Brendan and I were recently given the contact details of an Ecuadorian man who speaks English who had been contacted through phone witnessing, and wanted to learn more about the Bible.
We phoned to make contact with him and found that he has a proper street address in a town about an hour or more away where he lives most days of the week, but on Saturdays he is in Otavalo, nice and close to us. But the address was rather vague – opposite the estadio or stadium, near an old white adobe house, but he assured us that if we asked the neighbours they would point out which house was his.
A week or two ago we checked out what we understood to be the stadium in Otavalo, but couldn’t find any houses – just a playground and some businesses. We eventually realised that what we thought was the stadium is referred to in Ecuador as a coliseo. We found out that a coliseo is a covered sports venue whereas an estadio is an open air venue. (Kind of important to know what we were actually looking for!)
So then Brendan looked on Google Maps and found that there is an open air stadium not far out of Otavalo as you head north at a place called Carabuela which we could easily get to by bus.
On Saturday morning before field service, I phoned the man we were trying to find and confirmed that it was the stadium at Carabuela that we were looking for, so we arranged to meet him around 3pm.
We caught the bus just near our house and in no time were at the stadium at Carabuela. “That was easy”, we thought. Little did we know!
The stadium is large, new and in good repair but it’s really in the middle of nowhere, on a dirt road, with not many houses or people around.
First, we had to find an old white adobe house. Not immediately obvious, so we asked some people at one house and no, they hadn’t heard of the man we were looking for.
There were people hoeing corn in a nearby field, so we approached them. One lady came over and spent quite some time reading and re-reading the directions I had written down and trying to work it all out and said she didn’t know him, and there was no old white house and not many houses in the area at all.
Just then some more people walked past, so she hailed them and brought them into the conversation. It was all quite friendly and everyone was helpful, and in the end after much discussion, the conclusion was that this wasn’t the stadium we wanted after all. Somewhere else on the directions it mentioned the name of a community, and it was thought that maybe that was where the stadium was. They said that there is an old stadium at Carabuela, whereas the one we were at was the new one, and they thought it was the old one that we wanted. So they pointed roughly where to go, and gave us more directions (only some of which we understood), and off we went.
We figured we would just ask anyone we could find, and hopefully in the end we would find the stadium and the white adobe house and the man we were looking for.
We spoke to various people, some of whom were also hoeing corn or working outside, and they all pointed us roughly the same way, or showed us a shortcut, so we figured we were on the right track.
Brendan and I walked along this shortcut between cornfields
After around half an hour of walking, we came upon more houses and it appeared we were coming into the town of Carabuela. We saw a grassy playing field with a few people sitting around it, some houses nearby and an old adobe building. We thought, if an estadio is an open air playing field, maybe that’s it? So we asked if anyone knew the man we were after, but no. So we walked on.
The directions various people had given us indicated that we had to go downhill and maybe turn left, etc etc, so we just kept on going downhill, asking people along the way.
We found this couple couple hoeing their corn (with help from their chickens) and also asked them
One man was pasturing 3 or 4 cows and a pig by the side of the road, so we asked him if he knew of the man we were looking for or of the old stadium at Carabuela, or if he knew where that particular community was situated. He said that the community we were after was back towards Otavalo – not what we wanted to hear!
We did have the phone number of the man we were looking for, but as we had no idea where we were, no idea where he was and no street names were marked anywhere, we didn’t figure that would help.
By this stage, Brendan had got out his phone to look at the maps program to see if we could work anything out. He found another stadium further along in the direction we were going, so we just kept walking.
In spite of so far not finding what we were after, we found the walk interesting as we hadn’t been in this area before, and it was nice and quiet with hardly any cars, the roads were dirt or cobblestone, and there were occasional cows, pigs, chickens, etc., and lovely views of the countryside. We’d seen the area from buses as we drove along the Pan American Highway, but hadn’t actually been there.
So far we had been walking downhill, away from the Pan American Highway, but as we went in pursuit of our third stadium the road started going uphill. By this stage, we’d probably been at it for an hour or so and it was starting to be not so much fun.
Somewhere along the way, we came across a couple of Quichua men also walking along the road. We greeted them, and asked the usual questions, but the younger man said nothing, and the older man spoke in a mix of Quichua, Spanish, and a little too much alcohol. So that was no help.
After walking (staggering, by now) to the top of a hill, we found a few more houses, another playing field, a little church, an old adobe building, and a little shop at which I asked the usual questions. The young man said, yes, that’s an old adobe building, yes, that’s an estadio, and no, he didn’t know the man we were looking for.
We got to enjoy some lovely scenery along the way
We hoped we were finally in the right place, so asked at a few shops and houses, but nobody knew who we were looking for. At one shop, the lady said a man in the area had a very similar name, and was it he we were looking for? She also indicated that the community we were looking for was still further on.
By this stage we were definitely running out of steam, and although Brendan’s trusty map program indicated yet another stadium 500 meters in the direction the lady had indicated, we’d had enough for one day.
We’d noticed a local bus service running up and down the road all the time we’d been slogging it out on foot, and as we were currently next to a bus stop, we decided that was as good a place as any to call it quits.
While we sat on a low wall waiting for a bus, our new Quichua friend wandered over and “chatted” to us in his peculiar mix of languages. I think he asked us why we were looking for this particular man, and I explained about teaching the Bible, and gave him a tract in Quichua.
Fortunately for us and our lack of understanding of his particular idiom, the bus came then came and took us away.
So, we will need to make another phone call to the interested man and check that we have his name correct or whether, in fact, he is the man the lady in the shop knew of, and also to check whether we need to find a fourth stadium with a fourth white adobe house next to it.
But at least we know next time we can let the trusty bus service do all the uphill work for us!
The view from the bus stop – not such a bad way to fill in some time!
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