It’s market day in Cañar, and as I walk the streets with friends visiting from Canada, I realize one of the things I love about this place is that it has not been found worthy of global chains. Here, you’ll see nary a McDonald’s (35,000 outlets in 119 countries) or Burger King (13,000 outlets in 79 countries); KFC (18,875 outlets in 118 countries) or Pizza Hut or Taco Bell (also owned by KFC), as we did in Mexico last year. In many historic towns, hotel and food chains are wrapped in sheep’s clothing of a colonial-style exterior with a gutted and “standardized” interior. (Photo below: That’s a Burger King, close right, in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas).

Cañar is still a town of small independent businesses, many at street level operated by families who live behind or above. Tiny little storefronts, one after the other, line the streets, many offering the same things: shoes, soft drinks, videos, cell phones, soccer balls, gloves, and – always popular with Cañari women – knee socks that say USA with a little American flag. Why? No one knows, but I included a pair of these socks in my first Cañar photo exhibit in Portland, twenty years ago.

Often, for the proprietors (most often proprietresses), these businesses serve a social function as much as, or even more than, an economic one, providing a venue for visiting with their neighbors and passersby. Many stores have a bench just inside the door where you can sit either waiting your turn to have an ID photo taken – at Estudio Inti for example – or just to chat with María Estela and catch up on the gossip. These benches also serve as a perch to keep an eye on the street. (The hand-painted blue bench in this store (unseen) belonged to Michael and me back in the 1990s, in our first Cañar storefront where we lived on weekends.)

In other cases, an older person might simply spend her last years sitting in her ancient store with her ancient merchandise, watching the world pass by. Customers are only a bother. For years I greeted this dour señora, who was obviously unwell, but she sat in her store every day until, one day, she was gone. Now her husband sits in her place. 

Cañar has been a trading center since pre-Inca times – strategically located in the sierra between the coast and the Amazon – and a market town since the Spanish conquest over 500 years ago. Every Sunday, people have come into town from the countryside to attend church, to buy and sell, to court, to get a change of scene from the monotony of daily survival by agriculture. The photo below was taken nearly 45 years ago by a Peace Corps volunteer, and the one below that by me a few months ago. Not a lot has changed.

I read recently that approximately two-thirds of the world’s population still live on three dollars a day or less. While this region has been enriched by remittances from migrants in the U.S. and Europe, many folks living in the countryside could still fall into that category. The weekly Feria Libre (free market) means many people come to town to sell their produce “on the street” without having to pay any overhead. These three women from the same village (hats and shawls give it away) sell their cheese sitting on the curb. No matter that they sit side-by-side with competing product; more important is keeping one another company while awaiting customers.

Or these men, who only need their trucks to display their wares:

Jacinto, our favorite taxi guy, is the president of his cooperative. The drivers own their own cars and wait together on a particular street corner, with a telephone attached to a wall. We call him when we or visitors need to be picked up at the house, and he once drove us to Guayaquil. I know his backstory (I scanned his family photo album as a favor), and he knows about us and our visitors. He still asks after my mamacita, who visited eight years ago.

What we do have here, and everywhere in Ecuador, are shelves and shelves filled with international brands: Nestle, Coca Cola, Pepsi, Doritos. One day I buy an orange juice drink called Del Valle, and see by the top that it’s owned by Coca Cola. Doritos is owned by Pepsico as is Tropicana. Ubiquitous Nescafe (hated by all true coffee lovers) is owned by Nestle, of course (largest food company in the world measured by revenues) as are Maggi, Cheerios, Carnation, and 2000 other brands, many named and targeted for Latin American markets. Our first little “super” market appeared at the same time as migrant dollars began to flow into Cañar.

A collateral effect of migration – leaving children behind with elderly grandparents, and sending money regularly – has meant a degradation of the traditional Andean diet (potatoes, beans, barley, peas, favas, guinea pig) and the introduction of junk food, called chatara, meaning literally “junk.” Grandparents buy quick-cooking foods for growing children: noodles, ramen, rice, hotdogs. And kids buy all sorts of sugary drinks and sweets, with the result that nearly every child under five years has black stubs for teeth.

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And we still have this – every Sunday!

For Michael and me, shopping is personal, a pleasure, and a chance for a social transaction we would not otherwise have. During the construction of the house, the folks at Michael’s hardware store became trusted friends (with credit and discount): Gladys, Maria Elena, Klever. We invited them to the housewarming celebration.For years I’ve bought roses from the medicinal plant woman in the Feria Libre, and although I don’t know her name, and she doesn’t know mine, she notices when I’ve been gone, and I ask after her family. Seeing her sweet face is one reward of my weekly routine.As I finish writing this, it is another Sunday morning, this one gray and rainy. Michael is just leaving for the market, to check in on César and see what he has for fresh fish today. “Mira Miquito – pescados frescos!”

Last week our consulting agronomist came by, took a look, and said our amaranth was ready to harvest. (The birds already knew this – they’ve been busy helping themselves the past couple of weeks). A slight shake of a catkin-like head brought down a cascade of tiny seeds (the little yellow specks in the photo above). And such tiny seeds! How many plants will it take to make a pound of this gluten-free- -pseudocereal-with-eight-essential-amino-acids, I wonder? It also makes me realize why amaranth is not a popular crop here. It takes the same amount of land, watering, weeding and fumigating that a crop of barley or wheat takes, with much less payoff (except nutrition-wise). Still, it has been an absolute delight these past six months to watch this beautiful plant go through its stages as we glanced out our windows, and I will certainly miss the sight of it next year, when ho-hum corn or potatoes will be back. 

So on a very cold day (about 50 degrees; the Andean winter is upon us) Jose María – who plants our field and whose harvest this is – came by and we followed the agronomist’s instructions: cut off the catkin-heads and put them in a sack, trying not to shake too many seeds onto the ground. Lay out the heads on a tarp for several days to dry in the sun. The three of us set to work with clippers, but we kept stopping to show off the most spectacular plants, and take photos. That’s quinoa behind Jose Maria, which won’t be ready for a couple of weeks, if the birds leave anything. Too bad we’ll miss it. For that harvest the agronomist said he will bring a threshing machine. The amaranth was not enough to warrant a machine, and in fact, in only took us about an hour to finish the harvest.

Here’s what’s left of the field, with quinoa on the left and sangorache, another form of amaranth, on the right, still waiting for harvest.

While the seed heads await their shaking/threshing.

I promised Michael’s recipe for quinoa, but all I can say at this point is that he made paella (without measuring a thing) the famous Spanish dish, using quinoa instead of the usual arborio rice. The result was tasty, but not as good, I think, as with rice. But we’ll keep trying! Thanks again for all who sent recipes.Today is our last day in Cañar for 2014. It takes about three non-stop days to strip the interior of the house of its character and color – hangings, throws, pillows, rugs, blankets, bedding – wash and store everything in trunks and bags and big plastic containers in a storeroom. That’s my job, along with many trips into town to take care of last details, such as submitting a formal request to the phone company to reduce my Internet service for six months. (Didn’t get it right the first time; was sent home to compose another.) On the last day, I cover the bookcases, kitchen shelves, dining table and living room with cloths- old sheets and the like. Michael’s job is to shut down the mechanics of the house – pumps, gas, water, hot water heaters, espresso machine – and to put up the shutters that cover every window and door. The house grows dark, the only light from the interior patio. It’s time to leave.

And some final farewells, one from Mama Michi and her daughter Mariana, one of our scholarship women who graduated yesterday from the University of Riobamba in public health.

Our final act is rather ignominious: we call a taxi to take us to the Pan American, where we stand beside the road with our bags, waiting for bus to Guayaquil to pass by. Others are waiting too, and it’s sometimes a scramble to get on and find seats. If there are none, we scramble off and wait for the next bus. And if there are no buses, as happened one Sunday, we hire a taxi at the last minute. We’ve developed a technique: I jump on fast and grab the seats while Michael stays to see the bags stashed underneath by the driver’s assistant. Only then can we relax into the four-hour ride to Guayaquil, where we’ll get a midnight plane to Miami, then another to Chicago, then finally arriving in Portland 18 hours later.

It’s been extremely cold and windy in Cañar these past couple of weeks, and we can’t wait for a Portland summer. Regards to all, until next January (unless I get inspired to write about Portland). In the meantime, I invite all to stay in touch.

Guayaquil airport, 8:10 PM, June 24, 2014.

I grew up on the western slope of the Colorado Rockies, where tumbleweeds were a constant in my small-town landscape –  rolling across the sagebrush desert and down the roads, piled up against every fence. When I was six and we lived in the country, my fantasy play involved using tumbleweeds as umbrellas (rain was an important part of fantasy in that high dry climate, there being very little of it). And of course I grew up hearing – every morning on KRAI country radio, it seemed – Tumbling Tumbleweeds by The Sons of the Pioneers. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UiSMyyj-Ac)

I hadn’t thought much about tumbleweeds until recently, when I began to write this blog and discovered they are in the same family as the gorgeous quinoa and amaranth growing in the field behind our house. In fact, the main reason I’m writing this blog, which I think might be the last before we leave on June 24, is because I’m so in love with the view outside our windows.

Here is quinoa, at about six months. As it ripens and grows ever brighter, it turns from a sort of lavenderish pink to a pinkish red. And when the sun is setting, the reflected light inside the house seems to glow with its shades. I can’t stop photographing it. And here is Lourdes, our architect on a visit from Cuenca, standing amidst the amaranth, in the same field alongside the quinoa. Amaranth (amaranto in Spanish) might be even more beautiful and strange than quinoa.And finally, in this magical field, we have sangorache, a hybrid of amaranth. Lourdes collected the leaves and made a hot alcoholic tea, with lemon and Zhumir, that brightened our evening tremendously and impressed our guests from Puerto Rico. So, believe it or not, these three plants are all species of goosefoot, a huge genus that includes the tumbleweeds of my youth. The subspecies in our field is a chenopod, closely related to beetroots, spinach, and Swiss chard. Our particular chenopod family produces tiny edible seeds called pseudocereals, not real grains like wheat or barley because our plants not part of the true grass family. 

Still with me?

The seeds of the amaranth are tiny, and you wonder how anyone figured out how to cook and eat them. Here they are in the hand of one of the agronomists who has been consulting with us and Jose Maria (our compadre who plants the field). The agronomists are part of an effort to reintroduce quinoa to this region as a cash crop, but so far Ecuador is way behind Bolivia and Peru as producers.

Quinoa (the Spanish name is derived from the Quichua, kinwa) originated in the Andean region of Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia and Peru, where it was domesticated for human consumption 3,000 to 4,000 years ago.

Despite it’s amazing qualities (near-perfect protein source, anti-oxidant, anti-inflammatory, maybe even cholesterol-reducer) and popularity in the U.S., Michael has yet to be converted. Nor is it popular in local kitchens. Years ago, quinoa had to be washed and washed and rinsed multiple times to rid it of its bitter coating of saponins. This took time and, for households with no running water, too much trouble. Most families here prefer rice or potatoes for starch, and for their grain, barley or máchica, roasted, ground-up barley.  For Michael, who loves our local potatoes, of which there are several varieties, he can”t see the appeal of quinoa. Nonetheless, at my request he has cooked it a couple of times, with so-so results. But sitting at his chess table every morning and watching the birds feast on the pseudocereals in our field, he did feel compelled to make a scarecrow.Well dear friends, I was hoping for a harvest to finish this story, but I think that won’t happen for another week or so. This means you’ll probably hear from me once more before our Cañar sojourn is over for 2014. Meanwhile, for those of you who cook with quinoa, send some recipes – let’s try to convert Michael.