Sep 2, 2016
By Saya Des Marais
My Unlikely Friends in Mountainous Ecuador
It’s hot. How can it be this hot? Since arriving in Salasaka, this indigenous village in the Ecuadorian Andes, I have had a constantly sun-burned, peeling nose. Having an 8-year-old child on my back doesn’t help.
I struggle along, Fernanda on my back and her 5-year-old sister Ñusta leading the way. Ñusta is a great helper, waddling along with her sick sister’s backpack, which is almost as large as her. We walk down the wide, dusty roads lined with agave; sheep bleat and donkeys bray, everyone lazily complaining about the sweltering heat. I can see endlessly across the green, quilt-patterned hills, and everything looks exactly the same. We could be anywhere in all of Salasaka, and I would have no idea. All I can do is trust the girls to know where they live. At the school where I am teaching, when a child gets sick like Fernanda has, we can’t just call home, mom rushing over in her minivan to pick the child up, sign her out for the day. Almost no households in this village have a phone, and neither does the school. The only way to get them home is to do this, to carry them for miles until you reach the shanty and farm that is their home.
As a recently trained child therapist back in the U.S., I feel sick with guilt because it’s breaking every rule in the book that I’m doing this. Carrying a child on my back for miles? Taking them home when their parents haven’t given me signed permission? But I’m not their therapist, I remind myself, or try to. Because Fernanda is sick, and needs to get home, and this moment is more important than all the things I learned in graduate school.
“Podemos descansar?”, I ask the girls. Can we rest? I gently set Fernanda down, and the 3 of us sit together in the shade of a stack of cement blocks. Fernanda immediately lies down and puts her head in my lap. My “clinical instinct” is to gently remove her from her physical contact with me. Physical affection is always a liability. Keep your “boundaries”, they tell you. To the 7-year-old client who innocently tells me, I love you, I am trained to respond, I see that you really care about me, and I care about you too. Not “I love you too”, never that. A separation between you and the child. Care about her, of course, but from a distance.
I quit my job as a therapist because I was so terrified of how much I cared about my kids. I must not be doing something right, I felt. I must not be cut out for this. It broke my heart. A career down the drain because I just loved those kids too much. But here I was, in the mountains of South America to where I escaped, doing the same thing. Loving too much, again.
But I can’t help it. I love Fernanda. My heart is filled with her. She is only 8 years old and already the smartest student in school. She pulls my hand before recess ends every morning, lamenting, “Vamos a clase!” She watches over my shoulder with anxiety that is palpable as I grade her multiplication drills, as if she has ever received anything less than a 100%. There is a moodiness about her, a subtle neediness, and she sometimes sits apart from the group as Renato, the music teacher, leads them in warbling South American pop songs.
A woman passes where we sit catching our breath, wearing her chumbi and green shawl, half a dozen protesting sheep leading the way. She looks at me, and her confusion is reflected in her glare. What is this gringa doing out here with two of our precious children? The girls chat pleasantly with her in Kichwa, the sing-song indigenous language that I haven’t learned yet, and finally, she smiles, understanding. And somehow, with that smile, she is granting me the permission to love this child freely, to really love her, to love her and all of her sisters and friends without clinical boundaries, without restriction. Love her simply, freely, not as a professional but as a fellow human being, as an adult in the community who shares the responsibility of raising and caring for her. And maybe that’s not such a terrible thing.
I put my hand on Fernanda’s forehead. She doesn’t feel hot, and I don’t know if she was really sick at all or if she just wanted this time with me. “Listas?”, I ask the girls, and Ñusta puts on two backpacks, her own in the back and Fernanda’s in the front. I stoop to let Fernanda on my back, and we keep on walking.
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About the Author
Saya Des Marais
Saya Des Marais is a world traveler and children's social worker currently based in Guanajuato, Mexico. She was born in Tokyo, Japan and went on her first international trip to visit her American side of the family in California when she was 3 months old, and has been traveling ever since, She won Gold in the Bad Trip category in the sixth annual Solas Awards by Traveler's Tales.