Saturday, July 29, 2006
Huambalo and Confessions
Saturday morning it was breakfast and off on the bus to Huambalo. We are getting sort of used to the bus ride. It is very fast and scary, but we are getting used to that. If you just don´t look down, WAY down. I have pictures for later.
You may know Joy Zabala and so you´ll understand. She just loves social games (I don´t). Anyway, she had us all email her husband a secret about ourselves that the group wouldn´t know. She had the secrets typed on a list and we were to try to figure out what secrets matched which people on the tour.
I´ll get back to that thought in a minute. When we got to Huambalo the three of us working on the ramp went right to the Center to continue hoedading, shoveling, hauling dirt, and one new thing. We started hauling volcanic rock from about two blocks away via wheelbarrows. We´ve seen that in Ecuador when a street gets torn up for say laying new pipe, all the digging and filling is done by hand, no mechanical devices. That is what we are doing.
It turned out that in addition to Osima and Dennis and I, several of the women in the group started showing up and helping out. Maggie was terrific with her wheelbarrow work. Beth took to hoedading like a natural. Stacy wheelbarrowed rocks to the ramp and ran up the ramp to dump the rocks. Folks, I did that twice just to prove I could do it, but Stacy ran up the ramp with a few hundred pounds of rocks. Animal! Lori did something of everything at the site. Heather was also proficient at working a hoedad. Dennis of course carried a lot of rock and so did some volunteer from the community. He was clearly the toughest at rocks. It was a busy hard working 3 and a half hours with no big breaks. After lunch we all came back and started arranging the rocks. Bridgett, Dennis, and Lynne were in charge of this. By the end of the day we had dug down about eight inches for the 2 and a half meters wide and maybe 30 foot length of the ramp. Tomorrow, Sunday, we may actually start mixing cement and pouring it over the rocks.
I´m back to my original thought about Joy´s game. My secret was that I had been a bassoonist in high school, but that when I finished my junior year I discovered that a very talented person was joining the orchestra and band, and clearly would move ahead of me by a chair or two, so I gave up my music career. However, the other part of the reason was that the person was a fantastically talented young woman.
I hastened to say that this was in 1954, 52 years ago when things were different and certain movements had not even moved yet. So I told the music director that I had a very busy academic schedule for my senior year and I wouldn´t be able to play in band or orchestra. Actually I dropped music and took a year of auto mechanics.
I cheated with the game. After witnessing the work of the women on the ramp project I told Joy that I wanted her to have someone randomly draw my secret. Joy cooperated and Stacy drew my secret and since no one but Joy had guessed my secret I confessed that it was me. After spilling the beans I went way out of my way to indicate that I had always know women were smarter, but based on today, I think a lot of them are STRONGER than me. So I apologized to all the women in the world, but particularly those in our group.
Now that you know one of my secrets, please do not ever tell anybody what it is.
You may know Joy Zabala and so you´ll understand. She just loves social games (I don´t). Anyway, she had us all email her husband a secret about ourselves that the group wouldn´t know. She had the secrets typed on a list and we were to try to figure out what secrets matched which people on the tour.
I´ll get back to that thought in a minute. When we got to Huambalo the three of us working on the ramp went right to the Center to continue hoedading, shoveling, hauling dirt, and one new thing. We started hauling volcanic rock from about two blocks away via wheelbarrows. We´ve seen that in Ecuador when a street gets torn up for say laying new pipe, all the digging and filling is done by hand, no mechanical devices. That is what we are doing.
It turned out that in addition to Osima and Dennis and I, several of the women in the group started showing up and helping out. Maggie was terrific with her wheelbarrow work. Beth took to hoedading like a natural. Stacy wheelbarrowed rocks to the ramp and ran up the ramp to dump the rocks. Folks, I did that twice just to prove I could do it, but Stacy ran up the ramp with a few hundred pounds of rocks. Animal! Lori did something of everything at the site. Heather was also proficient at working a hoedad. Dennis of course carried a lot of rock and so did some volunteer from the community. He was clearly the toughest at rocks. It was a busy hard working 3 and a half hours with no big breaks. After lunch we all came back and started arranging the rocks. Bridgett, Dennis, and Lynne were in charge of this. By the end of the day we had dug down about eight inches for the 2 and a half meters wide and maybe 30 foot length of the ramp. Tomorrow, Sunday, we may actually start mixing cement and pouring it over the rocks.
I´m back to my original thought about Joy´s game. My secret was that I had been a bassoonist in high school, but that when I finished my junior year I discovered that a very talented person was joining the orchestra and band, and clearly would move ahead of me by a chair or two, so I gave up my music career. However, the other part of the reason was that the person was a fantastically talented young woman.
I hastened to say that this was in 1954, 52 years ago when things were different and certain movements had not even moved yet. So I told the music director that I had a very busy academic schedule for my senior year and I wouldn´t be able to play in band or orchestra. Actually I dropped music and took a year of auto mechanics.
I cheated with the game. After witnessing the work of the women on the ramp project I told Joy that I wanted her to have someone randomly draw my secret. Joy cooperated and Stacy drew my secret and since no one but Joy had guessed my secret I confessed that it was me. After spilling the beans I went way out of my way to indicate that I had always know women were smarter, but based on today, I think a lot of them are STRONGER than me. So I apologized to all the women in the world, but particularly those in our group.
Now that you know one of my secrets, please do not ever tell anybody what it is.
