Martin Chambers Ecuador Trust

You catch us on a quiet long weekend for the feast of All Souls’ Day tomorrow (Friday). Since most people in this shanty town have come from other parts of the country and, since most people travel to visit the graves of their dead relatives for the feast-day, it will be a quiet place this weekend (oh great - no Saturday night discos blaring until 5am). When Nueva Prosperina goes like that, I love to get out and about and walk the streets saying hello to folk and visiting the sick and housebound. Today I am going to pop in to see Olga and Jaime, an old couple in their 70s. Jaime was a bus driver for many years but for the past five has been housebound whereas Olga, although 71, is more robust and gets out and about shopping and visiting family. I have had a soft spot for them for a long while for many reasons: they were the first couple to get married after I arrived in the Parish (although they had lived together for thirty years); they suffer from very ill health and cannot afford the basic $1 medicines; their house is the size of a small living room and yet it is the first house they have “owned” in their entire lives; and yet, because of a lack of running water or drainage, they have never lived in a house where they can turn on a tap or flush a toilet. Poverty screams out of their lives. And yet what I find is always a warm welcome and a couple who are able to enjoy life and laugh in the face of problems. That is why I will be happy to pop in and see them today.