Ecuador 4: Viejo Willie

I saw lots of crazy stuff while I was in Yamana. One person had a tattoo with a tattoo of the Star of David and what looked like a swastika inside. Every time I walked by the town pool hall, I got that gross whistle sound and an occasional “I love you” in broken English. I saw a cow milked for the first time- I wasn’t invited to milk it myself (I think it’s a ‘guy thing’ in the Ecuadorian culture) but I was fine with that. I politely declined the opportunity to drink the pure milk, but I did enjoy visiting the pigs and cows on the farm. Especially since the ride down there was in “Viejo Willie” an old beater jeep that breaks down almost every mile., and once got stuck in a rut and the wheel fell off REALLY far from town. The owner of Viejo Willie is my host cousins’ dad who just came back into the picture after a few years of absence. He makes a good amount of money working in the silver mines, so he can afford nicer things than most. He convinced me to take $300 of his money to buy nice American clothes (which they much prefer due to the quality- American clothes survive the hardcore soapy scrubbings of hand cleanings by washerwomen and don’t fade the color like Peruvian clothes).

Sometimes I felt weird because I was a “tweener” in Ecuador- in between child and adult- way older than Juanita’s kids but since I’m not married with kids, I’m definitely not classified as an adult by their terms. Patricio, Juanita’s husband gave me life lessons while intoxicated one day. He was on his 5 days of vacation from construction work and told me I should never change and I can do great things- it was like a dad talk, but from a 35 year old man. Awkward but funny. It helped me after a terrible day in which I hit my head so hard on a doorway that I had neck pain for days AND lost all 300 of my photos from Ecuador due to a faulty memory card in my digital camera. But I still had my Ecuadorian family and in the scheme of things, I handled the traumatizing day better than I probably would have in the states. Life goes on…