Lindo Quito


I first visited in December, my first trip to Quito. I was invited by Alicia, a friend of a friend from DC. Casa Victoria is the name of the non-profit organization that was Alicia’s dream, and also of the historic house that is central to the organization she and her family founded. The house, situated in Old Quito just outside the historic center in a low-income neighborhood, was built in the 1800s and was first the country home of a wealthy businessman. Over the years it has been a residence, hospital, and later its beautiful rooms were divided into small sections and rented to poor families.

Alicia, with her daughter Carolina, a historian and teacher, and Carolina’s husband José Luis, an architect, work together for the foundation. Several years ago they bought the abandoned house with the idea of renovating it into a community center and home for adolescent boys who would live there in Christian community with mentors and learn trades such as carpentry and plumbing as they worked together rebuilding the house.

Over the past couple years, José Luis completed the blueprints, Caro did a historical study of the neighborhood, and the founding members of Casa Victoria (above mentioned, plus a beautiful couple, Cheryl and Tylor) interviewed the neighbors, gathering their impressions of the neighborhood and ideas for the house. José supervises the renovation process, and Caro works closely with Gaston, a teacher, catechist, and artist, who moved to Quito from his home in Buenos Aires to mentor the boys, on issues related to their formation.



When I first visited in December Casa Victoria did not yet have mentees, but when I returned in March there were three street kids, Oscar Patricio, Raul, and Leo, living with the two mentors, Gaston and Esteban. There is also now a steady trickle of other teenage boys who come to the house invited by their friends for meals and soccer games.


(front row Oscar, seated behind him José Luis and Carolina, behind them Esteban and Leo)

Since my first trip to Quito, I have felt at home in Casa Victoria, and to my delight this visit extended into a two-week stay. My parents were with me for a few days, Mom mothering the boys, Dad working with the kids scraping paint at Casa Victoria, and all of us enjoying getting to know the beautiful people there and the adventures on which José and Carolina took us.



When Mom and Dad left, Nana and Julia, two Austrian volunteers who are doing their social work internship in Mi Cometa with PAIC, came from Guayaquil, and the 3 of us stayed another week (All pictures are from Nana´s digital camera).


Julia




Nana



We joined in many of the group´s activities, including a hike up Pichincha, and Nana and Julia visited organizations and universities in the captial to learn more about social work in Ecuador.



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“Hoo hoo hoo,” I mimicked Juan’s soccer-playing monkey noises as I tackled him, trying to strip the soccer ball in the weekly Wednesday afternoon soccer match. He passed the ball to Leo, I spun around and went after it, laughing as Esteban teased me, “Go for the ankles or shins.”

“Galletas,” (crackers) Juan complimented Leo on his footwork, and I stopped, leaned over, gasping for oxygen in the thin air of Quito, 9400 feet above sea level.

That night at the dinner table I pulled up my jeans to look at the black and blue that ran from my ankle halfway up my shin. Juan (not his real name), sitting at the table accross from me cocked his head, jerked it quickly upward. “Ey, Dana. Let’s go to the discoteca.”

I laughed. “Do they let you in, Juan? You’re only, what, 14 or 15.”

He gave me a mischievous half-smile. “No, I’m 23.”

“And I’m 85.”

Nana walked into the dining room, Julia close behind, and we sat at the table for dinner. “Nana, Julia, let’s go to the discoteca.”

“Why don’t we dance here?” I said, “You guys can teach us salsa.”

Nana smiled, “Yeah! We can push back the table and dance.”

“But the dishes have to be done first,” I said. Gaston and Esteban were at a meeting with Carolina so I was in charge of the boys for the evening. After the nightly argument about whose turn it was to wash the dishes, dinner ended and the girls and I went to our rooms to read. Oscar and Leo went to get their salsa CDs and Juan went into the kitchen and turned on the water over the stack of plates in the sink.



I emerged from my room 20 minutes later to find Oscar yelling instructions at Gabriel, who he had by the hands between the table and buffet. Leo was dancing to one side, and Juan soapy plate in one hand, was dancing on the other. “Come dance,” they said.

“Dishes.” I peered into the kitchen, where there were soap suds all over the counter and floor, water still trickling from the faucet over the plates.

“Ya ya ya ya ya,” Juan said, returning to the sink.

An hour after the preparations had begun Nana, Julia and I were being spun around in the living room, and when Carolina, Gaston, and Esteban walked in they found us dancing, the boys arguing about whose dance partner was better.

A week later we were sitting at the lunch table, nearing the end of our rice, sausage and fried plantains, when the conversation turned to tattoos. Several of the boys had tattoos, and when I asked Juan why he had tattooed a blue dot on his arm, Leo replied that it was a sign of his gang. “Why did you join a gang?” I asked him matter-of-factly. He looked sideways at me, then seemed to relax.

Shrugged his shoulders, “to mess around.”

Some of his friends were in the gang he joined, his cousin in a different one.

“What did you have to do to join?” I asked.

“You have to have muscles.” He flexed his bicep. “We had to carry heavy things across a river on our shoulders.”

Gaston was looking at him, “And how much influence did the ‘king’ of the gang have?” he asked. “If the king said let’s go get that guy, would everyone go?”

“No,” Juan said. “Decisions had to be unanimous. “If one person didn’t want to do something, we didn’t do it.”

The conversation continued; one by one people excused themselves from the table until it was just Gaston, Juan and I talking over empty plates. We eventually started talking about why Juan had left his town to move to Quito – he had shot a man.

“It was an act of revenge,” he explained. “They sent 2 of us, both with guns. I shot him in the side, the other guy in the leg. We didn’t mean to kill him and we didn’t.” He stuck out his chest. “If I’d meant to kill him I would have.”

“Can you imagine how he felt when he was shot?” I asked.

“No, he was just some stupid gang member,” he looked down. Gaston and I looked at each other across the table.

“Do you realize that description could have been applied to you?” Gaston asked. Juan muttered something.

“Are you afraid to die?” I asked.

Juan looked up. “No, I’m not afraid of anything.”

“How long after you shot him did you leave town?” Gaston’s question.

“A week later, I didn’t know if they knew it was me.”

“And so now you can’t go back?” I asked.

Juan´s eyes went to the table again. “No.”

Gaston brought up Juan’s recent conflict with a gang in the Quito neighborhood where he was staying. “You are going to be leaving Quito soon, too, if you keep having conflicts like that."

“Yeah, but I can’t just walk by if someone’s insulting my mother or insulting my friend’s mother.”

Gaston described several different ways it was possible to react, and also how the provoking guys would tire if ignored.

“They don’t know your mother anyway,” I said. “Can’t you try thinking that – it doesn’t matter what they say about her.”

Gaston empathized with Juan´s inability to let someone be disrespectful to him or his family, but emphasized that there are options for how one chooses to react. “You could always sing under your breath, like you do here and keep walking when you feel yourself getting angry,” he suggested. “And you’re behavior’s not going to change from one day to the next, but if you decide you want to start reacting in a different way, you can do it, poco a poco.”

“Do you see how you are letting other people control your life?” I asked. “If you continue just reacting to others you will never be able to make any decisions for yourself.”

“You’ll move from here to Cuenca, then to Guayaquil where you’ll soon have to leave,” Gaston added.

Juan looked at me. “Are you saying I shouldn’t fight?”

I looked back at him. “No, I’m just saying I think it’s a good idea to think about the decisions you have made and are making and how they affect you, to see if this is how you want to live your life.”

I got up from the table, got a roll and the jam, and sat back down. Spreading the jam, I smiled at Juan. “What do you love most? Who is most important to you?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Who’s most important to me? My family. My mother and brothers.”

“And what do you like to do for fun?”

“I love to play soccer, andI love the beach.”

“And for work? What work would you like to do?” I asked.

“I liked being the cobrador on the busses that run between beach towns near my village.”

“It seems to me, Juan, that you have two options. You can keep letting your life be determined by your reactions to other people, or you can work toward achieving this positive thing – to live near your family, where you can play soccer on the beach, work on a bus, go salsa dancing and hang out with your friends. It’s something worth thinking about.” I took a bite of my roll.

There was silence at the table for a minute, then Juan looked between Gaston and me. “Is this conversation finished now?” Gaston and I laughed, we all got up and took our plates to the kitchen.

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The Saturday before I left Quito Gaston had the day off, so we packed our cameras, extra film, he put his maté and thermos in his bag, and we headed out the door after breakfast. “What do you want to do?” he asked.

“Let’s get on a random bus headed out of town and get off somewhere pretty,” I said, remembering one of his favorite Buenos Aires pastimes. He smiled, and led the way through the rain to where the busses waited in a smoggy huddle to gain the weight of passengers and follow roads that wind from Quito into or between the surrounding mountains.

The cobrador (man in charge of collecting bus fare) held out his hand, asked where we were going. We paused. He asked, “The Triangle?”

“A little further than the Triangle,” Gaston replied. I giggled.

“80 cents.”

Gaston emptied change out of a film canister and handed the man the sum. An hour later a grassy bank filled the space between the road and a river.

“Let’s get off here,” I said. We did, and spent the rest of the day wandering the village, finding shapes in the clouds, laughing at the flying Super Jesus we encountered in the town’s church, taking pictures, and drinking smoothies made from a mysterious fruit that looked to me like a cactus. We never did find out the name of the town.

When we got back that night we met up with Nana and Julia and went to the restaurant on top of the Panasillo, one of the mountains in Quito. We had drinks, I had the local specialty of hot chocolate with chunks of cheese in it (?!), and we admired Quito’s lights, how they covered the hilly landscape below. From that hight we could pick out the arches of Casa Victoria, illuminated among the street lights and church steeples.


- posted by little monk @ 10:08 AM