Saturday, December 29, 2007

Africa Revisited

Saturday, 8 December 2007


So, I hauled out to this town , San Lorenzo, at the northernmost tip of coastal Ecuador, despite many telling me I shouldn't go, that I would get "kidnapped by Colombians" and so on. I went anyway, as you might imagine I would. I don't know if my spirit has gotten bolder or stupider as time has passed, but my luck has remained so well in tact that I feel blindingly confindent about being able to go wherever, whenever I want.

I arrived in San Lorenzo in the mid morning after 4 and half hours on a bus descending from the high mountains of the sierra through the dense, wet, tropicalish cloudforests of the lowlands, passing banana plantations and groves of palm oil trees, cacao and pineapple, to emerge in a dusty, dirty, chaotic fishing town. I worked my way from the bus to the dock where I first came into contact with coastal Spanish. Much, much different from that of the altiplano. Couldn't understand anything it seemed, even the cost of my fresh squeezed orange juice as I tried to replenish the sudden sweat loss that came from the sun and heat of the equatorial sun. And this after being all proud of my newly honed spanish language skills. It was like going to another country. Africa, to be exact. Suddenly, not only was there fierce sun and humid air, but everyone was black.

I knew this, of course. It was part of the reason I went. This is untouristed territory. The only person I've met who went there is this Belgian guy who also spent 6 months in the Colombian jungle. He was prepared.

From the dock I loaded myself and all my stuff onto a little canoe with an outboard motor and went zipping off into the open water where the Pacific meets some river estuary or something. Mangroves everywhere, their multi-branches penetrating the water in such a maze you couldn't tell which ones were descending from the tree, or sprouting up from the silt and sand. We were racing pelicans at one point, their large black sillhouettes flapping fiercely in the glare, keeping apace with our speed. Our first stop was some tiny, bleak outpost, little more than a dock and a sunburnt stall selling coconuts, where 10 naked black boys dove off the cement stairs into the water, unable to take their eyes off of me, the white blonde lady in the boat next to the crates of Coca Cola and Malta sodas being unloaded to stock up some unseen tienda. After picking up a few more passengers we fled to Limones, another dock at another tiny sandbar village, where I disembarked and waited in the sun, happy to stand and stretch my legs, while speaking in terribly broken spanish to the two "captains" of my boat. Answering questions about where I'm from, and how long a flight would be from New York to various other international locales. "How long is it from NY to China? To Japan? To Miami?" Having never been to any of these places, I could only answer, "No se. Depende."

Even though I was really thirsty, and really hot, in my long gringo sleeves and denim trousers, I refused offers of coconuts and their quenching juice. Why? I don't know. That weird apprehension, I guess, that comes with accepting any gift in a place where you don't the rules of gift giving. That, and the fact that I didn't know how long it would be until I could find myself in some semblance of a bathroom. Dehydrating by necessity.

After about an hour, wherein I was the main attraction, I boarded another boat and sailed off to La Tola. Remote by travellers standards, but at least connected to the rest of Ecuador by a road, albeit one of bumpy dirt. I had read that you could walk from La Tola to Olmedo, my destination, but as I peered down the road, through a shimmer of heat waves, I could see nothing but a girl pulling a baby boy on a flat piece of plastic. The reign, a piece of dingy rope, the boy naked. Beyond that, coconut palms and...nothing. I sought shelter and a moment to collect my land legs under the canopy of a comedora. I bought a diet coke and sucked it down thirstily, although now I was really ready and willing to drink from a coconut, regardless of rules. But oddly there were none. I asked how to get to Olmedo, and one person pointed in the direction of the sleigh driving girl, another told me of a bus. I didn't think I neeeded a bus, but was suddenly apprehensive, despite my aforementioned confident fearlessness, about walking through town, glowing white like a spotlight in a moonless night. It has been a long time since I was so bizarrely obvious in any place.

I waited for the bus. When it came, I got on board only to be let off less than 3 minutes later. And that was a 5 minute walk PAST the entrance to the village. As I hiked back in the direction the controllador had pointed, I came upon a locked gate that seemed to lead only to a noisy grinding silo of sorts. Then out of nowhere, a man in a pickup appeared. He asked where I was going. Anyone would have. I mean, look at me, if you can in your mind: a lone white girl with a heavy load on a dusty road in the middle of Afro-Ecuadorian nowhere. I got in, and he drove me through the proper entrada and deposited me amidst even more curious stares at the foot of a footbridge. There was supposed to be a hostal in the village, an eco-tourist endeavor, a cooperativa run by a group of women. "La Hostal?" I asked. People pointed with a curving motion of their arms over the bridge. I climbed up a plank and manuevered my way across a rocking, creaking piece of construction. At the other side, I swear to you, it was Apam, Ghana. It was that little muddy, dusty, litter-strewn and loving village where I lived in coastal west Africa. It was amazing. I had returned to Africa, somehow, by way of Ecuador. The moment I crossed the bridge I was embraced in a multitude of literal and figurative ways by the people that lived there.


Sometimes the immediate pleasure lies solely in the arrival. This is especially true when the journey is long, difficult, and confusing. A journey and an arrival I fretted about. One I feared. One I worried I would not make. One I was so relieved to have achieved. Just the arrival. I waited on the veranda of a beautifully constructed, if completely out of place, wooden hostel on stilts at the waters edge. Every other building around me was made of warping, blanched wood and deteriorating concrete. Windows were mere tiny open holes. Everything raised above the damp, sandy, watery earth. Families of 7, 8, 9 or more lived in one room separated only by curtains of thinning cloth. After meeting Sobeida, a grandmother or dozens and jefa of the cooperativa, I dropped my luggage on my bed, untucked a tank top from my pack, and went about seeing the village.

I was immediately met by a group of young children, 3 of them related to Sobeida. Marcial, Yuleici, and Harinson, who would come to be known to me affectionately as Hachi, and their mom, Marcia. I complimented Marcia's pedicure, all pink and cute little polka dots, fading on worn weather beaten toenails. "My daughter," she said. "You want?" Now? Yes, now. And so, looking down at the worn patchy red of a long ago New York pedicure on my own feet, I went with her to their house where Yuleici painted my toes by dimming light, creating the most perfect multicolored detailed butterflies on my busted up toes. She was 16. Cut the tips of her nailpolish brushes herself, making them fine and precise. All of this while sitting on their torn and stuffing-less sofa under a poster of Shakira, hips a-shaking, while the youngest, 6 years old, fried me some plantains and peeled me an orange. No money was ever asked for. When I left, I wrote Yuleici a note and enclosed a five dollar bill. Telling her, "For more colors." I had seen her drawings in a little notebook, they were really good, and her mother spoke of wanting to send her to colegio in another, larger, better town. But of course, there is no money. God how I hate that this story lives again and again, and all I can do is write sweet notes in purple ink and leave $5 in my wake.


The children claimed me as though I was a prize to be won. I shared my dinner with them, rice and fish. I took Harinson with me on my canoe tour the next day, and when he got to steer the boat, a smile ripping across his face from ear to adorable ear, I took a picture to preserve that memory of his simple, singular joy in being included in a rare adventure. I went crabbing in the morning with the grandmother and then ate those self same crabs we caught with lemon for our dinner in a tiny kitchen while I tried, tried so hard, to understand the stories she spun for me. I gave my guide my compass, though he asked for more, much more. We shared kisses under my mosquito net, but I could give him no direction other than a little grey green metal circle of north and south and east and west.

No one called me Obruni. Only Maggie.

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