New Camp Shelter Project

There is no alarm clock quite like the loud “OJO!” of a 74 year old Ecuadorian man at 6:30 in the morning, knowing he was up over an hour ago and he’d walked all the way from town. 

Once Guillermo “Vaca” hits you with a “buenas tardes”, realizing you’d just woken up, he’ll ask what’s for breakfast. 

By the third day of this, he’s in the kitchen making sure breakfast is up to his liking, because he can’t trust the gringos to put enough salt in anything. Rice with peanut butter-onion sauce and bananas became the winning breakfast in the end, and its actually really really good. 

After some smack talk and coffee over breakfast, it’s time to get down to business. We spent the day building a new camp shelter, hauling wood and hammering nails. If we start getting on Guillermo’s nerves with our endless questions and adjustments, he starts asking for almuerzo. It’s gotta have meat, it can’t have mayo, and the rice can’t be too “duro”. 

At this point you can usually distract him with a banana or a handful of raisins in order to hold him over until lunch. If he catches you walking towards the house in this time frame, you are likely to hear a “Mas Chorizo” yelled over the saw. 

We met Guillermo in town, sitting in an insanely beautiful restaurant/house made entirely of wood. Our friend said that his dad built it, and pointed to the man chopping wood outside. We were looking for a carpenter and so we talked to him.

Turns out Guillermo is 74 and is still doing construction and trail building weekly. He says work is “Buen por salud.” We also learned that he built all of the trails at the reserve over 20 years ago. He is a wealth of knowledge of everything at the reserve; some things are just meant to be.

He told us that he’d be at the reserve at 8:30 the next day, and that he had no phone. We heard our first OJO at 7:00 the next morning, and the rest is history.

We spent the back half of August working with Guillermo to build the camp shelter. Our days went like this: OJO, Breakfast, work, lunch, more work.

When we weren’t grabbing hot sauce, salt, or sugar, we were grabbing nails and other tools, and never hammering in exactly the place he wanted. The afternoons were a chorus of “Clave! Empujar!” and lots of other words that we don’t know the real meaning of, but we know what part of wood to hit when he says it. If you messed up, you’d get the glare. After a few days, though, we learned that you could counter the glare with a “Mal ayudante!”

It was a really great experience for three reasons. One, the floor we built looks really awesome, like artsy airbnb level awesome. Two, we learned a ton about carpentry and woodworking from an absolute expert. We were even saying that we would have paid for the experience we were gaining. Third, we’ve gained a great friend in Guillermo. We would spend the whole day working but also laughing and joking in Spanish, learning a lot of words and phrases that will not be included in this blogpost. 

Now, when we go into town we stop in at Guillermo’s and spend some time with him and his family. We have sweet bread and a fresh cup of a tea-oatmeal thing that isn’t quite either, but it’s delicious.