Fair-tradewinds is the sum thus far of my personal exploration into sustainable, fair and direct relationship trade. I've wandered the four corners of the globe, sailed and swam and surfed and spear fished seas the world over, tasted exotic local liquors and foods, and been sick on them both. Having tested many thousands of miles this way, I've been blessed to have seen some of the worlds great treasures and a few of it's secret spots; and I want every one to know them.
I went to Ecuador, a small country in South America, between Columbia and Peru. Ecuador is a country filled with people who live much closer to the ground. A country of craftspeople and artisans, farmers and ranchers who preserved the skills we had abandoned in the west, not as a matter of preference, but of necessity.
I knew that Ecuador was a less developed nation, and I knew where it was on the map, but besides this, I knew almost very little about the country or it's people.
I had the good fortune to make some great local friends early in my trip there, and with two of them, Pedro and Sebastian, I embarked on a three week road trip around the entire country. During our adventure, bouncing down pot-holed roads along the Routa del Sol, the route of the sun, my friends told me of each towns 'specialty'. In Ecuador, labour is very much focused as a village economy, in any given town, the people will work together to produce their specific craft - for example, in Cotacachi, ten minutes from the market town of Otavalo, the people all work in leather. The main street is lined with leather shops and boutiques, side by side by side, all selling hand made leather jackets, shoes, wallets, boots, saddles, all leather. Only ten minutes from there is the tiny village of San Antonio de Ibarra, home to some of the most skilled wood carvers in the world. Again, the town has only two kinds of shops - grocery stores, and wood working shops. In Ambato, the project is bread, and Ambato bakeries can be seen as far south as Chile selling the bread made in this small town.
All of these skills, the collective sum of countless generations, and all the treasure that they produce come to a nexus point, in the market town of Otavalo, famous for being the largest indigenous peoples market in the world. Every Saturday, artisans and vendors from the surrounding towns come to fill seven city blocks with hand woven textiles, brightly coloured art, carvings, leather-craft, woodworking, vegetables and produce, jewelry and trinkets, historical artifacts and hand made instruments.
The Otavalenos, as the people of that town are called, have a long history selling their wares in this market, a jovial bartering is a way of life, and every 'gringo' represents a potential buyer. "Compra me camiseta, senor" ("Buy my shirt, sir!"" or "Hammacka, hammacka, chompas, compra no mas" ("Hammocks, hammocks, sweaters, just buy one!") are common greetings in the bustling market. Although my spanish was limited at the time, I enjoyed short conversation with one of the younger Quechewa at the market (the Quechewa are an indigenous peoples native to South America). We had a friendly conversation, and although I didn't buy anything from him at the time, I made a note to stop by and say "buenas tardes amigo" whenever I was in the market.
That first day, I bought all kinds of unique gifts for my friends back home, knitted wool sweaters, books with hand carved jade covers, a little wooden statue of Don Quixote, and a couple scarves for myself. On the ride back to Quito, through the chilly mountain passes of the Andes, I threw on one of the scarves I had just bought and I was amazed at how soft and how warm it was, not knowing anything at the time about Alpaca, I had never felt a wool so luxurious, so light and yet so warm. My first thought was "Wow, we seriously need these things in Calgary!". As my friends fought over who got to wear the other Alpaca scarf I had bought, I was planning to go back to Otavalo and find out where these scarves came from, and what they were made out of.
For the next week, my friend Pedro and I toured the surrounding villages, searching for the people who made the kind of scarves I had bought in the market. We met distributors, shipping companies, manufacturers and other importers, but had no luck finding people who were actually producing these scarves by hand, although I knew they must exist, somewhere off the beaten track. At the end of my rope, tired of fruitless searching, I suggested we go back to the market and ask my Quechewa friend from the market if he knew who did this kind of weaving.
When we got back to the market, I sought my friend out and after our usual jokes and greetings, I asked - "Who makes these scarves? Who weaves them by hand?" He smiled, "My family are weavers, we made this scarf, and most like them in the market here were made in my village. Come and see."
Together, we rented a taxi (in Ecuador, the meter starts at .35 cents!) and rumbled up the rough dirt roads to the surrounding hillside, to a village with a Quechewa name, no more than 15 minutes from Otavalo. Here, he introduced me to his family, his uncle and his cousins, his grandmother and her daughters, all of whom were working together weaving the very blankets and ponchos I had seen in the market. The loom in his house, which you'll see in the photographs on this site, has been in their family for over a hundred years, Uncle Tio, (his uncle) was a fourth generation weaver, and seeing him at that loom left no doubt as to the veracity of his story. On the spot, I asked him if he could make me a thousand scarves like the ones I had bought, in the colours I thought would be popular here in Canada.
During the next month, while Uncle Tio and his family wove and dyed the scarves for my order, I had labels made in Quito, the capital city, and planned my journey back home. Having never seen a thousand scarves in one place before, I asked my friend, as I ordered the scarves, "So, how big is a thousand scarves?" Nonchalant, he replied "aye, no tan mucho, asi, por asi," - ("Not so big, like this, by, like that") as he vaguely waved his hands, indicating a pile about the size of a washing machine. I thought I would have no problem getting the scarves into a couple of large duffel bags and getting them on the plane back home. This was not to be.
A few weeks later, when the scarves were all ready, I went with my friend Sebastian to pick them up, the day before my flight home. When my friend arrived with the scarves, he was driving a half ton truck he had borrowed - the bed of the truck was full, side to side and top to bottom, with what turned out to be 350 pounds of Alpaca scarves in nine huge sacks. "Cuantos bufandas son mios?" I asked, - how many of these scarves are for me? All the Quechewa guys who were helping to unload the truck had a good laugh - "Todos! Hay un mil y uno!" - "All of them! There's a thousand and one o!" It turns out "Not so big" in my friends terms was a little different than my interpretation!
With some careful manoeuvring and creative packing, (leaving behind clothes, shoes, a tripod and anything that wasn't scarves or my llama chaps), we managed to pack all one thousand scarves into five 70 lb bags, which after some serious haggling at the check in counter, I managed to get all of them on the plane. And the rest, as they say, is history.