Pathways towards Completion

Pathways, guides into the mystery of beyond, once infused with intent radiate a sacred presence into the very air around them. "Follow me," they promise, "for I lead somewhere."

Pathway to toilet foundations.

I worked on a pathway for all of the afternoon. It leads to the site of the dry toilet. The pathway is soft earth lined with stones. I finished construction for the day and walked along, inspecting my work. On the pathway I felt a tingling sensation up and down my spine, such as I have felt at midnight temples and tea-houses in Japan. Working ceaselessly as we are on restoring the old house to the fullest extent possible before the late august moon heralds arrival of a first volunteer; working slavishly on tiny details and in tiny spaces I forget our true purpose. The house, the house ! -- inside becomes my space and outside the wild, the foreboding, all prickly burrs and biting bugs. In placing the pathway I found my head. In placing the pathway I performed a first trick of magic on the site, mixing chaos and order to seed sacred serenity. Renewed, I delighted in the ecstasy of being.

Painting the walls green.

Boring though the recent renovation has been, constant commitment to the task at hand has allowed us to beautify the interior. We have painted the walls, white and lavender in the interior bedroom and white and new-leaf green in the main room. We have sealed the ceilings with plaster and silicon; before that we screwed fresh plywood to the rafters and made ceilings in the pantry and main room. I have hewed four legs for a bed frame from a 5m lumber pole. I have finished the first wood window frame and attached a tule cut to screen out the bugs.

Plywood ceiling.

Bed frame.

Slowly, steadily this temporary residence that has absorbed so much of our time is nearing completion!

There are no strings on me!

We knew the big challenge when Oscar left would be to work on the house while caring for Ainoa. At nine months of age she revolts against overlong rides in the baby carrier. Her crawling skills have improved to where leaving her sitting on the foam play-mat is out of the question as well. Our temporary solution is that Sandra has been taking care of Ainoa while I work on the house, though we try to switch roles and relieve each other during easily rotatable activities like painting.

Chirimoyal - Main room with netting tent

For some work rotation is simply not an option. When we have a task requiring us to combine our efforts and leave Ainoa alone for a short time we place her in a travel crib and try to focus on our work over her cries of frustration. Just two days ago she learned to pull herself up on the crib side and watch us work through the open doorway. This discovery and mastery of equilibrium has provided for a much calmer co-working time. We also have begun more keenly than before to feel the need for a large playpen which should give Ainoa sufficient space to exercise her burgeoning crawling and walking skills.

Chirimoyal - Painting the interior bedroom

On Wednesday we visited the elusive carpenter Juan and gave him measurements and descriptions for the playpen, using one piece of a set he had crafted for Valentin as a model. The 155 cm by 125 cm size will fit around the foam play-mat and the price, US $150, was in the range of 1 m^2 playpens we had inquired about at the Santa Clara market in Quito.

Once the interior bedroom has been completed, which may be as soon as July 6, we will move Ainoa in along with her new furniture and current anti-fly enclosure. We will continue to use the crib for positioning her around the house while we finish the interior.

For future outdoor work we have yet to develop a method, having however the outlines of a plan in mind. The basics of this plan are:

1. Choose a visible location near or around the site and clear the ground. May involve levelling terrain.
2. Install the bug-net equipped 3 m^2 tent on this location.
3. Place the play-mat in the playpen under the tent.

Of course we shall have to evaluate the practicality of this plan once we begin construction of the dry toilet, our first big outdoor project. The final solution may keep us working at a slower pace, as does the current arrangement, but enjoying Ainoa’s ever more alert and active presence the day through is, for now, a welcome exchange.

Magnum Opossum, Part One

When moving into an abandoned house, never assume the former tenants were human – or former.

Chota Valley - Repair works on the roof.

Twenty years is roughly how long the house in Chota had been derelict when we arrived in Ecuador last February. While inspecting the house for the first time we noticed a shoddy wooden food rack and two thin mats in the middle room which connects to the veranda. These obvious human artefacts put our minds at ease and led us to the assumption that natural processes had been kept at bay, at least somewhat, by the presence of people. Even if only a resting area for day labourers, we thought, the habit of the attentive species homo-sapiens to form a comfortable habitat could be relied upon to ward off complete re-assimilation of the house into the field. If we had taken the Mango tree seriously, we would have arrived at a very different judgement.

Chota valley - Stripping the ceiling 

Beside the front entrance to the house is an old Mango tree, the crown of which looks down upon all the land. I park the pickup truck in the shady nook between tree and house. We have trimmed the branches of this Mango tree several times to protect the house. In the beginning, the Mango tree was devouring the house; and an opossum was devouring the mangos.

Usually when something unexpected falls into one’s lap, one does not expect to be bitten: that is just what is unexpected. The worker we hired to repair the roof encountered an opossum in the rafters, startled, lost his footing and fell through the ceiling to the floor where he lay when the opossum fell on him, bit him, and scurried away. Or, as one version of the story went, he killed the opossum, worked the rest of the day, took the carcass home and had opossum for dinner. Whether we believed in escape or entrée, at least the opossum seemed to be a problem resolved.

Chota Valley - Covered in dirt

While we were back in Quito haggling over paperwork at the visa office, Oscar stayed on in Ibarra to continue working on the house. He soon heard scuffling and squeaks in the ceiling, starting daily around four in the afternoon. We returned and I went back to working on the house with Oscar. I didn’t hear what he had, however as we were about to fit a new ceiling into the interior bedroom and I thought removing the old, rotting plywood would make this easier, I suggested we have a look. Up the ladder I climbed, between the plywood boards I wedged a metal trowel, I pulled and down the board came. I was not prepared for the shit we found up there. Opossum turds, mango pits, dead leaves and corn cobs; detritus poured to the floor and rose billowing into a grey cloud until the walls of the room were invisible and I fled, coughing and brushing my eyes clean with the inside of my shirt. I resolved to buy an anti-dust respirator and goggles and continue the next day, which I did. When all strips of plywood had been brought to the ground and the grey dust hung low in the darkened room I surveyed my work. Several inches of debris covered the floor in a thick layer, hiding many of the plywood strips. Oscar came in with a broom; I took a shovel. All the refuse was enough to fill two large sacs formerly used for 50 kg of sand. We dug compost holes in the garden and emptied the sacs there.

Chota Valley - Stripped ceiling

Two days later I had stripped the plywood from every ceiling but the standalone room in which several weeks earlier we had installed the gypsum board sub-ceiling. I went through an entire anti-dust cartridge in the respirator and each time I finished a room I could feel the dust in my nose, in my mouth, on my skin. We had eliminated a potential Asthma risk for Ainoa but still we had not found the opossum. There were only three pieces of plywood left on the ceiling against one wall of the main room. We decided to leave those for the moment and continue putting in the new ceiling.