Home building a lo Colepato

While in Ecuador, Jesse, my co-leader, and I arranged homestays for the students - and for us - with families in the nearby indigenous community of Colepato (say: Co-lee-paw-tow). It was one of the highlights of the trip for me, in no small part because I finally came to a better understanding of the people there, who can be a tough egg to crack.

Jesse and I chose for ourselves the house-on-the-top-of-the-hill, a spot on the ridge-top with an incredible view into two valleys. We thought we were getting away with something, living in the Colepato equivalent of the Hamptons. Of course, it occurred to us later that no farmer wants to live on the top of a hill, and that our family was among the poorest, not the richest.

Our "host dad", Don Segundo, had a whole gaggle of kids. I forget how many now, but 14 wouldn't be an over-estimate. It may have been more like 11. This house, made of cement, is characteristic of those built with remittances (money sent home), and actually belongs to Don Segundo's son, who works for the "system of pipes" in Queens, NY. His daughter is in NY, too - going and working in the US is pretty common for people in rural Ecuador.

So I helped Don Segundo with his project - building a shepherd's cabin in his pasture in the forest about a half-hour hike into the mountains from his house.

Working on this shack was interesting on a lot of levels. Superficially, the construction part was interesting - in my past life (before I was a star rock climber) I was a master homebuilder, and seeing how a shack is built in the Andes was totally fun. But more so, a lot of what we were teaching and learning in Ecuador was community-based conservation and preservation of habitat and ecosystems. And a lot of the deforestation that occurs in the tropical Andes is not timber harvest by evil corporations, but simply land cleared by subsistence farmers. So, really this was it(!), this was the deforestation of a tropical biodiversity hot spot, and I was helping!! It really felt no different than a backyard project at home, so seeing it in its greater context of vicious, malevolent environmental destruction required doing a lot of reading of publications by the World Wildlife Fund.

On to the construction:

The shack was framed in a generally normal way when I got there. We had to add a couple more rafters, cut from trees in the forest. The rafters were held on with large nails. The hammer, whose handle was made out of the leg of a chair, had sort of a jumbo-sized burr that quickly gave me a wicked blister:

(we also had a fairly small assortment of tools...)

After the rafters were attached we had to put on cross-pieces, to support the grass roof. At first we used more sticks for this, but then ran out and had to venture into the forest to cut bamboo.

The horizontals were held in place by tying them down with this peculiar vine that we also collected from the forest. Don Segundo told me the name of it at least 5 times, and eventually I remembered the name for the rest of the day, but of course I've forgotten again. Anyway, the stuff was just like rope - even thickness and workable just like rope. As we were tying the horizontals into place Don Segundo said something to me that I hope I'll never forget:

"when I was a kid we were, well, we were rather poor. We used to have to build the houses entirely with (this vine). We didn't have the things we have now. Now we have nails."

Lets be clear that I'm really not one for bullshit sound bites and trite epiphanic moments. I've known people who had "life changing" experiences every 45-or-so minutes, and I'm not one of them. But something about the way he said "we didn't have the things we have now - now we have nails" resonated with me. Thing is: he was serious. He really meant it - he may have even been strutting a little. "Now we have nails - life is GOOOOOOD......." Its a bit like the realization that nothing can ever be difficult when you're on flat ground (see a future post). Anyway, the moment captured my attention as a poignant reminder of how good we really have it. Fuckin' eh, brah. We've got fuckin' nails.

Eventually, one of Segundo's daughters, Fannie, showed up, bringing us lunch. It was, of course, rice, lentils, and a corn-like food called mote (say: mow-tay). I was hungry enough that I was actually able to eat the entire enormous portion they gave me. These guys can eat lentils in a volume that would astonish even a 15-year employee of the food court in a Kansas City shopping mall.

Eventually we finished framing the roof, and we figured we may as well start on cutting some grass for the roofing. I helped a bit, but Fannie was roughly a billion times better than me at cutting the necron grass (warning: google has never heard of "necron grass". It does know what a "necron heavy destroyer" is, who "necron" the final boss in Final Fantasy IX is, and "nekron", the embodiment of death who FIRST appeared in Tales From The Green Lantern Corps. Anyway, the lesson here is don't run around writing about necron grass in your next Nature paper, since it seems pretty likely that I don't know how to spell it.) Anyway, cutting the grass wouldn't seem like skilled labor, but I seemed to move the machete a helluva lot more than I moved the grass. I was getting pretty tired, too, so I mostly wandered around and took pictures while they worked.