Termites and teaching in Cusuime

We’ve spent this week travelling to and working in Cusuime. This community is in the south, right next to the border with Peru. It has an airstrip but this time instead of going by plane we travelled by land – it’s cheaper and means we can take more things with us – sacks of cement are often too heavy to go on a flight. So we drove 8 hours to the last village you can reach by road, then got into a canoe to go up river. It took 4 and a half hours – even with a motor. The river was very low so getting up the rapids was quite hard work and often involved getting out to push. About halfway through the journey a thunderstorm started – obviously we had nowhere to shelter!

On the way back to Shell we had to wait 4 hours for a culvert to be put in and the hole to be filled with sand - lots of the road was still under construction as we were driving along it.  We got gorgeous views while we were waiting though.

In Cusuime we were reinstalling the pump and carrying out repairs to the existing tank – the water has a low pH (testing in photo) and so had eaten away the sand from the tank, which had damaged the pump. We reinstalled the mended pump and coating the tank with xypex – a chemical to stop the water penetrating the concrete.  When we arrived we also discovered there were problems with the water tower because it hadn't been constructed properly.  It was made from wood – environmentally friendsly, local materials, etc – but unfortunately was attacked by termites. We had brought some paint with us, but not enough to completely solve the problem. We left with dire warnings to the village that if they didn’t buy more paint their tower would collapse within a year. This is a community HCJB have been working with for a couple of years so there’s every hope that they may pay attention!

My youthwork experience came in very useful here as we spent 3 mornings teaching in the school - a mixture of bible holiday club and hygiene teaching.  Previous holiday clubs as well as songs and games I’d learned in Peru came in very handy as we hadn't got much material planned in advance.

Teaching about hand washing; si tienes fe como un granito de mostaza (if you have faith like a little grain of mustard)

The kids all seemed to have a knowledge of good hygiene behaviour and the importance of handwashing etc. Meanwhile a good proportion of the adults were in bed with stomach infections – we spent a while trying to convince them that this was because they hadn’t been washing their hands (which they hadn’t) rather than the immediate suspicion that a shaman had come to the village and the sickness was because of witchcraft. We’re continually told by locals that the Ecuadorian culture is to blame anyone other than yourself. It’s even reflected in the language – you’d say ‘the plate broke itself’ rather than 'I broke it’!

When I was in Engand thinking about working in communities to provide water systems and latrines, it didn’t really occur to me that this would mean living in communities without water supplies and latrines! We have had a week of fetching water and filtering it. Fortunately on day 2 they built our latrine (after a cow fell in the hole) as I was getting a bit tired of bushes.