La Salsa

My feet don't keep pace and my hips don't click like a Latino woman's. But I don't care. I made it, I'm here. I'm looking up and I'm laughing. And I'm in Latin America.

I lose myself in the music. Swinging and twirling with partner after partner--I forget that I arrived to this nightclub alone. I forget that, everyday, I'm constantly arriving everywhere alone. The floor like a beating drum strikes a rhythm in my bleeding heart, and I watch the room fly by in lights and colors. I forget for a moment who I am, and just be.

A Brief Stay with the Torres Family, Intag

Their wood-planked house sits on the side of a steep hill in San Alberto. Almost too steep to support agriculture, but the Spanish had taken over the flatter lands to build haciendas during the conquest, and this is where the farmers migrated with their families. Maybe for them the migration had proved to be worth it, because this land is beautiful. Silent, too. Hours away from the meat hawkers, car honks, cat calls and blasting music. There's only one noise that permeates throughout Ecuador no matter where you are: Barking dogs. Even the ones with homes, they've all gone feral.

The Torres family. Father, mother and kids age 16-28, all of whom show home at every opportunity to help out on the farm. The ones still in high school take the hour walk at dusk in time to prepare dinner, shut out the lights and wake early enough the next day to do chores before they make their descent. The ones with jobs stay in Cuellaje at the family's second home until the weekends. While American adolescents view their party-drenched weekends as proper justification for their grueling work weeks, the Torres family children trek home and spray fungicide, milk cows and prepare meals.

So that's what I did with them. Aside from providing some highly improvised entertainment, I tried my best to become accustomed and integrate into their way of life. If someone were to ever ask me where I learned my Spanish, my ultimate response would have to be: In Intag.  But Spanish was just a gateway into all else I learned there. In Intag is where I learned the culture of real Ecuadorian people; where I composed my first song on guitar; where I learned the true process of preparing a meat dish; where I learned what it means to be truly alone, and isolated; where I learned how to reach out to those around me; and where I learned what a great blessing that skill can be.

I'd spend most of my days with Cecilia, the oldest daughter, and the only one who remains home all year. It was with her I grew the closest, eventually sharing dreams and frustrations and little life meaning. But I became most intrigued by the youngest daughter, Sylvia, and gravitated toward her whenever she showed home from school. When I'd pop out of my room she'd shoot me a sinister smile and say, "Heyyyy Tarraaaaa," and we'd giggle incessantly. When I'd stumble on treks she'd look behind and laugh and tell me to keep going, rather than the usual "Are you OKAY?? Do you need me to carry your bag??" It was probably unintentional, but she kept me challenged, and allowed me the space to learn on my own. Carlos was the oldest son, who was home on vacation. He had been studying for six years to become a priest. Although he frowned when I said I wasn't religious, he was the one who always took the extra time out to slow down his speech and make sure I was caught up with dinner conversation. He'd play music and sing for me his romantic songs and teach me how to play as well. The other two kids, of middle age, worked at the Internet center and hospital in Cuellaje. I didn't have the opportunity to spend as much time with them.

The mother, Claudia, bared on her shoulders the majority of the domestic weight, a weight unimaginable to a first-world citizen. I don't think this is often the case, but at the time I was there the men, including my host father Francisco, were working in the MINCA carving out roads in the mountainside. Claudia and Francisco would often times be falling asleep at the dinner table, but waited there until the dishes had been cleared from the table and all the kids had used the bathroom. Always the first awake and the last in bed.

And then there was Lucho. An old, grumpy man with a lion's face. I could barely make out the Spanish words he slipped between his front gums. Often times I'd catch him at the laundry basin, stripped nearly naked and pouring buckets of water over his head. He had some fear of the shower. At dinner, the whole family would talk about him to me and, sitting at the end of the table popping kernels of corn of their cobs, would never look up. No relation to the family, they only took him in some years ago out of pure compassion and the fact that his own family wouldn't take him back. He was a "malcreado" as they say.

This family worked to keep their land thriving while participating in a community with little to no financial security, a faulty infrastructure and corrupt behind-the-scene practices. This place is a hotbed on which to start laying the groundwork for development, yet practically none has entered. In other words, their latest installment was electricity. This family showed me more strength, courage, hope and happiness than I ever thought possible. They also showed me pain and suffering, anger and distress. They were raw, and they were human. And the experience cannot be matched by anything else.

A Day in the Life, Intag

Here are some photos that provide a more accurate account of what my life was like in Intag, the Cloud Forest of Northern Ecuador, one of the most beautiful places I've ever had the opportunity to stay.

Milking cows: The morning regimen

This dead cow skin would soon become a winter sweater for this calf.

After milking cows: Feed the chickens

Lay out the corn to roast a bit before feeding and cooking the next day

Lunch time

Visiting the fam while they're makin' roads

They appreciate any entertainment to break up the day

To the left: "The Prof" To the Right: Host Father

Prof wanting picture on precarious structure

Walking to the water mill

Chillin' in the creek

Waiting for water mill introduction

Finding Alicia after school, taking the truck back to San Antonio

My favorite sisters 

Heading home 

A visit to prison

*Names have been changed to protect the already incarcerated.
*Not suitable for children

"You don't 'hype up' in the wake of tragedy. You underwrite, letting the events speak for themselves." -Gay Talese

"You have to know someone to enter," an Ecuadorian lady with bright red lipstick and a crocheted blue sweater told me in line after I had asked what the easiest way was for a foreigner to enter the women's prison in the North of Quito.

I didn't know anyone. The only reason I found myself staying in line outside of the prison is because a couple of days before I left Portland my favorite yoga instructor told me that if I were to do anything out of the ordinary in Quito, this would have to be it.

"What if I don't know a name?" I asked.

"You have to find one or you won't enter."

"What if I just show the guards some gifts I want to bring?"

Her eyes lit up. AH! She realized, "Just say you are a volunteer from the United States, and want to bring presents to the woman from the United States. Then they will let you in. But stay in line with me." She grabbed my arm, and once the metal doors synched open, dragged me past the guards toward the check-in.

"Who are you here to see?" The guard asked as she flipped through my passport.

I recited what the woman had dished out a few minutes earlier.

She locked eyes with the guard standing by. "Veronica," she wrote on the form, but never once gave me a name. "Pasale," she said. Pass through.

I proceeded to the security stand, where I was searched head-to-toe along with my bag, in which I could have hid countless commodities never to be detected.

Walking onto the basketball court, the scene came straight out of a movie. Clicks of women with bulging arms and sweatpants lounged around, smoking cigarettes and selling whatever they could get their hands on. A slight nervousness ran through my body. How in the hell am I supposed to find "Veronica" from the United States?

"Psssst," a guard grabbed my arm and led me to a chained up door. Three women peered out from the foot-wide crack. "Who you here to see?" they half-interrogated.

"I'm here to see Veronica." I said with a straight face.

One woman led me through the dining hall, past the vegetable stand and through to a small cafe, where I immediately recognized Veronica, sitting at a colorless plastic table that looked like it came straight out of k-mart with two Nigerian women, dressed like princesses, and who I would learn was her boyfriend, also a Nigerian.

Veronica creaked her head around toward me as if it was about to snap. "How you know me?" Veronica sneered at me in her hot-pink T and leggings, with dyed red hair to match.

I returned the dour glare, but quickly softened my eyes again. "I don't. I just have some extra things to get rid of before I leave the country, and I thought someone in this place might want them. So they sent me to you."

"Sit the *f* down! Whatchu bring me?"

I slid onto the plastic stump. "From New York?" I asked.

"Hell *f*in' yea girl. You bring drugs?"

"Nah. But I brought some nice toiletries and a couple of books," I snickered.

"I tell you what. You're the first American to visit me here. That's awfully nice of you to bring me some shit, especially some shit I could use." She began flipping through the "self-help" book and reading passages out loud. "Man, I tell you, these Americans, they always talkin' about they emotions and shit. How they feeeel and what's botherin' them on the inside, like it got any practicality in the real world. You and me though?" She nudged me like I was already an old-time friend. "You and me, we ain't gotta worry about none a' that weak shit."

I nodded at her with vulnerable eyes; ones she couldn't detect. Vulnerability is beyond her reality, I thought. It was this humility I had been needing.

After some questions about accommodations, a little girl with tight curls and toys in her hands ran up and laid her head in Veronica's lap.

"This is my baby girl," she said.

Suddenly, I began to sense strongly all the children's presence. I looked around. There were kids playing everywhere I decided to look. Kids crying, being yelled at, being held, drinking soda.

"How long is she aloud to stay in here with you?" I asked.

'Till I'm gettin' out, baby! So soon! Nobody's takin' my baby girl from me."

"Ah. So what do you plan on doing when you get out?" I felt anxious for an answer, I didn't know if these questions were too soon.

"Whatchu think? They same shit that got me in here. I'm trafficking drugs. I need some money to pay back this debt and get my ass home," she said emphatically.

Everything in this prison costs money. The rooms, the food, the toiletries. Jobs on site are sparse and pay a dollar a day, the cost of the room. So if there is no outside help for these women, they're forced into debt and have to find some outlet while there to make ends meet, or else they feel their best option is back onto the streets to sell drugs until they can get "back on their feet again."

Of course, there are always the guards who are willing to pay a little bit for some time alone with the prisoners.

"Why do you think there are so many babies runnin' around in here?" Veronica's boyfriend later said to me in confidence.

Veronica was a tough cookie. I learned quickly why all the guards gave me a puzzled look when I'd mention her name. She had been transferred from Guayaquil to Quito due to starting too many fights. Not that there are better rehabilitation programs in Quito. I'm told there's not much different. Just guards getting fed up.

She didn't intend to stop fighting.

"I'll do what I gotta do to get my baby some diapers and juice," she yelled while we sat on her bed. "Nobody here's gonna think they can mess with me."

"No one messes with Veronica," the Nigerian woman laughed. Her presence was so calm in comparison. I later learned she had found God.

Veronica's boyfriend asked her to calm down. A wind of pain washed through his eyes whenever her temper rose up. "I'm just worried about you baby," he'd say. "Something serious can happen to you in here."

Veronica laid back on her bed next to me and spread her legs to resonate in us more soundly her following point. "What the fuck you think Imma do all day? Sit like every other American motha and tickle my pussy all day while watchin' soap operas, not showerin' until the afternoon? Imma hustla, and Imma do what I need to do to raise my daughter and get up outta this place. You feel me?" She nudged me again.

Luckily, she didn't give me time to respond. This woman was wound up. She tore pages out of one of the books I gave her, wrote down numbers for her man to call. I could guess through the whispers exchanged what those numbers were for, but I'd rather not jump to conclusions, especially on a blog.

Then she hopped up and left the room in search for her daughter, who'd been downstairs playing on her own for awhile. The women make it a point to keep the children safe, though.

Veronica showed back with some food to offer me. I took a bite and said I was full. It was an excruciating process, forcing it through my throat. I don't know if it was the taste itself, or the fact I was in a prison, and assumed the food could not be good, especially after Veronica had told me how many times she'd gotten nearly fatally ill from it (not sure if that's dramatized or not).

"I assure you this plate is good," she pushed the plate back in my hands.

"Honestly, I just don't want to eat it right now, thanks though," I had to refuse, I felt I had a right to. She inhaled it anyway, and I'm glad she got some food in her stomach. I didn't need any from her.

The bell rang, and a bustle started on the floor below. Visiting hours were coming to a close.

"Keep this girl safe when you get outside, alright? I don't want nothin' happenin' to her." Her boyfriend nodded and pulled out a bit of money to give to her.

"Yes. Thanks baby. Imma turn this into double reallll quick."

He shook his head and walked away.

"Hey girl!" Veronica shouted from down the hall. "Come back and see me Wednesday! There ain't shit else to do in Quito anyhow!"

"I'll be back," I smiled, and turned the corner back onto the basketball court.

I thought of offering a reflection, but it's simply too early. I think this story speaks for itself, and you can form your own opinions. I do know that during my three months travelling all throughout Ecuador, this experience is right up there for one of the most powerful.

Intag, an Introduction

The hidden, lesser known Ecuadorian cloud forest region of Intag is a natural spectacle. Just about 70 km north of Otavalo, its short distance is highly deceiving. The route to Intag is not an easy one, and travelling 70 km by bus takes you on winding detours through the mountains; the landscape and vegetation thickening with each advance. During the dry season dust will dart through the windows and infiltrate your eyes and nose.

The town of Cuellaje lies deep in the Intag region. An isolated, tranquil town that is often regarded as "boring;" there are absolutely no restaurants and the closest thing to a bar is a house attached to a corner tienda. In other words, it's not a town for the faint of heart. The morning milk truck is the only efficient way to travel to the seven parishes nearby, and other than that you'll have to know someone with a motor bike. Staying for an extended amount of time and getting to know the people is the only way to find comfort in this style of living. The benefit is understanding a part of Ecuador many travelers fail to even hear about.

View of Cuellaje from the Parish

Somehow this remote region has been washed out by Western culture. There was nearly no trace of traditional clothing. The Sunday vendors merely had pirated DvDs, watches and second or third-line designer wear. I fear this lack of aesthetic culture might cause a hindrance to the development of eco-tourism there, when the Andes is a road away and the Amazon within hours. Luckily, they've got the land. If the mining companies don't end up earning rights to tear through it, that is.

This area has been plagued by controversy stemming from the big-buck mining industries in Ecuador. I tried to grab hold of this controversy while I was there, but I had limited contact with English speakers and absolutely no method of transport to talk to higher up officials who were more directly connected to the subject. But I did find an important man in the community: My host father.


While these subsistance farmers seems to have technical skills inscribed in their brains through an almost collective consciousness, they face many problems securing the future of their crops and livestock. The largely sought after bulls are often too expensive, and inbreeding churns out weakened and disabled offspring, threatening profits from milk. "You can see it in the people too; disabilities from inbreeding," the volunteer coordinator told me.

Slash-and-burn is a serious threat to food security, weakening fields until they are unable to produce sufficient yields of maize. Each year families will increase their usage of fungicide to balance out the Ph of the soil until it's deemed unusable. While purchasing this fungicide is a time-saver, it's hurting their profits. Sometimes at night while I'd be trekking back to my house I'd cock my head up and sigh at the fires, knowing fully well these weren't natural. But until a better alternative comes along, or eco-tourists provide the necessary time and labor to instill greater methods into their minds, these people will use slash-and-burn like it's their second religion.


One of the most lucrative crops from this region is the Agave plant, which produces thick fibers used for making baskets and rope. Often times the fibers are donated to women's collectives, who weave the baskets. This type of plant is also one of the most grueling plants to cultivate and harvest, along with sugar cane.

But all these issues can seem like an easy fix until you actually live with and understand the minds of the people in this region, as well as the obstacles they face if they are to openly invite development to occur.

Agave basket