Today, my adopted city in Ecuador is showing itself off to a raft-load of presidents, prime ministers, and even a king. The city is hosting the 23rd Summit of Iberian-American nations, which includes Spain and Portugal on one side of the ocean, and just about every nation in Latin America on this side. Even King Felipe VI of Spain is in town. We are all impressed.
The town is loaded with police, soldiers, and men dressed in black suits, white shirts, and dark ties huddling in front of restaurants, hotels, and auditoriums, keeping a careful eye out for any kind of potential trouble. Traffic in the center of town is being redirected from its usual courses to allow for motorcades of shiny black SUV's with no plates to roll from one venue to another.
I am sure the discussions on such themes as "Inclusion, Sustainability, and Employment" will be profitable and may make some difference in the lives of ordinary people in these nations, at least I hope so. Certainly the city of Cuenca is enjoying its day in the limelight and doing its best to impress the Ibero-American leaders with its colonial architecture, urban development, and magnificent cathedral domes.
Just one problem with all this: Cuenca is now in its 125th day of drought, a paucity of rainfall that has left neighborhoods in the city without electricity for up to 12 hours a day. Our four rivers, usually roaring through the heart of the city, are down to less than trickles, looking now more like moonscapes of rounded rock than the great rivers we remember from last year. How bad is it? The mayor announced yesterday that beginning this coming week, well after the dignitaries have left the city, water will be rationed with regular "cortes de agua" for several hours a day.
The thing is, nobody seems to have seen this coming. This is a "one in a hundred year" drought, clearly caused by the cascading effects of climate change. It is now more likely to become a "one in an every few years" drought, or, God forbid, just the "new normal" of the region. A place like Cuenca, high in the Andes, depends exclusively on rainfall to keep life normal here; there are no glaciers or snowpacks to slowly melt...it is all or nothing. Ecuador depends almost exclusively on hydro-electric dams to power its energy grid so with reservoirs behind the dams close to empty, rolling blackouts are already the new norm. Only the southern city of Loja has windmills. Geothermal power, which there should be plenty of here (being a highly volcanic area) has not yet been significantly developed here. There are no nuclear plants that I know of. So who suffers: small businesses, restaurants, industries, the poor, actually everybody. Gas and diesel generators are running full time making a huge clatter and filling the atmosphere with their noxious fumes just so folks can keep going. Pray we don't run short of diesel! But then...all that burning of carbon just contributes to the fundamental problem of filling our atmosphere with the toxins that have led us to this environental mess in the first place. Need we add that mining, both legal and illegal, in many corners of Ecuador is wiping out the natural resources needed to clean the air?
I suppose little of this will be on display for the big shots who are in town today, (the city suspended blackouts while they are here...thank the government for small favors), but maybe they will get some idea of what is happening to once-lovely cities like Cuenca and actually do something to change the direction of the climate disaster we are now getting our first big wiff of. They are presidents and prime minsters and even a king; surely they can convince the industrial world to get their act together and stop this before cities like Cuenca die a slow death from the horror of unquenched thirst.
We expats can leave before that happens, and I hear some are already making the pilgrimage back to the States or elsewhere. But the locals, especially the poor and middle class, can't. If we don't get water from above, what will happen to them? Since I am no king, president, nor prime minister, I have no political power (here I can't even vote); I am left only to pray for rain...for their sakes.
As my Cuencana housecleaner told me the other day over lunch on the patio: "Podemos vivir sin luz; pero no podemos vivir sin agua." We can live without electricity, but we can't live without water.
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