Sometimes, like yesterday when I was out walking, hopping off and on the broken sidewalks filled with people and commercial activities (motorcycle repair, tent making, chicken roasting), I’ve found myself fuming with righteous indignation. This city is filthy, broken down and without basic infrastructure (not to mention usable sidewalks)…. A few examples: .....There are open manholes everywhere, because thieves sell the covers to scrap metal dealers, both parties acting with impunity….. A woman died one night last year when she drove her car into a three-story-deep, 50-yard-long hole in a street close to our apartment; the hole was unmarked and unguarded, and remained pretty much the same way for another seven months before city workers finally filled it in after completing whatever construction work was involved….. Rather than households being connected to a central water supply, water is delivered three times a week, with different neighborhoods taking turns receiving it……Sewage? I shudder to think what happens to it, since I haven’t seen or heard of a processing plant nearby, and the fact that nowhere is the water potable is no doubt related…..The traffic is out of control, pedestrians running for their lives when they have to cross a busy street or hop off a sidewalk…..
What a way for 400,000 people to live!!
And yet they get along, and are generally very good-natured about it all. Only someone like me gets crabby about such things. Ecuadoreans seem impervious, I think because experience has taught them that government is of little use in their lives. It saddens me how often people say that everyone in government is corrupt, using a tone of voice implying inevitability.
On most days the concept of “inevitability” goes against my grain. We wouldn’t be down here trying to do something about injustice in the world if I we dwelled too much on inevitability. Anyway, it reminded me of a poem I ran across in November when we were in Kentucky spending an evening with friends, and I’ll put it here as a nice way to begin 2009.
Happy New Year.
Sometimes
Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.
A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man; decide they care
enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.
Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.
Sheenagh Pugh, b. 1950
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