Freezing cold, mingas, and los chiquitos

I have one word for you: BRRRRRRRRRRR!

I had no idea it was this cold just thirty minutes away from Baños. The altitude really makes a huge difference, and as you climb away from the rainforest the temperature drops dramatically. The nights are rainy and the mornings FREEZING. I had to buy a new alpaca sweater because I was becoming an ice cube. It´s so cold, I started to wonder if I can stay here for a few months, but I can always head down to Baños in the afternoons or on the weekends, which I definitely will do, considering how cold it is up here. Baños is so warm and modern, it´s only thirty minutes away, but it´s a world apart. There in Baños the tourists roam the streets, the tour agencies hawk their services, the thermal springs teem with visitors and locals. Here the women walk around quietly spinning their wool. A different language cuts in and out of the Spanish conversations. The men in their long black ponchos talk on the street because there is little else to do.

The other day, the community called a ¨minga¨ to fix the school up. A minga is a community event kind of like a barn-raising. Everyone who has students in the school must come to help or they receive a fine for not doing their part in the community. Mingas are a great way to get a bunch of people to do a large job quickly, if it weren´t for the socializing. One man suggested they just get a tractor to do it, and after that, everyone refused to work more. The problem was, they had to wait for the municipal tractor guy to have his lunch break, then they had to compensate him for using his lunch break to take the tractor to the schoolyard to level the ground for the basketball court. The yard was half-leveled until Friday, when the tractor guy finally decided to come. ¨I hate mingas¨ R tells me.

R owns a place down in Ambato, the nearest city, which, like Baños, is thirty minutes away, but in the other direction. Ambato is cold like Salasaca. Last night, we went to a comedy play in Ambato, a play about corruption in South America, and I slept on a massage table at R´s closed-down spa, a much more comfortable spot than my old bed of rocks.

A few of the younger children (we call them ¨los chiquitos¨, the little ones), who don´t know that Quichua, Spanish, and English are different languages and just say whatever in whichever language have mistakenly decided that I speak Quichua. This probably stemmed from the pushing them on the tire game in which I threw in a little bit of my very little Quichua vocabulary. They would scream ¨ñukaka¨ (me, me) and I would shout back ¨canca¨ (you?) and they would say ¨ari¨(yes!). This was a mistake. Now they come running up to me saying things that sound like cuchikunkikukuchunkiminimu and they don´t understand why I answer them with blank stares. I did at least understand the three year old who ran up to me crying ¨carry me, carry me¨ in Quichua.

The Internet gods are, not smiling, but kind of grinning slightly, upon Salasaca this afternoon so I am going to pray to them that this post gets put up. It took me five minutes just to open Blogger.

I will be in Baños this weekend, probably hiking with R, and going out later Saturday night. Maybe I could squeeze in some phone calls.