Our first assignment was in a community called Neuvo Esperanza (New Hope). We still aren’t entirely sure of the specific details, but they aren’t that important anyways. Jim, our translator/coordinator, told us that we would be carrying poles up this hillside. We were prepared for hard work but I don’t think anything Jim could have said would have prepared us for what we actually did!
The pick up truck was an hour early. After inhaling breakfast we jump in the truck with a handful of other people from our community. After a bumpy twenty minute ride the truck stops and we all get off; although I am slightly confused because we appear to be in the middle of the road with nothing around us. We begin to walk down a hill, I later learned that the truck dropped us off because the hill was too steep for it to drive back up. As we approach the bottom of the hill, to our right, we see these longs poles and I’m pretty sure our jaws dropped. “Jim, are these really the poles?” we ask. Unfortunately, the answer was a yes. These were not wooden electrical poles like we had all envisioned. Nope, these poles were 30 feet long and made of concrete!
We see a steep but reasonable hill in the background and ask if that is where we are going? Of course, the answer was a no. We will be carrying these poles literally up a mountain side that is super steep, winding AND across a cable bridge. Okay, now how in the san hill are we going to get this 30 foot, ridiculously heavy cement pole up this mountain? Lucky for us, Ecuadorians are very intelligent and resourceful! They tied 15 rods of wood across the pole, each rod about 2 feet apart; creating handles. Then a person stood at each handle and there was a rope with two people at the front and back of the pole. All of us lifted at the same time and walked.
Now, we had to take a lot of breaks, but we did it. The first obstacle was the bridge. As you can see it’s not very sturdy looking- so only 8 or so people went across it with the pole, which was on a small trailer of sorts. When we came to the end of the bridge we needed to make a rather sharp turn to the right and we learned that cement doesn’t give. In order to make the turn, we might have had to knock out one of the wooden supports on the bridge. Praise God that the bridge never gave!
After the bridge was continuous steep narrow hills and some more sharp turns. It took us about an hour and a half to get to the top of the mountain to the New Esperanza community; but only 10 minutes to walk it down. The walk was beautiful, up through the rainforest, simply breathe taking.
As we walked up the mountain women from the community followed us with a bucket of juice and 5 cups. Now when I say a bucket I mean a large bucket that you would buy tar or paint in!! Luckily they were mostly clean. The ladies would dip the cup in, give it to you, you would drink it, give it back, and then she would give it to someone else! When all was said and done we were able to carry 3 poles up the mountain that day. It’s really strange to think that people still live without electricity.
