I woke up at 5:45 to get ready to leave the house by 6:45 with my host sister, Lucía, who was heading in the same direction to go to class. After Lucia's stop, I rode the bus to the end of the line, to one of the big bus terminals in the north of Quito (Quito is extremely long and skinny, so everything is delineated by being north or south). When I got off at the end of the line I went to one of the kiosks and asked for a bus to Otavalo or Ibarra, both of which could get me to my final destination, Cotacachi. However, the women at the kiosk informed me that I was at the wrong terminal and I had to go to one farther north. I didn't even know another one existed up there! She kindly put me in a taxi and I arrived 10 minutes later at the other terminal, feeling slightly harassed, for something already having gone awry. Well I managed to buy my ticket and the helpful security guards ushered me to the appropriate bus. First challenge surmounted.
I asked the bus helper dude (most buses have a driver and someone, usually a man, collecting money and shouting out the destination from the door) to let me know when I should get off to go to Cotacachi, which he did about a 3 hour bus ride later. So there I was, gotten off the bus outside the entrance to Cotacachi with rather vague ideas about how to proceed. Luckily, a friendly indigenous woman had gotten off with me and helped me take another bus 10 minutes into town. I could have taken a taxi, but it was nicer and cheaper to take the bus with this woman. Having arrived in Cotacachi, I didn't really have a destination in mind because I was supposed to call the woman I was meeting, Magdalena, to set up the interview. So I hopped across the road, recharged my minutes on my phone and called my interviewee who told me to meet her at her house in 1/2 hour. This gave me just enough time to register for classes at the internet shop (my registration had opened at 845 that morning) and hail a cab to take me out to her house. When I arrived, she wasn't there which wasn't totally unexpected because she said she was out and would be arriving around the same time as me (also, I was functioning on US time and she on Ecuadorian time). But there was a cute 11 year old girl and her dog hanging out in front of the house, so we chatted. For 15 minutes. and then 1/2 hour. And then 45 minutes... Meanwhile I am playing games with this girl in my notebook that I don't know the rules to and calling other phone numbers of people in Cotacachi to try to set up more appointments. Well, an hour after our meeting time, she shows up carrying a shawl full of beans on her back and apologizing for not calling, but she had no minutes on her phone.
After finally making contact, I was very happy to get down to interviewing. We sat on her cement porch and I offered to help shell beans (I probably shelled one for every 5 that she did) and set about interviewing with my handy voice recorder. We talked about a number of interesting things including her experience becoming a woman leader in the local indigenous organization but because I have to write a 20 page paper on that soon, I'm not going to go into it here. She cooked us some choclos (a kind of corn) and we shelled beans and talked about politics. Then she gave me some more numbers of women in the area and sent me on my way with best wishes and a recorder full of experiences.
It was then about 1 o clock and it was time to call one of the women I'd already gotten ahold of. She had to decline because she was too busy, but the number Magdalena had given me turned up a meeting at 3 o clock right in town. I went to town and got lunch, two great cups of coffee and purused the multitude of leather stores Cotacachi boasts of. Then at 3 I headed down to the office of the main indigenous organization in Cotacachi, UNORCAC. There didn't appear to be anyone in the open office so I poked around a bit and then waited in one of the chairs by the entrance way. A few minutes later a woman and a little girl wandered in. We small chatted a little and it turned out she was the sister-in-law of the woman I was hoping to meet, Luz Maria. While we waited, two women wandered in from the back of the office and asked us to help them with something. Turns out they were taking promotional photos for the organization and needed us to sit at the computers and look useful. So maybe I'll make it into the promotional material for UNORCAC, who knows.
Eventually, the photographer helped me find Luz Maria and we had an intriguing interview about her own process of becoming Leader of Women (Dirigenta de la Mujer) in UNORCAC, punctuated by various children playing in the office and asking their mothers for money for sweets. Luz Maria introduced me to two other women who I may be able to interview, and I got the number of one of them. I may be making this trip again this week.
Then, at about 4, I walked over to the bus stop and grabbed a bus to Otavalo, where I grabbed a different bus to Quito, to get back by 7. Whew.
