In 1982, the rains due to the El Niño phenomenon were frightful, the thunder made the peasants and fishermen remember God and the government of Oswaldo Hurtado.
Doña Brígida, the town healer and the main godmother of the Children's Center of the OCAME organization. After her work with the children, she was going to lead the prayer in the church of San Francisco de Asís, where her image in a statue of almost a meter and a half was the center of prayers and prayers.
The palisades brought by the river and the floodwaters of a fruitful Pacific Ocean created pools where shrimp grew everywhere.
The closure of the dirt road to the Cape, where the ranchers had to cross rivers such as the Quingue, which grew up to two meters after the storms, forced the passengers to spend the night in the town's shacks on a hill, with the impressive sea view.
To go to Esmeraldas to collect your salary, visit your families, and do some shopping, you had to walk from Cabo to Bunche, along a road full of mud, in the middle of the jungle full of birds, because walking along the beach, the rock between both towns was dangerous when the tide and waves hit that vertical rock 100 meters high.
On the way, mosquitoes that not only attacked people but also cattle appeared like a cloud, and shortly before reaching Buche, on a plain where they were building the first shrimp farm in a mangrove swamp, blue crabs were the aggressive owners of the route. From there to Muisne you had to take a launch, or a canoe, to navigate a peaceful estuary surrounded by mangroves to the island, which was dotted with coconut palms. that grew giants in white sand.
Muisne was an island paradise, with wooden architecture, except for the municipality and the hospital, where I worked the last three months of my rural internship, without cars. Bucheli, mayor, for decades, was a man, white, tall, with a cowboy hat, like a cowboy from the American West, he had more than 10,000 hectares on Bolívar and Portete. I met him in 1973 when I went around Ecuador with a backpack, he brought me in a red Willys jeep along the beach.
Leaving Muisne to Esmeraldas on the new road under construction was also another feat, the passengers had to push the buses and station wagons that got stuck in yellow mud, which was irritating to the skin.
On the island, the OCAME was building its headquarters, a two-story wooden house, it had a sawmill and a concrete platform, to dry the cocoa that the peasants brought in slime, that is, with the shell. Also a very long canoe boat, with a large outboard motor.
Then the government began a vaccination campaign against tetanus, measles, whooping cough, and malaria prevention with chloroquine tablets, which were given to those who presented symptoms after an examination of the blood films, which the promoters health workers and malaria workers, who fumigated houses with DDT, collected.
Malaria due to anopheles and later, some cases of encephalitis due to the bite of a black mosquito, which abounded in the shrimp farms and ponds due to the palisades, also appeared.
Muisne became, in addition to an infectious pole of malaria, tuberculosis, and paragonimiasis, by the parasite of a mangrove crab, the pangora, which attacks the lungs, like tuberculosis, but the patient expels coagulated blood, not red,
With Verónica and Fernando Godoy, one of the leaders of the health promoters, we went up the Bunche River to the mountains of Matambal, to vaccinate and distribute avenia milk, through a canyoned river, which we could not return because it dragged trees giants.
The first night in the mountains we slept on the wooden floor of a peasant house, where they fed us a strange animal, which they later told us was a fox. In Matambal the people were white, with blue eyes, unlike the mulattoes, blacks, and cholos fishermen of the Cape. They were people from the neighboring province of Manabí, who, due to the brutal droughts or floods that affect that province, which is very flat and deforested, created a culture of violence, which made them famous bandits on the Coast. The most powerful drug cartel in the country, Los Choneros, was born from the inhabitants of the Chone Canton. Some of these peasants were persecuted bandits who hid with their families in these mountains.
Bunche. The town we left was the oldest black town on the Pacific coast of South America, it was born from slaves who escaped from a galleon that sank in Portete, in the 16th century, and settled in this place, the site of ferocious Indians such as the Chiggers, because they found freshwater waterfalls, since the rivers next to the beach. They have brackish water. At that time black slave was the most valuable, thanks to machetes given to them by the English pirate Francis Drake, they resisted.
