Life and Soul

Ecuador -Part 10

Guaiquil is the second capital of Ecuador, a port city on the southwest coast. The sprawling industrial city & commercial port of Ecuador, it is through Guaiquil trade flows to & fro with the rest of the world.
In the past this has been a very dangerous place for gringos, it still is if you venture off into the suburbs at night, although the city now seems cleaner & safer than Quito. I am told that recently a new governor was voted in; you can see the improvements in policing, cleanliness, hygiene & pollution. Quito at present has no police presence giving the blaggers a free run of the city. Before both cities were completely corrupt, officials getting rich while chaos reigned on the streets.

It seems that the new governor in Guaiquil is not corrupt & is reinvesting the people’s money in the city, much has changed, and the main shopping streets look more akin to Oxford Street in London with its flash marble shop fronts & designer names.

Now you see two armed police on the corner of most streets (only around the posh tourist areas), it’s a little much but there is next to no crime in these areas. I would still be cautious at night as the police seem to disappear from all but government building & the streets return to the blaggers.

The air is much cleaner & thicker in Guaiquil being near the coast at sea level altitude; recently the new man has brought in pollution laws similar to the West’s. Laws which now limit exhaust fumes from factories & vehicles; anyone breaking the law has there vehicle condemned & destroyed.

There is also an army of cleaners employed, out there cleaning anything in there path, keeping the city spotless (only around the posh tourist areas). Like every other city in the world the people seem not to care about the cleanliness of the city they inhabit, dropping litter, rubbish whenever they have finished food & drink, if fact anything they had consumed & finished with is just tossed aside for another to clean up.

This makes me mad I have seen the same attitude everywhere I’ve travelled to, what makes humans too complacent to look after there own rubbish & put it in a bin or take it home. Us English are the worst, after public or commercial events the mess that has been left is unbelievable maybe one in a thousand bothers to bag there rubbish, take it away and put it in a bin!!???

This costs loads to clean up which we pay for in the ticket price or through council tax. It’s not hard or complicated – become responsible for your mess!

We in the west already live in a throwaway society; if something stops working or its fashion is out of date we throw it out to be replaced by the bigger better brighter versions. It doesn’t matter what it is the attitude is the same “ah just get a new one” we have been programmed to think like this, after all if we buy a new one we spend more money, consume, consume, consume.

It’s all about our programming, our internal operating system, the information that has been programmed into us by the governments, rulers & religions. This information or truth is flawed, incorrect & it’s acting like a virus eating away at the very fabric of our society bringing manifestations of increasingly negative degree.
Time Is, all of us need to awake from our sub conscious programming, our slave slumber, work at taking control & command of our own thoughts & emotions, create our own positive actions & reactions for our future evolution.
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It would not be good for our consumer economy if we repaired items or heavens forbid made them with everlasting quality to last as long as possible. In the seventies we still made things as well as we could, an example being hi-fi equipment, solid and reliable still going today. Today the reason your electrical items have a life of 5 years, if not less, before they break down, is a fault that is built into there design in the first place so you would have to be a repeat customer within 5 years.

As I’ve been travelling around S.A I’ve noticed many of our old items, electrical equipment, cars patched up in many ingenious ways to get them working again.

The taxis bring a smile to your face; from brand new models to the oldest Lada’s outside Russia, barley held together & battered to crap but still working.
You find at the street markets large piles of cloths & shoes from the US being eagerly sifted through by crowds of interested buyers out for the pick of the pile.
“If it can be fixed – fix it”, “if it can be made to work – keep it”
Unfortunately Ecuador recently has had big problems with its economy; they were eventually brought out or sold out to the Americans. They lost the “Sucre” the local currency; it was replaced by the US dollar. As a result a great deal has changed, house & land prices soared, goods & services became more expensive.
For the people with a good situation, form owning a house or running a business life got easer & more profitable. The other 80% of the population struggle with rising prices on property & goods combined with low monthly wages. Does this sound familiar?

You can see the families that have been Americanized, its been 4/5 years now since the change to the dollar, people who are doing well seem to want the biggest or the best it doesn’t seem to matter whether were talking cars, televisions, houses, pools; you name it its gotta be big & better than Carlos next door.
Something to show off, look at me, look what I can afford! Cars are taken to the extreme with Chevy trucks and oversized 4×4’s being the “poser’s” choice, fitted with all the extras, big wheels & tyres blatantly too large.
As you travel through the country in Ecuador, even in the most remote areas someone owns a 4×4 or a big flash television, in the country villages, often in an open shack you see four or five families crowded round a TV at night, all mesmerized by the images they see, no longer do they play or put there time to the old pursuits of passing the time.

Time is changing even in the remotest reaches of our world people are being affected & brainwashed by the consumer calling. This is resent 10 years ago these people knew little outside there own village life, now all they want for the life they have seen on the television.

It’s a crying shame, this thing called progress?