration on the Cañari calendar, and perhaps the biggest of them all: Pawkar Raymi, or Carnival. As with other carnival celebrations, it coincides with the beginning of Lent. But here the big day is Carnival Monday, when all the Cañari communities gather at a host village (this year our community of Chaglaban) to create a long procession through town and out into a large field in the country, where presentations of food, crafts, dance and music go all day and into evening.

Pawkar Raymi in the Cañari culture marks the flowering of the crops, abundance and generosity, and one important aspect of the procession is the cuy-naña carried by the women of the host community. (The name means “sister guinea pig” though English does not do it justice.) It is a heavily loaded platform with fruit and flowers, drinks and sweets, with two cooked cuyes and a chicken atop the poles of the platform and a cage of live cuyes at the bottom. With tremendous effort, the women must carry the platform for hours, with regular rest stops….

More than anything, a big fat guinea pig represents abundance and freedom from hunger. Here are the women from Chaglaban who carried the cuy-naña that day. A less favorite part of Carnival in Cañar for me is the custom of throwing water and maicena, or cornstarch, on passersby – in the streets, from the rooftops, during the parade, at house parties. Here’s Buddy after a maicena attack during the procession (in much better humor than I would be.)  A modern twist is the horrible kareoka, or spumy spray in canisters with triggers, that covers one in a chemical foam. I suffered a direct hit from one little two-year-old in her mother’s arms, who looked wide-eyed with fear as I yelled “NO” right after she covered my best camera with foam.

Finally, I want to mention the wonderful work being done by Allison Adrian, the ethnomusicologist who worked six months in Cañar in 2016. Back at her home university in Minneapolis, with help from professional editors, she is creating three films on Cañari music. Two of them are ready to be seen publically and next blog I’ll post online links. Meanwhile, we are making them available locally as DVDs.

The Cañar Book Club

Ah, the poor Cañar book club is in a funk. Everyone has been too busy to meet and we’ve exchanged little news of good new books. For myself, I tried one Michael had liked (That Bright Land by Terry Roberts (“a southern gothic thriller set in the summer of 1866), and didn’t get hooked, so I moved back two centuries and now I am well engaged with Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks (set in Martha’s Vineyard in 1660’s, the story of a young woman). A faithful reader from London has suggested two books that sound intriguing: The Orphan Master’s Son, by Adam Johnson, about North Korea (“alarming and eye-opening”), 2012 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction. And for these times we should all be reading: How to Live a Feminist Life by Sarah Ahmed, and The Power, fiction by Naomi Alderman.

We’re calling a regular meeting before the next blog in March, so all member readers – please send your suggestions!  Over and out…..

Dear Friends: On this cold foggy afternoon, I look out the window where I sit at our dining room table and see our immediate neighbor to the west, Magdalena, doing her weekly washing in the small field behind her house. She pulls the clothes out of a big plastic basin sitting on the ground and rubs them hard with a bar of soap on a wedge-shaped tree trunk. The wedge is resting on a crude wooden box, propped up with bricks at each corner. It barely reaches 18 inches, but Magdalena is short and she has good leverage leaning over. She sloshes clean water from a bucket onto the pants and t-shirts of her teenage kids and her own bright wool skirts. She squeezes the water out and lays the clothes on the grassy ground beside her, to be hung on the barbed wire fence between our fields. I just checked the temperature outside: 55 degrees F. So I’m happy to see she is wearing rubber gloves, some slight protection. Now the fog is drifting in so thick I can barely see the long black braid that hangs down her back below the bottom of her pink sweater. Her white felt hat. Wool tights. Blue skirt. (Below: Magdalena several years ago when we were building our/her retaining wall).

There are no animals behind her house today – but we often see pigs (in a twig-and-stick shelter at the bottom of her land), sheep, a cow, chickens, and guinea pigs and rabbits in pens nearer the house. Magdalena owns another property up the mountain and the family seems to move their animals up and down.  This is really a story about our neighbors and the views from our house, not an easy subject while I try to respect privacy and cultural differences. When we bought the Cañar property 12 years ago, we had an almost 140-degree panoramic view that ran from the west, where the clouds come up from the coast, to the north view of the high mountains (my header image), and to the east, where we could just see the lower mountains that mark the boundary with the Amazon basin (though a neighbor’s tall concrete wall already blocked some of that view). This magnificent panorama was the reason we bought the land and positioned our house so the windows in the living/dining area would capture it. A beautiful cypress tree at the bottom of our lot (belonging to our neighbor) framed the view of the mountains. I loved that tree, and used it in every panoramic photo at the time.I painted the block wall a dark green and planted vines (despite Michael’s protests that it was not our wall). We came back the next year to see our neighbor Miguel up in the tree hacking away at it with a machete. I foolishly ran down and asked him if he had to do that – it was such a beautiful tree. Yes, he said, its branches were bothering his señora in her wood-fire, tin-roofed kitchen. Now it looked like this (below), but I still loved it and our crops (here quinoa) helped harmonize the scene.After that, every year we came back to find drastic changes to our sector which, unbeknownst to us, had been slated for urbanización to accommodate the fast-growing region of Cañar. We watched as a private “charismatic church” was built on the other side of Magdalena, constructed higgledy-piggledy of concrete block with a large back wall blocking our view to the west. The field below that became a housing development when a local man bought the agricultural land, went to New York and sold most of the lots to migrants from Cañar. I grew a thick hedge to block all that, with only the steeple and cross showing above, and for awhile I liked the green-neon cross but it soon went out.Another year we came back to see that Miguel had chopped off the top of the tree and it looked very sick.Our neighbors are poor. Magdalena has at least four children but only the two youngest live with her now. Years ago she told us her husband was in the U.S. and sending money back to build a new house, but the towering pile of bricks that she gestured to as evidence then is still there, stacked near the road. Meanwhile, her family lives in two small wattle-and-daub structures that abut our property: a windowless cook shack and a slightly larger shack for sleeping. Years ago they added a separate bathroom.

Magdalena is illiterate, and she knows her survival depends on her willingness to fight. Years ago, when we finalized property lines, she argued fiercely about where a rock marked the edge of her property. Michael measured, then moved the marker 20 centimeters into our side and said he was giving her a little bit of our land. She was happy – then!  But over the years, when she complained that our land was eroding down onto hers, we built a retaining wall; when she complained that our poplar tree was sending up seedlings in her dirt patio, we took it down. When she complained that our broom hedge was hanging onto her side, making it easier for thieves to creep in, we sent our garden-helper over to cut it back. Lately, when we run into one another on our road, Magdalena is very friendly.

MIGUEL: Miguel: lives to the northeast of us with his wife and children and grandchildren on a small lot. He’s older – between 60 and 70 – and mestizo, but like Magdalena he is poor. I frequently meet him on the road, always wearing a funny floppy cloth hat and raggedy clothes. Hola vecina! (neighbor) he always greets me. When we moved in, Miguel’s back stone wall bulged into our property. When doing measurements for our fence, Michael told Miguel we would keep the line as defined by his bulging wall. He was pleased.

Then, last year I was horrified to see a block construction going up directly in our view of the mountains. Miguel and helpers were building a house. But wait – they’re tearing it down. No, here it comes again, facing the other direction and even more intrusive of our view. Of course. we could say nothing. Miguel and his wife deserve a real house, however ugly and despite lack of zoning laws.

When we arrived last year, the tree and bulging rock wall were gone and in their place a 10-foot concrete block wall, with the hated rebar sticking up another ten feet in case Miguel wants to expand upward. The house is done and it’s a mess, with an adjacent shed with corrugated tin sheets making a sort of overlapping roof. On the outside of the wall facing us for some crazy reason – a padded headboard with a heart – and a big yellow tarp hangs down from his balcony, which is blocked off with a sort of wooden pallet.

This year Miguel complains that the vines I planted are climbing into his house – “almost into our bed,” – he joked. We sent the garden-helper to trim the vines. I asked in exchange that his grandkids stop throwing garbage into our field. Agreed.  But what about that capuli tree? he asked, pointing to a volunteer cherry tree that I’m counting on to help partially cover up the wall. “The roots will be coming into our patio soon,” he said. “That’s MY tree,” I answered more strongly that I meant to, “and I don’t think the roots are coming for you.”  He backed down and the tree stays. For now.

I look out one late afternoon at a beautiful sunset and see Miguel standing on his half-made balcony, dreamingly admiring the view – the same 140-degree panoramic view we once had. Ours now – if measured from wall to wall – is down to about 45-degrees. But Miguel and I admire the sunset together, neighbors coexisting for good or bad in our gorgeous little world.

Cañar Book Club

Well, the members of our virtual book club have been quiet since the holidays, but I’d love to hear what new books have come your way, and what you are reading/liking/hating. For my part, I’m reading both non-fiction (lunch) and fiction (bedtime), a practice I learned from my mother to keep two books going. (In her case, it was to keep the dullest one for bedtime so the narrative wouldn’t get her excited and keep her awake.) I don’t have that problem, so I’m reading over lunchtime The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World by Andrea Wulf. Heavy going, but I love the early history of “our” part of the world. Humboldt was an early explorer of Ecuador and, according to one map, I think he might have come through Cañar territory around 1801. At night, for relaxation, a fiction book, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, by Anuradha Roy. The result of a mix-up: I thought I was reading the new book by Arundahati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Took me a while to figure that out, given the similarity of authors’ names and poetic titles. Not the brilliance of Arundahati Roy, but I’m enjoying it.

All for now. Stay in touch!