Monday was the end of our time in Quito. Bittersweet, for sure. We were off to explore the countryside, and Alicia had to go back to work. But the goodbye was softened considerably with the knowledge that we'd all be seeing each other several more times this month.
Our driver (yes, Dayana, for sure) wouldn't be picking us up until lunchtime, so we pulled the kids out of bed and dropped off Alicia at work so we could get a peek at the US Embassy. I'm always fascinated by all things Foreign Service, and jumped at the opportunity for a behind the scenes tour.
Quinn was obviously less than thrilled at being awake at 8 am, but the Cars book he found in the embassy library softened the blow a bit.
Our destination that day (and for the next couple of weeks) was Otavalo, a small market town in the north of Ecuador. But our transportation plan was hitting a few speed bumps. Earlier that day, Dayana texted us that she wasn’t able to find childcare for the four hours it would take to drop us off and return to Quito. She asked if she could bring her daughter. I told her, "of course!" It would be a tight fit, but I wasn’t willing to entertain the thought of another driver taking us on the Pan-American freeway.
I knew that seatbelts (and simply even seat amount) are seen merely as suggestions in South America. So it was nothing out of the ordinary (for Dayana, at least) to have 5 normal sized humans, one giant, and a month's worth of luggage in her tiny Korean import. I had no idea how we were going to make to Otavalo. But we made it work. Everyone had a bag on their lap, and Aimee had an extra child on hers. I struggled with the ethics of Dayana's tiny daughter not having a booster seat. The fact that no child in Ecuador uses a booster seat didn't make me feel any better (nor did seeing Dayana's daughter roaming around the car sans-seatbelt even before we got in).
To further reinforce how far apart our concepts for child safety were, Dayana asked me at one point on the drive what our kids were sitting on. “Are they orthopedic seats or something?” Not only did she, a professional driver (and a relatively safe one, at that), not use booster seats, she hadn't even seen them before!
But the drive was otherwise delightful. I was pretty convinced at least three collisions were imminent, but none panned out. Dayana’s floor boards may be forever dented, however, by me pushing on them hoping the brake pedal on the other side would take notice. Mimi even had her first taste of raw sugarcane, when Dayana picked some up from a roadside vendor. To no one’s surprise, she loved it.
By mid-afternoon, we had rolled up to the map pin that our Otavalo contact has told us to meet him at. It was an empty freestanding office on an empty street, in what appeared to be an empty town that wasn’t even Otavalo. The directions took us to the neighboring city of Cotocachi (which barely registered three sentences in our Lonely Planet guide). The only sign of life was an older woman who popped her head out of her window to see who could possibly be coming down this street. I tried to stammer out that we were meeting someone, but I didn't know who, and I barely knew where. It went about as well as you'd expect. She simply looked confused and told me that everyone in town was gone. She kept saying, "They're all dancing! They're all dancing!" Dementia? Population level alien abduction? Either way, this wasn't going to plan.
By that point in the day, I was at least 80% sure that we’d be paying Dayana to take us back to Quito. I ran through the preceding couple of months' worth of communications with this homestay organization. Replies were infrequent and often delayed, information was sparse (even that map pin had only ben sent to be a few hours earlier), and I was never asked to pay a deposit or otherwise lock down the reservation. Only two things kept me from finding another place to stay weeks ago. 1) The organization we were using was run by local indigenous families and was highly recommended by our guide book, and 2) We had the ultimate backup plan. As long as it was daylight, we could make it back to Quito and crash in our friends' apartment until we figured out our next steps. That took a lot of pressure off the situation (and probably the only thing that made it even remotely tolerable with two (scratch that, three) children in the backseat.
About 20 minutes after we got there, I had finally reached our homestay coordinator over Whatsapp. He apologized for not being there, and told be that he was going to take a taxi to meet us and show us where the house was. But even that wasn't as easy as it sounded. Four apparently stranded tourists and their equally confused driver attracted a lot of attention from the passing taxis. So as each one rolled by, I squinted and looked in the backseat to see if there was someone looking for us. Invariably, the occupants squinted and looked out the window to see who was nervously looking at them. Nope. Not the host. Repeat, repeat.
But just as I was getting ready to call it, another taxi rolled up behind us. Out came the homestay coordinator that I had been communicating with. The coordinator had been remarkably casual ever since I had connected with him 6 months earlier. Almost too casual. He told me just to pay when I got here, only confirmed that we had a place to stay after several rounds of me asking, and never even asked for our names. Although I was relieved to see him, I still wasn't taking our sleeping arrangements for granted at that point.
Before you call Child Protective Services and report us for endangerment, home stays in this area are highly regarded. It's what this area is known for. Odds were good that we weren't about to put our kids in harms way. And in fact, our kids were the whole reason we were even attempting this! We wanted to find a homestay with some kids about the same age as ours. Not only would it be fun for them to have more kids to play with, a little passive Spanish exposure might also help consolidate what they're learning in school.
But we still had to get there. I intentionally made sure we arrived with hours upon hours of daylight left in the day in case we needed to execute any of our multiple backup plans. But thankfully we didn’t need to. Claudio, the person I had been texting with, hopped into our car and led us down a few meandering dirt roads. (For anyone who is keeping count, that’s now seven passengers in Dayana’s Kia go kart.) Five minutes later, we pulled up to a traditional rural South American home. A child no more than 10 met us at the front door and took us around back. Claudio seemed to know him and didn’t appear surprised, so we followed along. But my guard was still up.
The 10 year old showed us a couple of guest rooms off the main house’s back door. Before I had the chance to articulate any of the several questions swirling in my mind, the child’s mother came running up with three foreigners in tow. The mom, Lucia, apologized for not being home when we arrived, and explained that she had taken the other three people with her to the festival in town.
[As an aside, two of the three sentences about Cotacachi in our Lonely Planet guidebook talk about an annual festival in June that “the locals live and die for.” We later learned that it's a massive, weeklong celebration with non-stop dancing in the streets. So that's what the grandma who popped her head out of the window meant! They were all dancing! She's as lucid as they come.]
After just a few minutes of chatting with our new host family, we knew we'd be staying there. Adventure over. Lucia (and her son, Samuel, 10 year old who met us at the door) were absolutely delightful. They're an indigenous Kichwa family (Spanish is their second language) who, like several local families, subsist on their own farming supplemented by hosting tourists.
What a relief. There was a lot riding on this homestay, about which I had next to no information on. A key reason for our entire trip (in addition to visiting our friends in Quito) was to give our kids the opportunity to befriend some locals and see that Spanish isn’t just a language spoken for half of their school day (and—at least for the time being—when Aimee and I don't want them to know what we're talking about). We had worked hard to find a family in a safe town with kids close enough to our own kids’ age, and still be close enough to a population center that I could connect up with work when needed. I really wanted this to pan out. First impression, not the best. Second impression, this is going to work out great.
While Lucia turned over our rooms (she had been at the festivities with her previous guests all day), we grabbed some lunch in town and came back to watch our Mimi and Quinn immediately become friends with every kid in the neighborhood.
It's already happening.
We were immediately in awe of Lucia's work that day. Between preparations for the festival, cooking for her own family and two groups of guests, plus taking the other group into town, she likely hadn’t stopped moving since 6 am that day. We later learned that this was her normal. She was every bit the stereotypical super parent we had learned about in what has simply become known as “the book” that Aimee and I have been referencing for nearly every parenting decision over the past couple of years.
In addition to the ever-helpful Samuel, the rest of Lucia’s family consisted of her kind husband (who normally works as a gardener near Quito 90 minutes away, but was off this week for the festival), her absolutely adorable three year old, and her elite-level soccer playing 15 year old, Miller, who we later learned walks, hitchhikes, and takes the bus two hours each direction to his soccer practices every day. He’s one of only two indigenous kids on his club team, a fact that the family clearly takes a ton of pride in.
This was going to work. The family was such a delight that we were willing to overlook that we were 30 minutes away from anything besides more rural homesteads, that the local stray dog population made walking anywhere nearly impossible, that the shower was still very much wired for the widow maker style water heater that has long since become illegal in the United States, and that our closest neighbors were three squealing pigs (plus at least 2 roosters and an uncountable number of hens).
We could even overlook that our children were not actually staying in the same room as us. They were adjacent, but each had their own non-locking door to the outside. I'm sure it'll be fine. Who could ever evade my rope-between-the-two-doors-tied-to-a-coffee-mug security system?
On more than one occasion, Aimee mentioned that she felt like she was back in the Peace Corps. But now with children. And you know what? We were just fine with that.
