Going, Going...Juan

September 27, 2010

Both Todd and I hit the ground running today. He left at 5:00AM to catch the bus to Guayaquil and I was busy scurrying around the house doing last minute guest preparations, and moving our stuff to Casa del Sol for the next 3 weeks.

Later in the morning Bobby came roaring into the compound to announce that our neighbor Juan had died. Fonda came over to tell me the news around 10AM.

Juan and Lydia are local neighbors of ours, and could always be seen sitting outside their casa together – a sweet older couple who for the last 3 years have been reliably kind and friendly to us. They were always together, and we never saw one without the other, so my heart ached for Lydia. As the day wore on, awnings and chairs were set up in front of their house as friends and family of Lydia began holding vigil (a custom we have begun to notice*).  Others were gathered inside. I walked over late this afternoon to pay my respects.

I was looking for Lydia, and drifted inside the house in my pursuit.   Once inside, I felt somewhat obligated to join the contingent there (there were around 20 people – mostly women and children – gathered in the front room and another clutch of women huddled in the back room. Most of the men were outside under the canopy sharing a bottle).  Juan’s body was laid on a bed in the living room still hooked up to improvised I.V. stuff.  It was very solemn, and very sad.

About 15 plastic chairs had been hastily set up around, and I sat in one and paid my respects to him…I wasn’t really sure if it was proper for me to be there at all, so my plan was to quickly find Lydia and give her my condolences about Juan’s death and beat a hasty retreat. As I discreetly scanned the two rooms with peripheral vision looking for her, a movement caught the corner of my eye….I shifted my glance in that direction and saw……Juan take a deep breath.

How I didn’t shriek and fall backwards off my plastic chair, I will never know.  I thought I was looking at a dead person.

Juan was being kept alive on life support until funeral arrangements could be finalized (Ecuadorian law requires that bodies are buried within a time frame – I believe that is still 24 hours after death). Bobby neglected to mention that Juan was “brain” dead during his big broadcast this morning, and Fonda and I both scolded him later for omitting this little detail before I nearly had the living daylights scared out of me.

Tonight, we are comfortably settled into our spacious room at the Casa del Sol; we shared a couple of beers and shots of “cana” (a wickedly deceptive sugar cane liquor, I think) with TJ this evening, and have called it a day. It´s been a long one.

Two days later.
Courtesy of Mike Miller

* We now know that the disembodied voices coming from the town´s loudspeakers originate from the "communa" (city council, for lack of better word) building, and announcements accompanied by the “El Condor Pasa”  tune (popularized by Simon and Garfunkel on their¨"Bridge over Troubled Waters" album) indicate that someone has died and donations ($1-5 generally) are being solicited for the bereaved family.