Ecuador Dispatches, Jan/Feb 2001
Report #2 from Bahia de Caraquez, Ecuador
By Peter Berg
January 28, 2001
When the mayor asked six months ago for a volunteer
Environmental Planner to assist him personally, I promised to fulfill the
request. I correctly supposed that he wanted to undertake initiating and
coordinating the ecological policies and activities of city agencies,
while also responding to numerous suggestions and needs of non-profit and
business groups as well as private citizens. In this spirit, a Department
of Tourism and Environment has been created in the intervening months. The
new department is in the process of being staffed, and an Environmental
Planner was found, Gabriela Chejtman from Argentina, who arrived at about
the same time I did in mid-January.
What I incorrectly guessed was how much that promise
would occupy my mind in the space of time until my return to Bahia.
Locating a planner in San Francisco didn't seem to offer a wide enough
range of choices, so I decided to explore finding someone solely through
the Internet. A brief job description was sent to one professional and one
special interest listserve. It was almost immediately picked up by another
half-dozen web sites that broadcast somewhat garbled versions of their
own. In most, the condition of "bilingual English/Spanish" was
retained but "volunteer" was unfortunately dropped. As a result,
I received fifty or so serious responses over a space of two months
(another one actually came yesterday) from places as widely separated as
New Zealand, The Netherlands, and several countries in South America,
besides those that could be expected from the US and Canada. They each
required different responses depending on what version they had read,
their requirements, and each one's qualifications. Many dropped away when
informed that the announcement they saw had "volunteer" missing.
I composed a second, more detailed description and list of questions for
the remaining candidates. Another round of personal follow-up
correspondence was then required with about a dozen capable and willing
applicants, and more e-mail conversations with each of them took place as
the selection process narrowed. It was a huge amount of work and
concentration for the intervening six months, ranging up to several hours
roughly every other day while electronic messages crossed back and forth.
Gabriela has spent most of her time so far meeting
with the mayor or city agency staffs and following up leads to citizen
eco-ciudad activities. There is so much information and first-hand
observations that she needs to absorb that I haven't seen her much. She
went on the eroded land survey, jammed between Ivan Aquirre and myself in
the front seat of a pick-up truck as we veered through mud-clogged
sections of the main highway or bounced along back roads, asking pertinent
questions about local social conditions as well as natural features. I
hope to have an impression of her general approach and specific
recommendations before I leave in less than a month. To questions I ask
about these things now, Gabriela cagily answers “Veremos” (“We will
see.”) With the marvelous but peculiarly isolating increase in
activities that is underway, there is an urgent need if for nothing else
to have a central source of information that everyone can use to stay
current. The new department and Gabriela's planning position have the
promise of doing much more, of course. They might eventually be able to
match what has been up to now a mainly bottom-up citizen's movement toward
a green city with a complementary top-down effort from the government.
Amy Jewel works for a recycling company in New York
City and immediately threw herself as a volunteer in Bahia into the task
of conceiving an overall view of waste generation. She envisions
converting the city's garbage program into a recycling operation with
remarkable single-mindedness. She became an instant confrere of Canary
Islands bred fellow volunteer "Jay" McConnell whose dedication
during the last two months has revived and transformed the main public
market's moribund waste separating effort. Operating under the aegis of
Stuarium Foundation, the market now consistently provides organic material
for compost to a private agricultural producer as well as the city. (An
official understanding was created this week between the city, the market,
and the private company that will insure proper waste separation with
Gabriela's supervision.) Now Amy wants to find ways to recycle the
non-organic portion. She was disgusted by the pollution and
disease-fostering conditions during a visit to the main landfill. Inspired
to create an alternative for burying the municipal trash, Amy made a
sample survey of household and hotel waste by actually getting up before
dawn several days to beat the garbage trucks to refuse containers on the
sidewalks outside buildings. She put on gloves and opened up garbage bags
to get at the true story! It's her impression that half of the discards
are organic matter that the city could render into compost She has even
made a preliminary tour looking at land for potential compost pile sites.
Recycling companies that operate on a fairly low level here haven't
escaped her scrutiny, and she now knows the local going rates for
cardboard, glass, plastic, and metals that can be separated out by each
household and commercial establishment. Amy is writing a report to present
to the mayor next Tuesday along with mine on eroded hillsides. Overcoming
the gulf between good intentions and demonstrable results is a formidable
challenge anywhere. Native-born residents often warn us that Ecuador is
particularly slow in this regard. Our transformation-minded evaluations
need to be circulated in a finished form within the city council and
appropriate agencies for approval as policies. Then they can guide future
actions that can be large-scale and dramatic. But first comes a briefing
for Dr. Leo who candidly told me, "I'm good at two things: doctor and
mayor. I need knowledgeable people to explain everything else."
Aching legs when I stand up or walk today are proof
that Marcelo Luque, Amy and I accomplished more than just a sightseeing
tour for her through the Maria Auxiliadora park site yesterday. We carried
one-foot diameter, four feet long sprouting hobo logs down the fairly
steep entrance stairway into the interior to plant alongside the trail.
This is the first time that plantings have been used to support structural
elements of the park. Some low parts of the trail were previously built up
to a level height by shoveling in dirt. Those spots have looser soil than
places that are naturally level, and could eventually slump or fall away.
Hobo trees will provide a nest of roots to support the trail.
Cultural notes
“Maldicion” (“curse word”) appears regularly
in Spanish subtitles that run throughout English-speaking movies and
television programs as a substitute for four (or more) letter words. The
same thing happens by using bleeps or silent spaces in US televised
versions of movies. The moralist's ax is a little sharper here by adding
"damn," "hell," and other religion based words.
Sometimes the censor seems to have a special prejudice or simply lacks
exposure. For example, in a recent film Julia Roberts' character called
someone "a limp dick" which was translated in a Spanish subtitle
as "homosexual." What happened there? Did "limp"
transfer over to “limp wrist,” or was limp dickedness chauvinistically
assumed to be a condition of homosexuals? Even though it was an
inappropriate translation, more of the Spanish-speaking audience might
have understood the slang expression "maricon" without needing
to check the definition with each other. Was the potentially more
English-sounding "homosexual" chosen to make a critical cultural
reference? Or was it used to simply make things even more obtuse? As
off-the-wall censorship, this bit requires genuine cultural archeology.
Socializing on weekend nights here includes a curious
combination of urban cruising and country-dances. Small groups walk or
drive around the ocean front Malecon Boulevard and main streets waving
from the curbs or calling out the windows to friends, drinking beer, and
stopping to talk. What makes this different from a strictly teenage scene
is that it can be completely inter-generational. Older couples get out of
their cars to dance at high school celebrations, twelve year olds ride
along with cousins in their twenties and thirties, and different groups
can all start singing together when a well-memorized song happens to come
over a passing car's radio. It may be limited as a diversion, but no one
is excluded.
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