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Saturday, September 23, 2006
VENZUELA FOR THE WINTER; A VISIT TO THE CARPENTERO
Bahia de Caraquez, Ecuador, Thursday, 21 September 2006
Venezuela for the winter
Things look now set for Kathleen and me to be house-sitting in the little town of La Guardia on Isla Margarita off the Venezuelan coast. Our commitment is for three months from mid-November 2006 to mid-February 2007. The house is owned by Americans who plan one day to use it as a retirement home. But for the moment they are only there sporadically and prefer to have someone living there then to letting it stand empty.
You can get some idea of Isla Margarita’s charms by visiting www.casatrudel.com.
Our plan is to leave Bahia de Caraquez with enough time in hand to travel overland north towards Columbia, Panama and Venezuela. Some people warn us against bus travel through the southwestern portion of Columbia because it is infested with ‘insurgents’. FARC is only the best-known outside of Latin America. But the warring political groupings have degenerated, we have heard, into just highway robbery and thuggery. It is not at all unknown for them to stop night busses, pull ‘gringos’ off for ransom or simply plunder them on the spot. This might all be exaggerated. But the central government in Bogota does not readily admit that it in fact does not control about 40 percent of Columbia. Quietly instead, it has licensed ‘privateers’, armed groups who roam the area killing the killers. This is making me nervous! I think we shall take a plane to Bogota or directly to Caracas instead. Kathleen, our social and travel coordinator is working on our plans. Stay tuned for updates.
Unfortunately, Kathleen herself will only get to spend about five weeks of the three months on Isla Margarita. She has committed to a music gig in Frankfurt for January and February. Her travel plans are even more complicated because she will fly straight back to warm and sunny Ecuador from cold, snowy and rainy Germany and meet me in Bahia de Caraquez.
So, what will we be doing in La Guardia to pass the time? When people ask what we do to pass the time on Vilisar, we tend to answer, ‘Oh well! There’s always the fruits and veggies to be picked over. A little boat-painting here and there. And, of course, we have a lot of books that have to be read. And don’t forget the ongoing canasta tournament!’ We have also heard that red wine is very, very cheap in Venezuela. Somehow we shall find something to do.
On a more serious note, we might even have the money to take formal Spanish lessons. By the time we can actually speak Spanish proficiently we shall probably be in French Polynesia.
A visit to the carpentero; shopping in Ecuador
Going about one’s errands in Bahia reminds you that most of Ecuador is basically pre-industrial. There are not many factories. I think there is a Chevrolet assembly works near Quito making Asian-designed small cars, and there are some larg-ish plywood factories around. Otherwise, everything you want or need is either imported or made by hand.
Of course, if you want a fridge, TV or car, you are not going to go to the local tradesman. There is a lot of hand work in making wooden stake-truck bodies and there is even a little jeep-type truck made by hand that you see form time to time. It even includes a wooden dashboard.
In Bahia there are no large supermarkets though they can be found in Guayaquil, Quito and Manta. You do your shopping here at the daily mercado that opens early and closes at noon. If you want a piece of furniture or a piece of metalwork, you go round to the tradesman of you choice, place your order and take delivery of something bespoke.
Maestro Luiz, for Example, has a largish carpentry ‘shop’ just across the street from Puerto Amistad where we are anchored. Maestro himself is typically short for an Ecuadorian but atypical quite overweight which gives his face a rather sad, hang-dog look. His ‘shop’ consists of an open-air lot, part of it covered for storage of some logs and rough-sawn lumber. All of it is tropical, some very light and some very, very heavy. Five and one-half days a week from Monday morning till Saturday at noon, Maestro has about six or eight men working there full time. There is a small lathe for turning table legs and the like and he has an electric planer back under the roof with the lumber. Clouds of sawdust emit from under that roof. Maestro’s ‘office’ is an old and cluttered table under a lean-to attached to the back of a house. He lives with his family next door. Turkeys, chickens and ducks walk around his workyard.
So you get the picture. We are not talking here about those graveyard-still, perfectly sanitary, high-tech/high-engineered, CAD-CAM designed and steered, assembly-line factories producing huge numbers of fully-automatic widgets without the benefit of actual production employees. In the industrialised world, the relationship of actual production workers to other tasks (management, financial, marketing, advertising, etc.) has been sinking for years as machines take over. The ratio would have sunk even more except that computers have largely replaced all of middle-management too. Tradesmen don’t exist in such environments much any more and ‘labourers’ are absolutely a thing of the past. Not here, though. Management (i.e Maestro Luiz) represents about 10 percent of staff; production workers make up the remainder.
Every project starts with the lumber and each project tends to be a one-off. For example, Maestro Luiz does a brisk business in coffins. There always seems to be at least one on the go, so to speak. The wood is sawn and work begins when they have a live customer, again, so to speak. The interior of the box is framed and lesser woods are used to box things up. The outsides and the top are added using better materials. The top opens in two halves and is not just a flat lid: the top has a little pointed roof like a church. In fact there is something gothic about the whole thing.
The coffin stands on sawhorses in the shade and the carpenters move back and forth to work on it rather than, as in a production line, the product moving past the worker. It’s is like a project in your home workshop, or, better, like a boatyard. There is nothing even remotely like an assembly line. I think they really only make one coffin at a time. All the sanding is done by hand and so is the varnishing. I don’t remember seeing any hardware (e.g. handles) though there might have been some hinges at least. The final product was beautiful I saw one in a funeral procession in town once. I also recall that many undertakers (also a handwork) in America grew originally out of carpenter shops and coffin-making. I shall keep an eye out to see if they start bringing corpses over to Maestro Luiz.
This past week I had occasion to visit Maestro Luiz again to order new wooden spreaders for Vilisar. He had already made two new 7-foot oars for our dinghy and a lovely carrying box for an Andean musical instrument that Kathleen is taking to Europe with her. We chit-chat a little to the degree that my Spanish (modesto) allows. Then we discuss the wood to be used (it needs to be light but strong and able to deal with compression pressures from the rig) and when the spreaders will be finished. At the ‘Gretchenfrage’ - i.e., ¿Quanto costa? - he scratches his chin for a while. This time I do not bargain with him since think the price is reasonable.
I also pay a visit to the metalworker, Maestro Quanqui, across the estuary in San Vincente. His employee and his wife take my order and tell me that Maestro is in Guayaquil that day: since only Maestro can negotiate the price, he will have to call me on the cellphone the next day to fix price and delivery date. True to this, he calls me yesterday and I complete my first negotiations completely in Spanish on the phone. His price is pretty much what I expected to pay so there is no dickering this time again.
Working with tradesmen like this and small shopkeepers can be a little taxing at times. But you actually get to meet Ecuadorians in the course of their and your daily activities. Compare that to a trip to a supermarket and you realise how lonely you are there. The only one you get to talk to is the checkout lady. She is, of course, trained in smiling and the friendly remark: ‘How are your today?’ and ‘Have a nice day!’ It is the barely-human face on industrial-scale shopping. It’s not enough to keep the soul alive, really, is it?
The closest in America or Germany you can come to the type of shopping you get here in Bahia is, say, in a florist shop if you want to get bouquet made up, when buying spectacles, perhaps, or when you want to buy a car. By the way, we have compared food prices in the Safeway-type supermarket in Manta with food prices in the Mercado here and in little shops. They are not much cheaper in the supermarkets except, perhaps, for liquor and wine. Wine is pretty expensive in Ecuador anyway so we don’t buy much of it. It is definitely not worth it to spend the extra money and time to go to Manta unless you are doing a big provisioning for a long voyage.
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