chola cuencana

cuenca is the place to be.
this city is beautiful! it´s green, the tomebamba river runs through the city, and the air smells so good. i took the shortest flight of my life to get here from quito yesterday (45 mins) and we were checked into hotel oro verde and out wandering in the city by 10 AM. i´m jealous that you got to live here, jeremiah. it is so colorful.

last night we went to la iglesia de san francisco in the center of town and had met with padre rigoberto, who also runs the homeless shelter at the church. the main reason for the choir´s trip here was to raise money for the shelter. we ate dinner there, with the homeless. my mom and i sat with a group of 6 or 7 men from the ages of 20 to 85. they were very inquisitive. first just the normal questions "how long are you in cuenca?" "your first time in ecuador?" but then turned to "how do you treat your poor in the united states?" "why is it so easy for north americans to come to ecuador but so hard for us to come to your country?" one man said that he had been living there for 2 years and had never seen someone from the united states visit the shelter. he said he was beginning to lose faith in the goodness of people and that our visit meant a lot to him. the group brought many things for the shelter, and has raised a lot of money.

after dinner i met a woman in her seventies,named maria,who slept at the shelter often. she was still working, selling cigars and newspapers on the street, to support her two mentally challenged sons who live with her in the country. she is not able to go home because it is so far out in el campo and she works in cuenca 7 days a week, so she sleeps and eats at the shelter. she began to cry, saying she had nothing and that she was so tired. i held her and told her that she had music, and that she had people who cared about her, and the sun. she began to feel better and she sat next to me during the concert singing along with many of the ecuadorian songs. the whole audience chimed in for certain songs like vasija de barro and leña verde. padre rigoberto called me up in front of the audience of 100 or more to do some impromptu translating for him on the microphone.

at the end all of the ecuadorians sang "chola cuencana" to us and most of the people who came up to me afterwards said that they hoped i´d return to cuenca, and also that i´d learn the song so that we could sing it together.

the whole evening was quite an incredible experience.