COVID Story #3: Rita

I had a lovely chat yesterday afternoon on our porch with a young woman named Rita, who I met twenty years ago. She was ten or eleven years old when I first knew her, which puts her in her early thirties now. I remember her as a sweet, quiet, and contemplative child, a contrast to her younger sister, Erica, who was loquacious and a bit of a clown. Rita -- her face, immediately recognizable, though aged from my memories -- came up the path to our casita with her barefoot son, Julian, carrying a generous sack of delicious local products: big ripe plantains, dirt-covered camotes, two avocados, and six huevos criollos (blue and cream-colored eggs from her chickens). They were gifts for us.

After we reminisced over our shared memories from two decades ago: making pizza crust from cauliflower, eating a stir fry of zucchini and beef, reading children's books in my little living room, Rita described to me her life over the last several years. She is married to a man from a nearby village. He sounds like a good guy, and they get along well. They have two children, Julian (age 11) and a four year old named Dana. Rita graduated from university several years ago with a nursing degree and was working in Latacunga (the closest Sierra city to La Josefina) as a nurse before the pandemic. Her husband was a driver and delivery person for a business in the city as well. They were doing okay, though finding nursing jobs with consistent pay was challenging, and the best jobs were hard to come by without connections. At one point, Rita was hired full-time in a private clinic for three months and was never paid, despite having worked many 24-hour shifts. Once a week, Rita's mom sent a load of coastal food up on the bus: plantains, yucca, bananas, oranges, and other fruit. Paying rent and buying food was a stretch on their shared income, but they made it work.

When COVID hit, their tenuous situation in the city started to fall apart. Her husband lost his job -- there were no deliveries to be made. Schools closed. Local transportation networks were interrupted, and her weekly food supply from her mom became unreliable. She told me that she spent upwards of $200 a month on groceries, which wasn't sustainable. Everyone was scared to go outside; her children were miserable, and so were she and her husband.

And so, they made the difficult decision to leave their urban dreams of a life of opportunity behind and move back to La Josefina. Her toddler, who had been having behavioral issues -- likely in response to her parents' stress -- was in immediate heaven; her temper tantrums all but disappeared. But Rita's son was initially very unhappy. He missed the only life he knew in the city; he missed television, bustling markets, the activity of the city.

Upon her own return home, Rita immediately felt peace. She was no longer struggling to put food on the table. She knew and loved the family finca, and found herself motivated to plant corn and yucca, buy chickens for eggs and meat, start raising rabbits. Once again, Rita was surrounded by community, and for the first time, she had the direct presence and support of her own mother to supervise and grand-parent her two children. Even still, as the acute impacts of COVID pandemic started to wind down, Rita and her husband began to ponder city living again; she likes nursing, and she believes (like most people from here) that the educational system in the Sierra is superior for her children's futures.

Rita took the bus up the mountains to Latacunga in search of work; her husband also went hunting for a job. Transportation has come back, businesses need drivers again. They took their children with them, stayed with a relative, and were initially quite hopeful. But after two weeks of searching, they lost some momentum: rents are even higher than they were when they left two years ago; jobs are still limited; prices for groceries and gas have increased dramatically. It just doesn't make sense for their young family to start the struggle again in the Sierra.

And so, Rita re-enrolled Julian in the local La Josefina school. She went back to planning her finca, and they are making the most of enjoying the beautiful tranquility out behind her mom's house. "I am happy," she told me with a beautiful smile that brings me back to her youth, "My kids are happy. I have food for them. But I do dream of something better for my children, and my husband and I, we are still talking about it. What is best for them. Maybe, some day, we will figure it out."

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