Day 4: Otavalo & the Bosque Jerusalen

Today's newspaper, with tons of information about the election

Today (Sunday) was election day in Ecuador. Voting here is mandatory, and people are fined if they do not vote—even if they are traveling for business! Our Ecuadorian guides left us for the morning so that they could get a card to prove they were not in their province and thus would be unable to vote. Without this card, they would have to pay a steeper fine. The television set in the hotel restaurant showed people lining up at the polls to vote. Elections are held on a Sunday because, in a country where 95% of people are Catholic, nobody is working on Sundays and everyone is able to get to the polls.

Ms. Meyer with Maria Virginia Farinango

We were incredibly fortunate to have breakfast with Maria Virginia Farinango, the co-author and “main character” of The Queen of Water, a novel based on her life story. She brought her two children with her. Yanni is nine, and her daughter Leslie turned five months old this morning. Yanni joined us for breakfast as well and, as we ate, we spoke with Maria Virginia about politics and the election. There are seven candidates running, including the richest man in Ecuador, a businessman who is the majority shareholder in Bonita bananas. He is running for the fifth time (he has never won) and according to Maria Virginia, the majority of Ecuadorians will not support him, in part because he sees money as the solution to all of the country’s problems. The incumbent, Rafael Correa, has the support of many indigenous people, as he has been a strong advocate for indigenous people’s rights. Indigenous families are no longer saying that they can’t send their children to school, as education is free, and the economy has improved under Correa’s tenure.

Maria Virginia also talked a lot about her life and her book. She is an incredible person with a fascinating life story. I told Maria Virginia that one of my favorite things about her book was the use of the word vivísima to describe her personality. Maria Virginia studied psychology in college, and she told me that she did a sort of experiment with Yanni as she raised him. She told him over and over again that he is smart. Today, he is confident in his intelligence and readily tells other people that he is smart. As she said, words have meaning, and when we hear things, we believe them and feel them inside of ourselves. If she had told her son he was a fool, or stupid, over and over again, he would have come to believe that. Maria Virginia wrote the phrase “Querer es poder” (to want is to be able to, or to want is to have the power) in all of her notebooks to remind herself that she had the power to achieve her dreams. I don’t want to be corny, but I truly hope that my students hear these kinds of positive messages from me and that these messages are helping them believe in themselves.

Some of the many cacti in the dry forest.

After breakfast, we shopped in the famous Mercado de los Ponchos in Otavalo, which was great fun. I really wish we’d had more time there. From the market, we headed for the bosque Jerusalen, or “Jerusalem forest,” a dry forest that had many cacti. I’ll include a couple of pictures below. At this forest, a national park, we hiked up to the mirador (lookout spot), which was both beautiful and neat, as we were standing on the equator while there.

We’re currently back in our Quito hotel. Tomorrow we’ll be off to a jam & cheese factory and the Museo del Sitio Intinan…after that, Galapagos!

View from the mirador