At The Tungurahua Tea Room: Planting Radishes, Raising Awareness

*Disclaimer: This blog entry is not about refrigerators.

"Look at the mess we've got ourselves into, just because we invited a gringo to eat some bananas." --Colonel Aureliano Buendia, from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude

Photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/meghanhatch

Carol told me her favorite book growing up was The Secret Garden. While her garden, The Tungurahua Tea Room, may be no secret, it certainly is a wonder, and from many an Ecuadorian point of view, it's a mystery, an incongruity, and a waste of time. They think she's crazy--just another gringa loca transplanted here from the land of promises above Mexico. Despite her bountiful garden, they don't think she knows the first thing about farming. And this is partially true. She came here not even realizing she wanted to have this garden-meets-farm, nor knowing how to do it, and so her mind was wide and free as it began to take shape, and her methods are often...unconventional.

You see, Carol doesn't hate weeds. If a wild cabbage seeds itself in the middle of the mandarin orange orchard, so be it. "If it wanted to grace us here, with its growth, well it's more than welcome. We'll just plant around it." This is one Carol-inian sentiment, and it's not just another hippie notion. While we certainly do an extraordinary amount of weeding, nothing is wasted. Some of them are edible--the dandelion and wild mustard have leaves that spice up a salad. Nettles, though brutal on your hands, are medicinal in many, many ways. With them we can make a tea, a poultice, a soup. Some have flowers that become bouquets on our little log table. And those that are, sigh, simply just weeds, those get tossed into the compost pile where they will become rich soil, or burned on the bon fire to become ash for fertilizer.

Her neighbors hate her living walls--cane grass and agave plants, trailing vines of passion fruit and tall spiky palms. Their dried leaves and baby fruits fall into their yards and paths. They throw the broken branches and the often still ripe fruits back over onto her property. "Why can't she build a normal concrete wall like the rest of us?"

Tobacco, which grows wild here, is something that Carol cultivates--not as a cash crop or as something to smoke, but as a natural pesticide. The leaves can be soaked for a week in water and then sprayed on plants to keep bugs away. The prolific seeds of the plants are easily distributed by birds and the wind, which means they often end up in the neighbors fields, sewing tobacco all around town. For many Ecuadorians here in Baños, tobacco is a weed to be eradicated--this is maybe how they view Carol, too. Many now prefer chemical pesticides, having left behind the traditional methods of farming in their culture in favor of "modern technology" which the world laughably lauds as "progress."

When you see women at the market, their baskets full of gleaming mangoes and tender avocadoes, you can easily imagine both woman and fruit have come from a utopian farm somewhere in the mountaneous distance, where they've cheefully grown and hand chosen each and every one just the day before, cows grazing dumbly and happily in the pastoral scene. The truth looks more like young women and men emerging from an entrance to a field somewhere alongside the PanAmerican highway, wearing a bright orange hazmat suit, goggles, gasmask, and a plastic backpack full of poison.


How is this better? How is this progress? Becoming a free market means having to compete with global markets. Competing successfuly means moving at a pace that cannot be supported by the simpler, more patient, healthier practices of the past. And too often, despite trying to change "for the better," all collapses anyway.

Carol does not have to worry about feeding her family, or supporting herself, or her land, from the produce she produces. Her utopia hinges on the resources she had at her disposal upon moving here. Her farm is worlds apart from the farms surrounding her. They need to make money. Carol wants peace. She can enjoy the luxury of experimentation. Her strawberries can fail, having generated maybe one or two plants out of 30 that bore fruit, and she can say, "That's alright. What matters is that they grew. We'll try again next time." The woman on the hill next door, with the tent-like green houses full of hundreds of tomato plants can't just "try again next time." But this is not to say that chemicals are therefore the only answer, the only way the poor campesino woman can survive. So what is it that stops her from using tobacco water instead of chemicals? A misguided belief that the chemicals are foolproof, that they guarantee the bugs won't destroy the crop, and a deliberately disseminated campaign of fear that methods like tobacco are "a risk." And yes, protecting hundreds of plants as opposed to 30 requires a different kind of diligence, but the earth was never really meant to support hundreds upon hundreds of just one solitary crop on one patch of ground. The tobacco would work, but as family farms turn into gigantic agrobusinesses, the integrity of the fields, the cycle of nature that works best and has worked best for thousands of years becomes disrupted and destroyed. Whereas before, if you had tomatoes and corn and cabbage all growing around each other, the corn bugs and the tomato bugs and the cabbage bugs would all sort of cancel each other out, and if one crop did fail, you had two others to rely on. Now, if the tomatoes go, there's nothing to back you up.

It would be easy to point fingers and blame the Ecuadorians (or the Africans or the Peruvians, or the fill in the blank) for their poor, impetuous, blind-faith kinds of choices. But what choice have they other than the limited ones thrust and forced upon them by powers greater than they are? Maybe Carol and her farm are a faint suggestion of a different kind of possible choice.

As Ecuador swiftly hurtles into the "modern" era, gently and steadily shedding this label of "3rd world," the 1st world steadily and not so gently rushes in to reap the benefits of a population who want so desperately to "advance." When you care to look closely, foreign investments and the farce of international development--which more often than not ends up destroying not developing--are revealed as hydroelectric dam projects that have poisoned rivers, displaced ancient cultures, decimated ecosystems and community networks that stretch for miles and millenia. They are oil fields where rainforests used to grow. They are giant supermarkets importing apples from Chile when you could just as easily buy them from the woman up the road--but she can't afford to sell hers for less than twenty cents apiece. It's dollarization, when the US dollar replaced the Ecuadorian Sucre in 2000, that purportedly saved the Ecuadorians but that now means people can't afford to keep their farms and so they sell off land that has been in their families for centuries. Who buys it? Well, a lot of them are being bought up by Colombian drug lords who are seeing their fields sprayed with an agent-orange like substance in Colombia, compliments of the United States Government, and so they're moving here. 30,000 Colombian refugees live in shanty towns on the Ecuadorian border because their crops died, and they fled lest their children die, too. This is modernity. This is what it looks like to emerge from a so-called darkness. It looks like hell.

Carol told me some of Ecuador's recent history through her eyes. She's been here 14 years, the last 7 of which have seen Ecuador going through its most rapid rate of change. It used to be that lines in the airport stretched for what seemed like miles. People traveling back to Ecuador traveled with everything imaginable--refrigerators, ovens, new tires, garden hoses--because none was readily available here. Then: Dollarization. Walk through Quito today and you can get Japanese meditation stones, french cheeses, Converese sneakers, not to mention refrigerators and tires. It is easy to mistake the flashing lights and bars and cute restaurants and new pickup trucks and other western amenities that now abound here in Ecuador for "progress" and "success." It all depends on how you measure such things, and whether or not you take them at face value or dare to search out their underside.

After 2000, the Ecuadorian economy became "lower risk" and "more stable" for foreign investment, and suddenly anyone could import anything, which meant that stores and markets were flooded, mostly with cheap crap from China. This country is drowning in plastic, drowning in disposable garbage that infiltrates and crowds out their culture and all things cultural. And they buy it. People who hadn't needed a refrigerator for centuries suddenly needed one simply because it was available. So, they saved and saved and spent their money, which maybe could have sent the youngest child to school, and inevitably, in few months, maybe a year, it broke. They can't afford to fix it or buy a new one, and so it gets tossed to rot somewhere, usually beside a river in town, poisoning the ground, and the Ecuadorian goes back to buying milk from a neighbor farmer and not from Nestle, and back to leaving their eggs on the counter--which, by the way, is totally harmless anyway.

This flooding of a formerly local, indigenous -goods market with foreign imports also meant a decrease in the profits for Ecuadorian people themselves. The dollar meant stabilization of a rapidly devaluaing sucre, but it also meant $1 ended up having a lot less local purchasing power than 25,000 sucres. But why had the sucred plummeted so far so fast? Partially because of national debt--owing foreign investors more than they could ever pay back for those aforementioned so-called development projects.

No, I have not flown south and become a raging communist. I am not saying that Ecuadorians (or Africans, or fill in the blank) don't need or shouldn't have refrigerators. But development could be more cautious; it should be. And in our global society where greed and want trump everything requiring patience, caution is thrown into the poisonous wind. Those who benefit, those who horde the resources and windfall with which they can escape the catastrophic fall when it comes, those people are not the Ecuadorians selling tomatoes in the market. Sell your land for a satelite dish. Sell your soul for a can of Coke. These are not just hyper-reactionary statements. In the longest run, they will be the truth. They will be the the only things we'll be able to say when we look back if we don't start doing something different now. How do we stop the corporotocracy steamroller, where those manning the controls live by privatization, capitalist zeal and corruption, all in the name of an insatiable greed that snares everyone and benefits few? Maybe we look to Carol and how she and her farm fit into all of this...

The Tungurahua Tea Room offers an example of an alternative kind of change. A tempered progress that makes lasting, positive impacts on the land and the people who work it. There you can see a balance between the ways of the past and the future of a globalized universe where everyone sports Nike sneakers and a satelite dish and where there is no time line, only instant gratification. Globalization is not a bad thing in and of itself. It was, after all, the thing that helped lead me to Carol in the first place. It can be a tool, or a weapon of destruction. It is up to us how we choose to wield it.