Now that's development!

The countryside is so beautiful and the city much less so, that we try to go out on excursions each weekend. This quebrada is on the way to Papallacta.
Last week, I asked Helen and Gene where we could get a Quito phone book. Gene told me I could find one of the telephone company's (Anditel's) offices at the corner of Avenida Amazonas and Avenida Gaspar de Villaroel. He warned me though, recounting how last time he'd gone to ask for one, he had been required to show his Ecuadorian I.D. card and an Anditel phone bill proving he was a customer before being given the phone book. Seeing as I don't have an Ecuadorian I.D. card and we've not yet received a phone bill, I decided to try anyway. For one thing, the office was located at just the right distance from home for a good walk, so I headed out on Friday after work.

I entered the front doors of Anditel and surveyed the lobby. It had booths around two sides of the room with employees attending to customers or seemingly twiddling their thumbs, and in the middle it had the usual rows of chairs for the public waiting their turn. Then I spotted a big pile of telephone books on my right. It looked like I could just take one and leave, but after Gene's story, I thought I should ask permission. No way was I going to wait in line (well, actually, in chairs), so I approached the nearest booth where the employee seemed idle and asked if I could take a phone book. Sure, he said. I could hardly believe my luck, as I went out the door with the thick book under my arm. The bonus was the extra exercise I got lugging the thing home.

When I told Gene about the ease with which I got a phone book, he said, "Now that's development!" Gone are the days when the telephone company couldn't afford to hand out the phone books for free. Gone are the days when many people would cut up the pages and use them as their long-term supply of toilet paper. (However, people still bring phone books to soccer games and shred them for confetti right there on the spot.)

This left me thinking about development. Gene and Helen have worked in various ways to improve the lives of the Ecuadorians for over 50 years and much of their work might have been seen as in search of development. I've worked in my career for 25 years and usually call it "international relief and development." More recently, I've changed from using vocabulary such as "progress" and "development" to "improvements in the well-being of people, especially women and children." I won't go on and bore you with my analysis here, but I would like to share with you some signs of development in Ecuador - some of them improving people's well-being and some of them perhaps not.

We went last weekend to visit an amazing farm, where a young woman with her partner and her father have turned their 170 acres of her great-grandparents' huge hacienda into a large organic farm. They provide much of the goods for the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) organization to which Helen and Gene belong and from which they receive a weekly basket of fresh farm produce. The young woman offered to give her community supporters a tour and we signed up.
You can find out more on Natalie's blog. Here's Caleb making friends with 2 cute piglets that ambled over while we were admiring the "chicken tractors" that are moved every day across the field.

Here's another view of the chicken tractors, which were sharing the field with llamas and alpacas.
So that's one kind of development, but many people still believe the better kind of development is large-scale export enterprises, like the flower farms that are prominent in Ecuador and ship millions of flowers to the U.S. every year. You know them by their huge greenhouses and often tight security systems. Here's a picture of one across the quebrada from the organic farm. Click on the photo for a closer view.

Here I'm holding a big $3.00 bouquet of flowers bought on our little street at the local flower shop, where big roses are 25 cents each and smaller ones are 10 for $1.00.
Here's another sign of development: Ecuador has had a huge increase in the number of vehicles on its roads since I first came 24 years ago. Gas is cheap because of Ecuador's large petroleum supply. Another sign is that women are working at gas stations (no self-service allowed in this country).

People have cars, malls in which to shop, and jobs on flower farms (among the pesticides). These signs of development aren't important to me. Instead, I'm thrilled to see how much more education each generation is getting, how much better the houses are for healthy living, how many parents are choosing to have fewer children and then are able to follow through with that choice, and how people in general have a higher quality of life and are living longer. Not that there isn't more to do, but we should celebrate how far we've come.

-Spee