Flashback: July '71 We arrive in Ibarra, Ecuador

"Well Jesse, you're not in Alabama anymore", I thought to myself as we headed north on the Pan American Highway from Quito, heading towards Ibarra.

I was on total sensory overload. At least, familiar faces had picked us up at the airport- Robert & Pat who we had met at our congregation in Mobile a few months earlier and sang the praises of Ecuador.

I was 18 years old and had been regular pioneering for a year since I had graduated high school. My father had made the decision that we should move to serve where the need was greater, and now here we were with my mother and father, 15 year old brother, 12 year old sister, and invalid grandmother. None of us spoke a word of Spanish and Ecuador might as well have been Mars for the amount of information we had on it.

Ivan Morillo & Jesse at my Ibarra house.

Now as I watched the eucalyptus trees zip by and admired the mountain scenery that was so different from coastal south Alabama, my primary thought was – “this should be fun.”

And fun it proved to be- and by the time we ran low on funds and had to return to Alabama two years later- the adventure proved to be the defining event of my life that has influenced me down to this day- four decades later.

Having to learn a new language didn’t scare me at all. After all, I had done it before when I was 8 years old and my father, an electrical engineer, got a job transfer to Wiesbaden, Germany. We were there 3 years and I attended German school for the 3^rd-5^thgrades where no-one spoke English and I was the one who had to adapt.

Having a new family move into the congregation was a big deal. There were only about 50 publishers to cover the entire province of Imbabura. The presiding overseer was Carlos Salazar (yb89 pp. 218-219), a Gilead graduate and native Ecuadorean who had grown up in New York and was fluent in English. He was single and lived with his elderly great-aunt.

Hugo Salas & Jesse

The congregation may have been small, but it was extremely zealous with an eclectic blend of regular and special pioneers. We weren’t the only Gringos. There were four elderly sisters from Canada who were living together on their social security. There were the Ginn’s, a younger married couple from Canada and the Convery’s, a Canadian family with a teenage son and daughter. Dave never met a fruit he couldn’t turn into wine- not as quickly as Jesus- but often with a 24-48 hour periodWith the addition of my family, there were now 17 Gringo publishers in the Ibarra congregation.

The Watchtower conductor was Rodrigo Vaca (see g85 9/8 22-25 for his life story), who happened to be blind, but not handicapped. I watched with amazement as the reader would read the question and whoever wanted to answer would say “Yo” out loud. Brother Vaca would recognize the voice and call on the person. Of course, in those days the Branch didn’t provide recordings of the literature, so a volunteer would record the magazines on tape for Bro. Vaca and he would essentially memorize them. 

Did I mention Rodrigo only had one hand, but he loved to play guitar? He would strap a leather pick thing around his right wrist and strum while fingering the strings with his good left hand.

Jesse & Rodrigo Vaca

And of course, he was a special pioneer, getting 150 hours a month in service time.

Of course, Alabama is not exactly a hotbed of ethnic diversity (in our congregation in Mobile we had black and white, that was it), and I had never met a Hispanic in my life. So the new variety was fascinating. Just the fact that my brother and I knew that “”Vaca” meant “cow” and that was a brother’s last name was a source of some initial amusement. Let me introduce you to some of the other brothers:

There was Guillermo Suarez, a high school English teacher who spoke very broken English in an almost unintelligible accent. For some unexplained reason and with no provocation he would loudly break into his favorite song, Doris Day’s “Que Sera, Sera”. (Sample lyrics: "When I was just a little girl I asked my mother, what will I be, Will I be pretty, will I be rich Here's what she said to me.")

Then there were the teenage Salas brothers, Fabian and Hugo. In our twisted minds, my brother and I pronounced Fabian like the teenage '60s teen idol Fabian and called Hugo “Juice”, not realizing the “H” was silent. 

Carlos Salazar

 A dear friend about my age was Ivan Morillo who lived in the poorer section of Ibarra. Of course I wasn’t aware of the subtle class distinctions of the culture, but Ivan and I became fast friends communicating in that weird “Spanglish” that people do when they’re learning the language. He became a fixture at our house and delighted in my mom’s pancakes and syrup, which he had never experienced.

That’s it for today’s retrospective, but there will be plenty more as I countdown to my long-anticipated return to “needgreater” status once again.