Journey to the coast
Trip Start
Aug 29, 2008
1
7
9
Trip End
May 29, 2009
Quito, Ecuador,
Ecuador
Thursday, January 8, 2009
We arrive to a scattered cloud of strangers, foreigners and locals, and make our way to the spectacle to which everyone is turned: a three-storey hotel of brick and bamboo fully aflame. A man stands on a ladder, reaching towards a window on the top floor. Someone is handing him mattresses from the inside as he throws them to another man on the ground, he drags them far from the burning building. The crowd shouts, "¡Vaya! ¡Vaya!" (Get out! Get out!) to the person who is still inside.
Full of nervous energy, unsure of what we can do to help or who to even ask what to do, we jog in a confused line to the other side of the building. There, in a large dirt field, stands the entire town, matched by a wave of local and foreign tourists who had come to Canoa to enjoy the New Years weekend. Hundreds of people standing and watching, the only other evident source of light besides the flame that rages in front of us is the glow of cell phones and cameras, people trapping the event in their electronic memory. An ocean of water not but two blocks away and a sea of people staring blankly, dumbly, unsure what could be done, or who to ask what to do, paralyzed by indecision. The 7 of us stand with them and watch the hotel burn.
A few nights earlier I took an overnight bus from Quito to the Coastal town of Bahía de Caraquez, only 35 minutes from Canoa by motor boat followed by a short taxi ride. Reclined in a back-row seat of an Ecuadorian coach bus, I woke up as the sun rose and looked out the window at people, houses and livelihoods.
Honestly, my feelings have been numbed by my cultural upbringing. My first experience seeing extreme poverty was not as shocking to me as my reaction to it. I felt very little for the people I saw. Though deeply saddened by structures that separate, marginalize and oppress, my spirit seemed indifferent to the people themselves. Christian Children Fund commercials, UNICEF brochures, the Hollywood backdrop of an anonymous "developing country"... Once I saw extreme poverty standing in front of me in the flesh, it was still as if it were on a movie screen, or part of a photograph in a magazine that would disappear as soon as I flip the page to the next article.
I sat and watched the window. Houses the size of my living room, made out of bamboo and sitting on stilts, the endless number of incomplete cement brick homes that seem to freckle all of Ecuador, passing the bus window like frames on 35mm film. But real life differs distinctly from the commercials and pamphlets that sell you charity; here you see people smiling, playing cards, children kicking around a soccer ball, mothers holding their babies on their back, wrapped tightly in a blanket-turned-sling as they sell fruit to passerby. You see real people in a setting you don't expect, in one that makes you not feel for them as victims, but as a reflection of your own humanity, with stories, histories and wisdom. Being surrounded by this unavoidably for the past 4 months has caused me to think about where I come from.
Where I come from you don't have to think about poverty if you don't want to. Everyone seems to live in adequately sized houses. You hear about people who don't have enough to eat, but everyone you know has a full 'fridge and cupboards, even if it came from the sale rack at the local grocery store. Good people read the newspaper and volunteer at the food shelf, they know that poverty exists. But to you it still seems theoretical, almost hypothetical, indescribably distant from the life you know. You continue driving your very own car, coming home to your two-storey house, bathing in unlimited running water and falling asleep with a stomach full of food and job security.
This ocean of wealth in reality stands not far from the deteriorating living conditions of people in poverty all over the world (at home or abroad). Yet everyone stands watching the hotel burn, frozen, unsure of what they should do or if they should do it.
Is the answer to this inequality simply sacrificing water to put out the flame? Or does this understand "the poor" in the same way as our televisions and magazines: passive victims in need of aid from generous foreigners? Is it not our place to intervene in the struggle of others, allowing them to lead their own resistance, shape their own destiny? Or do our decisions and our social location contribute to this inequality? Something clearly has to be done, but who can I ask to know what to do or how to do it?
I stand idle, a dumb look of indecision drawn on my face, and I watch the flame grow.
