Landslide City

If you talk with five different people in my site you will probably get five different answers as to when the seasons change here. Oh and there are pretty much only two seasons here, summer from May until September and winter from October until April. The winter is in no way classified by a drop in temperature that is for sure; where I live it stays pretty constant at 65-80 degrees all year round. The only difference in the seasons here is the excess of rain that comes right around February and lasts until April. When I arrived to Ecuador the entire country was having many troubles with landslides and floods in various places all over the country. Fortunately my site and Loja weren’t too affected last year. But unfortunately it was all waiting for this year.
The rains started to get stronger about mid-February this year, it wasn’t as though it was raining here all the time but when it did rain, it rained really hard. So for about two months we received some really hard rains about 3-4 times a week. In the beginning things were ok and we didn’t see too many problems. Then one by one I started to notice how in the neighboring mountain there were about 9 landslides, then 13, then 18. After one hard nights rain I heard the roadway was blocked to get back to the city and that travelers had to walk through the mud to meet the bus on the other side. These types of adaptations seemed somewhat minimal to me. Then after a very hard night of rain it seemed like the entire town was going to slide into the river. There were houses who were swept off their foundations, the main road was again closed due to the HUGE landslide that took about 3 days to clear, the road to another smaller town was completely blocked, and lastly one of my good friends’ pig farms was just about wiped out by a landslide. I went to visit him to see if I could lend a hand and his pig pens were full up to the top board with mud. Thank goodness not a single one of his 40 pigs was lost. But he did have two crops wiped out and rented a third bit of land to a poor farmer who lost about 3 months of work in the landslide…very sad. The main highway that runs right alongside my site also had a HUGE cave in, thus causing the road to be unusable and diverting all the daily traffic to Vilcabamba through my quiet, sleepy little town of San Pedro.
Not to mention all the damage done to the peoples houses and farms but our new potable water system, which had tubes running down from high in the mountains down the river banks, was very damaged in the rains. The workers were going up everyday to fix the system where every time they fixed one part, they discovered another area broken. With these damages to the water system we were basically without water for about six weeks, yes that’s right SIX WEEKS! In order to get by the local firefighters would come by and fill all of our plastic water tanks up that would last for about 3 days. I have to say it was mighty annoying but after about the second week of not having water I became accustomed to life without it.
In a conversation with my counterpart a couple of weeks back we were talking about the issues we were facing and it was then that I made a very interesting realization about Ecuadorians and their culture. I asked him, “If you have this problem pretty much every two years or so, then why don’t you do anything to proactively fix it.” Basically his response was “We just don’t.” With that response I came to the conclusion that the Ecuadorians function pretty much only in the here and now. What are they going to earn today(money wise), where are they going to get today’s meals, ….if it rains all night and my house is filled with mud I will just shovel it out and continue on until it happens again and will shovel it out then too. In my brief experience here I have found it hard to find someone that thinks ahead into the future (not to say they don’t exist). Their tradition is solely to address problems or challenges when they are faced with them and not to have any type of forethought about what might happen to them or their families in the future.
Henceforth in hopes of possibly lessening the impact of future landslides I am looking into possibly doing a small project of finding certain types of native plants here that we can plant in critical areas where their roots will strengthen and hold the land from falling. I am hoping to do it with one of the local schools to introduce them to certain strategies to combat these landslides which have pretty much ransacked my small town this year.